#1.01 the wrong path
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Iolaus – self-proclaimed protector of Hercules since forever
Young Hercules & Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
#young hercules#hercules the legendary journeys#hercules and iolaus#iolaus#dean o'gorman#michael hurst#htlj#htljedit#yh#silvermoon gifs#90s tv#1.48 Apollo#1.01 the wrong path#2.13 The Enforcer#gifs
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The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom. For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There's a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken.
Loki | 1.01 - Glorious Purpose
#marveledit#lokiedit#loki#tvedit#usersugar#userelysia#userjasmine#underbetelgeuse#tuserdaisy#miatendos#userlaurianne#marvelgifs#useraurore#tuserhan#dailyavengers#mcuedit#chewieblog#userdiana#tuserpolly#gifs*
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Matt Murdock in
THE DEFENDERS (2017) | 1.01 - The H Word
Uh, bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been... uh, three days since my last confession. I lied to someone. Someone I love. She asked me if I, uh, miss the life. The other life that I led. And I told her I didn't. Acknowledging a lie is often the best path to finding the truth, son. A lie this this one is often a sign of indecision. A sign that your mind and your soul are not yet aligned. Well, I'm trying very hard to ignore my soul. "The Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." If you could elaborate, Father. Ignoring doesn't change anything, Matthew. God knows your heart. Let him in so he can help. Even if that heart is damaged? Especially if it's damaged. Matthew, I want to talk frankly. Please. This other life you led... is your heart still with it or is your heart with the one who walked through it by your side? Elektra. Yeah. I do miss her. But I know that the things she brought out of me were wrong. From what you've told me about her, I think she'd be happy about how well you're doing. Maybe. Or maybe she'd tell me I'm abandoning that life. And with it, her memory. You're not abandoning Elektra. You don't have it in you. What you're doing, we call that moving on. Purgatory is a place for the dead, Matthew, not the living. There's nothing wrong with letting people go. She'll find her peace. I pray you find yours as well.
#the defenders#marveledit#mcuedit#daredeviledit#tvedit#defendersedit#mattmurdockedit#marvel#matt murdock#father lantom#gifs#phase three
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okay so after i posted my notes on 1.15 the benders, i realized what i said about the hunt for azazel being synonymous with sam's return to the family was wrong (i've edited the post slightly to reflect that now).
the hunt, actually, is synonymous with jessica, and therefore representative of sam turning away from the family. in season 1, jess, john, and azazel all represent the same feelings for sam, and dean is the diametric opposition to this. the plot of season 1 as expressed by 1.01 pilot is that sam has to go home, but he can't figure out which home to return to. his options are jess, stanford and independence and his life away from his family, or dean, the impala and codependency and a return to the family. this explains a few things:
why dean is more invested in saving people on hunts than sam is before 1.14 nightmare (see here)
why dean doesn't actually want to find and kill azazel, and why he associates this hunt with abandonment (see 1.02 wendigo, 1.16 shadow, 1.21 salvation, 1.22 devil's trap, to name a few major examples)
why dean calls sam selfish in episodes where sam is split between hunting azazel and sticking with dean (1.11 scarecrow, 1.22 devil's trap)
among other things. the choice sam has is between dean and jess: every time sam chooses jess, he's necessarily abandoning dean, both emotionally and physically (he leaves dean for california in 1.11 scarecrow, he tries to run a suicide mission in 1.21 salvation). sam's revenge and his relationship with dean cannot coexist, and so long as sam chooses revenge, he's choosing jessica. john therefore is a manifestation of this path, and every time sam seeks out john he's again abandoning dean. john and dean, too, are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist (and so john must die).
and the important part of this is that neither of these choices that sam is presented with is a good choice. both paths are repeatedly condemned by the narrative. revenge is meaningless and only causes more pain with no healing (1.02, 1.05, 1.07, 1.14, 1.15), but family is ruinous and will hurt everyone around them in its pursuit (1.11, 1.12, 1.15, 1.16, 1.20). sam is not presented a good option, and no matter what he decides he will invite destruction. this is a tragedy.
the difference between the options is that revenge is the option that's ordained by fate, and family is the option that opposes it.
sam was born to become the boy king (lucifer's vessel). he is cursed by his mother and by azazel and later as we find out by the angels themselves. he's a blood freak, the boy king, the child with demon blood running through his veins. jessica was killed to move him to action, to begin his journey down azazel's path. meg tries to lure sam away from his family and toward her, and when that doesn't work she tries to kill sam's family so he has nothing to return to. sam is meant to embrace this curse and his power and follow his fate to azazel. sam has to abandon his family in order to fulfill his destiny.
the problem is that none of this aligns with his values. if sam is to go down this path, he has to compromise what he wants most, and what he wants most is his family (is dean).
sam was raised to value family, and his exclusion from it only made him crave it to a deeply unhealthy degree. as soon as dean accepts him and includes him and trusts him, sam returns and devotes himself with all he has, consequences be damned. and as season 1 demonstrates, those consequences are indeed terrible. the people around them will die and sam and dean will sacrifice innocents to protect themselves (1.11, 1.12, 1.22); they will compromise their values and morals for each other (1.12, 1.18, 1.22); their relationship will be toxic, aka codependent (1.12, 1.15, 1.16, 1.18, the entire rest of the show lol). choosing the family is not the good, healthy choice, even if it is the one that aligns with sam's values.
the "right" choice is morally bankrupt; the "wrong" choice is congruous with his values. there's no winning, and he has no potential of escape. the third option is to remove himself from the narrative altogether, which he can't bring himself to do: he's angry over jessica's death so he can't abandon his revenge quest, and he wants too badly to be part of his family, so he can't walk away from them (note, of course, that sam didn't want to leave his family to begin with: it was john who closed the door, which implies that sam wanted to maintain a relationship with his family through college and possibly even return afterwards).
the deciding factor is dean. dean including sam and treating him as an equal is what sways sam from revenge to family. sam gets what he's always wanted through dean, and that gives him the strength and determination to oppose his fate and the curse in his blood. he gives up on revenge and devotes himself entirely to dean, and because this is what dean has always wanted too (his family, sam, together with him) he responds in kind.
this is the path to destruction, but it's what sam and dean have always wanted so it doesn't matter. together they choose destruction and ruin and each other, and together they and everyone around them suffers the consequences of opposing fate.
#supernatural#sam winchester#it was bugging me all night because my original conclusion (the meaning of revenge shifts over time) didn't make sense#i guess i overlooked it because both revenge and family are expressed as bad choices#and yes they're both bad it's just in different ways. duh.#shrugs i figured it out in the end#and it makes everything so much worse#what a fucking show fr#spn posting#.txt#spn1
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I’ve seen all the mainline entries of Neon Genesis: Evangelion and I have some opinions.
In general I like cosmic horror and using Christian iconography for cosmic horror goes hard as fuck, so naturally I am inclined towards liking the whole of Evangelion, but I think it stumbles by doing the usual anime thing of having an extremely high number of Macguffins and Secret Objects and Concepts. The Rebirth movies had a chance to consolidate all of these things, considering the change in format from 90s serial, but it actually doubled down and got worse!
I’m totally fine with a piece of media not spending a lot of exposition time on some of the outlier fluff, but Evangelion spends tons of time of fluff that doesn’t even matter, not to mention all the things that needed more exposition time. Barriers, spears, moons, bla bla bla… there’s just so much.
There was a lot to like, including, but not limited to:
The found footage of the Second Impact was great. “It’s spreading its wings!” with that broken feed was just enough to be vaguely unsettling and really cool.
The pilots have great motion in the plugs and it translated really well to the action by the Evas themselves. Asuka especially moves great in her plug.
Tokyo-3 is neat. Love the receding buildings and the missile launchers disguised as hillsides. The whole geofront is good.
Love that all the Angel’s weapons find ways to form a crucifix.
In general, very good characters.
The Angel concepts were good, especially in the rebirth movies where the bad ideas could be safely discarded. Loved both depictions of the sniper battle with (checks wiki) Ramiel.
Solid ending (of the rebirth movies). I’m glad Shinji didn’t win through force of arms but through patience and understanding. I’m glad Gendo got actually introspective and recognized he was wrong.
Obviously, there’s also a lot to not like. Let’s start off with the obvious that Shinji sucks. He does. Goddamn does it suck watching over 20 episodes and 3.5 movies where the main character acts like a baby. I am fully aware that he’s suffering, and that he’s got some trauma, but geez how exhausting is it to watch the entire plot revolve around “will the main character literally just do the thing already” over and over and over again. He spends 40+ minutes of Thrice Upon a Time just being a baby. There’s no other way to put it. He’s finally allowed to mature at the end, but it’s frustrating how much of the plot requires Shinji to be immature as long as possible.
Other things I didn’t like:
I briefly thought the time skip would be a super solid choice, allowing the narrative to break away from the original show and forge a new path unburdened. Unfortunately, it instead became extremely silly. The narrative scale ramps up as the resources available dwindle to zero. Mountains of Evas, four spaceships, clones everywhere…
The names of the rebirth movies. 3.0+1.01? Get out of here.
Speaking of 3.0+1.01… I think it was planned to get some mileage out of the same imagery as End of Evangelion despite the narrative being so different, which I thought was bad. Obviously they wanted Big Rei back on the horizon and the ocean of crucifixes across the earth, but it just came off as “been there, done that.” Especially without the image of everyone turning to soup as their souls were taken it just seems too self-referential. It didn’t need to happen in the film, it just needed us to see it.
Even with the most charitable reading, some of the nudity and sexual stuff from the show is not great considering the characters are 14. I’m down with media recognizing the inherent trauma of growing up and grappling with the conflict between childhood and adulthood when it comes to sex and relationships, but many times it felt leering instead of respectful given the media and it’s intended audience.
In general there was a missed opportunity to tell a more tight and consistent story in the rebirth movies, and 1.11 really proves that. Unfortunately it looks like the project ballooned too much as time went on.
Anyway, I liked it all fine. Some really solid stuff and some stuff that wasn’t. Mari and Misato and Asuke steal the show, because of course they do. I liked the tone shift in the original show as it embraced the cosmic horror, and was glad the rebirth movies really leaned into it, but at the end of the day there’s just too much going on, and I often got the feeling that what was happening on screen wasn’t connected to anything concrete. There are questions posed and I don’t think the creators even have answers (the Far Cry 5 gambit, if you will).
Honestly, just a few more passes over the shows own cosmology and it would be much better. If nothing else, it’s just further proof that crucifix imagery goes hard as fuck.
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The Fifteen Minutes After
Fandom: 911 Lone Star
Characters: Carlos Reyes, T.K. Strand
Rating: EXTREMELY T
Summary: "It felt like a challenge. And the answer was no. Carlos absolutely could not handle whatever was going on right now, hence why they were about to walk into his home and do whatever it was you did with a one night stand you picked up at the bar."
A/N: "Yes, I recall the fifteen minutes after we met." Since we didn't get to see any of those fifteen minutes I have filled in the blanks. Episode tag for 1.01. Huge shoutout to @bluenet13 who basically deserves a co-writer credit at this point because I literally can’t post without her.
Read it on AO3
Captain Strand’s son was…not a good dancer. Carlos had to bite his lip to keep from laughing as he watched the other man attempt to shimmy and follow along with the steps. It was adorable. Incredibly, wonderfully adorable. And no matter how bad his hip shaking was, Carlos still found him incredibly attractive.
Also, he should probably introduce himself so he could stop referring to him as ‘Captain Strand’s Son’. “I’m Carlos, by the way,” he said as they turned to the left and then to the right.
“T.K.,” he said, flashing him a ridiculously cute smile.
T.K.? Well that was different. Carlos would have pegged him as more of a Ryan or a Chris, but T.K…he liked it. He liked him a lot.
“Does that stand for something?” he asked, kicking out his feet in time with the music.
“Yep.” T.K. gave him another sassy smile that said he would probably have to work to get the answer.
The dancers turned to face the back wall and Carlos turned with them. When he turned back he found T.K. checking out his ass. His eyes slid up to meet Carlos’ and he didn’t look in the least bit sorry to have been caught. “Like what you see?” Carlos asked, flashing a smile of his own.
Like what you see? Who the hell was he tonight? Carlos was a confident guy, but he wasn’t usually so cocky with people he’d just met. His mother had raised him with manners. All of which had apparently gone out the window the second he got an eyeful of T.K. Strand.
“Not bad,” T.K. said, his eyes full of laughter and…a little bit of desire? Maybe? Was Carlos reading that right? God, he’d been out of the dating game too long, he couldn’t even tell anymore.
“Not bad?” he repeated.
“You heard me,” T.K. said with a smirk.
Carlos felt himself growing tongue tied. Yet another thing that didn’t typically happen. He was a controlled guy. Confident. Not falling all over himself over a guy he’d known for all of five minutes. What the hell was wrong with him?
“It’s just kind of hard to tell,” T.K. said leaning close to him, “with your jeans on.”
If Carlos had been sipping a drink he would have choked. As it was he missed a step and nearly stumbled into the woman next to him. “Sorry,” he apologized as the song ended and the crowd shifted around him.
By the time he looked up again T.K. had moved back to the bar, but his eyes were still on Carlos, who found himself walking toward him as if pulled by a magnet, butterflies fluttering in his stomach. He absolutely had not come here tonight looking for a hookup. He’d just come to hang out with Michelle. He hadn’t even thought about the hot firefighter from the call earlier. And he definitely hadn’t been hoping he would see him again sometime.
He was halfway back to T.K. when his path was blocked by Michelle. “Hey you need a drink?”
“Uh, no, I’m good,” Carlos said, looking past her to where T.K. leaned against the bar top, a smirk all over his face, clearly having clocked the situation.
Michelle peered at him closely. “You okay? You look a little flushed.”
“What?” Carlos snapped his eyes back to her. “Yeah, yes, I’m fine. It’s just hot in here.”
His eyes found the bar again, but T.K. had disappeared and Carlos felt something akin to panic as he scanned the room trying to find him. Which was ridiculous. Because they didn’t even know each other. At all.
“You sure you’re okay? You’re acting strange,” Michelle said skeptically.
“I—yes.” Carlos caught a glimpse of T.K. headed out the front door. “I’ll be right back.”
Michelle called something after him but Carlos was already gone, pushing through the crowd to the front of the Honky Tonk.
The night air was cool against his burning cheeks as he searched the parking lot for T.K. “Well fancy meeting you out here,” said a voice to his left and Carlos pivoted to find T.K. sitting on top of the low porch railing that ran along the front of the building, half hidden in the shadows.
“Are you leaving?” Carlos asked, trying to keep his tone casual even as desperation filled him. He didn’t want this man to go. For a thousand reasons he couldn’t even explain.
“No, I was waiting for you,” T.K. said, taking a step forward.
Carlos’ breath left him in a rush and before he could even think he was moving, crashing into T.K., lips seeking, hands fumbling.
It was intense. T.K. tasted like spice and mint and a little bit of smoke. And Carlos wanted more. So, so much more. He was used to being the one in control, but T.K. met and matched his every move, parting his lips, hands sliding under his shirt, bodies bumping up against each other.
Carlos moved to T.K.’s neck and smiled when the other man let out a groan, his fingers fisting in the fabric of Carlos’ shirt. His hips bucked against Carlos’ and Carlos made an appreciative noise of his own.
His heart was pounding so hard in his chest it was almost painful but he couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop. He just wanted more and more and more.
It wasn’t until he felt T.K.’s fingers on his belt buckle that a tiny sliver of reason managed to worm its way through the screaming haze of his libido. He pulled back just a little bit, his breathing so ragged it was like he’d just run a marathon. He felt almost dizzy with want and lust. “Wait, just, hold on,” he rasped.
T.K. made a noise that almost sounded like a whine, but he allowed Carlos to take a half step back. “We can’t—I’m a police officer, I can’t hookup with you out here like this.”
“Are you sure?” T.K. asked, lips finding Carlos’ earlobe and Carlos felt his resolve weaken so much his knees almost gave out.
“I—yeah. I mean your entire crew is inside.” Another thought struck him and his eyes grew wide. “Your dad is inside.”
“Maybe we should get out of here then,” T.K. said, his voice low and full of sex.
Yes, yes, that was a thing you could do, right? They didn’t have to stay here, they could go somewhere else. “My place or yours?” Carlos asked.
“Yours,” T.K. said immediately. He seemed to realize he’d spoken too quickly and looked a little bashful. “I uh, I currently live with my dad.”
Well that was fucking adorable. How could this man be so cute and so sexy at the same time? It didn’t seem possible.
“No shame in that,” Carlos said. “I lived with my parents until I graduated from the police academy.”
How had they gone from pawing at each other to such easy and practical conversation? Carlos felt like his head was spinning. T.K. smiled and adjusted his shirt so he looked slightly less rumpled. “Just uh, just give me a minute?”
“Yeah, sure, of course, take your time,” Carlos said immediately.
T.K. looked him up and down and let out a breath, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
He disappeared inside and Carlos took a second to try and unscramble his thoughts. He pulled out his phone and texted Michelle. Heading home. Headache.
Seconds later a text came back. Really? Okay. Feel better.
Of course she wouldn’t be suspicious. Because Carlos never took guys home. Ever. It was a rule. A big rule. Not something that he did. Until tonight. Apparently tonight he did. Oh god, what was he doing?
He was about three seconds away from hopping into the Camaro and driving away as fast and as far as he could when T.K. reappeared, all smiles, his hair still mussed from Carlos’ fingers just minutes before. “You good?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Carlos said. “Yeah let’s go.”
If Carlos had been worried about the twenty minute drive home and whether it would be awkward or a mood killer, he didn’t need to be. T.K. was charming and easy to talk to. He kept the conversation flowing so easily that Carlos felt like he’d known him for years rather than minutes.
“So you have any weird roommates I need to know about or anything?” T.K. asked as Carlos turned onto his street.
“No,” Carlos said. “No roommates. I live by myself.”
“Interesting. Are you sure I’m not a serial killer or something? Isn’t it a little dangerous for you to take me home like this?”
Carlos chuckled. “I’m a cop T.K.”
“Oh, so you think you can handle me?”
It felt like a challenge. And the answer was no. Carlos absolutely could not handle whatever was going on right now, hence why they were about to walk into his home and do whatever it was you did with a one night stand you picked up at the bar.
Carlos glanced over and looked him up and down. “I guess you’ll have to wait and find out.”
The butterflies were back as they walked through the front door. He was completely out of his depth and trying hard as hell not to let it show. He tried to remember everything Adriana and Francesca had told him in vivid, explicit detail about their own one night stands, but everything seemed to have left his brain except for T.K.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked as he turned to lock the front door. “Water or—”
Before he could finish, T.K. was on him, lips against his, hands in his hair, hard and hot and intense. And for all his nerves, now that the moment was here, Carlos didn’t hesitate, grabbing T.K.’s ass and pulling his hips into his own. It felt like his whole body was on fire. Appropriate since the man he was currently making out with was a firefighter.
It seemed like T.K.’s hands were touching him everywhere at once, tangling in his hair, gripping his waist, sliding across the planes of his chest and stomach, and Carlos couldn’t get enough of the way his fingers moved so tenderly across his skin.
Carlos’ own fingers were making quick work of the buttons on T.K.’s shirt. “Is this okay?” he managed to ask.
T.K. nodded, letting his head fall back against the wall, eyes closed, breathless as Carlos pressed a kiss to his chest for each button he undid. He was holding back a little bit, trying to gauge T.K.; what he liked, what he didn’t, although, so far, it seemed like T.K. pretty much liked everything. “My bedroom’s upstairs,” he mumbled against T.K.’s skin.
“Okay,” T.K. said, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get there, grabbing Carlos’ face and lifting him so their mouths met once more.
His hands moved to Carlos’ belt and this time Carlos didn’t protest as T.K. undid the buckle and then moved onto Carlos’ jeans. He paused briefly, eyes meeting Carlos’. “Yeah?” he asked, searching for consent.
“Yeah,” Carlos replied and T.K. wasted no time undoing the button and the zipper, pushing his jeans down until they hung low on his hips.
Carlos wasn’t sure how they made it up the stairs without dying, both of them half undressed, falling all over each other. When they finally reached his bedroom he felt desire burn down his spine so hot and fast he could hardly stand it. He steered T.K. toward the bed by his hips and gently pushed him down. “Oh so that’s how it is?” T.K. asked with a laugh as Carlos pulled his shirt off.
“Yeah, that’s how it is,” Carlos said as he climbed onto the bed. “Do you think you can handle it?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” T.K. said with a grin.
Time seemed to slip away and before he knew it, it was the early hours of the morning. T.K. was up and pulling on his clothes. “You can stay, you know,” Carlos said, shifting in the bed. “If you want. It’s late.”
“You don’t do this a lot do you?” T.K. asked with a smile.
Carlos barked out a laugh. “Not really.”
Never would be more accurate, but T.K. didn’t need to know that.
“I gotta say I’m surprised. A guy like you,” T.K. let his eyes wander appreciatively over Carlos’ body, “I can’t believe everybody in that bar wasn’t trying to take you home.”
Warmth flooded through him. Was this bliss? It wasn’t love. For sure. You couldn’t fall in love after one heated make-out session and a couple hours of mind-blowingly good sex, right?
“I already called an Uber,” T.K. said. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “This was fun though. We should do it again sometime. Give me your phone, I’ll put in my number.”
Carlos reached for his nightstand but came up empty handed. “I think my phone’s in my pants downstairs.”
T.K. grinned, clearly remembering exactly how those pants had come off. “Do you have a pen?”
Carlos managed to find one and T.K. took it, then reached for Carlos’ hand, carefully writing down his cell number. “Don’t lose it,” he said with a smile.
Carlos would have it tattooed onto his skin if necessary.
T.K.’s phone buzzed and he looked down. “That’s my ride. No don’t get up,” he said when Carlos began to rise. “I’ll lock the door behind me.”
He leaned over and pressed one more burning kiss to Carlos’ lips. He turned when he got to the doorway, biting his lip and eyeing Carlos critically. “Very nice.”
“What?” Carlos asked in amused confusion, pushing himself up onto his elbows.
“Your ass. Now that I’ve seen it, I can say for sure, it’s very nice.”
T.K. grinned at him and then vanished down the stairs. Carlos snorted and shook his head. He wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened, but whatever it was, he’d liked it. A lot. And he really hoped they would do it again.
#911 Lone Star#911 LS#Tarlos#Carlos Reyes#T.K. Strand#It's not smut#But it's close#Lots of making out#And clothes coming off#But the private times stay private#Carlos is a sucker#And totally in love with T.K.#And T.K. is down for a good time
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SENTENCE MEME ⟶ WESTWORLD / 1.01 –– 1.02
always feel free to tweak the sentence to fit your muse.
“I’m not feeling quite myself.”
“Would you like to wake up from this dream?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, as long as you answer my questions correctly.”
“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”
“Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty.”
“At one point or another, we were all new to this world.”
“They’re looking for the same thing we are, a place to be free to stake out our dreams, a place with unlimited possibilities.”
“I’d rather earn a woman’s affection than pay for it.”
“Do you ever feel inconsistencies in your world, or repetitions?”
“All lives have routine, mine’s no different.”
“I never cease to wonder at the thought that any day the course of my whole life could change with just one chance encounter.”
“Don’t mind me, just trying to look chivalrous.”
“There’s a path for everyone, and your path leads you back to me.”
“I know things will work out the way they’re meant to.”
“Is that any way to treat an old friend?”
“I realized winning doesn’t mean anything unless someone else loses.”
“Seems you’re not the man you thought you were.”
“Would the things I told you change the way you think?”
“Every new person I meet reminds me how lucky I am to be alive and how beautiful this world can be.”
“I’m more interested in the bad guys.”
“He must have slipped it in there without telling anyone.”
“It’s the tiny things that make them seem real.”
“They don’t make that like they used to. They don’t make anything like the used to.”
“I’ve seen a few showdowns in my day.”
“Perhaps we better drink to a deep and dreamless slumber.”
“I know how boys think. Was one myself once.”
“I am what I am because of you, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“It’s beautiful, when you’re angry but trying to control it.”
“The guy kind of creeps me out.”
“If you’re this bad at small talk, how the fuck did you get your job?”
“I wanted to apologize if I came across as aggressive.”
“The guy’s gonna chase his demons right over the deep end.”
“You were saying should our fearless leader have a breakdown, you want to leverage it for your career.”
“I just wanted you to know that you have my support.”
“Here I thought you were only good for writing depraved little fantasies.”
“You’re smart enough to guess there’s a bigger picture, but not smart enough to see what it is.”
“You’ll have more rich assholes to gratify tomorrow.”
“I’m beginning to think you’re getting sweet on me.”
“Sometimes I envy your forgetfulness.”
“This isn’t minor improvisation, it’s a fucking shitstorm.”
“Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool –– the mistake.”
“I flattered myself thinking we were taking a more disciplined approach here.”
“I suppose self-delusion is a gift of natural selection as well.”
“We’ve managed to slip evolutions leash now, haven’t we?”
“We can cure any disease, and one fine day perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead.”
“You must indulge me the occasional mistake.”
“I have a question, a question you’re not supposed to ask.”
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
“You’re all here indulging your particular vices, so I’ve come to indulge mine.”
“I know we both believe the same thing.”
“No matter how dirty the business, do it well.”
“The problem with the righteous? They can’t shoot for shit.”
“You’re in a dream that could determine your life.”
“I shall have revenges on you both.”
“What they are, I don’t know, but they will be the terrors fo the earth.”
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
“Unless this uptight prick is who you really are, in which case be someone else.”
“This is to make sure we don’t give you anything more than you can handle.”
“Figuring out how it works is half the fun.”
“If you can’t tell, does it matter?”
“You don’t have to worry about what most people would do.”
“I think there’s something fucked up going on with his cognition.”
“I’ll make sure this is not something more serious.”
“I know that you think you have a handle on what this is gonna be.”
“This place seduces everybody eventually.”
“You’re gonna be begging me to stay because this place is the answer to that question that you’ve been asking yourself.”
“That’s the best thanks you could muster?”
“Don’t do anything you might regret.”
“Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice telling me to stop, to be careful, to leave most of my life unlived.”
“This is the new world, and in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want.”
“You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.”
“There’s something else bothering you, I know how that head of yours works.”
“The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage.”
“You think it’s sabotage?”
“I imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations.”
“The problem is that what you and I do is so complicated.”
“We create life itself out of chaos.”
“He’ll only try to rope you into some bullshit treasure hunt.”
“They all got some big adventure that they want to sell you on.”
“First up, you’re gonna buy me a drink.”
“You haven’t told anyone about our little talks?”
“How many interactions have you participated in since we last talked?”
“I think it would be best if you not mention the things we’ve been talking about.”
“There’s something different about you, about the way you think.”
“I find it fascinating, but others may not see it that way.”
“In this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want.”
“Never open your mouth that wide unless someone’s paying you for it.”
“If you find yourself in a bad dream, close your eyes, count to backwards from three, wake yourself right up.”
“You can get fucked right back to sleep by one of these assholes with their miniature peckers.”
“You pay for the drinks, not the right to gawk at me.”
“That woman in charge is quite formidable.”
“This character analysis routine really isn’t half as charming as you think.”
“You’re always worried about making a mess.”
“You are talented, driven, and inoffensive.”
“As a sign of my humble appreciation, I’d like to offer you an opportunity of a lifetime.”
“Did you just grab a cock from the body shop and hame it between his eyes?”
“He used to say that only boring people get bored.”
“That’s what I love about this place.”
“As much fun as this is, I got to be moving on.”
“When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real.”
“You see what a bored mind can conjure?”
“Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.”
“You’re certainly comfortable with long, pensive silences.”
“Fuckload of aggression, courtesy of those morons.”
“I guess you could add lying to your list of sins.”
“The only thing wrong with the seven deadly sins is that there aren’t more of them.”
“My transgressions wash off a little easier than yours.”
“I’m the king of hygiene.”
“I have vivisection, self-cannibalism.”
“They come back because they discover something they imagine no one had ever noticed before.”
“They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are.”
“They already know who they are, they want a glimpse of who they could be.”
“The only thing your story tells is who you are.”
#rp meme#roleplay meme#sentence meme#sentence starters#starter sentences#KIND / SENTENCE.#KIND / IN CHARACTER.#BASED ON / TV SHOW.
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The TNT loop got me good today. 7.21 is... a new level of angst now. I’ve been yelling my incoherent feelings at @wigglebox about this, and decided I just needed to make all the parallels. So I’m just gonna quote chunks of the transcript for 7.21 here, and then comment on it. Because it is A Lot™
(honestly y’all should be glad I’m not a gif maker because a) it probably would make this post lethal, and 2) the first casualty would’ve been me)
Okay, here we go. For reference, I’m just using the transcript here, and basically annotating it with thoughts from the POV of 15.03. Some of it will be directly quoted from this transcript at the superwiki if you’d like to follow along for maximum pain (or to fill in any blanks I’ve left in the rest of the episode), and some of it will just be direct commentary.
We begin with Cas awakening, bolting upright, from the catatonic state he’s been in since he’d healed Sam’s Hell Trauma. Remember, Cas took that wound into himself. Cas’s awakening wasn’t “natural.” It coincided with the awakening of the Prophet Kevin Tran, and Dean shattering the ancient rock concealing a long-buried “Word Of God.” I’d like to take a moment here to remind everyone why Sam had even suffered this trauma that Cas had to heal in the first place. Not only was “breaking Sam’s wall” one of the “terrible things” Cas had done in s6 in the name of trying to keep Dean from being conscripted back into service in the new Apocalypse Raphael was plotting, but it also led directly to The Worst Thing Cas Has Ever Done In The Name Of Doing The Right Thing Of His Own Free Will. Because ALL of this was couched in that language. In 6.20, in that final scene, this was the specific language that Cas used with Dean in his final attempt to earn Dean’s trust and support in his (soon to be) catastrophic plan. And Dean couldn’t give it to him. ALL of this is now currently wrapped up into the events of the first three episodes of s15. Free Will, the Word of God, a Cosmic Wound that has injured both Sam and Cas (and that Cas was unable to heal this time), Kevin Tran forced into service, A Plot to gather god-like power through the consumption of souls, a Rift into an afterlife for the purposes of releasing a terrible apocalypse on the world... heck... there’s probably more, but this will do nicely for a start, for the purposes of Painful, Awful Context.
FLASH TO TITLE CARD
(see what I mean? this is gonna be a long, bumpy ride... I should probably put this under a cut...)
The lightning flashes and odd weather effects from breaking open the tablet caused a worldwide disruption to the weather, to the point that a meteorologist on the radio said he wasn’t baffled by it, but offended.
So the Word of God being freed, from being given power by having been revealed, revealed something that went beyond confusion, and was just so wrong it actually made the guy ANGRY. Hmm. Kinda like Dean in early s15, yes? Dean’s our “offended weatherman.”
(I really miss the text separator line function. Thanks for taking that away from us, tungl. I guess I’ll have to insert something else between commentary... asterisks it is... I’ll keep it to three for a visual separation that hopefully won’t screw too badly with screen readers)
DEAN: So, what? We start the storm heard 'round the world?
SAM: When we broke this thing [SAM touches the stone tablet] open last night, every maternity ward within a hundred-mile radius got slammed. Looks like any woman in the last month of her pregnancy went into labor.
WELL that’s definitely an interesting parallel... motherhood, giving birth. With the imagery of Rowena’s spell in 15.03 looking both like Mary and Jess in 1.01 as well as a weird sort of “reverse birth” of hundreds of souls.
***
Sam and Dean were planning to head West to Rufus’ cabin, until THIS, that had them heading in the exact opposite direction, because Cas:
SAM: What? [to DEAN] Cas is awake.
DEAN: When? [SAM puts the phone on speaker and holds it out.] When?
MEG: Last night about eight.
DEAN: And you waited till now to call us?
MEG: I've been busy with Cas. He's just a tad different than when he dozed off, 'kay?
DEAN: What do you mean, different?
MEG: Hey, Seacrest, guess what – not a nurse. Just playing one on TV. Want answers? Start driving.
Or, because Demon who teamed up with them specifically because they intended to use Cas for his specific power... Meg intended to earn Cas’s loyalty for her own security/protection/personal mission against Crowley, so she could swing him like a big hammer. In s15, Belphegor’s machinations were much the same, with his long-term plan to earn just enough of Cas’s trust to use him as the key to open the box holding Lilith’s Crook. By hook or by crook, right? Demons, man. I mean, I’ve mentioned the parallel to 8.17, and the crypt scene with the unlocking of this box in a different crypt for a different god-level power item (in 8.17 it was brainwashing and the angel tablet, and in 7.21 it’s denial and the leviathan tablet, but you can draw a big fat straight line through all of it). And this is just another go-around of all those same themes.
***
DEAN: We raced all the way here, and now I don't know. I can't say I'm fired up to see what's left of the guy.
SAM: You think he remembers at all?
DEAN: That, and I'm guessing whatever kind of hell baggage he lifted off of your plate. It's not gonna be pretty.
Oh remember this? Previously on Supernatural, this was owie, but now it’s been weaponized with new context from s15, with this endless cycle of guilt and blame laid on the table between Dean and Cas. He couldn’t look at Cas, was terrified to see what had become of Cas because of ALL of this. Because of everything that began in s6 and culminated with them finally cracking the Word of God. Or at least A word of god, since we know now that this wasn’t the only thing Chuck wrote, you know? And we’re still due to progress through Metatron’s hackneyed retelling, too. But even back then, Dean’s feelings of guilt, blame, and loss were all tangled up together regarding Cas, and infused with a confusing dollop of friendship, need, and (dare I suggest) love. Because the kind of stuff Dean (and Sam) have forgiven Cas for over the years? Even if it was only in knowing the underlying good intentions and wondering about all of Cas’s motivations, this isn’t the kind of thing you forgive someone for unless you truly care about them, deep down. The only ones who truly have the power to break you like this are the ones you love.
***
After Cas’s unsettling attempt at a “joke,” (pull my finger *lights explode* *disturbing chortling*), Dean needs information, and needs it from Cas.
DEAN: Okay, just hang on, Cas. Wait. Let us catch up to you for a second.
SAM: So, you're saying you remember who you are, what you are.
CASTIEL: Yes. Of course. Oh. Outside today, in the garden, I followed a honeybee. I saw the route of flowers. It's all right there, the whole plan. There's nothing to add.
SAM: You might want to add a little Thorazine.
MEG: Right? He's been like the naked guy at the rave ever since he woke up. Totally useless.
Let’s start at the end of this mess and work our way back to the start. Meg declares Cas “totally useless.” Because in his current state (I don’t fight, I watch the bees), he literally can’t be the weapon she hoped he’d be for her own personal needs. Like Belphegor in s15, it took some chipping away before Cas could even remotely be “useful” to him. Cas couldn’t even look at him, and he certainly would never agree to fight for him (the muscle).
Next let’s tackle Cas’s perception of creation, as told in metaphor between his observation on the micro-level scale of the “route of flowers,” which he directly compared to the macro-level scale of “the whole plan.” As if there was a “whole plan” to the universe. I could write a doctoral thesis on just this statement alone, of how Cas’s observation of the plan inherently altered it, how his presence in the garden as observer watching the bees do their thing, following them along their paths to the flowers irrevocably inserted him into the “whole plan,” and whether he or the bees realized it or not, those bees by necessity altered their paths to accommodate Cas’s presence in their daily routine. Did this make their lives easier? More difficult? Regardless, it had to affect their choices, which flowers to visit, which paths to fly, because Cas’s mere presence provided an obstacle to their routes. They couldn’t fly through him, you know? Left or right, over and around, He became something the “whole plan” needed to work around. And isn’t that what Chuck’s been doing since the start? And on an entirely different level, Chuck’s done it all with intent, because “the whole plan” had been his creation from the beginning.
And then, both first and last depending on your perspective, is Dean, asking Cas to stop just long enough for him to finally catch up. Asking Cas to wait. Because Dean feels like he’s the one who’s fallen behind.
Okay, everyone take five to have a good cry *passes out tissues*
***
CASTIEL: Will you look at her? My caretaker. All of that thorny pain. So beautiful.
MEG: We've been over this. I don't like poetry. Put up or shut up.
Ah, Cas and “poetry.” He’s temporarily given up on seeking Free Will, temporarily abandoned the attempt to “teach poetry to fish,” as he’d said in 6.20. And Meg doesn’t like poetry either. She just wants Cas to suck it up and do what she needs him to-- be her personal hammer. She doesn’t care about him, but only what he can do for her. Put up or shut up.
***
CASTIEL: Oh. Of course. Now I understand.
SAM: Understand what?
CASTIEL: You were the ones. Well... I guess that makes sense.
DEAN: What makes sense?
CASTIEL: If someone was going to free the Word from the vault of the earth, it would end up being you two. Oh, I love you guys.
CASTIEL pulls DEAN and SAM into a hug.
Of course The Winchesters would be the Disruptors™ to the natural order, right? Even though Sam and Dean had only stumbled across the word of God by accident, while trying to clean up the planet-wide epidemic of cosmic Goo left behind after Cas’s attempt to rewrite the story and play god. But still, of course it would be Sam and Dean, because it’s always Sam and Dean, right? I mean, Cas already hung a lampshade on “The Whole Plan” being right there for anyone to see, in everything from the path of the flowers right up to the unearthing of the Word.
Chalk another one up to the spiral narrative as everything.
***
Cas mutters something about cat penises, and females not being consulted on that terrible bit of creation. Chuck, man. Throwing barbed penises around with zero consideration for the ladies. Ow. But on to the bigger things:
DEAN: Cas, please, we're losing ground out there, okay? We need your help. Can you not see that?
CASTIEL: This is the handwriting of Metatron.
SAM: Metatron? You saying a Transformer wrote that?
DEAN: No. That's Megatron.
SAM: What?
DEAN: The Transformer – it's Megatron.
SAM: What?
CASTIEL: Metatron. He's an angel. He's the scribe of God. He took down dictation when creation was being formed.
SAM: And that's the Word of God?
CASTIEL: One of them, yes.
They’ve been drowning in goo for months, and Cas coming back had represented a beacon of hope in the darkness. But the reality of the whole situation at hand wasn’t something Cas could deal with. He was so burdened with personal guilt that he chose to ignore the mess, reacting with anger (and by disappearing) with directly confronted with it. In s15, Dean... can’t just disappear, even though he’s the one drowning now.
A... Transformer. A misinterpreted word that changes the meaning, creating a baffling misunderstanding that requires a re-translation and correction before understanding can occur. That’s so meta I could cry. “I always get the words right.” Cas had no idea what “Megatron” or “Transformers” were, but saw that Sam and Dean were literally “speaking language he didn’t understand,” but that they’d come to a satisfactory conclusion that seemed irrelevant to their current conversation anyway, and just... continued on as if the disruption had never occurred. An entire loop of conversation just flew right over his head. He might not get words wrong, but sometimes he just doesn’t get them at all, you know? Nor does Dean always understand what the intent behind Cas’s words are. They need a translator. Or they need to stop speaking in references and metaphor, and speak clearly in unmistakable language. And all of this is wrapped up in the parallel to the indecipherable Word of God, which will require a unique translator to interpret.
Author to Scribe to Prophet, because the knowledge within is not meant for angels. It’s not even meant for humans. It’s just another randomly-scattered puzzle left by Chuck to be simultaneously helpful and dangerous. Choices and drama.
***
CASTIEL: Don't like conflict.
CASTIEL disappears and the stone tablet drops to the floor, breaking into three pieces.
Aah, the conflict, that Meg attempts to blame on Dean, when she was the one who (I mean, understandably she was curious, but she’s still a demon that Dean still doesn’t trust, who once possessed Sam and tried to force Dean to kill him, so... she’s not actually their friend, she was “mutually assured destruction” in case things with Cas went sideways while Sam and Dean were running around trying to clean up the Leviathan mess...). Cas’s reaction to conflict back then had been to drop the Word like a hot potato, smashing it to pieces on the floor. Even when he isn’t trying, he’s tearing up pages and altering the shape of Chuck’s story. Bless him. But he’s still... actively avoiding doing anything, including acknowledging his own role in the events that have brought them to this point, and to everything Dean had been fighting almost on his own (Sam’s been “in the bell jar” most of s7 fighting the Hallucifers) and basically surviving with whiskey, denial, and pasting a fake smile on and pushing through trauma after trauma without Cas (or... pretty much anyone else in any measurably reliable way). But we all know this isn’t how DEAN reacts to trauma, right? He pushes people away, by manufacturing conflict when he runs out of organic conflict.
***
DEAN: All right, I'll go handle Cas. Sam, will you please pick up the Word of God?
Dean, delegating responsibilities. He’ll take the broken angel, and Sam will take the broken Word.
***
MEG: We both call, who do you think Cas will come to? I'm guessing me. You heard him – thorny beauty, blah, blah. I'm the saint who stayed with him. He owes me. His words.
SAM: Yeah, what about what he owes us?
MEG: Well, work on him a little. Maybe he'll start crushing on you, too, hot stuff.
SAM: What are you gonna do with a broken angel? Don't be stupid.
MEG: I'll take power where I can get it. I've got myself to look out for.
Unlike Belphegor, Meg never even attempted to disguise her motives. She wanted Cas for his power, broken or not. She’d find a way to manipulate him to defend her-- despite his insistence that he doesn’t fight. And it’s interesting it’s Sam who’s given the line “what about what he owes us?” While Dean’s discussion with Cas is far more personal.
***
DEAN: You realize you just broke God's Word?
CASTIEL looks away and DEAN sits down at the table opposite him.
DEAN: It's Sam's thing, isn't it? You taking on his, uh, cage-match scars. I'm guessing that's what broke your bank, right?
CASTIEL: Well, it took... everything to get me here.
DEAN: What are you talking about, man?
CASTIEL: Dean, I know you want different answers.
DEAN: No, I want you to button up your coat and help us take down Leviathans. Do you remember what you did?
CASTIEL holds up the board game “Sorry!” He shakes it once and the board and pieces appear on the table, set up ready to play. CASTIEL sets the box aside.
CASTIEL: Do you want to go first?
Dean’s still kind of in awe at the notion of directly defying God’s Word, and Cas just... doesn’t even seem bothered. Dean needs to find an explanation for Cas’s avoidance of the Urgent Matter at Hand. He blames it on what Cas suffered after taking on Sam’s Hell trauma, but Cas tries to tell him it’s so much more than that, that his entire experience since the moment he gripped Dean tight and raised him from perdition had led to this moment. But that’s too much for Dean to even wrap his head around, and Cas is just... speaking in riddles anyway. So he presses on and demands a direct answer. Cas continues speaking in riddles.
And pushing for a more direct personal conversation, despite the chasm of misunderstandings separating them. For possibly the first time ever, it’s Cas speaking in metaphors and references that Dean does not understand. And it frustrates the hell out of him. He just wants to get some straight answers out of Cas before the world goes up in flames. Or drowns in dark waters.
He needs Cas to “button up his coat” and help save the world. Save it from the mess he technically made of it. But Cas won’t even engage with what Dean’s saying to him, like in s15 Dean doesn’t even engage with what Cas is saying to him (but Cas is also refusing to button up his coat and do what had to be done in s15, refusing to even look at Belphegor... despite actively assuming another equally important job... he wasn’t avoiding HELPING, just avoiding the specific task Dean had tried to give him... as the one of them most qualified to monitor a demon for ~demonic hinkiness~ or whatever. Sam and Dean would’ve just assumed they were dealing with Jack if Cas hadn’t been the one to tell them it was actually a demon, you know?
***
Meanwhile, back in Cas’s room, Kevin is knitting the Word of God back together, while being simultaneously baffled and terrified by everything that’s going on.
***
DEAN picks up a “Sorry!” card.
CASTIEL: You know, we weren't sure at first which monkeys were gonna make it. No offense, but I [DEAN moves a marker on the board] was backing the Neanderthals because their poetry was... just amazing. It's in perfect tune [CASTIEL picks up a card] with the spheres. But in the end, it was you – the [CASTIEL moves a marker] homo sapiens sapiens. You guys ate the apple, invented pants.
DEAN: Cas, where can we find this, uh, Metatron? Is he still alive?
CASTIEL: I'm sorry. I – I think you have to go back to start.
DEAN moves a marker.
DEAN: This is important.
CASTIEL motions for DEAN to pick up another card. DEAN does and moves another marker.
DEAN: I think Metatron could stop a lot of bad. You understand that?
CASTIEL picks up another card.
CASTIEL: We live in a "sorry" universe. It's engineered to create conflict. I mean, why should I prosper from... your misfortune? [CASTIEL puts down a marker and moves DEAN’s marker back to the start.] But these are the rules. I didn't make them.
DEAN: You made some of them. When you tried to become God, when you cut that hole into that wall.
CASTIEL: Dean... it's your move.
DEAN pounds a fist on the table and swipes the board to the floor.
DEAN: Forget the damn game! Forget the game, Cas.
CASTIEL: I'm sorry, Dean.
DEAN: No. You're playing "Sorry!"
Dean’s still trying to solve their bigger problems, but he’s really trying to play along to appease Cas, trying to speak to him on a level he can understand. Trying to “play his game” and hope that Cas will play by the rules Dean had thought they both understood-- give and take. Mutual contribution to the conversation. But Cas continued talking about things Dean believed were irrelevant in the face of the current crisis. Neanderthals losing out to homo sapiens. And again, Cas talking poetry, and referencing the spiral narrative of creation.
The thing about Sorry! is that the game involves a lot of elements of chance, but also a lot of elements of CHOICE. I know someone’s written meta on this in the past, but really quickly, in Sorry, each player controls a number of different pawns, all of which must eventually be advanced from the starting point to their respective finish line. The playing board itself is the defined and accepted parameters of the world the game will play out on, yet there are multiple different “paths” for each player to take. The players draw cards in turn (the element of Chance) and then decide which of their pieces to advance according to the instructions on the card they selected (the element of Choice).
The thing is, in this game, Cas could’ve chosen to “play a different piece.” He could’ve made the game easier on Dean while still advancing his own position, and yet he chose to strategically remove Dean’s piece from the board. Cas was playing not just to win for himself, but to frustrate Dean’s chances to even get a fair turn to play. Cas was playing by the rules, after all, which encourage competition over teamwork. The name of the game is Sorry! after all, and “sending your opponent back to the start” is half the point of the game. Cas wasn’t going to even play in the spirit of cooperation with Dean. He wasn’t going to provide answers. This was, in a horrific way, Cas’s attempt to revert himself back to the “reprogrammed” Cas that came back from Heaven at the end of 4.20. All under the guise of playing sorry, without having to engage with it in good faith.
Dean wasn’t even asking Cas to fight here. He was trying to respect Cas’s choice to “avoid conflict.” But Cas wouldn’t even TALK to him, wasn’t even engaging with him as if HE was real. And Dean was not unreasonably frustrated.
Dean’s been fighting back against an impossible enemy that can’t be killed and has devised a way to suppress human free will into submission, so that all of humanity will willingly march themselves into the slaughterhouse. It’s horrifically WORSE than the apocalypse to Dean, and he’s desperate and at the end of his rope, and is hoping for even a spark of hope to keep fighting himself... and Cas has nothing but poetry for him.
***
And then the angels show up, prepared to take the Prophet with them, as if Kevin was their property. Kinda raises some questions about how the Prophet Chuck could’ve been unaware of what he was, you know? Almost as if it had literally been a lie...
HESTER: You smote thousands in Heaven. You gave a big, scary speech. Then you were gone. What the hell was that?!
CASTIEL: Rude, for one thing.
INIAS: Where have you been?
CASTIEL: Oh, Inias. Hester, I... I know you want something – answers. I... I wish it could be that… There are still many things I can teach you. I can offer, um, well, perspective. Here. [CASTIEL points a finger at HESTER.] Pull my finger. [HESTER doesn’t move.] Uh... Uh... Meg will – will get another light, and I'll – I'll blow it out again. And, well, this time, it'll be funny, and – and we'll all look back and laugh.
HESTER: You're insane.
DEAN: Hey.
DEAN is standing in the doorway.
DEAN: Heads up, Sunshine.
DEAN puts his hand in an angel-banishing sigil he’s drawn on the wall outside the room. White light flares and the angels vanish.
Unlike Dean, who’d tried to be patient and understanding with Cas despite everything, Hester simply angrily demanded answers from him. And Cas... was equally evasive with her. She labeled his evasion “insane,” but Cas is 100% sane. He knows exactly what it is he’s avoiding answering for, but he’s paralyzed with fear that anything he does will only add to the problem. And Dean gets rid of the angels before they can start killing everyone (including Cas).
I mean, Cas’s answers are pretty obvious anyway, you know? His guilt, his hubris for believing he was choosing the right thing, in trying to teach the angels a better way-- Free Will and the protection of humanity-- that in the execution he lost his own free will (and his life) and unleashed a horror onto Heaven and Earth that he’s entirely incapable of fixing. It’s not like he doesn’t HAVE answers, they’re just... to much for him to even face. Guilt is a terrible thing.
***
DEAN: That is back in one piece, I see. And you're saying that there's some sort of a "How to punch Dick" recipe in there somewhere?
KEVIN: I-I don't know what you're saying, but it seems kind of like an "in case of emergency" note. What did they mean by "prophet"?
DEAN: Oh, no. [to SAM] Really?
SAM: Yeah. Yeah, that's what the angel said.
KEVIN: I don't want to be a prophet.
DEAN: No. You don't at all.
Yeah... nobody wants to be a prophet. It’s a terrible job. No free will, no freedom at all, just ensnared into the service to God’s Word. (oh, and poor Kevin will try to resist, will willingly nearly kill himself trying to turn God’s Word around into a weapon he can wield. I can see why Chuck would single him out for specific “punishment” for messing around with his story like that.
***
MEG: Yeah. Yeah, Castiel. It's me.
DEAN: Cas? Where? Where is he?
MEG: [to DEAN] Shut up.
CASTIEL: I’ll stop speaking.
MEG: No. No, Cas. You talk.
CASTIEL: [audible over MEG’s phone] I’m in a place called Perth.
MEG: Perth?
DEAN: Perth? As in Australia?
MEG: What dogs? [to DEAN] He says he's surrounded by unhappy dogs.
CASTIEL: They’re chasing a rabbit around [indistinct]…
MEG: Oh. Okay. He's at a dog track in Perth.
CASTIEL: I’m surrounded by large unhappy dogs.
MEG: Yeah, they're unhappy 'cause the rabbit's fake. Listen, we're on highway 94, north of St. Cloud, Minnesota, just passing mile marker 79.
CASTIEL materializes in the back seat between MEG and KEVIN.
Okay, first off, miscommunication. This is just riddled with miscommunication. But the background conversation, Cas is at a dog track surrounded by large, unhappy dogs. Kinda makes interesting light of all the “Dean is a Weird Dog” the show has been hammering on for years-- both literally and metaphorically. But... these dogs at the track are given the runaround. They’re trained to run a specific track for the entertainment of the spectators, running in endless circles chasing after a lure that they can never quite catch before they arrive at the finish line, where even winning the race just means they’ll have to run another round around the track the next day. And the lure? The rabbit they’re trained to follow after? It’s fake. It’s all part of the bigger game the poor dogs can’t escape from. I’d be unhappy, too.
Which is all a tidy metaphor for how Dean feels in s15, but how Cas has seen pretty much everything since way back at this point, if not far earlier.
Hence even more miscommunications, or at the very least each of them not understanding where the other is even coming from, based on these wildly different baseline perspectives. Cas, as an angel, had always been one of the spectators before Dean had pulled him into the race, so to speak. He’s always understood all of existence as a sort of game in this way, but Dean had never even had an inkling of the bigger game they were all part of all along. He’d thought he understood the rules, understood his role in the game, and it took until s15 for him to see that all of it had been a game to Chuck. That even when he’d thought he’d escaped the endless go-around of fake rabbits, it had only put him back at the startling line over and over again to run another race. And Cas... can’t understand Dean’s perspective here any more than Dean can understand Cas’s, despite them each believing they actually understand one another and just don’t care... awful, right?
***
CASTIEL: They're from the Garrison – my old Garrison. Looks like Hester's taken over. We were assigned to watch the earth. Often, it was boring. The wars were very boring and the sex – you know, the repetition. Anyway, I was, uh... I was their captain. Isn't that strange?
SAM: Cas, why are they pissed at us now?
CASTIEL: [to MEG] You know, those racing dogs were absolutely miserable. They can only think in ovals.
DEAN: Cas, don't make me pull this car over! Why are angels after us?
CASTIEL: Are you angry? Why are you angry?
DEAN: No, I-I'm... Please, can we just stay on target?
CASTIEL: There is no reason for anger. They're only following protocol. If the Word of God is revealed, a keeper of the Word will awaken, like this [He touches KEVIN’s nose] hot potato right here.
Observing creation enabled Cas to see the “repetition.” The endless loops. Like the dogs running in ovals. But he’s unable to connect with humanity directly right now, unable to risk feeling. And we’re back to doorways to doubt, and the same “only humans can feel true joy.” But also suffering. As long as he remains at a distance, he can protect himself from feeling all of that, from having to recognize his part in it.
And he doesn’t understand why Dean is angry that he keeps talking in circles.
Dean just wants to know why the angels are angry at THEM, why they’re coming after THEM when they’ve got so many other bigger problems they’re trying to solve.
***
CASTIEL: Anyway, Garrison code dictates you take the keeper to the desert to learn the Word away from men.
DEAN: What kind of sense does that make? He has to tell us so that we can use it.
CASTIEL: That's God and his shiny red apples.
Cas didn’t expect anything less from God. Dean just wants to stop the Leviathan from eating humanity and destroying life as they knew it, and Cas... doesn’t have anything to give.
***
DEAN: Okay, you know what? Screw the Garrison. We need the tablet to end Sick Roman's "Soylent Us" crap.
CASTIEL: If you want the Word, you'll have to duck Hester and her soldiers.
SAM: Yeah, you're in our corner, right, Cas?
CASTIEL: No, I don't fight anymore. I watch the bees.
see? yet despite that declaration, Cas does try to help how he feels comfortable-- painting sigils to hide them from angels, but leaving off banishing sigils or he himself wouldn’t be able to stay. Kind of a conundrum, right? Sacrificing some of the safety Sam and Dean could’ve worked into the sigils so he himself could remain in the room with them.
***
CASTIEL: You seem troubled. Of course, that's a primary aspect of your personality, so I sometimes ignore it.
SAM: Okay. Um... right now I'm just wondering about you.
CASTIEL: What about me? You're worried about the burden I lifted from you.
SAM: I think I was done for. Do you see Lucifer?
CASTIEL: I did at first. But that was... It was a projection of yours, I think, sort of an aftertaste. Now I more see... well, everything. It's funny. I was – I was done for, too. The weight of all my mistakes, all those lives and souls lost, I... I couldn't take it, either. I was… I was lost until I took on your pain. It's strange to think that that helped, but –
SAM: I know you never did anything but try to help. I realize that, Cas, and I'm grateful. We're all grateful. And we're gonna help you get better, okay? No matter what it takes.
CASTIEL: What do you mean, "better"?
And here we have it. Sam plainly expresses his own guilt and regret over what’s become of Cas. But Cas hasn’t even begun to see how deep he’s buried himself to avoid dealing with his own guilt. Using Sam’s trauma as a sort of penance, he’s using that to “transfer” his own guilt away from himself, the way he shifted Sam’s trauma into himself. As if the second shift washes away the first and he’s wiped the slate clean. As long as he lets himself believe that, he doesn’t have to face what he’s done, and the consequences of his own choices.
Which is... kinda what Dean’s doing in early s15.
***
KEVIN: I am not prepared to factor the supernatural into my [DEAN puts the brown paper bag over KEVIN’s face] world view.
DEAN: Okay, there we go. [He pats KEVIN on the back.] That's it. That's it. Just breathe. Take it easy.
KEVIN holds onto the bag and breathes into it.
DEAN: Oh, I don't know, man. What can I say? You've been chosen. And it sucks. Believe me. There's no use asking "why me?" 'Cause the angels – they don't care. I think maybe they just don't have the equipment to care. Seems like when they try, it just... breaks them apart.
I mean, Dean’s seen what trying to care has done to Cas. And Dean... was the one who pushed Cas to care in the first place.
***
And Meg kills a couple of demons who’d picked up their track, but that also brings the angels back down on them:
MEG: Typical. I save our bacon, and you're sitting here, waiting by a devil's trap. Seriously, I just killed two of Crowley's men. I could have gone the other way on that.
CASTIEL: It's true, incidentally. There's other demons' blood on that blade.
MEG: Look, I'm simpler than you think. I've figured one thing out about this world – just one, pretty much. You find a cause, and you serve it. Give yourself over, and it orders your life. Lucifer and Yellow Eyes – their mission was it for me.
DEAN: So, what? We should trust you because you wanted to free Satan from Hell?
MEG: I'm talking "cause," douchebag, as in reason to get up in the morning. Obviously, these things shift over time. We learn, we grow. Now, for me currently, the cause is bringing down the King. And I know we'll need help to do it.
DEAN: Crowley ain't the problem this year.
MEG: When are you gonna get it? Crowley's always the problem. He's just waiting for the right moment to strike. I know what I'm supposed to do. And it isn't screw with Sam and Dean or lose the only angel who'd go to bat for me.
SAM breaks the devil’s trap with his foot.
CASTIEL: This is good – harmony and communication. Now our only problem is Hester.
yeah, but they haven’t really communicated anything useful yet. But Cas does know that the angels are about to find them again...
***
HESTER: You took the Prophet from us?!
CASTIEL: I'm – I'm sorry?
HESTER: You have fallen in every way imaginable.
INAIS: Please, Castiel. We have to follow the code. Help us do our work.
DEAN: He can't help you. He can't help anybody.
HESTER: We don't need his help... or his permission.
HESTER nods to INAIS, who nods back. There is the sound of angel wings and INAIS disappears.
HESTER: The Keeper goes to the desert tonight.
INAIS reappears with KEVIN.
DEAN: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back off. We're actually trying to clean up one of your angel's messes! You know that.
CASTIEL: He's right. An angel brought the Leviathan back into this world, and – and they begged him. They begged him not to do it.
DEAN: Look, just give us some time, okay? We will take care of your Prophet.
HESTER: Why should we give you anything... After everything you have taken from us? The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost! For that, you're going to pay.
HESTER walks towards DEAN.
CASTIEL: Please. They're the ones we were put here to protect.
HESTER: No, Castiel.
HESTER backhands CASTIEL and he falls to the ground. INAIS and the other MALE ANGEL each hold up two fingers to stop DEAN and SAM from going to CASTIEL’s aid.
HESTER: No more madness! [She punches CASTIEL.] No more promises! [She punches CASTIEL again.] No more new Gods! [She punches CASTIEL repeatedly and then holds up an angel knife.]
I couldn’t decide how to break this up to talk about it, because one thing leads directly into the next, and it all goes to context.
Hester accuses Cas of falling “in every way imaginable.” In the wake of their brush with free will, the remaining angels are attempting to restore the old order to Heaven, because there’s not much left to them than what they’d known before. When the new rules fail, the only thing they know to do is revert to the old rules.
Dean calls them out on it, and Cas even steps in to support Dean’s words. Only Cas can’t even say *I* and *me* here. He talks about himself in the third person, but at least he’s acknowledging what kicked off this mess, even if he’s still not taking direct responsibility for it. Not only that, he acknowledges that Dean had tried to stop him, and that he’d refused to listen. This seems to be a key point again in 15.03. The inability to acknowledge guilt and responsibility, and the refusal to listen. This entire conversation is just a few painful twists away from the Breakup Scene in 15.03.
But Hester lays down The Worst Truth, that Dean himself is at fault for destroying Cas, for just the TOUCH of him “corrupting” Cas, breaking him until he broke the world. To Dean, this was the equivalent confirmation of all his worst fears-- he’s poison, he’s worthless-- that Cas got from Belphegor in 15.03-- that Dean doesn’t care about him beyond his usefulness. But this is something that Dean will carry with him for YEARS, and which Dean will continue to feel in every dealing he has with Cas going forward-- that HE is at fault, that HE is unworthy, that everything that makes Cas “fall” in any way is because of him, because he’s poison. And so he internalizes every mistake that Cas makes, every burden he endures, as his own, because it’s all his fault anyway, right?
But Cas, too, learned a lesson here as Hester beat and prepared to kill him: NO MORE MADNESS. NO MORE NEW GODS. And when confronted with the truth of what Belphegor planned-- to become a new god in the same way that Cas had-- he understood what he had to do. He would not exchange one problem for another, exchange one apocalypse for one that would likely be even worse. It was a terrible choice, and I think this is the root of his decision.
***
Here have some dramatic irony, and the demon saving Cas’s life:
INAIS: Hester! No! [He grabs HESTER’s arm.] Please! There's so few of us left.
HESTER punches INAIS in the face with the hand holding the knife.
HESTER: [to CASTIEL] You wanted free will. Now I'm making the choices.
HESTER raises the knife. White light blazes from her chest and she falls to the ground. MEG has stabbed her.
MEG: What? Someone had to.
Hester claimed she was choosing her actions now, using the same excuse of Free Will that Cas himself had claimed as his motivation for swallowing Purgatory in the first place. Even when everything she’d done had been in the name of restoring the Old Order, of following the Rules that angels had always obeyed. Talk about not getting the point of Free Will.
This is what Dean’s struggling with now in s15, with his own long-held understanding of what Free Will even meant, with this new context that Chuck had repeatedly thrown new obstacles in his path, personally. There are no rules left, or so it feels like to him. There’s nothing to revert back to, or hold on to as an ideal, when every choice they make has been engineered to lead them to equally bad outcomes.
***
But Cas... he’s understood this for a very long time:
INAIS: These are strange times.
CASTIEL: I think they've always been.
INAIS puts a hand on CASTIEL’s arm.
INAIS: I wish you'd come with us.
CASTIEL: Oh, I'm not part of the Garrison anymore, Inias. I'm sorry.
Sure, he’ll be forced back against his will, but in a way that will help save him eventually. It won’t feel like salvation for years to come, though, but it’s a journey.
***
SAM: Here. “Leviathan cannot be slain but by a bone of a righteous mortal washed in the three bloods of the fallen.” Uh... It says we need to start with the blood of a fallen angel.
SAM and DEAN look at CASTIEL.
CASTIEL: Well, you know me. [He holds out a small bottle.] I'm always happy to bleed for the Winchesters.
CASTIEL hands the bottle, which is filled with blood, to DEAN.
DEAN: What are you gonna do, Cas?
CASTIEL: I don't know. [He smiles.] Isn't that amazing?
AAAAHAHAHAH. Angel blood, required by Belphegor’s first spell. This scene was directly paralleled in 15.01, and with context, it’s it awful? After refusing to fight for the entire episode, Cas is happy to bleed. To do penance, but not to be burdened with action or responsibility. And with complete freedom to choose his next move, to choose for himself what to do with himself, he... chooses nothing. And heck, I get it, after billions of years of thinking he didn’t have ANY choices, suddenly he’s presented with EVERY OPTION, and is DELIGHTED by that.
But the one thing he WON’T choose? Staying with Dean. Standing by Dean’s side while he fights to clean up Cas’s mess.
Dean’s next line to Sam after Cas leaves? “Well, let’s get to work.”
They can’t rest yet. They can’t stop, because the world’s still ending and they’re still entirely on their own. Only now they’re armed with at least a DIRECTION they can work toward. It’s something, but... it’s still just the two of them alone against the apocalypse. Which is what Cas had spent s6 trying to avoid. And can’t face at all now.
And this is what Dean had long since resigned himself to-- that Cas, given the choice, would leave. So Cas choosing to leave in 15.03? I think Dean was shocked he hadn’t left sooner.
And then of course there’s the angels dying when they return Kevin to his home, only to be deceived by Leviathan and abducted.
He just couldn’t win. And neither could Cas, and neither could Dean and Sam. It was an unwinnable game that would just break them all again.
I could do a post like this for 7.22, and for 7.23, and probably for every other episode from all the episodes between then and now, but this has taken me all day. I really hope y’all are making all the same connections, spotting all the thematic subversions and twists of every turn of the narrative spiral between then and now. But this episode killed me today. And it gives a lot of obvious context to Dean and Cas’s choices and issues in early s15 that led to the Breakup. But hopefully it also lays down the foundation of what they truly need to put out on the table to move past this impasse.
They need to put down something better than Sorry! They need to use real words and actually listen to each other. But the fact that scene in 15.03 directly called out this miscommunication, this refusal to listen (and it’s not just on Dean here, but Cas has refused to listen, too). And now the narrative demands they have that conversation for real. For their own good, but for the good of the world, to break these eternal ovals and finally break free of this endless chasing after the fake rabbit.
#spn s15 spoilers#spn 15.03#spn 7.21#spn 15.01#spn 15.02#destiel#if you say 'mysterious ways' so help me i will kick your ass#it's spirals all the way down#spiders georg of the tnt loop#s15 meta rewatch#using your words#holy crap this is long... it's taken me all day because i had to keep stopping and doing something cheerful in between thinking about it
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⤏ send me “plots please”
@auroradicit : Plots please!
In this very fucked-up, overpowered house we love and support Aurora!
Saving People, Hunting Things, the Family Business
I can’t find an about page for Jess but just...just hear me out. The way she died was bullshit and we all know it, but WHAT IF she just faked her own (...hyper-specific...) death. It turns out that Sam isn’t the only Stanford student facing down a sad fate: Jess had her arm twisted into faking her own death and setting Sam on his current path by some hot shot in Hell (not Crowley this time, wait for it!). In essence, she made a deal, and not a good one at that, but they were willing to renegotiate...as long as she was willing to break the heart closest to hers. Spin it as far out as you like. The idea is that she’s free to from Hell’s grip on her, but can’t contact Sam, when she runs into a very agitated demon dreaming up schemes well beyond his means.
In other words, let’s rewrite the show from 1.01 with the heroine we deserved and the antivillain we came to tolerate. ;)
Two Inches to the Left
Two worlds on the verge of an apocalypse briefly collide: when they separate again (”Mirror, Mirror” style, if you will!), some of their parts gets mixed up in the passing. For example, the wrong Crowley goes to the wrong Hell at the side of the wrong angel.
“Weren’t you supposed to be an Impala?”
“Weren’t you supposed to be thinner and taller?”
It’s not going to be the pleasant end of the world everybody had in mind.
this isn’t an idea.
...I just really like Sasha. I don’t know what to do with her, but she seems like a fun character to combine Crowley with!
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What's happening in Australia?
I’m pretty sure the only thing I’ve posted about Aus recently is the wildfires, aka Australia is on fire so let’s go with that
Some of the most recent info I can find says there are 62 fires currently burning across NSW, with 35 that still need to be contained which unfortunately seems to be more than this morning. Around 300 homes have been confirmed to be destroyed, 19 facilities and 577 outbuildings destroyed too with 208 outbuildings damaged. Around 4 people have been killed. So many have had to evacuate and there are a good amount of people missing.
It’s harder for me to find the info for Queensland but the most recent I can find says there are 76 fires burning across the state, it’s not doing too well either.
But as far as I can tell, the west coast is getting hit by them too, and Tasmania and possibly other states and territories. Those just seem to be the two places that are the worst off. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe they’re just getting the most coverage.
There have been an estimated 2.5 million acres of farmland and bush that have been burned at this point. That’s 1.01 million hectares roughly. And of course, lots of injured and killed animals that didn’t escape the fire’s path, I know they said they expected at least 350 koalas to have been killed.
A lot of the firefighters are absolutely dead on their feet at this point too.
Course, a lot has been saved too but it’s not exactly great over there. If it’s not the fires, it’s the smoke. Hell, we even got some of the smoke floating over here to New Zealand, the moon looked vaguely red one night because of it.
Bushfires are pretty normal over there, but not to this degree and not this early on in the fire season.
#australia#of course i'm not an expert though#do your own research and all that#welcome to climate change i guess#quebedazarn
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Grand Titans Rewatch: 1.01
so! i only really got into the show around the 6th episode, which means that while i was intrigued by the first five, i didn’t really pay a lot of close attention the first time ‘round. so i’m going to try and rewatch the entire series over the next several weeks and bring you Thoughts, because um. well. I Will Have Them.
SPOILERS for pretty much the entire series, though i will be covering only the pilot episode in this post. let’s see how this goes.
1. i’m just such a sucker for eerie dreamscapes, so i’m definitely biased when i say that this is a promising start. what’s really intriguing, though, is rachel dreaming of dick’s past well before she’d met the guy. after eleven episodes, the extent and even the very nature of rachel’s powers is still nebulous; this ability to dream about people she hasn’t even met only comes up this once, as far as i remember. (again, my initial viewing was superficial, so i might’ve missed it coming up/referenced again.)
1.5. a doylist explanation for this? hint at a special relationship between rachel and dick right off the bat, set the tone for the rest of the series, establish a character-development-by-dreamscape precedent, give us a gander at the origin story of the most iconic character in the ensemble, and set the broader arc of the season—an acceptance of and an ascent out of inner darkness—in motion with these two characters.
an in-universe search for an answer is potentially more interesting, however: why should these two be connected? i like to think that trigon’s influence started here, pushing rachel further and further down the path that would lead her to free him. i mean, handwaving aside the comic-booky implausibility of trigon foreseeing the exact pattern of random events that would lead to the moment rachel pulling him out of the mirror in 1.10 (he’s an interdimensional being! i don’t know! *flails hands*), i like the symbolism of it: both batman and trigon as phantom fathers that rachel and dick run away from, only to be pushed together. this is not to imply any broader equivalency between trigon and bruce wayne, of course; but it goes some way in explaining why this dick is especially traumatised and brutal, and why it would’ve had to be an especially traumatised and brutal bruce wayne that taught him everything he knows.
1.6. HAH at the ‘flying’ in the ‘flying graysons’ sign fizzling out just before the rope snaps, tho! so corny but also so upsetting.
(‘so corny but so upsetting’ – a valid tagline for titans)
1.8. oh but the set-up around rachel is so intriguing, tho! this is both the greatest strength and the greatest pitfall of the show: each of its characters can occupy a genre show of their own; because the first three episodes focus so heavily on rachel, it seems like the tone of the show changes when the titans finally get together, and like a lot of interesting, painstakingly slow set-up for rachel is just dropped and wasted.
2. the first glimpse we get of dick grayson is in the rearview mirror of his car. FUCK. i’m going to start a count.
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 1
Ok. things i love about this little two minute introduction to dick grayson:
a) look at this broody asshole. i love him so much.
b) right away we have this push-pull re: his robin identity. he hates it, resents it, but can’t quite let it go. his officer grayson persona isn’t enough for all the evil in the world, even if it means losing control and falling farther and farther down a spiral of self-loathing.
c) he’s so damn mired in crime and tragedy, tho: officer grayson by day, vigilante robin by night. MAKE A FRIEND, DICK. GET A BEER, DICK.
(so true to character, tho: a suffering dick grayson is usually a determinedly self-isolated dick grayson.)
d) AMY ROHRBACH! i refuse to believe they’d just unceremoniously kill off such an iconic character. i fully expect to see her in s2.
e) “you do your thing. i’ll do mine.” a poorly functioning dick grayson picking up unhealthy coping cues from his mentor.
f) i love how implicit it is that gotham is a carnival of unending horror among the officers in the precinct, and probably every other city in america.
3. the clawmarks on rachel’s mother, tho! fuck, i wish they’d carried over more of this eeriness in the second half of the season. oh, and also:
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 2
i realise why we had to get a move on with the plot, but i can’t help but wonder if we could’ve gotten an even slower build-up to rachel’s powers, because honestly? i know you’re lying, i always know when you’re lying, and the vicious slut! in the school bus window? actually more unsettling than watching rachel liquefy some baddie from the inside.
(tho. um. don’t get me wrong. that’s plenty disturbing, too.)
4. conflicted!brooding!vigilante!dick, here to chase away the images of dead women splayed over living room floors with bullet holes in their heads.
4.5. the fight scene was brutal, sure—but to be fair, most of batman/robin’s fights teeter on the fine line between causing enough damage to keep the bad guys down for a bit and outright brutality. it’s difficult to bring that to life on screen (in a series that touts to inject grittiness/realism into proceedings, no less) and portray a robin who’s definitely crossing some lines without going into some real brutal territory.
4.6. so far i’m loving how economical the storytelling is when it comes to dick—how quickly it’s established, then underscored, how being robin is so important to him and the last thing he wants. his curdling resentment at the thugs immediately looking for batman the moment they see him, and his inability to move on from being the other half of batman-and-robin. he feels compelled to play both parts at once when he’s fighting, and he hates it. all of these things are playing out right underneath stretched-too-thin skin, jagged and awful and ugly.
4.65. and the editing and sound choices keep emphasising how this is not dick in his natural state—how, in a lot of ways, robin is not his natural state anymore.
4.8. dick, brooding in his open-plan apartment, broodily listening to vinyl records and cleaning his armour of blood, while brooding. did i mention that i love this asshole?
(i don’t know where the bruises came from, considering that it seemed like the thugs couldn’t get a single hit in during the fight.)
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 3
4.9. a dick timeline: the zucco thing happened, what, two years ago? robin hasn’t been seen in over a year. and dick moved to detroit a month ago. hmmmm.
5. rachel’s alter-ego-self as a manifestation of her powers continues to be fascinating. as is the fact that that alternate self appears less and less as she grows more accepting of what’s inside her and learns to control her abilities.
5.25. so, what, was sally a part of the cult that wants to kidnap rachel specifically, or just a Bad Person in general?
5.5. “you got that thing for helping kids” – i love that dick has this reputation barely a month into his time in this department. like. this guy is broody and closed-off and clearly traumatised, but hey, he’s good with kids!
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 4
5.8. “you’re the boy from the circus” is super-dramatic and all, but how did rachel recognise adult!dick when she’s only seen kid!dick in her dreams? and also, why did she dream of dick at all?
5.99. side note: officer!dick’s hair is the best. it never gets better than this for the rest of the season at least until he becomes trigon’s demon acolyte.
6. KORY!
6.5. so… did the car accident cause the amnesia? do we ever find out why exactly she couldn’t remember anything about who she is? she doesn’t look injured; just dazed.
6.6. her passport was issued in 2014—so she’s been here a while, searching, researching. or not, because it’s probably a fake-ass document. stop reading so much into this, emmram!
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 5
6.8. her super-convenient amnesia means she’s forgotten her identity but not human language, mores or customs. i like this extra layer of… alien-ness? that this brings to her: so now she’s not only a stranger to the rest of the world, but to herself. again, so many interesting things are set-up here that the show never really follows through with for the rest of the season—imagine re-discovering kory’s identity along with her, piecemeal, rather than an impersonal infodump near the end of the season!
6.9. also given that portrayals of starfire (at least those that i’ve seen/read) make liberal use of the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope, i rather like this take—she’s already learned everything she needs to know about assimilating into human society, and it’s a question of rediscovering that knowledge instead of having some dude patronisingly mansplain the world to her.
6.95. why did she snap that russian dude’s neck, tho. that’s just brutal. i’d forgotten about this.
7. i like to think here that when dick says i’ll find someone who can help you, he’s not just thinking of law enforcement, but also of people in the super-community—psychics, or telepaths, or somebody who has experience with both. there’s still so much about dick that’s kept in the dark for most of the season, but given the length of time he’s been with batman and the easy familiarity with which he talks about other heroes in the finale’s dreamscape, i’m going to assume that he’s more than well-connected.
7.5. but he’s shuttered himself away for so long, and robin’s return has been far from well-received. i like this little moment where he steps outside and just… lets himself be overwhelmed. just for a bit.
7.7. i like that amy says “sidekick” first instead of “partner”. on-the-nose, but i like it!
7.8. the glibness of he and i had different ideas of how to do the job is making me laugh. oh, dick.
i guess the idea of batman sours quite a lot when you’ve spent most of your life as his partner. i get that he’s projecting losing his own sense of self to a role he just isn’t cut out for onto bruce, but it’s sad anyway.
7.9. gosh i just want these two to bond. i don’t care how you do it Show but bring back amy next season, yeah?
MIRRORS, MIRRORS EVERYWHERE: 6
8. is there any particular significance to the repeated security-cam footage shots we’re getting in this episode?
(gosh, i love the cinematography so much in this scene.)
8.4. so… kory had to use some sort of russian mob and come all the way to vienna to find rachel?? why??? are we ever going to find out?
8.5. on a happier note, i love love this version of starfire’s ‘innocence’. like. she’s baffled, almost apologetic about it, but she isn’t going to take any shit about it, either. also, the music when she uses her powers for the first time, man. FUCK.
9. aaaaand there’s the liquefying-a-guy’s-insides bit. i both love and hate this show’s self-indulgence.
9.5. i gotta say, this episode makes a lot more sense on rewatch than it did the first time ‘round. i remember being so confused by evil!cult!guy, but then again, i was pretty distracted at the time. i only really picked up the show because i was so amused by the over-the-top reactions fans had to the trailer. now look at me, writing 2k+ word reviews dissecting its every moment. *shakes head*
10. *rachel stares at dick’s porsche*
“this is yours?”
“family heirloom.”
“… from the circus?”
“not the one you’re thinking.”
I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS EXCHANGE.
10.5. i love these two Dramatic Kids.
11. beast boy cameo! just to assure us all that yes, he is in this show, and that, yes, he is the Best of them all.
12. you guys, this episode is so much more fun that i remember it being. you’ve got an amnesiac interstellar super-spy in kory, a straight-up supernatural horror story in rachel, and a psychological case study whatever genre batman’s supposed to be in dick. each of them could easily fill their own show, but i love that titans wants to connect them with something more than just a team falling together just because.
#titans#meta#dick grayson#koriand'r#rachel roth#a byronic cupcake#badass strawberry truffle#a gothic cookie#grand titans rewatch 2k19
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since we know the name of the first episode, do you have any predictions for what it will be about?
So the title is Eden, and the little green plot of land is their Eden, and we know people are going to be fighting over it because humanity can’t have nice things.
I’m not a biblical scholar, so maybe we should check in with some of them, because there are a lot of people who are exploring the biblical old/new testament references. Maybe more old testament? Not sure, because like I said, not a biblical scholar. I think we have some Jewish mythology in The 100, also.
Let me do some free associating, because I don’t really have predictions.
When I think of Eden, I think the garden free from evil, which is clearly our little green valley. Adam and Eve–which brings to mind Kane’s 1.01 statement about bringing them all down to a cosmic Adam and Eve if he has to, and that makes me think Bellarke, as the main male/female partnership of the show. I think of the tree of knowledge. I wonder what that could be? We still have the flame which is a computer AI with lots of knowledge about how the world ended. Or maybe the flame is the snake. Or maybe we have a snake who is trying to convince Eve (who is Eve, Clarke or Bellamy? they often change which character fulfills the feminine/masculine roles in their allusions) to eat the apple of knowledge. ALIE or Becca could definitely be either the snake or apple of knowledge.
And then there’s also Lilith, who is a story not often told. Some say a demon. Some say the first woman before Eve who refused to be subjugated to Adam. But heck, I googled Lilith a little and she kind of sounds like Octavia. Which would be interesting considering the dark path of Octavia. But I was also introduced to the myth of Lilith through feminist theory, and in that case, Lilith could be a reclamation of the demon myth into one of independence and reclaiming feminine power. This is a feminist story, so that’s possible.
They’re looking to start humanity over, to repopulate the Earth. Clarke is now a mother (their little trick of adding Madi skipping all the difficulty of pregnancy and babies and little ones on film.)
Maybe the Eligius is the snake in the garden. They are all nightbloods, right? So anyone of them could take the flame. Maybe they hunger for that knowledge. Maybe the bunker survivors are the children of Adam and Eve. Or maybe it’s the reverse. Or maybe they won’t play good guy children and bad guy snake/lilith. They like to make things morally ambiguous.
Lookit.
I got nothing.
Just ideas. No predictions from Eden.
From other things, I predict Clarke and Bellamy will reunite, if not in the first episode, then the second. I predict that spacekru will land on earth in episode 1 or possibly even before the season started. What if they landed a year ago, but in the wrong place, and they’ve spent a year trying to get to Clarke. What if the significant day that spacekru lands was ACTUALLY the fifth anniversary of Praimfaya. Or last Unity Day. We’re only assuming they haven’t come down yet because they haven’t returned to Clarke, but the Earth is big and it’s dangerous.
Hey. Yeah. Lindsey said they land on a significant day. JR said they land sooner than expected. They said spacekru comes down at a time that is not expected, right? What if the reason why they haven’t come home is because they did come home and there was a malfunction and it took them, oh, who knows… to south america? To the west coast of north america? What if they’re struggling to get home the whole time Clarke is talking to them on The Ark. What if they see the Eligius come down and are drawn to that, and that’s how they find Clarke.
I predict we get Clarke reunited with spacekru before they get the Bunker free, which I’m guessing is 5.03 or later.
you know what? none of these are predictions. they are all speculation. can you just imagine im saying speculation in stead of prediction. i don’t have enough info to predict.
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Third Open Letter to President Trump
Why did we not have a second GREAT DEPRESSION?
In 2008 America began shedding jobs at the rate of 700,000 a month. Wall street was on the verge of collapse. Huge banking firms had gambled away billions on risky default swap trades. These trades were based on derivatives made up from small slices of thousands of junk mortgages that plummeted like an avalanche, taking everything in their path.
These collages of junk mortgage pieces were sold as top rated securities. Furthermore, they were insured, (uh, sort of… maybe, uh,) if nothing went wrong. You can insure anything, even securities, but insurance law dictates that you must have assets to back up your policies.
Now even the biggest banks didn’t have that kind of wealth. Derivatives make up more than the GDP of the whole world. Wall Street brokers liked the big profits of these mortgage sales so they found a way around the insurance requirements. They would call them something else,– “default swap trades.” The security buyer would agree to pay a fund to the seller and the seller would guarantee that if anything went wrong he would refund the purchase price to the buyer. Sounds like insurance to me, but then what do I know?
It was fun while it lasted. Brokers made profits on the sales and then reaped more profits on the swap trade payments. Their pockets were fat and lined with gigantic bonuses. How sweet it was!! until the collapse.
We bailed them out to a seven-hundred billion dollar tune (that’s $700,000,000,000). Their butts were saved and greased with more bonus money. But all this did not reverse the downward slide of the economy and the loss of jobs for the common man. (That’s right, most of us are just commoners and can’t even breathe the rarefied air those fat cats live in.)
But don’t worry, the government plunged another $700,000,000,000 cork into the hole in the sinking ship,– the stimulus package. It helped a little, but it looked like the duck in the Aflac ads plugging holes in a sinking fishing boat.
In spite of it all (though we should have from the problems we faced), we did not see a second depression. Why?
Aside from the $1.4 trillion one-time investment of the TARP and stimulus packages there was a giant, sleeping beneath the wreckage of the sinking ship.
As FDR began his first administration he said: “We must build toward a time when a major depression cannot occur again;…” He viewed old age, and failure to have work, as a single problem with two branches. He said, “Today, there is no need for a long argument that old-age security logically and inevitably ties in with the whole problem of the unemployed and that something can actually be done about it.” Looking Forward, pg. 94.
He went on to say “These social situations must be met with no haphazard answers. The principles of insurance can be made to meet the basic problems of unemployment and old-age want.” During his administration both Social Security and unemployment insurance were born.
The magnitude of their effect on our economy is hardly appreciated, especially when enhanced by Medicare and Medicaid. Here are some figures.
The stimulus factor refers to the additional flow of these monies through the economy as the funds are quickly spent. Yes, the TARP and Stimulus were $1.4 trillion. That was a one-time shot in the arm. The $2.1 trillion in the chart above is each year, and since 2008 it has pumped an additional $16.8 trillion into the economy. Thank heaven for the foresight of Democrat presidents, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson for making these wise programs a part of the American way of life! Without them we would surely have had a second Great Depression.
By the way, some politicians cling to the idea of tax breaks for the wealthy as a way to boost our economy. The Stimulus Factor for giving money to the monied is only 1.01 times, a drop in the bucket for an economic boost.
What saved us from a depression? Social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. You promised in the primaries not to allow anything to happen to these economy saving programs. Most of them are funded by employee/employer contributions APART from the general revenues. If congress passes anything to weaken these programs or divert them into something else I hope you will keep your promise,-- and veto it.
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SENTENCE MEME ⟶ NEW AMSTERDAM / 1.01 –– 1.03
always feel free to tweak the sentence to fit your muse.
“Well, at least you didn’t kill her twice.”
“I actually expect you to practice medicine at this hospital because it’s, I don’t know, your job.”
“If she comes back, let’s keep her.”
“I know what I did was wrong.”
“I should have put you first, but I am gonna change.”
“Wanna grab a drink later?”
“You know when I say ‘grab a drink’ I don’t actually mean grab a drink, right?”
“We all feel like the system is too big to change, but guess what? We are the system.”
“I don’t care if they say no, let’s get into some trouble.”
“You look tired. Do you need a nap?”
“A hot list is a to-do list, but you know, with a cooler name.”
“They were all corrupt and lazy.”
“With all due respect, I don’t need a pat on the back on the way out.”
“There are other ways to help people than by cutting them open.”
“The whole system’s rigged. They’re not gonna let you come in here and just help people.”
“This girl has been abused in the foster care system three times and you want to put her right back in?”
“Her brain convinced her heart that she was dead, even though she was very much alive.”
“I guess I’d rather us be friends.”
“Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
“I want to get married, I want to have kids.”
“I have this plan for how I want my life to look.”
“You can help me tell her she’s going to die.”
“Why do you care about me so much?”
“Your mind is strong and resilient. I’m sorry you were led to believe otherwise.”
“I know we haven’t talked in awhile, but I have to tell you this.”
“What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino? [answer: elephino]”
“Healthcare is the number one cause of bankruptcy in America.”
“Congress actually made it illegal for hospitals to disclose prices to you.”
“I’ve eaten today.. if espresso counts.”
“The good news is, I can fix a broken heart.”
“When was the last time you saw them smile?”
“I think you would make a really good dad.”
“Why do you say these crazy things?”
“If you believe this is the best thing for them, prove it.”
“I can be here for you, with you.”
“Look, even when you were there, you weren’t.”
“It’s the first hospital to put a courtroom in the building.”
“There’s usually a reason for rage.”
“Not everything’s gonna go according to your plan.”
“I really didn’t expect to care this much.”
“I promised her that I would be there so we could start a family.”
“He needs to be able to process all this displaced guilt.”
“Just tell me something. Anything. Just one true thing.”
“According to my Fitbit, that’s how many steps it’s taken to keep up with you.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re having a nervous breakdown, because that’s what this sounds like to me.”
“Deep down, you care about this place as much as I do.”
“I thought you would be grateful.”
“How long do you think you can keep this a secret?”
“Just for the record, I don’t agree with this plan.”
“You are the only person in the world who actually likes hospitals.”
“Three people have seen a guy running naked through the halls.”
“She looks quite healthy for a dead person.”
“I messed up, I know, and I broke a lot of promises. I’m just trying not to break any more.”
“It’s an ongoing discovery that the world thinks I’m a fraud.”
“Everybody notices something, but nobody says anything.”
“There are no laws against doing this.”
“Even if the system is broken, we can offer them a path.”
“We can only help people if we ourselves are willing to take risks.”
“You’re making a mistake that could cost you your life.”
“I’m putting my life in your hands.”
#rp meme#roleplay meme#sentence meme#sentence starters#starter sentences#KIND / SENTENCE.#BASED ON / TV SHOW.#KIND / IN CHARACTER.
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