#I think of very weirdly complex random scenarios

[lakelandseo]

Google vs. AI — Whiteboard Friday

Large Language Models have taken the world by storm in recent months. In today’s episode, Tom goes over some of the new threats to Google from recent advances in machine learning models like ChatGPT, and how Google might react to those threats.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk about some of the threats posed to Google by recent advances in large language models and natural language processing and chatbots and this kind of thing.

I want to talk about how Google might react to some of these threats because that's obviously going to affect us, whatever happens, as SEOs. Now the lens that I want to look at this through is think about some of the different kinds of query that we currently use Google for. Really it's kind of an artifact of Google's dominance in the last decade or two that we use Google as the go-to tool for such a varied set of uses.

So I've got some example searches here, and obviously this is just some random things that came into my head. This is not representative of everything people use Google for, which is even more varied. But I've got like a commercial query, "running shoes £ 50." So a lot of people know now and the data has been around for a few years that Amazon is actually a bigger product search engine than Google in the U.S.

More product search journeys start on Amazon than on Google. So that's not anything to do with large language models, but that's sort of some context to this scenario for Google. Then we've got things like "pancake recipe," sort of very informational, uncontroversial where, yeah, actually a chat AI can do a pretty good job just sort of aggregating all the different recipes that it's consumed in its training set.

"COVID symptoms" way more authority sensitive query, right? So at the moment, this is kind of a strong point for Google because, weirdly enough, as consumers we trust Google more than we might trust something like an NLP model right now. Then "Moz blog," so this is your bread- and-butter navigational web search, where really a web search engine, this is what they originally set out to be good at, and they are the sort of natural tool for a problem like this.

Whereas for some of these other ones, it's not obvious that what I want is a website at all, let alone a web search engine. Now I think the interesting thing here, so I talked about how Amazon was probably the natural competitor for some of these product queries, but it's a more complex picture than that.

So though Google is trying to compete directly with this threat with things like the product updates, making sure that they are a good product search engine, and if you want to be a bit conspiratorial, you could say, well, maybe they're trying to make sure that Amazon affiliates aren't too dominant in the SERPs. It's also the case that these are big money terms for Google in terms of AdWords.

But like I said before, we're using Google for everything these days and have done for some time. Part of that is making sure that you're locked in with these kinds of queries. You get in the habit of using Google. You're in their ecosystem, so you're more likely to use them for this kind of thing. Now I've written loss leaders here, and I think that's an interesting concept, an interesting way of thinking about this.

In retail, you might have a loss leader, which would be a product that the store does not make much money on or it might even lose money on, but they've got you in, so you're going to buy the high-margin products as well. So these kinds of query, these are not so obviously easy to monetize, but they can be loss leaders to get us engaged when we do make these high-margin searches.

Now that's kind of why I've included this search here because I want to explain why these searches, which might seem like they are not ... something like a chat AI response to this is actually very expensive to produce relative to how easy it is to monetize.

You can kind of see that with how Amazon and Google have both struggled to make money on their sort of home chat devices, Alexa and I think it's called Google Home. They both sort of struggle to make money on those because these kinds of query are hard to monetize.

But they are loss leaders that will engage you for this kind of thing. So that's why they're important. Obviously, for this kind of query, this is the one where Google is most obviously threatened by things like the new Bing and things like ChatGPT and that kind of technology as an alternative to a search engine for now.

So how might they respond to that? Well, obviously, if you can't beat them, join them. Google is launching Bard. Their original announcement on February 6th and most sort of logical predictions are that, well, suggest that it was going to end up in the SERPs sooner or later.

At the moment, it's a separate interface to SERPs. But it seems like it will end up looking like a SERP feature sooner or later. Then we should expect to see more and more sort of Knowledge Graph results. At the moment, there are a lot of things you can search for on Google where you won't see a website as a result. If you search for something like "five liters in gallons," then you won't see a website as the top result.

You will see a Knowledge Graph result, and I'd expect that to become more and more common because that is a better answer for these kinds of queries often than showing a website. Now what about COVID symptoms? What about the more authority sensitive query? Well, I'd say the threat here is kind of the other way around. It's not that Google thinks you might use a chatbot to ask for COVID symptoms, although in time you might.

It's more that if Google's own results are not high quality, if Google's own results were written by AI, then they've lost their differentiator, right? At the moment, we trust Google more than we would trust some of these new technologies, more than we would trust some other search engines. They need to maintain that edge, and the way to maintain that edge is by making sure that their results are written by people, at least by authorities or at least checked by authorities.

Whereas some of these alternatives are not. So that's why you see things like the Helpful Content Update, which now looks extremely prescient, that was late last year, and also core updates. The core updates are Google refining and improving its algorithm over time, but making sure they stay ahead of the game.

Similarly, that goes to these kinds of queries too. They have to make sure they're still the best at this kind of thing. At the moment, things like Bard and things like the new Bing, the chat interface on new Bing don't really work for web search. But in time, there's no reason why they couldn't. So Google has to maintain an edge in this area as well.

So that was a quick, whistle-stop tour through how I think Google might react to some of these new threats. Let me know what you think on Twitter or on Mastodon or on any other or on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I'd love to hear more people's opinions about these kinds of emerging trends.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

[bfxenon]

Google vs. AI — Whiteboard Friday

Large Language Models have taken the world by storm in recent months. In today’s episode, Tom goes over some of the new threats to Google from recent advances in machine learning models like ChatGPT, and how Google might react to those threats.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk about some of the threats posed to Google by recent advances in large language models and natural language processing and chatbots and this kind of thing.

I want to talk about how Google might react to some of these threats because that's obviously going to affect us, whatever happens, as SEOs. Now the lens that I want to look at this through is think about some of the different kinds of query that we currently use Google for. Really it's kind of an artifact of Google's dominance in the last decade or two that we use Google as the go-to tool for such a varied set of uses.

So I've got some example searches here, and obviously this is just some random things that came into my head. This is not representative of everything people use Google for, which is even more varied. But I've got like a commercial query, "running shoes £ 50." So a lot of people know now and the data has been around for a few years that Amazon is actually a bigger product search engine than Google in the U.S.

More product search journeys start on Amazon than on Google. So that's not anything to do with large language models, but that's sort of some context to this scenario for Google. Then we've got things like "pancake recipe," sort of very informational, uncontroversial where, yeah, actually a chat AI can do a pretty good job just sort of aggregating all the different recipes that it's consumed in its training set.

"COVID symptoms" way more authority sensitive query, right? So at the moment, this is kind of a strong point for Google because, weirdly enough, as consumers we trust Google more than we might trust something like an NLP model right now. Then "Moz blog," so this is your bread- and-butter navigational web search, where really a web search engine, this is what they originally set out to be good at, and they are the sort of natural tool for a problem like this.

Whereas for some of these other ones, it's not obvious that what I want is a website at all, let alone a web search engine. Now I think the interesting thing here, so I talked about how Amazon was probably the natural competitor for some of these product queries, but it's a more complex picture than that.

So though Google is trying to compete directly with this threat with things like the product updates, making sure that they are a good product search engine, and if you want to be a bit conspiratorial, you could say, well, maybe they're trying to make sure that Amazon affiliates aren't too dominant in the SERPs. It's also the case that these are big money terms for Google in terms of AdWords.

But like I said before, we're using Google for everything these days and have done for some time. Part of that is making sure that you're locked in with these kinds of queries. You get in the habit of using Google. You're in their ecosystem, so you're more likely to use them for this kind of thing. Now I've written loss leaders here, and I think that's an interesting concept, an interesting way of thinking about this.

In retail, you might have a loss leader, which would be a product that the store does not make much money on or it might even lose money on, but they've got you in, so you're going to buy the high-margin products as well. So these kinds of query, these are not so obviously easy to monetize, but they can be loss leaders to get us engaged when we do make these high-margin searches.

Now that's kind of why I've included this search here because I want to explain why these searches, which might seem like they are not ... something like a chat AI response to this is actually very expensive to produce relative to how easy it is to monetize.

You can kind of see that with how Amazon and Google have both struggled to make money on their sort of home chat devices, Alexa and I think it's called Google Home. They both sort of struggle to make money on those because these kinds of query are hard to monetize.

But they are loss leaders that will engage you for this kind of thing. So that's why they're important. Obviously, for this kind of query, this is the one where Google is most obviously threatened by things like the new Bing and things like ChatGPT and that kind of technology as an alternative to a search engine for now.

So how might they respond to that? Well, obviously, if you can't beat them, join them. Google is launching Bard. Their original announcement on February 6th and most sort of logical predictions are that, well, suggest that it was going to end up in the SERPs sooner or later.

At the moment, it's a separate interface to SERPs. But it seems like it will end up looking like a SERP feature sooner or later. Then we should expect to see more and more sort of Knowledge Graph results. At the moment, there are a lot of things you can search for on Google where you won't see a website as a result. If you search for something like "five liters in gallons," then you won't see a website as the top result.

You will see a Knowledge Graph result, and I'd expect that to become more and more common because that is a better answer for these kinds of queries often than showing a website. Now what about COVID symptoms? What about the more authority sensitive query? Well, I'd say the threat here is kind of the other way around. It's not that Google thinks you might use a chatbot to ask for COVID symptoms, although in time you might.

It's more that if Google's own results are not high quality, if Google's own results were written by AI, then they've lost their differentiator, right? At the moment, we trust Google more than we would trust some of these new technologies, more than we would trust some other search engines. They need to maintain that edge, and the way to maintain that edge is by making sure that their results are written by people, at least by authorities or at least checked by authorities.

Whereas some of these alternatives are not. So that's why you see things like the Helpful Content Update, which now looks extremely prescient, that was late last year, and also core updates. The core updates are Google refining and improving its algorithm over time, but making sure they stay ahead of the game.

Similarly, that goes to these kinds of queries too. They have to make sure they're still the best at this kind of thing. At the moment, things like Bard and things like the new Bing, the chat interface on new Bing don't really work for web search. But in time, there's no reason why they couldn't. So Google has to maintain an edge in this area as well.

So that was a quick, whistle-stop tour through how I think Google might react to some of these new threats. Let me know what you think on Twitter or on Mastodon or on any other or on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I'd love to hear more people's opinions about these kinds of emerging trends.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

[madcatdaderpydrawer-blog]

An Obstructer fight: Ranmaru

Ranmaru and Sara continued to check the graveyard, being careful not to wander too far from the rest of the group. A quiet grunt caught Ranmaru’s attention, and he peered in the direction the noise came from. No one else reacted to the strange noise, so he tried to ignore it and continue working but it stuck in the back of his head. There’s no way it could be another Obstructer, right?

A few minutes passed in silence, and Ranmaru had nearly forgotten about the noise when he heard Reko yell out “What the actual fuck is that?!” Anzu ducked behind her partner fearfully as a grotesque creature slinked out of the darkness. Mere feet from him, the creature was made almost entirely of long, dangling limbs. It slide unevenly from side to side, as if searching for something. Ranmaru just stared at the obsurd creature as it lumbered around, looming over with a bulky size that nearly doubled his own.

“What are you DOING?! Get away from that!” Naomichi whisper yelled, unsure if the abomination could hear. Sara took his hand, slowly stepping backwards to make as little noise as possible.

With a final lurch, the creature rose to a standing position. The long arms stopped surveying the area, and it became still. For a tense moment no one moved. Ranmaru held his breath, gripping Sara’s hand tightly. 

The creature slowly tilted its head in Ranmaru’s direction, swinging out its arms wildly at the two teens. Naomichi lunged forward, pulling Sara out of its path. Her grip slipped, and she let go of Ranmaru’s and. Just as Naomichi grabbed the boys arm, one of the hands just barely caught the shuriken pendent dangling from his neck. Ranmaru was swept off his feet, a hand gripping to the small boys neck as he was dangled high in the air. Sara cried out, fear filling her eyes, “NO! Ranmaru!!”

Everyone was speaking at once, but Ranmaru could hear none of it. He could only hear his heart beating in his ears. He let out a pitiful squeak, unable to make any other sound. He struggled in the large creatures grip, kicking it in the chest in a feeble attempt to free himself. But the creature held steadfast, more hands clamping around his wrists, gripping and tearing at the bandages snuggly wrapped around his chest. The raw strength of the creature made his arms burn with pain, and no matter how much he tried he couldn’t free his arm from the monsterous creatures grasp. It began to pull on him, dozens and dozens of hands pulling at his limbs, undetered by any attempts of resistance.

“Please, please do something! They’re gonna tear him apart! They’re gonna tear him apart!!” Anzu wailed. Ranmaru’s stomach dropped at the realization. The hands weren’t just pulling, they were twisting and yanking so hard it nearly dislocated his shoulder. It was trying to tear his arm off, it was trying to tear everything off! He screamed as another hand landed on his leg, uncharacteristically trembling in terror. He flailed wildly, clawing at the hand holding him up to no effect. He couldn’t die, not here! Not again! His breath quickens, his breathing becoming short and uneven, “Hurry!! Please hurry, I...I can’t.. much longer...!” he wheezed out, gasping for air.

“Hang in there, Ranmaru! We’ll get you down, I promise!” Sara yelled up to him, with her usual confidence that always managed to make him feel a bit better. It was reassuring to hear, even if he didn’t exactly believe her. He wanted to, he really did, but he hadn’t held these new comers in high regard and bitterly assumed they’d have no care for the safety of a doll. 

No matter how much he squirmed and struggled and fought, Ranmaru was quickly immbolizied by the many armed creature. His vision began to fade, pain pulsing through his body as he felt his arm slowly begin to tear open. Every part of him was in blistering, agonizing pain. He hadn’t even noticed, but he started to cry silently. He wasn’t going to get out of this alive, he hated himself for even having hope.

And then, the pulling stopped. A horrendous shriek boomed through the air, and Ranmaru landed to the floor with a thud. Slowly, his vision began to clear up and he was promptly tackled by the petite clown girl. He weakly smiled at her, patting her on the head softly with slow, painful movements. “You’re alive, you’re alive!! Ranmaru, can you hear me?? Ranmaru?” Ranmaru slowly nodded in response, making no attempt to speak.

Anzu got off, and Sara gently crouched down beside him torch in hand. In front of him was a pile of ash where the monster once was. She cocked her head to the side, gently running her hand through his messy white hair. He flinched slightly, turning red as a tomato. “Are you feeling alright, Ranmaru?” He looked at her in shock, and then mutters out in a forced hushed tone, “Y...You.. helped me...”

“Of course I did. We’re friends, Ranmaru. I care about you. Doll or otherwise, we’re all in this together. I made a promise and I intend on keeping it.” Ranmaru cracked a small smile, reddening further at the comment. Sara lent him a hand, which he hesitantly took and she hoisted him up off the ground, wrapping a arm around his shoulder to support his weight. “Be careful, alright? I got you.”

“Let’s get going already.” Naomichi insisted stubbornly, crossing his arms over his chest. Ranmaru could tell that he felt guilty about what had happened, and couldn’t help but smile. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. 

Maybe none of them were. Maybe... Maybe they could work as a team. 

#yttd #yttd naomichi #yttd ranmaru #yttd obstructor #yttd sara #ransara #fanfic #oneshot #yttd reko #yttd anzu #This is a fanfiction I thought of last night and wanted to write #not really proofread #kind of posted it on instinct #i like making myself sad #I think of very weirdly complex random scenarios #but hope you like it

[mikami]

Hellooo Luna, why is Mikami your favourite?

I’ve loved Mikami since around 2009, so the answer to this question has become weirdly complicated. I always have to stare for a moment and just go “I am not sure I remember what it is like to NOT have him as my favourite.”

Mikami’s a character who’s always been there in my life and my perspective on him grew a lot over time even as my love remained unwavering.

When I initially came to adore him, I was 14 years old. What I primarily connected to back then was his desire to do the right thing - I was a kid, I was being bullied, I was having a hard time and seeing Mikami be someone who perseveres no matter what in his unyielding quest to do right by himself, that was something I found sad and inspiring at once.

For a lot of my teenage years, my motto was to be a person he could respect. I used to walk with my gaze planted firmly on the ground, afraid to accidentally lock eyes with anybody, until a random day when I was 15 or so and decided that if Mikami could walk upright despite all the abuse he endured, so could I. My walking posture has been fixed ever since.

Since then, I have come to understand Mikami a lot better. I no longer believe he’s someone who sincerely cares about justice as an adult. I know he is selfish and a misanthropic asshole. But at the same time, I’ve come to appreciate his complexities a lot more.

Mikami is a character who has so much going on below the surface. He’s a case study of a good kid turning into a bad adult despite seemingly adhering to the same principles the whole way through. His psyche is both well-explained and complex. At the same time, he is inherently funny. Permanently scowling muscle-lawyer who is a drama queen when he’s entirely in private? He’s hilarious! The fact that he’s boring IS in itself, hilarious! He’s the perfect straight man to any scenario, he is just endearingly serious.

And he’s a character who hits on so many themes I think are fascinating to explore: the desire to help others for the sake of others vs the desire to help others for the sake of feeling good about yourself; the need for an external structure that you can model your life after vs the incapability to accept any perspective but your own as correct, misery as a result of experiencing violence vs continued misery as a self-inflicted state of being....

Since the mechanisms of his mind are so well-explained and comprehensive, it is extremely fun to put him into different scenarios and reason out alternative paths for him - even if he only changes slowly and very little.

Mikami is a character I fall in love with over and over again. How I thought of him when I started in this fandom and how I see him now have very little in common, but he’s always been intriguing and always rewarding to think about. 

#IDK HE'S JUST MY ETERNAL NUMBER ONE ITS HARD TO EXPLAIN #HE'S GOOD #answers #teru mikami thoughts

[delicadenza]

The Long Way Home: On Love, Departures, and What Detroit Means to Me

(What originally started off as a little thought-seed about the Very Specific way I imagine my precanon Phichuuris turned into a grossly long-winded ramble about the nature of love???? I don’t know how to explain, omg. I’m so sorry.)

The fourth episode of Yuri!!! on Ice was a pivotal episode for me for many reasons. Prior to that my investment in the series’ early episodes was always tempered by a kind of caution—I’d been enjoying the push-and-pull between Yuuri and Victor as Yuuri struggled to come to terms with the fact that his idol had taken any degree of interest in him and Victor attempted to draw him out of his shell, and seeing the seed of what would eventually develop into a complex dynamic between him and Yuri Plisetsky, partly admiration, partly rivalry, partly a care and concern that neither of them quite knew how to express. But likewise I’d made it a point to be a little guarded—to hang back and wait until fuller character arcs for the protagonists and for the people in their world began to emerge before I gave the series my heart and soul. (I was a little scared, do you see? I didn’t want things to just turn out like another carrot-and-stick game between the shy anxious boy and the hot foreign guy he’d idolized forever who had taken a sudden and inexplicable interest in him. It didn’t help matters that at the time all the conspiracy theories floating around were that Victor was evil, or that he was dying. But anyway.)

All of that reserve flew out the window by the fourth episode, which essentially took the little hints the earlier episodes had been making at the characters’ hidden depths and cranked them up to eleven. There’s so much wonderful insight that comes out of this episode—from the by-now iconic “When I open up, he meets me where I am,” to the way Victor challenges Yuri to put together his own free skate as a way to build his confidence. The conversation they both have with Yuuri’s former coach, Celestino, is especially telling of Yuuri’s personal challenges and what he needs in order to grow: Victor asks, “Why didn’t you let Yuuri choose his own music?” to which Celestino replies that he chooses the music for his skaters unless they tell him that they’d like to pick their own. He proceeds to add that Yuuri only brought him a piece once, but that he’d gone back on it when asked if he believed he could win skating to it: “Please choose the music for me after all, Coach.”

In a sense, this conversation with his former coach reveals to Victor how past!Yuuri failed a kind of test—one that had to do with his capacity to trust his own choices—and that present!Yuuri now needs to face and surmount a similar test before he can move on. The difference is, of course, that Victor’s not going to let him give up on himself. Where Celestino withdraws and lets Yuuri fold, Victor insists on pushing. I also like how this short conversation is illustrative of the fact that, for all that it didn’t work out between them, and for all that his methods differ from Victor’s, Celestino knows Yuuri and has his best interests at heart, and understands what he needs in order to succeed, even if it’s not something he can help Yuuri with at this point.

Suffice to say that there’s a lot to like about this episode, a lot to love, but the real kicker for me came a little under ten minutes in, when Yuuri’s slumped at his desk at a loss as to what to do with his program, and he’s scrolling through his Instagram feed. He sees a friend of his is practicing in Thailand—and right then and there, he calls this friend. Yuuri, who’s anxious and overthinky and shy and has such a hard time opening up to people, just calls up this random boy from Instagram in the middle of the night, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He greets him with “Sawasdee krab.” Cue me bringing my hand to my mouth in dismay—He has a Thai friend and he’s greeting him in Thai, oh my god. I felt the axe hovering above my head about to drop.

Suffice to say that it was love at first sight for me, as far as Phichit Chulanont was concerned. From his very first appearance as a smiley image on Yuuri’s phone screen, he exudes a natural warmth and an effervescence that it’s difficult to look away from, and that have proceeded to endear him to the fandom surprisingly thoroughly for a supporting character without too much screentime/internal monologue time/poignant backstory reveal time. But more than that, it was the ease with which I saw him and Yuuri talk to each other that intrigued me, and the idea of their shared past—“Detroit’s boring now that you’re gone!” he said, and I felt the axe smash me right down into extrapolation hell, because cute former rinkmate? Cute former rinkmate whose wiki entry later told me was also a former roommate? Look at all the fanfic waiting to happen.

(Spoiler: Happen it did, and then some.)

I think one of my favorite things about fanfiction—possibly my favorite thing—is that you never start from zero. There’s a joy to be derived from building upon the foundations of a preexisting universe—taking the characters and fleshing them out in ways that canon doesn’t get to, dropping them into entirely new scenarios or even entirely new worlds, exploring “what if” scenarios. In other words, the act of filling in gaps.

I love visiting other people’s worlds to play. Add to this the fact that I’m the kind of person who enjoys thinking a lot about how our pasts shape who we eventually become, and who can get pretty obsessive about going back over my own memories with a fine-toothed comb and trying to trace how the various people I used to be might have been built, brick by brick, experience by experience, into the person I am now. So maybe it only stands to reason that I’d latch on to the idea of Yuuri’s time in Detroit, that long formative period in his life that’s talked about in canon but we never actually get to see except in the tiniest glimpses, and turn that strange obsessiveness of mine toward extrapolating the life out of it. Or, well, extrapolating the life into it, I guess I should say—making it real, trying my best to build it into a world of its own. I’ve never been to Motor City myself, but in the process of all this extrapolation I’ve looked at so many maps of the city, so many long lists of shops and restaurants, so many photos in particular of the Detroit River and of Ambassador Bridge, that it kind of makes my head spin. The imaginative exercise has made Phichit and Yuuri’s Detroit so real to me that sometimes I think I can almost smell the air. It’s honestly kind of weird when I stop and think about it, but that’s what the imagination can do if you take it and run with it.

Yuuri leaves home at eighteen, and spends the next five years in Detroit. He trains under Celestino, goes to college, makes it to his first Grand Prix Final. It’s never established in canon how many of those years he spends living with Phichit—usually I go with around two, on the assumption that Phichit moves to the US at eighteen, as Yuuri does, though this varies depending on who you ask—and how they come to be such good friends, different as they are. In other words, lots of gaps to fill in. Lots of room to play, and to extrapolate.

In the Detroit that I imagine, Yuuri and Phichit go to school and train together. They do the groceries and the laundry. They explore the city. They get hamsters. Somewhere in the middle of everything, Phichit gets his driver’s license, which means long late-night drives in Celestino’s car. Sometimes they go to parties. Sometimes they dance. They eat and watch TV and clean up their apartment and study together, and eventually they push their beds together so they can sleep next to each other too. Probably in that shared space they talk more and more deeply with each other than they ever have with anyone else. (Needless to say I was happy beyond words to see that little flashback in episode 11, where Phichit tells Yuuri about his dream to skate to “Shall We Skate?” at a major competition, and how important it is that Yuuri be there too when it finally happens. Needless to say at least three friends who saw it before I did were kind enough to tweet me a warning that the episode was going to kick my ass. Shout-out to my friends. I love my friends.)

In my imagination, all of this leads to them falling in love, though weirdly enough that’s almost beside the point—secondary to the fact that, somehow, they come to love each other. More on the difference between those two things in a bit.

Yuuri tanks at the Grand Prix Final in December. He returns home to Hasetsu in March of the following year. In the intervening months you can imagine him as caught in a kind of downward spiral—how depressed he must be from what he imagines is the worst performance of his life, how lost he probably feels. The competitive season has ended early for him, and he’s right about to finish his college degree, so in a lot of ways he’s at a crossroads, and there are a lot of things he’s unsure about. Should he leave Detroit or stay? Should he keep skating, or start trying to imagine a life where he does something different? Can he see himself taking over the family business, even?

What little we learn from canon about Yuuri’s eventual decision to leave Detroit is zeroed-in on Yuuri to the exclusion of everything else. All we know is that he doesn’t think that what he’s doing is working anymore, so the only decision that makes sense to him in this time of intense personal crisis is to seek a change of scenery. We learn that he’s trying to recover the love for skating that he’s somehow lost along the way, and the way he’s decided to do it is to make his way back to his origins. We see him return to Hasetsu, his hometown, and skate Victor’s “Stay Close to Me” program for his childhood friend Yuuko, a nod back to when they were little and fell in love with skating copying Victor’s iconic performances. We’re not told anything about what he’s chosen to walk away from, what he’s decided to leave behind.

Detroit City is one of those things. Celestino is one of those things, as is Phichit, as is the skating club they practice at, and the place where they live, and the hamsters. And it’s possible from here to spin out versions of this story that are sad and painful and poignant especially with regard to Phichit’s place in this quite complicated order of things—to look at it from bittersweet pining Phichit angles and I’m-sad-I-couldn’t-help-you-love-skating-again angles and I-know-you-don’t-love-me-like-I-love-you angles, and from here it makes sense that in some imaginative spaces this develops into a deep undercurrent of helpless sadness that those Phichits carry with them into the canon timeline, sometimes past it, sometimes forever. And I get the place those Phichits grow from, I do. I know what it’s like to love someone you’re scared you can’t help because you don’t completely understand what they’re going through, and how easy it is to feel like you failed them, and to carry that with you so long it starts to feel like part of you—but that’s another story for another time, and the bottom line is that, with all the respect due the imaginations of others, my particular imagination always gives me back something different.

My imagination hits a wall whenever it tries to imagine Phichit wishing that Yuuri might stay when he knows he’s not happy, or that he isn’t growing. I can’t see Phichit looking at Yuuri and feeling like he’s the one that got away. In some versions of this story, sad!Phichit exists, but mine isn’t one of them. It can’t be, just because my imagination—the tiny, not-so-significant-for-all-its-obsessive-extrapolations little theater of my mind—doesn’t play it out that way for me. I’ve already told you that I’ve watched them fall in love; now I see them not so much fall out of love as decide that it might not be good for them to be in love anymore if they’re going to be apart in such a big way, and that this decision is just one of the many things Yuuri has to set in order if he’s going to go home. And he needs to go home, if he’s going to move forward with his life. I’d like to imagine that, not only does Phichit know this, but he commits wholeheartedly to helping him. Because, any way you want to slice it, he loves him.

Phichit knows that Yuuri needs to go—and yes, this knowledge is a sad thing, but that’s not all it is. I want to think it’s also a decision that makes sense to him. For one, he’s a skater himself and knows how ephemeral their existence as professional athletes is and how tumultuous lifestyle setups can be when your craft necessitates you shuttle back and forth all over the world. In addition to that, though, there are certain things I imagine someone like him—someone who by every token seems to be such a giver, such an emotionally generous and caring and other-directed person—would probably understand about the nature of love.

It’s easy to see the act of letting someone go, of ending a relationship, as essentially black and white. If you really loved this person, you would never have left them, or if you can’t make someone you love stay with you, then you’ve failed them and yourself. But the thing is, a lot of the time it’s not like that. It’s entirely possible to love someone a lot and still need to recognize that your time together has run its course, at least for now. It’s a loss that needs to be grieved, for sure, and it can feel like your whole world has been turned on its head because suddenly you’re missing an important presence, so many routines have fallen through, certain places look weird to visit now without them beside you. I know.

But the sad thing about getting stuck on what-might-have-beens and if-onlys is that you miss the possibility of something good coming out of that necessary separation—which you probably can’t think of at all in that moment, I know. It’s hard. Sometimes you can’t even imagine what life would be like after you let someone go, because naturally human beings find comfort in consistency, resist change because the unknown is frightening. If you let someone go, how can you be sure you’ll ever reencounter each other? How do you know you’ll ever be happy again?

On the flipside of that, we talk all the time about how love is wanting the best for the other person. I think what we talk about less often is that part and parcel of wanting the best for someone you love is giving up control over them and their decisions—trusting the other person to know what’s best for themselves, to do what’s best, to make their way back to you eventually in the ways that are best. Or maybe not, if life happens and leads them so far away it doesn’t make sense to reconnect; that’s the risk you take. But if you do find your way back to each other, after you’ve had the chance to be apart and grow up a little bit and become essentially new versions of yourselves, how can the chance to pick up again be anything but a gift?

There’s a very specific nuance here to the act of letting go. It needs to be total. You don’t let go halfheartedly, while still partially clinging, still wanting to hold on. You don’t let go kind of hoping to be vindicated somehow for your selflessness. You let go with grace, in good faith, and trust the process that may or may not bring you and the one you love back around. (The feelings are running high at the moment, so let me pass you briefly to Maya Angelou, one of my favorite poets, who captures the idea of true unconditionality better than I ever could: “I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says, ‘I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now, so I love you. Go.’” The last words are gratitude and acceptance. That imperative she ends on is really, really important. She said Go.)

One of the things that makes Yuuri such a compelling protagonist is that all throughout his narrative the biggest, most frightening, most important struggles are against himself. His greatest battle is the battle to recognize himself as a person of worth, and so much of that has to do with how he learns to recognize love—to recognize himself not just as someone who’s capable of immense love but as someone who is loved. It’s a battle you see him begin to win in (again!) episode four—which practically deserves an Oscar just on its own, IMO—and it’s a thing of joy to see him work at it, sometimes mastering his demons, sometimes folding under them, but always coming back a little stronger each time.

It can be terrifying, paralyzing to realize that you are loved. Often it makes people push others away—don’t look at me, don’t care for me, I’m not worth your time or attention, direct it at someone or something more worthy—but I like to think it can be inspiring too, and that there’s so much strength to be gained from resting securely in the love of others. And I don’t mean this in the sense that you have to constantly depend on others to build you up because you can’t do it for yourself; rather that sometimes it’s enough to recognize that you’re not alone, to draw strength from that and to become, in turn, a more loving person. Yuuri starts off utterly unable to imagine what Victor sees in him—which, if you think about it, dovetails entirely too well with his difficulties with accepting support from anyone else in his life—but everything is changed by the fact that Victor insists, continuously, that it doesn’t matter. He won’t be beaten down by Yuuri’s stubbornly deep-rooted poor opinion of himself. Instead, it becomes a challenge: Try to see in yourself what I see in you. Try. Try your hardest. Use your imagination.

I haven’t spoken a lot about Victor in this rambly, weirdly convoluted little essay, I realize. Part of it is because I never quite feel like I need to—so many wonderful things have already been said about his and Yuuri’s relationship, and about how important they are to each other’s journeys toward becoming more loving people and learning to own what they do and who they are. Part of it is also because I’m looking at him right now as a link—albeit a singularly important one—in a chain of events that precedes his and Yuuri’s relationship and spirals incessantly beyond it. And that’s one other really wonderful thing about love, I think—that love in the true sense doesn’t close the world. Instead, it opens up the world; it makes everything look more whole.

In light of all these things, I find it so compelling that so much of what Yuuri learns, through Victor and everyone else, is retrospective—that not only is he loved and supported and believed in now, but that he always has been. Victor helps him see something that’s existed all along—that love has passed from person to person and from place to place and that never for a moment has Yuuri been without it. For one reason or another he hasn’t always felt it, recognized it for what it was—anxiety, terror, the impossible standards to which he holds himself—but it’s an idea we see him grow into little by little, with help. And by the end, when he’s running down the sidewalk in St. Petersburg toward Yuri and Victor and thinking “We call everything on the ice ‘love,’” he knows. Suddenly it makes sense now how everything that came before had a hand in bringing all of us here to each other; suddenly it makes sense that all of us are meeting here, where we are.

Let me wax extra self-indulgent for a bit and talk about one imaginary scene I always go back to whenever I think about Yuuri and Phichit. Whenever I think about Yuuri leaving Detroit, I always think about Phichit taking him to the airport. Twice now I’ve written out that scene in a fic, Phichit behind the wheel of Celestino’s car (legally borrowed, this time, because it’s an Important Day), Yuuri in the passenger’s seat playing the music as he’s done on so many similar drives that I’ve imagined. Except this drive is a little different, because it’s the last for the foreseeable future. They see the end coming; they’re moving together towards it.

It took me a while to figure it out well enough to get it down in words (instead of, you know, emotional keysmashing) but now I know why I always imagine things this way. I understand why I need to put Phichit where I do, right on the knife’s edge of that departure, carrying him all the way to the last possible moment before the separation happens. I think at the heart of things it’s me trying to emphasize something to myself about goodbyes—that yes, they’re sad, and they hurt, and for a long time you’ll inevitably miss the person or place or thing you’ve let go of. Sometimes deeply, sometimes for a long time, like an arm or a leg or a chunk of your heart. Of course you will. But then I think about Phichit and Yuuri in that moment I imagine, idling in the airport driveway—and part of my mind is already flashing forward some months later, to that first Skype call and Phichit’s smiling face on Yuuri’s phone screen, forward still to Beijing and Phichit turning up by chance in the very hotpot place Yuuri and Victor have decided to eat at—and I can’t help wanting to believe that that’s not all there is.

I want to imagine Phichit smiling at Yuuri across the car, maybe squeezing his hand for courage and good luck. I want to imagine in that moment things are as simple as they’ve always been between them—that while it’s not easy, because departures never are, these two silly boys rest secure in the knowledge that they’ll always have each other even when they’re not side by side, that it won’t be impossible to pick up again anytime they get the chance to. That’s how much I want to believe they trust each other, how important they are to each other—and how much I want to think that holds, no matter where they go and what they choose to do.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine pointed out that in Japanese the expressions mata ashita and mata ne, which mean see you again, are so much more common than sayonara, which signals a more permanent, or at least a more long-lasting kind of goodbye. I think about how in my native Tagalog the word for goodbye—paalam—has its roots in the verb alam, which means “to know.” When you say goodbye to someone—pamamaalam—you’re letting them know something, and somehow in my imagination that act of telling someone that you’ll be leaving works to make the absent person even more present. Weirdly enough it helps me remember the idea of returns.

I love these boys too much—and I want to believe that they love each other too much—to keep them stuck on the idea that they’re losing each other. (Is such a thing is even possible?) I much prefer to put them in the space of “see you again,” of “catch you when I do,” like it’s not a big deal at all, even if at the same time it is. Imagine Phichit laughing and saying, “Text me when you get home,” which is something most of us have said to our friends at one point or another before parting. Never mind that home is across the sea, on the other side of the world, fourteen hours away. Imagine how strongly he’d need to believe that the two of them have the power to collapse that distance, make it feel like nothing. Imagine that Yuuri, for all the things he’s afraid of in that moment, kind of believes it too.

There’s a tiny amount of actual footage from the show to go on, so maybe I’m making mountains out of molehills here, but from the very first moment I ever saw Yuuri and Phichit interact, I’ve been struck by how simple things seem to be between them. I love that. I love that it’s uncomplicated, that the only way they seem to know how to be with each other is just tender and joyful and pure. I really love the idea that it’s possible to be that way with someone that you may have loved differently in the past, and that you can acknowledge how important it was to you without necessarily wanting to bring it back again, because that would take away from the integrity of what you share now. And while you can remember the then as something beautiful, so is the now in its own way—and that it’s okay, you’re here, you can be happy now with what you have.

Even if you don’t imagine them as having been in love before, look at how present with each other these two are, in the instances that they have to reconnect. They’ve been apart and come back together, attentive to how much they’ve grown but also to how little certain aspects of their relationship have changed. One of them can call the other in the middle of the night and greet him in his native language, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. They smile at each other on the phone. They bump into each other in a foreign country and sit down, organically, for hotpot. They allow themselves to be proud of each other, to cheer each other on in competition: He’s giving everything he has to this season, too.

In all instances, they’re still them, only grown-up enough now to stay in each other’s lives by choice. That’s what holds, regardless of where they end up or what they do or how much time passes in between. The next time I catch up with you, we’ll probably be totally new people, but I know that over and above everything else these moments are a chance to rediscover you, again and again. Even with the people you know best in the world there’s always something new to learn—and I choose to keep learning. That’s how much you mean to me.

I don’t want this to be a utopic scenario, something that’s thought of as unrealistic or too good to be true. It’s real and it can happen, and it’s worth all the work.

The tenth episode shows us a pair of photos of Phichit and Yuuri at the Detroit Skating Club, taken at an unidentified point in their shared past. The first is a selfie at the entrance, where they have their thumbs up, and they’re laughing. The second is of them posing on the bleachers while Celestino sits in the background, looking away, thoroughly unamused.

I look at Yuuri in these pictures—take in his smile and his silliness and how comfortable he looks in his own skin—and I can’t bring myself to think of those days as any less real than the days leading up to his departure. It’s easy to conceive of Detroit as the place Yuuri chooses to walk away from, the place he needs to leave so his story can begin. But it’s also a place with stories of its own, and even if canon never reveals them to us, it’s not difficult to imagine the ways Yuuri himself is touched by them even as he moves on.

I think this could be true for him as it’s probably true for many of us: you need Detroit to make it, in the end, to St. Petersburg, that wonderful faraway ending-place that you probably thought existed only in your dreams. You may not be in Detroit anymore, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a false start or a waste of time, or that it was never important—in fact, it’s precisely because you aren’t there now that you can maybe now begin to comprehend what it did for you, looking back over your shoulder in memory at all the places you’ve been and seeing with a clarity you didn’t have before just how far you’ve come from where and who you used to be.

On the one hand, of course you remember how hard things used to be. But maybe, just maybe, as you sift through all the things you remember, you’ll find that in more instances than you might originally have thought, you were happy too.

You don’t need to go back to Detroit, even. In a way, you never left—you carry that truth with you. You were happy then. You are happy now. All of it is real.

#phichit chulanont #katsuki yuuri #yuri on ice #phichit x yuuri #yoi meta #i guess??? #i actually have no idea what this is #whatever it is i'm so sorry for inflicting it upon you #there are way too many words in this monster #and way too many feelings #don't look at me #meg rambles #headcanon #phichuuri

[avoresmith]

CAN’T SLEEP, ESSAY ON RANDOM WRITING SHIT AT 1AM INSTEAD.

Im gonna link you to a video, it’s technically about playing Overwatch better but it describes a decision making process that I found really fascinating and it’s fairly short so here you go:

Maybe it will also improve your gameplay!!

Anyway, it describes this OODA loop which, i will shorthand you, is a decision making process wherein you (like on main slide there) Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And this is how people in combat or sportsballs or chess masters or whatever should make their decisions in order to win the thing.

But THAT itself is not the interesting part, what is interesting to me is it gets into the importance not just of processing your own OODA loop, but of processing other people’s. Your opponents, your allies, etc. And certain factors come into play, namely 1) how many loops you can process 2) how quickly you can process them 3) how accurately you can process them.

What really caught me about this was not how it would drastically improve my gameplay but how it is a really useful mechanic for describing how I look at and generally operate in the world. I have spent a lot of time thinking about/making peace with myself as a pretty fundamentally manipulative person, because while I am not malicious or anything, I simply don’t have any way to navigate the world that isn’t basically running these constant OODA loops in all situations. And if you are running the loop and you have the information it produces then you have to act on it??

Anyway. in life and in gameplay I am very good at making accurate predictions and very bad at making them quickly so if you go off loop in a conversation I will noticeably drop all the spinning plates at once and reveal myself to be Not Actually Very Good At People, and in Overwatch I just die a lot. 

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH WRITING, AV.

Well, you see, since this is how I process the world this is also how I process my characters as I write them, and it got me thinking a lot about what type of writing I find compelling and how I think the OODA loop is a weirdly good guideline for avoiding stale/route character interaction/development/etc.

So I am CONVINCED that to some degree everyone runs these sort of decision making loops, even if they aren’t thinking about it. But they may be skilled in various different parts of it and they my skip steps depending on personality/skill level etc. So I think what is interesting to think about is well, for example. Hanzo and McCree are in a conversation. Hanzo is running his OODA loop but also running McCree’s but part of him running McCree’s loop is assuming that McCree is running his, so he is not just trying to predict McCree but trying to predict how he thinks McCree will observe and predict him, etc.

And with characters who KNOW each other well, who have history, these loops can get really fucking complicated just between two people, which is probably why I love writing Shimada brother’s so much. Because their respective observations/ability to orient themselves in each other’s reality influences their loops and they don’t REALLY have an option to ever stop considering each other’s loop and even if you DO that is in of itself a loop run in response to another loop. (I.E., Genji avoids/pretends to ignore his family while he goes to be a useless playboy but this is never actually indicative of him truly moving on or forgetting his family because it is in part always a move made in response to the people in his life and how he was raised).

Anyway!

I think in tropy, unimaginative writing, one of the biggest problems is characters not doing the first two steps.

Tropes are themselves guidelines. And You Know How It Goes. IE: they meet, they Conflict, the are Thrown Together Again, They Grudgingly Make Amends, The Plot Conflicts Upon Them, They Come Together, They Fall In Love.

You could write any two characters doing that story and boy HAS IT BEEN DONE and never stop to have either character really orient themselves in their reality, it just gets stuck in the back and forth of Cowboy and Samurai, Meet, Fight, Make Up, Make Out.

When you slow down and make sure each character is observing whatever scenario you’ve concocted for themselves, oriented themselves in that reality, Make An Actual Decision, and only then act, you get complex character interaction. Even in the flattest or most mundane of coffee house AUs.

But the thing is, the loop is constant. First there is the loop of just getting them to the coffee house, then the loop of what they decide to drink then the loop of where they decide to sit or stand or if they decide to leave. Everyone else in the coffee house is running their own loops, and if your character is someone worth observing then they are going to factor into those loops, and so on and so forth. 

Another weakness of writing I feel is forgetting that the characters occupy a universe where there are other people in the world navigating around them. People have families/coworkers/bosses/teaches/friends etc who are, to some degree or another, considering your characters loop when they go about their own decision making processes. They have formed their own biased opinions, predicted your characters move, and acted in accordance with their own agenda. How well they succeed depends on a lot of factors (did your character out maneuver them? Forget they were there? Were they slower or less accurate in their predictions?).

ANYWAY, TL;DR. Characters aren’t just thinking about their own movements they are thinking about the movements of others around them and reacting in accordance with them, so will do this better or worse, also characters who you may not even consider a part of your story are out there acting in response to your character, predicting their movements, and acting accordingly.

And your audience is ALSO running loops, and you are also perhaps acting in tandem with them but also hoping to surprise them? But when the audience is running loops for different from yours AND can’t see how your loops are working, I think you start to get that dissonance where you lose the reader because the fictional reality just stops being suspended.

(Post script TL:DR; i get really really excited about systems that describe thinking processes. So INTJ it hurts.)

#op me #intj as fuck #lol #whatever it's 1 am #this all made sense to ME #i wonder if will in the morning still #goodnight friends #musings

[impatient14]

John’s Blog is another Key

Oh shit guys. I found something else.

Each of John Watson’s blog entries that are not episodes of the show relate to TST or TLD in some way.

The Six Thatchers:

After Sherlock had managed to insult her about her looks and the way she was dressed, she told us about a murder that had taken place at her university. Pietro Venucci, an art student, and Sally's best friend had been found stabbed in the pottery room. His boyfriend, Beppo Rovito, was discovered next to the body and told the police that he'd just discovered him. A smashed window seemed to confirm that someone had broken in and as there was no knife on Beppo or in the room, he'd been released from custody. Sally was convinced that Beppo did it as he and Pietro had had a fiery relationship. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to work out that she'd also been in love with Pietro. Sherlock was instantly on the internet and was thrilled to discover that there had been a number of burglaries at houses belonging to a couple of students, a lecturer and a friend of the victim. He had, of course, already worked it all out.

I don’t think I need to explain this one to you.

The Aluminum crutch:

The murder victim Sidney Paget (who played the detective Matthew Michael) was also the killer as he himself swapped the fake murder weapon, the rubber aluminium crutch, for the real murder weapon, a real aluminium crutch, in an attempt to get William Howells (who played the killer Albert Chaplette) fired. The plan itself backfired and he caused his own death.

This is complicated, but there is something there. We have Sherlock running through scenarios about surviving a gun shot wound and we have this story about someone who swapped a fake weapon for a real one, which then ended in their own death. Interesting...

The Speckled Blonde:

“ Sherlock took the bottle to Barts and analysed the contents. It contained a slow-acting poison. Every time the girls had been using it, they'd been slowly killing themselves. Helen told us that her stepfather had promised it had already been tested. It was safe! Sherlock pointed out that this hadn't been an accident (he didn't exactly break this gently to Helen). Her stepfather had killed her sister in cold blood and was now doing the same to her. He'd put the puncture marks in Julia's ankle to deflect attention onto one of Percy's snakes. We rushed back to the house to confront the old man but it was too late - he was already dead. He'd hung himself from the kitchen light-fitting.”

Here, we get someone getting repeatedly poisoned by someone they trust, then the person who did it hangs themselves. The poisoning theory is a very common one for TLD because of the ACD original story, The Dying Detective. Also, I remember someone mentioning seeing a noose somewhere in TST? Help me out and I’ll link it! EDIT to ADD: I now remember too that SHerlock had the line, “A noose to put my neck in” when he was at the meat market and following around Toby.

The Geek Interpreter

This one is just a link because I think it is not a TST thing but a, “Hey TJLCers we see you! We love you! Sorry we’re assholes to you!” thing.

UMMM Actually No. Editing to add that in fact I think this is really important. All of the stories that this kid reads in his comics begins coming true. As in all of the blog posts that John has written...begin coming true. Again. Holy shit.

The Hollow Client

“As we stared at the suit, Sherlock quickly formulated a number of solutions. Alan had been winding Jack up to the point where Jack genuinely believed he was invisible. Jack had wrapped himself in a complex set of mirrors so that it appeared as if he was invisible. Or had been wrapped up in the mirrors by Alan. He briefly considered invisible paint. Perhaps Jack and Alan were highly-advanced scientists (they weren't, they were media students). We'd been drugged on the way in and taken to an exact replica of 221B Baker Street where a camera was projecting the suit into the chair. I did stop him at that point and ask who'd have done that. He shrugged and suggested ninjas. Then he continued... the suit was a hologram, Jack had never existed, Jack was dressed up in the same fabric as the chair...”

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.John as a hollow client, aka balloon. Drug mentions, and someone who dresses up as the same fabric as a chair. Seriously? SERIOUSLY??

Happily Ever After

Because, yes, he was right, Sabrina had been having an affair, but this time it was for all of the right reasons.

Sabrina had been married to her husband, Chris, for about five years but it clearly wasn't a happy marriage. She told us that he'd been having an affair and she needed to find proof. Sherlock, again, wasn't hugely interested, describing her marriage as being of 'zero importance in the grand scheme of things'. But then something happened. Mary arrived. And suddenly he changed his mind. He decided there and then that he'd find the proof she needed so she could divorce Chris. Naturally, I assumed it was because he saw me and Mary together and just wanted to make someone else happy.

Um. Yeah. This one hurts. All that conjecture about John having an affair with SHerlock not the woman in red? Well, maybe in Sherlock’s mind he couldn’t replace himself with a woman yet, but John cheating was “for all the right reasons.” And remember, this case is about a same sex couple’s happily ever after.

The Poisoned Giant

It all started when I received an email. There was no text just a picture of a pearl. I assumed it was spam but then, the next day, there was another one. Another email, another picture. Another pearl. And again and again. Six days, six pearls.

And then it just stopped with no explanation...

What I couldn't understand was why he'd emailed me in the first place. Why lead me to an innocent man who he'd killed? And, most weirdly, why lead me to a laptop full of clues as to the location of his next heist? Obviously it was a trick of some sort. He wanted us to go the wrong place. But even then, why send me the emails at all? Or was it all a trick by someone else? Was someone else setting up Swandale? To be honest, I was baffled. But then again, when am I not baffled?

So we’ve got the pearls references. Six of them. Then we’ve got something that reminds me of the whole TAB Sherlock’s question to Lady C “why employ me to prevent a murder you intended to commit?” I also feel like it is possibly referring to the aquarium incident.

Murder at the Orient Express

They'd all done it! The customers and staff, all apparently random people, each had a motive for killing Wong. Sherlock had found online how they were all connected. An ex-member of staff had tweeted about how Wong had unfairly sacked him. Someone had replied saying that he'd been attacked by Wong years earlier. Someone else had replied... and so on and so on. A group of seemingly random people, all connected online.

So we’ve got a room full of people who all conspire to lie about how someone they hate died. Interesting.

Death By Twitter

“Ceylan's last four 'tweets' were pretty interesting.

"I know he's coming for me"

"I know he's coming"

"I know"

"I know"

This could be a reference to Aj coming for “Mary”

We also get this from John at the end, obvious referencing the beinging of Sherlock’s downfall in the press, but its interesting to read now too.

But, obviously, as everyone reading this blog now knows, all our cases were faked. They weren't real. None of it was real. None of this nonsense is real. It's all just lies. Isn't it?

That's one for you, Sherlock.

The Deadly Tea-lights

The death of yoga teacher, Tim Leng, was brought to our attention by his flatmate, Scott Bevan. Leng had been found lying, dead, in a bath but he hadn't drowned. He'd been asphyxiated. In a locked room. And we know how much Sherlock likes locked room mysteries.

Oh, you mean someone who should have drowned didn’t? Like maybe there was sand instead of water in their lungs? Oh, interesting...

Our fathers have deceived us while also giving us everything we need from the very beginning. I have never had more respect, love, and absolute loathing for someone in my entire life. Sherlock is re-using these stories in his MP to work out the true case at hand. Besting Mary and saving John.

Shout- out to @captain-liddy for this post which sent me down this path.

@monikakrasnorada​ @isitandwonder​ @gosherlocked​ @may-shepard​ @ebaeschnbliah​ @loudest-subtext-in-tv​ @yan-yae​ @the-7-percent-solution​ @loveismyrevolution​ @tjlcisthenewsexy

#sherlock #john watson #the six thatchers #the lying detective #meta