#tianchen mysterious friend

[danhjngs]

i legit just wanted to know if this guy had been introduced properly, so i was looking to see if maybe i just missed his name in the anime, but... i ended up finding this thread and just- yeah, same. i thought about scaramouche when i read 'hat guy in the background'

[daily-linkclick]

What is the theory abt lg being from an alternate timeline? I’ve been seeing a lot of ppl talk about it and idrk where it comes from, and what are your thoughts??(have a nice day!!)

this ask magically appeared in my inbox just today but apparently it was sent weeks ago, holy shit! thank you for waiting op LMFAO

anyways, it's a theory that's been around before season 2, iirc! mostly because we had little to nothing lore wise around their powers, and its just fun thinking about while we waited for anything canon. there were a few things that did hint at lu guang being from an alternative timeline, being that we don't know his age and backstory, and his weird hair color (not a lot of people sporting full white hair, or any unnatural hair color in link click, at least)

those aspects don't necessarily point to him being from an alternate timeline, but they also could be hints towards it! but there's new content that makes this theory potentially canon! it's from this music video played during Bilibili World. it features an alternate mv for vortex, which is interesting because we see lu guang falling first:

in it, there are several shots with cheng xiaoshi wearing completely different outfits, some injured and one seemingly dead? Plus a frame that shows four cxs's merging into one. maybe it's just ooo pretty visuals, but there's a looot of imagery that implies different timelines (shard fractals, reflections, mirror images, etc)

There's also this shot, with lu guang wearing an alternate fit we've never seen - and he's wearing more black in this one?? his s1 fit also featured a dark shirt and pants but his flannel color was more dominant. this leads me to believe that this is lu guang but less experienced (another timeline).

maybe all of this is just non-canon for marketing, they did market lu guang as dead for all of pre-s2 lol, but i like to believe this is them teasing lu guang's past! even if he's the main character, he's someone who's past we know the least of. i'd argue we find out more about side characters than we do about him actually - which makes me (and a lot of other people) think he's from an alternate timeline!

that's the gist; i'll put my own thoughts under a read more so this post won't be insanely long

my own thoughts on the theory is that i think lu guang is from multiple alternate timelines. the frame with multiple cheng xiaoshis, and the one where four merge into one makes me believe lu guang met cheng xiaoshi in his timeline, but cxs either died or had a miserable life. he kept going into different timelines in an attempt to save him / be in a timeline where cheng xiaoshi is actually safe and happy, and finally got to the timeline we see in the show.

though that part requires him having more than just the power to look into what happens in a photo. but there's been proof of lu guang hiding what he knows / has with cheng xiaoshi (re: him hiding the fact emma died, and him hiding the photo that liu tianchen gave him). he's also an incredibly private person. if he hides from his closest friend, who's to say he isn't hiding something from the audience either?

we also don't know how they got their powers. if lu guang originally had the power to dive back into pictures, then it would make sense on how he's able to go to different timelines. also, studio lan clearly emphasizes the fact that the pair are two halves of a whole, and the show is more interesting because of that dynamic.

as an extra: lu guang's doting nature makes a lot of sense too, he just doesn't want to see cheng xiaoshi miserable again! it's a pretty known fact that cheng xiaoshi didn't have any friends (besides qiao ling) before lu guang, and his life insantly got better when they finally were a trio (interesting that it was mainly because of a mysterious person that popped out of nowhere). here's a fun twitter thread by t3mp0s about the trio's dynamic

lastly, i just think it'd be fun if at one point cheng xiaoshi slowly discovers what lu guang did in his past for him. and how hypocritical lu guang would sound after saying "past or future, leave them be" if he never applied that to cheng xiaoshi! either way i still want to see a cxs saving lg arc man... they keep teasing it EVEN IN THE MV

that's it!! i know link click's best quality is the trio going through other people's stories, but i think they're preparing us for the biggest one: lu guang's.

[muninnhuginn]

Season Two Link Click Thoughts

I've put this below a cut because it gets long, but these are just my assorted thoughts on s2 in general. It's going to be waaaay more opinions than my usual speculationy kinda deal and contains spoilers for all of season two.

I hit character limit on my bullet points so I think that's my cue to leave it at that even though I have more thoughts honestly. I didn't even know that was a thing.

Pacing. I think pretty much everyone can agree that the pacing was... dubious. This series could have easily been shorter or had different meaningful content rather than repeated footage reuse for flashing back and overly extended fight scenes (episode 7? I think it was, was particularly egregious about this). I get there's presumably a fanbase for fight scenes and I won't contest that they were really nicely choreographed, but sometimes it felt like you'd take a break from actual events to spend ten minutes on a fight scene that didn't really... further anything else? I do enjoy recontextualisation and I recognise that that does require reusing some aspects of footage rather than entirely reanimating scenes when there's no need to, but at the same time, this is a series that is lowkey set up for binging. Flashing back so frequently when it's a series specifically engineered to make you binge it (hi constant cliffhangers) seems an odd recipe. I almost wonder how much of this was for production reasons, though maybe I'm overreaching here.

Linked to this is the overuse of cliffhangers. Season 1 had some cliffhangers, yeah, but it at least had breaks between arcs and more importantly, didn't repeatedly move the chronology of scenes purely to service an artificial cliffhanger.

Art and animation was mostly very nice. There were two episodes that did suffer art-wise (episodes three and eleven) with various off-model faces, but for the most part it was all pretty solid and I don't have any complaints about the animation. My favourite part of the art is still the almost rainbow outlines you get around objects. It made scenes like the Lu Guang speedboat one look gorgeous with the lights and colour on the water.

Mystery. Okay, so for all my qualms I genuinely think the mystery aspects were almost perfect. There were a couple of places I feel they somewhat 'cheated' but otherwise (the twin with the photo in the hospital doorway looking like tianxi in a close up shot. and then cxs/wj acting possessed in ep 6 but having their eyes appear normal at first and only having them changed the next episode. I'm fine with false negatives on the eyes when the audience isn't yet cued in on a possession, but in this case it looked like they were possessed up until the eyes showed otherwise)? Everything made total sense and tied together by the end. Even going into episode 12 we had a couple of gaps in scenes in Chen Bin and Liu Lan's death that I think it would be incredibly easy to overlook considering we "knew" what happened in them, but the hints were there in both cases that there was more to it and those hints paid off. Even Liu Xiao's identity worked just fine without the hat guy visual. All the hints were there about a younger favoured brother of the Liu family, Li Tianchen's new friend being a rich "Master Liu", him being abroad studying but stated as "soon to return" (which he then did). There are so many threads and they all tied together by the end such that even if I didn't always agree with the delivery, I do think this season is worthy of being called an excellent mystery.

Characters. So, okay, we introduced a whole host of new characters this time which was a choice. This sorta worked sorta didn't. The arcs of Qian Jin and the twins all tied together thematically and episode 9 was pretty explicit drawing the parallels together. However, we had characters like Qiao Ling not getting much new material at all despite a hopeful start with her scene about "wanting to be trusted".

Unfortunate implications (my head automatically goes to TV Tropes with this :V). Mainly surrounding the use of female characters as devices to propel the male characters. LTX is the most obvious instance (I shouldn't have to explain why), but Wang Juan was also treated as though she would be important and then largely shunted off to apply more pressure to XL; Liu Min's mum taking the hysterical role. On their own they may not be too bad, but I guess it's that it's combined with the stuff around Emma from s1 where the big 'twist' in the finale is killing her once there's a hope spot, and also added to how the mother in the Doudou episode is the one who's reverted to a younger age, whilst the dad is exhausted. Just a whole load of stuff that individually on their own don't necessarily mean anything but when put together forms a pattern I'm not super comfortable with? I do get the impression that show is well-meaning in terms of this stuff (QJ and LF especially point that way) but feel like it still fell down in a few places and could have done better with these aspects.

Lu Guang going back to save CXS confirmed. Admittedly I am incredibly biased to this type of plot, but I'm so glad they confirmed it. We haven't been given many specifics around when he went back from/to and I imagine we'll get more next season so I'm holding off judgement on all that for now (the paradox implications have me a bit worried but until we know more about the mechanics I can't judge). That said, I really liked the scene where it was comfirmed (the darkened shot of Lu Guang covered in blood my beloved) and am thinking that Qiao Ling having knowledge of Lu Guang's memories will mean she has to play a bigger role next season. There's no point in giving her that knowledge if it won't go somewhere. Relatedly, it seems like dying does pass on the powers and that's how we got LTX->QL and CXS->LG. It doesn't seem like Qiao Ling fully realises though if she has got Tianxi's powers (and it's been two months), but I suppose it's not exactly something you *would* realise if you didn't know what you were looking for or had previous experience with these powers.

I do genuinely think that this season was a case where the new characters were written around the existing ideas of the story and the themes which means they're interesting to analyse but I didn't feel like moments hit anywhere near as emotionally as season one? I think the parts where season two was able to approach season one's level of emotion were mainly around the twin's backstories. Meanwhile Qian Jin and Xiao Li's whole deal is interesting in theory but in practice I didn't have much reason to care for Xiao Li. Suffering to make the audience empathise only really "works" if there's more beyond that.

Lu Guang-Li Tianchen parallels make me sad. There are plenty of similarities in how they treat CXS and LTX respectively but I keep thinking of how their final choice in s2 is to either commit to preserving the past (Lu Guang with CXS) or to let go of the past (Li Tianchen with LTX and his mum). And how typically, clinging to the past is seen as a bad thing and letting it go a good thing. But in this case it's almost the opposite? I'm not saying it's healthy for Lu Guang to deny Cheng Xiaoshi's death, but I do think the story will eventually align behind him on this choice. And I think that Li Tianchen leaving the past behind in this case is more about trying to forget his trauma and in the process just digging himself deeper, deliberately choosing to forget the very person he fought to protect.

General s3 spec (keeping it brief). Li Tianchen confirmed that he obtained Liu Min's phone for Liu Xiao and it has info on it Liu Xiao needs but we still don't know what's on it beyond Qian Jin's comment about "family secrets". In terms of Liu Xiao himself, he didn't get much airtime but what he did have he made count. He mentioned about wanting to make "uncertainties into certainties" and the idea that there are "parallel lines". This pretty much sets him up against Lu Guang in terms of aim and seems to suggest our understanding of time travel mechanics is about to get a serious update next season. Also, the new "paranormal section of the police force" seems incredibly pointed. I don't really want it to get a huge focus honestly but with the way the scope has widened each season I don't think I'll get my wish.

[friedwizardwhispers]

The Red eye mystery

Well we have answers to some of our questions at least.

Here is what we know so far.

We know for sure who Red Eye is. Li Tianchen could still be just the possessed one but that's less likely and that makes things a bit less confusing. We know that Qian Jin made them disappear and probably took care of them (probably) and he really hates people who betrays him. We also know that Li Tianchen wants to kill Lu Guang really badly but can't.

We have confirmation that both he and Qian Jin want to change the past (for obvious reasons) .

We know that Li Tianxi is not with them and they are looking for her.

We know Li Tianchen dressed as his sister to trick them and to make the police do the work of actually finding her for him.

We also know that Li Tianchen's power doesn't work through photo

From that we can probably infer several things:

Li Tianxi probably didn't agree with the things they were doing and probably ran away, she was probably the one who gave them the picture to go back in time. "Save my good brother" written in childish letters was probably hers and she is also probably the one who has Liu Min's phone, right ?

Considering the thing about betrayal, we can assume someone (Li Tianxi ?) seems to have betrayed them ? I'm guessing they considers leaving a betrayal (well Qian Jin does, Li Tianchen didn't really answer, I'm gonna assume he doesn't actually want his sister dead).

Here what we still don't know:

We don't know who killed theirs mother and how Li Tianchen's childhood friend with no face is related to all of it (except that he and CXS!Li Tianxi inspired Li Tianchen to act on the day of the murders).

We don't know what was the interactions between him and Qian Jin right after the murders and what convinced both of them to work together.

We don't really know how his power works actually, We thought it was pictures but it seems to be touch ? maybe ? but how did he manage to possess Emma ?

We don't know why Qian Jin seems to be so resentful of the police and just is okay with killing them and framing them for things they didn't do.

We also don't know if he is the only one with power in the family.

Here are some random theories:

The unknown kid is probably hat guy who is probably also Liu Min's younger brother (which... that checks out, siblings seems to be a major theme of the season). Maybe he is the one who has powers through photos like Cheng Xiaoshi. Maybe theirs power combined allowed Li Tianchen to possess Emma through photos/the cameras on the bridge.

I rewatched episode 6 and we know at some point the mother seems to be posessed but what was interesting was when she finally defends herself, she kicks that fucker in the ankle, it felt to me like a Cheng Xiaoshi move so I'm guessing we are getting back there, I think with him at some point defending himself.

Maybe the reason why Qian Jin is so cavalier about killing his ex-colleagues/friends to himself:is this " it doesn't matter if we kill them now, everything will be changed back anyway and they will be alive again".

That or he thinks they betrayed him because we are missing a peace of the puzzle in his wife's investigation. it feels like we don't know a lot about it.

In conclusion:

This episode just gave us so much more questions but I do think we have a clearer image of team red eye (even if we are probably still missing one player, looking at you, Hat guy but considering the promo of next week,we'll have more answers there 👀).

We have a confirmed motive and the confusion as to who was red eye is somewhat taken away.

[teruki-inoue21]

Possible Link Click III plot line??

This, my friends, is the latest poster for Neo Aurora (which I believe is some type of upcoming Link Click concert?). Take a look

Who’s there at the center, u ask? Why, it’s none other than the Hat Guy aka Liu Xiao aka THE GUY WE’VE BEEN WAITING OUR ASSES OFF FOR YET IS NOWHERE THE F**K TO BE SEEN!

So yeah, I don’t know about y’all, but I think I know how Link Click II is gonna end. In the last episode (well, only god and the staff behind know what it’ll be ‘bout), just before the cliffhanger, there’s going to be a brain-damaging, coma-inducing, heart-attack-starting badass entry of this guy, Liu Xiao, who’s probably been manipulating EVERYTHING behind the scenes from the very start and maybe also has some ability we know nothing of….

Ok, now that I’m done ranting, let’s get the theories addressed. Here, we see Tianxi at the leftmost, Qiao Ling at the rightmost, followed by Tianchen right beside Tianxi at the left, and Cheng Xiaoshi beside Qiao Ling at the right. Center stage goes to Lu Guang n Liu Xiao.

Hmmm… Y’all see where I’m going with this????

Well then, let’s draw some parallels.

Let’s start with our main trio. Qiao Ling is the sister counterpart, whilst Cheng Xiaoshi is the main character, impulsive and emotional, yet with a strong sense (in his case this sense is of justice), whilst Lu Guang is the best friend of the main character, who one day appeared out of nowhere, and who we know nothing about, and who’s quite mature and calm-n-collected.

Now, about the pink twins and Liu Xiao. Tianxi = sister. Tianchen = impulsive guy with a strong sense too (which for him is the ideal of becoming a hunter, a “murderer” if u will), and finally Liu Xiao = the friend of the impulsive boi, who, just like Lu Guang, appeared out of nowhere in Tianchen’s life, who we know 0% of, AND whatever scenes we’ve seen of him, we can clearly deduce that he’s ALSO level-headed n a mature guy (quite a bit much for his age, and that’s what makes him all the more eerie and enticing).

[NOTE: Thanks a lot to @mrbokchoi at myanimelist.net for bringing up this wonderful and feral-making theory.]

So, I think we can safely deduce what could be the plot for Link Click III (and trust me ppl, it WILL happen). All the while we were watching II and we’re waiting for the CXS vs LTch showdown, it was never about THEIR showdown. It was always about the face off between the two guys in the shadows, the two mysterious variables who were working on their own agenda, never revealing what they were truly there to do. Yes, it was always about Lu Guang and Liu Xiao. Just as Link Click II has been completely from CXS’s POV (and a little bit of QL and Xiao Li’s perspective), I believe Link Click III will definitely be Lu Guang’s perspective, how he’s been traveling between and thru various timelines to save CXS from dying, a bit of focus on the alternate timelines, and finally, his showdown with the ominous Liu Xiao, the man behind EVERYTHING (?).

With that being said, I’m gonna drop one last bomb to make y’all go truly feral. If what I think is true, then in order to shift the POV from CXS to LG, this means that Link Click II will have a……….(wait for it)…………….(dramatic silence)……………………… BAD ending!!!! CXS will be gravely hurt, if not totally dead, and LG will be repeating the cycle, once more, as his pain grows……

Well then, I hope all of you who’ve been reading thus far, have a great wait for the final two EPS of Link Click II and for the third season.

(And a happy journey to becoming feral too, me lads!! 😈😈😈)