Of course Aubrey had heard of the Council before. I mean– who hadn’t? They didn’t necessarily rule the streets, or Night City’s underworld for that matter, but they sure as hell loved to rub their asses all over it at any given opportunity and never in his years of being a fixer himself had he felt the need to associate himself with any of them.
He understood why it was necessary, sure– the agreements they made and the city-wide gang activity they monitored and reported to one another were a vital part of ensuring business stability as well as their own survival– but he knew the biz well enough to not trust the feigned kindness and so-called sense of community they supposedly aimed for.
Everyone always had their own agenda. None of it was simply out of the kindness of their hearts, to ensure the safety of the innocent citizens of Night City– it would be naive of him to think so and by then he knew better than to let wishful thinking cloud his judgment.
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Why stick to an interpretation of a foil as homophobic, when the far more intriguing option of Gay Underling in love with his Sexy Brilliant Boss, acts out of jealousy and fear of losing him is Right There and far more relatable and narratively interesting?
The desire to suppress Ed/Izzy's romance, a relationship that is less wholesome/more complex/more toxic, has to do with the perfectionist burden we carry as queer ppl, to have our relationships be inherently more Evolved, emotionally mature, and come off more Healthy than straight ppl, even if we currently lack the tools to get there. This perfectionism isolates so many queer ppl who feel the need to perform happiness in relationships, and also makes ppl terrified to even try to find real happiness, in friendships and romance.
Stede and Ed, who's romance is idealized to the point of tossing all their mistakes onto Izzy, are actually canonically prime examples of how your own feelings of inadequacy can cause you to wreck your chance for happiness and give up your power of self determination. Even Stede, who works thru his inadequacy in episode two ("I am adequate"), still had remnants of his lack of self worth that were easily activated by Chauncey's speech and death.
Stede ran to a place he knew he couldn't be happy because being loved was scarier than returning to what he already knew. Izzy had nothing to do with that one. Those feelings of inadequacy coming to the surface again and again, even long after you thought you settled it- thats the foil! Thats the Big Bad. Being the villain in your own story is adulthood, babes!
Most of the time, the obstacle in the way of love is our own internal bullshit. Of course if you cannot accept this, due to naivety, perfectionism, a sense of inadequacy, you have to suppress Izzy's queerness and flatten him to the homophobic villain. Its too painful to permit yourself to relate to the flawed reject who may never be enough, the greatest foil to his own happiness who would rather be hated by the man he loves than lose him, and who may never find that effortless, soft love, a physical manifestation of everything you fear
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See, the thing about the Amy episode that makes Dean’s actions so reprehensible is not only the part where he doesn’t trust Sam and goes behind his back to kill Amy or even the hypocrisy of Dean ‘you can’t change what you are so you’re going to kill someone eventually’ Winchester sparing the kid right after stabbing his mom, it’s that Amy is very explicitly supposed to be a Sam parallel. There is no other way about it, from the they’re both freaks part of it to Dean dropping the line about ‘the other shoe’ right before he kills her, she is Sam, how Dean reacts to her is supposed to give us insight into how he feels about Sam. And Dean. kills her.
The not very subtle subtext being that Dean is ready to off Sam if he goes too far off the deep end? He’s aggressive and mistrustful of Sam at every turn in the episode, lays the feet of it all at Sam’s hallucinations maybe leading him astray, but end of the day, Sam’s crimes here are A) was tortured in Hell and B) is traumatized by that in a way that makes Dean’s life more difficult.
And it is hard to watch. To spend this whole episode with Sam being completely functional on his own, making a rational decision based on past experience and on all the information about Amy he has available, and for the episode to end with, ‘but yeah, if dean thinks sam goes too far, he’s probably gonna kill him. because sam can’t change or be fixed, so it’s for the good of everyone that he be put down.’
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I really hope that TSatS features Nico and Will having so many issues around being complicit in Octavian's death, and Nico in addition having so many issues around killing Bryce. On Octavian's end these are children complicit in a gruesome death; necessary or no, that sort of thing's going to stick with them! Especially since as far as we see they never tell anyone about it (Nico might have told Dionysus during their therapy sessions, but as far as I can remember that's not confirmed), which means the only people they can discuss the whole thing with is each other. ...Or I guess Michael Kahale—assuming he's still alive post-ToA, since that's not actually confirmed—but I feel like the understanding between him and them is probably that they Do Not Acknowledge It, assuming they ever see each other at all. Anyway. I'm sure being able to share the weight of what they were part of between the two of them would help, but... well, sharing the burden of being a teenager traumatized by your part in a brutal death with another teenager traumatized by their part in said brutal death is only going to do so much. And I feel like more specifically the fact that Will is a healer would make the whole situation so much worse for him; knowingly standing by and letting someone die knowing he could easily save them would be hard for any hero, but for someone who's dedicated to healing people? Yeesh.
And of course on top of that... Bryce's death is a really cool and dramatic scene that goes way harder than I'd expect a children's book to go, but it's also absolutely horrific. Partially because Nico turns him into a ghost with zero sign of hesitation and that is so much, but I feel like for Nico partially because he doesn't remember it. Like, the fact that he has no memory of killing Bryce gets glossed over in BoO, but he turned a guy into a ghost with no hesitation or mercy and he doesn't remember. He was really angry at Bryce for threatening Reyna, and the next thing he knew the guy was dead (and he'd been knocked out for three days). He has no idea how he did it or even what he was thinking at the time! He was either out of control of his own actions or he wanted to kill Bryce, and he has no way of finding out which. That would be a terrifying thought: either he's a willing murderer (while him killing Bryce was to save Reyna and Hedge and I fully agree with it, it was absolutely murder in a way Octavian's death isn't, Bryce was completely powerless and begging for mercy by the end there) or his powers can hijack his body and push him into doing things that he would never do of his own free will, and he'll probably never know which. Which does beg the question of if anything could set him off like that again, which I feel like is something that would weigh on Nico. I'd love to see him admit that he's actually really scared that something will push him over the edge again and either he'll lose control of his powers and kill someone else or (possibly worse) discover that he was in control when he killed Bryce and did it because he wanted to. Now, I don't think Nico could turn someone into a ghost just like that, my theory is that it was only possible in Bryce's case because Bryce was threatening someone he loved using a closely held secret (which Nico understandably took rather personally) and, more importantly, he was halfway faded out of the living world already; I doubt he could've done it if he hadn't been mostly full of darkness already or if he hadn't been overwhelmed with protective fury at the threat to his dear friend. But whether or not Nico knows that is unclear; I can see him being terrified at the very thought that it's possible that he could snap and kill someone again.
Basically given how TSatS seems like it's going to be largely about All The Trauma, it would feel like a huge failure on Rick's part to not go into how being responsible for Octavian's death absolutely would've fucked Will and Nico up, and also how directly killing Bryce absolutely would've fucked Nico up. If I'm remembering right, setting aside Luke's death—Percy and Annabeth supplied the weapon he stabbed himself with, but I wouldn't call them complicit in it the way Will, Nico and Michael are complicit in Octavian's death since it was entirely Luke's decision in the end—Will and Nico (and Michael Kahale but he's not important currently assuming he's even still alive) are the only protagonists knowingly and willingly complicit in another demigod's death, and Nico is the only protagonist to actively kill another demigod! I can accept them not talking about it in ToA, since "Hey, we're super fucked up from the deaths we caused/played a part in and we don't know what to do about that because we're kind of sort of murderers before the age of eighteen and that's really not the sort of thing you just tell people" isn't something to drop on Will's suddenly-sixteen-and-mortal godly father without warning during a serious crisis situation and I can't see anyone they might have told about it off-page spilling the beans without permission either and when it happened Apollo was already in deep shit and so probably not paying a lot of attention to what his kid was doing, so our POV character wouldn't know about it and wouldn't find out (I know he's aware that Octavian's dead, but unless I'm forgetting something—which is. entirely possible, I should reread ToA—he doesn't know the part Will and Nico played in it). But if it doesn't come up at all in the book told entirely from their perspectives, I'm... honestly gonna be pretty pissed!
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tbh i don’t even think miguel’s breakdown rant about miles’ existence as “anomaly” spiderman causing the death of 1610 peter is even about peter, or even quite abt miles. it’s about the idea that somehow 1610 peter could’ve shut down the collider if it weren’t for miles, even though miles’ presence didn’t actually affect peter’s death in any way. it’s about the idea that peter could’ve prevented a reality - that is, anomalies getting slingshotted throughout the multiverse - that miguel feels like he’s buckling under the emotional burden of (”And all this time, I have been the only one holding it all together!”). But even that’s not quite it, it’s about the fact that Miguel has been sitting on the resentment of feeling like he’s utterly alone in this burden, when in reality he’s not. When he created a structure designed to help share that burden between people who should understand it the most. But he won’t - can’t - ask for help bearing the emotional burden because it’s not even quite about the anomalies, it’s about Gabriella. But you deserve to suffer for it, you deserve to hurt. You dwell and grieve her and a mistake you won’t forgive youself for over and over again, all while hiding away and refusing to confide in the people who care about you how badly you’re spiraling, all while a part of you resents them for not knowing, even as they couldn’t know.
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