this is the face of a man who is connecting a lot of dots.
we know vegas had flagged porsche early on as someone to keep tabs on — he sent the assassin girl into that gala to report on porsche's skills as a bodyguard. but then we have this interaction:
vegas is clearly baffled that his dad cares about this random bodyguard, but gun provides zero context. just a vague, pointlessly harsh order.
so vegas makes his best guess at to why gun might care, and arrives at something close to "he's a point of weakness for kinn — we can use him." and he proceeds to do just that.
then, too-late, he learns he was wrong.
(shoutout to gun being angry about namphueng's son getting hurt while ACTIVELY hurting his own son. what a dickhead.)
i bet this new information just eats away at vegas, especially while he's trapped at the safehouse. how could he have possibly known he was supposed to keep porsche safe? when has his father EVER wanted to keep anyone safe? why the fuck is porsche so important?
once porsche hands him the photo, it all falls in place.
the consequences of being left in the dark were severe for vegas. it wrecked all of his plans from the start, and vegas had no clue how much it would matter. but neither did porsche — and as vegas says himself, kinn doesn't know either. this is a secret that goes all the way to the top.
gun cares about porsche, because gun cares about porsche's mother enough to have a photo of her in his office. and you can tell vegas is burning to know why.
sure, he says. he'll go find arthee. he'll fork up the five million in cash. he'll do whatever it takes to help porsche learn the truth of his past — because in some sense, it's vegas's past, too. and vegas wants answers.
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I think i finally understand how the Distortion works. I mean, i don’t think it’s possible to ever fully understand it, and i don’t know the whole picture yet because i don’t know what Helen will be like, but i feel like i’ve just been granted a glimpse at the lovecraftian (as in ineffable) thing that is this being.
It’s not a person and a creature fighting inside one mind. There’s no Michael clawing himself to the surface to express his emotions and get his revenge.
Michael Shelley is dead. The Distortion became Michael. It sounds so simple, yet a least in my opinion it’s hard to fully understand.
I think what provides the best metaphor is a small thing the Distortion says after becoming Helen: "without a proper mind." The Distortion does not have its own mind. It’s only a what, but in order to really exist in this reality, it needs a who. It needs a body, but also a mind.
So if i understand this right, it’s like this: Michael Shelley is dead. His conciousness is not there anymore. And the Distortion got forced into that mind, an empty mind of a dead person. This doesn’t make it human, it’s still able to understand the impossible, it’s still the thing that was created to scare and kill. But in the mind it’s living in… the previous owner’s furniture is still there. It gets the dead person’s memories. It becomes Michael, in the sense that it has to be someone. Its existence got tied to being Michael, although Michael Shelley is dead.
When Michael got "emotional", that wasn’t Michael Shelley coming through. It was the Distortion grappling with the side effects of being someone - of living in a mind with all the memories and the human emotions that a human mind can’t fully turn off, even when the thing inhabiting it isn’t human at all.
The Distortion was Michael in the sense that it was thinking with Michael Shelley’s mind. When it became Helen, its consciousness, its being stayed the same, but it needed to adapt to this new mind. It could see clearer now, realizing that the windows of the previous house had been dirty, realizing that the wirings of the previous mind had driven it to do something that it actually didn’t want to do. The throat of the Spiral itself getting caught in the spiralling of its own, borrowed mind.
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Thinking about how in the start everything was like "joel is obsessed with Etho" but it turns out that it was a mutual thing and Etho is equally obsessed with him.
Yeah, Joel said that Etho was obsessed with him, but nobody believed him until Etho was like "yeah it's true". AND NOW WE HAVE A BOATBOYS FEAST. Literally a two-hour stream where they are interacting. I had 0 trust, but the world always surprises me.
When s10 started, and they didn't really interact (Joel really doesn't really interact with anyone in his povs unless they look for him lol) I was losing all hope. Thank you Scar for being the smalletho beacon of hope.
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@doridoripawaa YES YES YESSSS FEAR!! You get it 😭😭😭😭 You pass the Uehara Ayumu exam!!!
My take with the season 1 conflict is that painting Ayumu’s jealousy purely as a romantic thing does a big disservice to her character. For me the key thing about it is that she’s so so afraid. She’s so anxious and it’s hit a critical point. She clings to Yu’s side because Yu doesn’t change. Yu is always there for her! But when this whole idol thing starts Yu starts changing - she goes from floating about in life to having a dream and this once steady anchor starts floating around and god damn Ayumu is terrified! I could talk on and on about this but all the visual symbolism in Dream With You really screams that Ayumu wants time to stop and for now to be forever but it’s 1am !!!
But yes you’re right about everything … Setsuna and Ayumu are actually alike in that way….. 🥹🥹🥹
I’m going to think about them sharing an umbrella for the rest of my life….
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My Headcanon for Liminals
I've been having a lot of fun posting headcanons, and I'm starting to realize just how many I've built up over the years, so here's another one.
So I've stated before that part of the reason why Danny and Vlad are so different is because Danny was inside of a portal when it turned on whereas Vlad just got a face full of energized Ectoplasm and other assorted nastiness. The still human and already ghostly halves of Danny fused into a cohesive whole in order to survive the opening of the portal and continued supporting eachother. Vlad's human half forcibly integrated his resistant ghost half as it formed in an effort to survive. Rather than a cohesive whole, Vlad is two dischordant halves.
That said, I do not consider Vlad's state the default result of humans being exposed to ectoplasm.
Part of it is because the exposure was violent and his human body was so incredibly unwell that it made sense for the part of him with less emotional attachment to it to want to escape. This illness did not stem directly from the ectoplasm. We know this much because other people exposed to ectoplasm did not get ecto-acne, and figuring out the involvement of the cola was what allowed the Fentons to cure it.
Part of it is because Vlad has a superiority complex. This means that, in any given state, Vlad considers his current way of being superior. As a human, Vlad considers humanity superior. As a ghost, Vlad considers ghosts superior. This leads to a whole lot of clash between the parts of his psyche which each consider the other half to be lesser. Combine this with the fact that each half despises the illness and associates the illness with the other half, and you get a whole lot of internal toxicity.
For the average person with ectoplasm exposure, there wouldn't be so much of a clash. They would take on some ghostly traits (more and more over time, with continued exposure) and maybe start doing some prep-work for ghosthood, but they wouldn't be trying to leave their human lives early. They probably won't have insane healing factors like Danny, but they won't be tearing themselves apart like Vlad either.
They're preparing for the afterlife, but they wouldn't be so eager to discard the human life they are still living. If you've ever had a favorite hoodie that you wore all the time until you loved it to pieces and it came apart at the seams, that's kind of the feeling. It's not the end of the world when you can't wear it anymore; you can wear other jackets when you're cold, but you want to hold onto it for as long as you can.
The more someone is exposed to ectoplasm (in terms of both frequency and amount), the more ghostly they will become over time.
A random person who just happens to live in Amity Park on the opposite side of town from Fenton Works and and was somehow never at the sight of a ghost fight, will probably just experience a slightly increased awareness of ghost-related stuff and perhaps a slightly smoother transition when their time comes.
Other kids at Casper high, who attend school with Danny every day and get caught up in ghost attacks sometimes will probably start to form the wispy beginings of their ghostly self. Sometimes you just catch a glimpse of what sort of ghost they are going to be. They may also develop some slight powers while still alive.
You look at Paulina carefully shaping and lacquering her nails into something both beautiful and dangerous, and for a split second you just know that, someday, she's going to be all claws and glittering scales and passionate pursuit of her goals. She will transcend the human form and shape herself into a work of art of her own design and a powerhouse none can deny. Then she turns to her friend and giggles over a funny story, and the moment passes; she's just another kid steadily making her way to adulthood.
She's just another kid until some jerk at the mall oggles her a little too blatantly and her jewelry flashes brighter than the lighting should allow, blinding him so that he trips into a fountain, and Paulina smugly watches him sputter before turning to walk away with a satisfied spring in her step.
Sam and Tucker, Who hang out with Danny every day and frequently explore the ghost zone with him, will start forming more of the foundation of their ghostly selves and probably develop more powers sooner. They are more likely to develop to a point of being able to take on a ghostly form while still alive.
Typically, a halfa formed through extreme, prolonged exposure like this would have a bit of separation between their human and ghostly halves, but without much discord between the two. However, with Sam and Tucker spending so much time around Danny during their formative period (and having so much less contact with any other ghost than with him), it's entirely possible that they would subconsciously learn the integrated system approach, in much the same way people pick up habits of speech from the people around them.
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