#tog meta

[avelera]

I think the term, “flaws” as a necessity for writing well-rounded fictional characters is often misunderstood. It can lead to new writers thinking these flaws should be in a laundry list alongside their OCs hobbies, eye color, and favorite food.

All of the above traits shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. They all need to serve the story in some way, usually by illustrating plot, character, or themes in a way that enhances the story.

Saying a character’s flaw is that they’re “clumsy” isn’t really a flaw unless this trait stands between them and what they want in a meaningful way. Being clumsy is an obstacle for a dancer, or for a teenager who will be socially judged and derided in a meaningful way to the story. Even still, it’s a somewhat shallow and overused flaw.

What got me thinking about this is the fanfic characters I tend to enjoy writing are flawed people. The more flawed, the better.

I struggled to write Nicky and Joe in The Old Guard because they don’t really have any flaws. They’re never stupid, or selfish, or awkward, or mean. I couldn’t really write them until I wrote a story where the plot is that one of them gets returned by amnesia to his pre-character development Crusader self, back when he was prejudiced, quick to anger, and provincial in his world view. Then I had somewhere to go with them.

By contrast, Newt and Hermann from Pacific Rim are riddled with flaws, and it made them not only popular characters, but a blast to write. They’re rude, loud, snarky, selfish, self-involved, self-important, arrogant, and mean. They’re also both sincerely trying to save the world and willing to sacrifice themselves to do it if necessary. It makes them a wonderful mass of contradictions and it makes them feel like real people.

And recently I wrote about my desire to write Dream and Hob from Sandman as more like their comic selves, with all the rough edges and taciturn misanthropy and selfishness and rudeness that implies. I don’t want to write perfect people.

I saw a post that imagined Hob as passionate about returning artifacts stolen by the English to their country of origin. It was a very sweet post and fun, don’t get me wrong. But as a perverse creature, my first thought was, “Ok, but what if he wasn’t? What if he, as a former bandit and soldier for the Crown, wasn’t in favor of the artifacts being returned? What if he was the opposite?”

Now to be clear, I think it’s more in character for the brief glimpse of the Teacher Hob we see for him to be more worldly, more in favor of repatriation. I genuinely think that take is probably more accurate to the character.

That’s not the point.

The point is that I think one way to avoid creating these sort of perfect shiny soft characters with all the rough edges sawed off is to ask, “Ok but what if they didn’t do the right thing here?”

What if they don’t have perfect, up to date progressive political views on all possible topics? What if they weren’t always altruistic? What if they don’t always say just the right thing to their lover when that person is feeling down? What if they have moments where they’re stupid, selfish, insensitive, prejudiced, rude, awkward, or off-putting?

Personally, I think that’s how you get more interesting characters, who are more like real people and, more importantly, have room to grow or sometimes not grow in a way that better serves your story.

[goldheartedsky]

Another day, another round of "Booker should've never been mad at Nicky and Joe amidst his grief!" bullshit that once again centers all this shit on Nicky and Joe when it's not about them.

Grief is a monster. It digs its claws in you in ways that leave unimaginable scars. And losing a child is a *far* different monster than losing family or losing friends. I recently lost my dad and, while the grief was overwhelming, the thought of losing my son is earth shattering. Losing a child upsets the natural order of things and, if you listen to anyone who has lost a child talk about it, it's a pain that never heals. Not after five years. Not after ten years. Not after twenty or thirty.

And Booker had to do it not once, but three times.

And Jean-Pierre, his youngest and last son, dies at 42 years old. The same age Booker was when he suffered his first death. He dies of cancer in a time where there is no treatment, no way to ease his pain. Jean-Pierre dies a horrible, slow death and Booker has to watch it, knowing that his son hates him with every fiber of his body. There is no reconciliation, no forgiveness, no closure.

And that wound inside his soul bleeds. And bleeds. And bleeds. Because there is no way to heal. Grief ebbs as time passes and you're able to try and move on with your life, but when time has stopped at a stand-still for Booker? There is no way to move on.

We can see the complete and utter devastation on Andy's face when Quỳnh is simply mentioned, and this is 300 years after losing her. The pain that Booker is carrying around from the loss of his sons, after a little more of half that time? Unimaginable.

Joe and Nicky got off light. And it's not about them. Because, as Booker correctly pointed out, they had each other.

All he had was his grief.

[normal-thoughts-official]

That post I made earlier today got me Thinking™ about Mr Yusuf al-Kaysani and the way he uses humor, and turns out that I find that a really interesting trait of his character, so I'm giving it its own analysis

Like. Listen. Joe is funny. We know this and he knows this. It comes naturally to him and it's part of who he is. However, the more I think about the times he made deliberate jokes in the movie, the more I realize that they were almost always made in times of distress or to diffuse a tense situation

When we get the first scene of the immortal family, Joe shows that he is fun and carefree (the way that he spins Andy and makes her laugh nearly instantly), but he's also pretty laid back. He's happy to sit back and laugh as the moon when he's lost in darkness gets his ass handed to him in a bet, and generally takes a backseat in the interactions while the others do their respective clown routines. He isn't really trying to be funny, at that point; the ones making jokes are the others

The first time we see Joe have an "I am fucking hilarious" moment is when they're in the helicopter and he hits Nicky with his Fuckboy Grin™, and that is a mood diffuser if I've ever seen one. The other three are all tense, armed and getting ready for battle, and we get several slightly-uncomfortable long shots of them sitting still and getting into their Soldier Headspaces, and then it pans directly from Nicky's longsword to Joe's open mouthed grin. It makes Nicky smile, and it also gives some relief to the tension that had been building up

And sure, part of that is that it's how Joe is, he's the carefree one, but part of it also seems like a very intentional way of lightening the mood - and it works, too, both for Nicky and the audience

Then, the first joke he tells in the movie is the one about the shoes Copley planted in South Sudan, which. I hesitate to even call it a joke because it falls so flat, but that just solidifies the point that Joe is using humor on purpose to try and diffuse the tension in the group. It is clearly an attempt at a joke, he even gives a little chuckle at the end, but he's obviously hurt and it doesn't quite land. Still, he tries, because everyone is tense, and upset. And humor is the best way he has to try and pull them back from that state, if only for a moment

Then, over the rest of the movie, we- okay, to be fair they are in stressful situations the entire rest of the movie, but most of his deliberate jokes come as direct responses to Moments of Duress™ - "he thinks you're a mouse, Nicky" comes when Merrick is threatening them, "bedhead?" when they are strapped to their tables, "faster than the elevator" when the fight with Merrick is over and they're all catching up with their tiredness and tension, and so on. Similarly, his silliest moments come when they are in tense situations (the wink and other funny faces and laughing when they are in the dinner with Nile, which is obviously tense as hell for all of them). The fact that he's using humor deliberately to try and lighten the mood during hard times becomes pretty obvious when you put all of his jokes together

Which isn't unusual, plenty of people use humor as a coping mechanism. Hell, I'm from Latin America, "laughing so we don't cry" is a common saying where I live. But the thing that gets me is that Joe is not using humor as a coping mechanism, because it's not supposed to help him

He doesn't make a joke when he sees the shoes, despite the fact that they clearly get to him. He makes it when the others are rattled by the fact that they've been set up. When Nile dreams of Quỳnh, Joe is so visibly devastated, but he doesn't try to lighten the mood once. When he is in the van, chained and desperate to see if Nicky will wake up, he doesn't make a joke. When he finds out that Booker has betrayed them, which obviously hurts him, maybe more than any other of them, he doesn't make jokes (he is cutting, yes, and I'll admit that "no man left behind" "well there's always a first time" is one of the funniest lines in the movie to me, but I don't think he intends it as a joke; he means it, because he's angry, and the humorous effect of the response is cut by the "he's nothing but a traitor" at the end. But, again, Joe is just naturally witty so it comes across as funny without that being, necessarily, his intention). In the moments when Joe is in the most distress, his humor is nowhere to be found. When his family isn't there to hear/see his response, he is just as tense as the rest of them are

Which brings me to my main point - Joe isn't using humor as a coping mechanism, because he isn't using it for himself. He uses it for his family's sake. Every time he makes a deliberate joke, or is goofy, it's for an audience, it is directed at the rest of the family, it is functional. He is trying to make them feel better, not himself

And that makes sense, because after Quỳnh was gone and before Nile joined? Joe was the only one who was really light in their group. Andy and Booker were obviously doing their Depression and Self Destruction Tour at nearly all times, and Nicky is a rational person. When confronted with problems, he thinks of solutions. When Andy is mad at Copley, his response is to say "we did it right, for the right reasons" - which doesn't work, because Andy doesn't want to hear it, but it's the way Nicky thinks. He has no regrets as long as his heart is in the right place, and when in a tight situation, he's going to try and get out of it. He's not the kind of guy who lightens the mood when things get tough; he is the kind of guy who takes everything deeply seriously, and takes it upon himself to find a way out of bad situations

Which is not to say that Nicky is a closed-off cold weirdo who doesn't know how to have fun, because if the baklava bet proved anything it's that Nicky also knows how to try and make his family happy. I know we all love to roast him for being shit at bets, but let's be real for a moment here - after a millennium of knowing Andy, there's no way he doesn't know that he will never fucking win at this. When he loses, he puts his hands over his face, but we can see that he is smiling about it, and I think he covers his face to hide that fact. I'm pretty sure Nicky was genuinely trying to outsmart Andy when this started, but at this point I'm also completely sure he just keeps doing it because it makes everyone laugh when he inevitably loses

(I think Joe knows that, too, because the smile he gives Nicky when he proposes the bet is too knowing and too fond)

But Nicky's moments of lightness come when they are already at ease; once the mood darkens, Nicky immerses himself in the seriousness of the situation. He is a soldier, and that's the headspace he immediately goes into. Which has its role in the group, but the fact remains - without Joe, the three of them would let themselves be swept up by the tension in their lives and never come back. They need Joe, because they need someone who can bring levity and soul into their lives

Which is a role Joe fulfills naturally, of course, because that is who he is - he is the artist, the one who's in love with life, the one with the easygoing personality and sense of humor. But it is also a role he fulfills consciously, and deliberately, because Joe also cares deeply, and so he knows that they need him to bring them back in the moments of darkness, and he is still trying, desperately, to keep his family together emotionally

And I just wonder how much of a toll that takes on him sometimes. Because after Quỳnh and before Nile, there was no one to do it for him, no one to pull him from his own darkness. And whenever there is tension in the group, Joe needs to step up and try to take care of everyone. And I'm not saying they don't take care of him as well, obviously, but this does mean that Joe is frequently choosing to put his own fears in the backseat in order to help his family. And the thing about using humor as a coping mechanism is that it's an easy way to make your own feelings ignored, both by yourself and others

Now, obviously Joe also allows himself his feelings - part of his whole thing is that he feels so openly and so intensely - and him and Nicky are clearly constantly playing taking-care-of-each-other chess trying to outprotect the other at all times, and Andy also tries to care for them all despite her own pain. But there is this particular thing that he also needs and that no one else is really well-equipped to provide, and that kind of forces him to put his own feelings aside on a regular basis so he can help the others. And it's gotta be pretty lonely and alienating, sometimes, to be the one to always take the lead in these moments and be the only source of lightness when things get heavy

(I'd also like to take this moment to praise TOG for making it so that Joe takes this role without making him a Comic Relief Character™ and also giving him the depth and complexity he deserves. God, I love this movie)

So, in conclusion, I believe that Joe being the only one who is able to diffuse the tension in the group a lot of the time is one of the ways in which he suffers from their isolation. It makes him uniquely lonely and challenged by their immortality situation, as they all are. It is also one of the small ways in which he takes care of everyone else, and an important role he plays in the group, particularly after Quỳnh is gone and before Nile comes*

*by which I don't mean that Nile is the New Comic Relief, although she is also pretty funny. What I mean is that her arrival changes a lot in their dynamics, particularly because it makes Andy visibly lighter, so the situation changes considerably once she's in the picture

TLDR: Joe uses humor to try to support the rest of his family emotionally, and it's an interesting trait of his character

[nevermindirah]

Who talks to who, for how long and about what, in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince Bythewood?

I got curious and so I watched the movie taking a lot of timestamp notes. way back three and a half years ago now, I watched this movie for the first time bc I like gritty action movies, and it's a really good one of those. I'm still obsessed with it all this time later because it's full to the brim with well-drawn characters who have compelling relationships with each other, and boy howdy does the data show it.

I was especially curious about who spends how much time alone together on screen, so I coded all the scenes with that in mind, and I found some really interesting patterns in the breakdown of scenes where just two characters talk, where one character is the sole focus, and when three characters talk.

the winners of course are Nile and Andy, our dual protagonists, who spend 10% of the movie's total runtime alone together. they also spend a lot of time with our dual friendly antagonists, Booker and Copley. scenes featuring combinations of just these four characters make up 40% of the total runtime.

Joe and Nicky show up less in this analysis because they're side characters who mostly appear in group scenes, but wow are they richly drawn side characters. they're key players in all but two scenes where four or more named characters talk.

read on for many numbers and much analysis of what it all means!

Andy Nile 0:12:20 Nile Booker 0:06:00 Andy Booker Copley 0:05:22 Andy Booker 0:05:01 Andy Nile Booker 0:04:56 Nile Copley 0:04:18 Nile alone 0:04:07 Andy alone 0:03:31

Andy Celeste 0:02:49 Merrick Copley 0:02:41 Joe Nicky 0:02:24 Nile Dizzy Jay 0:01:33 Andy Quynh 0:01:31 Andy Nile Merrick 0:00:52 Booker alone 0:00:32 Copley alone 0:00:28 Nicky Kozak 0:00:27 Booker Quynh 0:00:21 Copley Keane 0:00:09

(the spreadsheet, if anyone's interested in digging deeper with me)

of the 12 min that our main characters are alone together on screen, almost fully half is super duper antagonistic:

4:26 is the kidnapping sequence

1:29 is their conversation outside after Nile's nightmare featuring the iconic "me and those three men in there will keep you safe" "like Quynh?"

and 7 seconds is Nile glaring daggers at Andy after walking over all those bodies in the church

the other half breaks down like this:

2:14 is them connecting over their mortal families — where Andy makes Nile give her phone back at the end

1:45 is Nile telling Andy she's not doing this, that she's going back to her family — Andy pushes with "we'd do the same for you" but then relents and gives Nile the car

50 seconds of them gearing up for the last segment of the fight — Nile tries to get Andy to wear a bulletproof vest, she jokes around with "is this gonna be like the last signal?" — it's operations-focused but there's a real warmth between them by this point in the movie (this scene starts at 1:41:45, just 13 min before the credits roll)

and 1:29 of Andy looking at Nile like she hung the moon (which, extremely valid and relatable!) and Nile saying that the time Andy's got left "you're gonna spend it with us"

Nile has an uninterrupted 4:18 sequence with Copley that speed runs the same general shape of her arc with Andy, hella antagonistic to teamwork, though the latter here is more of a professional camaraderie than the real warmth we see Nile develop for Andy.

in this context Nile's arc with Booker is remarkably different. their first scene alone together is 1:11 in total, intercut with Andy killing mercs elsewhere in the church, and it's sort of their only scene with friction between them. Booker keeps telling Nile to wait for the signal without explaining what that means, annoyingly continuing Andy's grand tradition of not fucking answering Nile's reasonable questions, ugh. though another way of framing this is of course that he's too busy packing her a change of clothes while showing off his tits for her. as I noted in a previous meta, the end of this sequence is the one time Booker lies to Nile (claiming he doesn't know who the mercs are when he has at least a basic idea, though we don't know for sure whether Copley involved him in this specific plan).

after this Nile and Booker have two more scenes alone together and they're both extended conversations: 3:14 for their conversation alone in the cave after Andy leaves, and 1:18 when Nile joins Booker on the balcony outside the bar. both of these conversations are remarkably intimate for how little these characters have interacted beforehand. remember, 6:02 total of Nile and Andy alone together with heavy animosity (Andy shot Nile in the head ffs!) before things between them started to warm up. granted, the conversation where they first start to warm to each other is right after Nile's cave scene with Booker and Andy's scene with Celeste, so an argument could be made that this was the point in the movie where Nile started to feel ready to open up to the other immortals generally and her first one-on-one conversation once she got there was with Booker before Andy. I'm not saying you have to ship them just because they get so close so quick, but the numbers sure do make it clear that us BoNers aren't making this shit up out of nowhere.

Nile and Booker's heart-to-heart in the mine is the third-longest one-on-one conversation in the whole movie — third after Andy kidnapping Nile and Nile's sequence with Copley, which are both heavy on action and exposition and antagonism, making this the longest intimate conversation in the movie. their other heart-to-heart, 1:18 on the balcony outside the pub, is on par with Joe and Nicky's 1:17 in the van.

there's also a 51 sec sequence during the Merrick tower fight where it intercuts pretty much equally between three subsets of the action: Andy going off on her own with an axe, Joe waiting for Nicky to wake up after that head shot, and Nile and Booker being drift compatible when Nile's gun jams. we're not making this shit up out of nowhere.

ok back to our blorbos in chief. we get 4:07 of Nile as the sole focus, and 3:31 of the same for Andy.

the sequence of Nile going through hell on base just because she fucking lived (laser eyes @ her squad forever) lasts 1:14 and includes a few lines from minor characters. we get 15 sec of her first dreaming of the others and waking up unmoored, then a 20 sec reprise with her nightmare of the first person she killed. the sequence of her driving away from Copley's then figuring out what the empty gun clip means is 48 sec. and then, one of the things that stood out to me the most in really digging into these numbers: just how frequently and for how long the camera lingers on Nile's face in this movie.

extended closeups of Nile with no dialogue and no montage:

10 seconds staring at the car she crushed, killing Merrick in the process but somehow not herself

36 seconds in the elevator

and a whopping 44 seconds of listening to Frank Ocean

that's fully 1 minute and thirty seconds of this movie's 2 hr 5 min credits-included runtime devoted exclusively to long takes of Nile Freeman's face.

Andy's sole-focus time is a little less tidy, because the majority of it isn't precisely focused on her like with Nile. we get 15 sec of her staring at her hand, realizing her immortality is gone. I could have coded all the pieces of the movie more granularly to find all the moments where we get Andy reaction shots, but I also could've done that with all of them and I'm but one humble spreadsheet lover, and it's more interesting to me that Gina primarily uses other kinds of film language to put us into Andy's perspective.

1:35 of her cutting through all those mercs in the church — other people are active in this scene, but they're not shown as people, and the horror of that is exactly the point, for the viewer, for Nile, and for Andy herself

41 sec of her voiceover at the opening of the movie, over clips of the kill floor scene

1 min of her moodily sitting in the car after the pharmacy and flashing back to Lykon's death

the Andy/Quynh flashback sequence that's a subset of Nicky and Joe narrating to Nile is 1:31, so counting that alongside this flashback here brings us to a total of 2:31 of Andy/Quynh(/Lykon) alone together screen time. almost precisely equal to Joe and Nicky's total 2:24 alone together.

further underlining Booker and Copley as our tritagonists, we get one scene of on-screen alone time for each of them: 32 seconds of Booker being drunk six months later and 28 seconds of Copley reacting to the kill floor footage. it's easy to focus on the Andy in a Union uniform element of this Copley scene, but a photo of his late wife is visible in almost every frame. I went back and double checked — only 3 sec of those 28 don't contain that photo of his wife displayed proudly between the kill floor footage and the Civil War photo, 3 sec of Copley in closeup. now that's what I call environmental storytelling.

we get almost exactly 5 min each with the sets Andy + Booker + Copley, Andy + Booker, and Andy + Nile + Booker. ABC and ANB conversations tend toward driving the plot and fleshing out detail about immortality, though a decent chunk of ANB in the "is this a Rodin?" part of the cave scene is Nile and Booker talking about following the money (their first moment of drift compatibility!) while Andy angsts nearby, and a decent chunk of ABC at Copley's place is Andy and Booker's heartbreaking "this is what you wanted" "not like this" exchange while Copley awkwardly hovers. just under half of Andy and Booker's 5:01 on screen alone together is about his betrayal, 2:13 across three scenes. the other half breaks out pretty evenly between them talking about Nile, making battle plans, and just being pals.

has any mid-budget gritty action movie ever done it better? even the infodumps are full of character and relationship details.

I also find it noteworthy that Booker and Copley are never alone together, and they never directly acknowledge anything about their relationship. we know from what they tell other characters that they've been in contact before the events of the movie, probably for some time in some detail. we know they worked together to ultimately enable the cartoon-villain antagonists to do their villainy. Copley is direct about how these results were absolutely not what he intended, and we can infer from Booker's behavior that he wasn't aiming for decades of medical torture either. but we get no information about how they feel about each other. now that I'm looking at it with this frame, it seems like the absence of information is itself a kind of telling — Booker and Copley maybe purposefully avoiding 1:1 contact, purposefully treating each other as mere acquaintances when others are around, because to do otherwise would be to look their guilt in the eye. oh shit I think I might have given myself a whole new meta idea on this tangent here: Copley and Booker as mirrors for each other.

disclaimer as we're nearing the end that there's inevitably going to be bias and error in something like this. I measured by seconds not milliseconds and I wasn't always precise about where I paused to note timestamps at scene changes. sometimes I included what ended up amounting to several seconds of establishing shots and sometimes I didn't. and there are a bunch of edge cases where there's more than one way to count who was an active part of which scenes, like for example:

I separated out Andy and Booker's opening motorcycle stalking and Don Quijote chat from the later part of what was probably just one scene in the script, where Booker talks to the hotel clerk while Andy interacts with tourists nearby

I included all as one Nile + Dizzy + Jay scene the sequence where Dizzy and Jay talk to each other about Nile before they go into the med tent and act shitty to her face about how Nile's still alive

I counted as Copley + Merrick the conversation in the car where Keane and Kozak are present and react on camera but don't have lines per se

similarly I counted as Andy + Booker the "she wants to talk to her family" exchange after Nile and Nicky leave the dinner table; Joe's still sitting there next to them but he doesn't say anything and the camera doesn't focus on him

I didn't try to delete the time where Andrei said/did stuff from the 4:26 Andy kidnaps Nile sequence but I did remove a Keane cut-away from a later Andy + Nile scene

so much has already been lovingly written about how well Joe and Nicky spend their short on-screen alone time and rightly so. I don't have anything new to add there so I'll take a moment instead to shout out to the 27 sec of Nicky telling Kozak to go fuck herself, and also the iconic Joe headbutting Merrick. fuck, this movie is so so good. every moment is a delight.

[tommy-evan]

you know how nicky when to uni right? like we have his id?

i love the idea that during downtime, joe and nicky would do random things. not just wholesome, adorably romantic cute things like settle in one place long enough, be that couple until they can't be that couple, and they become a legend of the town but like...

while nicky is going off to school joe gets like, a real estate license

just because he could

like he went to uni already, and he gets why nicky likes to go every couple of years, but he did that in first life, before his first death and while he enjoyed it, he wants to do other things

so real estate license it is

and then he just...starts flipping houses, afterwards

at some point he becomes one of those celeb ones because have you seen him? also have you heard him? he can sell a house to a potato

but yeah, joe doing random mundane things and getting accreditation, and being so naturally good at it he makes bank and then it just becomes his thing, whether he wanted it to be or not

like, nile's all, how did you even get this safe house?

oh, yusuf owns it, he owns delta safehouse up to lima safe house

and nile's like, damn, that's why he's so strict with turning off the lights

(you can blame @nilefreemans for this)

[livlepretre]

Im like 90% sure that Rowan is a descendant of Mora and Aelin is presumabky related to Mab (wiki also claims that she’s a descendant of Mora but it’s unclear how that relation would exist), so they’re related that way. Best as I can tell, the relation so distant that it’s practically nonexistent, unless I’m missing something

So yes, that is what the books say… but that makes no sense!

Mab and Mora are sisters.

Mab is Aelin’s great-grandmother. We know Mab became mortal in order to be with her human lover, and this started the Ashryver line. So let’s assume that happened maybe ~100 years ago— on the longer side of how far back that many human generations would go.

Meanwhile, Rowan is already 300 years old. We know in text that his parents had him when they were ~980 years old, and died from the fading when they were ~1000. (Correct me if I am wrong.) We don’t know which of his parents was descended from Mora, but that’s not really important here.

Okay. So on Rowan’s side that already sets us back 1300+ years to get to his grandparents’ generation. We’re already at a time then before the founding of Terrasen to get to the birth of Rowan’s parents. Therefore, before the end of the Valg Wars.

How old were his grandparents when his parents were born? 50? 500? What is the generational length?

The thing is, we know that the Fae are “immortal” but they’re not deathless. We see in the text on numerous occasions that the lifespan is roughly 1000 years (“a Princess who was to live for a thousand years”). Maybe we can speculate that Mab and Mora lived longer because they were so powerful, but how much longer? Mab was still alive recently enough to have become mortal and had Aelin’s grandmother just a few short generations ago. Maybe we can guess that that happened more distantly in the past than a mortal lifespan. Maybe Aelin’s grandmother, a true demi Fae, had a longer lifespan and this happened centuries ago.

This still doesn’t account for enough time passing to make Rowan and Aelin essentially non-related. Even if Mora had Rowan’s ancestor when she was very young and Mab surrendered her immortality when she was very old. Unless every single one of Rowan’s line before his parents had children in their 20s, for generations, which seems odd and unlikely considering that his own parents did not manage to conceive their one and only child until their 980s.

It would have made a lot more sense to say that there are many human generations between Aelin and Mab and that’s why they’re distantly related. But since Mab is Aelin’s great-grandmother, that puts the pressure of establishing many generations on Rowan’s side, which as a fae with such long lives and long generations, makes no sense. Literally, the timing suggests Rowan is probably either a grandson or a great-grandson, maybe a great-great-grandson of Mora. Making him a 2nd cousin once removed, a 3rd cousin, or a 3rd cousin once removed.

I get why SJM said they’re basically not related. She wanted to pair them together and for them both to have the descent from the faerie queens. Perhaps this stems from the original Queen of Glass novels when Rowan was merely Aelin’s mentor and not her lover; a closer kinship would make sense in that context. (Although, the weird vibes between Aelin and Aedion suggest that SJM is not above the cousins thing.) An example of actually not even related is Dorian and Aelin; a thousand years of human generations in between is a lot of genetic distance. Most people on this planet probably have ancestors much more closely related than that.

But again, Rowan and Aelin don’t have that. They’re descended from a pair of sisters, and those sisters could have only lived so long, so there is only so much time for the generational gap to be established on Rowan’s side… but it is just very doubtful to me that that could be possible with what we know of his family history.

[max-nolastname]

when the old guard was like “heres a group of functionally immortal warriors, hundreds, thousands of years old” and then it was like “btw, they can die anytime, still! they will always bounce back until one day, seemingly at random, they dont” and then it was like “what if you came into your immortal life alongside another? they are your partner in every way you dont know immortal life without them but you understand that one day you might just have go on for another thousand years without them” and then it was like “what if an immortal was imprisoned in an environment where they die every minute again and again for hundreds of years with no relief” and then it was like “what if an immortal had severe depression” 

[jayktoralldaylong]

A lot of fans like to give Chaol heat for blaming Aelin for everything in QOS, but I reread that conversation enough times to know that Aelin started that shit. Now, her feelings are completely valid, I get it, I too would be devastated beyond repair, but you have to understand that Chaol too was devastated! Of all the things these two would do when they reunited, fighting over Dorian was not on the Bingo card.

Aelin popped in with "Where's Dorian?" And when Chaol answered that question....the accusations came pouring in. She started screaming like "You left him! You left him with that man. I would never have left him!" A really shitty thing to say Aelin, Chaol barely got out alive.

Then Chaol is still trying to salvage the situation.

Chaol: Well, that's why you're here now, so we can go save Dorian.

Aelin: There is no saving Dorian.

Chaol: What do you mean by that?

Aelin: You've destroyed him Chaol. By leaving him with that man there's going to be nothing left. Dorian is gone Chaol. He's dead! Dorian is dead because of you!

(I don't care how levelheaded or calm you are as a person, if you hear someone tell you that you've killed your best friend, you're going to lose it. And that's what Chaol did.)

Cause if you read Heir of Fire, you see Chaol defending Aelin with his life. 🥺 Even when she's not there, which is the most important. He's feeding hope into as many people as he can. He's reassuring everyone that Aelin will come back with change. Aelin comes back with a boyfriend and no plan in sight. 😂 And she's telling him his best friend, his hope for the future, low-key the greatest love he's ever had in his entire life, is dead because of him. Of course he snaps.

[sheafrotherdon]

TOG meta thinky thoughts, if you’d care to indulge me, Cate: do you reckon the transition to immortality is predicated on violence?

Did Andromache die while defending her sisters and so vehemently refused to let that be the end that she willed herself back into being to enact revenge for all their deaths? Did Quỳnh know she needed more than one lifetime to put to rights the atrocities she’d witnessed, and then that belief was acknowledged and she came back? Was Yusuf so wholeheartedly convinced that he needed to stand between the invaders and the sacred city that the universe recognised that and reinstated him, even as it did the same for Nicolò, who thought he had the right of it, too? Should Nile have died from something like a heart defect, would she have come back as she did or was it the violent end that triggered the change?

Obvs, a lot of people die raging against the injustice of it. There would have to be many factors that play into what decides that these specific few become immortal. But maybe this is one small part of the puzzle, eh? Would love to hear any thoughts you might have!

I love this thread of thinking! Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . . Perhaps there is some melding of causes, some additive path between resurrections. Perhaps Andromache not only raged against death and dying, but was in a position - a unique, once-in-a-million position - to have an impact beyond her own beginning. Perhaps Quynh was who Andromache needed in order not to stray into desolation, and Andromache who Quynh needed to pull her back from despair. Perhaps the things they knew and the skills they had, the places they had seen added up to more than the sum of their parts. And perhaps it was chance that Yusuf and Nicolo killed each other, but there was unparalleled potential in their being resurrected together. Perhaps in all of them, especially Nile, there was something - something that could temper fear and grief with compassion - that pulled them together.

I wonder why Booker was chosen, and what he wasn't able to give or understand. His first death seems soaked with despair. His subsequent grief was so large it was never assuaged. His desperation didn't wane. He certainly participated in finding usefulness in their long lives, but I can't say I think he found solace. Was it less that he raged, and more that he needed others to rage for him? Or does the animating force that cause him to live again make mistakes?

[avelera]

So I’ve gone back and I’ve been reading some Old Guard fic (as I try to get motivated to write the last damn chapter of my one damn TOG WIP finished so I can finally moved on), and I must admit, one silly and very minor pet peeve I have in some Nicky/Joe fics for the Old Guard that explore their Crusader days is the trope of having them go a really long time without being able to understand each other. Because based on Nicky’s path as a Crusader even getting to the Holy Land, and the various hints we have that Joe has a pretty worldly background, I would suggest they should have had a baseline to communicate already when they met and that bridging the gap would have gone very quickly for one or both of them once they committed to learning.

There’s a few reasons I find them going a really long time without speaking each other’s language (most likely Nicky picking up Arabic) somewhat implausible:

- First, just based on my own personal experience: I went through a full language immersion experience myself and yes it was painful and yes, having textbooks and classes certainly helped, but all told it was 3-4 months from almost zero before I could start doing normal things for my age group like read simple books and do homework. However, the most effective language learning program in the country, Middlebury, does a full immersion program that gets people to baseline functionality in 6 weeks. Yes, learning a language is hard and I will be the first to say that mastery takes years and mastery without immersion is nearly impossible, but if you’re completely immersed there, without options, it goes much faster. You won’t be fluent of course but you will be conversational. Also, by all accounts, being illiterate or otherwise not bothering to learn how to read and write at the same time and ONLY going for verbal communication actually makes things go even faster.

- People who pick up by speaking (rather than reading and writing) and people who speak multiple languages already tend to pick up other languages even more quickly. Once you learn one or two, a lot of polyglots don’t stop there. There is that old joke: the word for speaking three languages is trilingual, two languages is bilingual, and speaking only one language is American. Which is to say I think native English speaking writers might be the ones underestimating how quickly a language can be learned (at least to a conversational level).

- Now throw in the fact that both Nicky and Joe have been recently in multilingual societies or organizations as a requirement of their meeting during the First Crusade, no matter how you slice it. Either as both coming from a merchant trading backgrounds traveling across international (so to speak) lands, or Nicky being part of the pan-European Christian army where multiple languages would be spoken across the camp, to him possibly having a priest background which would mean Latin as well. Not to mention Greek if Nicky picked up anything while in Constantinople (if he came over land). Nicky also would have been on the road to the Holy Land, if he went overland, for as long as 3 years and in Antioch before Jerusalem.

- Now, as an admitted caveat to all of this, I’ve lived overseas and it is absolutely common for expats to live in a country for years without bothering to pick up the local language at all. There were cultural and societal reasons that European Crusaders and the Egyptian Fatimids who lost Jerusalem wouldn’t bother to learn each other’s languages or any of the common merchants tongue or other common languages like Greek to bother to talk to each other. That’s absolutely fair to invoke for why they wouldn’t have a single word of any language in common.

- However, I will say, once both or either of them decided to try, I think some writers don’t give enough credit for how quickly one or the other would pick a language up, especially if it’s the language of the country they’re in (basically, I think once he tried, Nicky would pick up Arabic very quickly if he’s still in the Holy Land by the time he and Joe start trying to communicate). Effort plus full immersion is probably the single fastest way to learn a language, you’d be able to have rudimentary conversations within a few months at most. Really from there it’s just a question of whose country are they in once they start talking and stop trying to kill each other.

TL;DR I will be the first to say an author should go with what makes their story work best BUT there’s plenty of historically backed reasons why Nicky and Joe should have been able to carry on a basic conversation with each other from when they first met, and not be completely stymied in communicating with each other because of a language barrier.

[captain-grammar]

i just find the idea that each of the immortals have, at some point, been attracted to/emotionally involved/physical with a compelling prospect.

think about it. these are the only people in the world that you can ever truly connect and be yourself with. you're spending decades, centuries, millenia with them. lines will get blurry sometimes. you'll be friends, lovers, and friends once more, lines crossing and uncrossing through the years as your wants and needs evolve. quynh loved lykon. quynh loved andy. andy loved quynh. andy loved booker. booker loved joe. joe loved booker. joe loved nicky.

then nile comes along and all the love and hate and conflicting feelings mixed with this dependency they have with each other must look so strange to an outsider. how do you even begin to explain it? how can you prepare someone for that?

you don't. you just have to wait for it to happen to them and help them reason with themselves.

[goldheartedsky]

Cannot stop thinking about how, even if Booker didn’t have the most tragic backstory possible, his ultra-traumatic death (which would have taken anywhere from 15-20 minutes and is undeniably the worst of the Guard’s OG deaths) would have had him clawing his way out of immortality by itself

[normal-thoughts-official]

Today's flavor of insanity is brought to you by the fact that we only get ONE scene where Joe and Nicky are alone in a room. And it's in a fucking lab where they're being held hostage and Nicky was being tortured in it literally less than 5 minutes ago. And yet all it takes is for Joe to say ONE line (one fucking line. Hell, it's one word) and Nicky laughs unabashed for the ONLY time in the entire movie. He laughs unabashed and he even snorts and he looks more relaxed and open than at any other point, including the bet. Because it's just him and Joe and when it's just him and Joe he can allow himself to let every guard down, which he doesn't do even when he sleeps because he sleeps with a gun, but somehow, in the middle of the enemy's lair, after being tortured, Nicky can allow himself to relax enough to ugly laugh. Because it's just him and Joe and as long as it's just him and Joe he doesn't have to keep himself in check

[nevermindirah]

"between us three there are over 5000 years" Andy says of her Quynh and Lykon in the new comic. the references to Mongols and the Great Khan put this in most likely the 1200s. she first met Lykon when Alexander the Great was around, so that's 1500 years, and I'm vaguely remembering from a previous timeline attempt that Quynh was born around 1000 BCE so that's 2k. leaving around another 2k years for Andy when we know she's a lot older than that

hmm 🤔

there's an easy Doylist explanation: this is Greg once again being bad at math

but I'm digging this Watsonian idea: Andy is either choosing not to remember or choosing not to count how long she was alone before Quynh

[sad-endings-suck]

The Canon: She had dark blonde hair.

The fan artist: Anyway here she is, platinum blonde just as described. :)

[salmonsaur]

Sometimes I wonder if snow has a lot of significance in ToG.

About Horyang (Ilmar): during his backstory, after becoming the devil's right arm, we see he's being transported somewhere unknown. When I was reading this part, I remember it felt like Horyang was being transported to either be discarded/ destroyed, or sold to someone because the Workshop was done with him. Anyway Headon appears, the transport driver is shocked, Horyang is taken by Headon, and that's how Horyang ended up climbing the Tower. (S2 chapter 42).

The place Horyang was being transported to was over a body of water, and it was snowing. Horyang stated that it was his first snow back then, and that he thought it was beautiful. In the distance, there seems to be a fuzzy silhouette of maybe a giant tree or multiple trees.

About Wangnan: there's a scene (S2 chapter 230) where Wangnan tells Miseng that he was born in a cold place, and the Hell Train's cold climate is easy for him to deal with.

About Arlene: we learn in season 3 that Arlene has stayed at a place called Seolhyangwon that has eternal snow within it (S3 chapter 132).

------------------

What if all three of these mentions of snow and the cold are connected? Maybe it's a coincidence that they all have something to do with cold weather (and the possible tree silhouette in Horyang's flashback and Seolhyangwon is a coincidence too), but I have a hard time ignoring coincidences in this story 😅 Hopefully we get to see more Arlene/ Bam/ V/ Jahad/ Wangnan lore in the upcoming arc