notes after rewatching fallout s1 ep4
• cooper and lucy wandering the desert and mans starts coughin', somethin' settin' in
• whoa i just realized you could hear roger roaring from outside
• roger was at a clinic, probably trying to find something to help him ☹️
• i wrote a whole entire post on this scene but anyways can i say we see full blown uncooked cannibalism hardly ten minutes into episode four like is everyone ok
• the fact this scene is presented with a lot of tension, like a horror film and truly it's just a guy named roger fighting to stay not feral
• i wonder how cooper met him? ghouls tend to know each other after a while [on account of the discrimination], i'm sure he was checking with this man every now and then tbh. perhaps. a friend.
• cooper asks roger how he's feeling and he says "you know... it's hard out here. dang smoothies can be so unkind" and i just 😞
• "i see you got a smoothie of your own" ding ding ding ghoulcy this one's for you
• you know what's particularly sad about ghoulification is for example that roger has had to isolate himself from others, even ghouls, because he was turning
• roger asking for a vial and cooper looking at lucy [cooper, you botched the using lucy for bait, come on]
• firmly in the camp that if cooper had vials left, he would give one to roger. cooper has shown himself to be crude and cruel seeming at times but i just know he went there with purpose
• roger accepting he's turning and telling cooper and lucy to leave as a warning, roger seemed so nice, why and how did he get like this
• "i did ok" 😞
• going from standard human to turning into a feral ghoul in less than twenty eight years in the fallout universe is insane and idk if there's a lot of lore on why someone could end up like this and someone like cooper not
• the difference in cooper's and roger's symptoms are pretty stark--- not entirely sold on him coughing and passing out is from ferality and more inclined to think chem withdrawals but i digress
• "say, you remember how good food use to taste?" post war life is so bad, nobody in the wasteland remembers when food use to food 😭
• because roger is really nice and having a conversation, roger turns, speaking to lucy. cooper using this as an opportunity to kill roger seems so sudden and a betrayal until
• look at cooper's eyes and his reaction after pulling the trigger--- not exactly the expression of someone who is in it "for the love of the game", in fact, i have come to view this act as a mercy kill
• which is ironic of course because as we've all come to see, lucy does the exact thing for her own mother four episodes later
• once feral, ghouls roam the wasteland operating on two instincts alone: hunger and defense. they are a threat to all those around them and i don't recall much on reversal. that's no life. roger would've turned feral and harmed them or others, it is sad
• cooper mercy killing roger was in some ways compassionate, he had a sweet conversation with roger giving his last thoughts something warm and nice. cooper then going on to butcher and consume his flesh was an uh choice 💀
• and lucy immediately confused was like "wait?, why'd you do that? he was sick." i don't know if she entirely understands ghoulification, seems she thought maybe he could be helped
• lucy is basically confused, begging cooper to not like, eat this guy 😭
• i'm gonna have to agree that he didn't have to eat roger, radroaches is everywhere and for free, still pondering if he did this to fuck with her or because some reason i am missing
• cooper asking lucy what her name was [hold on, why he care about that?" and lucy so nearly coming this close to finding out what hank did and who cooper is [since she didn't ask his name]
• "sometimes a fella's got to eat a fella" is my all time favourite quote in season one of this show lmao
• cooper be funny as fuck for no reason like this man's brain is cooked
• i would personally like to ask walton whose idea it was to go "mmm. mmm." while eating irradiated human flesh like that, like why is the pre war actor cooper howard like this
• lucy is incomprehensibly disgusted but then goes on a thing [a vulnerable thing] about vault 32 starving [in the great plague of '77] and that she lost her mother during this time and that her father never resorted to cannibalism. there's some time and memory discrepancies here
• "well there's what people say they did and what they really did" i wanted cooper to be wrong so bad here when he went on to clown hank by saying "i'll bet your daddy was first in line at the cookout. i bet he had a bib with a drawing of his neighbour's ass on it"
• lmao they gave all the best lines to cooper, i'm sick, he was right
• lucy, having had enough and not finding cooper's humour being used as a way to cope like this asks this disturbed little man
• "how do you live like this? why keep going?" and for the briefest moment, and i do mean brief, cooper feels the crushing weight of who he is when lucy confronts him like this
• of course he shakes off a moral inquiry and transfers it to another as he asks "why the fuck am i doing all the work?... ass jerky don't make itself." and forces lucy to do it instead
• twice now this man has talked about ass in less than ten minutes and for everyone's sake i'll move along 💀
• woody basically trying to interrogate the raider prisoners and getting nothing, meanwhile--- i think they already starting to be poisoned
• ooo ok but betty telling norm he's the last standing maclean in the vault so his words carry and people listen. it occurred to me maybe he inadvertently inspired the poisonings of the raiders but it's also occurring to me that because they couldn't just all be shot outright, being poisoned was the best follow through method, nobody notices until it's already too late. now who is sneaky enough for that?
• "when clever boys like you are angry, you're lucky not to have seen where that can lead." so... was betty present for shady sands? hmm
• betty asking norm to tread lightly is very... not a threat, but she's watching him, right
• ok! we have that second water scene. it's confirmed here cooper is fetching water from an irradiated source [hence why denying lucy any makes sense] he puts it in his canteen and drinks it just fine. lucy is obviously mindlessly thirsty because she defeatedly drops down to drink the murky, stagnant irradiated water. it's so irradiated, her pip boy is going crazy, she literally gags in the scene
• "now you're getting it. how does this golden rule jibe with what's going through your head now?" well i mean we knew cooper been fucking with her the whole time and showing her the wasteland streets but it is also unlikely she would have found a clean water source where they are, i guess her getting radiation sickness may have been inevitable but cooper denying her water kept her from being sick
• after another insane string of sentences from this centuries old movie star, lucy finally asks "what are you?" and it's more like "what the fuck is wrong with you?"
• "oh i'm you, sweetie, you just give it a little time" is majorly menacing after everybody just drank stagnant rad water like it's koolaid
• cooper felt so smug then was zapped with karma again because he has a coughing fit directly after telling lucy this lmao
• walton has such a good old man cough ❤️
• lucy takes cooper coughing up a lung as an opportunity to run [where i don't know but]
• cooper uses his lasso skills he used to use at kid's parties to pull lucy back and then says some shit like "where you think you going? you ain't going nowhere."
• so we have arrived at the infamous and intriguing finger biting off scene--- can i just say she bit his finger off with such ease and then! cooper doesn't even act like it hurt, he seems... pleased he got that kind of reaction out of lucy. he's like into it 💀
• "there you are, you little killer" i'll keep this pg13 and say cooper really wanted to get a rise out of lucy, to bring the dog out of her, huh
• he... then proceeds to cut her [corresponding hand's] finger off. ironically applying the "do unto others as you would have done unto you" tit for tat, if you will
• i was surprised he did this because like ok, she spat it out? pick it up and reattach it, fella 😭 but there's more under the surface here because
• cooper says "now that right there is the closest thing we've had to an honest exchange so far." and he's being framed in a close up so close, you can see his dainty eyelashes, sun shining in the background, his hazel eyes sparkling--- this is not on accident ☝️ gdgkdkfd
• there's a lot of symbolism to be had but for now, i'll save that for next episode notes when cooper does the thing
• ah chet! and steph. i kinda am of the idea she strategically got with him but anyways! who wouldn't! chet hot as fuck! and steph look like an assassin
• bert's shoes so small gldgldfl
• steph is definitely angry and sad dealing with bert's death in her own special way [trying to fuck chet]
• excuse me but why they turned an almost sex scene into a birthing scene 😭💀
• lucy been walking the wasteland without a shoe, how she do it 😭
• i did not pick up on cooper bartering lucy for two months' worth of vials [thanks subtitles]
• "mint condition" [looks at a bloody stump on hand] "near mint condition" now who fault is this?? lmao
• "you got problems out here too, sweetheart" like, shut up 😭
• cooper every time he interacts with a mr. handy is one of the only few places he gets to hear a voice of this old friend
• "best you try your luck behind that door" well at least he untied her
• this is like the third time he's gotten instant karma with lucy because either he pretended to keep it together until she went in or genuinely didn't know he was going to pass out but
• went through the five stages of grief trying to figure who he sold her to because i deadass was thinking the same thing lucy was 😭
• lucy being given the finger of like, a corpse or something because it's grey 😭 forever changed by the wasteland, always carrying a little bleakness and death with her ❤️
• lucy never experiencing real cotton [or maybe only rarely]
• lucy calling cooper a creature 😭
• "he put a leash around my neck and made me drink from puddle water that i'm pretty sure was some kind of animal pee" sending 😭 she talking to this evil mr. handy like it's a person
• her recounting her captivity with cooper like he was simply being mean to her is just
• "and i thought i was here to be a sex slave." "what?! no! what a disgusting idea. i'm simply going to harvest your organs." damn, fallout which one is worse, like fuck---
• hope the jello cake veronica got wasn't poisoned...
• "what are you looking at?" "a murderer in a cage, paying the price for what you did to us. for what you did to the innocent people in vault 32" and norm gets circumstantial evidence from a raider by accidentally cross examining one of them with it being more than anything woody could coax out of them
• one thing about the macleans, they smart
• i also think it's excellent writing that intrigue was spurred like this by a raider saying vault 32 wasn't innocent because they were running an experiment like all the vaults did, everything isn't so black and white
• norm reads every situation correctly because why he read chet by saying chet came along to investigate because norm reminds him of lucy fkdgkdkg
• still piecing together the full extent of vaults 31, 32, 33 together but at first i couldn't understand why it looked like so many took their own lives--- apparently them discovering what vault 31 was about started a rebellion but two years seemed so recent to me. curious how this overlaps with shady sands if it does
• they showed the spooky ass rat utopia experiment still playing on the tvs in there but i wasn't sure if this was explicit about that being vault 32's experiment
• lucy being prompted to continue on because of a flashback from her mom upon awakening 🥲
• "lucy sweetie what are you doing out here?" and those were her memories on the surface [nevermind cooper calling her [[condescendingly]] "sweetheart"]
• i did not realize the ghouls were being kept in the freezers but it looks like they either only sell ghouls or keep the ghouls "on ice" [not unlike how dom pedro would keep cooper and cut pieces off of him] and collect the organs of standard people right then and there
• "sir, you can't do this. please, i need my organs" lucy, it's just a robot bulter, he's not a real guy 😭
• the way lucy got out of this pickle quick, almost got snip snipped but short circuited the murderbot
• lucy putting her murdercap on and putting drano in the murderbot's syringes, clever girl
• it was so "star wars" of her to treat mr. handy like a person and then the guys running the organ trafficking scheme going "you might as well be holding an air conditioner hostage" 😭
• the organ traffickers running the super duper mart ring are so dull and banal evil types, it's so satire
• i just registered those two organ trafficker guys got a camera and can see cooper laid out in front of the store
• lucy freeing the ghouls 🥲and one even thanking her [even the feral ones 💀]
• poor martha, i peep how we see lucy's grey finger and it being shown used to defend herself against martha in her feral state
• organ traffickers got ate up bless
• nothing lucy did besides shoot was going to honestly stop martha, sometimes your pacifist playthrough doesn't go as planned
• the pip boys still being on and running on the not alive people in vault 32
• "death to management" and it's directly the reference to vault 31's experiment, right there
• lucy walking out of there with mismatched shoes but two shoes nonetheless ☝️
• i guess lucy sincerely did not comprehend cooper is a ghoul or ghoulification, i suppose most vault dwellers literally would never know, that's post war history, wow
• lucy asking cooper about if the vials keep him from going feral and he cannot even speak, he can only nod, from a prone position, on the ground--- the power/framing trade off is excellent
• lucy bends down, briefly rolls the gun in her hand, while cooper lies helpless, she delivers a fatal line
• "i may end up looking like you. but i'll never be like you" harbouring not enough ill will against him despite mistreatment, she gives cooper several vials, directly near his hand. didn't have to do none of that shit!
• if i was cooper, i'd be scared as hell of this lady, she took down an organ trafficking ring in a grocery store ran by two armed guys, a murderbot, with some feral ghoul hostages, all of the bad and dangerous people fucking died
• she really could've ended cooper right then and there, his devotion in season two gone be unmatched lmao
• i truly think he had a hint of a smile on his face after she helped [save his life] by anyways
• lucy walks into the proverbial sunset meanwhile this man shambles into super duper mart about to go on the biggest bender the wasteland has seen since the bombs dropped
• cooper gets so fucked up, i lost count how many things he ingested, king said all of 'em
• cooper is so goddamn famous, his film "the man from deadhorse" is just sitting next to a tv
• you could say here is where cooper has a crisis of conscience whereupon he holds the tape in his hand but truly we know already he had that centuries ago when he filmed "the man from deadhorse"
• cooper watching the scene, the very moment in his life where things started to shift--- he tries to cock an invisible fun, being unable as he remembers his trigger finger is gone [neutral, disarmed, here's where i think he decides he wants to sew on lucy's finger to his hand] it's like he's starting over, a moral rebirth but with his trigger finger
• they really made cooper say "you commie son of a bitch" in a western, just ugly propaganda
• let's examine "feo, fuerte, y formal" again! "ugly, strong, dignity" does post war cooper have two out of three on that front? is this his step into regaining dignity again?
• cooper was always playing characters, it was expected of him and he got paid for it. it feels like a wall is being torn down, something is being shed here. and maybe it's this character he's masquerading as
• cooper and lucy both having revelations in the super duper mart--- lucy realising you can't always reason and logic out of a situation and cooper being confronted with the fact you can keep your morality and sense of self intact and a horrible place and situation doesn't have to change you
41 notes
·
View notes
The Owl House takes place on a corpse. That's clear from the beginning. The people we meet, the fantastical things we see, every part of it is life that comes from death, and it's beautiful. Luz says that, the first time she's far enough away to see the bones. It's beautiful. The Titan was so full of life and magic that what he left behind could be passed on and made anew, and the people who sprung from that, who rely on it, understand that and are grateful. Everything they have is built on the bones of a god.
But what grows from the bones of children? Nothing. Nothing at all.
The Titan hunters killed children. They said they were monsters, but they were children. Children who played games and laughed and from their first conscious moments wanted to be loved and belong. And they hunted them to extinction, and kept their pristine skulls as trophies. An entire room full of them, of tiny skulls that could've become something wonderful and terrible and life-giving but never had the chance. They wear them, as a badge of honor. Look what I've done, look what I destroyed.
Philip Wittebane had been making grimwalkers for hundreds of years, sure, but even knowing that, there's so many of them. How many could've reached 20? There's piles of them, of bones and identical masks, scattered at the bottom of a pit, and god, were they dead, when he threw them down there? It's clear that he doesn't care, that the only thing that matters is disposing of them once they wear out their usefulness, moving on to the new model. Children tossed aside, left to rot and decay, and when we see them the bones are all clean.
661 notes
·
View notes