#but the problem is that he stole my post . my theory Point for Point | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

crowning-art · 1 year

Text

TGCF SPOILERS FINALE!

Me and 10 cuties who have been keeping up with my crazy TGCF journey after i finally finished it 2 years later lmaoo

*Note that clown in the center is me and everyone knows why after seeing my wonderful, beautiful, RIDICULOUS AND OUTLANDISH theories throughout the read lmaoo

Without further ado...the finale!!

-------------------------------------------------------

Goushi really swooped in during the LAST TWO SECONDS of this huge novel and really just stole everyone's heart, huh? I love this dude

In the last second, a hand caught Feng Xin’s boot, and Feng Xin caught Mu Qing’s boot. When he looked up, he cried, “WHAT THE FUCK!!! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!!! GUOSHI OLD SIR, PLEASE DON’T EVER LET GO, ALRIGHT!!!”

YOOO FENG XIN ACCEPTED HIS CHILD OH MY GODDD DJJDJDJDJF T-T THE CHARACTER GROWTH

THE WAY THE TABLES HAVE TURNED AHHHHH its now Xie Lian who has Jun Wu pinned and nailed down to the ground with a sword djdjdjjdjjd low key, Xie Lian really needed to do that....yknow....therapeutically lol

I love this so much cuz ya, at the end of the day, it's tiring, it's exhausting keeping up a facade and forcing yourself to be someone who u know really isn't you and I feel Jun Wu despite all he's done was very heavily a product of his situation.

“I just genuinely really miss Your Highness,” Guoshi said. “I miss the once-Kingdom of Wuyong,

I miss our people, and I miss the days before we ascended. That’s all.”

“…”

Guoshi then added, “It’s been so many years, Your Highness. Just watching you makes me tired. Very tired. How about you? Are you not exhausted?”

And yes, I get that there was still a bit of inherit evil within him which got amplified thanks to the wuyong problems but like at the end of the day, he's just a sad little meow meow

AND THEN

“…Have I been defeated?” Jun Wu sounded a little lost.

After a moment of silence, Xie Lian took off the bamboo hat carried on his back, took it in his hand, and covered it over Jun Wu’s face.

DJDIFNIFJFJFJFJ DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT AGAIN??? HJDHDHFHFHF U KNOW WHAT IM GONNA SAY AND UGH ITS ALWAYS BACK TO THE ✨️THEMES OF KINDNESS AND LOVE✨️ BRB gonna cry some more AGAIN

Ahh I remember pointing this out a while back but Hua Cheng was always the ONLY one who really helped ground Xie Lian when he was lost and confused. Like the split emotions he kept feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or cry, all gone even when he's told the craziest news yet, aka Wu Ming identity

All of a sudden, thousands of emotions, millions of words swarmed into his head. There was gratefulness, there was shame, there was heartache, there was wild joy, but above all else, there was incurable love.

Lol u guys don't even get it, there were so many parts that were my fave here and I was trying my best to not post the whole chapter here cuz i loved EVERY part, the way Xie Lian leaped into Hua Chengs arm at the end, the cute Xianle trio bickering, just everything T-T

WTF U MEAN LIL BREAK I DO NOT NEED THIS RN PLZ DONT OH MY GODOHMYGODOHMYGOS HUA CHENG DONT U DARE DIE OH MYGOD

All of this:

Hua Cheng’s long and slender fingers gently combed through Xie Lian’s mussed hair. “Then, Your Highness, do you know why I refuse to leave this world?”

Xie Lian couldn’t understand why Hua Cheng could still be so calm at a time like this, as he was panicking so hard he was trembling. But, while feeling lost, he still simple-mindedly asked,

“Why?”

Hua Cheng replied quietly, “Because I have a beloved who is still in this world.”

Hua Cheng said quietly, “Your Highness, I understand your everything.

“Your courage, your despair; your kindness, your pain; your resentment, your hate; your intelligence, your foolishness.

“If I could, I would have you use me as your stepping stone, the bridge you take apart after crossing, the corpse bones you need to trample to climb up, the sinner who deserved the butchering of a million knives. But, I know you wouldn’t allow it.”

They really did invent love, I can't think of anything else to say to this 😭

HIS EXPRESSION MY HEART CRACKED INTO A MILLION PIECES AT THIS WHOLE SCENE BUT ESPECIALLY AT THIS LINE

Hua Cheng’s gaze was gentle and blazing, that remaining eye filled with love, and it gazed at him silently.

He's gonna be back for sure. The red string and the ashes are still there....but it's still soooo saaad

LMAOOO the heavenly officials became homeless fr I'm dying lmaoooo

ROUYE IS BACK YESSSS!!! AND UGHH XIANLE TRIO!! IM SO HAPPY THEY R TOGETHER AGAIN!! I MISSED THIER SHENANIGENS SO MUCH

Xie Lian rummaged around his sleeve and fumbled out a white silk band that was torn in half, and said joyously, “Yeah, finally, the material to fix Ruoye is found! I’ll go patch it up right now!”

However, Feng Xin stopped him. “Patch it up? You?! Forget it, what can you patch? Ask someone else to help you.” Then he turned his head and shouted, “MU QING! COME GET TO WORK!”

Pei Su and Banyue were really an underrated duo this whole book, especially with the way they guarded Ke Mo and the other ghosts lol

Pei Su and Banyue were sitting at the entrance, both of their expressions blank.

Feng Xin divorce arc lmaooo Finally it came to an end...and in a really nice and mature way. I really appreciated the way MXTX wrote Jian Lan's whole character, like she also grew as a person and is def underappreciated

However, Jian Lan withdrew her smile. “What you’ve said are all things of the past. What was love once doesn’t mean it’ll last. I’m not interested in being a charity case and a nuisance.”

And Xuan Ji! Everyone really grew up huh? (*sobbing incontrollably*)

Still don't like Pei Ming smh overgrown man child fr U go Yushi Huang for showing him whose boss!!

GUZIIII MY HEART NOOOOO I really respect LQQ for doing this

so I could only…gather a bit of the soul particles of the Green Ghost and keep them in a lamp. Now he shows up in front of me every day hugging that lamp, asking when the soul within the lamp will grow bigger! I really…”

And Guzi! Fret not! Qi Rong will be back cuz his ashes aren't destroyed!!

THE PEARLS ARE BASICALLY A GIFT FROM THE INLAWS THAT HUA CHENG HAS NOW DJJDJDJDJDJDJFJDJD

A moment later, Xie Lian nodded slowly. “It’s mine. It’s a pair of pearls my father and mother gave me when I was young.”

Lol Ling Wen's punishment thooo and the subtle hint that Ling Wen may have acc cared for the dude despite everything kinda warms my heart

Ling Wen gave a small laugh. “Your Highness, don’t say it like I would do anything for him. After all, I’m cold-blooded and recognize no loved ones, so why would I do anything like that?”

“Is that right?”

“Let it be.

I love love love the way the passage of time was described here God I don't know how to explain it but I love it

People came like the tide, then left like the tide. Mount Taicang regained its deserted lonesomeness.

Atop Mount Taicang, there used to be an enormous field of maple trees. They were all burnt down by that massive fire, but reborn after a thousand years. They were no longer the same ones Xie Lian leapt through to train once upon a time, but the landscape was the same.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASAASASSMXKXKXJXNCJXNX AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

With three thousand Blessings Lanterns rising along with the night behind him, that man turned back and gazed at him. Robes redder than maple, skin as white as snow; between the brows of a face so handsome it couldn’t be stared at, there was still that wildness and a feral aura, a proudness that couldn’t be cut down.

There were no words. Both started walking towards the other.

A step, another step, each step faster than the next, then finally, they started running.

He ran forward whilst tears fell and stayed behind him. Xie Lian voiced this in his heart: he believed.

He believed that this man would die for him again and again, and would be reborn for him over and over. Even if he fell into the depths of hell, he would break through the abyss for his “belief”.

Last time, they spent eight hundred years running towards each other.

This time, it only took an instant to fall into each other’s embrace.

DID I CRY HERE? U BET YOUR FUNKY LIL BEAN I DID And u don't get get AGUHH it took 1000 pages for them to get to where they were AND ONLY ONE PAGE TO MEET AGAIN THE ABSOLUTE POETIC METAPHOR HAS ME LOSING MY MIND u have to read through 244 chaps to see them trying to get to each other and when they finally do..it takes less than a page for them to reunite again I AM CRYING RN

The grand final banquet in Puqi shrine, with windmaster and the fellow beggars, he xuan secretly eating with them, fengqing arguing and bantering (flirting basically -_-), heaven's eye, hualian, the heavenly officials dropping by, just everyone finally living a happy life

What a story! Like what a story! Unbelievable!

This is how it started and this is how it ended

However, if people worship the divine statues of this one god and one ghost together, then there will be a miracle

Cuz their whole story is a miracle but that's the point! U can't give up! Xie Lian's story IS inspirational despite being fictional! Believing in your principles and doing the right thing, showing kindness no matter the circumstance, and growing from adversities, honestly I had so much to say but I read the post script and lmao MXTX said EVERYTHING I wanted to say!

-------------------

I'm always the kind to finish books within a day or two but I really didn't want this one to end (hence two years to read it) but God the whole experience was so incredible and tbh, I started documenting my thoughts for myself just so I can reread them later and laugh lmao but then a bunch of you guys kept up with it and it genuinely became such an exciting thing to look forward to after reading as well!!

Special shout out to @silvia-moon and @maause who were there from the beginning!! I loved every comment of yours and had a blast reading them every time 🥰

Ahhhh IM GETTING SO EMOTIONAL LIKE THIS LONG WINDING JOURNEY HAS FINALLY COME TO AN END 😭 (borderline tearing up while writing this post) but alas! Every banquet must come to an end (haha see what I did there? Hahaha....😭😭😭)

And of course there are the extras! But those shall be read some other day! In the meantime, I'm so so excited to get to drawing all my fave scenes!! I can't wait to get to that!

Until then,

Farewell 😊

26 notes · View notes

baladric · 1 year

Note

For the writer ask meme!! 🎀 🪄 💌 (I wanted to ask everything but I showed restraint- if 3 is too many just do one or two ok love yooouuu)

hey i LOVE u :')

fic writer ask meme!

🎀 Give yourself a compliment about your own writing

oh boy hmmM well hey there little guy, you sure can write a sentence that punches people in the face!!!!! and you're very good at naming ocs, and your worldbuilding gets lusher and lovelier every time you sit down with it!!!

🪄 What is your post-writing/sharing aftercare? How do you take care of yourself or celebrate yourself when you've finished a fic?

answered here!

💌 Share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

i say it a lot and i KNOW y'all always tell me to hush but i feel SO BAD that all i ever wanna talk about is pirate au, and yet there's nothing out here for anyone to READ!! STILL!!! nearly a year later!!!!! but it's so in progress, and it only gets better, and i literally cannot wait to tie off the first draft and start the editing pass to make it cohesive from the start—at which point we'll start posting it! like post as we edit kind of a thing!!

so. i mean. UH. HERE'S A FUCKIn PREQUEL PIRATE FICLET IN ITS ENTIRETY a;ldkfjwl;f shhhhh nobody tell celebros i shared her xmas present before we posted the fic (jk she reads my tumblr)

He did not know why he was surprised, but all told, it took a good long while for sailing to become fun. He had theories, of course—six years of running wild with only Freja to impose a schedule had evidently done a number on his habits—and now there were work shifts to keep track of, and problems to solve with only one right answer (“When in doubt, call for Sozu or Arnezha or Iölo or me or literally anyone other than Sinker, I beg of thee, darling.”) There were knots to learn—a startling discovery, as he had thought he knew them all already—and terminologies and what do you mean, there are two ships?

Simply put, it was a lot, and Maia took care not to harbor regrets, but it was occurring to him in drips and drabs that this was maybe a teeny tiny little bit of a mistake. That, perhaps, Shaleän had been right, and he was not necessarily cut out for the sailing life. That maybe Paris had had a point when he hinted that Maia could have been of just as much help (if not more) at home, with Freja.

He was tired and he was sore in places he hadn’t known he owned and he missed his warm little bed in Freja’s warm little cottage and this was all just so strange. Idolatry was a child’s game in which he had seriously overinvested, and now it was like being struck over the head to realize that Shaleän on her gilded pedestal was a criminal—a pirate, the King of pirates.

He’d had an inkling, of course, but it was one thing to fantasize about his rake of an aunt, the glint of her saber raised in the battle cry, and another to stumble across a frightened goblin child in the same cargo hold in which he himself had hidden not two days before, her hair shorn in a servant’s crop and one of her ears notched in a clear sign of past cruelty. It had been another thing entirely to calm her down and bring her to Shaleän, propped on his hip, his collar still damp from her tears, and learn that she was part of a matched set squirreled away in a secret room on the ship, and that her mother was as yet too deep in the megrims that sometimes stole over a person whose situation has taken a sudden, hopeful turn to keep a proper eye on her michen.

Was this smuggling? Soul trafficking?

“No,” Shaleän had said, her frown heavy and fitting far too well on her face; lines Maia had attributed solely to her broad, bright grin suddenly made more sense. Frown lines. Scowl lines, like wheel ruts worn into the hard-packed earth of her. “It is liberation, Maia. We offer what freedom is available in this blighted world to the people who need it most, and my only regret is that I cannot give it to everyone suffering under the weight of man’s cruelty and greed.”

So, he was… adjusting, one could say. In light of the insistence with which he had forced his way into this world—onto Shaleän’s ship, into Shaleän’s so-called business—he found this struggle to be more than a little embarrassing.

It was not fun—it was work. Good work. Work with an undeniably positive influence on the world, regardless of who might label the unlicensed liberation of indentured servants a crime.

Maia brought a smile to the fugitive Min Pallared’s face within an hour of meeting her properly (And Cstheio Cairei, was the hold in which they hid their refugees small) and it was work, but he felt that spark of light as a tectonic shift in the bedrock of his soul. Paris was wrong—he could help here, without a sword. And so he did it again with their next lot of escapees—a family of Telvar, whose anxious tails and too-wide eyes made Maia sick to his stomach in the imagining of the lifetime of cruelty required to so damage them. They reminded him too much of himself, those first few months away from Edonomee, and when he laid in his hammock between shifts and caretaking duties, he could not help but sink into gruesome thoughts of what he himself would have become, had he been left to Setheris’ cruel hands for a lifetime.

It was work, to be sure, but he had never felt so alive as he did in those first months aboard that two-faced ship.

All around him were people, storied and vibrant, and he doubted he would ever tire of cracking them open, that they might tell him of their families, their dreams, lost loves and the folklore that belongs to single blood lines. Sozu Khalamar and his grandmother’s insistence on the ill omens of curdling milk. Sinker Shipsblight and the long string of willful calamities that had earned him his moniker, and the respect of Paris. Iölo Marin and her repeating dream of sprouting wings to fly away from everything she had ever known.

And, of course, there was the music. He had not expected the music.

Sometimes, as they drew to the end of a hard sail, Paris would turn a blind eye to the halving of the usual night shift in favor of a sleepy skeleton crew abovedecks, and everyone else would retreat to the ship’s galley and drain the last kegs of ale dry. It was a raucous thing, everyone thoroughly soused, and then someone would start singing—Sinker, usually, lusty and loud as the south wind.

The repertoire were things Maia had heard before, having spent nearly half his life in sailing communities: rowing songs, shanties, bawdy ballads. He knew the tunes to most of them, if not the lyrics—and the ones he did not know came to him quickly.

Almost six months on, he felt he had nearly gotten the hang of it all. He could scale the mizzenmast in sixty seconds, rarely got tangled up in all the different words for wind, and could wail a bawdy drinking song with the best of them.

They had just finished one such song, and Maia’s cheeks were hot with drink and the youthful embarrassment of singing about breasts with a zealous lot of sailors on a dry spell and a trio of especially fervent marnai. He was fully considering tapping out from the excitement of it all, when someone cried over the merry shouting of the men, “Let’s have Maia lead one!”

The roar that rose at the idea was a thing of beauty. It sped Maia’s pulse, for he doubted that even an ocean’s worth of ale could fake such unmistakeable delight. The clamor rang of something like acceptance, and Maia was helpless to resist the hands that chivvied him to stand atop the swaying table.

Someone pressed a fresh flagon of ale into his hand, and he heard shouts of “Let’s have it, lad!” and “Put thy chest into it, sprout!” as well as a clangor of song requests—and, so dizzied, Maia startled himself as much as everyone else by belting out the opening call of his favorite shanty:

“Ye nations have your princes, you kingdoms have your kings,

But we who set to sail the sea

Bow only to the Wind!”

Laughter and cheers of recognition met the first bit of the tune, and though his voice shook with sudden nerves at the start, by the time he reached the chorus, he had built to a jubilant shout. He raised his flagon as all joined in the singing.

“So follow me, lads,” the crew of the Glorious Dragon wailed as one voice, and Maia stomped the tabletop with all his might.

“‘Fore he storms upon the fray!

Corat’ will whip you down to dust

And blow you straight away!”

The beating of fists and stomping of feet raised the beat of The Ballad of King Corat’, and Maia did not think he had ever smiled as hard as he did then, singing of his legendary aunt, the King of Pirates.

“The baron sees no bloodshed, the emperor no rain,

But the Serpent King who skims the sea

Reigns only over pain!”

The men howled, and a jostling in the crowd caught Maia’s attention—the crew shifting to give Shaleän, Corat’ herself, space as she waded towards the table, her grin a rakish slash of white in the warm dimness of the galley. Maia beamed and reached to haul her up beside him, and they stomped out the chorus together, arms around shoulders.

“So follow me lads!

‘Fore we heel to his domain!

Corat’ will crush us down to dust

And rinse us down the drain!”

“Your krakens and your sirens,” Maia sang, thrilled as Shaleän joined him, her voice rough and far from tuneful.

“Your leviathans and all

Know better than to raise a hand

To Cruelty the Squall!”

She clashed her flagon to his, dousing them both thoroughly in ale, and Maia did not know if he had ever been so happy in his life. It was such a simple feeling, yet so large that it brimmed over all of his shakily sketched borders, rendering him a jubilant creature in Shaleän’s tight grip.

“So follow me, lads!

‘Fore he finds us in a pall!

Corat’ will strike us down to dust

And spell a fell downfall!”

And so they sang and stomped and crowed for the whole sprawl of verses, telling a blazing tale of Shaleän’s conquests—and her pressed to his side all the while, loud and calamitous and alive alive alive. The both of them, so very, wildly alive.

Maia’s voice was shot by the end and his blood ran hot with a palpable sense of belonging unlike anything he had ever felt. Joy, repeating. Life, glorious and wretched and reeking of too many people in too small a space.

Shaleän embraced him then, like she knew what brilliant cacophony was brewing in his chest. Like it was the work of her life to hold him in one piece, whether the shaking be a thing of joy, or of grief.

“I love thee, my heart,” she murmured for him alone. “More than every jewel in thy Lady’s starry sky.”

“Oh,” Maia said—a silly thing, for he had long known the timbre of his aunt’s love. It was only that having this talented, determined crew respond to him with nothing but delight in their collective voices had stripped him raw, and it brought to the surface that little part of him that still curled into a protective ball when he slept. And that part was ever so hungry for all Shaleän and her crew offered.

“I love thee, too,” he replied, squeezing her tight enough that she gave a little Oof of surprise. “More than the whole sea.”

“More than the mermaids?”

“More than every blessed fucking fish in the place.”

Their laughter was lost beneath the clamor of their crew, which was just fine with them.

#aj answers #himbohaggins #ask meme #ask #the writing tag #maia's a pirate now #;alskdfjawl;kfdjw IDK GUYS I WANT EVERYONE TO CARE ABOUT THIS FUCKING STORY AS MUCH AS I DO

16 notes · View notes

jasongracesblog · 2 years

Text

This whole thing about hope being toxic makes my head spin and hurt and the writers really making it sound logical and confirming it made my suspicions clear they hated handon and landon as a character and also they just don't care about following through the storyline or about the writing the story in general at all. All they care about is where they want the plots to go and the end result they want and always about shocking the audience after foreshadowing a different story they end up with a different ending because hey they want to shock us...

I seriously don't care about the canon story at this point at all , given the fact the plotholes has story built upon it

Here's my theory ,

Go check the above thing out to understand better

but let's just start with three important fate threads / storylines of legacies universe

Cleo, malivore,hope

Landon, gods

Gemini twins Lizzie ( I won't be discussing about it here )

Warning this is going to be a really long post but it will definitely be worth it

So the werewolves , witches and vampires threatened by many beings they couldn't defeat themselves like the dragons, gorgoyles, heck even the gods they stole the magic from so they basically created a Ultron who could basically do whatever they can't ,defeat those who they can't by combining all the three factions and all of their blood magic to create malivore/golem and using malivore ( ultron of this verse) they wished to be the apex predators of the world with keeping a leash on malivore by spelling him with insatiable hunger and the three factions to be toxic to him / unable to harm him

Like every artificial intelligence malivore became aware over the course of time ( you should watch the gameplay of Detroit become human it's really amazing and also you would the understand concept I'm talking better if you watch it )

He wanted to escape his own existence / role have you ever felt sometimes in your life that you wished to be someone else because of inferiority complex this was basically malivore

He wanted to escape the confines of the spell that spawned him and overpower his creators and wanted to kickstart his own super species

Now came cleo into the picture who kickstarts the whole hope and malivore storyline,

the muse inspires malivore with the idea of creating a vessel which he could possess this vessel was everything malivore wanted to become like in existence ( all of his powers and more ) without being anything like how he was created to be ( his weakness and current form and existence )

Hence project landon kickstarts while cleo was able to create a vessel in the beginning for malivore it was basically created from malivore mud/golem the same way malivore himself was created in the first place by the triad so it was only partially free from all the spells confines that created malivore (in fact the vessel that cleo first created for malivore was only temporarily able to hold malivore and also only satiated his hunger temporarily) those vessels at best solved his hunger problems but all of them were temporary but all of them were still toxic to Tribrid because they were essentially made from the same golem / malivore mud which was made from the combination of the triad blood magic

See the mistake here, why malivore hated all of his own creations was because (he saw himself in them trying to be something they were not) both cleo and malivore were trying to keep on making vessels( fashion beings who were like him ) that were basically golem in nature exactly like Malivore ( magical mud man / golem ) as they were essentially made from the same magical mud that was created by the triad blood magic to give rise to malivore

Things are going to get interesting now the post I earlier tagged if you have read it the following things will be much easier to read

The birth of the hero who rises , the phoenix, demigod now currently hades , whom if you strike him will come back stronger than ever

LANDON KIRBY

In a nutshell while malivore was basically creating mud robots from his own mud this time he switched his tactics and wanted to create a vessel that was biological he basically wanted to create/fashion a life and he had a god handy contained in him named ben ( please go and read about xenobots it will be worth your time it will help you understand the nature of Landon's birth he is a synthetically created life not one made out of nature )so he used Ben's dna ( not exactly dna gods are made of pure power ) to synthetically create a power/lifeform that mimicked him and impregnated seylah

So biologically he was part human part god was also a xenobot created by malivore who was everything malivore wanted to be and beyond in existence in flesh and hence he wasn't toxic to hope as his biological parents were ben and seylah only to Malivore and everything that was magical golem made from malivore mud that was made of triad magic were

We'll discuss about Landon being a demigod in a future post and about Landon's nature in general

Hope was the loophole created by nature to destroy the triad made malivore

And landon was a synthetically created lifeform ( Xenobot) made by Malivore from Ben's powers

And landon has his own loophole the golden Arrow

Notice how opposite they are

That's why they are endgame

#landon kirby #landonkirbyedit #legacies #landon kirby defense squad #landonkirbyappreciation #landon kirby powers

6 notes · View notes

affectiondeficitdisorder · 2 months

Text

Cupid, Draw Back Your Bow... and shoot yourself in the face

The current trend on my Facebook feed is “Post a picture of yourself at 21.” We members of the Formerly Cute (stole that from Garry Trudeau) like to remind the world that we really, really were cute once - promise! I posted that the only available pictures of me at 21 were mugshots. Everyone thought I was joking. I wasn’t. At 21 I was arrested while living with a coke dealer who called me his precious baby and assured me that no one would ever love me like he did. (The subtext of that, of course, is that no one else would ever find me lovable… and I bought it.) And if he hit me occasionally, well, jealousy is a natural part of passion. Isn’t it?

It sounds insane when I look back on it, of course, but at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable. I thought that kind of intensity is what love was supposed to feel like. And once I felt it, it was so intoxicating that I would return to the poisoned well again and again and again. Because I’m an addict.

The cocaine didn’t help. But my real drug of choice always was what they have come to call “limerence,” a potent cocktail of lust and longing that is self-defeating by definition, because you can’t long for something you actually have. It creates a compulsion and obsession no different from what an actual cocktail does for a practicing alcoholic.

“If you see someone across a crowded room and your eyes lock and your knees tremble… run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.” The late John Bradshaw, who wrote the first popular books about codependency, said that to me sometime in the early 1990s. I thought he was an idiot. What else is worth living for other than that exquisite flutter, that intoxicating rush of erotic anticipation, that blissful sensation of limerence?

The problem isn’t the fluttery feeling, of course. The problem is the intoxicating part. Anything that gets you high holds within it a promise that it at some point you will crash. The question is, where’s your pain threshold? For some people, the party is worth the price of the hangover. I can’t stop doing something until what it’s doing FOR me is overpowered by what it’s doing TO me. Prison is a hell of a hangover.

Bradshaw’s theory was that when you see a person and feel an instant connection, it’s not because you are karmic soul pairs. It’s because that person hooks into some childhood trauma that we don’t recognize or remember. He drops his left shoulder like Daddy does. Her hair catches the light just like Mom’s. I lean more toward a biochemical theory: A fellow love addict is broadcasting on the same pheromone wavelength as you are. We love junkies seem to always find one another… in the dark and in another language, if need be.

That doesn’t mean it’s not hot. It’s waaay hot. But it blows holes in our culturally endorsed notions of love at first sight. Think back to your first soulmate, your first true love. Remember that delicious feeling? Okay, think about that person today. No delicious feeling, right? Next, think about your latest soulmate. Same delicious feeling. Now think of three or four more trueloves – you probably have a few rattling around, same as me – and remember that delicious feeling. Picture them standing in a row, and picture that feeling as a radiant glow that attaches itself to one, then another, then another. Limerence is temporary at its core.

Author Susan Cheever put it nicely in her memoir "Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction”: "Addiction to other people -– especially addiction to sex partners –- is the only addiction that is applauded and embraced. Few parents will be thrilled to hear that their child is binge drinking, using drugs, or taking out college loans and gambling them away. Most are delighted that their child has romantic partners. Few of us want to drink too much or become drug addicts or rack up unmanageable credit card debt, but most of us want to fall in love.

"The problem is that we are not addicted to just one person, the person with whom we are in love. We are addicted to the feelings of new love, of being swept away, of being adored, of being obsessed. These feeling usually last from six to 18 months. After that, it takes a new person to evoke the same feelings."

Different faces, same feeling. What’s special and wonderful and intoxicating isn’t Him or Her at all. It’s the limerent glow. We associate the glow with the person, and so pine for the person, long for the person, kill for the person and die for the person… but it was really the glow itself that captivated us. Like some Star Trek alien sprite that inhabits human bodies and makes them irresistible. It’s not for nothing Cupid is portrayed as an imp with a lethal weapon.

I'm all for romance. I just don't want to bleed to death.

#love addict #romance #relationships #addiction #love addiction #sex addiction

0 notes

micer2012 · 3 years

Text

hey, while we're waiting on matpat to make his statement . i would like to direct everyone to both mine and my good friends art that we've done :>

my friends deserve a lot of the credit for making such amazing fanworks and HELPING theorize, a lot of the stuff i realized when bouncing back discussion with them. and i dont want their work or art to go unnoticed while i get all the attention here : > 🤍🤍🤍

https://micer2012.tumblr.com/tagged/MY-ART

(my art, tw blood, 3l/ll spoilers, and others on the posts themselves)

https://micer2012.tumblr.com/tagged/exiavojtmmc

(all fanwork (and my own theories) related to EXIAVOJTMMC (Evil Xisuma is a Victim of Jeff the Minion's Midas Curse))

#i wasnt sure if my (exiavojtmmc) friends wanted to be tagged. but germ auri percy deer spark aj and jade I Couldnt Do This w/o U #matpat would have never stolen my shit.if i didnt ramble to you all everydayBHVGHGFXCVHB. also irl friends and non hc friends #and of course. credit to pooka i shouldnt have to say this. but like Jeff. Jeff exsisting ISNT a theory. jeff posessing ex isnt a theory #i dont want to act like i own 'jeff the minion is possing ex in s8' because no. no thats LITERALLY in the text #MORESO than when i First made my theory its become More obvious pooka has been making it more clear. because thats what Plot does #My theory is ex being a captalist is related to the midas curse. and ex is controlling x like jeff controlled them. and the white eyes.#i dont Own jeff the minion that stuff is literally in the text (and matpat. acting like He just came up with it. is. it Sure is)#but the problem is that he stole my post . my theory Point for Point #HERMITCRAFT #HC #MATPAT #GAME THEORY #GAMETHEORY #EVIL XISUMA #EX #XISUMA #MCYT

126 notes · View notes

analoghorrorexplained · 2 years

Text

Dear Analog Horror community: you are killing your own fandom by sexualizing it

I am pretty sure many of you who have followed me when I started posting may have noticed my lack of posts as of recently. There are definingly more analog horror facts to be shared, theories to be discussed, and Easter eggs to find. But to be 100% honest I have been struggling to want to even post content for this community anymore. There is a plethora of reasons for this: general burnout, life shit, etc... but the biggest deterrent of me actually posting content and reviewing stuff is literally the fanbase itself.

A few days ago at the time of writing, Alex Kister posted a tweet:

From what I have seen he has been the only Analog Horror creator to actually address this issue; but within time I think more people will come out of the woodwork to talk about it as well.

There is a massive problem within the Analog horror community (more specifically in the Walten Files and Mandela Catalogue sub communities). And the funny part is this issue is perpetuated by literal minors. People who should not be engaging in sexual spaces anyway are literally perverting these series from what they are, horror storylines, into baseless smut.

I have stopped drawing fanart of Mandela Catalogue all together because of creepy/sexual messages I receive from other ‘fans’. Most of these messages objectify my drawings or they ask me to draw “CHARACTER x CHARACTER” porn. I even had to leave the official discord because literal minors (some probably in MIDDLE SCHOOL by the way they talked) would not stop talking about sex and what they would do to the characters. I can only imagine what type of harassment/DMs Alex gets regarding this issue since he is the creator of the series.

It has already been made clear that Alex does not like the creation of this type of content and many other fandom members have expressed discomfort that this is even happening. So with that said why is it still happening?

By doing this shit you are:

Forcing your sexual interests upon other people who do not want to engage in sexual topics and activities

Actively disrespect the creator’s boundaries by posting endless amounts of porn/beyond suggestive text posts

Creating a hostile environment for asexual people, other minors, and people who just do not want to talk about sex

Stripping meaning/suspense away from these series by boiling it down to ONLY porn

And if you are a minor doing this you are literally engaging in content you should not legally be viewing. And by engaging with other fandom members in this way (some who may even be adults) you literally run the risk of actual legal ramifications. Fuck, you may even get an entire fandom’s official shut down because of child saftey concerns. Because even if a space is made for adults and is generally populated by adults: if a minor gets in and makes it a place where minors are engaging in sexual activity the entire thing will be nuked anyway.

On top of that: this continued behavior will most likely result in many Analog Horror creators stopping their projects if the issues continue. I know many fanartists have already jumped ship. Why risk forcing your favorite series to stop making new episodes/content all together because you cannot control your own sexual urges. Plus I would like to add using “Rule 34″ as a defense here is utter bullshit. We are not dealing with a franchise, we are dealing with people making unsolicited porn of somebody’s passion project. They (being the creator of the series) has the right to tell people to stop drawing porn of their creations. And at that point we are crossing into the realm of actual sexual harassment.

This meme I blatantly stole from twitter (created by @HexKirari) puts it best.

Some of yall are literally willing to use your own horniness to justify harassing your favorite creators and objectify their work.

And the more you do that, the more people will leave the fandom (including creators) and it will get to the point where there will literally be nobody left but the sick freaks who get off to poorly drawn police sketches.

Stop it, touch some grass, and stop forcing your sexual desires down everybody’s throat.

#analog horror

333 notes · View notes

hermesserpent-stuff · 2 years

Text

building on au thought:

So! heres some of the attempted stealers and stealies (idk)

Music Meister and Pied Piper

Joker and the Trickster

Riddler and Scarab (Billy)

Lex Luthor and Mirror Master

This got a bit long sorry. @lirabuswavi

1) Music Meister! Hes got a musical obsession problem. As seen in the episode of batman b&b. so when he sees footage of pied piper, he's determined to see if they can be more powerful together. Even more manipulation. He comes into town during a Rogue heist and starts controlling everyone, including the flash. Piper flees as he switches off his hearing aids. He adjusts the hearing aids to block out the mind-controlling frequency. He comes back and there is a music duel. Its a massive thing, where all of central ends up under one or the other's sway. Sadly Music meister is distracted by harmonies and how well they can jam together, so Pied Piper ends up pulling him under his control and then uses that to force him to free everyone. Pied Piper then knocks the man out. Music Meister still has a bit of a fascination, both a fan and a bit of a stalker. He’ll try to convince Pied Piper to join him every couple of months but Pied Piper continues beating him off. Piper dislikes the guy and wishes he'd find another music villain to bother. Though if he would chill on the whole “leave your family and join me in my villainy” schtick then Piper would love to talk a little more music theory with someone else. But for now, he wants the dude gone.

2) talked about this one a bit before. Very very scary. To add onto that post, Harley (who is still with joker at this time) loves the kid and adds another level of complication. Trickster hates and fears the clown but doesn't mind Harley as much. Shes a little less intense.

3) Riddler! (one of my favorite bat villains) : Scarab translates a tablet that Rogues have brought in, but it turns out to be a riddle. He can't figure it out but is now really curious. He asks his family and none can figure it out. Digger hates seeing the kid sad, but won't say anything. What he does do is offer up the favor Riddler owes him for getting the man some supplies a while back. Piper sets up the equipment and Billy calls as Scarab, telling the riddle and answering any additional questions about the tablet itself the green villain has. Riddler arrives at an answer that Billy is pretty sure is right. Billy thanks him. A while later Riddler calls up Digger to ask to speak to Scarab. It seems he has something to translate. Billy asks for him to solve another ancient riddle as compensation. Riddler agrees. This exchange goes on for a while till they call each other for riddles and knowledge talks. Riddler respects Scarab as he views translating ancient language to be a bit of a puzzle, something he is also fond of. He pushes a bit to meet in person, but Billy keeps saying no. One day Riddler straight up walks into central, hunts down Len, and tries to negotiate for an identity. Billy then decides that if Riddler can figure out his identity based on a few clues he gives him, they could meet. The Riddler does so and at some point becomes like an honorary rogue.

4) Lex Luthor is interested in Mirror Master for two main reasons. One: Mirror Master broke into one of his facilities and stole some of his stuff. Lex has no proof. But he is very sure it was Mirror Master. Two: Mirror master beat him in chess. This miffs the billionaire (gazillionaire? Who knows). Mirror Master out of uniform has had to deal with a few attempted kidnappings. Everyonce in awhile its a bit successful. As in Sam goes, plays chess with Lex and then manages to escape. The other rogues are a bit angry at this problem.

(im thinking over for the others but this is the immediate ideas)

#chilly batson au #Billy Batson #scarab #riddler #lex luthor #the trickster #the rogues #mirror master #hermes speaks #pied piper #music meister

27 notes · View notes

stormblessed95 · 3 years

Note

https://chimkookiefied.tumblr.com/post/646401865120153600/whos-room-is-it-anyway

I read this theory and felt somewhat convincing

Before reading this one I have already had a tinhatory moment for myself.

I personally think jk was watching jm vlive and even commenting.

It's not a new thing. He have already called jin and rm before in their vlives saying he's watching their vlive. He told jin he have commented on jins vlive and if jin had seen it for which jin shouts how he can see and know if that's him lmao.

But here I think jm saw jk commenting in his vlive . When you watch vlive at a moment he's suddenly getting all hot and flirty mode coming close to cam , licking lips , reading comments and simultaneously seducing.

This was not regular jm seducing towards army but I think it was intended to one person who he knows is commenting.

One tym during vlive , when jin talks about the bag he says wt jk will feel when he watches this. To which jin asks do you think jk will watch this and he ans no. But I think he know jk was watching it.

Also , in another moment someone was at door jin said it maybe jk(coz he usually joins for jinminkook lives) an jm was rushing toward the door. He was completely calm full when it was jhope.

So yeah that's wt I think about this vlive.

Hello! Sorry it took me so long to reply! But I'm here now! I'm sorry, idk if it's just my end, but the link you sent isn't working for me. It just tells me that what I'm looking for no longer exists. Idk if the person deleted their post or if the problem is on my end or what 🤷🏻‍♀️ but we can still talk about the vlive and my thoughts over it all! Here is the original vlive in question from September 2018:

And let me just say I love this vlive and I love JinMin so much. Before we get into it, I will say that I don't totally agree with you here. Sorry! I mean, it's not impossible, but it's a bit of a reach. But let's talk about it!

To start, I've seen a lot of Jimin vlives, solo and otherwise simply because he is my bias and I love just listening to him talk sometimes and I consumed content like a crazy person for a long time. Lol his behavior and the way he interacted with the camera did not seem super different than the other times he did. Jimin has a habit of licking his lips and running hands through his hair. Thats not necessarily him flirting when he does it. He was smiling big at the camera often and looking extra beautiful, but he wasn't giving off excessive flirt vibes to me, just the normal amount of flirty vibes. Lol

Jimin talks about how he often feels a little awkward during solo vlives so he wanted to do this one with another member, so he stole Jin's dinner and is basically just waiting for him to show up so he will eat with him and do vlive together. Lol idk if we can call this a hostage situation, but it's hysterical and I love it.

I won't go into crazy in depth detail about everything that goes down in this vlive, I'll just cover main points that relate to jikook and then move on, but I would encourage everyone to go watch this one if you haven't already. Not only do Jimin and Jin look extra beautiful, the amount of smiles and giggles is top notch. The JinMin duo is out in full force, the flirting and teasing and story telling is amazing. Just their interactions together, i love it. They are criminally underrated as a duo.

Before anyone else gets there, Jimin tells us this is his hotel room. He pointed out the computer in the back and says he brought his laptop with him and set it up in case he gets bored. And then adds "to play games." I'm partial to believing him, but I've seen some theories out there that the computer was actually Jungkook's. Saying the red box in the corner is the same brand that he bought as his computer. I'll say that we don't know that Jimin didn't buy from the same company though. But the way he said play games seemed a little shy. And we know that while Jimin does play some video games, he is not a big gamer like Jungkook or Taehyung are. Literally the year before in 2017 on vlive, JK was teasing Jimin about not being good at games. Soooo I could buy into the theory that it was Jungkooks computer actually back there. But that is all that it is, theory and rumor. Nothing really concrete to back that one up.

So Jin shows up and he is there for all of like 2 minutes before they hear noises by the door again. Jin asks if it is Jungkook and goes to check, Jimin gets up to follow. I disagree that he ran to the door, he just hurried over to catch up with Jin and see who it was. It was Hobi who was originally going to Jins room, but came to join them briefly in Jimins when he saw them both there. We have a small portion of time with the 3 of them. Then it's basically all just Jimin and Jin talking and eating and feeding each other and joking around for a while.

Around 40 minutes in, Jimin is up close with the camera, saying they are going to end the live soon and reading some comments. He sweeps his hair back as he does, looking very good and giving off what could be considered flirty vibes. And Jin promptly asks him why he does that. Lol Jimin laughs and asks if he did sweep his hair back? When told yes, he says "I guess I do unconsciously." Meaning he isn't intentionally flirting with the camera, these are just habits and part of who he is. He can't help that he is charming and beautiful. Lol that doesn't mean he is flirting though. But this ties back into what I was saying at the beginning. I don't get excessive flirting vibes, I don't think he was being extra with it at all, I think he was just unconsciously behaving that way and just honest to goodness looked extra good that day.

The bag conversation happens about 52 minutes into the live. Jin says his bag that he gave to JK was left and abandoned still in Korea, basically saying because JK only uses the one Jimin gave him now. Jin tells how a year before, he placed an order to get a bag custom made for Jungkook as a birthday gift. He tells us how he gave him his present first and then as soon as he saw Jimin give him his bag that it was better

He says that even though he got a bag from Jimin too, he was still remembering that Jungkook said he loved Jin's bag and would use it at the airport and take it on tour with him. And what's interesting is that when Jin says JK promised to take the bag on tour, Jimin starts looking around his room, like he was wanting to see the bag somewhere? Coincidence... maybe, but also just another check on the "they were maybe sharing a hotel room again" list

And then we have the part anon brought up about how would JK feel if he watches this. The keyword you are missing there though was IF. We know that the members have gone and sometimes watched vlives back that they missed from the other members sometimes, so I think that is what they were talking about here, not that Jimin knew JK was watching right now. But that he was saying hey, don't talk down about your gift, JK would feel bad if he saw this and thought you were thinking he didn't love it, because we know he does!

Jin follows that up immediately with a "Why, do you think he will watch this?" And Jimin laughs saying "Nope!" So it's a moot point for if JK would hear him say it. Lol Jin also then asks Jimin if his bag was bigger in the size he was originally going to get it, making it larger than the one Jimin bought for him, would Jungkook have liked Jin's present more than Jimin's? And Jimin giggles and gives an almost smug smile when he says "No." Lol doesn't matter what you changed, Jimin knows his gift was going to be the favorite no matter what. Also interesting!

Jimin then tells us why he bought the bag for JK. And it basically comes down to the fact that he hated his old camera bag. Lol he said he carried the giant bag around everywhere and even stopped dressing up, only wearing hoodies and track pants to the airport and carrying his bag. So he wanted to get him a very pretty bag, so that he could use it at least once and then Jimin would throw away his old one. Lol Jin immediately started laughing saying that was what he wanted to do too. But instead of being able to toss the old bag, JK just started carrying both his new bag from Jimin AND his old camera bag around at the same time. Lol they then gave their goodbyes for the next few minutes.

P.S. you all have no idea how much I just wanted to spent an extra like 10 paragraphs here just gushing over how much I love JinMin and how cute and wonderful they are together as a duo and during this vlive. Like, it was never ending how sweet they were being together.

Jin about Jimin on stage:

Jimin about Jin on stage:

Anyways! To wrap it up, basically no, i don't think that JK was watching and commenting through the vlive or that Jimin was flirting anymore or any harder than usual. Honestly, I think they made it pretty clear that JK was probably NOT watching when Jimin said that no, he wouldn't watch this live. Lol I do think though that a very strong argument could be made that Jimin and Jungkook were planning on sleeping in that hotel room together that night, if they weren't just unofficially sharing, they would probably be having "sleepovers." It was an amazing vlive.

Of course, this is all just my personal opinion. You are free to agree or disagree as you choose! Hope this helped a little though. Thank you for the ask!

#jikook #kookmin #jikook sharing hotel rooms

80 notes · View notes

dovahkiin796 · 2 years

Text

Glamrock Freddy and Gregory. ARE NOT MICHAEL AFTON OR CRYING CHILD!!!!

This theory has been popping up recently and it’s all do to Matpat. Well, here’s the thing. Matpat is not the book of knowledge who knows everything in the media world. This man, for the past several years has not done the research for any of his theories. He has other people doing the research for him and it shows when you truly look deeply into the theory he’s covering. The infamous one was his Hazbin Hotel video that made him look like a massive idiot as he got so much information wrong. Ranging from Alastor’s creation, connection to Bill Cipher from Gravity Fall’s for some reason, and thinking Helluva Boss has some effect on Hazbin Hotel’s main plot when in truth it doesn’t. Since Vivziepop herself said the two shows won’t be crossing over despite sharing the same universe. So that would mean the two shows main plots won’t affect the other. Which makes sense as Vivzie and the writers don’t want to be constrained by what the other show does that might affect the setting of Hell. (But I could wrong on that. We have to wait and see.) I think the dumbest thing he could’ve ever done was make a theory on a show that’s not even close to being finished and with Viv and her crew still trying to figure out the lore and rules. Because remember, Viv has left the show’s information super vague so we can go into the show blind and to take everything they do reveal in their streams with a pinch of salt as things can change with time and somethings about the characters and setting have changed since those streams. But it’s clear he only did the theory was because he was no doubt constantly being hounded by his fans to make one about the two shows, but he honestly had no true interest in either of them. Anyway, onto why this post actually exists.

Gregory is not Crying Child as a robot. There’s BARELY any evidence to suggests such a thing. But Matpat’s first God awful piece evidence is Gregory and CC have brown hair....... I’m not kidding. That’s one of his pieces of evidence to suggest they’re the same person. Despite HE HIMSELF HAS BROWN HAIR! Brown hair ISN’T unique to CC nor to the Afton family save for Elizabeth who clearly took more from her mom.

His next piece of terrible evidence is how Gregory’s and CC’s shirts share a similar stripe going across them. You can tell Security Breach didn’t leave him (But truly to the people he has do the research for him.) much to work with so he’s grasping at very thin straws. I should point out that Gregory and CC are kids. Kids wear basic clothes with basic designs because they’re kids. Not teenagers or adults who do their best to dress nice in fancy or high-quality clothes with colors that match. If a parent is trying to dress their kids in the fashion of a teenager, then those parents are shallow as hell. A young child only needs nice clothes to wear that are functionally and will last a long while. Also, kids’ clothes are more likely to have designs of their favorite cartoon character or child video game franchise than no design at all. Another thing is if you do a specific trick with Gregory’s in-game model. You can see his shirt, socks and shoes are patented products owned by Fazbear Entertainment which could indicate he stole them from Glamrock Gifts. Which might explain his cleaned-up appearance as we know he’s homeless and the Pizzaplex does have a shower room. Though the only problem is he wouldn’t have much time to take a shower and get a fresh set of clothes since it’s heavily implied (pretty much confirmed) the night, he snuck in is the night the game takes place. Since he doesn’t know anything about the Pizzaplex and its rules. However, he could’ve taken a quick shower just to be cleaned.

His next bad evidence is how Gregory stuttered to tell Glamrock Freddy his name and believes Gregory’s stuttering was because he was thinking of a fake name to tell Freddy. From my own personal experience, when I got caught by either teacher or an adult in an authoritative role. I would stutter out my words because I was caught and the fear of me getting in trouble would cause me to stutter. I also never lied about my name because it never crossed my mind.

Now this next piece of evidence is more generalized than to be specific to Matpat or any other Youtuber does theories on Security Breach.

We all know if the player looks at Vanny our vision becomes red and distorted. Now everyone uses this a major piece of evidence to believe Gregory is Crying Child as a robot. But the thing is, Gregory NEVER COMMENTS on this. Not once does he ever bring up that whenever he looks at Vanny his vision becomes messed up. It’s clear this is done as nothing more than gameplay and to avoid Vanny. Nothing else.

Now Gregory being Crying Child doesn’t make sense no matter how much you look at it. For starters, when did William have the time to make Gregory and where did he make him? We all know William was more focused on his studies of Remnant and was then trapped in a secret room in the fnaf 1 location for 30 years. Giving him no time to build Gregory, or even care to. Or even activate him. Remember this ending from fnaf 4?

Yeah, this actually doesn’t go anywhere. Crying Child’s story truly ends here suddenly with no true conclusion. Fnaf 4 was supposed to be the final game in the franchise. But we know that did not end up happening and future games were all about Henry, Willaim, Michael, and Elizabeth. Crying Child was nowhere to be seen or mentioned in the slightest.

Concluding Scott either couldn’t figure out how to continue his story, or it’d be better that CC’s story just ends with no resolution. Gregory being CC is a resolution. Something I’m sure Scott wouldn’t do, given it’s been years since fnaf 4.

Another thing that debunks this robot theory. Well, Gregory gets tired by running too long. And since he’s a child he doesn’t have a lot of stamina. Now before anyone mentions Charlie from the Charlie trilogy. That’s a different universe with a different history of the events. Robots that are able to pass of as humans has never been a thing in the game’s universe and hopefully, they don’t ever be a thing in the games. Plus, Charlie would be programmed to do think she can do things like eat and get tired. Hell, she could be programmed to not even notice she’s not getting exhausted like her friends would be after a long run.

Another thing, Roxanne has the ability to see robots through walls. Gregory would constantly be in-danger by the female wolf if he was a robot.

In conclusion, Gregory’s not Crying Child as a robot. It doesn’t make sense and it would ruin Gregory’s character.

Glamrock Freddy is not Michael Afton. GF has so much dialogue that disproves it ten times over. He misses Glamrock Bonnie, he’s shocked to learn he might not be the only Freddy to ever exist, his programming heavily restricts him (and we know the ghosts can overcome the programming of the animatronics, at least a little bit), Glamrock Freddy never mentions anything From Michael’s past, nor does he recognize Gregory, and the Glamrocks were hacked by Vanny and are not possessed since Michael and William were not the only ones in the Pizza Simulator when it was set ablaze.

Despite the Glamrock animatronics being the most advanced ones in the franchise. They were still made with shortcuts in mind by Fazbear Entertainment so save a pretty penny. So, GF’s having a sudden glitch on stage is not out of the ordinary. Plus, this sudden glitch freed him from Glitchtrap’s connection. A connection Burntrap tried to reestablish when Glamrock Freddy went back into the Pizza Simulator location.

There’s also the fact Michael never possessed an animatronic. He stayed in possession of his dead, rotting body. And it along with everything else burned away in the fake Freddy’s location. So, Michael was freed to move on to the afterlife, believing his work was done. Only Willaim Afton showed this unique ability to come back over and over again while everyone else only did it once and stayed dead after the fire. William has tons of enemies, not just Michael. And out of all of them Charlie and Golden Child hate him the most. They would come back to put a stop to him again, but they didn’t. And that’s because Help Wanted was a soft-reboot to the franchise. The Afton story came to an end in Pizza Simulator. Yes, Willaim came back, but Willaim can be used to start the new storyline without completely undoing the previous one.

I had trouble putting this next debunk as it relates to both Michael and Gregory. If Gregory was Crying Child, (Which he isn’t) that would mean Michael left Gregory on his own to fend for himself while Michael willingly let himself go up in flames so he can become an ash pile on the floor. That’s careless as shit!

In conclusion. They’re not who the people think they are.

#five nights at freddy's #five nights at freddy's: security breach #michael afton #gregory #crying child #my thoughts

17 notes · View notes

natromanxoff · 3 years

Text

Most of you probably know about the alleged tape incident of Roger’s. After constantly getting pissed off because of him getting called as “dumbass”, seeing people trying to find and watch the video (let’s be honest that is actually a little impertinent); now I am able to acknowledge better how someone out there made up some incorrect version about this, maybe even totally fake, story and the misinformation had spread around. It’s actually getting even worse when the incident in question might not have happened at all.

Last month, I have come across and received the scan of another article which had headlines about this matter. And guess what? While I was only expecting to read pure nonsense again, there was more about it - I realized that it doesn’t tell about it as Roger giving the wrong tape and it’s totally different. The Sun said “it’s stolen" too but everybody around has been saying “he gave it”. Before I start, I’d like to point out some important points:

1. Be aware that this is, even though it has reached out to tabloids, a private issue. Whether the story is wrong or right, this is a story about a private stuff of them. Above all, Roger is already a private person himself about his personal life. Please be respectful at that if you ever say something about it.

2. You all use this story to mock him in some ways which I don’t really appreciate – it’s kind of like IILWMC –, don’t do it. I am not writing this down for you to change the context and make more jokes. My sole purpose is trying to stop this ‘gave the wrong tape’ accusation because I don’t see any source or proof regarding that. Send me if there’s any but I don’t think there is.

3. Always remember that these are only tabloid stuff. Most of the time, they are not credible or creditable at all. Those are the same papers which wrote all the horrible things when Freddie passed away. It’s hard to trust anything that those unreliable papers wrote about. But, at least, we’ll be able to see the origin of some details. Basically, keep in mind that this whole thing might not have happened at all but it also mentions nothing about him making a mistake - that part doesn’t appear anywhere on the internet actually, except on the words of fans’.

4. Let’s just not delve into this subject much more than necessary but only read the paper to see what it says. As I said, this post is written only for information.

We all know about The Sun article (May 4th, 1991). The one I mentioned now is from Sunday Mirror (SM) (May 5th, 1991). There is a couple of interesting points when you compare these two; that person asked for £10,000 from the first one anonymously and £5,000 from the second one by arranging a meeting; The Sun says they let the police know about it and some progress have already been made, SM says they gave the files to detectives the previous night; The Sun is somehow able to tell that the video was recorded in the previous year but also tells that it’s not known how the copy was made, meanwhile SM describes it with details. They make me nothing but more suspicious, like they are in contradict and something feels off. Did he request two different amounts of money from two different newspaper company by having only one copy to see which one will accept? Or were there more than one copy? If there were more than one, it makes me think that people would have found it by now. I am not going to question these anymore though, I don’t want to do that and it’s not my aim at all, because the main point I’d like to talk about and correct is how the tape has reached out to Douglas Lane, the person who tried to sell it,: by the man who was hired to do some work at Roger’s home when he was away. He thought the tape he saw on the shelf is a video from The Miracle album and took it home to watch so he basically ‘stole’ it because he ended up making a copy and giving it to Lean.

Lean claimed the tape had been “borrowed” and copied by a 47-old-friend.

The man had been hired to do building work at Taylor’s £700,000 second home in Kensington, West London, while the star was away.

He took the tape from a shelf thinking it was a video from Queen’s Miracle album.

Lean said: “He is a Queen fan so he thought he would take it home and have a look at it.”

And Douglas, who earns money in an unsatisfying amount, thought that he would get more by selling it.

“He had the sense to copy it and put the original back, but he didn’t do anything with the copy.

“He knew I was involved in music and told me about it.”

Lean, who drives a concrete mixer by day and earns £20 a night playing guitar in pubs, said: “I immediately thought I could make myself a packet out of it.

“It was my idea to sell it.”

Sunday Mirror writes that Lean said Roger edited the tape so that after those “sessions”, you see Breakthru video and he labelled the tape “Breakthru promo”.

“Taylor has no idea the video has been copied,” said Lean.

He said the tape was labelled “Breakthrough Promo” — the name of the band’s single from the Miracle album.”

I mean, really? I honestly don’t have any idea why he would do that. Why would he add a private video on a same tape with one of Queen videos? Why would he bother? If he did, why does he label it with that? Why does that worker get so curious about a video from 2 years ago? Maybe he didn’t have chance to see it in those two years, that could be the only answer. But why does he bring it to his home rather than watching it in Roger’s home? Surely, he wouldn’t see any problem at that as he’s fine with taking something that doesn’t belong to him. It’s purely a chance that he came across with something unexpected which will make him want to copy it at his home.

And after everything, this is apparently what Lean says:

But he insisted: The video was not stolen. It was just borrowed and copied.”

I can say a lot of words right now but I won’t… If all these things are really true, that is not an excuse of taking someone’s private stuff to copy without their consent, not ethical at all as he aimed to sell it and make it public. Ergo it was indeed stolen.

So, see? There is no “mixing the tapes and giving the wrong tape to a fan”. I assume this article must be the first place where that wrong version came from. And if it is telling the truth, there seems to be no mistake he has done here because his private stuff has been taken from his property unbeknownst to him. Briefly, we don’t know for sure if they had a tape and if it has really reached out to someone but if it did, then I believe this is high likely how it would happen.

It’s worth to mention that there is another theory regarding these news, that it’s been arranged to take media’s attention off Freddie. I can’t tell which one is true or if both them are wrong and nothing even happened, of course. It’s up to you, choosing whatever you’re going to believe in. But know that I can’t see any creditable source about him giving the wrong tape - so I wouldn’t suggest believing in that or keeping talking about it - and there might be more about this that we don’t / won’t know about so it’s only haste to make a judgement based on these.

Last note about something regarding him in general: Please, don’t take the different versions of this story and comments about them into account when you form your opinion about him because only those things don’t define him. Or the other way around, “if it’s Roger, it’s probably true - he would do it” attitude is not really fair when we consider that it’s actually you who chose to perceive him in that way by getting influenced whether by the movie or some ‘facts’ around - they do not reflect some aspects of him in the right way. Always try to find an original source. It is not always only him who would have his fun in those various ways, it is possible for any other rock star. All of them did some stuff - sometimes some really bad stuff - but it is not only Roger (I don’t mean the stated story here though, I honestly can’t see anything bad there). So him being the one who is involved in this story doesn’t prove or provide any authenticity. If everyone complies with that while critizing him or not approving something about him, it is always acceptable and welcomed, in my opinion. And that is valid about everyone, of course.

#gosh i have oscillated so much between posting and not but here it is #queen #queen band #roger taylor #roger meddows taylor

57 notes · View notes

beewolfwrites · 3 years

Text

The Oar in the Sand - Chapter Seven: The Second Day of Nostos

@cheshiya @tenseoyong @szallejhscorner @something-more-original-please @ofsunsetsandpoetries @nek0dzuken @allozaur @serenzippity @hiqhkey

Another update! This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but life just kept getting in the way. But thank heavens it’s here now :)

I’ll stick the AO3 link here for the ones that want it. Thanks for reading <3

------------------------------------

There were two things I had come to enjoy here in the Borderlands. The first was the freedom I had now that the old world and all of its problems were gone. The second was waking up beside Chishiya.

Usually I was the first to fall asleep and he was the first to wake up, so it was rare that he was still around when I opened my eyes. This morning was different. His face was angled away from me, and his hair was splayed across the pillow, almost obscuring his face from view. Almost, but not quite. Curling up at his side, I observed the way his sly smile had become slack, disappearing entirely as it made way for something far different.

He probably hadn’t intended on sleeping in like this, but the exhaustion of the previous day was overwhelming. I remained there for a long time, peeking out at him from beneath the sheets until his breathing lightened and he started to stir. One eye cracked open, squinted, then slid over to mine.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just enjoying the fact that you’re not dead.’

He raised a brow. ‘Between the two of us, you’re more likely to get shot than I am.’

What should’ve been a snarky comment came across flat and uninterested. Now that he was awake, the shadows beneath his eyes were more pronounced, and I could see the dark roots of his hair had grown longer. It was strange to see him looking this weary, but even Chishiya was only human. He was no more immune to bullets than I was.

‘What are you thinking about now?’

I could tell by his tone that he was trying to taunt me. But my thoughts were detached. I couldn’t stop thinking about the game. ‘Yesterday, it wasn’t just me who cleared it. An was there too, with two girls from the Beach. They said that the King of Spades attacked their camp right after the second stage started.’

He quietly considered it for a moment. ‘And we were close enough to hear the gunshots. He probably started with the camp before heading over to us.’

Heading over to us?

‘You don’t mean…’

‘He knows the location of all the players,’ Chishiya said.

That’s not…

No, it was fair. Once a player knew about his game, it was easy to avoid him just by mapping out the location of his blimp and remaining as far from it as possible. Him knowing the players’ locations only evened out the playing field.

‘An told me something else too. Apparently he moves all across Tokyo. Aside from the other game venues, the whole city is his arena.’

I thought this would’ve piqued Chishiya’s interest more, but as expected he was already a step ahead. ‘I realised the same thing when he chased you. It makes sense they would plan things this way. They’re trying to drive players into the game venues.’ He sat up a little, resting against the headboard and lacing his fingers together. ‘While you were in your game, another one was cleared. The King of Clubs.’

The hardest of the Clubs games. It made sense that those ones would be completed pretty quickly, given the chance of survival was the highest. ‘That was pretty quick.’

‘I suppose it was,’ Chishiya retorted. ‘But I have a feeling I know who cleared it.’

‘Hm?’

‘Arisu.’

Arisu? The last time I had seen him was when he was with… ‘Kuina was probably there too. An said when their camp split up, she got into a car with Arisu and Tatta. They must’ve gone to the game venue together.’

And if they cleared it, that meant they were still alive. They had to be. Knowing Arisu, he would’ve taken Usagi with him too. I almost felt like I could rest easy if the four of them were safe. Although they must’ve met the King of Clubs while they were there.

‘The Queen of Diamonds died.’ I hated how thick my voice sounded. ‘But I wish she didn’t. Is that okay?’ I looked up, meeting Chishiya’s stony gaze. ‘I mean, is it okay for me to like her?’

‘I don’t see why it matters whether you do or don’t,’ he replied. ‘The outcome is the same.’

I could still see her smile right before the wood gave way, a sort of peace mixed with relief. ‘I thought she was going to be evil or scary, kind of like Mira.’ The way she’d picked out the footage of mine and Arisu’s first games, the provocation was like a test. The Queen of Diamonds though, had been totally different. ‘She wasn’t like Mira at all. Right from the start, she wanted us to win.’

Chishiya was watching the dust motes glide in the sunlight, idly listening. ‘Did you find out anything?’

‘I’ve dedicated my whole life to the pursuit of knowledge, but I’ve learned to be satisfied with not knowing.’

‘She was a player,’ I told him. ‘She didn’t know about the Borderlands either.’

He mulled it over quietly. ‘I thought so.’

Chishiya knew they were players?

I sat up in bed. ‘There’s no way you could’ve known that.’

‘It was just an idea,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been here longer than you. I’ve thought a lot about the possibilities.’ He paused for a minute, then smiled ironically. ‘It’s very possible we could all be dead.’

It was a horrible idea, the thought that all our efforts to survive were in vain. Or perhaps, it was one big test of character to determine our place in an afterlife. And if we died in a game, would it be a second death, or would it allow us to proceed to a further level of some kind? Was it a true death at all?

‘I’d like to think we’re still alive,’ I admitted. ‘You probably don’t care, but I’d like to go back to the real world with you.’

‘Oh? And what makes you think there’s a way back at all?’

Hatter’s theory had been only half correct. But while the Queen had avoided telling us everything, she’d revealed even more than she perhaps intended. ‘The Queen of Diamonds said she went through the same thing we did, found all the cards, and then completed the face card games like we’re doing now. But then she called the others citizens. If we’re currently here on a visa-basis, maybe clearing all the games gives us the chance of a permanent citizenship—’

‘If that’s so, it’d only prove my point.’

‘No.’ I shook my head, thinking back to the game. ‘She also mentioned that she chose to stay here. If there’s a choice to stay, it means there’s a choice to leave.

I could see Chishiya’s mind working, taking it all in. It was as if he absorbed all the knowledge he encountered, storing it up and processing it for use later. He didn’t respond to my theory, but simply accepted it, and relaxed against the headboard, staring at the ceiling. As he tilted his head back, the dressing over his neck was exposed, and I suddenly became aware that we were still wearing our old, bloodied clothes.

I really, really need a wash. And new clothes. And new bed sheets.

Climbing out of the bed, I left Chishiya and made my way to the bathroom to clean up a little. However, when I passed the mirror above the sink and saw the face staring back at me, my mouth fell open.

This can’t be me.

My skin looked thinner and sallow, and without the Beach’s constant food supply, I’d lost weight, only not in a good way. The girl in the mirror was haggard and I barely even recognised her. While Chishiya had cleaned the dried blood from my forehead the night before, there were still flakes in my hairline and my face was dirtied.

I reached for the bottle of water beside the sink, except the plastic crinkled, empty. Throwing it away, I then checked the bathroom cupboards for our extra supply, but they too were empty.

You’re kidding me…

A quick search of the store revealed that we’d run out of water entirely. If our little hideout were closer to the river, it wouldn’t be a problem. However the river was too far away to collect water on a daily basis, and with the King of Spades out there, it wasn’t worth the risk. There had to be some way of storing water for the long-run.

Standing in the small kitchen, I could hear the muffled creaks of Chishiya moving about upstairs. And then the idea hit me. Walking out into the hallway, I called up the stairs, ‘I’m just going out to get something! I won’t be too long!’

There was no reply, but I knew he’d heard me as the noises quietened. He then appeared at the top of the stairs, leaning against the banister with an unimpressed smirk.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? The last time you ran off on your own, you stole the Queen of Diamonds game.’

His words stung, even if they’d been said teasingly. I hadn’t intended to steal the Queen of Diamonds Game. I only ran inside the building because there were others sheltering in there. I desperately wanted to tell him this, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Chishiya may not have directly blamed me for what happened, but there was clearly some resentment that he hadn’t been able to complete the game himself. In his eyes, it didn’t matter.

And that hurt. It really, really hurt.

‘I’ll stay away from the King of Spades,’ I called out before leaving the furniture store.

It was warm out here in Tokyo, but not a pleasant warm. The air was dull and sticky, as if the city was thirsty for rain.

There must be a storm coming.

I took my time wandering through the silent streets and deeper into the city centre. Even here, the only sound was that of the birds building homes in vacant office blocks, and aside from a deer grazing on the grass in an empty lot, there was nobody around.

Luckily, I had explored this side of Tokyo enough that I’d formed my own mental map of the area, and I easily found the camping store where Kuina had picked up our current stove. Inside, the place was scavenged, and I had to step over several boxes until I found the section I was looking for. There were several water containers, but none of them were quite what I had in mind.

I ambled further down the streets until the road opened up into a car park. It was lined by several walkways leading into large, white interconnected buildings. Two tall clocks stood above a disused bus station and taxi rank. And as I walked further down the road, there were ambulances lined up outside.

I followed a series of steps led up to the main entrance, but once I was inside, the sunlight cut off. While an abandoned Tokyo was eerie, a dark, dusty hospital was a thing of nightmares. Just inside the entrance was an international poster stuck to the wall, with the same phrase written in different word-art fonts and various languages.

‘Welcome to Nihon University Itabashi Hospital!’

I walked further inside, passing a reception desk and a waiting area. It was evident that other players had been inside here, as there was litter on the ground, and some of the store rooms lay open, their contents emptied out.

Strolling along the corridors, I explored the theatre facilities. There were drawers upon drawers of syringes and sterile metal trays of surgical tools, and aside from a thin layer of dust, the hospital beds were all intact. If it weren’t for the King of Spades and the danger of other players, the hospital would make a decent camp for a group of survivors. But on second thought, I wasn’t prepared to give up the warmth and comfort of waking up next to Chishiya. Retreating back out of the wards, it was in a main corridor where I finally found what I was searching for.

A water dispenser.

Unlike the others, this didn’t open from a cap in the top, but rather the container had a tap at the bottom. It was perfect for Chishiya and I. Rather than having bottles of water lying around, we could simply fill it up and keep it as a main water source. It was balanced on top of a platform, unattached. But the container was filled with water already, and barely budged when I tried to lift it. Wrapping my arms around the body, I lugged it forward, right as a loud clap resounded through the hall.

The echo of a drawer slamming.

Someone’s here?!

Holding my breath, my arms slid away from the water container. I could hear it clearer now, the rustles of someone rooting through drawers of supplies. It was coming from the ward opposite me. Every instinct told me to leave quietly the way I came. My thudding heart screamed at me to get out now.

I should’ve listened.

Inching forward on tiptoe, I peered around the doorway into what looked like a recovery ward. On the right, the door to a stock room had been kicked open, the rustling growing louder as I approached. A tall man with dark fabric wrapped around his head was hunched over a desk. He muttered something, and my heart stilled.

‘What the hell’s this shit? Ah, forget it.’

No.

He was dead… wasn’t he?

‘Where the fuck do they keep the morphine anyway?’

He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.

My eyes gaped, unblinking, at the stock room door. I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t bring myself to look away either. The memory of his eyes burned through my mind. The sheer, unrestrained rage, and the desire to kill, I’d seen it all through the tatters of his singed shirt as he looked up at me from down below in the hotel lobby and pulled the trigger. I needed to leave. I needed to leave now.

I took a step back.

Clink.

The tiny, hollow clatter of a syringe rolling across the vinyl had never felt louder. It rolled across the width of the hall, before tapping against a doorframe. The rustling inside the store room suddenly stopped, and at that moment, we both knew.

#alice in borderland #chishiya alice in Borderland #chishiya #chishiya shuntaro #Chishiya x reader #chishiya x oc #aib #Imawa no Kuni no Arisu

58 notes · View notes

recurring-polynya · 3 years

Note

What’s your opinion on pre-canon Renruki?

I think that they already had a romantic or almost romantic relationship back in the Academy, maybe even back in Rukongai, and the reason it wasn’t explicit is because firstly it would have spoiled the endgame couples, and secondly it’s a shonen, so it’s implied.

I think they fooled around when they were orphans in Inuzuri. They grew up together, they were always together in their “teenage” years (however adolescence works for souls😅), I think it’s not impossible that they had their first experience, if just their first kiss and make out session, with each other. When they joined the Academy, they spent less time together due to their different courses, and I think Rukia’s sad expression when Renji leaves for the mission in the real world depicts that (along with worry for him, and maybe even jealousy for his achievements compared to hers). By then I think they were quite intimate, they fooled around sometimes (with the little time they had) and knew the other’s and their own feelings, but never said anything like “I love you”, or talked seriously about the depth of their relationship. If they were “just friends”, as some antis like to claim, they wouldn’t have been so heartbroken, have so many regrets and felt so guilty during their separation. And why that separation in the first place? It’s not a matter of class difference, because Rukia did talk to people of inferior status, like her Squad mates. What’s actually forbidden to people from different classes is relationships. If Renruki was just a friendship, there would have been no problem, but their bond was beyond that. Rukia wanted Renji to tell her to stay with him, but his feelings of inferiority and belief that Rukia deserved better (maybe even better than him) prevented him to do it. Their separation doesn’t feel like an end to a friendship to me, it feels like a breakup. They avoided each other because it hurt so much, and they couldn’t bear to have any relationship other than a romantic one, which was impossible once she became a Kuchiki.

After the Soul Society arc, they got back together. They were physically too comfortable around each other to be just friends, like when he basically hugged her to encourage her to go back to Soul Society when Orihime is kidnapped (and maybe he was also comforting her), or when, during the fight with the Fullbringers, he casually placed her head resting on his thigh. By then they were secretly dating, in my opinion. In the last arc they were always together, it’s so easy imagining them as a couple.

What do you think? Is my interpretation far fetched? I’d like to hear your theories about their feelings, when they blossomed, when they confessed, if they had something going on during their Academy years…

Thank you if you decide to answer!🤍

Well, as you say, Bleach is a shounen, and also I don’t think Kubo was particularly interested in including romance in the story, so I don’t think there is a correct or incorrect interpretation. It’s left to the reader to imagine what they like. I don’t think “spoiling the endgame” has anything to do with anything.

I don’t think your interpretation is “too far-fetched,” although I don’t happen to agree with it. There’s very little to go on in canon, people can fill in the gaps in whatever way makes them happy/makes sense to them. I have exactly 0 interest in arguing with people on the internet about stuff like this. I enjoy reading fanfiction that has wildly different interpretations from my own, I generally love to hear a variety of ideas, although I generally prefer the format of a narrative over Tumblr posts (funny, since I do seem to write a lot of them).

Anyway, here are a bunch of opinions. This is way, way too long, so I'm gonna throw it under a cut.

That being said, you have some really amatonormative ideas in there that I do take issue with. Friendships absolutely can be as deep and important as romantic relationships. I categorically reject the idea that a romantic bond is stronger than a friendship one or that acts of physical affection necessarily imply a romantic relationship. I actually have no beef at all with people who want to read Rukia and Renji’s story as a very strong friendship. I do think it was still reasonable for Renji to avoid her during their separation, even if his goal wasn’t romance. He wanted to see her live a better life, and didn’t want to drag her down. Yeah, sure, if he just wanted to be a casual workplace friend, he probably could have joined Squad 13 and seen her once in a while. But, especially in the early days, it would have been a bad look for Rukia to continue socializing with people deeply below her station, and I feel in my heart that Byakuya would have forbidden her from seeing Renji if he found out she was hanging out with someone from her Inuzuri days, even if it was just casual. Yeah, there exist people who say Rukia and Renji are "just friends" for the sake of other preferred ships, but also, like, so what? Who cares? That’s a lot better than making Renji out to be a bad person or trashing his character. To be honest, I am generally happy to read a fanfic that had some other Renji or Rukia pairing if it actually contained some solid Renruki best friend content (I have found a few 369 fics that do this, and maybe also in the little bit of RenIchi content I have read, so, uh, good job, my gays. This is sometimes touched on in ByaRen fics, but usually not as much as I want, althought I also tend to hold these to a high bar, because if I have to deal with Byakuya in my fanfics, they should have to deal with the Rukia-Renji friendship 😂)

Anyway, you asked for my interpretation, so here it is . These are all just, like, my opinions, man:

Life in Inuzuri just really, really, really sucks, and Rukia and Renji both have a lot of trauma and emotional hang-ups from that time. I think they forged a deep emotional connection during this time that was probably a little too codependent to actually be healthy. They had no models of healthy families or relationships. I also think they were incredibly close to Fujimaru, Kosaburou, and Mameji, and that even if they wanted to have a romantic relationship, they wouldn’t have, at the risk of ruining the more important bonds of the larger group.

In my fanfic, in their last days in Inuzuri, I do have them fool around for a brief period. It coincides with the deterioration of the bond with their last surviving friend, leading to his death. I did this for trauma reasons, because that’s how writers are.

“Communication” is probably the most important theme in my writing, and a thing I bring up all the time is that young Rukia and Renji had a thousand ways of communicating survival-based things between each other, and 0 ways of communicating how they felt about each other.

I did a post on this recently, but their whole gang was incredibly powerless in Inuzuri. They lived on the fringes of society and stole scraps to survive. I think that their number one duty to one another was to survive. In the anime, Rukia swears that she will never leave Inuzuri, that she will always stay with her friends. I think the reason she does an about-face is not just because their friends are gone, but because she realizes that she will lose Renji next, and the only way to prevent that is for both of them to get stronger. Neither of them actually wants to become a soul reaper. They do it for each other.

I think that Renji would have remained in Inuzuri and tried to make a life as best they could, but Rukia knew this was futile, and where Rukia goes, Renji follows.

I think they purposely maintained distance at the Academy. Just as in Inuzuri, their primary duty to one another is to survive and thrive. They were rejected and mocked for their low origins, and hanging out together would have made this worse. I think it hurt Rukia that Renji made new friends, but on the other hand, they were exactly the sort of people who would help him get a leg up in the Gotei. Rukia’s Academy days were very painful because she saw Renji succeeding, just as she wanted, but leaving her behind in the process. Conversely, Renji got super focused on doing well, with the idea that he could pull Rukia up behind him, except for the part where he never actually told her that.

I feel like I’m in the minority here, but so much fanfic focuses on Rukia and/or Renji being “wrong” in the scene where he tells her to go to the Kuchiki, but I disagree! Everything they have done is in order to get to a better life! It is Renji’s duty to encourage her to leave him behind. He doesn’t want to be an anchor holding her down. Likewise, Rukia knows that if she doesn’t go, she’s just gonna be a burden on him. Their relationship has always been about each of them surviving separately over having happiness together. Up to now, they’ve always managed to find each other again, although this kinda looks like it might be it for them. Do these kids need to go to therapy? Yes! Did they do anything wrong? No!

I think about this a lot, but even if Rukia had turned down the adoption (which… I’m not actually sure she could have), even the offer would have ruined their relationship. Imagine that Renji asks her to stay, and she does. Maybe they even get together at this point. Every rough patch, every time there’s money troubles, this spectre of “Rukia could have been a Kuchiki” is going to hang over them. In fiction, there is often an idea of sacrifice being a one-time romantic gesture, but in my real life experience, this sort of thing hangs around like an unwanted ghost. I can, in fact, envision a scenario where this is exactly how Aizen manages to get his hooks in Renji, by offering Rukia an unseated spot in Squad 5, even though she “isn’t really good enough to deserve it” and “taking care of them.”

I am really fascinated with Rukia’s crush on Kaien/Miyako. Bold proclamation here, but I think there is something developmentally healthy about young people having crushes on the older people in their lives, provided that said older people treat them with respect and dignity and don’t take advantage of it in any way. Crushes are, by their nature of being unreciprocated, a safe way for young folks to imagine the sort of people and relationships they want to have in their lives. I headcanon Rukia as bisexual, and maybe also a little bit genderfluid, and she had these two extremely cool people in her life, whom she maybe wanted to be and maybe wanted to kiss and maybe to have a marriage like that some day. I… like to think that their role in her life healed some of her trauma before their death caused even more.

Fully into headcanons now, but I like to think that Renji had a parallel experience, with, of all people, Ikkaku and Yumichika. Like him, they came from the ass-end of Rukongai, but they stuck together instead of bowing to the social mores of the Seireitei. It is critical to note that they were able to do this through strength. This is literally not a thing that Renji and Rukia could have done, but at the same time, Renji sees this as the kind of relationship he wants to have with a partner. He doesn’t want to look after Rukia and protect her, he wants to fight back-to-back with her and then make out afterwards. He’s still convinced that he needs to go through the proper class channels to see Rukia again, but without their influence, I don’t think he ever would have been able to say “fuck it” and turn on his captain during the Soul Society Arc.

Meeting Ichigo and dealing with his unreasonable need to protect everyone he cares about, personally, was also a huge blow to Rukia and Renji’s “I cannot allow the other person to take any risks for my sake” hang-up. Ichigo has his own traumas, which are entirely different from Renruki’s, but the one thing he had was growing up in a loving family. (Isshin has his problems, but I feel strongly that he always made his kids feel like his love was unconditional). I’m not saying that making friends with a shounen protagonist is a good replacement for therapy, but it does have healing properties.

Entirely off-topic, but I feel like Ichigo is incredibly selfish in the way of Terry Pratchett’s witches: “All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!

Where were we? Oh, yeah. I honestly think that it is unknowable when in canon Rukia and Renji confessed. I already covered this pretty thoroughly in this post. I hate the idea that they were secretly dating. Renji worked incredibly hard to get his post and I think that both his job and Byakuya’s respect are very important to him. I do not think he would put either of those things at risk like that, nor would Rukia want him to. I tend to prefer a slow-burn approached, and I honestly think they got together during the 17-mo timeskip at the earliest, and more likely post-canon entirely, although I think them confessing in the Royal Realm is the spiciest possible outcome, so that’s what most of my fanfic cleaves to.

#renruki #did tumblr increase number of characters you can have in an ask?#i was honestly surprised when i opened this one and saw how long it was

38 notes · View notes

beautifulterriblequeen · 3 years

Text

B2:S - Chapter 5

Much of this series will be about the differences and additions in the novel version, and how they contribute to my understanding of story canon. But there will be character appreciation, the odd theory and headcanon, and suchlike as well.

Here be lots of Viren deets, Best Boy Soren deets, some writing/continuity stuff, worldbuilding appreciation and half of a theory, Detective Rayla, Moon Temple geeking, Claudium and dark magic, and more!

Spoilers for Book Two: Sky below.

(I know for darn sure that I wrote up a post for chapter 4, but I can't find it anywhere so I guess Tumblr ate it and I'll have to redo it at some point, but today is not that day)

Viren, my evil dude, my bad guy, coming in clutch with the worldbuilding and backstory again! If you want to know decades of information, you gotta talk to Viren. Or read his scenes, at least. Here, he seems to not sleep much when he has a big problem to analyze his way through. Solutions trump pretty much everything else in this guy's life, and he's had a really hard week with a lot of new and complicated problems. Of course he's getting sleep-deprived trying to find his way through them all.

Harrow put so much trust in Viren when he made him High Mage! He just threw himself extra hard at that Lady Justice blindfold, didn't he? Didn't really want to see what Viren was doing in his magic study, so he left Viren to his devices. And Viren has a lot of devices.

Also, this is fascinating: Viren made the secret passage to his "less official study" in Katolis Castle! And he was inspired to do so by the way his own mentor kept the Puzzle House. What else could a Puzzle House be, except a place with secret passages? Yay! secret headcanon that "the Puzzle House" is just "Katolis Castle" from Kid Viren's perspective tho

So either Viren built all of those passageways, or at least the ones to his dungeon. Which means he has to have, or know where to get, a stash of those glowing blue Moonshadow crystals. Hmmm.

I can't wait to learn more about Kpp'Ar and young Viren, btw. From this description of Viren and all his literal secret ways, it feels like another parallel between Viren and Runaan, with the whole "secretive paths, members only, insider knowledge" type stuff. Only the really cool members of this cult club get to know the secrets, and guess what, kid, you're cool now but you can never tell anyone, okay? Our secret.

Yeahhh, that'll never backfire in any way for either of them.

Kpp'Ar calling puzzles and secrets "man-made magic," though. Yes sir, knowledge is indeed power.

This chapter mentions Runaan by name, from Viren's perspective. Generally that would imply that Viren knows his name, even though assassins do not share their names, and Runaan didn't seem to give his to Viren in the first book. However, there was a scene in book one where the last paragraph switched perspective from Viren to Runaan - a technique that's very common in visual media like movies and shows and gives you that "ohoho they left the room and didn't notice this, but you do!" vibe. Using Runaan's name there in book one, where Viren couldn't see it but readers could, helps them keep track of the assassin's story arc while maintaining Viren's racism.

So in book two, in which Runaan has no onscreen scenes (alas), using his name in a scene that calls back to the events in book one helps us remember what happened in that dungeon cell. It would be a bit muddier to recall the specifics if Viren kept thinking about Runaan as "Elf." So I'm cool with the perspective nudge because it serves a narrative purpose: clarity. But I'm also enjoying the angst of considering that, somehow, Viren learned Runaan's name either during or after the coining spell. Mwa ha ha haaa. (Obligatory "Keep my pretty name outta your mouth" goes here)

Okay, back to Viren's scheming! He took the mirror because it was human-sized in a dragon lair. He knew it didn't really fit there, and that made it interesting, so he stole it. But he realized it was really powerful when Runaan wouldn't tell him squat about it - the assassin's instinct to protect Xadian secrets from human hands meant that Viren was holding a very powerful Xadian secret. And that just made him want it all the more. Ah, Runaan, if only your relationship with lying was, like, the exact opposite of what it is. Nyx could've spun Viren a believable tale in 2 minutes flat.

Also of interest: Viren considers his cursed coins to be a final fate. He expects Runaan to remain in his coin forever. With the Chekhov's coins still extant in the storyline, we can assume that they'll come up again eventually, but Viren has no current plans to do anything with his elf money except carry it around.

It's worth noting that Viren admits that he got impatient when he trapped Runaan in the coin. Runaan's first fate in Katolis was supposed to be death at Soren's hands, but Claudia "saved" him from that. His next fate was to become spell components, but Viren's frustration with his stubbornness "saved" him from that fate, too. So now he's in a coin, where no one can chop him up at all. Yay? No, boo!

We get one last line about Runaan before Viren shifts gears: he makes a point of noting for us that Runaan's shackles are still locked shut. However much of Runaan made it into that coin - body, soul, hair care products - he was magicked there, pulled right out of his restraints.

The creepy black liquid that Viren pours right into his eyes is the last of a powerful potion he got from Kpp'Ar, and its recipe is ancient! Humans used it back in the age of Elarion to see through the illusions of the world. And we get a delightfully creepy bit of description about the preparation of this serum, which makes it abundantly clear that it's a Moon magic-based concoction, harvested from eyeless vipers on a moonless night, with the threat of irrevocable madness ("madness" by whose definition, though) if it's done wrong-

Hang on. Hold up. This is a Plato's Cave reference. OH MY GOD.

No no I'm fine, this is brilliant. Sorry, sorry, I couldn't figure why there was so much description for a potion prep that Viren didn't even have to perform himself. But now I get it. I see the light. HA. I should make a separate post for this, it's amazing.

Anyway, for reference, the humans who used this serum were called the Oracles of Ophidia, and Ophidia is a taxonomy group that includes all modern snakes. Can you say "creepy ancient snake rites"? I can! Woo!

Viren activates the serum with a spell, but apparently he's never done it before. He's not sure if it's supposed to be hot and bubbly, and he worries that it's been tainted by moonlight.

Oh, I do hope so.

The magic potion hurts, a lot. Viren will do just about anything, to himself or anyone, to do what he believes is necessary. He just risked madness and blindness to find out what this mirror does! Viren. Can you just. Take a nap or something. Have a Snickers.

This chapter gives us a fun clue that I don't remember from the show: when Viren's vision clears and he can see, his reflection has white pupils and the room reflected in the mirror has inverted colors. You know where else has inverted colors?

You know who else got white pupils for a hot second?

Okay, now it makes sense! Viren and Lujanne were both seeing into the realm beyond life and death. Him with his moon magic potion, and her with her moon powers on a full moon night at the Moon Nexus. Which is Very Interesting! Is it a direct hint about Aaravos's location, or just a separate cool detail? Orrr, does it look like a direct hint because Aaravos is actually trapped in the world beyond life and death, but it's actually separate and we'll see something about white pupils again later on?

Viren really does have self-esteem issues, we all picked up on it with his rant at his reflection. He throws a fit when he catches himself wondering if he's actually worthless. In the book version of his tantrum, he shoves the mirror and hurls a candelabra instead of flipping a table. He didn't need to shove the mirror to set the fire, but it's in here. Foreshadowing that perhaps, if push comes to shove, Viren will choose himself over Aaravos? Giving Aaravos time to peek through and see that the coast is clear?

Soren, my boyyyyy. He has a rough night at the Moon Nexus because two sides of him are fighting with each other. He struggles to understand Callum's friendship with Rayla, and he also fantasizes about chopping off Rayla's head. One of these is a pretty ordinary thing to do. The other is Soren's internalization of what he needs to do to gain his father's approval. If he brought his dad a chopped off elf head every week, he'd probably feel a lot more confident because Viren would praise him a lot more.

Okay, okay, omg, is it just me, or does the "Moonshadow Madness" story, as it's told in the book, seem like Soren just doesn't know what a monsterfucker is? He thinks an elf bite puts humans under a spell. But vampires are sexy, and some people want them to do more to them than just bite them. A passionate kiss under the moonlight could look very bitey, especially if one of the participants has horns and you're already culturally trained to hate them. No yeah, I'm already headcanoning an actual human-elf kiss that got misunderstood by an observer long ago.

it's Lujanne isn't it, we all know, because what is a love spell but a sweet soft illusion, I mean how else does she get supplies for her Caldera, I ask you, and also Corvus was totally sent to investigate once and he told Soren at camp what he saw

And then back to magefam angst: Soren pretending that his sister's nose-tapping is stupid, even though he actually thinks it's cool, just because their dad thinks it's stupid. Viren, istg. Let your kids like harmless things. It's so cute that Soren taps his nose back at her, though! Like they have their own sibling code. I hope we get to see the nose tap again, especially now that they've chosen different sides. It could mean so much, that they're not too far apart yet.

Rayla knows what buttery pancakes smell like. I love this. Do Moonshadow elves have butter and pancakes, does Rayla eat a stack of eight giant pancakes in the morning? Orrrr it is just illusion food? I don't care, let Rayla have pancakes! Everyone loves pancakes. Pancakes will save the world. this message brought to you by the fact that I can't eat pancakes rn, send help

I love that Rayla is both sus of the pancakes and hungry, and that combines into a very motivated "I will get to the bottom of this" attitude. She kind of goes into Poirot Mode when she inserts herself into Soren and Ellis's conversation about Ava, explaining about the wolf's illusion leg and segueing into her claim that the pancakes taste sus. Claudia confirms she used dark magic, and Rayla is furious. It's different than the show's version in that it puts Rayla in detective mode, as the only Moonshadow elf in the scene, and boy does she take that role seriously. Also, she doesn't actually swallow the dark magic pancake bite. It ends up on the ground just like Lujanne's grubs from that earlier meal. These poor kids are so nutrient-starved. You guys gotta eat!!

Rayla's determination and prejudices and the fact that she super knows Harrow is dead all dovetail to make her try repeatedly to persuade Callum that Soren and Claudia are Not To Be Trusted. It's nice that the book keeps taking the time to point out that Rayla is Well Intentioned But Flawed, just like Callum and pretty much every other character in the show. No one is Right All The Time, no one Knows More Than Everyone Else.

Callum loving the sound of Claudia's unique voice is so wholesome. When you like someone, it only makes sense that you like all the things about them that they can't change - like the sound of Claudia's voice. Her choices with dark magic, not so much!

Claudia seems to have the same concerns Soren does about Callum's relationship with Rayla, but she comes out and asks him. The inherent possession implied in "your elf" is interesting, though. Elves are not people to Claudia. They're enemies who can be disassembled for the magic inside them. So maybe more like robots than living beings, if she knew what a robot was. Maybe she heard Soren's "Moonshadow Madness" story and realized he totally missed the kissing implications - but she didn't, and now she's genuinely worried that Rayla could kiss Callum under a full moon and enchant him to do her will. Good thing it's only a half moon, then!

Okay, Callum nervously making a puppet hand and then not knowing what to do with his hands and freaking out about itching and moving and pointy elbows is such a ND mood. The sudden stress of knowing that someone else is noticing your existence and maybe you're Not Existing Right, amirite? Ugh, poor Callum.

The Moon Temple! Omg it's so pretty in the description! Made to be beautiful and useful, full of knowledge but also allowing light and life inside (butterflies and vines). Lujanne, when can I move in, please? Also, it's all the more angsty because Lujanne is the only one who gets to see this beautiful place, but it has lots of chairs and shelves and tables, and it was meant to be used by lots of people. :(((

Claudia knows some of the runes on the walls. She isn't in a hurry to copy the rest of them down or anything, either. Her spellwriting is very precise, and she's a skilled mage. Her father would have made sure she was aware of the dangers of drawing sloppy runes, as much as he made her aware of the dangers of doing dark magic wrong. And the whole point of dark magic is that it's easier to learn than primal magic. Claudia supports her dad and their shared knowledge and life path. She's not gonna go nuts over an elf library she can't translate.

Side note: Between Claudia knowing some Moon runes and Viren building a secret passageway and a dungeon and lighting it with the same blue crystals that Lujanne and Ethari use for light--and Claudia exclaiming that she loves ruins--I wonder once more if there are really Moonshadow ruins somewhere in Katolis, which Viren has found and looted. Father-daughter relic hunting trip, maybe while Soren is away at camp? Omgsh that would be so wild!

Callum out here having a Viren moment with his "I feel powerless unless I've got magic that lets me help" vibes. God. I love their complicated mirroring. One of the hard differences between them is that Callum is very sure dark magic is bad because you have to kill stuff and take its power to cast spells, and he doesn't want to be a person who kills and takes like that. The line he walks to be nice to Claudia on their tour of the Cursed Caldera because he likes her, while telling her that he doesn't want to do her magic, like, ever, is so fine that it might as well be a shifting shadow on the ground. It's a very fitting conversation to be having during the half moon, with its tricks and little white lies.

Callum being out of the castle and his comfort zone, having to deal with the fact that the Claudia he loves is not quite the Claudia who's chasing him down across the kingdom, but of the two of them, he's the only one with a problem with this.

They say that if you really want to get to know someone, you should spend time with them outside their comfort zone - in heavy traffic, with a small baby, taking care of a new pet, trying a new skill, following unfamiliar directions, etc. While the castle is familiar territory for them both, Callum's never really found his comfort zone yet, while Claudia is pretty comfortable with her growing skill set. The creepy part starts to kick in when Callum begins to realize that Claudia's comfort zone encompasses a whole bunch of stuff that seems like it should make her uncomfortable... but it doesn't. But that'll be for a future chapter!

#book two: sky spoilers #book two: sky #b2:s #tdp spoilers #viren #harrow #rayla #runaan #callum #claudia #soren #lujanne #moonshadow elves #aaravos

26 notes · View notes

dramaticviolincrescendo · 3 years

Note

Rewatching Shameless and i just watched 6x1 jail scene. Can I request a meta if its not too much trouble? I feel like reading a really good meta about that scene and you're one of the best we've got so.....

It’s never any trouble at all! That’s so sweet to say—thank you so much! <3 Kind of coming to terms with the idea that anyone cares about my opinion over here. You guys are too much!

This scene is actually extremely important to me because it and the response to it were what made me start writing Shameless fanfiction, specifically when I saw that my views regarding Ian’s behavior and how Mickey received it were so vastly different from what I initially read. (Insert shameless plug for “That Milkovich Reputation” here.) Now, I know you’ve told me not to do this before, but based on the controversial position in which this scene resides, I feel the need to present a couple of disclaimers for our audience at large.

I first fell in love with Shameless last March, a couple weeks before quarantine began. I didn’t know what it was prior to that and therefore was not present when Noel left the show, so I didn’t experience the disappointment of a beloved character leaving in a potentially permanent way and didn’t engage in the fandom or see how deeply upset people were by that until after I finished the series. I also don’t subscribe to the theory that there was something going on behind the scenes or any animosity between Noel and the creators, as I have not seen any relevant evidence from reliable sources to support that what happened was anything other than decisions made in pursuit of career goals on both sides. As such, my analysis of this scene has only ever taken the content and context of the story and characters into account. I have no interest in speculating on the motives of people I do not know in writing it or portraying it this way, and even if I did, this scene made perfect sense to me as it was written and performed.

I understand and appreciate that this is not a popular position to take and urge everyone to pass this post by if my position on that matter is offensive or upsetting to you. I do not mean to tell anyone what to think or believe, only to explain how I view this scene and the context in which I do so.

That said, let’s begin.

When Last Seen: Mickey

As in all things, context is important. Prior to the prison scene, the last time we saw Mickey was when Ian broke up with him and Sammi interrupted their heartfelt moment, which basically sums up her character in a nutshell. That was a rough couple of days for Mickey. He saw how devastated Ian was to hear his family talk about him as though he were just like Monica; was distressed in his own right to return for him and discover that he’d left the base with Monica; buried his frustration and sadness by sleeping around with other people, which seemed to exacerbate those emotions because those people weren’t Ian, nor had he and Ian broken up when he did it; and came running when Ian called him, only for Ian to end their relationship.

Mickey is a very sharp man—we know this. He can read people like books and manipulate or intimidate them accordingly. He knew Ian had feelings for him in s1 when he showed up on his doorstep seeking comfort rather than going to any number of other people he trusted. He was well aware that Ian loved him in s3, and that made what he felt he had no choice in doing that much more painful. He heard what Ian said and knew what he was doing in 5x12. Of that, I have never had any doubt. It wasn’t like Ian tried to hide that he didn’t want to break up but thought that that was what would be best. In fact, the way he initially framed it always made me think that one of his highest priorities was not dragging Mickey down with him, especially in the aftermath of being called “destructive” and similar to someone who “put them through hell.” That’s why Mickey’s response wasn’t to call him an asshole or get angry or beg. It was to reassure Ian that he was there for the long haul, that he loved him and wanted to take care of him no matter what that meant—and that they could make that work. All the sentiments Ian had tried to communicate before he got married, Mickey was reciprocating in his own way. Had they not needed to temporarily write Mickey out of the story and Sammi hadn’t shown up right that second, I believe that he wouldn’t have given up so easily. We do have confirmation of that being the case in the prison scene, but we’ll get to that shortly.

When Last Seen: Ian

Ian isn’t a selfish character. We know this, too. However, Ian needed to be selfish by the end of s5. What he had to come to terms with wasn’t something that anyone could fully help him with, much as Mickey desperately wanted to. To Ian, the enemy was within. It was inside him, in his brain, telling him what to do even if that destroyed himself and everything he loved. It’s terrifying. I’m not bipolar, nor do I suffer from any other diagnosed mental illnesses, but I admire and respect everyone who wakes up every morning and tackles these things. They’re heroes every single day. But by the end of s5, Ian doesn’t feel much like a hero. Instead, he feels like the villain, and he’s lost touch with who he even is anymore.

That’s not a healthy mindset to have in a relationship. Relationships require a level of give and take, and that used to be something that Ian and Mickey already struggled with. Ian gave more in s1-3 because he was able to, while Mickey had a limit on what he could openly give because of the environment in which he lived and the manner in which he was raised. In s4-5, those roles were reversed: Mickey was able to give so much more, but Ian was gradually falling apart. Neither of them are at fault for any of those situations. It is what it is, and they have a stronger relationship for it. Ian is a giver, though. He’s always been a giver. To be in a position where he doesn’t feel like he can give anything to Mickey because he doesn’t even know who he is was truly heartbreaking for him, and objectively, he needed to take a step back so that he could focus on himself. He knew it. Based on Mickey’s understanding of Ian’s reasons after watching him deny that he had a problem for so long, I think Mickey knew it too. This hurt both of them—Ian to say it and Mickey to hear it—but they’re not fools and they’re not naïve. In some ways, they know each other better than anyone.

Jimmy said that when you’re on a plane, they tell you to put on your mask before you help anyone else with theirs. Ian needed to put on his mask. His heart can’t keep beating if his lungs don’t work.

Starting Season 6: Mickey

Unsurprisingly, Mickey has settled into prison life just fine. We’ll focus on his interactions with Ian in a bit as that’s the meat of the scene, but there are major implications inherent in his discussion with Svetlana beforehand.

1. Mickey has accepted that this will be his reality for the foreseeable future. What else is he supposed to do? Besides, he’s known for a long time that the likelihood of ending up in prison was pretty high for him, as he alluded to in s2. He was a street thug. He stole from local stores, sold drugs, ran guns, operated a rub ‘n’ tug, created scam companies, and was a generally violent presence in the neighborhood for years. He was in juvie twice during the show, perhaps more beforehand. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that it would have been more surprising if Mickey didn’t get locked up at some point than that he did.

2. Ian has visited Mickey before. We won’t get too deeply into this yet, but he thanks Ian for “coming back.” The other times, he wasn’t even paid to do it. So, as far as Mickey can tell, nothing has changed. Ian is focusing on himself right now, but his love for Mickey hasn’t dulled at all. That’s an encouraging thought, and it certainly puts a smile on Mickey’s face.

3. Ever the opportunist and entrepreneur, Mickey really is doing just fine in prison. He runs a business, if you will, that appears to be quite lucrative already. This isn’t surprising either. Sadly, it’s a bad move. He’s already going to be in prison for somewhere around a decade, give or take a couple of years depending on his behavior. But his behavior isn’t good. He’s hurting people for money, and if he gets caught and brought up on more charges, not only will he serve the full fifteen years, but he could get more time added onto that.

4. Ian is aware of this arrangement. He has to be if he’s been going there with Svetlana, and they weren’t exactly hiding what they were talking about. Ian has been very consistent throughout the series: he’s not as concerned with the moral implications of Mickey’s behavior, just how it could potentially impact their ability to be together. He still cares about Mickey at the start of s6, and Mickey can see it on his face when he won’t say it out loud. (More on that shortly.) Once he’s in a better spot mentally, maybe they would have gotten back together had Mickey been on the outside. I’m of the opinion that they would have based on the context of the situation. It isn’t an option, however. This is Mickey’s reality, and he’s not doing everything he can to get out earlier. If anything, he’s tempting fate on not being released at all. (This, in hindsight, sounds rather similar to the issues they’re dealing with right now in s11.)

So, this is where Mickey stands at the start of the season: a prison hitman who is quite pleased that the man he loves has come to see him again, even if the latter is visibly not in a very healthy mental state.

Starting Season 6: Ian

Ian isn’t in most of 6x01. What we do see of him is typically sad or colored by his frustration, outside Carl’s welcome home party at the end of the episode. Even then, there’s an aura of discomfort that accompanies the family’s knowledge that things have changed. Carl came out of juvie a different person—they’re all different people after s5, and they’re not sure how to handle walking on eggshells around each other.

From the very start of the episode, we see that Ian is still struggling even though he’s had enough time to at least partially adjust to his medication, especially if he’s been on and off of it. It’s so sweet how Fiona gently wakes him up—it’s also a bit different. What happened to banging on the bunk bed and yelling for them to come down for breakfast? After behaving pretty normally with Debbie at the bathroom door, she’s almost handling him with kid gloves, and the punches keep coming when she reminds him that he (1) has to get up for work at a place he despises and (2) needs to remember to take his meds.

The kitchen scene is extremely telling of where Ian is at this point, and it partially shows why he’s somewhat standoffish by the time we reach the prison scene. Most of the family is gone or different. Fiona is repeatedly on him about meds and getting to work on time—Ian, Mister Responsible himself who was out of the house before anybody woke up to get to work on time as a kid. Lip is at college. Debbie is absorbed in her unconfirmed but likely pregnancy. Carl is in juvie, and Liam is playing with the switchblade he found under Carl’s pillow before they take him to pre-K. His entire support system is either gone or treating him like he’s broken. All he has is Fiona “going Fiona” on everyone. It’s clear that this is impacting him because he actually derails the conversation to say that they should go visit Carl the following weekend, which was the position Debbie used to be in when Fiona was in jail. Just like Lip shut her down, Debbie shuts Ian down, and he doesn’t say another word as he drinks his coffee—which he can’t finish because Fiona is once again on him about work, so he trudges out the door to another day of being a busboy with no dreams instead of a soldier who has a future.

Work isn’t much better. Svetlana wants him to go see Mickey when he’s determined to stay away. (We don’t have confirmation, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that he wants to distance himself if Mickey is doing something that will potentially get him into even more trouble, especially given some of his reactions at the prison.) Sean is sending Fiona to nag him about not moving fast enough when the diner isn’t even busy. When Otis is chased down by the cops and slammed against the front window, Sean rather condescendingly tells him to, “take your rag and wipe the blood and snot off the window.” Ian—West Point-aspiring, ambitious, courageous, caring, intelligent, hardworking Ian has been reduced to wiping up someone’s snot by a boss who’s living in his house with a sister that’s treating him like he’s shattered glass and a family that is growing further and further apart these days.

That is the day Ian has had before he even arrives at the prison. Odds are that that is how most of his days have gone for quite some time, minus the blood and snot. …Maybe.

The Prison Scene

Now we come to it: what you actually asked about! It’s taken this long to get here because we can’t possibly interpret this scene effectively without incorporating all of what came before it. Mickey’s position is regrettable, but he knows that Ian still loves him and is at least handling his situation with all the grace and competence that we can expect from him. Ian is a bit of a mess who’s had a bad day and is now faced with the man he loves, who he is telling himself he can’t be with, sitting behind glass—where he’ll be for a good long while.

I’m going to divide this analysis into two sections. For a scene that many prefer to forget, to me, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling.

Physicality

The body language in this scene is remarkable—phenomenally blocked, phenomenally directed, and phenomenally portrayed.

When Mickey first appears, he’s visibly chomping at the bit to get to the visitation area. He’s peering out there while he’s still behind a locked door, and he only diverts his gaze to the guard because he’s waiting for him to unlock it. He’s cool about the whole thing—he’s very cool—but he’s obviously also here for one reason and one reason only. That reason is where his eyes go the moment he sits down at his stall and spots Ian’s coat where the latter is pacing behind Svetlana. Throughout their entire conversation, we see his eyes darting to Ian as he attempts to get the business out of the way so that he can indulge purely in the pleasure. It doesn’t matter to him that Ian is visibly tired and reluctant to be there or that he plays with Yevgeny instead of actively joining their conversation. It’s Ian, and all Mickey has to look at in here is a bunch of fellow thugs he hasn’t loved since he was too young to know what that meant. Damn right, he’s going to shamelessly watch him.

In Ian’s pacing, where we can’t see his face, I find it interesting that he keeps himself angled away from the glass. We see more of his back even though he’s moving side to side rather than away. He doesn’t want to see this. He doesn’t want to be there. In s7, he told Mickey how hard it was to see him behind glass—that wasn’t an excuse. He wasn’t falsely trying to make it sound like he was suffering at their separation just as much as Mickey was. We can see that that’s the case right here in 6x01. Ian has never had a problem sitting still through difficult moments, not even when a potential court martial that would further ruin his life was on the table. But this? He can’t sit down. He can’t face that.

The first time he turns directly towards Mickey’s location is so that Svetlana can hand Yevgeny off to him, and Mickey is visibly loving the view. His expression gets a bit softer, and he ducks his head a little so that he can catch a glimpse of Ian’s face. He follows Ian with his eyes even though Svetlana tries to get his attention. What a blast from the past, right? Ian there with his son, taking care of him while he and Svetlana figure out their business? And just like before, he offers Svetlana all of the attention and input that he deems her worth—next to nothing. Ian’s over there. Ian’s keeping the kid entertained, playing with him and rocking a bit in their seat and leaning over his little shoulder to make sure he’s doing okay—but forget that, Mickey’s eyes are examining him from red hair to beat-up shoes. He only glances back to Svetlana because he has to in order to get the information for their next paycheck. Even then, he’s still back and forth, up and down.

And Ian? He can’t keep pacing. He can’t stay turned away, but he won’t look. He occupies himself more than Yevgeny because now he’s low enough that he won’t just see an orange jumpsuit—he’ll see Mickey, and he’s had a bad enough day with his family making him feel more alone than ever without adding that pain on top of it. (This is the third time Mickey’s been locked up for something directly or indirectly related to Ian. I’m sure it’s not unreasonable to suspect that he also feels somewhat guilty about that, especially when it happened right after he broke it off.)

When Mickey asks if Ian is going to sit back there the whole time and not interact with him, Svetlana turns around and presumably says something to get his attention. Their eyes meet, and Mickey gives him a look that clearly says, “What the fuck, man?” This isn’t the behavior of a man who is heartbroken at their relationship ending or questioning Ian’s love for him. This is the behavior of a man who wants the love of his life to get his shit together enough to come say hi to him—or at least look at him—because he can’t pretend that he doesn’t want to see Mickey as much as Mickey wants to see him. It’s impossible to hide that when Ian has let Mickey see so much of his heart over the years.

Ian’s response is so fascinating because he does meet Mickey’s eyes, and he holds that connection for a moment. Then, reading what Mickey is trying to tell him, he actually turns further away again so that Mickey gets his shoulder. This sets the stage for the rest of Ian’s development from now through s9. He’s doing what Ian does: he’s compartmentalizing. He’s taking the emotions he can’t deal with right now, wrapping them in tissue paper, and neatly stacking them in a box that he’ll put up in the attic where he can pretend they don’t exist. But they do. They really do.

If they didn’t, he wouldn’t have spent their entire conversation trying so hard to focus on literally anything but Mickey, because as we saw in the Hall of Shame flashbacks and as has been obvious since their first fight-turned-fuck, once they look, the battle is lost.

Dialogue

I’m going to be real with you guys: I adore this scene. I’ve watched it more times than I can count even though I haven’t rewatched much of the season in its entirety. There was so much said with so few words, and while I was sad at the end, I was also hopeful. This was an impossible position to be put in on both sides, and I truly believe that this was the best resolution they could get at the time. And yes, it hurt. It was painful. But why was it painful?

Because they’re so visibly, obviously, irrevocably in love.

Mickey’s tone when he tells Svetlana to leave because he wants to talk to Ian isn’t as harsh as it’s been for the rest of their visit. There’s such a disconnect between his words and tone: roughly telling her to scram while actually sounding a bit younger at the idea of speaking directly with Ian. Svetlana could tell. It’s so clear, and her smirk is super knowing. In that moment, we’re seeing the woman who stood in the doorway of what was supposed to be her bedroom and watched him make eyes at this unconscious boy she didn’t really even remember. Not in the tears and realizing she was in big, big trouble if he left her, but in the understanding that his heart isn’t in the body on the other side of the glass—it’s sitting behind her. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Svetlana as a person (as a character, she’s amazing), but since they reached their agreement in s4, she’s never had a derogatory thing to say about the love those two share, and I respect that. It’s actually a bit cute how she takes her time and is almost teasing in giving him what he wants. A bit.

As I have this scene running on repeat so that I don’t miss anything in writing this, I paused to type and ended up on such a meaningful glance at Ian’s face. Svetlana just took Yevgeny from him, and he hasn’t gotten up yet. He’s staring straight at Mickey, and he looks hesitant. Scared, almost. Then he looks up at Svetlana, nods a bit, and reluctantly moves into her spot.

Is it overkill to take this one exchange at a time? Probably. Am I going to do it anyway? Hell to the yes.

1. “Thanks for coming back.”/”Yeah… Svetlana paid me.” – I know that people hate this line and think this is painful. I know that it objectively is painful. I still laugh every time. Not because Ian agreed to come if he was paid. (He’s got medication to afford and no insurance. I can’t begrudge him wanting to make a few extra bucks any way he can.) Not because of the words, but because of what accompanies them. Ian will not look at Mickey—he’s lost so many battles lately, and he can’t lose this one too. Not when he started this one himself. He’s hemming and hawing, not looking up from the countertop and then twisting around to see if Svetlana is still there or anyone else is listening. It’s so stupid, because literally no one cares, but it gives you this sensation that Ian sees himself as being under a microscope the whole time. That’s his life anymore, at home and at work and now here. And Mickey? He doesn’t look terribly broken up about Ian accepting payment in exchange for coming. He gets this expression that I interpreted as, “Seriously? You’re playing it like that?” Then it settles into disappointment that Ian won’t open up or look at him like he normally would—that the glass interferes with the magnetic pull between them. But don’t worry, children. Uncle Mickey has just the thing to fix that: himself.

2. “You look good.”/*awkward silence* – I mean…what do you say to that? I actually felt so bad for Ian there because what must he have looked like these last visits if Mickey is telling him that he looks good now? What kind of mess was he then when he’s still sort of a mess today? And he can’t even return the sentiment because how can he? Mickey is in prison. He’s in a jumpsuit looking at being here so long that he’ll probably have a few grey hairs starting to grow in when he gets out. I don’t know how to respond when people tell me I look good on an average day, so I can only imagine how that must have felt in his position. And still, he won’t do more than glance in Mickey’s direction. Well, if that didn’t work…

3. Mickey chuckles and says he got a new tattoo. Ian’s eyes immediately shoot upwards, and Mickey slouches a little so that he’s in their direct line of sight—to hold them there, because once they look, the battle is lost. And Ian does lose. For a while there, he can’t look away again. First, because Mickey is courting some pretty nasty illnesses with his improper use of needles. Seriously, Mickey, a beautiful gesture but holy crap. Second, Mickey has his name (or a very close approximation to it) tattooed forever right over his heart. Ian had asked if Mickey was going to marry him, and Mickey told him to fuck off, but everything he’s doing points in the opposite direction. He promised sickness and health; now he’s made a permanent mark on his body for everyone to see. Mickey, who wouldn’t be seen in public with him once upon a time, has plastered Ian’s name onto his body. Ian tries so hard not to let that impact him, but it’s over. He’s lost the battle already, and he falls further and further. He’s smiling when he tells Mickey it looks infected, he teases him about the misspelling (which I think says more about how much that tattoo must have hurt than any inability to spell on Mickey’s part—I’d have a typo too), and he laughs at Mickey’s irritation that he messed it up. And it’s this sweet little laugh, not cruel or hurtful or mean. The wonderful thing about humor is that it can be used to cope with difficult emotions. We’ve seen a lot of people on the show start laughing when they’re in a bad place. Ian has been trying so hard to accept his life as it is even during the shitty day he was having. He tried so hard not to let himself fall into the trap of letting his love for Mickey rule his actions in the scene so far. That’s a lot. That’s denying himself to the point where I’m sure it hurts. And so he laughs, because Mickey did this crazy, absurd thing for him and yeah, it came out wrong, but he did it. This was all Ian wanted once upon a time (minus the felony), and now he has it—but he can’t have it. So he laughs. He immediately moves to hide it, but he laughs. He smiles more and has to bend away to pretend that he’s not—and Mickey lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree. This is the moment that keeps me from seeing this scene or Ian’s actions as being cruel. They’re both hurting, and this is an awful position to be in. But Ian loves him so much, and Mickey was doing everything he could to make him show it. Not exactly how he saw that going, I’m sure, but he’ll take it.

4. “Been thinking about you.” – Knowing that he lost that one, Ian looks away again. While the end of this scene will hurt for both of them, especially Mickey, think about the pain he must be feeling in that moment simply because he’s not. He’s not hurting. For the first time that day, he feels good. This can’t last. Mickey isn’t coming home with him when time is up. This wonderful emotion that filled him up enough for him to laugh and smile after such a bad day will be gone the second he hangs up that phone. Then he’s going to go home and have Fiona breathing down his neck with nobody else for support. And Mickey will be here—behind glass. He can’t handle that, and he pulls that box out again and starts tearing off the tissue paper. He has to get rid of this feeling. He has to be the one to put it away before it kicks him to the curb. He’s stubborn, and Mickey can see him shutting down but also knows that he’s knocked enough bricks out of Ian’s walls to say something softer, something emotional and closer to the heart. Something he is willing to say where the other inmates can hear, which I don’t think is lost on Ian since he immediately looks up again. He doesn’t look away either, not even when Mickey asks if Ian thinks about him. He glances to the side and opens his mouth a bit, but nothing comes out. Mickey knows the answer.

5. “Gonna wait for me?”/”You’re here for fifteen years.” – There’s this thing Mickey does after he first says that. He chuckles, because he knows that that’s pretty unreasonable to ask and has already predicted Ian’s response. His comment about being out in eight is lighthearted, a serious matter spoken as a joke because…this isn’t juvie anymore. They’re not going to see each other in a few months. This is Mickey’s version of what Ian was just doing, only where Ian tried to withdraw and escape within himself, Mickey is making it more humorous. He’s always done that, make light of pretty serious things to avoid looking at just how messed up it is. But I didn’t get the feeling he was really asking for Ian to wait that long. Instead, I got the feeling that he was testing the waters, seeing if Ian would shut him down—which he didn’t. He offered the bullshit excuse that Mickey tried to kill a member of his family, and Mickey saw through that immediately. I think he knows that he can’t ask Ian to seriously wait and never be with anyone else for fifteen years, or even for eight. I think he knows what he’s saying is a touch absurd. He also knows that Ian’s excuse is extremely absurd, and he doesn’t buy it for a second. It gives him a little courage to do something…well, a bit absurd.

6. “Will you? Wait? Fucking lie if you have to, man. Eight years is a long time.” – I think the important part of this isn’t that Ian says he’ll wait when he doesn’t mean it, which is the popular take. For one thing, I don’t think we can ascribe that level of calculated behavior to Ian in this instance. There are a few things about this part of the scene that mean a lot to me: (1) Ian doesn’t get up and go. He doesn’t even move in that direction. He sits there with the phone after the buzzer sounds and before Mickey tells him to lie. His mouth opens and closes like he’s not sure what to say. Because what can he say? If Mickey serves the maximum, Ian will be in his mid-thirties by the time they can be together. At that point, he was either nearing eighteen or just turned. I still can’t fathom what I’ll be doing in my mid-thirties, and I’m a whole lot older than that. Ian looks just a little terrified here, and that’s because he knows he loves Mickey but has no clue what he’s supposed to do with that in the impossible circumstances they’re operating under. (2) Ian can’t even see himself moving on yet. He’s still trying to figure himself out, not think about a relationship. He has a job he hates, and his family is a different brand of chaos these days. He feels alone, yes, but not in a way that has him openly desperate for a relationship. Based on what he says to Mandy about Caleb, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be in a serious relationship at this point or even in a position for more than casual sex anytime in the near future. How can he say that he’ll wait when he doesn’t know where he’ll be whenever Mickey does get out? Maybe he’ll feel better. Maybe he’ll be out of his mind, roaming all over the place like Monica. Maybe he won’t just be standing on that bridge. It’s a huge question, one that has a lot of ramifications no matter what his answer is, and Ian clearly has none. He’s blindsided by that, which Mickey sees. That’s when he gets serious about those eight years, about how absurd their situation really is. That’s perhaps the first and only time in this scene where we can see that, for as successful as he is at navigating prison, his freedom means something to him. His freedom means he wouldn’t have to coax a glance out of Ian—he could kiss his dumb ass and make him stop being stubborn about how much he loves Mickey. But he can’t. He won’t be able to for a long time. And I think that is what really breaks his heart in this scene, not…

7. “Yeah. Yeah, Mick, I’ll wait.” – Did anyone else notice how Ian swallowed hard before he answered? How his voice gets hoarse when he first speaks? I paused again to type, and the video is sitting on his face staring at the counter before the second part of what he says. He looks like he might cry. He looks like his heart is breaking just as much as Mickey’s is, because he can do what he’s asking this time—reassure him with a lie. Not because he doesn’t intend to wait, but because he is buried so far under what life has piled on top of him that he can’t see the light these days, and he doesn’t see waiting or moving on. He just sees the daily struggle of being this shell of a person. Of being without Mickey even if they’re not technically together. (Admittedly, I think he knew they would be if Mickey weren’t in prison at that moment. Ian has no real self-control where he’s concerned. Lip told him as much, and he’s self-aware enough to realize it, hence his behavior in this whole scene.)

When Ian hangs up the phone, he doesn’t get up immediately. He looks at Mickey—really looks at him—and each of them watches the other’s heart shatter. I don’t see it the way a lot of people do, though. On Mickey’s side, I don’t see it as being because Ian lied. I think it’s so much bigger than that.

Ian looks at him when they can’t hear each other anymore, and if he didn’t seem ready to cry before, he looks it now. Why? Because there’s nothing he can do for Mickey besides that. Ian, ever the giver, can’t give him anything. At that point, he couldn’t even help himself. He can’t be what Mickey needs in that moment, just like he couldn’t be what Mickey needed while he was sick, and it kills him. It kills him to know that by the time Mickey does get out, he’ll be older than he can fathom being and has no idea if he’ll even be around that long. It kills him to feel like even if he is, he’ll still have nothing to offer because, in his own words, this is where he lands. And it kills him to have to walk away and leave what he loves most behind glass.

Mickey is watching this. He knows Ian, and as painful as it was to get exactly what he asked for, it’s even more painful for him to see what him being here does to Ian. Where Ian is a giver, Mickey is a fixer. He makes things better. When stuff is broken, he puts it back together. When there’s a problem, he resolves it. Ian was going to leave because he couldn’t be an unacknowledged number three in Mickey’s life anymore? He jumped to solve the problem by coming out. Ian was acting strangely and wouldn’t get out of bed for so long that Mickey realized something was wrong? He immediately went to hunt down Lip, who he knows is closer to Ian than anyone else in his family. Fiona tells him that Ian is sick and needs to be cared for? He jumps in to do it, even to the point where it did more harm than good. Sammi caused a problem that Mickey couldn’t solve? He fixed the problem of her being there at all. But here he sits, behind glass, watching Ian that whole time and knowing that he was trying to maintain some emotional distance—and, because it’s Mickey, knowing why. There’s nothing he can do about this. He can’t fix it. For the first time since s3, Mickey is absolutely helpless to fix a problem. He takes a breath as Ian walks away as though he’s about to say something, but what can he say? What can he do? Nothing. He can do nothing but hang up the phone and weather the storm.

In the end, the heartbreak in this scene isn’t about them hurting each other, from my perspective. It’s not about Ian being callous and cruel or purposely trying to hurt Mickey. They know each other too well for that. They’ve been through too much. To me, this is about two people who love each other more than anything not being able to be what the other needed when they needed them—and that’s a whole lot more painful.

#shameless meta #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich

109 notes · View notes

micer2012 · 3 years

Text

MatPat plagiarized “Game Theory: Minecraft's DARKEST Timeline! (Hermitcraft SMP)” off of me.

Hello everybody! My name is Della, or micer2012. I made a post on tumblr on August 5th, 2021, that nearly every single point in Game Theory’s new video is stolen from. It’s been a very stressful and incomprehensible past few days for me, and I really wish that I had a PR team of my own to help me write this instead of having to put off my homework at 1:00 a.m. because a channel with 14.6 million subscribers stole from me, and is making profit from it.

TLDR: Though I can absolutely believe that somebody came to the same conclusion that I did independently, there is not a single point in the video that isn’t from my post, or wrong. And obviously wrong, things that make me think they didn’t even bother to watch CarnEvil, let alone make the theory on their own from being a long-term Pooka fan. There is also hard evidence of the comments being deleted, and GT has been caught plagiarizing content for years.

Disclaimer: I know MatPat and Tom didn’t write the video all by themselves, it was “Game Theory” all working together. I use their names interchangeably just because they are the faces of the channel, this video and this controversy, but trust me I Do know that. I also am a bit opinionated in this, but I didn’t make it to be a hate piece. I hope you can see the evidence and points I am making and consider them yourself. I’m open for any debate or questions.

I want to address the main thing first- I can 100% believe that somebody else came to the same conclusion as me. I’m not trying to claim ownership of saying “Jeff is controlling EX”, that’s barely even a theory, just connecting the dots of what Pooka has been hinting at for months. I didn’t make my first post with the intention of stating a theory- I mainly made it because I had just watched CarnEvil and realized that pretty much nobody else had, (shoutout to hermette-historian and arandomshine for being the places I first learned about Jeff and the CE trilogy, respectfully) and wanted to summarize and state what it meant for EX’s story in the past, and the EX storyline now in s8. I knew Jeff controlling EX was pretty much confirmed since I saw the square eyes in the reflection in 1013, (and knowing what Pooka had animated before), and wanted to raise awareness about who Jeff was, what he had done, and what he was about to do in the rest of the s8 plotline. The main theory was that EX’s greed and capitalism was connected to s1’s Midas Curse, that EX was influencing both Xisuma and the other hermits in the same way Jeff influenced them, and that EX’s change in character wasn’t just inconsistent writing, like most people on Hermitblr assumed, but because there actually was someone else behind the helm.

As more episodes came out it was more and more clear that this was where the EX storyline was going, with the white eyes, EX monologuing about how they’re not satisfied no matter how much money they have (and that it must be a problem with themselves, Deep Inside), and Jeff appearing both in EX and Jevin’s dream, (1019) and in Hels (1021). I made more posts, notably this iceberg meme (where I put “Jeff wants to go after MatPat” in the biggest text right at the bottom, because I thought it was the most ridiculous possible thing.) and my analysis of the white eyes.

Though my posts gained traction on tumblr, this was not a commonly talked about theory. I can tell you firsthand, I went looking for as many mentions of Jeff as I could find frequently to reblog, I loved seeing people talking about my theory or just asking who that shadowy guy in the background was. As you can tell from my enthusiasm, I love nothing more than analysis and discussing these theories and plotlines with people. And that’s why a part of me really does wish that ‘Tom’ was just a big hermitcraft fan who came to the same conclusion, but I can tell you that there is no doubt in my mind that the video was copied exclusively from my posts, likely without even watching the source material itself. (Hermitcraft, CarnEvil, and Evil’s Fault).

First, I want to link this post by @stygiuscantus. It compares every part of the video that matches with my explanation of the theory. I want to point out specifically comparisons like this:

(note, there are other shops Tom?? ex isnt controlling all of hermitcraft's diamonds, they can just do digging for more, Tom)

(note, in the small wording changes here MatPat states incorrect information. EX is not in the CarnEvil series, and they HAVE interacted with Jeff on screen in Xisuma's videos before this (the voice in 666 was confirmed retroactively to be him)

(note, he starts with CE2 just like I did, even though I realized after making my post that CE1 was retroactively controlled by Jeff. weird not to mention CE1 at all, except that I haven't posted about it)

While at first I brushed it off as “Oh, they were just going over the same backstory as me” it… It became a lot more noticeable when I rewatched and realized there is NO backstory that he goes over that I didn’t go over in my post. Besides going over the real mythology story of King Midas in more detail, he doesn’t mention a single thing from Pooka’s work or Hermitcraft that I didn’t mention in my post.

This is especially noticeable to me with ‘Tom’ apparently being a longtime fan of both Hermitcraft and Pooka’s hour and a half of self insert fan videos (no disrespect to Pooka!). No mention of the Dreamer and his complex relationship with Jeff, no mention of c!Pooka’s role in the CEs himself, (saying later that Jeff can’t target Pooka because he’s not a hermit, so he’s targeting X... Jeff is Pretty Explicitly targeting Pooka, since the first episode of CE up through Acquisition), and especially the lack of mention of any other Hermitcraft plotlines seems really suspicious and weird. I’ve only been a fan since 2019 (and only learned of Pooka’s stuff 3 months ago), but off the top of my head the nHo plotline has a STRONG case to be made about being connected to Jeff, Logfellas was another storyline where X got possessed, Helsknight and the helsmits and Hels as a whole seem weird not to mention, and ALL of Evil Xisuma’s 6 years of lore seem really important to cover or mention other than “They destroyed things” and “They’re like Darkiplier”. I’m sure there are other storylines through the 9 years of the server that could have easily been tied into this, but I didn’t mention them anywhere in my own post. No mention of very important parts of EX’s s8 plan like DerpCoin either. For someone who MatPat claimed to be using evidence from “deep cuts of the series,” he sure didn’t have any evidence that I hadn’t wrote 2 and half months ago, in a post that comes up whenever you look up “Jeff the Minion” or “Jeff the Minion Hermitcraft”. Real “deep cuts,” there.

The video to me also felt very… Dismissive of Hermitcraft. I wouldn’t say disrespectful, but watching I really didn’t feel like a Hermitcraft fan wrote it. Constantly comparing it to DSMP, saying s8 might be more lore heavy because they were copying the “smash hit” DSMP, (and not. Y’know. Third Life’s success or anything) talking about how they don’t script their lore and it’s reset every season, which… which while often the case. You’re Literally talking about EX lore across 5 different seasons. ConCorp/ConVex, Poultryman, Stargazer leading into s8, and Area 77 being a continuation of the nHo plotline are all very important plotlines that continue throughout different seasons, and this is just off the top of my head, only being a fan for 2 years and 3 seasons. Whoever wrote MatPat saying he never needed to do a theory on HC because it's just “casual fun” has not watched a season 5 Bdubs video. While he said there wasn’t anything wrong with HC’s storytelling, it still really doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone who’s been a fan of Hermitcraft for 10 years would write. There’s other signs like calling Pungence a ‘character’ (at first I thought he meant this in the DSMP way where the characters and ccs are more separate, but he doesn’t refer to any other hermit this way), which would only make sense if you were just going off my post and assumed he was a character the same way Jeff was, not for someone who’s been watching him since 2011.

I want to state also that MatPat is seemingly only using Tom’s word as gospel here. While I’m sure they looked into the situation, Tom, whether he plagiarized it or not is not an unbiased source, and there has been not a single person reaching out to me to try to talk or hear my evidence. If MatPat just consults his own workers and goes “alright, they said they didn’t copy it so that’s that.”, that’s not objective proof of anything. Personal accounts are not evidence, and I have a lot of evidence that I think contradicts what they are stating. By the fact they don’t even write my name in the post, just say “a tumblr user”, I really don’t think that this is an unbiased look at the situation, it really feels like they’re just trying to bury my name and reassure their horde of fans that they can do no wrong.

So now let’s go over the 3 only original points I could find in the video, and how they show a complete misunderstanding of the sources. The most obvious is when they say “It also allowed Jeff to form alliances with certain hermits, notably the hermits who weren’t part of the original assault against him in CarnEvils 1 and 2. These hermits, Welsknight, iJevin, and VintageBeef have all been influenced by Evil X throughout season 8, making them susceptible to his demands.” Now, no hermits fight in CE1, but in CE2 the hermits who led the ‘original assault against him’ were Pooka, Xisuma, Generik, Pungence, and Biffa. Out of these, X is the only one who’s still an active hermit. Meaning the point ‘Jeff is going after everyone who didn’t attack him in CE2’ is worthless, because that applies to every single hermit in season 8, except X, who he is… also manipulating.

The other way you could take this is that he misspoke (or forgot nobody fought in CE1, so was thinking of the two battles of CE2+CE3) and meant ‘Hermits who didn’t attack him in Any of the CarnEvils’, which is… proven wrong by both CE3, where they are there fighting him (and you can see in a shot he shows in the video), and the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet literally says “Fought Jeff _ times” next to every single person's name, this REALLY should not be a hard thing to factcheck. You can see iJevin’s slot saying he fought Jeff one time in the video itself, when MatPat is showing off what his slot says.

(iJevin, 4 down from MatPat)

Another note about that spreadsheet- There is a video, public on Pooka’s channel that is a video version of the spreadsheet. I didn’t mention it in my post, but if someone was a Pooka fan for a long time there’s no reason they shouldn’t know about it, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t use it in the video, as it makes for much nicer visuals then just reading off the spreadsheet. It is one of the first things that comes up when you search “Pixelated Heart th3pooka”, along with the other ‘deleted scenes’ which both me and GT didn’t talk about.

It is also mentioned (and presumably, used to be linked to directly) at the end of CE3.

The second point is claiming that Jeff is doing this for either 1. Revenge against Xisuma for scarring his eye in CE3, or 2. Trying to get more gold artifacts to power himself up. Firstly, Jeff has been targeting c!Pooka for FAR longer than he targeted X or even Hermitcraft, and saying he’s targeting X now because he scarred his eye doesn’t make sense when he attacked them before CE3 (both in the CarnEvils, and by using EX to attack HC in 350, 450 and 500.)

The second shows a large misunderstanding of how Jeff’s imprisonment and relation to the gold items worked. He needed them to free him from Dionysus’s curse and unleash his full power, and that already happened in CE2. As of Pungence stabbing him in CE2, he is no longer Dionysus’s minion. In fact his name from this point on is “Jeff the Nightmare” (as you can see in CE3’s description, where Tom claims he got the spreadsheet). At the end of CE2 he’s imprisoned in The Dreaming, and then at the end of Pixelated Heart he was defeated with the redstone Power of Love (not necessarily romantic love, just your bonds with people and remembering and drawing strength from them). Judging by Evil’s Fault, he was banished from interacting with the physical world again and only can exist in people's (notably EX’s) dreams and nightmares. While he is weakened again and can’t interact with the physical world, he is not a minion or under Dionysus’s control. In the credits, he’s listed as “Jeff the Nightmare”, and there is no sign he’s doing this to get any ‘Midas artifacts’. He doesn’t become powerful by eating gold items like powerups, he gains power by weakening people’s (notably EX’s) bonds with others and showing them their own memories to make themselves spiral into hate, anger, and giving up. Jeff doesn’t mind control people, he doesn't just mind control EX to Be Evil, he convinces them using their own memories that they’ll never be able to do anything but hurt the hermits, they’re an idiot, they’re useless, and that the hermits will just keep banning them over and over again because they can’t even be Evil right. Jeff doesn’t mind control you, he makes you convinced of what he wants you to be convinced of Yourself, by showing you evidence. And EX was so lonely, so spiteful and angry and jealous of the server that they didn’t have any redstone bonds at first for Jeff to have to break, letting him use EX as a vessel to destroy Hermitcraft before Xisuma banished Jeff from EX’s mind in 666 using the power of their redstone bond. Now, in the 2 year break between 800 and 1000, Jeff was able to slip back into EX’s mind (because Xisuma (who EX DOES still care about (“your precious Xisumavoid”) doesn’t trust or forgive them (and probably never did) and Worm Man has been missing for years). Jeff is gaining power in s8 because EX is isolating and controlling the hermits (notably X) to weaken their redstone bonds with each other, enough so that Jeff can get into their heads, convince them of how much all their friends hate them, and cause them to give up and be puppets for him just like EX is. In short, gold artifacts have Nothing to do with Jeff’s current plan.

That leads into the final point made, one that I… I legitimately cannot fathom how somebody who watched Evil’s Fault could claim it so confidently. It reads like a bad telephoning of the points of my post and my post only, without understanding any of Jeff or EX’s lore.

MatPat says “His (Jeff’s) return would actually explain why Evil X has become obsessed with money- Evil X is infected by the Midas Curse. And wherever that curse is, Jeff is along for the ride, waiting.”. Later on again he says “In true mythological fashion, Jeff needs items cursed by Dionysus in order to restore his full powers. That’s why he tends to linger around whenever the curse of Midas crops up.” This… Seems to imply that MatPat and Tom are saying that EX got the Midas Curse (??How? If not by Jeff??) in s8 (since that’s when EX started caring about money), and Jeff is only here and controlling EX now because he follows where the Midas Curse goes. At no point do they say that Jeff is the one who gave EX the Midas Curse, like I proposed in my theory, they say that EX got it, (after 800, before s8), and THEN Jeff has been lurking in their mind and around Hermitcraft in s8. This goes against pretty much every single thing in Evil’s Fault, the video that shows us the most about EX and Jeff’s relationship to each other for the past 6 years. EX has been EXPLICITLY working for Jeff (and under Jeff’s control) since at LEAST 450, and probably since 350. While EX feeling jealous and spiteful and wanting to destroy Xisuma were probably their own feelings that Jeff just took advantage of and pushed further into destruction, (and Jeff is probably where EX’s powers came from, since they didn't have them in s5 and s6, but do again now), every single thing that happened in all of EX’s episodes is because Jeff was controlling them and pushing them further into their own self hate and lashing out. To say “Jeff only just started being in EX’s mind in s8, since they got the Midas Curse” goes against everything seen in Evil’s Fault, and I can’t understand how it could be said by somebody who had watched Evil’s Fault at all, or even Xisuma’s episode 666.

In short, there are only 3 original points made in the entire video, and they all show an INCREDIBLE lack of comprehension of Pooka and X’s work, that makes me think they didn’t even watch the videos themselves, let alone come up with the rest of the theory independently.

Before I conclude, I want to state some other smaller nitpicks that just show the quality of this video is certainly not up to the standard MatPat claims they put into their videos. An old and incorrect version of Pooka’s skin is used, lacking pants, they call HC “the oldest minecraft smp on YouTube” (not "oldest active") when there have been many before like Mindcrack, says the theory has “it’s roots in the series’s origin from over 10 years ago” when Pungence’s vid was made in 2013, and uses exclusively he/him for Evil X. I don’t want to say that point is the biggest thing in the world since I fear redditors are gonna zero in on just me saying this, but Xisuma has used singular they/them for Evil X the past year, along with he/him. (x) (x) He’s never made a statement that they’re canonically NB or anything and probably won’t, this might not even mean anything, but it’s notable that MatPat took everything from my post except the characters correct pronouns, when you look at Game Theory’s history of transphobia, nbphobia, (x) and misgendering canonically nb characters like Kris from Deltarune (they/them) or the vessels from Hollow Knight. (they/them + it/its). I also want to say that ending the video with a 2 minute Audible ad saying ‘if EX had listened to Audible, Jeff the Minion wouldn't be influencing them!!’ is… In really bad taste, when Evil’s Fault clearly says that Jeff is a metaphor for addiction and spiraling into self hate. Very classy, Matt.

There’s also a lot of weird ways that the video is formatted that… Honestly seem to me like it was just moved around to not look like it was copying my post. 1010, the scene where EX literally watches Evil’s Fault and goes ‘oh I remember Jeff the Minion!! Sometimes I feel like th3pooka is the only one who understands me’ is what I started my post with, and seems weird to not mention until 10 minutes in, using it as a ‘gotcha’. He says “In season 8, the mysterious Jeff has begun to reappear out of nowhere, and not in any sort of obvious way, either.", and then proceeds to show Jeff’s 1019 and 1021 appearances where it’s standing there in plain sight. He doesn’t mention 1010, Jeff’s first appearance in s8 and a Very Obvious one, EX literally saying his name, until 3 and a half minutes later. I can’t exactly prove they moved the points around to not look like plagiarism, but it just seems like a weird and confusing way to format the video.

Addressing the comments… Though I am not a big channel and can’t say I know the details of how comments work, there definitely seems to be proof that the comments are getting at least hidden from view, if not deleted. (x) (x) “micer2012” and “della” are nowhere to be seen when i ctrl+fed a bunch of recent comments, but “micer12” “Micer2012”, “micer2012’s” and “mincer2012” where there, meaning people were definitely talking about me, but the only comments I could find where the ones where people had misspelled my name, not setting off the filter. I also saw people putting slashes through their comments to not get deleted.

I commented this on the video before I finished watching it, when it had been out for about 15 minutes. It was deleted (I’ve posted other comments since then not using “micer2012”, that are still up). It had no link, and the fact that I posted it when the video had been up for around 15-20 minutes, and it was erased the second I refreshed the page, means that “micer2012” was blacklisted before people were even commenting en masse or commenting with links, likely as soon as the video was published.

I wish I could finish this by saying “Oh, I’ve always been a big fan of Game Theory, I can’t believe he would do this!” but the truth is, I’ve seen him as a clickbaiter and plagiarizer (both in art (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) and theories (x) (x) (x) (x, specifically taking from tumblr) for years at this point. I loved his videos in elementary and middle school, but as I saw more and more of the channel’s behaviour, I grew to strongly dislike him. I’ve tried to not let that cloud my analysis and instead just post the facts and evidence that is apparent from the video, but I hope you can excuse this autistic 17 year old for being a bit mad that MatPat stole my work, is profiting from it, and is denying it. I joked about him stealing my theories for months after making my EX analysis post, I put ‘Jeff is targeting MatPat’ as the biggest, most unbelievable thing in BIG letters on my iceberg meme, and I… I still haven’t really Processed that MatPat thought this autistic teen’s ramblings about his hyperfixation and special interest were good enough to steal.

I don’t mean this as a hate piece, although I am understandably angry. I hope you can see the evidence that I compiled in this response for what it is and make your own judgements, and I will be more than happy to debate and answer viewpoints questioning or opposing me. My tumblr, @micer2012 is the best way to contact me, though I’ll be checking the comments on reddit and twitter too. I’m sorry this post is so long too, but I wanted to be comprehensive and show the extent that the video and their response doesn’t add up.

Della, m/i/c/e/r/2/0/1/2.

Transcript to the GT video

Timeline of the GT situation

#hermitcraft #hc #mcyt #dsmp #matpat #game theory #micer2012 #evil xisuma #xisumavoid #jeff the minion #grian #minecraft #gt #discourse #mine #exiavojtmmc

2K notes · View notes