#these are not textual impressions I do not fucking remember how the weather is in in-game hammerlocke. I just think itd be funny
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weather's turnin' cold
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#pokemon#swsh#champion leon#assisant sonia#gym leader raihan#three parts of a whole idiot#hi hello! hi. wow I have NO energy recently#got sick 1.5 times. made two cakes of various levels of deflated. walked a lot. slept SO much#and the weather is indeed cooling here! in fact a storm is hitting central vietnam right now#and I uh. I dont think its gonna affect the north a lot. but thats a good thing. I do not envy the folks down there at all...#gonna keep an ear on the ground for them. hope it's all gonna turn out rather uneventful#meanwhile. I draw little comic#this is how I (chronically tropical person) feel whenever I see snow and bare skin in the same frame#it's honestly a bit funny to me always that postwick is southmost and wyndon is like. the center of the north#forest imps leon and sonia vs city slicker raihan. and now temperate beautiful weather children leon and sonia vs#hail/snow/windstorm/humidity rotate raihan#raihan's childhood dream of seeing torrential rain outside and saying 'hm no. I think not' and weather manip hammerlocke into dryness#these are not textual impressions I do not fucking remember how the weather is in in-game hammerlocke. I just think itd be funny#also my brain was doing donuts around like. leon being exasperated at raihan's bare legs every winter#until he went on T and by age 16 he's like oh. oh I get it#(that doesnt last long he's still a frostbait southerner. u see the leggings. u know how it is)#okay. I'll doodle some stuff and transcribe this tomorrow. now I sleep#have a good night lads! bundle up
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March 24: Thoughts on 4x07 Gimme Shelter
Okay, I finally watched 4x07... It’s hard to gather my thoughts on it, though. I feel like I have a lot and they’re all sort of jumbled up.
In general, I did like it. I thought it was way better than the last two episodes, both of which I kind of hated tbh, especially 4x05. There were some weak points and some things I didn’t quite get or would quibble over but my overall feeling is a positive one. I liked the two main story lines, I thought there were several really good moments, and I was impressed with the episode’s ability to actually have a coherent and clear theme.
The Arkadia/Bellamy Story:
One of my big complaints this season has been that story line after story line after story line lacks tension because the general structure of the episode and the season make the outcome of the alleged conundrum predictable. This time, for once, I actually felt the sort of tension I felt when watching season 2 (well, okay, a slightly weaker version of it)--I actually didn’t know what was going to happen. Maybe that’s weak of me and I should have known that Bellamy wouldn’t be able to save Mark and Peter but I was still hoping for a last minute solution (unlike previous story lines, saving the Coltons wouldn’t have made overall survival any more or less likely, so it wasn’t completely insane to think that Bellamy could have been successful). The last scene before he loses contact with them, stuck in the Rover, was like... honestly a nightmare scenario for me, I mean this literally, I have had nightmares on exactly this theme, searching for some solution to some problem and finding none, so I was definitely emotionally compromised by it.
I was also very pleased that--even though Bellamy’s obsession with the Coltons was obviously from start to finish a surrogate for his worry about Octavia--we finally got to hear someone mention a member of the 100. I really thought I’d have to give up on anyone caring about that particular affiliation ever again. Literally everyone other than the named members of the 100 (by my count...8 people?) has completely disappeared into the ether so I was really beyond excited to hear someone talk about someone else as “one of the 100″ again.
You know how before S3 there was this talk about Bellamy being acknowledged as a hero finally and then instead his character was totally assassinated? LOL I feel like that statement should have been prefaced with “IN SEASON 4″ so at least I could have known how long I’d have to wait for heroic Bellamy to come back from war. I’m not saying this is the first time we’ve seen him since season 2 because it’s obviously not, but still, I loved it, I loved seeing him intense and devoted and trying so very hard.
I also really liked the Bellamy and Kane conversation toward the end, over the Rover radio. This is probably bad of me, but I laughed when Bellamy said “You floated my mom” not because it’s funny but just how sudden it was, like, ‘I hear you trying to be my dad and you’re not my dad!!!’ Also because I like when characters’ pasts are things that like actually still exist since that’s pretty hit and miss with this show. Also because I personally head canon Kane as a prosecutor figure on the Ark and this semi-confirms this view (or we’re just supposed to read the line as being like ‘you, a council member, were generally responsible for my mom’s death’ which is also possible).
I still maintain that Harper has negligible personality but I did like her little mini theme-reinforcing story line here.
Oh also today’s story reinforces what I’ve thought this whole season, which was that Jasper’s little trick about committing suicide by standing out in the “black rain” was not as reprehensible as people think, in fact not reprehensible at all, because if it were black rain he would have felt it right away so like he was obviously not in danger--it’s not his fault that other people are dumb and fell for such fakery lol.
The Island Story Line
This one is more complicated for me. I liked a lot of things about it but I also had some...uncertainties about it and it’s hard to separate the two.
First, the moral issue of the day... Okay, yes, as an initial matter, I still have enough of a soul to be disgusted by the idea of forcibly experimenting on people, like I’m not a completely heartless bitch (even though I think a lot of my episode reactions make me seem that way). But because I have no idea who this Grounder fellow is, and because he really fortuitously just fell into their laps--more on my thoughts on this later--it’s hard for me to feel what I think the full impact of the moral conundrum is. Just as I didn’t really, viscerally, emotionally care about the 4x02 slaves because I didn’t know who they are, I don’t really care about Baylis or whoever he is because he’s pretty much the definition of a rando. I would much, much, much rather a character I didn’t even know existed 24 hours ago die and all my faves live than my faves take the moral high road and give themselves up to death to save some dude I know literally nothing about.
So what I’m trying to say is that I’m stuck between ‘this is really gross’ and ‘this isn’t gross enough.’ The arrival of Baylis is such an obvious narrative out, a having cake and eating it too scenario: you’ll see our heroes doing something bad, but not, like, REALLY bad, don’t worry. But can I really be upset about that? My revulsion is going to limited anyway because disgust at medical experiments is sort of a theme we’ve already traveled on this show so I’ve built up a tolerance and also... if Abby et. al. were really the new Mt. Weather and I felt the same way about them as I felt about,, say Dr. Tsing in S2, I couldn’t still continue to identify with them as the protagonists of the story. So the narrative is necessarily somewhat constrained in that way.
Speaking of Mt. Weather...have the Sky People learned nothing from their own past experiences?? Yes, today’s moral conundrum was about whether to do the experiment to see if bone marrow works as a treatment, but if it DOES, then the next moral conundrum seems incredibly obvious to me and I’m just wondering why no one has brought it up? Like Abby was literally tortured by the last people who thought using others’ bone marrow was a good idea? You’d think she’d remember that. Maybe I’m just missing something, in which case I’m going to feel very dumb, but it’s sort of hard not to associate bone marrow with Mt. Weather in the context of this show. From S2 I learned that one person’s bone marrow can supply something like 8 people with radiation inoculation--if you’re willing to kill the “donor.” So unless Luna’s bone marrow is going to be used in a very different way, for example as like the basis for a synthetic bone marrow style substance, which maybe is where they’re going but it wasn’t very clear to me at least on an initial watch, they can save 8 people if they’re willing to kill her which seems...not great. (Really, thinking about this, their plan HAS to be using something IN her marrow to make a magic solution substance, right? Like there’s no way that’s not the plot.)
That being said at least we’re not going into fucking space I mean WOW THAT WAS SO DUMB I’M STILL NOT OVER HOW DUMB IT WAS. Still a waste of like 2 episodes but I’ll forgive them as long as I never hear “let’s just fly away into space like nbd” ever again.
As I was saying about Baylis. I’m all over the place on my thoughts on this. In general, I do feel like his appearance is super convenient, as I said above, especially since prior to this we’ve literally never heard of anyone else being on the island, of “scavengers,” or of particular Bad People in Emori’s past (besides, you know, her whole family who kicked her out--but that’s fairly obviously not who Baylis allegedly is). We heard some talk about ‘worse things than drones’ on the island but nothing as specific as what we got in this episode. And if random Grounders really are the ‘worse things’ we were forewarned about, by the way, what a disappointment. I was waiting for genetically engineered monsters. Yet again, The 100 meta writers >> The 100′s actual writers. My problem with contrived narratives like this is that they take me out of the story. All I can think is ‘I see you writers, pulling the strings, constructing this narrative.’ That’s a fine thing to think AFTER watching or maybe on a second or third rewatch but a well constructed story shouldn’t feel like a narrative on the first viewing, imo. You should be feeling it too deeply to be analyzing it on the level of construction.
So I thought it was heavy-handed. And I also was sitting there wondering ��when is someone FINALLY going to bring up that Baylis would be a great experimental subject???” Because I had come to that conclusion during his fight with Emori--back to the ‘this season is predictable’ theme I guess. I didn’t think the Dramatic Moment of Clarke suggesting experimenting on him was earned because, like, duh, why else was he even written into the show except to be a test subject? However, I will give this point a little bit of slack because of that final scene: finding out that Emori was acting the entire time--that, within the universe of the show, SHE was pulling the strings--made a lot of the earlier obviously-contrived-ness forgivable. Like, okay, it feels fake, but that’s because it IS.
And about Emori... Unpopular opinion time. I liked her, was intrigued by her, when she was introduced in S2. But I found her very lackluster (in terms of writing/conception, not in terms of performance) in S3. I didn’t think the writers really developed her in any way. I realize this could be disputed with textual evidence, for example, how she goes from trusting no one but her brother, to trusting and relying on Murphy, or how she learns to accept her deformity. But I’m talking more, I don’t know, emotionally, I just couldn’t see what difference she made to the story, I just couldn’t connect with her. I feel like she is largely a female Grounder version of Murphy, but less compelling because I know her less and see less of her. Her constant sole motivating factor is her own survival, which makes her very predictable and one-note. Similarly, her relationship with Murphy bores me because we never saw it develop, all of the getting together stuff happened off screen, and then once they were together they basically became like the same character twice over, interacting with itself.
BUT I really did like Emori in this episode. And I finally saw something in her that was compelling to me: how incredibly, incredibly sharp she is. Like that con she played, it wasn’t just on Clarke or on Murphy, it was on ME. I guess in a way I’m saying she earned my respect.
Also Luisa D’Oliviera’s voice is gorgeous, like why have I not noticed that before? When she and Clarke were walking in the woods in particular, ugh, beautiful.
I’m still not really on the Murphy/Emori ship but I will admit they were hella cute in this episode.
I don’t know how Murphy learned how to cook but I like that he does. I also like this “Murphy flirts with everyone” trait they’ve decided to give him these last couple of seasons. I definitely saw him as more ‘awkward boy trying to be cool’ in early Season 1 but I guess all of his experiences have just thrown him into the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude, which frees him up to flirt with everyone for fun and without worry.
But...what the fuck is a randzi?
One (more?) complaint about this story line though: The impact of the Baylis story was lessened considerably as it was told, imo, in that I could never quite get a purchase on WHAT he had (allegedly) done to Emori--maybe this is just my prurient interest, but I thought they cut a lot of corners in just painting him as a generically abusive bad guy. Sometimes I was tempted to read him as an abusive ex-boyfriend...but he also abused her brother and then there’s that ‘scared little girl’ line. Was he one of the people who cast her out? She talks about that event but also says it happened when she was an infant, so this must be someone she met later...I suppose someone who took advantage of her and her brother’s vulnerability while they were on their own. I eventually settled on a non-literal Bad Uncle type. I’m not saying I need a play-by-play on the abuse, but it just...I was constantly trying to figure out exactly what they were talking about and it started to feel a little contrived (again), how generically he was painted as A Bad Person Just Trust Me He’s Bad. But then that last scene makes me think...was it contrived on purpose? Maybe. Still, Emori’s abuser is, apparently, a real person: Murphy’s line toward the end is “He’s not the guy?” not “The story was fake?” So if the story was real, Emori could have used real details if she’d wanted--the details weren’t hidden from the viewer because she was bullshitting the whole thing but because, I can only assume, the writers were too lazy to write them in, and that, I don’t respect.
Oh, also, that line about saving themselves first and then restoring their humanity, that Kane says, is another one of those faux-deep The 100 lines that I always have to roll my eyes at (like “I bear it so they don’t have to” when Clarke says it, or “No one is innocent” when divorced from its original context, or my personal favorite “You don’t ease pain you overcome it” or whatever that 3x16 nonsense was). Again, did Mt. Weather teach you nothing? Once you’ve done something SO BAD that it erases your humanity itself, it’s gone; you don’t get it back. Maybe if someone actually listened to Dante we wouldn’t still be having these problems lol.
Also also: I’m still on the fence about these Ultra Modern Aesthetics like in Becca’s lab and house, but it was nice seeing Clarke shower, look clean, and rest. And I liked the almost horror-movie scene where she first sees there’s been an intruder in the house. But...was there blood on the pillow of that bed or am I just totally imagining things??
Octavia and Ilian
Two hotties I don’t care about, basically.
I honestly cannot conceive of anything Ilian could do or say that would make me care about him ever so.
I get why Octavia is Annoyingly Dramatic: she’s sixteen. She’s sixteen with an added dose of stunted emotional growth from literally knowing only 2 human beings for most of her life. But that doesn’t make her dead inside emo child bit any less obnoxious to me. (I realize I am a semi-hypocrite about this given some things I DO like and even worse some things I’ve actually written myself but shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.)
I know everyone saw I/O coming from a million miles away and so did I but that doesn’t make it any less nonsense. That said...I wouldn’t mind seeing Octavia become a sheep herder. I mean I’m so tired of her current state of being that anything would be a nice change of pace but like a real 180 about-face might be kind of refreshing. It might be nonsense...but when was the last time O wasn’t nonsense? Like at least it would be relaxing nonsense.
And on the trailer: Yes Jasper. Yes Miller is finally back from his extended spa vacation or whatever he was doing.
#the 100#bellamy blake#clarke griffin#john murphy#emori#s4 reactions#the year 2017#2017: fandom thoughts#2017: the 100 s4#the 100 spoilers
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