ayo new theory just dropped and bad news! the implications are cosmically horrifying
in the bulletin from time baby in book of bill, he says bill is a “danger to narrativity”, and that he risks the fourth wall. this kept bothering me. why reference the fourth wall here? why have time baby reference it? yeah the heaven page and shit is a bit meta, but thats just how bill talks, right? Well i was a fool
when you put “seven eyes” into the lost files site, this warning pops up from the oracle question mark? from journal three:
the therapese at the bottom translates to “set coords for dimension: r34lity”.
and putting r34lity into the website gives us this image:
the text below it reads they found a new home. those are “real” fucking images. the henchmaniacs are in our “reality”. the cryptids page might not have been a goof goof bit- they were “real”. (“real” meaning our reality in the book of bill sense of it but still our reality. is that tracking.)
none of the rest of the cast actually references us as a specific audience, or the fandom, or acts like we know them at all. the cast addresses everything they write to a mystery “reader” who needs to be saved from the book’s influence.
meanwhile, in the book of bill:
because bill’s not talking to a mystery “reader” who’s reading this book.
bill fucking sees us.
bill sees reality. REALITY reality. like this earth the one with alex hirsch and gravity falls the show and tiktok and shit. book of bill is a book in our reality for us the reader. (ie. there’s a reference to “they both reached for the gun” if you put gun in the website, which would only make sense if bill was sentient in this “reality” right now.) and someone is trying to get here to hide from him. maybe they’re already here.
i have suddenly become obsessed with a theme that HoO established but never proceeded to extrapolate on, which is:
You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.
You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.
You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.
You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.
You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.
You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.
You are Frank Zhang, and you are a shapeshifter. Inhabiting your own body feels strange and clumsy when you could be literally anything at any time. You are anything and everything and live your life with the simple certainty of knowing exactly how you will die.
One small detail that I really like about the whole 'rest' scene is that Daniel pushes back, but his refusals are so small -- nothing eloquent or deep, exactly, just phrases like 'I have a thing in the city'
And I kind of love that, because on the one hand, yeah, Daniel's response was never gonna be super lengthy and poetic after he'd been concussed and lost a lot of blood. But I think it's also just a nice contrast to all of the eloquence of these vampires (including Armand during this very scene) questioning the point of going on at all, waxing philosophic about existence and whether or not it's worth it.
And then there's this dumb, half-conscious mortal guy and his first instinct is just simply 'I like my life'.
Like IDK, I don't consider myself suicidal, but if some random being tried to hypnotize me into thinking I was, I don't think my reasons would be eloquent. They don't need to be. I want to be alive because I've got tickets to the movies tomorrow, or a delicious soup saved in my fridge, or because I want to pet my friend's cat. Yeah, sure, maybe you're right that my wife will resent me and my kids hate me or whatever, but I have a thing in the city and I'd like to stay alive for that.
*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?
tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.
I keep coming back to the fact that Eddie and Chris were playing boggle - both in Bucks loft and in the Diaz house in ep 1. Because boggle is about finding the words in a mass of letters - the answers are in plain sight- literally staring you straight in the face.
Eddie is the one who wins the game - because he is the one who needs to find the answers, not Chris - and it suggests he will in fact figure out what’s been in plain sight all along.
But I love the idea that Chris does have some of the same answers as Eddie. Not all of the same answers and he’ll perhaps have found some different words to Eddie, because they both ultimately want/need different things from their respective relationships with Buck, but that there is cross over in those wants and needs.
Growing up Buck always got parental love and attention when he when he was injured, so when Bobby (in Buck’s eyes) rejects him after the blood clots it was yanking a rug nobody knew was there out from under him…
ok once again I don't know too much about flowers but I like talking about them so bear with me lol
first of all morning glories are SO different than hydrangeas it seems almost like it was said on purpose
but one thing in common is they were always both very popular flowers in japanese culture since the heian era so sukuna just accessing megumi's flower memories seems like a very convenient LIE
especially with sukuna's line about sorcerers bonding with each other (sounds very possible for two sorcerers that shared a body) the themes of these flowers are so important imo. morning glories named after their morning bloom and mid-day fade represent the beauty in the fleeting moments just like everything else yuuji is trying to show, all the small things that make every life worthwile and important. hydrangeas on the other hand are associated with mutual understanding and unity. but they are also famous for having a very contrasting meaning in western culture: arrogance and a lack of empathy (what we see from sukuna all the time haha).
Does anyone have any interesting deep ocean or outer space horror movies to recommend? Preferably more psychological ones. Now that im done with school i started watching more movies and it would be cool to see something in the style of my favourite video game subgenre
thinking about trans Julian again specifically thinking about the idea of Julian being trans but electing to not undergo any gender-affirming surgeries
like I was thinking about this the other day in the context of his line about him and Kira being the only other options for a womb when he had to transplant the baby from Keiko, because the implication that Julian has a womb also implies he's elected out of having a hysterectomy for gender-affirming purposes. I say that because we know gender-affirming surgeries- at least the more cosmetic ones- are very easy to undergo (see Profit and Lace, where they very quickly and easily turn Quark into a woman (yes I know it wasn't gender-affirming for him but its the easiest episode to use for my point)) so I feel like it wouldnt be a reach to say that a hysterectomy would be a fairly easy procedure to ask for and undergo
which as ive been thinking about it more I think this like. perfectly tracks with Julian as a character, that he would opt out of undergoing gender-affirming procedures. because I think, considering what his parents did to him and how strongly he resents it, that he would steer clear of anything he would view as "changing" himself. honestly so far in the future I think its safe to assume views of transitioning are very different, and I'd like to think that there wouldnt be nearly as much social pressure to physically transition at all, but even if there was I think Julian would be very resistant to the idea that he would "have" to change anything about himself. Julian is very unapologetically himself in every regard, so im pretty confident in saying that that would translate over to his gender identity and asserting that he is a man, and he doesnt need to change anything about himself or his body to be one