#they're very amoral not in the sense of being Evil and Bad they just. don't have morals.

[an-eldritch-peredhel]

#dang it do i have a new oc now

Sounds like!! I'd love to hear more if you've got it!

(referring to my tags on this post)

You will meet a stranger, sometimes, if you make a habit to frequent taverns, inns, halls for game, or even the one tree where the young Bracegirdle cousins sneak off to play marbles. Well, you will like as not meet many strangers, except in the last case, but this one will be different. Or perhaps you get lucky, and don't frequent such places, but find yourself in one unexpectedly, and meet them regardless.

Everyone in Gondor knows someone who knows someone who met Lady Luck, no one has met her themself. If you do, starry-eyed romantics say, you'll be blessed with good fortune for all your days. The pragmatists tell you you'll be blessed with the good sense to discern a scam.

He may smirk at you after winning a bet, some dark-haired man, using his earnings to buy a round for the bar. It's always a different man, but it always goes to Alwed's tab. It keeps the crowd from getting too rowdy, even if the more superstitious get on edge.

No one remembers meeting them the first time, but dwarves with common sense avoid Audr's shell games and silver-toothed smile- you always win, but it's never worth it.

A woman with greying-gold hair and stiff fingers might call herself Eadrun, and challenge you to a game of dice. Few decline, and far fewer win.

For as few elves remain in Middle Earth, the one who calls himself Herendil and laughs as though his name is a joke should be recognizable. He seems young and lighthearted in a way most have lost, but he will play you cards, win just as much as he loses, and disappear, never recognized.

A hobbit-lass may giggle, red curls gleaming in the sun, and introduce herself as Peony Sandheaver, her family is visiting from Bree, and she wants to see how Shire-hobbits play Jacks.

Sometimes an orc prays over a set of knucklebones, knowing that at least one god will hear one prayer. Orcs have little luck in battle, but uncanny luck with dice.

There are countless stories, just as many true as not. Countless names, far more unnamed figures, always just out of place enough wherever they are to be interesting and promise new tales, never enough to provoke suspicion, not at first.

Even those in the Blessed Realm may find this dark-eyed stranger. Always dark-eyed, like bottles of dark glass. They stop by Aulë's workshop on occasion, to learn and suggest and play new games. They never win the first round, but most have the sense not to bet anything they aren't willing to lose on the second.

Oromë's people call them Umbarnica with a laugh and a toast in welcome. They thrive in the drunken revels after a successful hunt, sharp as ever as they dance from game to game, cackling at ill-advised propositions offered as collateral for or against a bet. Usually this means them winning to avoid it, a frequent enough occurrence as-is, but every now and then they'll decide to let someone get lucky. The bragging rights are the real reward.

And there are no guarantees with this stranger. No way to ensure their favor, though many ways to get their attention, few good. They like irony, take pleasure in hubris reaching its fall. They love superstition, even if they don't always honor it, and they love stories. There are gods that can be mistaken for kind, they are not one of them, created to serve the king the Dark Lord could have been. Their favorites are fickle, their grudges subtle but long-held. They love cheaters, unless they're at the end of the attempt. They will always catch you, and you will always regret it. They slink through candle-shadows and pipe-smoke, grinning, dance in town squares turned to faire grounds, curl up on comfy chairs indoors on rainy days.

But sometimes, in these days, you won't meet a stranger at all. Sometimes your storyteller will get a bright-dark glint in their eyes, and some dice will roll strangely high and some dice will roll strangely low and either way the story will be better for it. And if the next time the group meets you need to take a moment to remind the storyteller exactly what happened last session, well. That's why you take notes.

So pray to the dice-god, card-master, quick-sighted. It might do you no good, but they love superstition, and they love stories. And when you play a dark-eyed stranger, don't cheat at cards.

[kanohivolitakk]

Writing a fan fic about the dark hunters. Which portrayal is your favorite? a) the dark hunters as victims b) the dark hunters as bastards c) the dark hunters as complex and morally ambiguous d) the dark hunters as dumbasses e) the dark hunters as a messed up found-family

I think my favorite portrayal/interpretation of the is a mixture of a and c with a dash of e for good measure. I don't like b or d at the very least for the group as whole.

The way I personally like to see the Dark Hunters as the "true neutral" group of Bionicle factions. The Dark Hunters are mercenaries and bounty hunters for hire, and will work with anyone, good or bad, as long as they get paid for it and it doesn't harm them or their organisation. Most of the Dark Hunters aren't necessarily evil themselves, but moreso just doing their job. Yeah, TSO is evil and power-hungry, and there are certainly members who are like that as well but that doesn't indicate of the group as whole. I feel that the morality of Dark Hunters varies very wildly, with most of the group being more "amoral" than immoral or evil because they're so focused on survival and trying to make a name for themselves. Besides even TSO knows his place in the greater Matoran Universe and uses that to his advantage to gain status and power (I mean at least before Voporaks aging makes him go all insane which is why he is like THAT in the 08 serials).

Kinda a sidenote but I don't like how a lot of supplementary material and side-story stuff implies that the Dark Hunters are among the highest factions in the MU. I do believe that they're among the higher ranking yes but the idea they're as "clearly in power" as say the Brotherhood always bothered me. I felt their power and influence was more a "hidden in plain sight of thing", them being influental because of how much their services affect the world and how other seeminlgly stronger factions use them to do their bidding rather than them being an openly powerwielding faction if that makes sense.

I also really like interpreting them as victims because it just makes so much sense to me based on what we know about them. From what we understand, a lot of the Dark Hunters are social rejects who have no place to belong to in the greater MU, so they resorted into this life out of no other options. It's also worth pointing out that in a lot of cases TSO manipulated people to join his side by convincing them that they had no place to go if not outright arranging that to be the case. Are some of them irredeemable? Yeah but like most of the cases they aren't part of the organization because they want to but moreso because they have nowhere else to go.

And I just love that fucked up found family element to them since as a group of misfits and fucked up criminals either by own volition, tragic circumstances or a mixture of both rejected by rest of the world it just..SCREAMS fucked up found family potential to me. Though is it a found family if they all were forced to live under the same group by one powerhungry mob boss? I digress I digress but thats worth pointing out.

The reason I don't like "pure bastards" interpretation that much is because I find that to be just limiting. In general I don't like the whole way Bionicle has its morality of being "x group always good y group always bad". Yeah in some cases it works (see the Brotherhood) but I feel putting every group or every character under a simple good or evil scale is boring. I find moral grayness and nuances to lend to much more interesting storytelling. That said the Dark Hunters can be bastards, not just all of them and even those who are can have other layers to them besides their nastyness.

As for the "dark hunters are dumbasses" I feel a big part of this is because I want them to be threat or at the very least taken seriously both in universe and out of it. While some of them being Team Rocket levels of harmless makes sense (looking at you Devastator and your chuuni ass showoffyness) I don't like the idea of them all being jokes. It just makes them less interesting and also makes their impact in the greater MU feel less believable as a result. That and I don't like dumb idiots that much at least in a way where you KNOW they're dumb idiots I prefer dumb idiots who present themselves as a threat only for not being such.

Sorry this took long and I hope you like this answer nwn.

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

(regarding this ask) Thank you for answering so quickly!!

Lol, I'm not great with keeping the dates in order, the minor details simply escape my memory. But 001 being in his mid-30's makes sense... even though he sort of looks younger? To me? Idk if it's the actor or the way they showed him to us, but I'm honestly really thinking that his age matters, somehow. In his revelatory speech he goes on to say (i'm paraphrasing btw) "Humans go about a day just to get to the end. They live a day, a week, months, years, decades just to meet the end." The emphasizing of time moving forward here, in words, and the scene with Nancy looking at his memories where the grandfather clock's hands move backwards, an action, surely isn't a coincidence, is it? I was curious so I did a search and apparently in the books there's a girl who can see visions of future. Showing someone with that same power in the show seems impossible given what happened, but I'm pretty sure that 001 has powers relating to time. It's a hunch with no other support other than what I've written above, but I'm going to stick with it until S4B/Vol. 2 proves me wrong.

That brings me to my next point: The Upside Down not having any definite answers. Specifically about it being stuck on Nov 6, 1983, the night Will was taken. Now there are two options, A) UD has been stuck like that AFTER Will was taken or B) UD has always been stuck like that. Not exactly always, but maybe since a certain someone entered it maybe... *wink wink, nudge nudge*

Of course we don't know for sure if UD has always been there or El created it, but either way 001 is smart enough to have figured out in the what... 5+ years he's been there that he's stuck in time? So obviously he knew something was going to go down that night, and if he did have visions about it, he knew exactly where to sic the Demogorgon.

Now that I'm thinking about it, what if 001 is the reason the Mindflayer wants to come to the real world? This human from another dimension comes in, and MF sends someone to investigate, right? They're a hivemind so once they do have 001, they have access to learn about this other world. And lo and behold, a few years later El (& Party) is thwarting even the MF's plan.

And about Dr. Brennan: I saw that post asking if he's evil or not, and while I agree about there not being a black/white scale to judge people in real life unlike in fairytales and myths, I do think Dr. Brennan is more on the evil side than the good. His curiosity sparked with the arrival of 001 at his doorstep, and then he told the little kid's father the kid died, and started promptly experimenting on him (probably promptly). Now, years pass by, and he's amoral and does it "for the science". Tortures kid, breaks them, molds them, experiments on them. I even agree that after what happens he feels bad, so very, very bad, because this wasn't supposed to happen, but then he basically asks El to open the gate to another dimension, and that shit just doesn't fly with me. Mostly because I believe he knew about 001 being the true cause of it all, he had recordings, didn't he? So he knew about it. But what really, really fucks me up is this — before the last episode, anytime we were shown the clip of El in the rainbow room after it was all done, that mirror? It was intact. It seemed like an observational room (like the ones in a police station in an interrogation room) and there were probably no cameras. So Dr. Brennan probably didn't know about 001 being the real culprit.

Ugh. This show is just — ugh. Forces you to think, rethink, keep rethinking. But I'm still on the "Dr. Brennan is more evil than good" train for now.

I have one more question, or basically rant lol, but I'll send it in another ask, just because this one has already gotten too long.

~ FF

I think it could just be that he's a young-looking actor.

The show really diverged from the supplemental materials at this point. Prior to this, the Lab was shown as taking in kids with different sorts of powers. Now, though, they've undone all of that and made it so that they all were taught the same powers, though how they've obtained them isn't clear. It's always been assumed that El was born with them, but is that the case for them all?

Again, I don't really know what to make of the Upside Down being frozen on November 6, 1983. Nancy does name drop Will, referring to it as the day he went missing. However, I've seen some fans quickly jump in with that being the day El opened the Gate by making contact with the Demogorgon. Given that they've already established that El sent Peter there, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that it's more linked to her than Will. I mean, why not. Will gets less important and El gets more important with every season.

Brenner was probably changed by the massacre. He only had El left at that point, and he may not have felt comfortable bringing in any new kids after that. He was also shown inspecting the cracked wall where Peter was forced into the Upside Down. I wouldn't be surprised if he was trying to figure out what that all was. There were cameras in the Rainbow Room. Peter made sure El was aware of that so Brenner wouldn't catch on to his planning. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he disabled them, though. But we have to keep in mind that Brenner retrieved the security footage for that day, even though he wanted to go slowly, just to give Owens the progress he asked for. We even see Brenner hesitate somewhat as he does so. He knew it would be hard for El to watch, so I'm inclined to think he knows what it shows. That, or he never watched it and just assumes it is what he thinks it is.

Just like what he said, heroes and monsters are fairy tale concepts. Brenner is neither, but he has both good and bad in him. He does not deny this. In his mind, I think he's aiming at a "greater good" that justifies the questionable things he does. Whether any of us agree with him, well, that's another story.

[mevekagvain]

Chapter 280 - Lunark watching as Urokai and Zarga have their moment with Raizel is so funny like yeah you interfered to try and save 8th but fuck those two sjjsjsksk. Just let them die without even trying to help <3 On one hand I get it because wtf are you going to do against mr noblesse, otoh... it's hilarious.

- Oh lol I never noticed Frankenstein literally bleeding through his shirt while he fixes everyone else up after the fight. Rip. Also Rael why are you sitting there you’re not hurt 🤨

- "That Kalvin guy" he was a child Tao! But good for him on not giving the right antidote. Ofc I would never want the kids to die but at least the kid who did die did so thinking it wasn't in vain.

- Seira looking at Rael like "this fuvker actually helped? Error 404".

- Tbf Raizel's lifeforce dwindling to a mere fraction could mean he has like, 20k years left instead of 2 million. I know they mean more like a few months or a few years but maybe not. Maybe all nobles get decrepit and tired when they have only 20k years left. I see no evidence saying otherwise. Would explain why he doesn't die either. Because he still actually has plenty left to use even if comparatively it isn't a lot and only a fraction, he's just unfortunately now in his old age. Stop making grandpa Rai fight guys.

- They should have just given Raizel modifications to extend his life lmao. Frankenstein's right there. Idc if you don't want any Raizel, you're gonna do it for your pet human who's loyally wasted 820 years of his life waiting for you.

- Meanwhile Takeo "he slept for 820 years???" My guy is late on the new.

- Reminder that yes the Union does non-evil things too lol. Like sponsor a company to explore the seas.

- Oh Frankenstein is dripping blood on the floor... how did I never notice this in my previous rereads.

Chapter 281 - I ask again! Is Crombel microchipping his assassination squad members or is it an imitation of a noble bond?

- The Elders upon learning about Crombel's team "idk idc about just leave them be. how could this possibly backfire on us idk idk". Like how are they still alive 😭😭😭 I do hc that it wouldn't be an issue for the noble Elders who'd sense the weak imitation noble bond Crombel had with them but the rest of them???

- Is shrimp fried rice easily digestible? Seems like it wouldn't be but whatever.

- The trio can't read Raizel's minute expressions but the kids, Frankenstein, Seira, and Regis can. My bet is that Urokai can't either but the other traitor nobles probably could. Also very cute that he blushes and leaves when the kids comfort him.

- No but why tf did you want Raizel, an adult, to go to school with teenagers Frankenstein. Surely you could figure something else out.

Chaoter 282 - The image of Lunark sloppily applying lipstick before a meeting to cope is making me laugh snjsjsksk. I do still think as a ww she has no clue of human clothes or makeup or etc aside from the basics and thus in actual diplomacy cases she was dressed up by servants or Urokai who feels obligated to make sure every Elder dresses up properly. Urokai as a competent Elder when he's not chasing after Frankenstein propaganda,,,

- Crombel being the only Elder to not know wtf a noblesse is jahsjsjsk. Sorry bro you haven't been Elder long enough and gone to enough Union Elder pool parties for the gossip sessions they have to know shit. Especially since they're dropping off like flies now. I'm sure 3rd is disappointed to have to cancel the upcoming pool party 😔

- No but srsly why do all the Elders have void rooms to have meetings in. Just Skype each other.

- The nobles as a species "hmm have you all considered that world domination is bad?" which is why the Union is wary and apparently Zarga went "aww but i love looks at writing on hand being objectively bad". Like his reason makes no sense ajjsjskks. "Ah yes i hate the Lukedonian ideal of doing whatever tf u want as long as it doesn't hurt others".

- Karias' lightning and thunder tantrum with Amore,,, good for him

Chapter 283 - Roctis, pls stop sitting in your void room. It's bad for your health.

- Ignes!!! The one real female traitor!!! Edian is an honorary traitor who is always counted in said group only.

- Roctis stuttering when he says nothing's wrong to her... lmao okay dad I totes believe you.

- The funniest part is he remains sitting in his spinny office chair in his void room the entire time.

- tteotbokki! Did they really put mayonnaise and ketchup over it though??? Meanwhile Raizel struggles with his banana...

- Poor M-21... your life must suck when you get excited to receive a special nail file as a gift. But also good on Tao for helping him out by making one for him.

Chapter 284 - Oh lol so I wasn't going crazy. Crombel also doesn't know who tf the Elders were going to contact. My guess is Lagus, Gradeus, and Edian lol. It's going to be real embarrassing if I'm wrong because this is my nth time rereading.

- Just struck me that it was the dragon clan leaders in the Union. Fascinating. Dragons stick together I suppose, until they don't.

- Raskreia asking Gejutel to recommend a clan leader while Karias volunteers,,, my sis and I have the exact same energy.

- Rozaria and Kei screaming at Karias while the other three just sigh ajjskzkaks. Also Karias is right. She's older thus she's his nunim 👏

Chapter 285 - The soul weapons stuff still makes no sense to me like why does Rayga's full soul not being in Kartas mean Rajak can't utilise it fully. Like maybe you're just weak bro. Have we considered that? Maybe Rajak is just naturally weaker than the other clan leaders and his constant training only puts him on equal playing grounds with them. But I do agree that you baby clan leaders shouldn't be able to beat the old ass traitors, yes.

- No let Rael complain about daddy dearest. He's right. Rayga shouldn't have split the soul weapon.

Chapter 286 - Mvp lord knew Raizel's taste in jewellery but Frankenstein fucks up again despite being told already about his preference... Maybe Raizel just doesn't want jewellery from you king.

- I wonder who's in charge of putting the skin tight shorts on the test subjects put into tubes. Like did Ignes put them on Muzaka? 9th Elder? Did they force Roctis to do it? I have so many questions.

- M-21 and Takeo loving the gifts Tao gave them,,, my heart. And then when Tao comes to ask about them and guilt trips them by mentioning that he used up most of his pay to make them,,, beloved nail file and modified toy gun, perhaps you will become tsukumogami one day even though that's a japanese shinto belief not korean. Maybe dokkaebi? But I can't see them being abandoned so.