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scimitar-and-longsword · 15 days

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I love your headcanons. What's your favorite one about Nicky ? And/or your favorite character trait of him?

Oh my goodness, thank you!

Nicky Nicky Nicky 💕💕💕

My FAVORITE??? That's a tall order cause there are so many things I love about him. Luca did such a stellar job of taking this character who doesn't have as much screentime as some of the other characters and bringing him to life in the most subtle ways. (I have an entire meta about subtle face acting from him and Marwan lol which side note, is flagged for sexual content, and I was sitting here reading it like "what why?? This is just about facial expressions?" And then I got halfway through and went "oop- that'll do it 😅")

I wrote a meta about this back in the old days, but I think about it every time I rewatch the movie so I'm saying it again: I love that Nicky is fiercely physical with his love.

We certainly get to see Joe be more vocal about is love, (and it's a violent movie they all are physical lol) but every bit of Nicky's physicality and fight chreo is about protecting people.

He is constantly protecting those around him with his body (and to be fair, they all do this at some point. Perks of being immortal is that you can use your body as a shield) but Nicky just KEEPS doing it.

There's a subtle moment after Joe gets stabbed by Merrick where TO ME it looks like he's trying to get between Joe and Merrick. The guy holding back Nicky is like GRIPPING his shoulder.

Nicky is constantly going from the front of the group to the rear and back again. Like he needs to be the first line of defense against wherever the most unknowns are.

He does it when they first exit the lab they were being held in. He's second out of the door, following Nile's lead, but then immediately covers the rear (after executing a completely unnecessary slide move that you can only see in behind the scenes footage and always makes me laugh.) to then turn around and cover everyone else as they exit.

Then again when he takes the bullet for Andy, he's at the rear of the group with Joe, takes the bullet, and then runs through the ENTIRE group, while healing from said bullet, past the door they are going to go into (and presumably check that it's clear) to cover the other end of the hall. And look at that he's at the rear of the group again... Over the course of not even half a minute. Ping pong ball Nicky over here.

When Joe and Nicky are fighting Keane after the explosion Nicky is fucking reckless with how he fights, and mostly cause Joe is kind of getting his ass kicked. 😅 He throws himself onto Keane not once but twice! Both times when Joe is about to get absolutely bodied.

In a similar fashion, Nicky often acts like a battering ram, taking people down for Joe to take out just after him. (If you go back up to that behind the scenes gif of Nicky sliding you can see he does this there too. Shoots a guy in the knee who Joe then shoots in the head.)

Idk if this was at all coherent because I'm writing this on my phone while watching a Tinkerbell movie with my daughter 😂 so I'm sure I'm missing so many more examples of it. But Nicky is often quiet with his words, but he is not quite with his actions and I love that about him!!

#my stuff #my gifs #my metas #ask #anon #the old guard #nicky #the old guard meta #answer

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avelera · 2 years

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OFMD has completely ruined me for Hollywood Hot people in tv and film. I’m just so tired of it. I’m tired of everyone having “perfect” hair and “perfect” abs and fuckin’ “perfect” complexions without freckles or or unique characteristics of any kind because they need to fit some idealized fucked up sanded down boring ass producer’s vision of what “attractive” means to the largest possible audience and everyone’s gotta be “cool” but in that YA hero way where no one is cool because they’re not actually a real person they’re all just flashy plastic plot devices without rough edges or uncomfortable realism of any kind

I want to see people with more than zero percent body fat (Olu, Wee John, hell, Stede and Ed too and they’re the romantic leads!), men who are short (Izzy) and women who are tall and commanding (Spanish Jackie), or people with freckles and scars and not perfect teeth, people who have lisps that aren’t just being mocked for it (Black Pete), or who have a disability and it isn’t a huge misery porn plot device, and people who are “traditionally” hot (Jim) dressing for comfort and realism instead of to show off their assets for the titillation of the audience.

And I don’t mean this in a puritanical way like that this means no one should ever be sexualized. I also want to see normal looking people fuck and go shirtless and swim naked in the ocean and have partners who look at them like they’re the hottest person on earth because they are, who are shown to the audience as hot too, not because they look like a model but because even people who aren’t models are hot and you don’t need to starve and dehydrate people to death to make them hot, quite the opposite, if you’re not a focus group-driven ghoul.

So thanks, OFMD, you’ve officially set my standards way too high for just about everything.

#weirdly the Old Guard photos set this off because they DO look normal even though they’re all hot people #they’re dressed normal not just to Be Sexy and I realized I have a Type and OFMD made me realize it #our flag means death #ofmd meta

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astrabear · 5 months

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a lot of fans didn't like the second season of Good Omens and some of them came up with unhinged fan theories about it

a lot of fans didn't like the second season of Our Flag Means Death and some of them came up with spectacularly unhinged fan theories about it

fandom history johnlock blah blah blah

the Old Guard sequel will, supposedly, be released at some point, and early signs are not great

And so I ask you:

If the second Old Guard movie ends up sucking, or just being a huge fucking letdown, will we let it slide, or will we take our place among the lunatic fandoms of legend? Surely TOG fans are creative enough, and batshit enough, to argue about something more outlandish than racism and misogyny.

It's not really something we can plan in advance, because it will all depend on the specific details of how the movie disappoints us. But we can at least start considering it. Start telling yourself now: Greg Rucka is a mad genius playing 5-dimesional chess. Anything that seems out of character or not in keeping with the themes you liked from the first movie is actually a clever stratagem in support of your favorite headcanon. The second movie is only a setup for the third movie anyway. It all makes sense, as evidenced by the fact that it requires an essay of at least 10,000 words to explain it.

Start working those conspiracy muscles now! Strengthen your legs so you can leap to the wildest possible conclusions! We can do this. I believe in us.

#the old guard #2o2g #the old guard 2 #fandom #fandom meta

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goldheartedsky · 5 months

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Another day, another round of "Booker should've never been mad at Nicky and Joe amidst his grief!" bullshit that once again centers all this shit on Nicky and Joe when it's not about them.

Grief is a monster. It digs its claws in you in ways that leave unimaginable scars. And losing a child is a *far* different monster than losing family or losing friends. I recently lost my dad and, while the grief was overwhelming, the thought of losing my son is earth shattering. Losing a child upsets the natural order of things and, if you listen to anyone who has lost a child talk about it, it's a pain that never heals. Not after five years. Not after ten years. Not after twenty or thirty.

And Booker had to do it not once, but three times.

And Jean-Pierre, his youngest and last son, dies at 42 years old. The same age Booker was when he suffered his first death. He dies of cancer in a time where there is no treatment, no way to ease his pain. Jean-Pierre dies a horrible, slow death and Booker has to watch it, knowing that his son hates him with every fiber of his body. There is no reconciliation, no forgiveness, no closure.

And that wound inside his soul bleeds. And bleeds. And bleeds. Because there is no way to heal. Grief ebbs as time passes and you're able to try and move on with your life, but when time has stopped at a stand-still for Booker? There is no way to move on.

We can see the complete and utter devastation on Andy's face when Quỳnh is simply mentioned, and this is 300 years after losing her. The pain that Booker is carrying around from the loss of his sons, after a little more of half that time? Unimaginable.

Joe and Nicky got off light. And it's not about them. Because, as Booker correctly pointed out, they had each other.

All he had was his grief.

#the old guard #tog meta #sebastien le livre #I'm so tired of people who do not have kids brushing off Booker's grief and I'm not gonna shut up about it #y'all are WRONG and I will continue saying it until y'all get it through your heads.

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max-nolastname · 1 year

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when the old guard was like “heres a group of functionally immortal warriors, hundreds, thousands of years old” and then it was like “btw, they can die anytime, still! they will always bounce back until one day, seemingly at random, they dont” and then it was like “what if you came into your immortal life alongside another? they are your partner in every way you dont know immortal life without them but you understand that one day you might just have go on for another thousand years without them” and then it was like “what if an immortal was imprisoned in an environment where they die every minute again and again for hundreds of years with no relief” and then it was like “what if an immortal had severe depression”

#the old guard #2old2guard #tog #i watched tog 7 times in one month #u guys are extremely lucky i didnt start up this tumblr during that time period #the incoherent meta posts i would have been chugging out daily would have been insane #i have been rattling andy quynh joe nicky booker nile in my silly little head for over a year #theyre... they are a lot #nile came into the scene and was like wow you guys are a lot #also some of the fanfics in this fandom are insane bonkers #like wow you really broke down the human condition in a 100k+ fanfic about a youngold depressed french man opening a bakery

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nevermindirah · 3 months

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Who talks to who, for how long and about what, in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince Bythewood?

I got curious and so I watched the movie taking a lot of timestamp notes. way back three and a half years ago now, I watched this movie for the first time bc I like gritty action movies, and it's a really good one of those. I'm still obsessed with it all this time later because it's full to the brim with well-drawn characters who have compelling relationships with each other, and boy howdy does the data show it.

I was especially curious about who spends how much time alone together on screen, so I coded all the scenes with that in mind, and I found some really interesting patterns in the breakdown of scenes where just two characters talk, where one character is the sole focus, and when three characters talk.

the winners of course are Nile and Andy, our dual protagonists, who spend 10% of the movie's total runtime alone together. they also spend a lot of time with our dual friendly antagonists, Booker and Copley. scenes featuring combinations of just these four characters make up 40% of the total runtime.

Joe and Nicky show up less in this analysis because they're side characters who mostly appear in group scenes, but wow are they richly drawn side characters. they're key players in all but two scenes where four or more named characters talk.

read on for many numbers and much analysis of what it all means!

Andy Nile 0:12:20 Nile Booker 0:06:00 Andy Booker Copley 0:05:22 Andy Booker 0:05:01 Andy Nile Booker 0:04:56 Nile Copley 0:04:18 Nile alone 0:04:07 Andy alone 0:03:31

Andy Celeste 0:02:49 Merrick Copley 0:02:41 Joe Nicky 0:02:24 Nile Dizzy Jay 0:01:33 Andy Quynh 0:01:31 Andy Nile Merrick 0:00:52 Booker alone 0:00:32 Copley alone 0:00:28 Nicky Kozak 0:00:27 Booker Quynh 0:00:21 Copley Keane 0:00:09

(the spreadsheet, if anyone's interested in digging deeper with me)

of the 12 min that our main characters are alone together on screen, almost fully half is super duper antagonistic:

4:26 is the kidnapping sequence

1:29 is their conversation outside after Nile's nightmare featuring the iconic "me and those three men in there will keep you safe" "like Quynh?"

and 7 seconds is Nile glaring daggers at Andy after walking over all those bodies in the church

the other half breaks down like this:

2:14 is them connecting over their mortal families — where Andy makes Nile give her phone back at the end

1:45 is Nile telling Andy she's not doing this, that she's going back to her family — Andy pushes with "we'd do the same for you" but then relents and gives Nile the car

50 seconds of them gearing up for the last segment of the fight — Nile tries to get Andy to wear a bulletproof vest, she jokes around with "is this gonna be like the last signal?" — it's operations-focused but there's a real warmth between them by this point in the movie (this scene starts at 1:41:45, just 13 min before the credits roll)

and 1:29 of Andy looking at Nile like she hung the moon (which, extremely valid and relatable!) and Nile saying that the time Andy's got left "you're gonna spend it with us"

Nile has an uninterrupted 4:18 sequence with Copley that speed runs the same general shape of her arc with Andy, hella antagonistic to teamwork, though the latter here is more of a professional camaraderie than the real warmth we see Nile develop for Andy.

in this context Nile's arc with Booker is remarkably different. their first scene alone together is 1:11 in total, intercut with Andy killing mercs elsewhere in the church, and it's sort of their only scene with friction between them. Booker keeps telling Nile to wait for the signal without explaining what that means, annoyingly continuing Andy's grand tradition of not fucking answering Nile's reasonable questions, ugh. though another way of framing this is of course that he's too busy packing her a change of clothes while showing off his tits for her. as I noted in a previous meta, the end of this sequence is the one time Booker lies to Nile (claiming he doesn't know who the mercs are when he has at least a basic idea, though we don't know for sure whether Copley involved him in this specific plan).

after this Nile and Booker have two more scenes alone together and they're both extended conversations: 3:14 for their conversation alone in the cave after Andy leaves, and 1:18 when Nile joins Booker on the balcony outside the bar. both of these conversations are remarkably intimate for how little these characters have interacted beforehand. remember, 6:02 total of Nile and Andy alone together with heavy animosity (Andy shot Nile in the head ffs!) before things between them started to warm up. granted, the conversation where they first start to warm to each other is right after Nile's cave scene with Booker and Andy's scene with Celeste, so an argument could be made that this was the point in the movie where Nile started to feel ready to open up to the other immortals generally and her first one-on-one conversation once she got there was with Booker before Andy. I'm not saying you have to ship them just because they get so close so quick, but the numbers sure do make it clear that us BoNers aren't making this shit up out of nowhere.

Nile and Booker's heart-to-heart in the mine is the third-longest one-on-one conversation in the whole movie — third after Andy kidnapping Nile and Nile's sequence with Copley, which are both heavy on action and exposition and antagonism, making this the longest intimate conversation in the movie. their other heart-to-heart, 1:18 on the balcony outside the pub, is on par with Joe and Nicky's 1:17 in the van.

there's also a 51 sec sequence during the Merrick tower fight where it intercuts pretty much equally between three subsets of the action: Andy going off on her own with an axe, Joe waiting for Nicky to wake up after that head shot, and Nile and Booker being drift compatible when Nile's gun jams. we're not making this shit up out of nowhere.

ok back to our blorbos in chief. we get 4:07 of Nile as the sole focus, and 3:31 of the same for Andy.

the sequence of Nile going through hell on base just because she fucking lived (laser eyes @ her squad forever) lasts 1:14 and includes a few lines from minor characters. we get 15 sec of her first dreaming of the others and waking up unmoored, then a 20 sec reprise with her nightmare of the first person she killed. the sequence of her driving away from Copley's then figuring out what the empty gun clip means is 48 sec. and then, one of the things that stood out to me the most in really digging into these numbers: just how frequently and for how long the camera lingers on Nile's face in this movie.

extended closeups of Nile with no dialogue and no montage:

10 seconds staring at the car she crushed, killing Merrick in the process but somehow not herself

36 seconds in the elevator

and a whopping 44 seconds of listening to Frank Ocean

that's fully 1 minute and thirty seconds of this movie's 2 hr 5 min credits-included runtime devoted exclusively to long takes of Nile Freeman's face.

Andy's sole-focus time is a little less tidy, because the majority of it isn't precisely focused on her like with Nile. we get 15 sec of her staring at her hand, realizing her immortality is gone. I could have coded all the pieces of the movie more granularly to find all the moments where we get Andy reaction shots, but I also could've done that with all of them and I'm but one humble spreadsheet lover, and it's more interesting to me that Gina primarily uses other kinds of film language to put us into Andy's perspective.

1:35 of her cutting through all those mercs in the church — other people are active in this scene, but they're not shown as people, and the horror of that is exactly the point, for the viewer, for Nile, and for Andy herself

41 sec of her voiceover at the opening of the movie, over clips of the kill floor scene

1 min of her moodily sitting in the car after the pharmacy and flashing back to Lykon's death

the Andy/Quynh flashback sequence that's a subset of Nicky and Joe narrating to Nile is 1:31, so counting that alongside this flashback here brings us to a total of 2:31 of Andy/Quynh(/Lykon) alone together screen time. almost precisely equal to Joe and Nicky's total 2:24 alone together.

further underlining Booker and Copley as our tritagonists, we get one scene of on-screen alone time for each of them: 32 seconds of Booker being drunk six months later and 28 seconds of Copley reacting to the kill floor footage. it's easy to focus on the Andy in a Union uniform element of this Copley scene, but a photo of his late wife is visible in almost every frame. I went back and double checked — only 3 sec of those 28 don't contain that photo of his wife displayed proudly between the kill floor footage and the Civil War photo, 3 sec of Copley in closeup. now that's what I call environmental storytelling.

we get almost exactly 5 min each with the sets Andy + Booker + Copley, Andy + Booker, and Andy + Nile + Booker. ABC and ANB conversations tend toward driving the plot and fleshing out detail about immortality, though a decent chunk of ANB in the "is this a Rodin?" part of the cave scene is Nile and Booker talking about following the money (their first moment of drift compatibility!) while Andy angsts nearby, and a decent chunk of ABC at Copley's place is Andy and Booker's heartbreaking "this is what you wanted" "not like this" exchange while Copley awkwardly hovers. just under half of Andy and Booker's 5:01 on screen alone together is about his betrayal, 2:13 across three scenes. the other half breaks out pretty evenly between them talking about Nile, making battle plans, and just being pals.

has any mid-budget gritty action movie ever done it better? even the infodumps are full of character and relationship details.

I also find it noteworthy that Booker and Copley are never alone together, and they never directly acknowledge anything about their relationship. we know from what they tell other characters that they've been in contact before the events of the movie, probably for some time in some detail. we know they worked together to ultimately enable the cartoon-villain antagonists to do their villainy. Copley is direct about how these results were absolutely not what he intended, and we can infer from Booker's behavior that he wasn't aiming for decades of medical torture either. but we get no information about how they feel about each other. now that I'm looking at it with this frame, it seems like the absence of information is itself a kind of telling — Booker and Copley maybe purposefully avoiding 1:1 contact, purposefully treating each other as mere acquaintances when others are around, because to do otherwise would be to look their guilt in the eye. oh shit I think I might have given myself a whole new meta idea on this tangent here: Copley and Booker as mirrors for each other.

disclaimer as we're nearing the end that there's inevitably going to be bias and error in something like this. I measured by seconds not milliseconds and I wasn't always precise about where I paused to note timestamps at scene changes. sometimes I included what ended up amounting to several seconds of establishing shots and sometimes I didn't. and there are a bunch of edge cases where there's more than one way to count who was an active part of which scenes, like for example:

I separated out Andy and Booker's opening motorcycle stalking and Don Quijote chat from the later part of what was probably just one scene in the script, where Booker talks to the hotel clerk while Andy interacts with tourists nearby

I included all as one Nile + Dizzy + Jay scene the sequence where Dizzy and Jay talk to each other about Nile before they go into the med tent and act shitty to her face about how Nile's still alive

I counted as Copley + Merrick the conversation in the car where Keane and Kozak are present and react on camera but don't have lines per se

similarly I counted as Andy + Booker the "she wants to talk to her family" exchange after Nile and Nicky leave the dinner table; Joe's still sitting there next to them but he doesn't say anything and the camera doesn't focus on him

I didn't try to delete the time where Andrei said/did stuff from the 4:26 Andy kidnaps Nile sequence but I did remove a Keane cut-away from a later Andy + Nile scene

so much has already been lovingly written about how well Joe and Nicky spend their short on-screen alone time and rightly so. I don't have anything new to add there so I'll take a moment instead to shout out to the 27 sec of Nicky telling Kozak to go fuck herself, and also the iconic Joe headbutting Merrick. fuck, this movie is so so good. every moment is a delight.

#the old guard #tog meta #tog #mine

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artsy-waffle19 · 1 month

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One thing I love so much about "The old guard" is that in comparison to other action movies I've seen so far, there's characters that have actual personalities that are vital to the plot and why the characters are doing what they're doing.

major "The old guard" spoilers if you haven't watched it yet pls do. It's on Netflix n a second part is supposed to come out soon (it's already made but there's no release date yet but stiiill)

Idk if anyone noticed that yet and correct me if I'm wrong but I noticed that n needed to share because especially for the older group of immortals it pecomes so clear why they keep going (taking Nile out here because the entire movie is just about her, getting used to it and she isn't in the same situation as the others yet).

But Andy is doing everything she's doing because she feels responsible. Her entire struggle in the beginning is, that she feels like her work isn't doing any good. She wants to stop because the "projects" she works on don't seem to work out so obviously she's discoiraged but as soon as anyone in the group is in danger she immediately jumps to being the leader of the group again ("I will get them back whatever it takes" , "I always go first").

Nicky is the optimistic one of the group and believes that everything happens for a reason, which he keeps reminding everyone of as encouragement. He keeps doing what he's doing as long as he has faith that there is a reason, even if he doesn't know it. I think for him it's the most obvious because it's part of most of his dialogues with the rest of the group "everything happens for a reason boss", "it's like it was meant to be [....] like fate", and it also shows in a lot of his other scenes even if he doesn't outright say it (like the scene in the lab when he beings up going to Malta even though they're captured right now, once again showing how he's optimistic and believes that things will eventually work out).

Joe does everything he does for the principle. This is shown in smaller ways but i really like how they kept subtly putting it into his actions. Throughout the movie he mainly seems chronically pissed off, however we gotta consider that the movie shows a time frame where people are mainly doing things that harm him or the people he cares about in some way, which he obviously deems as wrong so getting back at them is just all about the principle. There's no arguing or reasoning with him because he is set in what he believes in and will fight for justice even about the little things. We can especially see that later in the movie in the final fight in the lab. This shows especially in the line "you shot Nicky...you shouldn't have done that" followed by him, killing the guy he just spoke to, like- Nicky is alive and well, the guy's immortal there was never even a slight risk of him dying but it's the principle. Also that he wants to leave Booker in the lab for betraying them, his last line in the movie of "she's not asking", which basically translates to 'you fucked up so now you owe us, deal with it' or just the entirety of the van scene. Obviously the whole "what is he? your boyfriend?" was just supposed to be some homophobic joke but, once again he asked so he's getting an answer. It's just the principle.

And Booker tries to do all he does for the people he loves, yet all the people he loved are dead and as we can see in his dialogue with Joe ("You and Nicky always had each other.......") and the first scene of all of them interacting, in which he doesn't interact with the group much or hug any of them, plus the fact that he's the youngest out of all of them, he doesn't seem to see himself as part of the group. He can't really find a reason for anything he's doing like the others do because while Andy will always feel responsible for the people around her, Nicky will most likely never lose his faith and Joe will always find something to be pissed off about, Bookers children are dead and any people he gets attached to will eventually die, which therefore disqualifies them as a safe and constant source of motivation. And the fact that he is aware of that but cannot find another reason to live for makes all of his actions so much more understandable and also really heartbreaking. To him his immortality isn't about responsibility, reason or justice it's just about hurting "just because we keep living, doesn't mean we stop hurting". So obviously he'd want to stop it.

I just rewatched it and it's so nice to see the dialogue and the character dynamics and really get the characters actions, which makes the plot like 10 times better. Generally I just really love this movie and I need Netflix to release the second one NOW because that cliffhanger was atrocious.

#please tell me this fandom isn't dead yet #i know it's been years but i believe in us #this is a movie about immortals the fandom cannot die after 3 yrs #the old guard netflix #the old guard #the old guard andy #the old guard nicky #the old guard joe #the old guard booker #meta #the old guard meta #long post

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tommy-evan · 11 months

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you know how nicky when to uni right? like we have his id?

i love the idea that during downtime, joe and nicky would do random things. not just wholesome, adorably romantic cute things like settle in one place long enough, be that couple until they can't be that couple, and they become a legend of the town but like...

while nicky is going off to school joe gets like, a real estate license

just because he could

like he went to uni already, and he gets why nicky likes to go every couple of years, but he did that in first life, before his first death and while he enjoyed it, he wants to do other things

so real estate license it is

and then he just...starts flipping houses, afterwards

at some point he becomes one of those celeb ones because have you seen him? also have you heard him? he can sell a house to a potato

but yeah, joe doing random mundane things and getting accreditation, and being so naturally good at it he makes bank and then it just becomes his thing, whether he wanted it to be or not

like, nile's all, how did you even get this safe house?

oh, yusuf owns it, he owns delta safehouse up to lima safe house

and nile's like, damn, that's why he's so strict with turning off the lights

(you can blame @nilefreemans for this)

#the old guard #tog #tog meta #yusuf al kaysani #joe the old guard #usernati #L writes things

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mirrorofliterature · 5 months

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don't get me started on the booker apologists who think that his being "queer" (because Greg Rucka said he's essentially bi and on the ace spectrum in a private discord chat, lol) absolves him of having a self-centered, amatonormative world-view.

the very fact that he thinks nicky and joe's queer romantic love shielded them from all other forms of loss/trauma/etc just reinforces the fact that his personal version of amatonormativity is not contingent on heteronormativity!! I don't know why people are choosing to be deliberately obtuse about this very valid point you made (other than woobifying an angsty white dude, as usual.)

I did stumble across that and I found the way people were treating that as canon very strange. I amended a post where I called Booker straight with this:

I am now aware that Greg Rucka has in a discord message confirmed Booker as queer. This is not canonical, however. It’s very not publicly available word of god. Until it is included in the next movie, it is not movie canon and I will continue to call him straight, because to the movie watching fan, that’s what he reads as.

It is even less canon than authors tweeting out that a character is x sexuality or confirming it in an interview - and I don't personally care that much what the author says outside the story. I find it very strange that people are weaponising booker's 'queerness' to absolve him of his sins. Like, queer people can be shitty, too.

I'm not sure why people are so desperate for him to be so when the film is chock-full of interesting and dynamic queer characters, but I digress. Just because Booker being bi and ace is Rucka's headcanon doesn't make it canon as it is not in the film - if it's your headcanon, that's cool, but Booker is not canonically queer. There is nothing that implies that he is bi or ace - I would have noticed, particularly the latter.

And you're completely right. Being queer does not prevent people from being amatonormative!

This is a really poignant ask. I think that what a lot of people disagreeing with my interpretation comes from is these people do not understand what amatonormativity is. It's not jealousy, it's devaluing all relationships outside of monogamous romantic relationships. It is implicit in Booker's words and is unlikely conscious on his part, but it comes out in this canonical line: 'you two always had each other!' Romantic relationships do not stop grief, or racism, or homophobia, or - millions of other horrible things nicky and joe have experienced.

All my posts really stemmed from a deep frustration at Booker's just absolutely selfish narrow tunnel vision - because Nicky and Joe lost their first families (their parents/siblings/nieces+nephews), experienced centuries of discrimination, AND lost quynh.

anyway booker's issues are not nicky and joe's responsibility - they have their own recovery to worry about.

#q&a #thanks for the ask!#the old guard #I hope that makes sense?#I am a very: if it's not in the film/book it is not canon it is the author's headcanon type of person #ex literature student here I have Done My Time #kaysanova #booker critical #amatonormativity #meta #my meta

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normal-thoughts-official · 1 year

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One of my (many) favorite details on TOG is how each of them reacts after dreaming about Nile. Presumably, they all had the same dream (considering both Booker and Joe saw the same things, Joe just needed Booker to jumpstart his memory to realize them, and also that the flashes we get for each character aren't necessarily the same things they mention after they wake up) but what each of them retains is wildly different. Joe remembers the people best; the first thing he says is "I saw an older woman in a hijab", and he draws Nile near perfectly without needing any help remembering her features. Nicky remembers the environmental information best; dirt floor, clay walls, the knife was a pesh-kabz, Pashtun. Booker has some flashes of information, but he doesn't retain it well (saw a part of a name tag but doesn't remember what it said, vaguely recalls a medevac) but what really sticks with him is the way he felt when she died. And Andy remembers the military information best ("she's a marine. combat or near-combat duty")

It's really consistent with their characters in many ways. Joe approached this with the empathy (in its literal sense) that he always does, latching unto the people, paying attention to their stories. Nicky was cataloguing information, sniper's eye, focused on anything that would give them clues as to her location, which is what matters best; Booker tries to focus on the objective details, but he's stuck on the pain; and Andy focuses on the military information (uniform and weapons, presumably). I find it really cool how they all retain different things from the dream, focus on different things, because even the same visions are different when you consider how wildly different their points of view and personalities are, and they showed their characters through that scene flawlessly

#tog #the old guard #yusuf al kaysani #nicolò di genova #andromache of scythia #sébastien le livre #nicolo di genova #andromache the scythian #sebastien le livre #meta #kinda

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paigian · 16 days

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the thing about the whole 'bestie they killed so many people' thing is that like. ok yeah they sure did, but it's an action/superhero comic movie - the conventions of the genre include killing lots of people, we the audience expect it. We do not expect the characters to have a conscience over this, but in tog they do. Gina has spoken at length before that she wanted the characters to feel the weight of their choices and that they do not kill people lightly. The movie takes the time to show us how exhausted and defeated they look after every fight.

it is so disingenuous to say tog isn't at its core about love and kindness and family when the movie spends so much time focused on exactly these themes? Nile's arc about her inner guilt over killing a man and her hesitance to do it again is not just there for fun. The movie deliberately sets up Joe and Nicky as foils to Andy and Booker to show you that the work they do and the lives they live is bearable only through love and compassion. Like 'oh they're murderers they kill people' bestie the two characters who try to define themselves only this way spend the entire movie miserable and drunk and angry.

#the old guard #meta

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avelera · 1 month

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So I’ve gone back and I’ve been reading some Old Guard fic (as I try to get motivated to write the last damn chapter of my one damn TOG WIP finished so I can finally moved on), and I must admit, one silly and very minor pet peeve I have in some Nicky/Joe fics for the Old Guard that explore their Crusader days is the trope of having them go a really long time without being able to understand each other. Because based on Nicky’s path as a Crusader even getting to the Holy Land, and the various hints we have that Joe has a pretty worldly background, I would suggest they should have had a baseline to communicate already when they met and that bridging the gap would have gone very quickly for one or both of them once they committed to learning.

There’s a few reasons I find them going a really long time without speaking each other’s language (most likely Nicky picking up Arabic) somewhat implausible:

- First, just based on my own personal experience: I went through a full language immersion experience myself and yes it was painful and yes, having textbooks and classes certainly helped, but all told it was 3-4 months from almost zero before I could start doing normal things for my age group like read simple books and do homework. However, the most effective language learning program in the country, Middlebury, does a full immersion program that gets people to baseline functionality in 6 weeks. Yes, learning a language is hard and I will be the first to say that mastery takes years and mastery without immersion is nearly impossible, but if you’re completely immersed there, without options, it goes much faster. You won’t be fluent of course but you will be conversational. Also, by all accounts, being illiterate or otherwise not bothering to learn how to read and write at the same time and ONLY going for verbal communication actually makes things go even faster.

- People who pick up by speaking (rather than reading and writing) and people who speak multiple languages already tend to pick up other languages even more quickly. Once you learn one or two, a lot of polyglots don’t stop there. There is that old joke: the word for speaking three languages is trilingual, two languages is bilingual, and speaking only one language is American. Which is to say I think native English speaking writers might be the ones underestimating how quickly a language can be learned (at least to a conversational level).

- Now throw in the fact that both Nicky and Joe have been recently in multilingual societies or organizations as a requirement of their meeting during the First Crusade, no matter how you slice it. Either as both coming from a merchant trading backgrounds traveling across international (so to speak) lands, or Nicky being part of the pan-European Christian army where multiple languages would be spoken across the camp, to him possibly having a priest background which would mean Latin as well. Not to mention Greek if Nicky picked up anything while in Constantinople (if he came over land). Nicky also would have been on the road to the Holy Land, if he went overland, for as long as 3 years and in Antioch before Jerusalem.

- Now, as an admitted caveat to all of this, I’ve lived overseas and it is absolutely common for expats to live in a country for years without bothering to pick up the local language at all. There were cultural and societal reasons that European Crusaders and the Egyptian Fatimids who lost Jerusalem wouldn’t bother to learn each other’s languages or any of the common merchants tongue or other common languages like Greek to bother to talk to each other. That’s absolutely fair to invoke for why they wouldn’t have a single word of any language in common.

- However, I will say, once both or either of them decided to try, I think some writers don’t give enough credit for how quickly one or the other would pick a language up, especially if it’s the language of the country they’re in (basically, I think once he tried, Nicky would pick up Arabic very quickly if he’s still in the Holy Land by the time he and Joe start trying to communicate). Effort plus full immersion is probably the single fastest way to learn a language, you’d be able to have rudimentary conversations within a few months at most. Really from there it’s just a question of whose country are they in once they start talking and stop trying to kill each other.

TL;DR I will be the first to say an author should go with what makes their story work best BUT there’s plenty of historically backed reasons why Nicky and Joe should have been able to carry on a basic conversation with each other from when they first met, and not be completely stymied in communicating with each other because of a language barrier.

#the old guard #tog meta #kaysanova #tog fic

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