#the v&a scene is gonna destroy lives | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lightwise · 9 months

Text

Ahsoka Episode 4 Spoilers/Thoughts

This was...a big one, to say the least.

Also note to self do NOT open tumblr while in the middle of watching an episode or you will be spoiled for that epic ending *sobs* oh well...

SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

2/2 Star Wars characters repairing ship wiring on their back...v nice

Sabine, you realize none of you would be in this position if you hadn't squirreled away with the map in your tower...jus sayin...

"Can I count on you?" Yeah I'm gonna say that's a no...

Sabine loading her blasters is super cool but also giving me flashbacks to trying to reload staple gun or nail gun cartridges and hoping you don't launch them into your face in the process

Natasha plays Sabine's nervous energy very well and Rosario is showing Ahsoka's own unease, reserve, but also very caring concern, extremely well. I really wish we could see the history between these two--animated in between series anyone??

I wonder why Dave doesn't bring up the fact that Ahsoka owes Ezra her life. It's only focused on what Ezra means to Sabine, but he means a lot to Ahsoka too.

Huyang's lil hands on hips...you can tell he's a full practical build here.

Speaking of...I REALLY want to know if the practical robot was used for this fight scene, or if they switched to someone in a costume/CGI. It seems like the HK droids are people/CGI but I could be wrong about that. Either way, go Huyang go!

It's always a treat to see Mandos and Jedi fighting styles together. And Sabine's Wonder Woman vambrace block was great.

Ahsoka's white lightsabers are so stunning in live action.

"May I make one request of you both?" LISTEN TO HUYANG. HE KNOWS WHAT'S UP. "Stay together." And WHAT ARE THEY NOT GONNA DO SMH

"Mom, how come I have to do what I'm told and you don't" lmao

Jacen is so spunky and I'm so glad Dave is having him be a full part of the series.

Carson Teva my man! And Brendan!

BUT WHERE ARE ZEB AND KALLUS. WHERE ARE OUR MARRIED BOIS

"Faith? I lost that a long time ago" Baylon's backstory pleaseeeee. Who was his master. How far did he get in training. Was he knighted? Did he have a padawan pre-order 66? Where was he during the war? Where was he during Order 66? When did he walk away, and what did he walk away to? What are his goals now? How did he find Shin/why did he want to train her? We desperately need a comic or a book here Lucasfilm

The graphics for the countdown clock (and the droids manning them) are super cool

Shin dear lord can you be any more dramatic

Sabine and Shin running off like rabid wolves while Ahsoka is just like, oh please, do I really have to deal with this right now

Ahsoka > any inquisitor, dead or alive, magic or real, anytime, any place, any age LOL

Ugh the parallels to Obi-Wan and Maul are impeccable.

So I totally knew Marrok would be a nobody/throwaway character but a nightsister necromancer ghost??? Did not see that coming at all. Eerie

Shin seems honestly disturbed by seeing Marrok fall. I wonder if the body that was used was someone she knew or had a connection to.

The lightsaber usage in this show is so interesting and such a unique blend of samurai techniques, OT trilogy techniques, and more realistic stabbing and swiping and slicing motions. I love the choreography and cinematography of Shin and Sabine going at it as well as how the trees and landscape are used in their fight.

Looks like Shin got her dramatics from her master. Sitting there with his hood up for effect lol

Definitely getting flashbacks to Ahsoka's sass in her fight with Maul in TCW.

Baylon's textured armor is so incredible. I want to see him leading a 13th century cavalcade

Can he read people's minds? Or does he do in depth research like Thrawn does so he knows the weak points of his opponents?

“One must destroy in order to create.” No. You are incorrect sir. One must die. One must morph, must change, in order to create. But that is different than destroying.

Again with the one saber. It's such an odd choice for Ahsoka to do that, and it honestly feels like an excuse for Baylon to be able to overpower her later. I don't quite like it.

It is very interesting how Baylon views Ahsoka, and tells her that her legacy is death and broken promises. What exactly does he think her legacy is? Because that is Anakin's legacy, not hers (at least through Rebels). What has happened since then?

He looks so sad, honestly.

There's way too much leaving oneself open to attack in this episode.

The fight scene definitely looks slowed down a little, and it's a little clunky, but man Baylon is brutal with his saber. Again why is Ahsoka not using both of hers to combat is strength??

Either there's a trailer shot that never made it into this fight, or Baylon and Ahsoka fight again. I'm missing where she kicks back against one of those tall rocks and flips over. That was such a cool shot.

I honestly can't believe Shin was able to block the whistling birds lol. That would be an intense hit to the face. Also I love how much of the shots and sparks in these shows are practical. It makes it feel so much more real.

The map burning Ahsoka is wild. It makes sense but very unfortunate.

Hot damn Ahsoka! She definitely was tapping into some anger there. In real life that hit to the back of the head should have seriously injured Shin. Filoni is really being gritty and brutal with the fights in this show, they're raw and dirty in ways that the trilogies were not.

Aaaaaand while I know Ahsoka isn't dead yet (there's no way Filoni would kill off the title character halfway through a first season) holy cow that was heartwrenching

Baylon is a master manipulator. He makes Maul look like a babbling teenager. And yet he doesn't seem to derive any twisted pleasure from it. He just is doing what he thinks he needs to do.

I'm sorry Ahsoka had WHAT to do with Sabine's family dying???? In the Purge??? Ugh geez that's awful.

Gah DAMN it Sabine!! C'mon girl!! Bad decision, bad decision!

WHAT IS THIS GREATER GOOD BAYLON

I would have loved to see Obi-Wan face off against Baylon. The quiet patience and calm strength...too much for one room

He is just not done digging at Ahsoka is he. Again, master manipulator, but why?

Huyang's little magnifying glass!

Dave definitely nailed the lighting in this show. Even if the volume is still apparent in some shots, the lighting is finally dialed in and soft and realistic and atmospheric. That shot of Baylon after decimating the map is epic.

Yeahhh, Hera, ya'll might want to skedaddle right quick before you get....oh, too late....

"Mom? I've got a bad feeling." Me too kid, me too.

"Lady Wren, Lady Tano" *sobbing* Hera make sure Huyang makes it back pls

This transition.

Oh boy

I know what's coming bc I got on tumblr too early but OH MAN

ahhhh it's so gorgeous

it's here, it's finally here and it's BEAUTIFUL (The World Between Worlds, who did you think I was talking about, Anakin? ;)

I'm KIDDING ANAKIN IS BEAUTIFUL TOO OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE MY EYES

"Hello Snips" I can't I truly can't

"I didn't expect to see you so soon" so is she dead? Dying? Disassociating while drowning? Dave if you kill Ahsoka off in this show I will never forgive you

She is in shock omg look at him she is reunited with her brother, her master, her friend!!

We think--DAVE WHAT DOES VADER THEME MEAN. DAVE, SIR, HOW DARE YOU KNOW HOW TO LEAVE US ON SUCH A CLIFFHANGER IT IS UNFAIR.

Welp I have no idea what to do with myself until next week and we find out what's going on here. I swear if that's not the real Anakin I will be beside myself.

Let's get ready for flashbacks folks. What an episode.

#ahsoka #ahsoka tano #ahsoka show #ahsoka series #ahsoka spoilers #ahsoka series spoilers #ahsoka show spoilers #huyang #sabine #sabine wren #baylon skoll #shin hati #morgan elsbeth #hera syndulla #jacen syndulla #carson teva #some light ramblings #somelightramblings

19 notes · View notes

tomatoteddy · 1 year

Text

Thoughts while watching Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure Episode 18:

Cure Butterfly debut let's gooo!!!!! Spoilers ahead, but thought I would chronicle my thoughts here as I'm watching it on my tablet!!

btw I just finished my exams this is the best way to celebrate it perhaps

NEW SUMMER OUTFITS!? I LOVE THEIR OUTFITS SO MUCH MAN MASHIRO AND AGEHA LOOK SO CUTE!!!!

Seeing how small these kids are reminds me of what small I used to be oh my god

"I'm not a Precure" *stares at the episode title skeptically*

Tsubasa enforcing the fact that things could get dangerous if their identities are revealed meanwhile Sky and Prism reveal themselves to an old lady to help her get to the airport (no shade tho love that episode)

Also him trying to be serious while in bird form <3

Also his little orange v-neck sweater is so cute need me one of those for the trans vibes

Also also love Ageha's bouncy and excited animation hope they hold that up for her transformation

Love that Ageha gets to stay over with them! Pretty Cure sleepover!!

Love that little dance Ageha does with the girls.

Takeru, punching your classmates for cutting in line isn't the same thing as punching sentient robot magic beings that can kill and might destroy the universe

Ageha I love you I love you I love you so much allfhkrbekhskfbn (⁠●⁠♡⁠∀⁠♡⁠)

Tsubasa I know you want Elle to see what's happening but it's gonna be pretty obvious if you're holding a purple-nette baby above your head

BATTAMONDA NOT THE ELEPHANT WATERING CANS NOOOOOOO

Also just saying Butterfly joining the team means we'll have a new eyecatch and opening!! So excited!!

Battamonda is such a pathetic loser (/both affectionate and hostile)

Also also I can't wait for them to add her to the pose screen of the transformation

YOU LEFT THE BABY BEHIND!?!? YOU LEFT THE INTERGALATIC SKY PRINCESS WHO'S CURRENTLY BEING CHASED BY MONSTERS BEHIND!?!?!?!?!?!!

"I don't like picking on weaklings, but I will" Me when I tease my little sister

NOT THE DARK BLAST OF ENERY NOOOOOOOO

"Now you're birds in a cage-" Shut up you fucking grasshopper I could literally kill you with a shoe

He is such a sore loser you're a full grown adult (assumedly) beating up teenagers for a living

I miss Kabaton btw

I love you Ageha 🦋🩷💖

Go run girl!!!!!

Battamonda's shocked face when his Ranborg faints from a girl running around it <3

Also also I really love her ponytail (it must be annoying for me to point out every little detail but this is what happens when I hyperfixate on stuff)

True true- nursery school teachers really do have guts, especially if they willingly agree to just be around children all the time. Can't imagine it's easy, I was a bit of a rascal as a kid I would know

Takeru finding connections between Wing and Ageha just strengthens my "Tsubasa and Ageha are siblings" heart

Tsubasa enforcing the fact that things could get dangerous if their identities are revealed meanwhile Ageha transforms in front of a child

IT'S ALMOST TIME LET'S GET EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also the lesbian colours on that Sky Tone do not go unnoticed

CURE BUTTERFLY TRANSFORMATION LETS GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My thoughts on her transformation it's like- it's so different but in a good way from the others?? It's not as fluid as Sky's or Wing's or as strangely stiff as Prism's. It's like jittery and energetic in her own unique way? Like obviously her hop step jump screens don't like pan out like Sky and Wing's, they're more like Prism's. But I feel like the absolute energeticness of the transformation makes up for it?????? Also can I just say I love all the butterfly shapes in her transformation, gives me early 2000's Barbie movies vibes.

ngl kinda dissappointed the sky in her pose scene isn't pink or purple like how wing's is orange and prism's has a rainbow, but I'll give it a pass since I'm a simple fan who just really wants Ageha content

I'm really here for Battamonda and Cure Butterfly bug rivalry 🦋🦗 fight fight fight fight

We really doing the Coral X-Shield now but with the butterfly let's gooooo!!

SHE JUST EXPLODED AN ELEPHANT WITH A KISS AKFHDOBSNHAGAKNAVOAGDNRBGIDH

Her stealing an entire building blanket (is that what they're called) while Battamonda is standing on it

SHE STRAIGHT UP NAPPY WRAPS THE ELEPHANT DKSHDKFHKDIJEN

Love that literally she gets to crush the enemy to purification 💖💖 Closest thing we'll get to her hitting someone with a bat me-thinks

My feet are going staticky right now wtf I don't wanna get up though

Yesss giiirllll go threaten the twink stick-ass bugman 💖💖

Takeru being a Cure Wing and Cure Butterfly fan just strengthens my "Tsubasa and Ageha are siblings" heart

throwback to her debut ep where she jumps onto Sora at the door + Sora somehow carrying an entire eighteen year old woman carrying a suitcase on her back (what sort of training do they do in Skyland???? I'm older than Sora by a year and I'm weak as hell!!)

YAYYYYY PRETTY CURE SLEEPOVER!!!!!!!

Also can I just say her hair looks so tasty?????? Like the yellow looks so appealing???

AGEHA AND TSUBASA GET THEIR OWN DUO ATTACK NEXT EPISODE I'M SO FUCKING EZCITED DKSJKABDOSGWBBWOZHXB

Overall, I really loved this episode!! I'm usually not one for making reviews as my thoughts usually add up to "omg magical girls!! Skehoeishaohjeidohagjajh" but they really did my girl Butterfly justice!!

#pretty cure #precure #hirogaru sky pretty cure #hirogaru sky precure #hirogaru sky #hirogaru sky spoilers #hijiri ageha #cure butterfly

12 notes · View notes

shitpostingkats · 2 years

Text

Yusei Fudo, Compassion, and Virtues Turned Upside Down

Okay, so I finished watching the Yusei v. Kalin fight, and I have THOUGHTS, so buckle up.

(Quick aside, I watched these episodes both in english and japanese, and, while I love both equally dearly, I’ll be mostly pulling from the og subbed episodes, because 4kids sure censored Yusei’s backstory to the netherworld and back. Again, no complaints to the localizers, who were just trying to do their jobs, but still, it’s a little hard to talk about a scene if half of it’s missing. Cool? Cool.)

I was pleasantly surprised when I started watching 5Ds and found that, unlike you would initially assume from the edgy loner vibes and the gritty aesthetic, Yusei is very much a people person. He has his gang of misfits on satellite that are basically his entire motivation for the first half of the season, then, when he gets thrown in prison, he immediately befriends pretty much everyone in arms reach. Even his enemies aren’t immune to the sheer force that is Yusei’s desire to make allies with any person who makes the mistake of stepping within ten feet of him.

Which, while very standard for a shonen protagonist, I find fascinating. Because the setting and the themes of 5Ds justify that. Almost everyone Yusei pacifies is his fellow man, being similarly manipulated by the city: Tanner, gone cruel and remorseful after being unfairly imprisoned, Grieger, who’s on the side of Goodwin begrudgingly for the sake of the people he cares about, Akiza, who’s being groomed by Sayer to promote his own agenda.

Yusei sees all these people, and reaches out. Says “I am not your enemy.” He is staunchly against any similarly disenfranchised fighting him, because he sees what the larger picture is; the power hungry manipulate the powerless and force them to destroy each other, thus accomplishing no change in the power structures. Inducting your enemies to your friendship squad isn’t just Yusei being a nice guy. It’s him building his revolution. And anyone who is at the top of the caste ladder? He opposes without mercy. GODDANG, that is an example of a trope being used in a story to further the narrative rather than just filling out the bingo card.

But Yusei’s kindness comes with a pretty major weak point.

It means he views choices as being almost exclusively crafted by the environment, not personal autonomy.

Yusei forgives Jack so easily, after all, because he justifies it as “Jack had no other choice.” Which isn’t entirely untrue. But Jack left his family, left Yusei, almost killed Rally, and that just?? Doesn’t bother Yusei? Not exactly the healthiest attitude, but they also have bigger problems, and holding a grudge against Jack is not going to help them save the world.

Kalin, however, is a whole other kettle of worms.

Now, what’s important about analyzing *sigh* “Team Satisfaction”, (I’m sure it’s much more poetic in japanese, and quite honestly, ‘The Enforcers’ is equally stupid.) is that the boys involved are young. Like, “I know this is an anime but holy shit you’re telling me they beat up every gang in the city by age sixteen?” young. And Kalin is stated, several times, to be the one thing that made Yusei, Crow, and Jacks’ lives less shitty.

Being on the team gave them security, safety, and the feeling like they had the power to change things. So of course they’re gonna be loyal to the guy who made it happen. That’s the first person (besides Martha, we are not going to ignore Martha) who made them feel safe. Kalin was probably the first friend their own age the three of them made besides each other. And Yusei isn’t going to give that up.

When Kalin returns, years later, as a dark signer, Yusei immediately tries his old routine of cutting through all the manipulations and convincing his opponent to give up the fight. He is ready to forgive this person who is threatening to douse him in hellfire.

Contrast that with Jack and Crow’s reactions, however.

Not exactly the look you give someone you’re happy to see back from the dead. Sure, he’s evil now, but Yusei’s done the Redeem and Recruit before, why would they be so worried? I mean, this is basically the first time we’ve seen Jack anything but prim and unflappable, and he looks terrified. Why-

Oh.

They remember being on the receiving end of that aggression. I mean, look at Jack’s expression there. He doesn’t even look surprised when he has to hold Kalin back. This might not be the first time he’s seen Kalin act like this. As we see through flashbacks, Kalin grew increasingly unstable throughout his tenure as leader of the team, starting as calm and aloof, to almost reveling in the fights him and the others dish out.

For Crow, however, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and his leader laying hands on him is what pushes him to leave this abusive family.

And Jack follows.

Just. Just think about that, for a second

They are both turning their backs on the only safety, family, and protection they have. At this point, they’ve personally beat up every punk in Satellite, so it’s not like they can join a new gang. In fact, they’ve made enemies everywhere, probably half the city is out for their blood. And they are (I reiterate), seventeen at the most.

But Yusei, in his own words, “Couldn’t abandon Kalin.”

Because Yusei sees the good in everyone. And he’s hella loyal. He would never turn his back on a friend. Heck, even when he does leave Kalin, he explicitly does so, not for his own safety, but because he thinks it will keep Kalin from putting himself in harm's way.

Even after this exchange.

Dear god, there is a lot to unpack here, but the show basically shows us, multiple times, that Kalin does not plan to survive his battle with the sector security. Referring to it as ‘Team Satisfaction’s final stand’ and berating them for trying to flee and survive rather than standing and getting killed. That is some OH BOY behavior right there, and a situation with basically no good options. But Yusei doesn’t seem to even recognize Kalin’s flagrantly self-destructive behavior, doesn’t understand that Kalin has long passed the point of reason, and, heartbreakingly, still thinks Kalin is someone deserving of selflessness.

I think it’s interesting to note, that Jack and Crow are both shown to have some very protective big brother instincts. Jack is, post class-traitor-arc, basically shown to the audience being handed back his Good Guy status by stepping in to save the orphanage kids. And Crow, of course, adopts any child left unattended for more than five minutes. Both seem to have this deep rooted impulse to protect, especially vulnerable kids, which makes sense, seeing how they were raised by Martha and how community-driven satellite culture tends to be.

So it makes sense, if, given the instability of their ringleader, both strove to protect Yusei from the full brunt of his nastiness. Like I said, Jack hardly seems surprised when Kalin goes to hit Crow, and both, upon seeing him return from the dead, are openly terrified.

It’s not out of the question that they play a part in why Yusei wears such rose colored glasses.

But even Yusei knows about Kalin’s final deterioration. He was the only one around for those final months, and they all were there the night he made his attack on security. And yet, still, despite knowing full well the things Kalin has done in the past, Yusei doesn’t even truly believe Kalin wants to hurt him.

Even now, years later, Yusei is still trying to excuse Kalin’s behavior by saying he isn’t in his right mind, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Which is a mindset often seen in children of abusive families. And again, we see him willing to assign blame to the city, to the system, to anything else that influenced them, before he thinks to see the person he’s fighting as having a choice in the matter.

The entire arc with Kalin, in both his duels, the show builds up to the reveal of how exactly Yusei “betrayed” Kalin. Of what exactly happened on that final, fateful, night. We even get flashes of it, teased in their first battle. But here’s the interesting thing.

The first clips we see don’t match the later reveal.

(Okay, yes, this is clearly them showing the flashback before they’ve fully nailed down Kalin’s backstory, or an animation inconsistency, or even the studio getting notes after the first duel to “dial it back a bit”. But when writing overly detailed essays analyzing Yugioh, you take what you can get and you RUN WITH IT. YOU FLEE. YOU DO NOT LET THEM CATCH YOU.)

The two major discrepancies are the amount of blood covering both Kalin and the officer, as well as the cops showing up when Yusei is fighting Kalin on the ground, rather than himself willingly surrendering to them. And in the first round of flashbacks, everything is black and white, grainy, with all the sound muffled except for the rain. Implying this could be that night, as Yusei remembers it. Blurred by time and the effects of trauma.

So when Yusei sees Kalin standing over the cop, about to beat his skull in, it’s jarring. It’s violent. It’s his brain seeing the scene in front of him as the worst thing it could possibly be, and burned in his memory, embellished with extra gore because, in his panic, that’s all Yusei could see.

The police cars pulling up when he’s fighting with Kalin could be just the effects of his memory of the night already being so muddled, events blurring together from shock. But, let’s twist the knife a little, shall we?

What’s that scene look like in the “true” flashback?

The cops are replaced with Jack and Crow, stumbling upon the scene. If you’ll allow me a bit of poetic license, I think this is because, to Yusei, his brothers showing up and seeing him, turned on their leader, is exactly as condemning as being caught red-handed by the enforcers.

Loyalty is everything to Yusei, his ability to be kind and understanding, to never turn his back on people who are struggling. And he’s just turned on the person he swore to never abandon, is stooping to violence against a brother in arms. That runs counter to everything about who he is. And the two people witnessing it are basically the closest thing he has left to someone whose authority he respects. The two people who can punish him, by shunning him for this criminal offense.

(Again, I don’t think Yusei has fully conceptualized that they left because Kalin was deteriorating and lashing out. I don’t think he even fully has a reason for it. But from his warped perspective, he betrays Kalin, and then Jack and Crow avoid him. And he is truly alone, because of him finally snapping and turning on his family. Perhaps, looking back, he thinks their departure the first time around is justified by how they had to abandon him a second time.)

So Yusei has just, in his eyes, done the ultimate sin, of betraying the trust of someone who he resolved to stand by. What can he do next?

He says “Take care of Kalin.” Get him help. Stand by him and help him through this where I failed to. Then, he tries to hand himself over. A redemption through sacrifice.

But that doesn’t work out, and Yusei is left behind. The family splits up. Jack, seemingly embittered by all this tragedy he’s had to put up with, pulls his own betrayal. Crow is in and out of prison. And Yusei….

Yusei tries to rebuild a family for himself, and tries to be as kind and understanding as he can, to anyone who cracks under the pressures the city piles on them.

So when Kalin comes back, when Yusei’s been holding all this guilt inside him for years, when one of the very events that caused Yusei to throw himself into aggressively remaining empathetic in the face of hatred, comes back to haunt him, at least he finally gets to try again. He gets to finally apologize, and stand by Kalin through the tough times.

And gets told that, if he’d been truly loyal to the end, he would have died that night.

It finally hits Yusei that his own selflessness almost got him killed.

There’s a pretty cool post from a couple years ago about how character flaws shouldn’t be some last minute add-on to a character. That a good, three dimensional fatal flaw is simply the natural continuation of a trait; Trust that leads to gullibility, determination that leads to stubbornness, ferocity that turns to power-hungry.

Yusei’s fatal flaw is compassion.

He is utterly willing to reach out a hand to anyone, even those actively trying to oppose him. That he’s kind, and forgives easily, even if they haven’t yet shown willingness to grow.

If he had been like Crow and Jack, if he’d cut his losses and run, he wouldn’t have to feel this guilt, this responsibility, to Kalin’s ultimate demise. If he was selfish, he wouldn’t always be looking for the best in people, and Kalin’s downward spiral wouldn’t catch him by surprise. Maybe he wouldn’t have been alone after that night.

But, I cannot emphasize enough:

Yusei is not wrong to be kind.

His ability to empathize is what propels his goals forward, what finally gets him his revolution. It’s not a fault to overcome, and it’s what makes him, both as a person and as a hero.

It just also means that he can have faults, same as anyone else.

And Kalin is the perfect example. That Kalin could hurt him so deeply, because of the trust Yusei placed in him. But also, Yusei is the only one that would be so compassionate, who’d believe so blindly, that Kalin could heal himself. The very bleeding heart that got him cut open in the first place is what he uses to see redemption in Kalin, one of the very people who was a catalyst to his morals.

Yusei is kind because he was once hurt, and he was hurt because he was once kind.

And that makes him feel very, very human.

#yugioh #yugioh 5ds #ygo 5ds #yusei fudo #kalin kessler #spk watches 5ds #kyosuke kiryu #essays #character study #I suppose #tw violence #tw blood #Ask me to tag with other tws if you need them #I'm just trying to be on the safe side #Also feel free to just yell in my inbox #I like talking about the blorbos #If you read the whole essay and all of these notes you're a champ

46 notes · View notes

kwangyadetective · 1 year

Text

🔭 The Visions: The Overall Lore Story (as of Miracle)

A special theory post about WayV’s overall lore journey as of Miracle before their next comeback, Phantom. This post is to help me and those who are interested in the WayV portion of the NCT lore in understanding it :)

(!) This is a theory as it is not fully confirmed by SM entertainment nor the members or NCT.

I’m making a special post for this before their comeback because I FINALLy understand what really happened in their lore... at least from the information that I have. I know I am LATE to the party but bear with me because I had a lot of confusion before 😭 Summarizing from a live(?) they had during Kick Back promotion, combining it with my speculation and my past post that talks about Kick Back and their Unit Songs,

(!) long and wordy post ahead

Regular

Not yet story, just an introduction.

Dream Launch

From what I understand, I believe DL happened first then TO. We were introduced that WayV are supposednto be astrophysics students or space enthusiasts living together in Reality. We were also hinted a wormhole which was used in NCT2020 until 2021. The main plot of the MV, they were given a Vision from a Dream; they will be using a wormhole to go to the Reality, symbolized by the ladder they used to go upwards. They are still inside a Dream here but was given the idea to go to Reality, which was why they were looking out to Earth from an unknown location. We also have that Dream Launch Plan video series that reveals the dreams they want to come true.

Take Off

We can see that planes are the main focus of WayV’s story. Although there are some motorcyles, planes are more consistently used. Essentially, they are taking off to a new place, the Desert Dreamscape after given that vision from DL. There are some member role introduction from the WayV Character Analysis, it is pretty clear from there(?) but only Ten’s role is questionable.

Moonwalk

Kun described this MV like “landing in a new planet”, they were just changing locations to this desert. This is the same desert that NCT 127 were in in Highway to Heaven and I believe they were already there.

There were some buildings, possibly built by 127. Moonwalk’s alternate title is 天选之城, which roughly translates to ‘The Chosen City’, very fitting because this place is very vital for all Neos and where they work around in the dream world. One scene where Ten was inside a space ship, all of them were there but only he was highlighted for the dance. That’s why after it fell into the desert, everyone walked as a group. Then they explored the place which explains why everyone are in different places. Plus everything are in odd places (like the floating car) because this is in a dream. In the end of the MV, all members stopped a time using their logo... now this is still a mystery because no member mentioned this BUT there were meteorites falling in the beginning and the sky was dark then after the time was stopped, the sky became clear... perhaps they were stopping natural disasters from destroying the place? PLUS

This is the sea of Ether, the medium of connection.

Love Talk

... According to YangYang they were creating culture and civilizations. Well, the lyrics is somewhat about people connecting so they are empathizing?? I’m just gonna take his words for that.

Turn Back Time

YangYang said something happened that made them locked up, but he wasn’t allowed to tell what. One thing that is clear is they were very firm to turn back time, like as if they made a mistake and need to undo it. In some of their photoshoots too, it was as if they were imprisoned and was put into different punishments in the MV(?). Another thought, they could possibly be captured? But as well know, Ten rescued them. Lastly, of course we saw that V-shaped rooftop and the hollow city, I don’t think this is the desert one? I had a speculation that it is related to SuperM though this needs to be in a separate post for this but right now my focus is on their comeback so lets move on.

Kick Back

This happened after NCT2020 and they were in the middle of going through the wormhole, but regardless each units have their own stories too. I have explained it thoroughly that they found Kosmo in this MV in another post (🔭 The Visions: Kick Back, Low Low, and Kosmo). But IGNORE the parts where I was confused with Kwangya.

According to YangYang, from a Weibo post during Low Low era, he (along with other WayV) has reached that Kosmo but other units hasn’t. But my confusion; I’m not sure whether Kosmo is just Reality or another ‘secret place’. They have specifically said ‘secret country’ and the Reality shouldn’t be secret... though after looking at that upside down desert room in the MV again I was somewhat puzzled.

Unit Songs

I don’t think I need to talk about each one of them in detail. Low Low is clearly about Ten and YangYang going to Kosmo by a plane. We have the chip thing that they input into their phones but we’ll see that in future releases(?) Kun and Xiaojun were exploring a portion of the dreamscape place that resembles a forest. They were by the beach and as we all know the sea supposed to represent Ether, symbolizing that they are connecting with the other Neos. By the end of the MV, they ran into a light (?) which could be interpreted as a portal to go to ‘Kosmo’.

Miracle

Miracle is closely more about NCT2021 and I have talked about it in another post though I think I have new ideas now. Ten was being sus and I have talked about it in Ten’s Birthday post. They didn’t talk about the secret place/Kosmo again though we see many waves as the background which again represents Ether. Ether isn’t water but it resembles it, essentially it can form waves since it is often said as ‘the sea of Ether’. They are connecting with the other units. Now this raise my suspicion again if Kosmo really is another place or Reality. In NCT2021 they went through a wormhole to get to Reality as NCT as a whole, when YangYang said WayV has reached Kosmo was during Low Low. We haven’t seen more updates on this... especially since the unit hasn’t got a comeback until this December.

With that,

IF this next comeback (Phantom) doesn’t talk about the secret place again... I can safely assume that Kosmo could be Reality. To add to my confusion, we have never gotten a clear and official definition of Kosmo itself other than it being mentioned in 90s Love; many people just believe that it is a city/place that is advanced and simply better. I was somewhat sure of what it is before but now, after looking back at it, I have a lot of questions. But if they brought it up again, then we’ll definitely get another continuation to their Kosmo mission. Since WayV is the Vision of the Neos, it makes sense that they are ahead of the others. But keep in mind my ideas will change depending on the new info I get so there is definitely an update to this theory.

I think that is all and the conclusion to his will soon come when Phantom is released :)

#nct #wayv #kun #ten #ten lee #qian kun #yangyang #winwin #hendery #xiaojun #smcu #SMCU THEORY

7 notes · View notes

sungbeam · 1 year

Note

HEYYYYYYY

To start off, phew, that pintrest post had me going DELULUUUUUUUU like jeez miss Molly Burford you def had some INSANE ideas/pos cause I read that whole thing like it was a small Changmin fic in and of itself and it just goes to show how strong literature can really be and how much emotion you can convey with just the smallest bit of writing like- *sobs*

AND YEAH RIP YOU WERE RIGHT QUANTUMANIA SUCKED LOWKEY 😭

Onto watch Hawkeye tho 😼🤭

AND YASSSSS I GOT INTO TBZ PRETTY RECENTLY (roar era 💀) BUT THE CONCEPT FOR MAVERICK WAS EVERYTHING TO ME I SWEAR LIKE I WAS GENUINELY LIKE, JAWDROP, WHEN I SAW THE TRAILER LIKE THE MUSIC, THE CUTS, CHANGMIN’S ENDING SCENE PHEW LIKE OUR MEN CAN A C T

I still go back to just watch the teaser cause it’s genuinely so cool to me and I just wished they did more with the concept cause it was such an interesting storyline BUT THE BE AWAKE/BE AWARE STORYLINE WAS ALSO PRETTY INTERESTING AND I CAN DO A FULL DISSERTATION ON IT I SWEAR LIKE, IN THIS ESSAY I WILL- 🤓☝️

But yeah I basically just started with tbz yet I somehow managed to get almost all the maverick album photocards so lowkey proud of myself, thanks mercari 🤭

And yeah with GOTG3 Floor was actually a bunny rabbit 😭 the way she moved like a spider freaked me TF out tho 💀 but yesss they were so cute and it just felt bad seeing them cause being experimented on was basically all that they knew and they were so happy to escape but then… yeah 😭

And LORDDDDD right when they were escaping and Floor started freaking tf out and kept repeating the same sentence was when I started sobbing RFYUTFJBJ FELT A LIL GOOFY DOING IT IN THE THEATRE BUT OH WELL

AND YES (omfg take a shot every time I say ‘and’ 💀) YOU’RE SO RIGHT ABT YOUR WRITING STYLE like I thought it was only me that thought your writing is almost cinematic?? Not bc of the scene or act titles or anything tho like I can’t really pinpoint how it feels cinematic but it does and I’m SO obsessed with it cause I usually imagine fics to play out as if I’m watching a movie [it’s smth I do with books too like I’ve always just had an insane imagination that I’m v v proud of (like thank you brain for giving me smth useful for once 🙄☝️/j)]

But yeah (take a shot every time I say ‘yeah’ 💀) your writing style just makes it way more easier for me to digest bc of my overactive imagination HEBUHDBRH

YAS I DO LOVE TXT AND BEOMGYU IS MY BIAS HEHEHE 🤭 Tae and Kai have been wrecking me fr tho PHEW but AHHH a lot of superhero aus typically don’t have the reader as a superhero so that’ll be super refreshing to see! :o

KEEP THE SUPERHERO AUS COMING THO CAUSE I *DO* LIVE FOR THEM unfortunately I haven’t seen moon knight, ms marvel, OR shangchi BUT THEY WILL BE ADDED TO THE LIST TRUST and phew superhero Kev with his white hair ARGH MAIN CHARACTER FR 😵‍💫

OH NAURRR THE CHANGMIN FIC TOO GOSH SOMEONE TAKE CHANGMIN AWAY FROM YOU CAUSE YOU *WILL* END UP DESTROYING MY HEART(/jk jk) but I can see it right now not even gonna lie like I’m kind of envisioning the almost nostalgic vibe of a late 90s-early 00’s anime (idk if the link will work cause I’m on mobile but kind of like this scene from Mysterious Girlfriend X https://images.app.goo.gl/Huz8NDfpAajF7iC37) like I always get that warm nostalgic vibe WHENIGND SORRY IF THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU WERE TALKING ABT AT A L L 💀

Also, confession time, I was also a CHRONIC ghost reader that would just like (mostly cause I didn’t know that reblogs actually mattered as much as likes-) but I have seen so so many amazing blogs disappear or go inactive due to the lack of reblogs, likes, feedback, or basically ANY interaction :( I’ve changed my ways now even though I’m still not sure if I’m doing my reblogs properly but I guess I didn’t realize how much feedback or reblogs actually matter to people until I saw how my OWN motivation improved when I receive feedback or praise. Especially when I’m struggling with my mental health, someone telling me that I did something right makes me feel SOOOOO much happier than a singular like does. So now I prefer sending anon asks to authors just so I can communicate how much I appreciate their work cause honestly if I was a writer then I’d love to hear what people would have to say abt my fics, no matter if the feedback is negative (as long as it’s constructive and not mean-) or positive, it’s still better than nothing. So I completely get you bro and I genuinely hope that more people come to the same realization that I did 😭🫶 like I promise guys, a little feedback goes a long way and helps more than you think it can!

- Love you more than yesterday, but less than tomorrow, 🌷 anon

🌷 I LITERALLY SCREECHED AND GIGGLED ALOUD WHEN I SAW UR MESSAGE AKFNSJDJ HI BFFIE 🥰🥰🥰

plsss IKR kdnskdnkd ykw that's just what these men do to me 😔😌 make me so utterly irrevocably irredeemably delusional 🤩🤸‍♀️ i too JUST got into the boyz so ur not alone haha :')) i go into them just a couple months before roar era !! so like the standstill in btwn but yeah, the be awake concepts were SO FIRE 😩🤘🏻 i was so so so excited for it to come out and WE WERE NOT DISAPPOINTED IN THE SLIGHTEST !! (like we were w quantumania 😬) WAIT HELLO U HAVE ALL THE MAVERICK CARDS ALREADY???(@;@*@((@9@*#; WHAT SORCERY WKFJEKDM i didn't buy anything from maverick era but i did buy like a mystery pack of pcs someone was selling off instagram and got a couple pcs to start my section of them 😔😔 but i think after buying be awake im trying to not buy anymore of that stuff :'))))

NO CUZ THE WHOLE ROCKET BG STORYLINE WAS SO SAD SKXNSKDN I DIDNT EXPECT THAT I LITERALLY HATE THAT ITS SO SAD AND DARK LIKE??? im so glad my man rocket was SOLIDIFIED as an absolute genius now tho, that's so cool for him even tho it was bc of that wicked fkn high evolutionary trash 😭😭 floor's voice and actions and appearance combined were so scary PLS 💀 she's an absolute sweetheart but my goodness gracious, she will be someone's sleep paralysis demon—

OMG 🥺🥺🥺 BESTIE UR FEEDING INTO MY EGO SKCNKEMD i sometimes do write like im directing a scene instead of writing a fic/novel (´Д⊂ヽit's like a really bad habit cuz it doesn't allow me to flesh it out, but if u remember from the changmin fic otr, in the scene right after they confessed, changmin calls chanhee and it cuts right to yn's actions, and i was literally just imagining it as like a very abrupt scene break 2kfnskfjkdkd AND in that same fic and wavelength, in the cherry blossom quad scene at the end where changmin says "we never did get to finish that duet", i just imagine the scene ending with them looking at each other with the quad in the bg and the screen fades to black and he says the line OR it ends with like a close-up of how close their hands r to touching or smth— im telling u,,,, i literally think abt EVERYTHING as a movie sequence 😭😭😭 i could prob tell u what angle the proverbial camera is in for each scene 💀

STOP CUZ BEOMGYU IS MY BIAS TOO 😭😭😭😭 I LOVE THAT MAN W ALL MY HEART FRFR taehyun has been wrecking tho lately @_@ LIKE ,,, all of txt needs to chill w going to the gym, that's all im gonna say......... OMG I WILL WATCH THAT CLIP IN A MOMENT JSFNJDNDN BUT I STARTED WRITINF SOME OF THE SLOW DANCING FIC AND IDK WHAT THE VIBE IS COMPLETELY BUT I WILL LYK IF THE CLIP U SENT MATCHES IT ONCE I GET TO WRITING MORE TRUST o7

i too used to be a chronic ghost reader 😭😭😭 i had an old account where i tried writing, but i never really interacted with ANYONE and i thought that reblogs were just for people who went above and beyond 😭😔 but then when i started gaining more traction on this new acct, i realized how much reblogs really did matter and how tumblr apparently does run on them 🤧🤧 but yeah, i do appreciate u coming into my ask box all the time !!! this and/or reblogging,,, i appreciate both VERY DEEPLY :'))

TULIP, U HAVE A WAY W WORDS (´Д⊂ヽ if that's a quote from somewhere else, we can pretend u came up w it 🤩🤸‍♀️ love u lots 💖 more than 3000

#sungbeam strikes again #🌷 anon

0 notes

sonofcoulson · 1 year

Text

1945 Wolverine Vol III

Logan looks 23/24.

Inspired by this scene from The Wolverine movie.

World War II is nearing it's end. The Marine unit of Victor Creed and Logan has been sent to the invasion of Okinawa. The mood amongst the men in the transport is low, but they are trying to banter and make light.

Logan is surly, not wanting to join in. He is a soldier because he is good at it, not because he enjoys it. He is there to do a job.

Victor is the complete opposite. He seems to be having the time of his life. He laughs raucously at the jokes and chastises Logan for his attitude. He says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity (for some of you) to win a war, beat the enemy…to death. The others, save Logan, cheer at this.

Victor sits with Logan…

V: You should be happy, this is a good life. We do a job we're good at, we make our living from it…you should at least try to enjoy it.

L: You enjoy it too much.

V: Why shouldn't I? I've lost count of my enemy kills, but I know it's higher than yours.

L: Don't you ever get tired of killing?

V: What else are you gonna do? Watercolors? Wildlife photography?

L: …

V: We're made for killing. You certainly aren't much good for anything else.

L: …When we were in Spain-

V: Are you still pissed off about that? Logan that was nearly a decade ago.

L: Those men were-

V: We are not men. We're not like them. You end up caring for them and then get upset when they...

L: Victor-

V: Stop trying to protect them.

The other conversations have died down and the brothers realise they are being listened to.

L: You're damn right I care. What about these men we serve with. Are they not our brothers too? Would you kill them Victor?

V (grinning): In a heartbeat.

Silence.

One of the marines asks Victor if he's joking. Victor lets out a hearty laugh and the others, save Logan, join in.

Logan knows he means it.

Then we cut to a fighting, moving, sweeping across the Island, capturing an airbase and Logan and Victor's differing-responses-to-the-violence montage. Logan tries hard not to react with sadness when members of their unit are killed. He responds with anger instead.

Then we see the remaining marines pinned down under heavy fire. Victor and Logan become separated from the rest of the unit and try to make ground themselves rather than get shot where they lie.

They come across a pillbox embrasure. They both take some hits. They storm the pill box, get inside and kill the soldiers. Logan is efficient, Victor slaughters them with glee.

Logan starts to admonish him when the pillbox is destroyed by an American shell.

Cut to black.

Logan comes to, heavily restrained in a basic treatment room. There are scratch marks, lacerations and deep gouges on the walls. Also a certain amount of blood.

A young Japanese guard sits, skittish, by the door. Recovering his wits a little, he strains against his bonds.

The guard jumps up and tries to grab his rifle. Snikt! The claws come out. The guard runs out.

Logan can't break the restraints nor angle the claws to cut them. He accidentally cuts himself in the struggle. The pain snaps him out of his instinctive reverie. He retracts the claws. The wound starts to heal.

There is shouting, in Japanese, outside the room.

The officer in charge of the camp, wearing his arm in a sling, enters. He sees that Logan is relatively calm. He sees Logan's fresh leg wound healing up. He remarks that Logan has some unusual gifts. That he survived a direct hit from an American shell. His body was still healing when they brought him in.

He introduces himself in his best English. His name is Ichirō Yashida. He says that he knows his men sometimes talk behind his back, they say he is too lenient. He says they are all men and should be afforded some respect, even in captivity.

He says that Logan is not a man, he is something else. They have had to treat him differently.

Logan asks if he caused Ichirō's injury. He did. He apologises. He says sometimes he is not in control of what he is doing. Instinct takes over.

He asks if anyone else was brought in with him.

Ichirō says there was another. The same gifts as Logan. When he woke he killed three men, injured more, and escaped. They believe he is long gone as there is no sign of him.

Logan says they are both very good at hiding and covering their tracks. He may still be here.

They have a few conversations, Ichirō is trying to get an understanding of the threat level.

I: What is your role in the military?

L: I have been an engineer, saboteur, sapper, sniper, assassin…you name it, I've been it. I started by following men to their deaths, now I lead them to theirs, only I can't die.

L: Killing…it's what I do best.

I: Is that a threat?

L: No. Just a fact…It's the only life I know.

I: Are you here to kill anyone?

L: No. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I: Are there more like you, in your unit?

L: I only met one other like me, and you said he's long gone.

Gradually they come to an understanding and Logan is released from his bonds and into the camp.

He starts to get to know the guards and other prisoners. He tries to take on more than his share to save the others from hard labour. The guards don't argue because they are scared of him.

Against his better judgement he begins to like the other POWs. He starts to develop a mutual respect with the guards and staff, especially Ichirō.

Then it starts. Late one night a guard is brutally killed, as if by a beast.

They think Logan did it.

Despite his protestations they lock him up in the recovery room like before.

It happens again, two guards this time.

They put him in solitary, down in a solitary underground cell.

It happens again, a POW spots the culprit and is killed too.

The guard in the tower sees it is not Logan and tells Yashida.

Logan knows exactly what is happening and pleads to be let out to face him. Victor is looking for Logan and won't stop until he finds him.

He comes again so they relent and release him. It obviously is Victor and he wants to take out the whole camp. The Japanese who run the camp and any witnesses. Logan is already angry at Vic for his brutality but he cannot countenance any further killing when they could just escape. Victor won't take no for an answer.

They fight having not done so seriously for decades. And when they did Victor would always win.

The fight is epic, brutal and bloody. Vic has the upper hand but is exhausted and totally focused on Wolverine. Ichirō uses this distraction to put a bullet in Vic's head.

Logan says Vic will recover, they have to put him in solitary.

The guards and the POWs are terrified of them both and put them in separate underground cells (I'm pretty sure they only have one in the film but we're having two for narrative purposes).

Then the atom bomb warning comes. The camp is evacuated as per the film.

Yashida hesitates momentarily but then frees Logan. He isn't sure about freeing Vic.

Logan steps forward and cuts the chains. Vic is angry and wants to kill Yashida and get revenge on Logan.

Logan says you want to fight us or you want to try and outrun that bomb?

Vic growls that he won't forget this.

Logan knows.

Vic leaves.

Logan wants to get back in the underground cell. The other officers want Yashida to join them in committing seppuku.

Logan rushes him to the cell and shields him from the blast. He is horribly damaged by the blast but regenerates in front of Yashida.

They spend some time in the cell together and then come out to survey the damage.

They are both left wondering whether Logan or Victor or mankind are most monstrous.

Mid or post credits: Essex, now Sinister, En Sabah Nur's envoy, ushers in another sacrifice. Aaaaah!

#it's all connected #iac #marvel cinematic universe #mcu #wolverine #logan #victor creed #sabretooth #ichirō yashida #nagasaki #world war ii

1 note · View note

qqueenofhades · 3 years

Text

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

2K notes · View notes

witching-hour · 4 years

Text

I’m Back, Baby [Carl Gallagher x Reader]

(A/N): season 7 spoilers! this one is shorter than what i’ve written so far, but it’s longer than a drabble. when i watched this episode, this scene was all i could think about and how if carl had a girlfriend, this is how it would play out

SUMMARY: the reader shows up at the gallagher’s home early one morning and is in store for a welcoming surprise

TW: metions of death

THE moment your dad walked into the house with the little blonde skank attached to his arm three days ago, you knew it was going to be a shitshow. The bottle blonde who’s hair was thinner than a newborn baby’s, and old enough to be your classmate, was every motherless daughter’s nightmare.

She acted as if she owned the house within the three days of living in it. She destroyed every room she entered, which left you to clean up the messes that wouldn’t clean themselves. She ate up whatever was in the cupboards and fridge. She even tried giving you orders.

You promised yourself you wouldn’t snap. And surprisingly you didn’t. Being in close quarters with your douchebag father and whorish step-mom in the making, made you wanna pull your hair out of your head. How you managed to keep your cool amazed you.

With the extended weekend from school, you were trapped in your house an extra day. Bonnie and Clyde were still asleep by the time you snuck out of the house. You climbed out your window with no problem since you lived in the bedroom on the first floor.

You quickly hurried away from the side of your house to the sidewalk before you got caught.

The walk to the Gallagher home wasn’t long, since you lived only a couple of blocks away. Your hands rested in the front pocket of Carl’s your sweatshirt (that he’d given to you the night he left for military school). You’d wear it most days when it wasn’t too hot—which it was in Chicago during the spring, but you didn’t care. This was the closest you were getting to your boyfriend since his leave for military school to become a better “man,” as he declared.

You jogged up the steps of the Gallagher house, twisting the doorknob gently to see if it was unlocked, or if you’d have to pick it with your trusty bobby pin. You knew it was early, especially for the Gallagher’s (and yourself), but there was no way you were gonna escape the madness that was your household after ten. The door was (surprisingly) unlocked. Which meant either someone broke in, or one of the Gallagher’s were up. Your money was on Ian since he liked to go for runs in the morning.

The moment you walked into the threshold, the savory scent of bacon clouded your senses. It was like you walked into heaven.

“Who woke up at this ungodly hour to actually make breakfast?” You snickered, kicking off your shoes, and sliding them next to the staircase.

“Hey (Y/N/N)!” Fiona greeted you from the kitchen table. “You’re alive!”

Kev and V let out happy cheers of surprise at your sudden and early arrival. Lip nodded his head up in greeting as he munched on the piece of toast hanging out of his mouth, and Liam waved enthusiastically as he went to town on his eggs. Ian was the only one to actually get up from his seat and meet you in the living room for one of his bear hugs.

Debbie had Franny on her hip as she stood at the little bar top dividing part of their kitchen, bouncing the baby every few moments to occupy her. “What’re you doing up so early (Y/L/N)?”

You laughed as you continued to cross the living room, Ian in toe as he had draped his arm over your shoulders. “I could ask the same Gallagher.”

You took in the scene of the kitchen and saw all the fresh ingredients to make pancakes from scratch scattered across the counter tops. You saw the plates of food on the table: bacon, eggs, pancakes, and toast.

“Carl surprised us all with breakfast.” She replied casually, turning and stealing a piece of bacon from Fiona who swatted her hand away from the plate, glaring at her redhead sister.

“Yeah, the Ghetto Ninja Warrior returned!” Kevin added with his goofy smile, which soon fell when he realized he was out of bacon, and reached over for more, but was beat by the bacon-stealing ginger mom.

Your eyes bulged out of your head at her words. Carl’s back?

Your head did a complete 180 as you stared up at the man who had yet to remove his arm. “What?! When?!”

Ian laughed as the boy himself stepped out of the downstairs half-bathroom drying off his hands on the star printed apron he had in his hands. The minute your (y/e/c) eyes met his blue ones, his face lit up at the confusion turned glee that spread across yours.

“I’m back, baby!” He announced, stretching his arms out in expectation of a hug.

You let out a small yell, running at your boyfriend, and letting him scoop you up in his arms as the bunched up apron fell to the floor. Your arms winding behind his neck, letting your hands run through the neatly slicked back mop of brown hair on his head. His own arms looped around your waist, dragging you into his chest as tight as he could, closing any proximity between you two as he had certainly missed you after being away at military school for so long. He pulled his head from your neck, sliding one of his hands up your face to cup your cheek and gave you a slow and desperate kiss.

There were various groans, obviously from Lip, Debbie, and little Liam. The both of you pulled away from the kiss in laughter before Carl suddenly picked you up and spun you around. You giggled in delight as he set you down.

Seriousness and sympathy washed over features. “I’m sorry about Monica.” You knew all about Monica Gallagher. You knew Carl didn’t care much for her considering the only memories he really had were when she was either gone or when she was at her lowest.

“It’s okay. She wasn’t much a mom anyway.”

“I know.”

Nothing else was said about the matter as the two of you joined the rest of the Gallagher’s and Kev and V at the table to dig into the breakfast Carl made. You were impressed with the quality, and voices your opinion to the others. You all poked fun at how the Carl Francis Gallagher made such a delicious meal.

It had been a long time since you’ve felt the peace and happiness as you did eating with the people you considered more of a family then your blood relations. It had been lonely without your boyfriend around, and with the rest of the Gallagher’s paving their own way with jobs and school, they haven’t been around either. But you savored the morning you had with them, and the time you had with you boyfriend before he would have to sign back up for the next semester.

SHAMELESS TAG LIST: @will-noble-owns-my-ass @lemur-femur @ineedmorefanfics

#shameless #shameless imagine #shameless one shot #carl gallagher x reader #carl gallagher #carl gallagher imagine #carl gallagher one shot #ian gallagher #fiona gallagher #veronica fisher #kevin ball #lip gallagher #debbie gallagher #franny gallagher #liam gallagher

2K notes · View notes

incorrect-ikevamp-quotes · 3 years

Note

i saw your post about Charles and what his personality past and part in the story line so i was wondering if u could do the same for vlad? :)

Ah, well, I can at least let you know what I’ve seen so far? I haven’t delved too far into Vlad, and some of his general impressions can be confusing, so I’ll do my best to make it sensible and unbiased! Here you go lovely <33333

Fair warning, there will be mentions of a lot of JPN app content since Vlad and his boys aren’t around much in the ENG app yet.

My general sense of Vlad is basically discount vampire Sasuke Uchiha.

What I mean by this is to say–according to what I’ve read so far–his clan/family were murdered by vampire hunters in cold blood when he was just a young boy. Presumably as a result of that traumatic event, he harbors a sizable enmity towards humanity and kind of lashes out on them in weirdly specific moments of violence. Another aspect of his motivation is something that’s mentioned within Comte’s route; which is that Vlad went through the timespace door on his own one day and allegedly saw a devastated future, where nothing remains of life on earth more or less.

I guess the reason I find him to be so perplexing is that he speaks about his actions in terms of efficiency, while most of the things he does just feel like unhappy outbursts (v often a product of unresolved trauma symptoms, I’d wager.) I also say this because he appears to have no larger pattern to his fury beyond the original event of his loss. Most of the human beings he attacks aren’t much of a threat to him and hurting them really doesn’t bring him any dividends beyond revenge.

For instance, he insists his disdain for humanity and insistence on controlling them is for the sake of ensuring they do not destroy the future–the horrifying wasteland he witnessed when he traveled through the timespace door. However, I’m not really sure how his current movements really speak to that goal? I mean sure, maybe he’s relying on Faust to create an immortal human so that humans will be forced to care because it will be their future too, but he doesn’t allow Faust to draw his pureblood blood for experimenting. (One can most certainly argue this was more about a lack of trust, and perhaps for plenty reason: Faust is vindictive enough to try to turn the tables and exert control over Vlad, or act on his own whims with his findings.) But if that’s the solution he’s waiting on, turning the rivals of the men in the mansion doesn’t really bring him any closer to that vision either? I mean, what good does it do to bring back Gilles de Rais–a prominent French serial killer? How would unleashing him on the populace help humanity “realize the error of it’s short-sighted and wasteful ways” and move to a brighter future?

Can’t help it, I ask these questions as I read.

In Comte’s main story, Comte hammers home that Vlad is not somebody to be taken lightly. One day when MC goes out to buy flowers, Vlad poses as a human florist to sell them to her–which is how Comte finds out he’s in France, and that he’s made contact with MC. When prompted, Comte describes him in a very particular way; and I think people really overlook this when they talk about their relationship. He says that Vlad is frighteningly pure in terms of the way he thinks and acts. The way I understood his description (given what I’ve seen of Vlad) is that Comte really does mean it point blank: Vlad is very simple in terms of why and how he does things. The issue with this is that nuance and context are lost on Vlad as well–and that’s where the problems start to flood in. Vlad is angry at humanity for what they’ve done to him. Baseline? That’s fair, they killed his damn family. However, Vlad thinks that by extension he has the right to decimate the general public and attack people completely uninvolved in his hurt.

And that isn’t right either–it’s ignoring so many factors here. He’s ignoring how much vampires use and toy with humans as pawns, it’s ignoring the massive power imbalance between him and his victims (this really isn’t a case of self-defense most of the time, nobody but Comte/Leo is a sizable threat to him), and he’s ignoring whether or not a person even did anything to deserve his retributive violence. While murder is never okay, it is perhaps more understandable when we see Jeanne’s frenzied and violent belligerence in response to a man who murders a boy’s mother for the sake of his own amusement/convenience. Vlad literally sees almost every single one of the rivals he created begin to heal/improve and murders them in cold blood because they are no longer of any use to him. That’s uh……..that’s a little messed, not gonna lie to you chief.

While part of me understands the efficiency here–he doesn’t want to leave any traces of his involvement, he doesn’t want any loose ends–it’s also just kind of foolish and cruel ultimately. From my understanding of the narrative, all the people he turned had some visible sign that indicated their origin to Comte. So even if he claims it was for the sake of concealment, it was more likely about his personal convenience. Which…..also yikes.

[Comte clearly does not trust Vlad to be reasonable, and I think there’s plenty of good reason enumerated above, but I actually don’t sense quite so much hatred? I think he’s just given up on the idea of Vlad growing up, even if he doesn’t like giving up on people. And considering Vlad’s behavior, I think it’s overkill to say that Comte just abandons him because he doesn’t care lmao. Even when Comte expresses real anger at the end of his own route, it was more because Vlad was fine with endangering MC’s life just to get back at him. I think Comte’s unhappiness with Vlad has more to do with Vlad’s treatment of human life as meaningless and worthless. It’s fascinating but also kind of sad? Vlad’s traumatic experience results in behavior that is a direct exacerbation of Comte’s trauma, and as such--no matter their potentially fond history--they can’t stomach each other.]

In Comte’s route, Vlad also has Shakespeare abduct MC and take her to the cathedral. Later on in the castle, we see an immediate display of Vlad’s shocking powers: he has the ability to manipulate people’s desires/thoughts. I’m not exactly sure how this works, but he is able to give MC visions of the mansion and Comte coming on to her–which shocks her into realizing it’s all just a dream. It’s not reality; it’s all manufactured by Vlad.

After that...weird introductory note...Vlad gives MC the rundown on his life together with Comte, which as always is subject to a question of bias. My assumption is that he did not lie, only because he was trying to convince MC that he was “right.” Furthermore, he does not omit the most damning evidence of his erroneous judgement, which suggests a continued inability for him to see where he went wrong.

We get a series of three flashbacks. The first is them as young kids. I don’t know if Vlad had already experienced the horrors of his family being destroyed, but this particular flashback focuses on Comte. His parents, in an effort to teach him that vampires and humans have no ability to co-exist, send away all of his teachers/mentors/nannies/the servants--pretty much everyone and anyone he was closely bonded to. Think about it this way: we can see that Comte is very sociable and affectionate by nature. He was living in a house full of people, all of whom cared about him and looked after him in their own way. Now the house is entirely empty. Naturally Comte is very very upset, and Vlad appears to try to cheer him up with little success.

[When I look back on this scene I don’t think I initially registered the sheer dissonance of Vlad’s reaction, versus Comte’s catatonic misery. There was a very solemn feeling to that memory, and the correct choice in terms of extending comfort is to hold his hand believe it or not. There is a sense that he feels very alone. When young boy Vlad enters one can argue that it was the proper thing to do; he was trying to cheer up his playmate and friend. But at the same time, I think I need to double check. Because I’m beginning to wonder if I was wrong. What if Vlad was happy to see someone as alone as him, and that joy is accordingly dissonant for that reason? He can’t see what Comte needs or how he’s hurting because he’s so glad he isn’t alone anymore in a way.]

The second flashback is the war nurse scene that I have spoken at length about. The important thing to focus on here is Vlad’s surprise that Comte would opt out of turning her out of respect for her wishes. The way Vlad frames the situation is starkly different from Comte’s. Comte sees himself as an outsider, somebody who invaded her life as a result of the timespace door and therefore has no right to suddenly change the course of her fate. He had no idea if she even wanted to live (considering the horrors she’d have to cope with and remember) or leave that time period at all, for that matter (considering the only thing keeping her going was helping the wounded/victims). Comte really was listening to everything she had to say, and he was taking her concerns and motivations seriously.

Vlad simply says: if you want her, take her. It’s as simple as that for him. And in one way that’s not entirely wrong--assuming Comte would have every intention of looking after her and actually cares a lot about her. But what’s being ignored here is her agency and the fact that they really don’t know each other that well? Something like that could begin and be rocky, if it doesn’t end in complete disaster. Worse, I get the feeling Vlad is perfectly fine with the notion of turning her and if things don’t work out, just kill her or get rid of her. Again, the simplistic thinking comes into play here: it ultimately comes down to Vlad being self-centered. He’s thinking only in terms of satisfying his needs, he doesn’t seem to have any concept of a larger pair or group feeling. There’s an inability to bend/be flexible for the sake of maintaining a greater harmonious feeling.

[For the record, I don’t think this makes him irredeemable? Only that it makes it very hard to live with him or love him, probably. There’s an inability to live at a joint pace? It’s always answering to what he wants without room for anything else most of the time, which to me is not living and it’s not love ;;;;]

Following their escape back to their own time, Vlad explains how he wants to use the door to turn geniuses and control humanity. He eventually wants to create a surveillance state, which would mean everyone is forced to move with his explicit approval, more or less. (He almost reminds me of Louis XIV, can’t tell if that’s what they were going for.) I have my doubts that his abilities could extend that far, but human history shows us that we are plenty susceptible to fascist and totalitarian rhetoric. In a shocking display of anger, Comte draws the line at controlling humanity and forcing them into a regime in which, and this is Vlad’s description not mine, “we (purebloods) would be like kings.” There’s definitely a concept of evolutionary superiority at play here, which echoes what I mentioned earlier; vampires seem to have this awareness that they’re apex predators in a sense, and enjoy the power that comes with that. Unfortunately, that probably makes for a fairly toxic/uncomfortable larger species culture, which is exactly what Comte and Leo hate lmao.

Vlad does not seem to find any issue with this sort of outlook, and asks MC to decide which of them--Vlad or Comte--is right. Who is more realistic, who best understands the future? As expected the MC replies that it's Comte, and Vlad goes from beseeching to big mad at record speed. He's p much that gif of the teddy bear that smacks its head down on the tables and then has the angry eyebrows.

This is where Comte intervenes, firing a warning shot that grazes Vlad's cheek and demanding he let MC go. In response, Vlad shoves MC into the turbulent timespace door--p much guaranteeing MC's death. (Essentially timespace is a void of sorts, a human being could never survive in that environment for long. Vlad fully knew this, and yeeted her anyway.)

So uh, yeah. Disagreement? Death. Moving on? Death. Nuanced approach to reality? Death. Beginning to think he doesn't really have a lot of patience or open-mindedness or any other kind of problem-solving approach.

He raises flowers and gardens like a fiend, and he openly plucks any single flower with a blemished leaf. Even if a single petal is slightly damaged, it will be removed and destroyed. So one could argue his extremism reflects a kind of perfectionism as well. No room for errors or troublesome dissent. No ugliness of any kind. I mean in all of his interactions with Faust and Charles this is the overt undertone. Don't ask more of me than I'm willing to give. Behave like good children, mommy's busy. Is that insubordination? boss music begins

One thing I actually don't understand very well is his decision making in Dazai's route. Dazai finds out about what Vlad's doing in a nanosecond when he senses MC is in danger, and yet Vlad makes absolutely no move to eliminate Dazai? He just watches from the shadows. Even when Dazai grills Charles about his loyalty to Vlad, no retribution.

My best guess for this specific situation is that Vlad does derive some level of satisfaction thwarting the future of human beings/former humans. Dazai--being somebody with no great desire to live, no rivals to speak of as far as we can tell, and no larger aspirations--is a life that is easily extinguished. There's no satisfaction in it. When Vlad's clan was murdered and he saw the future decimated, it could be that he felt humans had invaded and eradicated every potentiality that was important to him. Where he might have lived happily with his family, that future was ripped from his grasp. Where he might enjoy his flowers and the creation of an immortal for the rest of conceivable time, that too was ripped from his grasp with a desolate future.

So much about who Vlad is is about control, so it's very possible his lashing out is an extension of that. Dazai does not awaken any of the disdain he feels, and he does not succeed in overthrowing Vlad's control over Charles, so Vlad simply lurks in silence.

And last but not least, I've seen the preview to Vlad's newest birthday event story. The contents are incredibly revealing, in that MC wishing him a happy birthday and offering him a gift has him saying that it was "the best birthday ever." Granted idk if that’s sweet or just...beyond sad, but here we are. It’s only compounding my curiosity about the wound on his chest--I really do wonder if he was attacked and locked away by vampire hunters or hostile human beings or something. I say that only because that line speaks to a lot of isolation, and given how little he seems to care about turning people/subjecting them to his whims it feels odd. Why the isolation or lack of people who care about him? Is it a perceived lack where his actions alienated all the people who wanted to be close to him, or is it a more involuntary lack?

When she says let’s celebrate again next year, he seems a pleasantly shocked by the notion, and remarks “Ah yes, it’s a promise c:”. The preview was also mega horny: “You make me feel so loved, I don’t think I can be gentle with you tonight. If you enjoy it so much, then I won’t stop. I want to see you completely lost for me. I’ll teach your body what it means to be loved by a pureblood.” Aaaaaand pretty sure the CG was alluding to him licking the good stuff from her basement, though not entirely sure given it was only the preview.

The brief POV they give us is also very revealing:

“You always keep your promises, and I think I underestimate all the time how much you saved me. You are good, only you are good in this world.”

“Will we continue to make promises to each other in the future? Well in that case--you will always, always be mine, my vampire.”

Tbh he’s...v sweet? In his own way? Honestly he feels like a crabapple that is just so sick of the world and wants softe wife to take comfort in. While granted that’s not really my thing, I know a fanbase appeal exists for these types--so if that’s your thing, have at it!

So now that we have reached the end of my ridiculously long analysis (when am I ever brief, I’m so sorry. If you made it all the way here you deserve a cookie at the very least, if not the right to chase me with a bat) perhaps it’s more clear why I said discount vampire Sasuke Uchiha? “My clan is gone, every other second I’m going to be in retraumatization insanity, when I’m not I’ll be seeking power/hobbies, planning the demise of people who wanted the best for me, building a team to my advantage and unquestioned control, and eventually settling for a lifelong love who sees the best in me despite my more difficult moments and perceived hollowing loneliness. Not the most ideal comparison, but I will say if Vlad was not already named the historical figure, would have pointed and yelled Uchiha.

That’s all from me folks, hopefully this was a fun way to get introduced to him? And again, hope I didn’t alienate--I fully respect what people do and don’t enjoy o7

#asks #ikevamp #ikemen vampire #ikevamp meta #ikevamp vlad #ikevamp comte #ikevamp saint germain #ikevamp leonardo #ikevamp faust #ikevamp charles #ikevamp dazai #i hope this was helpful!#i had too much fun writing it jkahlgkjhgdf i love meta #but thank you for submitting <33333 #oh discount vampire sasuke uchiha we really in it now #rambles #not incorrect quotes

104 notes · View notes

eremiie · 3 years

Text

i saw this post here and just wanted to dissect everything lmao

aot 139 spoilers

“Eren admits that he literally killed 80% of the world’s population, he then says he only did it so it would look like eldians stopped a threat”

eren admit to killing 80% of the population bc he did... he’s admitting to what he did, and he says that he wanted to paint them to be the heroes— but not only did he do that, he ended the curse of ymir and gained freedom for his people. it wasn’t just to paint them as heroes

“He also did it so the rest of the world couldnt murder them”

he didn’t “also” do it for that reason, it was an effect, the rumbling ended up killing so many people that they can’t wage war on the eldians like eren says, it keeps them a little safe which they needed especially since some of humanity knows that paradis is what started the rumbling. it’s a cause and effect type thing. because eren killed 80% of the population that remaining population won’t be able to retaliate and try to kill the eldians since there are so little of them

the tybur family is treated like some of martyr and apparently pulling the strings which led to the deaths of millions of innocent eldians was actually a GOOD thing

this scene was interpreted wrong, armin says “...so you want us to be like the tyburs after the great titan war? we’re supposed to protect paradis from reprisal from humanity outside the walls?” he’s asking eren if that’s what they’re gonna do, he never says it’s a good thing. then that’s when eren explains that either way so much of humanity is destroyed that they wouldn’t be able to retaliate if they wanted to

Armin THANKS him for it

armin thanks eren for doing what he did to free them. not thanking eren for for mass murder period. it’s because of eren that the curse is lifted and that they are free and that’s what armin’s thanking eren for. mass murder is inexcusable, and eren knows that. that’s why after he panics and goes “but i dont want to die!” he comes to a realization that all the people he killed didn’t want to either, that the only way to atone for his sins is by dying himself. even if he didn’t die he would’ve probably been executed, or imprisoned for the rest of the life. just like in mikasa’s ova, “eren’s death is inevitable, no matter what reality you go to eren will always die because he carries death within himself.”

in another translation of the chapter armin thanks eren for being the bad guy so that they could win. he knows what eren did was bad. he’s not excusing it, he just understands why eren had to do it and that eren had no choice if he wanted them to be free.

from the get go freedom was one of the themes of eren’s character. if eren lived the whole entire world would be ruins and eren would’ve been even sadder than now, there would be nobody and it would’ve been worse than it is now. eren killing everyone was definitely not the ending to go. the ending we have could’ve been executed differently, sure, but in my eyes since i get the gist i think isa did an amazing job portraying what he had in mind.

“Armin is more upset with Eren saying he doesnt know how he feels about Mikasa moving on than mass genocide”

once again, armin isn’t all that upset with eren because he understands that eren had a path laid out for him that he had no choice to follow. the point of eren committing mass genocide keeps getting brought up as if it’s not know that mass genocide is a terrible thing. it is and that’s why everyone was so angry about it from the get go, that’s why that one plan of blackmailing humanity with the rumbling and not actually go through with it was brought up once— because they knew how cruel it is. armin knew how cruel it is as i believe it was him who brought that up

he’s upset with eren about mikasa’s feelings in like a banter kind of way. it’s like “this whole entire time this is how you felt but you couldn’t tell her that and let her suffer???? don’t forget what you said to her, she went through hell!” kind of thing. they had already talked about the whole mass genocide thing, mikasa was the next topic of discussion

“Eren then finally shows some fucking emotion and cries abt how he doesn’t want mikasa to be with anyone but him”

in another post i say, "okay so first i think the issue is that a lot of people fail to realize that the way eren acted all throughout season 4 isn’t eren really, that is him putting his emotions at bay so that he can complete something that he laid out for himself for his friends.eren from season 1-3 still exists, and that’s lowkey the eren that was talking the whole time in chapter 139— you can see the how he cares for his friends, you can see the desperation again, the compassion, everything in between.”

eren is still that s1-3 eren, season 4 eren just had to put his emotions aside so he could walk on the path that ymir put in front of him.

him crying over mikasa was one of his selfish desires coming to light, and it was realistic. it’s finally dawning on him that he’s gonna die, he’s finally getting to sit down and ponder about mikasa, he’s getting desperate, he’s panicking, and that compassion that he’s always had for his friends is showing through again. this gives realism to his character— it makes his character all the more human. one second he’s complaining about how he doesn’t want to die and wants to be with his friends bc its crashing on him, and the very next second he’s trying to be at peace with himself, realising that the only way to atone for what he caused is by dying. one second he’s complaining about how he wants miksa to be with anyone but him, the next second he’s coming to terms with himself and that mikasa needs to move on, because he loves her and wants her to live a long and happy life even if it means without him. the selfishness that showed for that mere second makes his character realistic. it shows that he’s still whiny, that little whiny angry boy from s1-3. he was never heartless and he was never cold. he was and is still eren jaeger, and you get a glimpse of the eren we know in that scene.

The founder ymir was apparently in love with the king???? another women stupidly devoted to a man, great.

i’m not too in depth with ymirs story so im not gonna speak too much about this because i myself do wish that whole love thingy went more into depth. i get how mikasa and ymir parallel each other, but other than that i’m not too sure myself, and i’ll admit that. it could be a case of stockholm syndrome, it could be that bc ymir was infatuated with living and she was confined to such a familial role she wanted to live in that role again with the king bc he’s the only person who gave her that familial lifestyle. i’m not sure. but if anything mikasa was im pretty sure the only character “devoted” to a man in aot. and it was because of the role eren played in her life, she’s not a bad written character, she has her developement. which i explain here

apparently mikasa’s unhealthy devotion to eren is what took her out of it????? in fact the series overly romanticizes mikasa’s love for eren despite the two having no chemistry and eren being an ass to her

in a sense, but that’s a simple minded way of saying it. ymir’s devotion to king fritz was unhealthy, eren describes it as “agony of love” because it was pretty unhealthy obvi. like i said ymir and mikasa parallel each other, and seeing mikasa be able to let go and kill the one she loves was that realization for ymir that she was able to do the same thing— that’s how i interpret that scene personally.

and in mikasa doing so, killing eren lifts that curse of ymir and frees ymir regardless, so ymir was happy about that as well. thanks to mikasa for cutting eren’s head off.

the series doesn’t necessarily over romanticize mikasa’s love for eren in my opinion. how i see it is that since eren is a big part of mikasa’s character he was necessary for her development as well, and her development was to let eren go because of how infatuated she was with him. this being said the series points out how unhealthy the way she loved him was especially in s1-3, and her love becomes more healthy when she gets her development in chap 139, finally being able to let eren go and move on. compare that to in the s1 when eren almost dies and she’s ready to die as well. thats development if you ask me.

one of the themes of the show is sacrifice, and almost every character has made one, mikasa sacrifices eren— she kills him and she chooses to go through with that decision despite how much she loves him.

eren was definitely mean to mikasa in s1-3 because she was overbearing, and thats one reason why i say the way she loved him was unhealthy at first. eren wasn’t able to reciprocate her love in the way that she loved him because it wasn’t healthy. eren also wasn’t able to reciprocate it because the last thing he was focused on was the concept of love. once again he had a path laid out for him that he had no choice but to follow, and mikasa didn’t have any play in this path until the very end, so the boy who keeps moving forward does just that and doesn’t pay her much mind, doesn’t get to sit down and think about his feelings for her, what she is to him.

(and i dont think i even need to explain the “mikasa i’ve always hated you seen, the chapter covers that enough)

they do have chemistry time to time, the eren v dina fritz scene, the scarf scene, “what am i to you”, little stuff like that goes into play and gives them these little sparks of chemistry. they couldn’t always grasp onto the full scope of the relationship they had and it was only some times they were able to do that with everything going on.

apparently the titans are just gone now….??? i cant even tell if its because Eren died or because Mikasa really made Ymir calm down

... eren controlling rumbling, eren dies rumbling stops, ymir finally lifts curse bc 1) eren died 2) shes able to come to realization that like mikasa lets eren go, she needs to let fritz go and the curse go. ymir lifts curse, eren’s goal is complete, if titan curse is lifted there are no more titans

Characters who murdered thousands and were the cause for AOT’s entire plot in the first place are now treated as heroes to the eldians… despite the shit that they did.

everyone in aot did some “shit” they all are murders, eren commited mass genocide, reiner commited mass murder, annie murdered so many people, reiner, armin destroyed thousands of people in one go, they all have killed somebody. they are seen as “heros” because they stopped the rumbling that was going to kill everyone else...... idk about you but if you just saved me from a horrid death, my racist opinion on you doesn’t really matter because you just saved my fucking life lmao, yes despite the shit that you did— because they have killed people too, and they were ready to kill the eldians still until armin told them that they killed eren, that they saved their lives and eliminated titans for good.... like whew???

the series went from “The military is cool” to “the military did a lot of fucked up shit” to “the military is SUPER cool”, and buffed it up

i’m not really sure where you got that tbh,, like the military wasn’t really a big thing up until the whole marleyan thing??? and they didn’t have much plot in the story besides it existing so like i’m not sure what to say ab this, i can’t really remember many times the military was even mentioned until now, but if anyone wants to elaborate on this for me that’d be nice

oh and they buffed up the military because since paradis had eren jaeger who started the rumbling, just in case, they had to be ready to fight again if the rest of humanity wanted to do something. after marley they updated all their technology, why can’t they update the military as well? it’s realistic, new weapons, new military, and all that

The military was buffed up bc the eldians are scared of the rest of the world retaliating, so Eren didn’t really fix shit except giving the Eldians an upper hand in the war

eren jaeger was the one who always screamed “i will kill all titans, we will get freedom” ya de ya de ya.... didn’t he do both of those things????? i thought those were some of his main goals as a character, he fixed those issues, the issues that have been issues since the start of the show

the rest of humanity don’t know the full scope like the eldians or marleyans, they’re probably just as scared and like in real life not all nations are at peace with one another. this is just another realistic factor— attack on titan is becoming a world closest to the real one we live in, there are militaries, there are still conflicts, there is still all these little aspects that bring the manga even more to life.

in my opinion it’d lowkey be weird if the rest of the world was just like “oh yeah those mfs that started the rumbling we love them haha” no... it killed 80% of the population like eren said... that’s not something to love.

Historia has a really disturbing speech about how the fight isnt going to end until either the Eldians or the rest of the world are exterminated, despite Gabi has an entire arc about her being deradicalized and learning to see the other side of things.

and yes i am not kidding, the heroic conclusion is that there’s still going to be a war, eldians are going to commit mass genocide (which was proposed by eren) and people straight up thank eren for the evil shit he did.

“this fight will not end until either eldia or the world dissapears. this is what eren said and he may be right.” she doesn’t say that it’s for sure gonna be a fight until one or the other is wiped out, she says there’s a possibility of this being the case because of the fact that these nations aren’t at complete peace yet.

not everyone is gonna be able to see the other side of things, and this applies to the whole word— us as humans will never be able to agree on one thing, and that’s what this shows. no matter what the cycle of hatred will always continue, and this applies to real life and this manga. we are human beings and that’s what makes what historia says even more real. “this is the world we live in, a world without titans.” titans are no longer their conflict. now it’s only like the real word— humans against humans, and as far as humanity existed it’s always been humans against humans. historia’s speech shows that.

the heroic conclusion is that as a human race nothing will always be agreed upon, eldians are going to fight if they need to like our military fights when they need to. people are thanking eren for freeing them and ending the curse of titans that they suffered with for 2000 years. nobody’s thanking him for his actions of mass genocide, they are thanking him for the motive behind his actions, and thats what makes him so heroic.

that he endured and did something so terrible so that anybody who lives after him can be free, and humanity can continue existing as humanity should’ve existed from the beginning.

and that concludes this for me, thanks for reading<3.

#attack on titan #snk 139 #aot spoilers #snk spoilers #aot 139

115 notes · View notes

maxwell-grant · 3 years

Note

For the Character Ask: I'm going to go with Ryu (The Shadow would be too easy)

Allright then! Definitely got some thoughts on the Street Fighter characters for this one

1: Don't treat Ryu like he's a superhero, let him get his ass kicked for real every now and then, let him WORK for his victories. And I don't mean "oh the bad guy roughs him up a bit but then he comes back with a insta-win special move", I mean it like how the Street Fighter II V anime opens up with Ryu and Ken getting the absolute shit kicked out of them by Guile, and that's the initial impetus for the two of them to try and improve more as martial artists.

Capcom seems to have far less reservations about letting characters like Ken and Chun-Li lose fights or get beaten badly compared to Ryu, which is kinda backwards considering that, if Ryu's the protagonist of these stories, and these are stories about fighting and action and overcoming the odds through battle, we should ideally be much more invested in how our protagonist is gonna overcome them. The Udon comics in particular treat a lot of the Street Fighter characters like superheroes who can insta-win battles with special moves and this is part of why I think they are terribly weak and uninteresting, it's the last thing you want to do for a franchise where the selling point is watching interesting characters fight in interesting ways. Which also brings me to number 2:

2: Have Ryu grow as a fighter in ways other than just giving him new cartoon superpowers / have him tame the Dark Hadou for the 100th time.

SF has, for a while, been doing this really great thing with Akuma where the techniques he shows off in his ending cutscenes show up in the following games as Super moves, like the punch he uses to shatter Ayers Rock in 2nd Impact became a Super in Third Strike, and the Hurricane Kick he used to destroy a sea vessel in his Third Strike ending became an Ultra move in SSFIV, and so forth. I always thought this was a really brilliant, inspired decision that allows for a sense of genuine progression, and I think it's an idea that would benefit Ryu much more so as a character.

Give him new techniques, have him invent new techniques, have him live up to the idea that he's a martial arts prodigy who in his first tournament defeated the world's greatest fighter with an unbeatable uppercut (yes he lost that fight and won with a superpowered possession-induced cheap shot, but the world doesn't know that) and then introduced the concept of fireballs to the scene, both of which are techniques everyone's using or developed defenses to by now, so he's gotta find ways to stay on top of the game.

3: Kill the idea that Ryu's an "honorable warrior" cliche, he's a guy living out of a duffelbag who, despite being a world-famous champion, chooses to be a homeless wanderer always on the lookout for a good fight and making a lot of weird friends along the way. It shouldn't be hard to make this character likeable or funny.

I think not a lot of Street Fighter fans even particularly think of Ryu as likeable but he really is, I think a Street Fighter story with him as the lead would stand to benefit from emphasizing that, all things considered, Ryu's got a great attitude when he's not distancing himself to fight with soul-rending inner torment or body-stealing dictators (and sometimes even then). In V even, one of Ryu's lines if you hit him particularly hard is a pained "Nice hit!", he's genuinely complementing you for kicking his ass. If any of this showed up more prominently in a Street Fighter film or cartoon, he's the kind of character Tumblr would be affectionately calling a himbo in no time flat (yeah I know, Tumblr calls every character who's beefy and kind a himbo, not my point).

Ryu's not some champion of justice or lone wolf, everyone who jokingly describes Ryu as a fight hobo is 100% right and this is not a dismissal, Capcom's not ironic about it, it's just what he is and that's one thing that helps to set Ryu apart from standard karateka protagonists. Ryu's not stern or humorless, he's focused and driven, and the two being treated like one and the same is a particularly annoying cliche in how Western media approaches Eastern martial arts protagonists. You can have a character who’s philosophical, determined, even aloof and lonely, without making them devoid of humor and wit and charm.

And that leads to my next point,

4: Ryu has a life outside of fighting, even if he doesn't think he does.

One of the things I really liked reading most in my obsessive quests for every scrap of Street Fighter lore was finding the details that were usually left out of the cutscenes or games and only brought up in guides or blurbs and whatnot, things that added texture and depth and details to the lives these characters had outside of the ring. I consistently really liked reading Ryu's because they would describe things Ryu would do just on a daily basis.

Details like, the reason why he dislikes spiders is because one day he woke up with one in his mouth, or how he uses Hadoken to catch fish as part of his diet. Ryu trekking through forests, waterfalls, old temples, roads, cities, and the fact that he canonically walks everywhere because he hates flying and can't afford it anyway. Ryu making enough money to get by via taking in odd jobs with physical labor. An Alpha 3 backstory blurb that describes Ryu stopping to talk down with a painter on his way to pay respects to Gouken. Or scenes where Ryu gets to interact with characters outside of his usual circle, like that ending where he eats burgers with Birdie following their fight.

Sure, Ryu's all focused on the fight, and Street Fighter's gotta have it's fights, but there's a world of stuff that happens in someone's life even when they are laser focused on only one specific part of it (which is a lesson I need to remember more often). I've always been fascinated by the parts of the lives of wandering protagonists that don't get the spotlight because they are not action-packed, quiet moments of survival or misery or joy that they go through alone or with others. I would like to read more of these.

5: If Ryu's the center of the story, he needs to grow with the story. He needs to be allowed to grow up and change.

Ryu is locked in a generally static mold as the iconic face of the franchise, even in V when other characters were finally allowed to evolve and change their designs or characterizations, like Ken or Balrog or Dhalsim, which is definitely a step in the right direction compared to SFIV. And to an extent it's understandable why Ryu's not likely to change much if at all, considering the popularity of said changes isn't exactly guaranteed. But, here's something: There already was a change to Ryu's presentation in recent years that got so popular, that Capcom ended up approving it and officializing it.

And yes, I'm talking about Hot Ryu.

Hot Ryu was, before the memes about Ryu in Fortnite, maybe the most attention I'd ever seen directed towards Ryu, and Ryu specifically, in my lifetime. And I want you to put whatever thoughts you have on the nature of what exactly people were talking about here to look at what was happening regardless: People were talking about Ryu, Ryu's design, what they wanted Ryu to look like, if they wanted this to be his main design going forward (and a lot of people seemed to want this), people were discussing Ryu. It's not like Capcom set out to intentionally create Hot Ryu, all they did was take off Ryu's shirt, rough his clothes a bit, give him a beard and call it a day, but even just this basic shake-up of Ryu's presentation was enough for a lot of people to look at Ryu differently.

A basic shake-up was the same thing Capcom did for some of the other characters in V. And while some were very poorly received (Akuma in particular), others paid off so well (Dhalsim, Balrog, even Mall Cop Guile surprisingly) that few seem to miss the classic designs. That Capcom is willing to do these alterations to the designs at all is already a major difference than how the characters were approached for SFIV, and the idea of tweaking Ryu somewhat to better reflect a different, growing facet of his character? Risky as it may sounds, even if unintentionally so, they already did a trial run for this that paid off better than they could have predicted.

So yeah, I think Hot Ryu was a great thing, and I think Ryu being allowed to progress and change, as he’s done in other Street Fighter media in the past (the Nakahira mangas, SF II V), could be a really good thing.

#replies tag #street fighter #capcom #videogames #ryu

33 notes · View notes

waynedunlaptheorgandonor · 3 years

Text

hey so “find me” dropped on premiere and i just watched it, so you know what that means??

it’s review time!

(super rambly as usual) spoilers under the cut

before i say anything, let me say, IT’S FINE, Y’ALL. as predicted. people are gonna be dramatic bc there are daryl/leah scenes, but like...we been knew? and some of them were rly important caryl-wise. (tbh, the episode was kind of boring and just a set-up for other stuff, lmfao)

okay, review:

opening credits, which i think most of us have already seen, were cute. obvi there was some weird tension with daryl that leads to the coming-to-a-head thing at the end, but their banter is still cute af

they went fishing and daryl’s reaction to carol was adorable, and there’s an important parallel later on, so bookmark this

similarly, there’s an important parallel to carol’s “the dead catch up to us eventually”/daryl’s “i ain’t gonna let it”, so bookmark that, too

dog is the instigator for the flashbacks, so if you wanna blame anyone, blame him. he races to the cabin, which for some reason daryl, who spent five years in this forest, seemed surprised to see? didn’t you literally map out that whole area, my dude? whatever

cue flashback!

i might have the scene order mixed up, but i think it starts with daryl being all sad by himself, and then dog as a puppy shows up and he’s like “!!! a dog!!!” which is v cute, and then he runs back off. we don’t meet leah yet

we see carol and daryl having a conversation while standing on opposite sides of a river for no reason except to probably symbolize distance or maybe covid, lol. the conversation basically goes:

carol: things are different

daryl: yeah

carol: how long are you gonna be out here?

daryl: -shrug emoji-

carol: i get why you’re out here, and i’d join you if things weren’t...

daryl: different

carol: yeah

daryl: yeah. anyway, it’s gonna rain, and also i’m having emotions, so ttyl

the end

at some point we see daryl sitting with an extremely unhappy face while it pours rain on him in the dark, and i want that as a reaction gif IMMEDIATELY

also the rain destroys his “where in the world is rick grimes?” map, which makes him v upset and scream-y, and we get the idea that he might be going a bit bonkers being all alone looking for a dead (or, ig, kidnapped by helicopter) man

in present day carol finds the note, and is like “oh dunk, she lived here??” so she knew about leah, and daryl’s like, “i already told you everything,” and carol’s like, “no you didn’t,” so we go back to flashbacks (but i’m still not sure what parts carol didn’t already know?? whatever, it’s not that important)

i’m just gonna hit the highlights of the flashbacks bc they were not that thrilling:

first time daryl meets leah the dog leads him to her cabin, and leah ties him to a chair and holds a gun to his head being like, “what are you doing on my land?” bc apparently you can claim whole forests during the apocalypse, and daryl says very little, and eventually she lets him go

next time dog finds daryl and he brings her back and leah is like, “the dog likes you” and they’re kinda flirty, and then daryl says very little and leaves

next time daryl is surrounded by walkers and leah shows up and helps and they hide in a tree and are awkwardly close to each other and daryl cannot handle the close physical contact so when the walkers pass he says very little except to tell her to never come back again, lmfao

the next flashback is my favorite bc daryl just fucking

goes to leah’s cabin and throws a fish at the door???

i laughed for ten years

he throws a fucking fish and then stands there for a minute like “is she gonna notice that i gave her a fish??” like, no, dumbass, you didn’t even knock, you just threw a fucking fish at her fucking door, what is wrong with you??

no wonder it’s taken him and carol so long if he thinks throwing fish at people is a smooth move. boy has NO fucking game

anyway, leah gets him back by finding him and throwing the fish at his head, being like, “wtf, don’t throw fish on my porch?” which, fair, leah

IMPORTANT CARYL PARALLEL (from here on out known as “caryllels”) #1: so earlier i mentioned the carol fish thing, and apparently the same thing happened with leah, where she speared a fish on her first try and daryl was like “tf?” v blatant “we are supposed to be thinking about carol and daryl’s relationship during this scene” sort of thing

leah’s backstory is bland. had a family, they got eaten or disappeared or something. she, her adopted son, and dog’s mom got away, but the kid was bit, and died the same day dog was born, bc ig when god closes one door, he replaces your dead son with a puppy, or however the idiom goes

ONLY PART THAT GOT ME LEGIT EMOTIONAL:

leah asked daryl who he lost, and he says, “my brother”

asklfdjaslfdjskl

god i miss rick

i hated rick for so long and now i miss him so much

but i digress

IMPORTANT CARYLLEL #2: leah and daryl have the same “the dead get you eventually”/”i ain’t gonna let it” conversation as caryl had earlier, only daryl is playing the role of carol in this scenario, so again we’re supposed to be comparing the two relationships. lemme get through the rest of the summary and then i’ll tell you my opinion on what that means

fuck what even happens next?

i have these out of order bc they were all the fucking same, but the two of them get closer, and there is the vaguest suggestion of sex ever. you literally only see daryl’s hand

then jump-cut to them sitting at the table being emo, ig bc daryl was gonna go back to look for rick for a bit, and leah is like “who do you belong with? your brother you won’t stop looking for? your family that you left? [side note: that seemed rather pointed, like, “hey hoe, you abandoned your family, that was kind of a dick move”] or me?” and he says he doesn’t know, and she’s like “yeah you do, now choose”

jump-cut to caryl scene where carol finds him at the river and says that she won’t be visiting as much, and daryl’s like “k” and they have a brief argument where daryl’s all snippy, like, “what? do you want my permission for you to move on with your life? i’m not still emo about the fact that you’re moving on with your life, and i also don’t think it’s contextually significant that every time you show up in my flashbacks you explicitly mention that you’re married and have a kid,” and carol is like, “bro, you need to Get Your Shit Together and come home”

jump-cut to daryl having what i’m assuming is an epiphany that carol/fam have all moved on while he was out being emo, and so he decides to go be with leah, except, plot twist! she’s gone. the picture of her and her son is gone, but dog is still there. daryl leaves the note, which says, “i belong with you, find me”

for those freaking out about the wording about the note, may i remind you that she specifically asked, “do you belong x, x, or with me?” so he was just answering the question

aaaaaand back to present day

carol is like, “what do you think happened to her?” and daryl is all -shrug emoji-, and then she’s like, “...do you think she might have just...you know...left?” and daryl gets rull offended, which was kind of funny

(she probably just left, bud)

carol tells daryl to stop thinking that when people leave it’s bc of him, and connie’s name gets thrown into the mix, and daryl gets a “oh here we fucking go” look on his face, and it sets him off

he said basically what we were already spoiled for. “you just want to run, you don’t know when to stop, i shouldn’t have taken you off the boat bc you still just want to run” etc

and carol looks fucking HEARTBROKEN, which hurt me, and she goes into the other room and we end the episode with daryl staring forlornly out of the window

the end

okay

so quick analysis

i think the significance of this episode is supposed to be so we have an understanding of why daryl is suddenly so !teamfamily, and !teamfuture, and how badly he wants carol to be there with him. at one point, one of them even says, “this isn’t about leah, or connie,” or anyone but the two of them. the title “find me” feels significant, bc the whole episode is daryl grappling with where he’s supposed to go, and what his purpose is, and by the end, he says to carol, “i know where i belong,” (implying, with her and the fam), pulling us full-circle. in the first flashback onward he is lost, but by the end he is found -cue amazing grace-

daryl and leah were flirty, but to me it felt very much like something that was just being used as daryl character development. we barely got anything that juicy between the two of them (except the fish throwing thing, that was amazing), and i still don’t think that it would make any sense, regardless of the showrunner, to pair daryl up with some rando after having so many other choices that people would have preferred. i don’t think we’re meant to #endgame ship it, so much as we are supposed to be like, “oh, ok, daryl learned the power of family and stability and leveled up, -you know what that is? growth gif-” as a result, i literally have no idea what leah’s role is gonna be in s11, but i don’t think it’ll be a huge plot point

so now we firmly know where daryl stands. he is all about moving forward, not looking back, and doing the best he can, and he’s frustrated bc when he took carol off the boat he wanted her to be in the same place as him so that they could grow together, but she wasn’t and isn’t there yet

so my guess is that what’s next for carol’s storyline is her reaching that same zen-level daryl’s at

once they’re both there, then they get to ride off into the sunset and make passionate love under the moon casting shadows over the vast desert wasteland

whew

anyway

tl;dr: idk, episode was fine, if not kinda boring. lots of caryllels. can i go back to writing my vietnam war au now?

the end

(stay hype, stan kang, and get daryl to call carol sweetheart 2k21),

-diz

#thank god i can move on with my life now #caryl #caryl spoilers #twd s10 spoiler #dunlap tp

97 notes · View notes