A little hopeful moment which I missed on the first watch, but which I think is so important. Nina and Maggie come to have their talk with Crowley. Now, we all know that Crowley is Maggie—yes, sure, Nina is sarcastic and suave and cool and calls Maggie angel—but it’s obvious that Crowley is Maggie and Nina is Aziraphale. Crowley even admits it himself in the very beginning of this conversation when he tries to justify meddling to get Maggie and Nina together:
“Nina needed rescuing.” Yeah, you know who else always “needs rescuing”? Anyway, moving on.
Nina says she just got out of a relationship and it would be a disaster to get into another one right away. And then this happens:
Nina says she hopes Maggie will still be around, but she knows she can’t ask Maggie to just wait while she figures out her own baggage. There's no guarantee. And then Maggie interjects—
The parallel between Maggie/Nina and Crowley/Aziraphale is so intentional as to feel heavy handed. So what does it mean that we get this exchange in at this particular moment in the script—buried within the conversation which is the catalyst for Crowley confessing his feelings, occurring in the lull immediately before the spectacular dissolution of everything the first two seasons were building towards?
“We could have been us,” Crowley says. Crowley walks out of the bookshop. Crowley turns off their song in his car. Whatever tentative blooming thing has been building between him and Aziraphale for six thousand years appears to be very clearly over. Aziraphale presses the kiss to his lips and knows there is no guarantee they will ever have a chance to be together. There's no guarantee that Crowley will ever want to forgive him, that he will keep on waiting for him.
But.
There is.
3K notes
·
View notes
one thing i think is so Neat about atla is how all the main bender characters have an arc that corresponds to their "opposite" element. zuko's arc is about the capacity to change yourself and your worldview, and the culmination of his arc is learning a move inspired by waterbending. katara is all about passion and drive, wanting to become a great waterbender and fight for what she believes in, and over the course of the show she comes into her power. toph's arc involves getting free of her restrictive family and connecting with a community, and aang's arc is about learning to stand fast in his beliefs and confront difficult issues head-on. it's a beautiful bit of symmetry that reinforces the show's point about the illusion of separation
718 notes
·
View notes
Ranni has every reason to hate Marika. She is the figurehead of an order that has caused her and her family so much misery… and yet, in the Age of the Stars ending cutscene, Ranni holds Marika’s head with such gentleness. It feels less like Ranni is putting down a tyrant, and more like she’s laying her to rest, after many long years of torment.
Ranni could have been Marika’s successor, but she rejected the guidance of the Two Fingers, slaying her own flesh in order to be rid of their influence:
“But I would not acquiesce to the Two Fingers. I stole the Rune of Death, slew mine own Empyrean flesh, casting it away. I would not be controlled by that thing.”
Ranni goes to such drastic lengths because the most intolerable thing possible to her is to be a pawn; her will not being her own, but being at the mercy of a higher power. Ranni’s quest is above all about free will – it culminates with Ranni using the Fingerslayer Blade to tear her Two Fingers into bloody ribbons, at long last giving her full control over her own destiny.
Marika in the present day is a prisoner held in perpetual torment. According to Enia and the Two Fingers,
"Queen Marika is the vessel of the Elden Ring, carrier of its vision. A god, in truth. But after the Elden Ring's shattering, she was imprisoned in the Erdtree. A grim punishment for shattering the Order, despite her godhood. The Fingers speak... "Marika's trespass demanded a heavy sentence. But even in shackles, she remains a god, and the vision's vessel.”
Marika shattered the Order, going against the will of the Two Fingers, and was punished for it gravely. In many ways, Marika’s fate is Ranni’s absolute worst nightmare. This is exactly the fate she took such drastic lengths to escape… serving a higher power with her entire being, her will not her own, but the will of the Fingers, with any attempt at change met with violent suppression, her body essentially being used as a puppet to defend the last vestiges of the Order.
“I would not be controlled by that thing.”
I think that Ranni, seeing Marika’s broken body at the end of it all, felt nothing but pity for her in that moment, despite everything she’d done. To me, the act of Ranni holding Marika’s head in her hands feels like she’s saying, “you were my enemy. But there is no worse fate in this world than what you suffered. Now, you can be truly free."
1K notes
·
View notes
chewing on big 3 kids being capable of absolutely devastating natural disasters and apocalypse-level outbursts of power.
Percy who creates hurricanes complete with lightning that pummel titans and flooding and whirlpools that can trap god-powered crocodile kaijus. Earthquakes that erupt volcanoes. Hazel who sunk an entire small island entirely on her own with her final breath, against giants and a primordial goddess of the earth.
If Nico dramatically wilts plants and cracks the ground when he's mildly stressed, and disintegrates enemies down to their skeletons with a single touch or rips their souls out of their still-living bodies, and can command armies of the undead, what happens if he tries to cause destruction? Even outside of total zombie apocalypse or insta-killing a crowd, he's shown enough geokinesis to absolutely be capable of the same destruction Percy and Hazel can manifest.
What about Jason? He can control the winds and storms. There's no way he can't create the most destructive tornadoes with casual effort that he can never justify using for the collateral damage they'd cause. With a single thought he can rip up a town and launch the remnants 50 miles out. (Jason in the center of a Dead Man Walking tornado, vortexes responding to his movements like an avatar...)
And what can anyone do to combat it? How can you fight the wind lifting everything you know and love into the sky, or floods sweeping you away, or the ground giving way beneath you? The Big 3 kids are scary because they are forces of nature, and their whims are the only thing preventing you from witnessing that at any given moment.
645 notes
·
View notes
Megatron's Opposite Day
"I free slaves"
This is Soundwave binding Ratbat but seeing as Megatron did the same thing to Pentius by putting his spark into Trypticon and reformatted Rumble and Frenzy into cassettes against their will I think he approves a lot of this practice
Megatron on Optimus and humans, after his defeat in All Hail Megatron ⬇️
he really salty
"I implant ideology" aka brainwashing
Decepticon cause = Megatron. nuff said.
"I liberate cities" says the person who let Nyon burn to make a point
Cities are too small, think bigger
Holding New York hostage.
"Like Autobots, they believe in the sanctity of life" which he doesn't. Kudos for being honest.
Allowing troops to do free-rein massacre is a reward for conquest. Nothing like some easy murder for de-stressing.
The Simanzi massacre which halved the Cybertronian population is off-screen so it doesn't deserve its own pic
"The revolution"
"We only feel good when we stand with a blade in one hand and a throat in another" "Let's make the entire face of the planet into our new gladiator arena"
What nice, confidence-inspiring revolutionaries. I'm sure they'll rule the population with benevolence after they've killed all the Necessary People with Necessary Violence. Final interpretation of what constitutes as Necessary is reserved for the sole discretion of Megatron, ofc.
Good goals.
Sentinel might be an absolute asshole but at least he's got one thing right: they're literally a gang of thugs who gets high off murder.
"The people are my utmost concern"
'The people': ................
"Battling for freedom"
Freedom of what? Function? Autonomy?
Religion?
the ability to choose whether to fight? on which side to fight?
Idk why they used the word "pogrom" for this, it's way too specific
Anyways it doesn't matter, they won't be missed.
Good for Bumblebee for calling him out. Screenshotted this just to appreciate Megatron's bitchy face ⬇️
Other urban legends:
"Megatron loves Cybertron" let's just burrrrn it
He did fight to save Cybertron in Chaos Theory but also made it pretty clear why he did it. It's not out of the goodness of his heart or any sentimental reasons like that. It's an ego/dominance thing.
Plus his wording when he's trying to convince Optimus to let him go with the Lost Light: "I broke the planet. And that, Optimus, is why I owe it to you - to everyone - to find a replacement."
Replacement.
In other words: I made a mess and can't be bothered to clean it up, so I want to get away from it and find somewhere new to start clean.
I don't think Optimus appreciates the favour.
"Megatron tore down a corrupt government" which is true, just too bad that he's worse
He's also, um, a closeted Zeta admirer?
"Megatron advocates equality" ???
Megatron x dictatorship is literally his OTP. They were inseparable for four million years. A lot of people died trying.
"Megatron cares about the Decepticons" no he doesn't. Not his troops nor its cause.
Like for one thing he treats them with complete scorn
Admits that the most useful thing about keeping Starscream around is that he can bully underlings into line
Wants to use the humans' nuke to get rid of his troops and reformat them into peaceful drones after they outlive their use because they were "too ruthless" for his perfect peaceful society
Has zero scruples about fighting Deceptigod, just affronted that his own soldiers are being used against him
And basically just drops the Decepticons like a bag of vermin after he surrenders. He never once mentions them of his own accord, other than to insist he has nothing to do with them. Even his surrender speech is something Optimus makes him do as exchange b/c he wants to go on parole. He wasn't planning on making a public address otherwise, he was just going to leave them hanging.
Looking at the publication timeline, Megatron started out as an established Evil McEvilson-type villain similar to how he is in G1 and it's not until Chaos Theory in 2011 that JRo really gave him a sympathetic backstory that drew his characterization away from the bloodthirsty pugno ergo sum warlord into someone who once held ideals about societal reform and remains convinced of his own moral supremacy throughout the 4 mill years of death and war, adding worldbuilding such as Functionism/oppression/government corruption as justification for the beginning of the Decepticon movement. But because the start of the Decepticons was already written in Megatron Origins and every evil thing he'd done up till Chaos Theory can't be retracted and they had to keep Megatron as a villain until his story was no longer central to the Autobot-Decepticon war line, and JRo didn't try to downplay the atrocities he'd committed (some of the most sadistically disturbing things Megatron did were exclusively in MTMTE flashbacks), but rather tried to distance him from them and placed the focus on the juxtapositions to emphasize change, this as a whole just resulted in Evil McEvilson getting turned into Hyper McHypocrite.
369 notes
·
View notes