One of the earliest examples of Leo’s “I’ll do my own thing to accomplish our goal without discussing it with my team first” is in episode one. It’s super, super quick, and ultimately inconsequential, but it subtly sets up a great precedent that I think is very interesting.
When the boys need to grab the medallion from Splinter without Splinter noticing, Raph, Mikey, and Donnie huddle together with Raph taking the lead in trying to devise a plan to get the mystic device. Meanwhile, Leo slinks away and grabs the device by clocking the situation (by knowing his father well enough to predict his actions - something he does with each family member multiple times in the series) and making a move on his own.
It works out perfectly fine, and is ultimately the best move, and it’s honestly okay that he didn’t consult everyone for something so small when it’s such a non issue to get it, but it nicely sets up how this tends to go in the series, including how it goes in the movie.
To be honest episode one is actually really good at setting up a lot of things for each character in the long run, this is just one example that caught my attention, as small and unassuming as it is.
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Proship dni for my comfort thanks.
I feel like everyone portrays F/Os as these romantic, perfect all around lovers, and while that's all well and good! I prefer F/Os who are flawed, who don't always say the right things. Who can sometimes be petty or selfish. F/Os who have a habit of seeing conflict as a contest on who can talk the loudest, instead of a conversation. F/Os who run out of patience sometimes and have to go cool off mid-conversation, even if they're right. F/Os who struggle to communicate their emotions.
I find comfort in the idea of a relationship where mistakes like that are allowed and given room to breathe. A relationship where, no matter what the conflict is, the walls eventually come down. Maybe it takes hours, maybe days until you're both calm enough to work it out. Maybe it takes several conversations to solve it, but each end in Hey. I love you. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
You're not perfect, and neither is your F/O. That's okay. That can be beautiful, too. There's not a hug that's more comforting than the firm, tearful one after reaching mutual understanding. Knowing that you didn't mess it up too much, you didn't break things permanently. You couldn't if you tried. They missed you... and you've got some serious affection to catch up on.
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the thing about eliot spencer as a character, right. the thing about him.
(and as always your mileage may vary on my analyses so if we disagree that's cool actually)
is that he is in fact a somewhat emotionally constipated idiot who is occasionally sensitive about his perceived masculinity and gets defensive about emotional intimacy around other men (largely hardison, who's much more comfortable expressing affection and embracing a softer kind of masculinity), but eliot displays enough emotional awareness and sensitivity and respect for women etc etc that anyone who's been subjected to that era of television will put on rose-tinted glasses without even looking twice.
(and he is, don't get me wrong, incredibly emotionally aware for a professionally punchy guy with enough trauma to sink the titanic. it still startles me to see.)
on top of which we have the layers and the accessories and the excellent hair with the secret braids and the way he barely has an ego and he's good with kids and protective of his team without taking it too far, and some of us never stood a fucking chance.
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it's still wild to me how choke was released while dallon was still in panic. how awkward does that sound ?? you're all eating lunch in the tour bus and the guy to your left is regularly performing a semi-subtle diss track about you
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Antis will be like “Jiang Cheng never viewed Wei Wuxian as family, he was treated like a servant!!! 😠😠😠” but like… if I showed up day-drunk to work, stopped performing my basic duties, kept skipping out when the most support was needed rebuilding, escalated fights during diplomatic events, and refused to tell anyone why I’d started behaving like this, I would definitely get fired. But instead Wei Wuxian has to quiet quit and then actually quit when even that doesn’t work, because as far as we can tell Jiang Cheng would've let him stay as first disciple forever no matter what. So like, if Jiang Cheng thinks of himself as just Wei Wuxian's boss, he does a pretty bad job of treating Wei Wuxian as just an employee.
Are there complicated class dynamics and internal senses of responsibility and debt and duty and obligation fucking both of them up? Absolutely. But Wei Wuxian is definitely not just a servant or a debtor, it’s much, much messier and more complicated than that--which is kind of the problem.
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There is exactly one criticism that I agree with my, very anti-Jedi, cousin on and that's the Jedi were TERRIBLE Generals. Generals may TRY to make sure their men mostly come back. But useless sacrifices are not only acceptable, but expected, the men are mostly expandable in war. The Jedi did not consider sacrifices like that acceptable or expected. Sure it did happen. It was WAR. But they tried their best to make sure it DIDN'T. The Jedi were terrible Generals. But they were the teachers and Leaders the CLONES NEEDED.
I'm not sure I'd ENTIRELY agree with that. I think I'd be willing to agree that the Jedi were perhaps less CONVENTIONAL Generals, and they definitely do seem to at least TRY to place the lives of their men above just tossing them away for an easy victory, but you can just as easily claim that keeping the men alive to keep fighting is a good strategy in and of itself.
The biggest piece of evidence I'd point to that the Jedi were actually perfectly good Generals is the Citadel arc and Tarkin's criticisms. The one real criticism he makes of the Jedi as military leaders is that they're occasionally too soft and will abandon a mission if it looks impossible to win without near total casualties (on either side). But he's generally fairly positive about the Jedi and if they were truly awful at their jobs, I don't think TARKIN of all people would hold back on saying so, even to the Jedi's faces.
And we DO see the Jedi willing to make sacrifices and accepting that this is a necessary part of war. The Citadel arc is, again, a perfectly good example of this. Obi-Wan and Anakin go in with like 3-4 men each I think and they come back with a grand total of 3 (Rex, Cody, and Fives). A LOT of clones die on this mission that they all KNEW was basically a suicide mission because the Jedi themselves decided that getting the information about the hyperspace lanes was vital enough to the war that it was worth losing multiple lives over (including their own).
So it's not that the Jedi don't understand that sacrifices are necessary in war or even that they avoid it entirely, they just avoid what they see as UNNECESSARY sacrifice for what might amount to a fairly minor victory. Keeping more of their men alive might, in the long run, be a better strategic choice than losing all of them on one campaign, especially if it's over like one uninhabited moon or something like that. There's nothing to say that the losses the Jedi deem acceptable are things that would've changed the entire tide of the war had they chosen to push forward instead.
The other good evidence that the Jedi acting this way would've been the WORSE choice is the Umbara arc. We are told and then see that Krell IS the kind of General who is willing to lose a lot of clones in order to gain victories in battle, and the clones do recognize that he has a lot of victories under his belt. But never once do they discuss whether those victories really MEANT anything or had a large impact on the war effort. It certainly never seems that the Republic is majorly pushing back the Separatists because of Krell's victories, nobody ever mentions that Krell gained them a major advantage with those victories or took out anyone of any consequence on the Separatist side with his strategies. And by the time he gets to Umbara, he's explicitly using this strategy to WEAKEN the Republic side and cause a loss. Several of his strategies WOULD'VE meant the Republic lost on Umbara and it's only the clones utilizing different strategies that put fewer of them at risk that they actually end up continuing to HAVE victories at all.
I'll also point out that the Jedi continuously getting their men killed en masse would've bankrupted the Republic a LOT earlier because they'd have to be paying for more clones a LOT more often than they did in canon and I can't imagine anyone would've considered that a particularly sound strategy and at some point I'm sure the Senate would've felt obligated to put a stop to it anyway and insisted on strategies that kept more clones alive for longer. So I'm not sure it's fair to claim the Jedi were utilizing BAD strategy by not just exclusively using tactics that meant most of their men were killed for every single victory.
So the ONLY criticism we EVER see of the Jedi's ability as military leaders is Tarkin claiming they're "too soft" and Tarkin is the kind of person who would likely say that until the Jedi started carpet bombing entire Separatist planets. Would it give them a victory? Yeah, sure, maybe, but that's the exact same strategy the Separatists are using and look how well that works out for THEM. Everything else we ever see seems to showcase that the Jedi are in fact perfectly good Generals, not just in that they're kind to the clones and are unwilling to carpet bomb Separatist planets, but also because they're just... good at this. They CAN be strategic, they CAN run wars if they want to. And I think that's the whole point of the Jedi in some ways is that yes, they CAN make war when they need to, they just actively choose NOT TO every time they can. THIS is why Qui-Gon tells Padme that he and Obi-Wan are there to protect her but that they can't win this war for her and they end up going off to fight off a Sith while Padme has to actually win the war with her own people and the Gungans instead. The Jedi don't WANT to be in the position of doing nothing but fighting, but they're absolutely capable of this kind of work.
That's the tragedy of the war in some ways, the Jedi ARE good at this no matter how much they wish they weren't sometimes. But being good at it means they can actually protect the Republic, their own men, and even the Separatist civilians better, so they're not going to just sit there and do things that will screw over a bunch of people. Yes, they're going to fight the war in such a way that they reduce casualties as much as possible, but reducing casualties also requires doing enough to not LOSE the damn war, too. It's a delicate balance they're trying to hold on to and I'd argue they manage it better than anybody else would've ever done in their position.
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haha no i dont think about glenn close genuinely questioning whether he should go back home or not cuz he has no family and therefore no motive to return !!! cuz he knew hed be going 'home' to an empty dead house !!!! so what wouldve been the point !!!!! hahahahah i dont think about how glenn had to lose morgan twice !! and then nick !!!! who he stated was (at the time) the only remaining bit of morgan he had left!!! i dont think about how much glenns family clearly mattered to him !! even if he was not a great father to nick !!!! glenn cared about them!!! and knowing hed live without them took away the motivation of returning 'home'!!! cuz what is home to him anymore!!!!!! it is an empty house!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHHA!! i dont think of that at all!!!!!
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