#this would be a show about surviving a fascist regime

[niobiumao3]

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Endlessly weird to me that people blame Pabu, the island and the episode, for somehow ruining the Batch.

I feel a way about this because Pabu is a) introduced to the group by unambiguously dark-skinned human characters and b) a refugee settlement. So to place the blame for the 'softening' or 'loss of coolness' of the show on that is really ugly looking. Like it just fucking is, sorry not sorry.

Acting as if without Pabu, Hunter super totally woulda been all in on rescuing Crosshair, is to pretend like the entire rest of S1 and 2 didn't happen. He was crushed by what he perceived as a complete loss of Crosshair at the end of S1 and has plainly spent a year telling himself to accept it. You can swap out Pabu with any one of a hundred other locations and the result is the same: Hunter isn't convinced Crosshair wants to come back with them, feels just as abandoned as Crosshair does. (Whether or not this is fair for either of them is a wholly different topic.)

None of that is about Pabu. Pabu is simply the place they come across--brought there by a fellow refugee who understands a need for solace and safety, even briefly--which reveals to them, like Safa Toma did for Tech specifically, that their lives CAN be something else. If you don't find that particularly interesting narratively, okay, but to blame Pabu is really a stretch. (Let's not forget, Phee is not about settling on Pabu either. She calls it a 'home away from home' for a reason. So she's not suggesting it as a forever place as it's not even that for her.)

Anyways. Kinda exhausted with this idea that 'Pabu' is somehow at fault for making the Batch not adventurous or heroic, as if any of them would never again leave the planet for a romp. Where does this weird ass idea come from, they have a spaceship! They can leave and come back at will!! Hunter being depressed and in his emotions about Tech being taken as some sort of 'because Pabu is an option' thing is weird to me. He coulda said Kashyyk. He could've said any number of other places. Pabu was just the place they were currently safest on.

Real over fandom not wanting narratives to play out, for characters to change and grow and become. That's how stories work.

[soullessjack]

okay now that maws has officially introduced the evil alternate superman concept into the show I think it’s necessary to point out that across nearly every dc media revolving around Superman going rogue (not including ones where his upbringing is changed) the tipping point for his every downfall is almost always the death of Lois Lane.

Superman The Animated Series - Brave New Metropolis - Lois is doing a story on Intergang and getting too close to exposing them, so they bomb her car. Clark takes this as a realization that he’s fighting a war, and so has to take extreme measures to protect people; these extreme measures include teaming up with Lex Luthor for the sake of his vast resources and establishing a dystopian police state within Metropolis, however it’s important to note that Luthor abused his newfound authority to that dystopian extent, and Clark was genuinely unaware of the city’s true conditions.

Injustice - The Joker tricks Superman into killing [a pregnant] Lois and destroying Metropolis by detonating a nuclear bomb she is strapped to. Superman goes mad with grief and rage, kills the Joker in that infamous fist-through-the-chest-heart-ripping panel, and continues to slowly deteriorate into an amoral dictator over the course of five years. Eventually he establishes a borderline-fascist regime called One Force Earth, ironically intended to “enforce global peace,” but at the cost of the entire world’s personal freedoms (STAS also had an episode about this, featuring Mala and General Zod as the dictators in question).

MAWS is heavily focused on Clark and Lois’ relationship and his status as an alien as elements of his becoming Superman–and given that we’ve already been shown glimpses of the multiverse, alternate Super-tyrants, and an entire legion of Loises who more or less survived their respective Clarks, I think it’s very possible that some of the Soups we see in Mxy’s orb are Supermen who’ve either lost their Loises or their upbringing with the Kents—Supermen who have utterly lost or utterly lacked the very elements that this show emphasizes as being what makes Clark who he is, and I think it would add so much more tension between Clark and Lois and the rest of the world to know that their safety and his sanity basically hinges on this one woman he’s fallen into major puppy-love with.

[mariacallous]

Part of what makes Russia’s war on Ukraine such a world-changing event is that it’s not just about the latter’s survival as a state. The war has also cast a spotlight on the future of Russia itself. Will it ever settle in its borders? Will the Kremlin turn its stated aims into action and try to restore its Cold War-era empire beyond Ukraine? What happens if Russia loses the war?

That nuclear-armed Russia is not as stable as its leaders would have us believe became obvious last June, when Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin launched an armed rebellion that brought his mercenaries almost to the gates of Moscow. The most significant challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin since he took power in 2000 ended in Prigozhin’s fiery death and a further crackdown on the regime’s critics.

Since then, Putin has hunkered down for a long war. With some 20,000 Russians arrested for anti-war infractions since 2022, dissent has been smashed. A staged election planned for 2024 will extend Putin’s rule for another six years; all serious challengers have been murdered, jailed, or pushed into exile. The Russian economy has been thoroughly retooled for war.

But whether the gamble Putin took on Feb. 24, 2022, will pay off is still unclear. If he wins in Ukraine, Europe could face other wars as Putin seeks to restore what he believes to be Russia’s rightful sphere of control in Eastern and Central Europe. If he loses, Russia might enter a spiral of instability at home. At Foreign Policy, we asked our best authors to spin some of these scenarios forward. Here are some of their most noteworthy articles from 2023.

1. The Dream of a European Security Order With Russia Is Dead

By Kristi Raik, Oct. 31

How will a future Russia fit into the European security order? France, Germany, and other European states long tried to partner with the Kremlin and grow economic ties. That vision crashed and burned with Russia’s invasion, leaving Europe to struggle for an alternative.

2. Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-Escalate

By Maxim Samorukov, June 13

Putin has everything to gain domestically by keeping his country on a war footing, Maxim Samorukov writes. That is one of many reasons why Moscow has no interest in negotiating an end to its brutal war in Ukraine.

3. Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future

By Anastasia Edel, March 10

“Increasingly lawless, economically doomed, and morally bankrupt, Russia is running out of good endings,” writes Anastasia Edel, who grew up in the Soviet Union and is no longer optimistic that Russia can take a turn for the better. She argues that only a clear defeat by Ukraine offers Russians the prospect of positive change after centuries of imperialism.

4. It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse

By Alexander J. Motyl, Jan. 7

In one of Foreign Policy’s most-read articles in 2023, Alexander J. Motyl examines scenarios for a breakup of the Russian Federation, which still contains dozens of colonized non-Russian peoples. Whatever its likelihood in the years ahead, not planning for such a disintegration betrays a dangerous lack of imagination among Western policymakers, Motyl writes.

5. Russia’s Frighteningly Fascist Youth

By Ian Garner, May 21

In an excerpt from his book, Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth, Ian Garner describes a new generation of Russians that glorifies war, death, and Putin—a creed that embodies the darkest elements of 20th-century fascism.

[pascalispretty]

Hello my lovely!

Number one fan girl here who just adores you and your writing!

So after reading your latest fic - History stopped in 1936 (EVERYONE READ THIS FIC) twice in the last half hour, I had some questions I was hoping you could share your thoughts about.

Javi sending his love away for her safety…. I know its the right thing considering what is going on around them, his dad. how do we think the conversation with his father went when it was suggested hed send her away? do you think Javi argues back with him because though he knows its for her, he really doesn't want to be separated from his love?

Hi darling!! Thank you so much for asking.

So I actually cut a LOT out about Javi's family and his parents, because it was mainly exposition and not really related to the plot. It also got into the politics of the family, but that's hard to explain concisely if you're not already familiar with 1930s Spain.

I don't imagine Javi and his father have a particularly close relationship - Javi's father is an industrialist and knows that Javi has no interest in taking over the business/businesses after him.

He does however appreciate that Javi got married and wanted to start a family. So I don't think he's suggesting Javi's wife go away to be cruel - he genuinely fears for the safety of the women in the house. Without getting into the politics of it all, he'd have to be pretty canny to survive the multiple regime changes Spain had in the early 20th century, so he's pretty wise to what's happening.

Javi I think is a lot more optimistic. They're about as far away from the fighting as they can get while still staying in Spain, so he thinks they can weather the storm (and ofc he doesn't know that the Italians are about to bring Mallorca under some pretty brutal repression for the next three years).

So I think Javi's definitely resistant at first. He doesn't want to be separated from his wife, and he straight up believes his mother would rather die than leave (because in my backstory, she's a Catalan nationalist). He argues, but his arguments are basically just vibes/feelings rather than the cold hard reality his father is showing him.

(I actually cut a whole exchange about his wife being more suspicious because she's a foreigner, but I didn't want to get into the implications of that so I left her nationality deliberately vague).

I think Javi argued for his wife to stay or for them ALL to go, but ultimately folds because a) his father is a lot more forceful of a personality than he is and b) he knows his father is generally right (and he's right in this instance too). Either the red terror (anarchists/communists/socialists/Republicans) will catch up to them or the white terror (the Nationalists/Francoists/fascists) will.

I hope this answered your question!

[loveoaths]

rewatching the mandalorian + tbobf reminded me: we kind of… do know why no one remembers much about mandalorian culture(s) and mandalore???

it gets glassed. specifically, anyone who might have told an alternate history of mandalore dies all at once in an orbital bombing attack. (you could argue that surely there must be some off world, but the show implies otherwise, unless this changes in season 3.) the only mandalorians left are those on concordia, who all believe in different stripes of the way of the mandalore. those left on concordia scattered for various reasons — enemies of the empire, fear, etc — and took up residence in isolation from the other groups. already a notoriously singular people, they likely weren’t cavorting or chatting with outsiders.

so beliefs pop up in isolation. those in the tribe create their religion/version of the creed; even a viszla believes this. bo katan, who was raised on mandalore in normal society before the forced exodus, and who leaves death watch after maul’s appointment, absolutely does not believe in the creed as a religion or believe in the sacred beskar. it seems to me that of the three types of mandalorian survivors left — bo katan’s crew, the covert and the stragglers/other factions we’ll meet in season 3 — none of them were particularly interested in interacting with the galaxy at large or setting the record straight on mandalorian culture, so yeah, the rest of the world forgot, and when they did meet a mandalorian in the outer rim they likely were mando or someone else in his covert, considering the covert has a rule that only one warrior may leave at a time, for safety reasons. meanwhile, the rest of the universe was enduring a horrific fascist regime, and like we see in andor, suffering people tend to put their heads down and ignore everything just so they can survive. most of us irl today struggle to think nationally (let alone globally) when we’ve got shit going on in our lives. there are a depressingly large amount of real life, actual factual people who’s entire image of the african content is built off those exploitative for-profit non-profit television commercials from the 90s. today. in the modern age. because there is no personal incentive for them to learn more. they stick with the first image they get and take it as gospel without a second thought.

so… yeah, i don’t think it’s that far fetched that in a system of a bazillion planets nobody thought about mandalore for a second, because why would they. their own lives were on fire. no need to sniff around someone else’s smoke.

[clonehub]

Copied from discord because i lost it in there KJASDHFLKAJSDFHLK

Who was developed? Wrecker. Why? Because of his trope. They stick to those tropes HARD all the way to the end gotta hand the writers that at least. Was the empire really developed? No Andor creating everything it did in six episodes and I think roughly the same number of hours and and tbb gives us a hiccup about the chain codes and the ends of the production of clones which we already knew about The lighting is nice the render is nice the lip sync is okay the VAing needs WORK. the soundtrack esp the main theme leaves much to be desired. the story just needs. some kind of overhaul. how tf can your premiere actually make the show less appealing. it went from unbearable to tolerable ive had that happen once to me before and that was The Office AKJSDHFLAJSFDHLKAS remember how they kept saying tbb would be darker than tcw. they had bitches heads bouncing in season 1 what did the tbb do HM? every time i went into an episode i was like wow the needle has not budged theyre digging their feet in on the whole Tell over showing wowowowow Did you know that Wrecker, as the demo expert, almost exclusively uses a gun? Did you know that crosshair's absence actually did not materially affect the team at all either in performance or emotional cohesion? Did you know that these people actually dont really care about each other and they really feel more like roommates with weapons who all have to look after a spunky kid than a family? You can't just call everything found family they gotta actually act like it and omega waiting until like 4 episodes before the finale to call the batch her brothers is not. how you wanna go about that. and they dont like. call her their sister when speaking about her to other people crosshair's fascism is actually a lot stronger than I remember like he's just on a constant path of doubling down i think his stans are just deluding themselves as to his moral standing and also frankly disrespecting his character for insisting he has 0 autonomy and is actually Really Good deep down why was one of the nicest moments when tbb all turned their guns on crosshair bc they thought he had the capacity to shoot hunter and/or a literal child why dont we get more tense moments like that

lie hot damn. what a (nothing) show. this could have easily faded from the collective conscious of star wars but its animated and animated well and also the Trope Troupe (4/5 man band set up) is always popular ig because of how goddamn easy it is to write and absorb? because who ever strays from that i was called slurs over this show lmao NAWT to spam yall with essentially a preview to the video essay about tbb i may or may not be writing next year but the fact that i cant even nail down a central theme-- is it family? only at the end and some parts in the middle. is it choice? not really? are they always on survival mode? yeah. does it FEEL like that? no because these bitches got something giggly going on 24/7 like the tonality is allll over the placeeeeee your fascist brother is hunting you for sport because he willingly joined a genocidal authoritarian regime that wants you and your kid sister dead why was the humorous writing outpacing literally every other mood by a mile

this show is like. style over substance. it wants the credit of creating an emotional story without doing any of the work to create that feeling in the slightest. a nothing burger. fireworks but its more smoke than flash. a tease of a theme here or there to keep you on the edge of your seat in the sense that youll sit there like "wow will they go down that road? will they address the size 00 elephant (crosshair) in the room?" and its almost always no some say a show doesnt need to be deep to be good i say yes it does because i have taste and no patience. and also good is so subjective as a metric for quality it just sounds like a disingenous argument from the start my friends and i were harassed over this show entire people leaving the fandom bc-- ok. im done. thats my review!

[gerec]

I only know about Stat Wars from cultural osmosis, do you think I would enjoy Andor?

You don't need to know anything about Star Wars to enjoy Andor; it is an incredible show that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. You only need to know that it's a story about people trying to survive under a fascist regime, and how ordinary people do extraordinary things to fight back. It's a masterclass in story telling, with amazing character work, pacing and world building better than most shows I've seen (and I mean ALL shows not just Star Wars ones). There is not one bad performance in the entire cast, and Diego Luna (and Stellan Skarsgard and Andy Serkis) in particular are phenomenal. What it does not have are cameos and easter eggs added just for the sake of having them (like everything MCU these days, and most SW too); everything and every character has a purpose that makes sense for this particular story they're trying to tell.

I really can't recommend it enough and I hope you give the show a try. Watch all three of the first episodes together if you can spare the time, as I think it gives you the best viewing experience to start, being able to feel the tension ratcheting from the beginning of an episode to the end, and from the first episode to the third. (Ep 1-3 is the first arc, 4-6 is the second with 7 being a standalone ep, then 8-10 and 11 + 12 being the 2 part finale).

Hope this helps! :D :D :D

[kuaille]

i can't stop thinking about an alive!bianca au so i'll just put them here to not forget

Bianca actually found an entrance to the labyrinth just before she was crushed, and fled there

She spent months in the labyrinth (which felt like a week) until she was finally able to get out

She left in Venice and was worried about everything that had happened with the mission and the others

Aphrodite showed up and told her that Bianca was presumed dead four months ago

Bianca wanted to go back immediately, find the hunters and Nico, but Aphrodite stopped her

The goddess said that she could protect Nico as he was under her blessing, but that Bianca should stay away as it would be too complicated to protect two powerful demigods together

(remember in MoA, when Annabeth, Piper and Hazel meet Aphrodite and she says "would it make their love life interesting?" considering all that Nico did, I would say Aphrodite had a lot of fun with so much tragedy)

Bianca was very afraid, but Aphrodite said that Nico was safe in the CHB; that Percy, because he understood what it was like to be a powerful demigod, would be by Nico's side

So Bianca trusted, and decided to stay in Venice

She learned to fight alone, discover her own powers (since there were many monsters there) and gradually remembered her own past

Unfortunately, the Di Angelos had been condemned shortly before Mussolini died, massacred as traitors for not following the fascist regime, and only Bianca and Nico of the family were left

Artemis' blessing was taken away by Aphrodite, to make everything more "real", according to the goddess

Bianca started having constant nightmares: she used to see Nico alone in the underworld, accompanied by ghosts all the time, always looking miserable and lonely

When she questioned Aphrodite about it, the goddess said that they were just irrational nightmares, fueled by a feeling of guilt at Bianca's core for having "abandoned" her brother (we all know how manipulative Aphrodite can be)

Sometimes Bianca also dreamed in the first person: that Nico had summoned her to a ranch together with Percy, that Nico had tried to summon their mother's spirit, and she had tried to stop him... but there was no way those things could be true, after all, Aphrodite was always so convincing in saying that Nico was protected at CHB, right?

Until one day, Aphrodite arrives and says that Nico died in the battle against Kronos, shortly after convincing Hades, Persephone and Demeter to participate

Bianca wanted to visit him in the underworld, but Aphrodite was persistent in saying that would only bring more headaches

And then Bianca stayed there, for years... living old and new memories, surviving the monsters, making friends, totally away from the greek world in the USA, and still with the bitter feeling in her chest

Years later, the situation got much worse in Italy: monsters appeared in huge flocks and just didn't die, and Bianca felt a crack between the underworld and the mortal world, along with the presence of thousands and thousands of monsters

Before she could focus on it, the nightmares returned: this time, Nico was alone in a dark and completely horrible place, with monsters sprouting from the ground, rivers of fire and lamentation, dark and empty sky and air that felt like poison

Bianca couldn't understand why these nightmares came back, but the more she had them, the more something stuck in her mind: she needed to go to Rome, and that's what she did

No one but her saw the gigantic flying greek trireme, but with her invisibility powers, it was easy to get there

Bianca felt the presence of demigods and wanted to know why they were in that place until she saw: Nico, with glassy eyes and looking half dead

She surprised the demigods, not looking at anyone and just going on automatic, wanting to get Nico out of there

It was then that Percy's face appeared and Bianca hesitated to run away

in this au nico kinda went crazy because of tartarus (honestly how it didn't happen in canon i don't know) and he's in a vegetative state where he doesn't recognize anyone

yes! bianca with invisibility powers! thanks to this post here:

idk if i should continue this

[shoulderpads-mcgee2]

Season One is Over and For What?

That’s a wrap on season one of The Bad Batch, and what are we left with? For a lot of people, disappointment.

This image comes from uwwtbb’s fandom response survey’s results so far, and it shows that this show survives on its cameos, not the actual merit of the show. The writing and main characters are the thing people like the least and for good reason.

The Bad Batch is a show with a lackluster plot and unlikable, underdeveloped characters, and with the season final out, it’s only clearer that this is true. None of the main cast has moved much beyond their tropes (leader, nerd, tough guy etc) which makes for a cast of cardboard cut outs-flimsy and devoid of substance. And the plot has gone in a big circle. Nothing has really changed over the entire course of the season. Crosshair is still being left behind by the group, his character amounted to nothing. He had no arc. He has decided to stay with a fascist regime for reasons we don’t understand because he hasn’t been given an ounce of character depth. The viewers can’t even agree if him saying his chip has been removed was a lie or not because there’s just nothing to work with. There’s no understanding as to why he acts the way he does or does the things he does. And there’s no reason to drag this out for another season. It’s gone on long enough to feel tired. People who decided to cling on to his character from the beginning are being strung along with the promise of depth and interest.

The only possible reason he might stay with the Empire is his assertion that he and his batch are “Superior,” and isn’t just a trip.

If you’ve been hanging out in tbb’s fandom space, you’ve no doubt heard of Unwhitewash The Bad Batch, a movement that aims to address the ways the clones, especially the bad batch, have been whitewashed both in their complexions and facial features from the Temuera Morrison base. Morrison is a Maori man and darker than The Bad Batch or The Mandalorian would have you believe. It’s also suspect to write these far paler “genetically enhanced” clones as being superior to their darker (though still made paler) skinned brothers. It sends a subtle message to the audience, especially when characters like Crosshair or their very smart and eloquent member, Tech are the palest while violence meathead, Wrecker is the darkest.

Over the course of the season, many fans have been vocal about these issues and tried to reach out to Disney and the crew working on the show like Filoni. For our efforts, we have received unconfirmed rumors of Disney allegedly adjusting the lighting of the show, but mostly it’s been absolute radio silence. When the concern of erasing characters of color and putting very pale versions of clones in a position of superiority, we have been met with silence. When bringing up ablism in the treatment of Echo, or antisemitic imagery in the case of Cid, a lizard lady with a New York Jewish accent and a love of money, we have been ignored. It’s extremely disheartening to have the voices of so many fans, including many disabled, Jewish, and POC fans, be completely snubbed by a company that claims to promote inclusion and diversity.

If you would like to help out in making these voices heard, I urge you to check out the reblog of this post that will include links to a carrd that explains these issues in greater depth, as well as check out the fandom response survey and the petition.

[southeastasianists]

Fears are growing in Myanmar that the country is facing another decades-long dictatorship, as coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has taken on the role of prime minister in his newly formed caretaker government, following in the footsteps of former dictator Ne Win, who ruled the country for 26 years.

Min Aung Hlaing’s self-appointment to the position and the formation of the new government were announced on Sunday as the Southeast Asian country marked sixth months under military rule imposed by his State Administration Council (SAC). On the same day, he said elections would be held by 2023.

Since the military seized power from the democratically elected government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in February, Myanmar has been in turmoil economically, socially and politically. The regime has been struggling to rule the country in the face of popular protest and civil armed resistance. Currently, highly contagious new variants of the coronavirus are battering the country.

The caretaker government is nothing new to Myanmar. In 1958 when the then ruling Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) was divided by faction and intrigue, then Prime Minister U Nu handed state power to then military chief General Ne Win after securing a promise from the general that an election would be held in six months. Ne Win agreed and formed a caretaker government, in which he was the prime minister.

However, the election was not held until 1960. Ne Win handed power back to U Nu’s party after its victory at the polls. Two years later, however, the general seized power back through a coup, claiming that the Union of Burma (Myanmar’s former name) was in danger of disintegration under the U Nu government.

After the takeover in 1962, Ne Win held power for 26 years as the supreme leader of the country. He turned what had been Southeast Asia’s most prosperous nation into a poor socialist state, isolating the country from the outside world and pushing it into the ranks of the poorest nations, with Burma earning the UN’s Least Developed Country (LCD) designation in 1987. Ne Win’s dictatorship was toppled by a nationwide popular uprising in 1988, but the protests were brutally cracked down on by the army, paving the way for another period of direct military rule until early 2011.

Given this historical context, the regime’s announcement on Sunday of the caretaker government and its promise to hold elections in two years were met with skepticism.

“The military is back in absolute power for the long haul,” said Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who has been covering Asia for decades.

He said if anyone had any doubts about Min Aung Hlaing’s intentions when he ousted the democratically elected government in Feb. 1, it should now be clear to all that the military grabbed absolute power in order to crush any attempts to establish genuine civilian rule, which was the aim of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s ousted National League for Democracy government.

A Yangon-based political analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue said the regime appeared set on holding power for as long as it can. He said that by forming the caretaker government the junta was merely playing another card in its game of misleading the international community into believing that it is not a regime, but rather a government that is holding power temporarily.

“They won’t give it back and it will be really bad for the country,” he said.

Min Aung Hlaing earlier promised he would hand over power to whichever party won the next election. On Sunday, he said the polls would be held in 2023 after the state of emergency period was over.

Last week, the regime officially annulled the 2020 election results, which saw the NLD win a landslide victory, claiming the NLD violated the constitution and election laws. The regime has also been working on disbanding the NLD over the alleged violations.

Given the existing situation, it’s doubtful the NLD will survive to see the election Min Aung Hlaing has promised.

Myanmar’s recent history also shows that the generals rarely keep their promises and are not reliable when it comes to polls.

When the NLD won the general election in 1990, the then military regime didn’t honor the results. They organized an election in 2010 that saw its proxy party win but the polls were internationally dismissed as a sham.

For the 2023 election—if it happens—one possible scenario is that a regime-backed party will have the upper hand with the demise of the NLD.

Lintner said it’s “criminally naïve” to believe that the military will hand over power to a democratically elected, civilian government.

Echoing Lintner, the Yangon-based analyst said parties backed by the regime will contest the vote, with one of them eventually forming a government.

“The regime will make sure that one of them will win,” he said.

[ignnru]

And again the battle continues

Rating: Mature

Relationships: Germany/North Italy Minor or Background Relationship(s) South Italy/Spain Austria/Hungary Czech Republic/ Slovakia Monaco/Seborga 

Language: English

Chapters: 4/?

Description:

Historical AU.The events happen during World War 2 (end of 1944 - beginning of 1945).

Ludwig - traitor to his homeland, a member of an underground organisation and partisan, trying his hardest, has fought against Fascist Germany regime since the beginning of the war. Trying to help everyone, he forgets about himself not caring about his future. During one of the tasks, his road brings him to a small mountain village occupied by German troops in Italy, where he meets a broken-down by war and trying to survive Feliciano Vargas. Would Feliciano be able to help Ludwig, showing him that he still has a future to fight for?

Read Here! 

[9worldstales]

MCU Loki: Why so far it had been disappointing how the series has dealt with what the TVA had been doing

Right from when the series started I carried on the belief that what the TVA was doing was horrible, a mix between a Nazi regime and a fanatical cult down to the elements of police brutality, to the extermination and persecution of people they felt different and lesser, detrimental for their own self being all out of blind faith to something they were indoctrinated into.

I was expecting a serious analysis of this from the show since Waldron seemed to be so enthusiast of the TVA as it was his creature

“The TVA is just an entirely new world [with] a new cast of characters, and that’s what felt most exciting about the show: building a new corner of the MCU.’ What if this was the best show ever?’ I think that was literally my pitch. My pitch for the show was kind of a big, crazy, fun-time adventure.”

[‘Loki’ Writer Michael Waldron On Building ‘A New Corner Of The MCU’]

References to the TVA being bad needed to wait till Ep. 3 “Lamentis 1” and where just two lines:

Sylvie: So, naturally you went to work for the boring, oppressive time police. [Ep 3]

Sylvie: It must have started when I spent my entire life running from the omniscient fascists you work for. [Ep 3]

More than focusing on how horrid the TVA is, both sentences criticize Loki for cooperating with the TVA even if he was forced into it as he couldn’t escape, cooperating with them was his only way to survive, the implication being he should have taken the hero route and die instead than accept to join forces with the TVA.

Mind you, it could have been an interesting angle to look at. How people can embrace terrible things in order to survive. After all we saw Loki cooperating with Thanos under the promise if he were to fail recovering the Tesseract death would be a preferable option than failure.

THE OTHER: You will have your war, Asgardian. If you fail, if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he can't find you. You think you know pain? He will make you long for something as sweet as pain.

The series could have drawn parallels from both situations, either making a point one should never bent or that sometimes you can’t do anything else but bent because not everyone is born as a hero, or because you’re just waiting for a time in which you can oppose as sometimes getting heroically killed for your ideals can be also very unproductive.

But no, it’s not this series.

Loki will maintain he accepted to work with the TVA not because his other option was being killed (something that’s remarked more than once), but because he wanted to get to the Time-Keepers to steal their powers or something like that. If he’s lying to himself to cope with the situation that’s not a problem the series pose to itself as the series seem to embrace this explanation even if it made clear Loki would be reset if he didn’t cooperate.

Episode 3 also introduces the idea that people at the TVA works under a false belief. They think they were created by the Time-Keepers but in truth they are brainwashed Variants they kidnapped from their timelines.

Okay, it was another possible interesting route. Loki was a Frost Giant raised on the idea he was an Asgardian, there could be a parallel here… though one that, for the TVA, was less interesting.

The TVA members are enthusiastic believers. Most of them show no empathy toward the Variants, no pity. They belittle and humiliate them, handle them as beings with no rights, punish them for not obeying rules they didn’t know existed in the first place. Feelings rage from enjoying doing it to just doing it the way a boot steps over a ant to use a familiar metaphor.

The fact that in episode 4 B-15, after discovering the truth, will go: ‘I looked happy (in my previous life)!’ doesn’t really make me feel very sorry for her on an intellectual plan.

Yes, what the TVA did to B-15 was wrong, but what about what she did to others without a single remorse? Enjoying her work?

But, whatever, not everyone on the TVA seemed to belittle Variants, in ep 1 & 2 Mobius showed some form of pity for them, not enough it’ll stop him but enough we can think he didn’t enjoy what was being done to the Variants so knowing how he’ll react could be interesting, couldn’t it?

We reach Ep. 4 “Nexus Event”.

While we see the TVA did to a child version of Sylvie what they did to Loki and this time there isn’t any ounce of doubt that it wasn’t fun, this isn’t really used to throw shades at the TVA but to underline how Sylvie’s life was miserable.

Sylvie: I remember Asgard. Not much, but I remember. My home, my people, my life. The universe wants to break free, so it manifests chaos. Like me being born the Goddess of Mischief. And as soon as that created a big enough detour from the Sacred Timeline, the TVA showed up, erased my reality, and took me prisoner. I was just a child. I escaped. Stole a TemPad and I ran for a long, long time, which really sucked. Everywhere and every-when I went, it caused a nexus event. Sent up a smoke flare. Because I'm not supposed to exist. Until, eventually, I figured out where to hide. And so that's where I grew up, the ends of a thousand worlds. ( /Scoffs/ ) Now... that's where I'll die.

Thanks to the TVA, so it’s possible to make the connection that if Sylvie was in pain due to the TVA the TVA is a bad guy, but it’s again left vague.

In an episode that feel the need to have Loki define himself as a ‘horrible person’ and a ‘narcissist’, that calls him ‘an asshole and a bad friend’ using ‘a cockroach's survival mechanism’ when he actually says the truth and how he is a ‘conniving, craven, pathetic worm’ who should know he ‘deserve to be alone and always will be’ let’s not talk about how terrible the TVA is.

After all, according to the previous episode they’re just ‘boring, oppressive, omniscient fascists’. Nothing big.

And it’s nothing big, really.

C-20, B-15 and even Mobius, once discovering the truth are solely concerned about how the TVA lied to them, not of how they had been the TVA accomplices into wiping countless lives from existence.

Hunter B-15: I looked happy. What now?

Hunter C-20: "Calm down"? I'm a Variant. So are you. So is every single person in this place. I'm ending this.

Mobius: You know where I'd go if I could go anywhere? Wherever it is I'm really from. Yeah, wherever I had a life before the TVA came along. Maybe I had a jet ski. That's what I'd like to do. Just riding around on my jet ski.

They don’t care about what they had done with the TVA, they are okay with burning the place merely because the TVA has wronged them. But okay, maybe they need time to elaborate, to realize the implication of what they’ve done.

For C-20, who was reset, there’s no more time but…

Hunter B-15: Why am I locked in here?

Renslayer: You freed the Variant. You were disloyal to the TVA.

Hunter B-15: Disloyal?

Renslayer: Did you think you'd escape punishment for that?

Hunter B-15: Disloyal to who? You were in the Time-Keepers' chambers. They weren't real.

Renslayer: And why does that change anything?

Hunter B-15: That changes everything! The people need to know the truth.

Actually what the people need prior to that is to stop. Stop pruning other existences who’re exactly the same as their own. The biggest problem, the biggest CRIME isn’t that the TVA has done TO THEM, as, in doing so, it has at least spared their lives, it’s that they had killed countless galaxies and continue doing so.

So we move to Mobius.

I… I really don’t get what the series wants to do with Mobius. Although he wasn’t perfect, he seemed a decent guy in episode 1 & 2, one that wouldn’t enjoy hurting or scaring Variants without a reason. Yes he believed they needed to be eliminated… but didn’t enjoy doing it.

Yes, the way he ‘interrogated’ Loki in episode 1 was bad… but he believed he was doing only his work, that interrogation might have a point, some of the things he said weren’t meant to be just verbally abusive for the sake of it but were part of his ‘credo’ in which people had to follow the path of the sacred timeline and a side of him might have felt sympathy or pity for him. Although he knew it was risky he wanted to have faith in Loki.

Episode 4 tossed all that away with the worst interrogation scene possible. It contained gratuitous beating, psychological abuse/manipulation, derogatory comments, pointless questions while Mobius defined himself as Loki’s friend in the same episode. That scene has no purpose if not to beat and belittle Loki. What’s worse, when Mobius discovers the truth and goes to Loki, instead than asking him how he feels after such a beating he asks him what he’s doing… and I won’t dig into the rest of the conversation because it’s horrid.

Mobius’ ideas of apology for what he has done to his supposed friend is:

Mobius: You were right, about the TVA. You were right from the beginning. And if you wanna save her, you need to trust me. Can we do that?

Loki: Yes.

Mobius: Okay. You could be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. I mean, just in case anyone ever told you different.

It was Mobius who told him differently. Okay, he has acknowledged Loki was right and he was wrong but not that he had unfairly had him beaten for God knows how long for no reason. But okay, maybe Mobius too needed time to internalize all that, so let’s look at episode 5.

Let’s face it, no, what Mobius did to Loki won’t come up again with Loki, Sylvie will merely tell Loki (and to us) Mobius ‘isn't so bad’ and that he cares about Loki. Loki will counter Mobius isn’t so good either but that’s why he gets along with him.

I… I’m not sure what the series is trying to do at this point with Mobius, all we get about what he did with the Variants in Episode 5 is this.

Mobius: All that time, I really believed we were the good guys.

Sylvie: Annihilating entire realities, orphaning little girls, classic hero stuff.

Mobius: Well, I guess when you think the ends justify the means, there's not much you won't do. By the way, you did some annihilating too.

Sylvie: I did what I had to do.

Mobius: Yeah, so did I.

Sylvie: You hunted me like a dog.

Mobius: I'm sorry about that.

Mobius admits they weren’t the good guys, which would be great if it wasn’t for the fact the moment Sylvie points out how he was dumb at not realizing it sooner because we finally are told that the TVA is responsible for ‘Annihilating entire realities, orphaning little girls’, Mobius defends his actions!

The ends justify the means, you did some annihilating too, I did what I had to do.

Hey, news flash, no, those aren’t excuses. This is not a game about who annihilated more make penitence and anyway, if this was the case, the TVA wins. You killed countless people and now you’re complaining you aren’t a hero? That others are bad too? That you were forced to do it when you were a willing believer that refused to question things even though Loki immediately pointed out how it all was dumb?

Mobius: Odin, God of the Heavens. Asgard, mystical realm, beyond the stars. Frost Giants. Listen to yourself...

Loki: It's not the same. It's completely different. No. It's not the same.

Mobius: It's exactly the same thing. Because if you think too hard about where any of us came from, who we truly are, it sounds kinda ridiculous. Existence is chaos. Nothing makes any sense, so we try to make some sense of it. And I'm just lucky that the chaos I emerged into gave me all this... My own glorious purpose. Cause the TVA is my life. And it's real because I believe it's real.

It took Sylvie remarking he hunted her like a animal to finally get him to apologize on something… and she’s the only one he apologizes to.

We don’t hear him apologizing to the other Loki Variants and this is his new glorious purpose:

Kid Loki: Mobius, assuming you do get back to the TVA, what exactly are you getting yourself into?

Mobius: I don't know. I'd like to let people know the truth.

Again it seems the biggest deal is the TVA lied to them and took them away from their lives, not that they pruned countless others without a care.

There’s no self reflection, there’s no horror for what they had done to the other Variants who were just like them.

When Kid Loki and Classic Loki say they’ll remain there because that’s their home he doesn’t counter ‘no, this isn’t and I’m sorry we let you believe this.’ It’s Loki who worries for them, pointing out the dangers of the place. Mobius, who’s either directly responsible or connected to the one responsible for them ending there and losing their whole world, says nothing.

So his sympathy toward the Variants, his pity… was it all fake?

Doesn’t he care anymore? This is the road the story decided to go with him?

Since Mobius has gained popularity into the fandom thanks to the first 2 episodes, to Owen Wilson and to those who shipped him with Loki, let’s strip him of what really made him great, the fact he didn’t enjoy mistreating the Variants and turns him into someone who doesn’t care?

What next, is he going to become the new villain?

Damn it, this series started with a full episode questioning what Loki did in New York, pointing out how Loki’s belief ‘he would make it easy for humans’ because ‘freedom is a lie’ is an idiocy, how he was just a murderer and asking him if he enjoyed hurting people and making him say that no, he didn’t that he was bad, that he was a narcissist and yadda, yadda, yadda, then it turns out Mobius annihilated entire realities, orphaning little girls, all because freedom is a lie and we’ve all to do what the Time-Keepers decided and let’s have the guy you call friend beaten up at random for no good reason and… and that’s what we get?

That he rebels to the Time-Keepers because they had dared to lie TO HIM about not having created him?

Is the series trying to make a point about how people at the TVA can accuse Loki of not being good but they’re actually worse because they did much worse and didn’t care at all about their victims?

Is it a critic to society, that find easy to criticize someone but can’t admit they do worse? Won’t even see they’re doing worse and would resent instead for any little slight done to them?

It would be an interesting theme… the problem is it doesn’t seem to be the goal of the series as it tends to overlook the TVA, its fascist behaviour and the annihilation of civilizations at the hands of willing, albeit indoctrinated members, to focus more on how the TVA wronged solely Sylvie (her complain about her being orphaned is more about HER being orphaned than about HER PARENTS having been killed) and the TVA members.

It’s fair to see the TVA members as victims… they are… but what about the other Variants who got erased? What about how the TVA members had been complicit in said elimination, enjoying it, gratuitously mistreating and belittling Variants before eliminating them?

Is it just up to us viewers realize it because the story isn’t going to do the work for us?

I don’t know. I hope the last episode will do something to fix this.

There’s still an episode after all and maybe I’m worrying over nothing, maybe someone, Mobius preferably because I want to go back considering him a decent guy, not perfect because nobody is perfect but decent, and I don’t like what episode 4 has done with him, will regret what was done to way too many people by the ones who were working at the TVA.

I’ll be fine if they still need to internalize what they had done... but I’d like for them to be done internalizing before the series ends because otherwise it’s just skipping over the whole topic.

So... I’ll try to keep hopeful. Maybe they won’t disappoint me.

[darrowsrising]

What brands do you think still somehow exist in Red Rising?

I think the Simpsons is just inexplicably somehow still going. Sadly not even the Society can kill the Simpsons.

McDonalds also exists but is gentrified to the point that only Golds can afford it.

I've been scratching my brains trying to answer this and I can only come up with serious answers, so I devided to roll with it. I can tell you what brands I think went poof and a few that sirvived...idk, this is a weird question for me, I never think of such things, sorry. I don't really get hooked up on brands to be honest...

I don't watch most american cartoons of great popularity (they all give me a headache for some reason), but I read some posts and articles about the Simpsons and they tend to mock some awful regimes, politics, politicians and behaviours, so I kinda think that of World War III did not destroyed the Simpsons, then fascist Society did. But not before they predicted abismal things about said Society.

I genuinely doubt that Golds actually consider McDonalds good enough for them - Pixies still gorge on champagne and caviar and Bronzies aren't actually rich or from rich families (see Fitchner), and Silvers exist, so I don't see how only Golds can afford fast food, no matter how gentrified.

I think that to my infinite dismay, Starbucks would still be a thing. But if I am even a bit lucky great streetfood from around the Earth is now available everywhere in the Solar System (vietnamese streetfood, mexican streetfood etc. Yum!)

In Red Rising, Harmony mentions something about highReds being brainwashed with advertising to spend even the little they earn for things they don't need, so I think a lot of fashion brands survived even though they had to rebrand a bit. Heaven Gaia and Zuhair Murad dress everyone that I like, I take no criticism.

The make up and skincare industries died because Carvers said so. Silvers took whatever was left and are now trying to fool young people to buy stuff they don't need. Pinks are the only ones to be trusted with beautification, though.

Because there is medicine for cancer in the Red Rising universe and they adapted skin to withstand desert sun on Mercury, I like to think they stopped doing harmful practices that affect nature and by extention humankind, so any brand that put a safety problem had to go.

Small bussinesses and freelancing are on a leash, most especially if you are a not a Gold.

I would like to think that people still watch shows and read books that have been banned. I mean, if Darrow can breeze through the Count of Monte Cristo, Good Omens must still be a thing as both show and book.

Ermm...that's all I've got to say on this for now. Kinda lackluster, I know...

Howl on!

[padme-amitabha]

I see a lot of stories with Luke and Vader. U don’t have to write this but would be cool if we saw more Leia interacting with Vader.

Oh yes I love reading about them too since there’s not much interaction in the movies. 

*

He didn’t know why he had brought her along. He had expected his son to accompany the smuggler Solo, the Princess and their band of rebels to Cloud City. And even after he had made a deal with Calrissian, it proved futile as Luke Skywalker was nowhere to be found. Interrogating Solo had not been of much use either – it seemed his friends were truly unaware of his whereabouts. Perhaps, he hoped his son might show up to rescue the Princess – they seem quite close after all.

He had known the young Princess since she was a child. His Master had doubts regarding Organa’s loyalty, especially since he and other Senators (including her) had opposed him before the creation of the Empire. The girl was quite a troublemaker and he had been felt nothing but anger when the six-year-old girl had approached him during one of his inspection trips to Alderaan and introduced herself as Leia.

Leia – the name he had once wanted to name his own daughter. His mother would often tell him stories of a brave girl named Leia and he had always admired her courage in the stories. He had told her about it and she had been pleased with it too, though she was quite confident it was a boy. He had known it all along it was a girl. But his unborn daughter was dead, along with his wife. And yet, the Organas had a daughter her age with her name. His daughter didn’t live and this girl lived on with her name.

He had seen her serving as a Senator at a very young age and proving herself to be a shrewd political mind. Unlike the other languid older Senators, she had novel ideas and a strong resolve. It did her little good when the Senate practically held no sway in the Empire. He always avoided her – for she seemed like her reincarnated from a certain point of view. As she grew older, she began to resemble his late wife more and more – it felt eerie but then again, she wasn’t exactly like Padmé either. She was a younger version of her, fiercer and more determined, a hope and light in the darkness of the empire which had no need for either. In a way, he resented her. He resented her because she looked the daughter from his dreams – in a galaxy where he had his family and no one else existed but them.

He looked out of the viewport at the surrounding stars. He really preferred not thinking about his past especially during his missions (he usually reserved them for his meditation) but the memories – the ghosts of his past – could never truly go away. He was Anakin Skywalker with no one to call him that – his name had lost its meaning.

“I want to be the first one to see them all,” he had once told the Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn. Ironically, he had visited most of them but it was to do his Master’s bidding. Not for himself.

“You know Ani, people on Naboo say those who die never leave you. There are always in the stars, and they are always around you,” Padmé had said once.

And perhaps she was right. His ghosts still haunted him and yet he could never reach them. He hadn’t known why before – but he did now. His past would never leave him (not that he wanted it to – the past was all he had of a better life) because he still had one person left in the galaxy. His son. Luke Skywalker. Padmé was right about that too.

“Darth Vader, you do realize holding me hostage is an utter waste of my time and yours? Luke will not come to save me.”

He barely looks at her. Princess Leia stands beside him, her face pinched with irritation. For a girl her age, she was incredibly authoritative that made her seem much older than she was. No matter what she had gone through, she rarely lost her composure. It was almost admirable in someone so young. Now that he knew his child had survived, he found that he didn’t resent her anymore.

“Perhaps he will, Your Highness. I would suggest worrying about other things. You are a known traitor to the Empire. It would not end well for you.”

She scoffs. “The Empire has taken everything from me and yet here I stand. I am not a coward; I will fight till my last breath to end you and your Emperor’s fascist regime.”

He turned to regard her. Those brown eyes were very familiar and with an even more familiar ferocity.

“You are very naïve. That is why you will always get captured while doing these treasonous activities.”

She narrows her eyes. “You mean on the Death Star.”

“Yes, you get yourself in these situations which are not appropriate for someone of your station, Princess Leia.”

“Who do you think you are, my father?” she scoffs. “What do you mean by someone of my station?”

“Your place is in your planet and in the imperial senate. What do you hope to achieve from this foolish cause?” he asks.

“You mean a planet that no longer exists and a senate that has been dismantled,” she replies bitterly.

“You were fortunate it was I who caught you. The Emperor is not as lenient as I am.”

“I do not need anyone’s protection. I need revenge for everything your Emperor has done to my parents and my people.”

“Indeed,” he humors her.

She must have realized her words were met with wry amusement because she loses her temper.

“I believe in democracy and I will see it be restored to the galaxy,” she declares. He turns away and continues to look away. It was amusing she believed in something she had not seen in her lifetime but this conversation was getting tiresome. He had other things on his mind. He had to locate his son and he had to convince him to reconsider joining him. 

“And when that day comes, I will look forward to seeing you and your Emperor fall,” says Leia Organa, the imposter who had once taken his daughter’s name and her appearance, as she turns away.

The stars were truly bright this night.

[travllingbunny]

The 100: 7x08 Anaconda

The mini-rewatch of season 7 that @jeanie205 and me did during this mini-hiatus is finished, and with that, I’m going to finally post my reviews of 7x08 and 7x09, hopefully before the show returns.

I’m tempted to start talking about the opening scene without any introduction, just like the episode itself started with no “Previously on” and no cold open (the latter, I believe, for the first time since season 1, when the show still did not have any opening titles).. but I’m going to still say a few general things before going into details under the cut. 

When it was first announced that an episode of The 100′s final season would be the backdoor pilot for a prequel show, that info was met with a lot of hostility (to the effect of “why waste a full episode on new characters instead of those we know”), which didn’t surprise me much. What did surprise me was that people mostly seemed to expect the episode to be 100% set in the past and unrelated to anything from season 7 - which, as far as I know, is not how backdoor pilots normally work, they still have to fit within the season they’re a part of. The structure of the episode is more in line with what I expected - while most of the episode is set in the past, the framing device is a scene of Clarke confronting Bill Cadogan in the Stone Room on Bardo, and the long flashback is both setting up a possible prequel, and revealing things relevant to the plot of season 7. The biggest connecting points are the Anomaly Stone on Earth, the importance of the Flame for Cadogan and the Disciples, and Cadogan himself, who is clearly not going to be a character in the prequel except possibly in flashbacks, but who is one of the main antagonists of season 7. The episode works as a backdoor pilot but is also interesting as a part of the backstory of The 100. 

I really enjoyed the episode - and as it turns out, I enjoyed it even more on rewatch, when I could stop and soak in all the new info and details - and I hope the prequel does picked up, as it has a lot of potential to be interesting, though there is one big concern I have about it. More about that at the end of this post under “Prequel speculation”.

So no Previously on this time (unsurprisingly), no cold open - and we get a brand new version of the opening titles - since this episode technically fully takes place on Bardo, these opening titles start with the Bardo Stone Room and end with another shot of the Stone Room we haven’t seen before in the OT, one with the Stone. The Stone Room is where they begin and end, just like the episode itself. And just like Clarke and the rest of her group have been stuck in this Stone Room for 4 episodes.

But I actually don’t mind it in this episode. At least Clarke is in the focus of these few minutes we spend in the present, and I really like these few minutes. We start with an expanded version of Clarke's response to the news of Bellamy's "death", with slow motion, distorted angles and close-ups of Clarke’s face showing shock and grief and numbness (and I’m going to post another screenshot of that, because I want to savor the moments when the show focuses on characters’ grief before going back to the action - and not just the type of grief that results in going off the rails and murdering people.) We also see Raven on the verge of tears, and Miller choking a little - the other two people who have been Bellamy’s friends for a long time. Clarke being Clarke, she picks herself up the moment she sees someone else in pain (Raven) and focuses on honoring Bellamy’s memory, just as Bellamy did in 4x13 when he believed Clarke was dead, and tells Raven they need to save Octavia and Echo: “We do this for him. We do this for our family” - acknowledging that saving them is something of particular importance as they were people important to Bellamy, and also including them in the “family”, as the term these people use to describe their group and the bonds that have formed over time. (Family is bond closer and less close than friendship. You can be someone’s friend and their family, but you can also be a part of someone’s family without necessarily having developed a friendship with that person, due to the overall bonds and loyalty.)

Then we get the first meeting between Clarke and probably the season’s main antagonist, Bill Cadogan, who comes to another wrong conclusion when he thinks she recognized him because she has the Flame (and, he hopes, Callie’s memories), when it's actually from a video Jaha showed her.

Gabriel has another moment where he helps Clarke (as when he covered for her in 5x13) and silently communicates with her to let her know that the Disciples believe she still has the Flame, so she could keep up that pretense. These two work well as a team.

The bulk of the episode is the flashback framed as Bill telling a story to Clarke - though we don’t actually see the flashback from his POV, and he doesn’t even appear in many of the scenes. In fact, it is almost all from Callie’s POV, and some of it from Reese’s.

And we get back to Clarke and the Stone Room in the end, with the shocking “twist” of Clarke and the Nakara group seeing Octavia, Echo and Diyoza as Disciples. Shocking for them, not for us - we know they had no choice. 

Clarke saying “You killed my best friend!” has caused some pointless (but in this fandom, expected) drama, where some fans saw that as “confirmation” that Bellarke is and will remain completely ‘platonic” - even though that makes no sense. What did anyone expect her to call him? My boyfriend? He wasn’t that. The man I love? My soulmate? Someone expected her to say that to an enemy she’s never met before, in front of a bunch of her friends and other people?  Very unlikely, even if he hadn’t still been Echo’s boyfriend when he “died”. Some thought “Bellamy” or “him” would have been better, but what would that mean to Cadogan? He’s never met her and knows nothing about her, and she was trying to make it clear how much Bellamy meant to her. If anything, the fact that she’s singled him out as her best friend is a big progress from their usual habit of never defining their relationship to each other - except for Clarke including Bellamy in the collective designation of her “friends” or “family”.

I love the way the Chromatics cover of Neil Young’s “Into the Black” was used in the ending montage - so I made two gifsets about the use of the song for the Cadogan family scenes, and for the scene with Clarke:

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186143096307712/its-better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away-the

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186346138370048/its-better-to-burn-out-than-it-is-to-rust-the

Flashback

This is our second look at the world pre-apocalypse - after the brief scene of Josephine’s memory in 6x07, where we saw Josephine and her friend in the diner. But that scene took place several years before the apocalypse (depending on how much time was needed to get from Earth to Sanctum on Eligius 3, which did not have damaged engines as Eligius 4 did after the uprising), since Josephine and her family and the rest of Mission Team Alpha were already on Sanctum 7 years before the apocalypse. And Josephine and her friend were far less interested in the current events than Callie or August, so we only got a few outside references, including the magazine covers which showed that Diyoza’s capture was the main national news, and that Becca was already very high profile and on the cover of a technology/science magazine.

This, however, is the very day of the apocalypse. In the first scene - Callie Cadogan and her friend Lucy in Callie’s and her mother’s home, after participating in a protest as parts of environmentalist group with the familiar name Tree Crew -  we get lots of info about just how crappy this world was even before ALIE started a nuclear apocalypse, through various news items on TV (see this post) - and it is like 2020, only taken to the 10th degree:

natural disasters as a result of global warming (a deathly heath wave is mentioned), new diseases (Coronavirus “Russian Ankovirus” outbreak), economic inequality (one of the news is that measures aimed at poverty relief haven’t met with support in Congress), internment camps in USA, anti-government protests in the USA that end up with riot police beating up protestors, together with technological developments, such as the first orbiting hotel (I wonder if anyone was already using it - if they were, there would be more survivors in space, but it doesn’t seem this ever became a part of the Ark), or the first brain transplant. a medical development which begs some ethical questions (since I’m pretty sure that a person with a functioning brain is still alive... I cant think of several different scenarios, disturbing to various degrees). 

The world’s population has risen to 11 billion - I guess that’s why ALIE thought there were “too many people” (but her reasoning was as flawed as Thanos’ - instead of killing people, how about increasing or just better redistributing resources?). 

It’s also confirmed that a Wallace was the POTUS at the time, meaning that the President and the administration went to the underground bunker at Mount Weather to survive the apocalypse (after which, as we know, they did the North Korean thing where they nominally live in a republic but their leaders are really hereditary).

Callie calls the US regime at the time “fascistic”, echoing how Diyoza characterized it in season 5.

Callie,her friend Lucy and August were all members of the environmentalist group Tree Crew (who already had the same symbol we later see Trikru the clan using), apparently declared illegal or terrorist or something by the Wallace administration.

Callie and Grace Cadogan also used to be members of the Second Dawn cult, led by her father Bill, together with her brother Reese. August also used to be a member. Possibly as a child of some other members. 

Becca Franko - described as “tech tycoon” and “reclusive billionaire” - had not been seen in public for a year, since she went to her Polaris space station (to work on the Flame, as we know), a year after she created the first ALIE (and quickly realized ALIE had a fatal flaw). She also owned her own network.

One other piece of info about this world: they had holograms as a means of communication.

Something that was not in the news and not known to the public: it seems that quite a few people were “in the know” about the fact that a nuclear apocalypse may happen (whether they suspected it would be ALIE, or thought there would be a nuclear war) - and even had a code word for it, “Anaconda”. Bill Cadogan was one of the people who knew it. The POTUS and his administration obviously had enough time to evacuate. It’s mentioned that a lot of people immediately started trying to get to the bunkers. 

Cadogan and Becca did not personally know each other before the apocalypse, but he apparently had “friends” in many of the space stations. This explains how she knew where the real Second Dawn bunker was located. But whoever these “friends” were, they clearly did not pass on that knowledge to the future generations on the Ark, since even Jaha, who researched Second Dawn, was only able to find public info - articles, Cadogan’s biography - and didn’t even know where the decoy bunker was, let alone the real one.

The most important thing the backdoor pilot needs to do, of course, is introduce compelling, interesting characters. It did pretty well in that regard - Callie is a likable protagonist, and the fact that the antagonists - Bill and Reese Cadogan - are her father and brother, gives more emotional resonance by putting family relationships at the center. The new characters have some similarities to the main characters from The 100, but are at the same time different enough. 

The comparison between Callie and Clarke is the most obvious. Oddly enough, Jason tried to draw a difference between them by saying Callie is focused on saving “everyone” rather than “her people” - which makes me scratch my head, unless he means that Callie will always remain absolutely the same through the prequel show, since Clarke also started off by wanting to save everyone - and that was her driving motive for a long time, until the plot kept putting her in situations where she had to choose between her friends and family and strangers, where the latter would often be aggressors attacking her people. What strikes me as the biggest difference i- not just between Callie and Clarke but between all these prequel characters and the main characters of The 100 - is their background and the world they have grown up in. Clarke and Callie are both “princesses” - from the privileged background, but in Clarke’s case, it’s privileged relative to the majority of other people from the Ark, like the Blakes or Raven (which meant things like, nicer living quarters, opportunity to watch recordings of old soccer matches as entertainment, probably less worry about not getting the medicine you need), but in comparison with the way the most of the viewers live... definitely not. The world Clarke was born in is a post-apocalyptic world of scarce resources and constant fight for survival, and even her happy (by those standards)’ life in that world ends a year before the Pilot, when her father is executed and she has spent a year in solitary confinement, expecting to be executed herself - before she’ and 99 teenagers are sent to Earth as “expendable”. On the other hand, Callie, Reese, August, Tristan and others grew up in a world similar to our own. There are, of course, many people in our world who also have to fight for their own day-to-day survival every day, but the Cadogans are rich, and the rest of the Second Dawn members and their families are no doubt not far off. This is Callie’s house:

Some of these middle-class and upper middle-class kids are rebellious, idealistic and optimistic and worry about the fate of the world, like Callie, Lucy and August.  On the other hand, there’s Reese, whose driving motivation is to impress his father and gain his love. He’s a rich boy with daddy issues, but he’s also a victim of emotional abuse - maybe physical, too (if we take into account a cut scene  showing a training session where his father injures him, under the explanation of making him tougher or whatever). Callie and Reese are only the second sibling dynamic we see explored on the show (I’m not counting Emori and Otan, since the latter appeared very shortly), and this dynamic - a sibling rivalry between a rebellious girl who is her father’s favorite even while she opposes and rejects him, and her jealous brother who wants to impress his father - is completely different from the Blakes. (It reminds me a bit of Gamora amd Nebula - and I’ve just realized this is the second time in this review I’ve referenced MCU.)

Watching this family dynamic, I was reminded of another family that paralleled and contrasted the Griffins: the Lightbournes. Particularly when Grace called Bill a narcissist with psychopathic tendencies and he was entertained by that, In the flashback in 6x02. Simone called Russell a megalomaniac - but that was really said as a cute joke, as the Lightbournes were happily married, and Simone was just as bad as Russell, and even more ruthless than him. But in both cases, we have destructive rich white guy megalomaniacs who made themselves into gods, and want to bring back their dead daughters. Daughters are both extremely intelligent, brilliant and charismatic, but completely different in personality. (The mothers, while all very different, seem all to have been medical professionals - I’m not sure about Grace, but Callie does mention learning how to stitch a wound from her.) Callie sees that her father is an a-hole and rejects his values, and is an idealist and altruist who wants to do the right thing and save people (while Josephine was a selfish narcissist). Her mother Grace is somewhere in between, as she also left Second Dawn and doesn’t fully agree with Bill - but will often go along with him, and tries to keep peace between the other family members, and thinks their family needs to “set an example”. With the Griffins, we had an idealistic, altruistic father and a daughter with similar characteristics, who adored him and misses him after losing him, and a mother who was similarly concerned with helping others, and the conflicts between them were about how to go about these solutions. With the Lightbourne, we had the evil version of the Griffins, and the Cadogans have a more complicated dynamic. Callie is more comparable to Clarke, and Bill to Russell. 

But one aspect in which Bill Cadogan is much worse than Russell is - where Russell loved his family, maybe a bit too much, considering what he did to bring them back, Bill loves himself and his “savior” role more than anything. Maybe his love for Callie comes close - and I get the impression that one of the main reasons he loves her is because he respects her and she challenges him - but it is still not his main motive.  He is ready to punish his ex-wife for disobeying him by leaving her to die. Reese is an a-hole, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for him when he thinks for a moment that his father is worried for him (when Bill runs up to Reese, who's injured) but Bill immediately shows that all he cares about is getting the Flame, so he can get the final code for the Anomaly.

Another issue is, of course, that Callie, Reese and Grace are POC, but I don’t know if race - or sexuality, or gender - will ever be raised as an issue on the prequel show itself - or if the world pre-apocalypse and right after it is supposed to be as post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender as the current timeline of The 100 is. On The 100, for instance, Thelonius and Wells Jaha being black or Clarke being bisexual or a woman, were not issues that affected their status - only class issues existed; if the pre-apocalypse society was different, then the show could explore Callie, Reese and Grace being very privileged in terms of class and status in SD as Cadogan’s family, and lack of privilege in other respects.

I’m not sure I fully buy the way Callie easily goes along with her mother and leaves her best friend to die. It seems to go against the rest of her characterization. But maybe it shows that she still wasn’t a full-blown rebel at this point, in spite of participating in the protests against the government and in spite of rebelling against her father - maybe she still wasn’t able to really rebel against her mother, too. 

Interesting line - as Callie stitches Lucy's injuries, Lucy says: "I don't want to be scarred for life" - which may be foreshadowing for Callie being scarred and haunted by the fact she left Lucy to die? Unless Lucy turns out to somehow be alive - but worse for wear. Which would again haunt Callie, too.

I guess Callie’s failure to at least try harder is supposed to be what drives her to try and save other people, after she learns that there was still room and resources for almost 100 more people in the bunker - and when she sees August fighting tooth and nail to save his girlfriend, when she is barred from the bunker because she’s not “Level 12″. August is clearly a character the show is setting us up to like - these scenes are reminiscent of Bellamy fighting to open the door for his sister, and his name evokes the Blakes (Octavia was named after Octavian August’s sister)..

(Sidenote: Callie mentions a high suicide rate (20 suicides in the last 6 months, twice as many attempts) - and this is something that would realistically happen in such a dire situation. It’s a bit unrealistic that it apparently never happened with Wonkru.)

The SciFi plot points relevant to the overall plot make an appearance when we see the Anomaly Stone on Earth, which Bill found in Machu Picchu and brought to the bunker (and we get an explanation why he didn’t use it right after the apocalypse but spent two years in the bunker instead - he didn’t know how to activate it - not being able to find the last two symbols)... and when, two years later, Becca Franko arrives from Polaris in her pod, as we saw in 3x07, with Nightblood as the cure against radiation she’s about to offer everyone, and the Flame in her head.

A few words about how I feel about Becca. While she is here positioned in opposition to Bill Cadogan - who is definitely a megalomaniac a-hole and a villain - I can’t see her as a pure unambiguous and unproblematic good guy we should stan, as Callie stans her. For starters, Becca is also a megalomaniac - she calls her second AI “the Flame”, comparing herself to Prometheus! (But she makes me think of Dr Frankenstein, and the full title of Mary Shelley’s novel was Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.) She is, of course, as a genius scientist, a lot more capable and competent than Cadogan,but she also has a huge savior complex (only she is focused on the idea of her AI being the savior, rather than herself), and is also another big capitalist - a “tech tycoon” who owns her own space station and her own network (and was so powerful and politically relevant that the Chinese and the Russian space station were refusing to join the rest of the stations until the US station destroyed Polaris -  Becca was apparently seen as a rival strong enough to challenge the US government?). She worked for a big corporation (Eligius) which colonized other planets and used people - prisoners - as “expendable” work force that can be left to die if necessary. And knowing that she had Nightblood developed more than 7 years before the apocalypse, and that she was worried about what ALIE could do  - I wonder why she didn’t offer Nightblood as the solution for a potential apocalypse before it happened, rather than isolating herself on Polaris to work on the Flame. That was one questionable decision - another one was putting the people on Polaris in danger and letting them die, so she could get the Flame to Earth. I could be more understanding of this decision if I could embrace the idea of the Flame as more important than anything, the one thing needed to save the world, as Becca believed it was. But her idea of a sole savior who will help everyone after being enhanced through an AI is something I find pretty questionable and a bit disturbing in general. To be fair the Flame definitely did fulfill its role once and help a person with a good mind use it to save the world - Clarke in season 3. But that was one time, to save the world from ALIE. This, however, doesn’t really justify passing the Flame on and on and giving people political power with it - even without knowing how distorted her initial idea would become in the Grounder society, surely anyone can see the potential for tyranny there? And Becca was aware that 1) the Flame could also make a bad person become even worse and powerful (as it has with Sheidheda) and 2) someone like Bill could use it to destroy the world, according to Becca herself. Seems like a way too big a risk to take.

There are apparently 744 different Anomaly symbols, which means an “infinite” number of combinations, according to Becca (err, not really; it’s a really, really huge number, but it’s not “infinite”, which bugged me a little, since I wouldn’t expect a scientist, especially one who uses the Infinity symbol as her logo, to use the word “infinity” as an exaggeration).

Becca manages to activate the Stone, not because of any scientific knowledge she has, but because the Flame, apparently, gives her enhanced hearing - allowing her to hear the sounds of the Stone, where each sound stands for a symbol. (Dogs can apparently also hear those rather unpleasant sounds.) Everything in this episode makes it clear that it is the Flame itself that Bill needs to find the code, it's always been about that. (Him thinking Callie is in there is just a bonus - emotional connection.) The Flame had no one's memories/spirit in this episode before Becca died, and Becca made it clear to Callie that it’s all about the Flame itself. If the Disciples knew Clarke didn’t have the Flame anymore, they wouldn’t need Madi or Sheidheda - it’s not about the memories, not even Becca’s., it’s that piece of plastic that's buried on Sanctum, if it can still work. (Or maybe they need Picasso :p.)

The most mysterious moment and the biggest question of the episode is - where (when?) did Becca go and what did she see when she activated the Stone the second time and when she and Callie saw the white light coming from the Anomaly? This is different from the green light we see when the Anomaly takes you to other planets. The white light is probably connected to transcendence and/or the Judgment Day that Becca said she saw - which Cadogan, with his typical arrogance, believes he is ready for. but Becca believes no one is. 

"It wasn't to open the bridge to another world, it was to remake this one" - this line would make me think that our protagonists are meant to rebuild the Earth - but at this point, I find it hard to see how this could happen over in just 7 episodes, with how the current storylines are going. So maybe they’ll focus on rebuilding Sanctum, after all.

For opposing Bill’s plans, Becca is locked up for 5 days, tied to a pipe (geez!) and, guessing what’s about to happen, she explains the Flame to Callie and tells her to take it and never allow Cadogan to have it, as she believes he could destroy the world with it. (Another often asked question was how the Flame survived Becca’s burning - we learn that it can and that it’s programmed to save itself.)

Becca is burned by Second Dawn Disciples led by Reese Cadogan, presumably at his dad’s orders. Which maybe was supposed to evoke the popular idea of “burning a witch”, but the historical fact that burning at the stake was the traditional punishment for heresy fits even better. There’s been speculation that the memory we saw in 5x10 was his - but that’s incorrect: Madi experienced that memory, she felt being burned, screamed and yelled what Becca was yelling, and we saw it from her POV - the Second Dawn members that were around her and herself reflected in their helmets.

Another memory we saw from Madi, the one we saw her draw in 7x09 (and which I initially mistook seems to be a memory of Becca or other people going into the Anomaly) seems to actually be a memory of the moment when Becca first interacted with the Anomaly Stone and talked about it with the other people in the room - Bill, Grace, Callie and Reese. In other words, every one of the Flame memories from this period may be Becca’s - we have no evidence that would help us learn who else took the Flame after her death. It could be any of the characters who stayed on Earth - Bill is the only one who definitely has never gotten his hands on it.

Retcons and Easter Eggs

I’ve always thought that the world-building, especially when it comes to the Grounder society and culture, was the weakest part of the show. Jason obviously followed some of the common tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction when it comes to the portrayal of Grounders, but didn’t think things through - and at some point, probably realized and/or heard/read all the criticism of the show and thought: “This really doesn’t make any sense”,  came up with the Second Dawn backstory, and eventually came up with this expanded backstory, which gives many new explanations. Even though we still don’t have the answer to the biggest question: how a society made of bunch of modern people, survivors, could deteriorate into a tribal society with a medieval level of technological development and lack of knowledge about science and the past culture and history - over a few decades. I guess we need to see the prequel for that, but there are some ideas how it could have happened.  I liked most of the retcons in this episode, such as:

Trigedaslang was devised by Callie as a child. The idea of a new language developing naturally over less than 100 years never made sense. (The “it’s a pidgin” explanation never worked either - as Trig apparently developed without the influence of any other language or necessity to communicate with people who don’t speak English. It’s just distorted/changed English.) The only reasonable explanation was always that it was an artificial language - we just didn’t know when it was made.

Finally we get an explanation about the fact that Grounders originated from the Second Dawn survivors and were influenced by their mottoes (”From the ashes, we will rise”), but at the same time, worship Becca as “Pramheda” and make their leaders take the Flame - in spite of the fact that Cadogan and Becca were rivals and that the latter was burned by the Second Dawn members. 

The fact that two factions already exist - Callie’s (adores Becca, wants to save as many people as possible by using Nightblood, clearly trusts in science) and Reese’s (Second Dawn true believer, burned Becca, needs the Flame for other purposes) may start to explain how things started going wrong and the society fractured.

Speaking of which, the Conclave seems to have originated from Reese Cadogan’s obsession with the fights his father made him have with him and his sister, and his dumbass idea of using a duel to determine who gets the Flame. This is a better explanation than “it is after an apocalypse, so they just started having death tournaments for reasons”. Callie, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic and doesn’t seem to care much about tournaments as a way to prove oneself - because she doesn’t need to, so she does the Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford thing and just pulls the gun and shoots him in the shoulder. One of my favorite moments in this episode. 

“Tree Crew” gets the award as the least expected and funniest new piece of info/retcon, though that begs the question of how the other clans got their names. I’ve joked that Ice Nation were a group of ice hockey fans... but for all I know, maybe that’s true! :D Or maybe the “Trikru” name was later misinterpreted as something to do with living in the woods, so the other clans started having names like “Boat people” or “Shallow Valley people”.

August made up the term Nightblood.  

"You must choose wisely" comes from something Becca said to Callie, about choosing the person to give the Flame to. Too bad that later Commanders didn’t know it meant “find the most qualified person” and instead got the weird idea that it meant making a bunch of kids fight each other and that one of them winning somehow means the dead Commander’s spirit “chose” their successor.

One thing that definitely makes a lot more sense now is the Grounder’s bizarre fashion sense, I can easily see a bunch of 21st century upper middle class/rich teenagers thinking it would be super cool to wear warpaint, tattoos and dreadlocks (even if you’re as white as the original Sheidheda), and some later Commander going: “I want to wear a crown! No, you know what would be cool? That thing Indian women wear on their foreheads? You know that thing? I could wear that!” 

Easter Egg: Callie was reading Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” at home just before the news of the nuclear apocalypse came - the same book that Niylah gave as a gift to Octavia not long after they went into the bunker (5x02). And maybe it is literally the same book - they sure weren’t printing any new books and someone had to bring that book initially to the Second Dawn bunker during the first apocalypse. In 5x02, it was symbolic of Octavia’s transformation into Blodreina. Here, it may be symbolic of Callie becoming a leader, or the transformation of the entire society.

But some other retcons don’t work well:

The Flame’s abilities have been retconed so many times, but this is the first time we learn that it enhances the Commanders’ senses - which is a big plot point, as it allowed Becca to hear the sounds of the Stone. We have never heard about that before or seen any indication that Lexa or S5/6 Madi had any enhanced sight or Matt Murdock-like super-hearing. 

So why was Becca called the Commander aka Heda? I don’t mean the fact that she was never one - Callie could have decided to call her the first Commander as an homage. But why that term? The flashback in 3x07 made it look like it was because Becca was wearing a suit with the word “Commander” (because she took the actual Commander’s suit before she left Polaris) - but since everyone knew who she was, why would that make them start calling her Commander?

Prequel speculation

There’s a lot of reasons why I’d like to see the prequel picked up. Firstly, because Callie is a likable and charismatic protagonist. Reese could be an interesting antagonist as he is her brother - and while he has been a grade A a-hole so far, there’s room there for character development, especially with his relationship with his sister, backstory of abuse by their father and the probability that he’ll understand at some point that he won’t be able to get the Flame to his dad even if he gets it. There’s also the fact that their mother will need saving at the start of the new show (if it gets picked up), and certainly a lot of other possibilities for family drama. And we’d probably also see Callie change and be faced with difficult and morally ambiguous situations that test her, much as we’ve seen with Clarke over the seasons.

Several other things mentioned by Jason in his interviews sound quite exciting:

Lost-style flashbacks to the characters’ lives pre-apocalypse: I’d love this. It would present a contrast before and after the apocalypse, and flesh out characters, and let us learn more about things like, what the Battle of San Francisco was, which wars was Diyoza in, more about Diyoza’s role as a freedom fighter/terrorist... can we get more Diyoza backstory?

the possibility of seeing the origins of the Ark and ancestors of our main characters like Clarke, Bellamy and Octavia (and we know we would see the ancestors of these characters, Jason mentioned that - the guy clearly does know what the fandom likes and wants), immediately doubled my interest. I just hope there’s a good idea how to do that without 1) the two stories looking completely disconnected (it seems this won’t be the case as Jason mentioned that Callie’s people will have to go to space to make more Nightblood and this will allow crossovers) and 2) with a good explanation how the people on the Ark, 97 years later, did not know about the survivors on the ground, about the Earth being survivable, or about the Nightblood, which had been used by Eligius years before. The line  "Dad had friends on more than one space station. They already know we're here" also begs for an explanation.

on the ground, we’ll see Callie and co. looking for more survivors (after all, there were more bunkers and other shelters) and offering them Nightblood as a “cure” - which could lead to a lot of interesting situations (and potentially pretty current commentary, if there are people who refuse it)... On the other hand, this could also lead to some more moral dilemmas when they run out of the Nightblood shots (they have 2,000 at the moment, and again, Jason has indicated that they will run out of NB and will have to create more).

Some of the big questions include - who becomes the actual first Commander? How does the society develop from there? When and how is the Anomaly Stone deactivated on Earth, and where is it now? How does Becca’s knowledge eventually get lost? We’ve heard it’s because the data got corrupted/deteriorated over time, but it’s a little too convenient that even Madi still had Becca’s memories, but the scientific and technological all other knowledge was gone during the following 95 years.

I have some ideas how it could go. A lot of people (including, obviously, Bill himself in-universe) wonder if Callie became a Commander and would like to see her be the first Commander. But Callie is the first Flamekeeper, and I don’t see her going “I’m the best and most qualified person, I should have it”. This doesn’t preclude the possibility - she may finally take it for similar reasons Clarke did in season 3, because she has to in order to do something important and there are no other candidates around. But that would be too optimistic an option. Maybe Reese manages to get his hands on the Flame, but Callie or August or someone from her faction manages to disconnect the Stone so he wouldn’t be able to get it to Bill? Or maybe someone else - say, Tristan, who so far can be summed up as “that while guy a-hole who hangs out with Reese” - managed to get his hands on it and then make himself Commander? If people like Tristan or Reese become the Commander, that would work better in terms of explaining how things went so wrong with the Grounder society.

There have been speculations if these characters are ancestors of this or that character we know. Maybe Tristan is an ancestor of this Tristan from season 1 (the guy who was sent to ‘slaughter’ the 100 and was killed by Kane in 2x01)? People are often named after their grandparents, sometimes even after their parents, or celebrated ancestors - names can get passed on like that, and Tristan isn’t exactly the most common name. Or, if Tristan manages to become a Commander - that would make it a popular name.

In any case, the prequel needs to provide a convincing explanation how the society of these survivors and their descendants went from what we see in this episode to the Grounder society we know. But this is my big concern about the prequel - and it’s the problem that many prequels have: however they get there, we know how things turn out; we know it all somehow goes wrong, and that not only will the antagonist fail in their initial goal (getting the Flame to Bill), but the protagonist, Callie, will ultimately fail in her attempts to create a better society. Instead, the Grounder society will descend into tribalism, worship of violence, and constant wars between a bunch of clans, the Flame won’t be given to the person chosen as most qualified but will be fought over by a bunch of children selected on the basis of “special blood” (as Nightblood becomes rarer over time) and forced to kill each other, and most of Becca’s knowledge will be forgotten, as Grounders become technologically underdeveloped and unable to really defend themselves from the Mountain Men, who will learn about them in a few decades and start using them as blood supply.

On the other hand, knowing that the protagonists will fail and that everything will go wrong is often the case with prequels (e.g. regardless of their quality, Star Wars prequels were certainly watched by many people), or, for that matter, with some period dramas (e.g. Babylon Berlin, which I love - set in the Weimar Republic, which means that we know all the time while watching the show that things will go horribly wrong on the level of the society). Sometimes that sense of doom doesn’t turn me off as viewer and actually makes the story more compelling in a way. But that would certainly be a difference from The 100 - no matter how dark, we can still hope things will turn out well and a good solution will be found. Or maybe everything will go even worse. We don’t know how things turn out with the humanity in general. In this prequel, we would know.

Body count for this episode: in the present day, no one. in the flashbacks... over 10 billion people.

Rating: 9/10

[365days365movies]

April 4, 2021: The Great Dictator (1940) (Part One)

So, Charlie’s been having an...interesting few years.

His marriage to Lita Grey has resulted in children, and a BITTER-AS-FUCK divorce, with Grey alleging that Chaplin had subjected her to “sexual perversions”. Other than the whole “she was 16, he was 35″ thing, which is...bad, obviously, Chalin was also a fan of orgies, fondling, and...pies. Yeah. Pies. Warning here, the next paragraph is...uncomfortable.

Dude would allegedly audition actresses having then sit on a couch, strip naked for him, and then he’d grope them on said couch. Then, he’d have them stand up against the wall, and he’d...well, he’d throw pies at them. Yeah. Um. He, uh...yeah.

I know, Matt Mercer, I know. And Hollywood agreed, because they didn’t really see to care? This info, amongst other stuff that I can’t seem to find out more about, was enough for grounds of divorce against Chaplin, and Lita Grey was gone from his life, taking the kids and a lot of money with her.

Film fame continued for Chaplin, though, and his 1927 film The Circus was a huge hit. But now, the “talkie” had been invented, and Chaplin HATED it. He believed that it was an unartistic addition to the medium, eliminating the need for his pantomiming. And, uh...he was technically right about that last point. He chose not to give the Tramp a voice, and made the film City Lights, which came out in 1931, and is considered one of his greatest films.

But the writing was VERY MUCH on the wall at this point, and silent films were a thing of the past. Still, City Lights did really well, and was Chaplin’s favorite of his films. Then, in 1932, he met Pauline Goddard (who was 21), and she would eventually become his third wife. He made his next major (still silent) film, Modern Times, in 1936, and it didn’t do quite as well. That’s because Chaplin had started to become more politically conscious, and used the film to make commentary on the industrialization of the USA, which he disliked. And that, interestingly enough, was a sign of the end for Chaplin.

Still, the film was good, as was still popular then and now. But in the years to follow, something else would rear its head and plague Chaplin...something with the same mustache.

Hooooooo boy. Yeah, Hitler was rising to power in the 1930s, and Chaplin fuckin’ HAAAAAAAATED HIM. At the time, remember, Hitler’s fascist policies definitely weren’t universally derided, and he didn’t show his true monstrous colors in the early 1930s. But, Chapin still understandably disagreed with his politics and character, which was interesting for a few reasons. The two were bourn FOUR DAYS APART FROM EACH OTHER, had similar rags-to-riches origins, and both used that same toothbrush mustache. But Hitler was a feverish militaristic nationalist dictator, and Chaplin was...not that.

However, this would inspire Chaplin’s next ambitious film, considered to be one of his greatest films ever, and his first ever talkie film. And one that would age interestingly, considering what would come afterwards. In 1939, Chaplin began making this film, the United Kingdom declared war of Germany, and Europe became embroiled in the Second World War. And then, in 1940, Chaplin’s controversial (at the time) film, The Great Dictator was released. And...oh BOY, this will be Chaplin’s high and low point, lemme tell you. 

But enough history (for now)! Let’s jump into this movie; I’m very excited! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap (1/2)

WAR!!! A world war has ended, and another is about to begun! The small (fictional) country of Tomainia is preparing for war by testing their gigantic anti-aircraft gun, Big Bertha. Helping with these efforts is a Jewish Barber (Charlie Chaplin), and YES. THAT IS HOW HE’S CREDITED. After some comedic hijinks with the gun, and with one of the large shells, enemy aircraft is sighted ahead.

The Barber gets aboard another anti-aircraft gun (which he has no control over), but soon falls off of it. He’s directed into the trenches with the others, and is given a grenade, which he has no idea to use, and Chaplin shows that his physical comedy is as funny WITH sound as it was without. 

On the battlefield, the Barber encounters and rescues a downed pilot, Commander Schultz, and helps him back t his plane as the enemy approaches. They get on the plane together, only for the pilot to repeatedly faint in mid-air. In the process, they begin to fly upside down for a period, and once again, Chaplin shows that he’s just as funny speaking as he was silent.

Despite their attempts, the pair crash as the plane runs out of fuel, but both men survive. The country has lost the war at this point, and the Barber is now unconscious and brought to a hospital. 20 years pass, and he’s finally able to leave, unaware of how his country of Tomainia has changed in the process. Now, they are ruled by a ruthless dictator, Adenoid Hynkel (Charlie Chaplin).

And i case you were wondering what the phrase “on the nose” actually meant...GODDAMN, this is an on-the-nose parody of Hitler. I mean, it’s very funny, of course, but HOT DAMN is it not even a little bit subtle. Also, living in a post-Trump world...Jesus, this is eerie. Anyway, the other reason this film is great is the fake German. And yeah, honestly, this is a very funny scene, even with the dark undertone, and the knowledge of what would be to come in World War II under Hitler’s regime.

Alongside his primary aides, Minister of War Herring (Billy Gilbert) and Secretary of the Interior (and Minister of Propaganda) Garbitsch (Henry Daniell), he makes a speech that’s clearly a parody of Hitler’s speeches. He also namedrops the Jewish population in the speech, which immediately makes them a target by his stormtroopers. This is noted by Mr. Jaeckel (Marice Mossovich), an elderly Jewish man who lives in the ghettos of Tomainia.

Mr. Jaeckel bemoans the fate of the country under Hynkel’s rule, and also notes the fate of those like his tenant, a young woman named Hannah (Paulette Goddard) who lost her parents since the last war. He also mentions the Barber, who writes every few weeks to say that he’ll be back soon. Just then, the Barber actually DOES wake up, completely unaware of what’s occurred in the last few years.

He heads to his barber shop, which has been boarded up, with the word “Jew” painted on the boards. Did I mention that this is a very on-the-nose satire? Anyway, he attempts to reopen his shop, only to be savaged by stormtroopers following Hynkel’s orders to control the ghetto. He fights back against two of them, and is saved by Hannah, who had attempted to stand up to them earlier with little success. They bond over this, and become friends.

But Hynkel’s savaged even more by a crowd of stormtroopers next, and they grab him with the intent to hang him from a lamppost, only for him to be saved by Commander Schultz, the pilot from the plane! He guarantees that he will never be attacked again, and that courtesy extends to his friends. He barber reopens his shop, and begins to fall in love with Hannah in the process.

Back to Hynkel. He’s enduring Herring’s introductions of military technology, including a bulletproof uniform and a parachute hat. Neither work, to hilarious effect. He then speaks to Garbitsch about the financial state of affairs in the country, which aren’t great. Gabitsch sugggests speaking with a banker, Epstein, to finance the money.

Garbitsch, by the way, is a massive Grima Wormtongue figure, and basically just fuels his megaloaniacal fervor, convincing him to extend his desires to the world at large, not just limit them to their small country of Tomainia. Soon, well...soon, the world will be in the hands of Emperor Hynkel; an Aryan world in the hands of a brunette dictator. And that starts YET ANOTHER of the most iconic scenes of the film. But only one of the most iconic.

It’s darkly beautiful, in and out of context. And eventually, the inflatable globe pops, which makes this even more poignant. Meanwhile, in the ghetto, the Barber is doing his best Bugs Bunny impression and cutting hair to a classical music piece (Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5). Bugs did the whole Barber of Seville routine WAY after this in Rabbit of Seville in 1950. One of the best Bugs Bunny shorts ever.

Back in the palace, bad news arrives. Epstein, the banker, has refused to give Hynkel any money, as he’s Jewish, and is protesting against the persecution of his people in the ghetto. Hynkel immediately decides to double down on his attacks on the ghettos, which he calls on Schultz to perform. But he refuses, noting that the persecution of an innocent people will only serve to demoralize the entire country. Hynkel sends Schultz to a concentration camp as a result, and proceeds on his path.

In the ghetto, people have been doing OK, as the stormtroopers had been lightening up their attacks on the ghetto, to attempt to please Epstein to get more money. But no more of that. As Hannah and the Barber are about to go on a date, loudspeakers broadcast an angry speech from Hynkel, in fake German. And while it’s never translated...the reactions from the populus, Hannah, and the Barber, aren’t difficult to read. Hynkel just waged war on the ghetto and the Jews.

Well, will you look at that; a halfway point! Let’s stop here, then head into a Part Two. See you there!