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finsterhund · 1 year

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Liveblog kinda I guess?

Someone recommended I watch the horror movie "Come Play" (2020) because "that's basically you" and yeah ten minutes in and this is pretty much exactly what 2010s Cayden embodiment would be. Except pure and not deranged lmaoooo.

So far this seems to be a more typical horror movie so it's more of an "eat snacks and try to guess when a jump scare is happening" experience which is usually what I watch. It's serviceable if generic. Not really bringing anything new to the table or being too interesting. I've been focusing a lot on artsy indie horror of late so it's good to change things up and go back into something knowing it's not going to completely flood my brain. It's nice to have neurodivergent kid protagonist representation that doesn't turn the kid into a source of "ooooh scary" for the sake of "disability weird and creepy" either. I kept bracing for "autism scary" but they never resorted to that.

Jealous of the cool house he lives in. This is quickly becoming a pattern.

The picture book monster designs are straight up spectres. I swear to fuck. If the little common spectres could grow up I guess. I want the in-universe book as like a hardcover or something it's cute. Can't tell if it's a ploy or if it's really a heartfelt monster friend yet. That's the fun of it. Could be either OR BOTH. I'd love to see that more in things. Where a supernatural creature is a predator with hunting instincts but it's not evil and will potentially under ideal circumstances be able to pack bond with humans who are otherwise a prey item.

Not gonna lie thinking about it now having it being central to the plot of a movie I am somewhat jealous of the availability of digital speaking devices possible with today's technology. I would have been far more articulate if I had something like that when my selective mutism was at its worst. May have made it easier for me to break into the wider world. Get more of a headstart. Saying that though the movie is quick to remind that neurotypicals can be fucking mean and stupid about accessibility tools. Not to go on and bash neurotypicals for seven hours straight but people get so fucking weird about this sort of thing. Call us unable to adapt to things but can't just roll with it when it comes to fairly cut and dry extensions of the self.

By the time I finally had an assistance device (first laptop) it was in high school and everyone learned to mind their own fucking business. I'd get chewed out by the occasional teacher but they quickly discovered I can't write for shit and that it was the only possible way I could take notes.

I'm expecting the "phone bad" plot to be stupid and drag my experience down but we will see.

I'm not liking the parents very much but how much of that is personal bias I cannot say. I may just be very stressed at the moment and projecting onto characters I know next to nothing about yet. The mom seems ok but the dad has a classic case of the "not really being there in equal measure as the mom is" that might imply worse.

Props to how you can really hear the parent's opinions and the learned ableism through the kid in Oliver's class whinging about how he gets "special treatment" for having use of a phone for accessibility. It really sounds like the sort of stuff you just know the kid is parroting from their shitty parent. The teacher could have handled it better than making it about that kid doing something to not deserve his phone as a toy. Should have instead been explaining that Oliver literally needs his for accessibility. But a lot of the time that is how these situations are mishandled by well-meaning but otherwise incorrect neurotypicals. The "clap back" at the kid who played Fortnite on his phone rather than explaining that the nonverbal kid uses his as a TOOL. and that's what's different.

The scene where the one kid from the bully's group lures Oliver with surface niceness just to get him away from prying eyes so their group can berate him is perfectly illustrated also. Because yeah they know to superficially not bully someone with disabilities, they know how to play nice, and the whole "pretending to be your friend to fuck with you" shit was very prevalent. I like how despite this being handled well it's not overly triggering like it could be.

God watching this just makes me wish we could have grown up together. This is a fictional fucking character but I know what he's going through so much and it's just not fair.

A lot of the spooky shit is interesting and isn't overdone visuals. Like the part with the papers in the car park. The camera filter scene also got me too. Because I am scared of cameras and the dark and faces. 🙃 The movie doesn't have deep psychological environmentally impressive fear building but the simple jump scares don't feel shitty either. It's basic for a horror movie but inoffensive.

Also I was right in the beginning to feel sus about the parents. They're having fights about Oliver and the mom is going on about how much she wishes she could "get rid of that part of him" so that she "wouldn't have to deal with it" as if it isn't literally a facet of who he is. The dad responds that it wouldn't be him then. The mom I swear to fuck I hate her. Shut the hell up "you have any idea what it's like for your own child to never look you in the eyes?" Bitch shut up. The kid doesn't feel comfortable with eye contact it's one little fucking thing to you but it's really significant issues for him. The mom is going on about how he apparently loves the dad but hates her. Oh I don't know autism warrior mom Karen perhaps he is able to tell and feel the way you talk and think about him? Like this? Right now? And that's why he doesn't feel comfortable or safe around you? Do you magically think he doesn't understand or feel the energy and vibes you emit about him? He's autistic, not mindless. For fucks sake. You think because he doesn't do things the way you think is the only way to do them he isn't able to at all? Gah. The dad being less present in his life is a double edged sword. Negative in that he could be there more for him but positive in the fact that when he is there he isn't a fucking bitch. Of course the kid is going to like him more. (I am taking this too personally I realize but jesus christ does this really hit at a sore spot)

"Larry" communicating with the same speech program Oliver uses is supposed to be creepy. They have him looking shocked and play suspense chords but I just think it's sweet. They're able to use the same aid and it's probably the first time Oliver has really had that sense of familiarity. I know that this is a monster and it's probably gonna try to eat him or something but so far the literal spectre ass looking demon thing has been more compassionate, respectful, considerate, and willing to be accessible to Oliver than any other major character. It's just scary and from another dimension. It feels like the monster is an allegory for having a disability that you're ostracized for.

Fucking screaming at the mom planning get togethers with the bully just because she's friends with his mom. Again, this is a common thing and it doesn't work out anywhere near as much as it should for parents to keep doing. But the mom being a fucking shit I realize she's likely never going to intentionally try to go out and find other disabled and/or neurodivergent kids to introduce Oliver to. These sorts of parents hope their kid will find "normal" friends that will make them "more normal" they already have to "suffer" "dealing with" their disabled kid they're not going to want to care for his peers too. 😔

The mom fucking going "can you try and have some fun for me?" You are literally forcing your kid to hang out with someone they don't want to, that I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you aren't aware is bullying him. You are taking away what little autonomy he has in his life at the present. God. And the cherry on top is him leaving a situation that's uncomfortable to him (terrified his phone is possessed) and the mom of course assumes it's all about her, that he's avoiding her.

God the bully's whole friend group gets invited to the sleepover and the literal first interaction I see of the bully's mom with him is her joking about how she wants to get rid of him and load him off on Oliver's mom. Just casually joking about not wanting to be around your son to his face. That's lovely.

Christ the bully's mom asking Oliver's mom if she can say hi to him. As if he's her pet and not his own person. 😬 100% why the bully is like this.

CHRIST THE BULLY KIDS WERE LIKE "WHYS HE BEING WEIRD?" AND BEFORE THE BULLY'S MOM CAN TELL HIM OFF OLIVER'S MOM SAYS "ITS OKAY" I want Larry to kill this fuck so bad. She then goes on to explain stimming... I guess. The fact that the moms are talking about his personal developmental milestones also just right in front of him and the other kids. Man for fucks sake stop it. Can you at least make the effort to pretend to give him a level of privacy and dignity?

It's really hard at times to not want the bully kids to get got by the monster lol. Sometimes their lines make it clear they're just wildly misinformed and other times there's that level of cruelty that I still don't know where some kids get it from and other times they're behaving a bit too "adult wrote the lines" bully cliche.

Larry being described as pale when he's been depicted until this point as corpse-black threw me for a loop. Was hoping this wouldn't end up being another pasty white "rake-esque" creature. It got old fast lol

I get the feeling that if the bullies don't die they're gonna end up friends with Oliver through shared trauma. Jokes on you nobody's getting out of this neurotypical.

Yeah the "real life" Larry design is just uninspired copy of the rake. The visual effects are good but man.

I don't get why they blamed Oliver for that shit with the book though. Like they witnessed all the bulbs go and the creepy ebook and the table move on its own. What do they think he's got telekinesis or something? What happened really doesn't seem like something they'd all collectively make up the same story to blame on him. If that actually happened they'd be going on about ghosts or some shit surely? Frustrated me and I had to pause for a bit.

Have yet to see "phone bad" at all and maybe they won't do that. But the mom is a sack of shit so don't hold your breath.

God the mom thinking he did it. Yeah I'm sure your kid did all that with his mind. Of course.

Also next day at school one of the bully kids has a chew stim????? He's never shown with one before. He's only got it now that their ringleader is absent from school? Which shows I guess that they join him in picking on the more obviously neurodivergent kid to try and prevent him from targeting them as well? Sadly a realistic thing that happens also. Bully kid is clearly traumatized so I guess my joke about nobody leaving this story neurotypical is coming true to some extent. Then he confesses it wasn't Oliver but the Larry entity. The weird thing is the mom believes now too because she was in the house when it again started fucking with shit but even though it's shown to have control over the house she zeros in on the tablet. Eventually the dad finally takes Oliver and immediately he's a better parent. Brought him to his job at a toll booth car park and encourages him to participate and explains to him aspects of the job that make it accessible. Saying that you can watch cartoons when you're not dealing with customers. I feel he means well.

Find it funny that everyone's immediate first reaction to the Larry book showing up randomly is to read it. And read it aloud. Oh neat a spooky monster kids book is on this ipad. Gonna read it out loud. I've got nothing better to do.

Again, the different ways they show that the invisible entity is in the physical world and where/how it's moving is pretty cool. The cameras, the laser sight measurement tool, THE STICKY HAND. The use of the sticky hand is GOATed

This fucking speech therapist is bringing up PHYSICAL EMPATHS. Aka pseudoscience. Being like "the reason you are also experiencing this creature from Oliver's imagination is because you love him very much" which is bullshit because 1. she fucking doesn't. 2. The closest observed condition that this could even remotely be compared to is Folie à Deux. There is no fucking basis of "empaths" as having psychosomatic reactions like this in real life wtfffffff. Everyone in this movie except for the goddamn monster and kinda the dad is absent incompetent negligent or stupid to the point of infuriating ineptitude in being there for Oliver. Christ. Then this stupid fucking mom is like "oh I destroyed *that* device. As if the problem was a single thing and not idk. It did stuff in your fucking house. What is the logic of this!? They even discussed how Oliver has been using multiple screens for so and so long period of time wtffffff

Oh I fucking knew it was the bully kid's mom who was why he turned out that way. The reveal felt so validating. These poor kids. The bitch tricked her kid into thinking Oliver hated him and turned him against him. Jesus Christ. Felt so gratifying when they realized and made up. She is now the character I want to die the most. Second is Oliver's mom obviously.

The later parts of the Larry book make it clear that the monster is at the very least possessive and will kill those who get in its way but still no confirmation if it has ulterior motives to making friends. It looks like it's just really possessive and lonely. Are they trying to set it up as being evil???

The scene with the streetlights going off behind the car is sick af. God. Too bad Larry himself the real world version sucks. Got a closeup of his face and it's just not working for me as a design. Took the mom way too long to realize that this thing wasn't tied to just the one tablet. The way it talks by skipping channels to different words is a neat concept but ruins the mystery of it. Okay Larry you go and villain monologue to the mom through the TV. That's great. Finally we get to the "phone bad"-ism where "everyone's so lonely looking at their screens all the time that it literally created Larry out of their loneliness" man wtf. If you love someone who's in another continent go fuck yourself I guess. You're actually lonely. You don't have real relationship through the screen. Never mind the fact that the main character is literally only so reliant on electronics because it's his fucking accessibility device. He is using it to communicate in person. God they didn't think this through. Also this movie literally came out in 2020 I think Larry being born is small potatoes compared to the obvious alternative of everyone dying from a certain pandemic. Hmmm 😬

I was really hoping it wouldn't pull a "phone bad" but somehow it held off on doing so and then did so in a way that's somehow worse.

God the mom being like "Larry is lonely? How do you think I would feel if Larry took Oliver?" Always making it about you. Not to mention the fact that you treat him bad and talk shit about him and say that he doesn't love you as much as his father because he won't overstep his own personal boundaries for your benefit. Everything you've done and said up until this point would indicate that you'd enjoy your life better if it did just go and take Oliver.

God the mom is something else. running around like a chicken with its head cut off grabbing every screen in sight in the house and yeeting it out the door when the obvious solution is to take Oliver somewhere else. Then when I think it won't get any worse she's unscrewing all the fucking lightbulbs. Making a racket. Oliver is having a meltdown and the bitch screams at him "can't you just be normal for one second" oh I dunno. You're acting like a complete mindless stupid dumb animal right now, assuming it's because you're stressed. Maybe have some of that fucking "you love him so much empathy" the speech therapist thinks you have for once and understand that he's stressed and scared out of his mind. The irony that Oliver has handled everything better than her is obvious to seemingly everyone except her and the writer. Ugh.

Saw a blurry dark camera angle of toys on the floor and immediately went "lol Skinamarink" so my brain is broken obviously.

Oh fuck it wasn't the bully's mom who lied and manipulated the situation and ruined the friendship (???) It was Oliver's stupid fucking mom? (Honestly I think it was equal parts both of them but ymmv. I do not understand this reveal) And during this reveal she's trying to force him to look her in the eyes. And they're hiding from the monster. And poor Oliver writes that he wants it to take him because she ruined his friendship 😭 god. I just can't.

First decent thing this shitheel does is recognize that Oliver calms himself with the SpongeBob theme song and hums it to him. It came out of nowhere. Really didn't feel this character has grown enough for this moment. Doesn't feel deserved.

Yeah the clearer the shots we get of Larry the more I can see his real world design sucks. Disappointing. I must stress the practical effects that bring him to life are incredible. Great effects. Just I'm so tired of oversaturated trope of tall pale humanoid creature. He's got pretty boring designed feet and hands too like. It's like if they took all the style out of the monster designs in Little Nightmares. So you're left with mildly uncanny valley stretched out hairless man.

The mom is something else. "This thing is powered by electricity. Why do you keep saying for us to go to the field???!!" Oh I don't know 😒 truly one of life's greatest mysteries.

The mom sacrificed herself to the creature which is honestly the only way I think she could have redeemed herself. Kinda saw this coming with the "only goes away when you finish the story, give it your hand" thing. Doesn't feel at all earned. I mean yeah she gave up her life to protect him even though she did it right in front of him and further traumatized him 🙃 again, the story keeps having this issue where it will suddenly insist the whole universe revolves around Oliver's mom.

There's some pretty big storytelling inconsistency whiplash in this movie. It really had no business sympathizing with the mom so much. She literally caused every non supernatural problem and significantly worsened the supernatural ones. In the end she like... comes back as a ghost and spends time with him and definitely loves him unconditionally now. We hope. The movie wants us to think this. She has the teensiest amount of redemption and it implies more than shows that she's learned from her negligence and wrongdoing.

I did like a lot of what this movie did but god the autism mom martyr complex shit is genuinely wrong and bad. The narrative that parents of autistic children are heroes and the true "victims" of the "disease" for their insurmountably good deed of not abandoning their own children and blah blah blah is wretched. It's the mindset that makes the "charity" Autism Speaks so insidious. They don't care about autistic people. They care about the poor undeserving neurotypicals who are forced to have autism in their lives 😒

This movie could have been an absolute banger if it instead focused on Oliver dealing with this creature. Hell, I was hoping that he would bring it into the real world to stay rather than what it wanted which was the reverse and after the friendship he had with bully kid was repaired he'd introduce Larry into their newly forming friend group or some shit. Or that the creature was insidiously trying to take advantage of the situation to capture him or something. But no. We got "phones bad" because they somehow created this creature who only wants friends but is also violent and scary, and several times is shown in a comparative way to the autistic boy, and we have shitty mother redemption. God.

It really felt like there was a good story here and a lot of stuff was really good but the bad shit is impossible to ignore. The actors were all good but yeah there's some serious issues with the writing and message. Very frustrating. They didn't use the kid being autistic for horror because instead they made the monster essentially a representation of a neurodivergent child and blamed his creation on the use of the very same electronic devices that the autistic boy used to empower himself and have more autonomy. Yeesh that's a big issue.

Oliver was such a tender sweetheart literally didn't deserve any of this.

I went into this thinking "oh boy this is just run of the mill monster horror shit that has a relatable protagonist unlike the artsy horror this isn't gonna make me use my brain" but no that quickly changed.

It is worth noting that I never finished the Babadook because of all the issues I had with it. This feels like it wanted to right those wrongs but still valued neurotypical comfort and status quo over neurodivergent child acceptance.

Idk I'm probably way too hard on the mom character but just this once can we have an autistic kid being loved not in spite of his autism but including his autism? Please?

#text post #long post #negative #cw: ableism #I was at first so into this movie and it just god #HoD despite Andy not officially confirmed as such still continues to be the best in neurodivergent child empowerment monster horror #please can I have some more I am starving

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duhragonball · 3 years

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Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 2-3

Chapter 2 is a flashback to the origin of Sir Integra Hellsing. As established in Chapter 1, the Hellsing Organization is a secret anti-Halloween-monster task force. From what I’ve been able to tell, they have a small army of guys and they all live and train in a big mansion, and the Hellsing family runs the whole show. It’s sort of like the X-Men except they actually do cool shit and you only have to keep track of four or five characters.

It’s implied throughout this manga that the Hellsing Family is descended from Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire hunter seen in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Shoot, I just remembered I wanted to read the novel so I’d know what this manga was referencing, but it’s too late, I’ll just have to do that later. I’ve been meaning to read the Great Gatsby for several years, too, and I just never get around to it.

On the other hand, Integra claimed that her family had been at this since “ancient times”, suggesting that they predate the events of the Dracula novel. If Abraham Van Helsing was part of their line, then he may have only been carrying on a tradition instead of founding a new one. I think the conceit of Hellsing is that it regards the Dracula novel as part of its canon. That is, in this fictional world, the events in the novel really happened, more or less. I don’t know if that means the novel exists in this world or not.

Whatever the case, it was Arthur Hellsing running the organization up until 1989, when he suddenly took ill. On his deathbed, he named his daughter as his successor, and asked his brother Richard to help her run things, since Integra was like, twelve, at the time.

Instead, Richard waited three days and staged a coup, forcing Li’l Integra to hide in the ventilation ducts. He has to act quickly, and kill her before the whole staff finds out what he’s up to, but if he can kill her, he’ll assume control and be set for life. I’m not really sure what Richard wants out of this. Maybe he just really wants to run the family business, or maybe he wants to shut the whole thing down and just be a wealthy nobleman without all the monsters. Anyway, the search for Integra leads to the “underground sector”, which hasn’t been used in over twenty years, so I guess 1969 is about when it was shut down? It houses a dark arts lab, a library, speciment room, torture chamber, dissecting room, and a dungeon. That last one tips Richard off, because before he died, Arthur told her that she could find something that would protect her.

But all she finds inside is a corpse, and then Richard and his goons show up shortly after. He plans to kill her slowly to punish her for wasting his time, but when he shoots he in the arm, some of the blood splashes on the corpse, and then it comes to life.

Just like Frosty the Snowman, only horrifying. Richard tries to kill it, which seems pretty stupid, considering how they thought it was dead a minute ago. That goes about as well as you’d expect, and after slaughtering the goons and taking Richard’s arm, the corpse kneels before Integra and addresses her as “Master.”

Richard apparently knew nothing of this, but the corpse seems to recognize him, at least as far as a Hellsing who’s not fit to head the family. As Integra shoots Richard dead, the corpse introduces himself as Alucard, the name her family has always called him.

One thing I find interesting here is that I could have sworn the Hellsing Ultimate anime established that Richard had poisoned Arthur, presumably thinking he would have a clear shot at the inheritance. But it’s never mentioned here. Maybe this was something they added in, because honestly, it just makes too much sense. The implication of this flashback is that there are certain secrets in the Hellsing Family that only got passed down from parent to child. Arthur and Richard’s father must have known about Alucard, and Arthur was likely the one who sealed him up in the basement in the first place, but neither of them said a word about him to Richard. Maybe if they had, Richard might have thought twice before trying to take over. Like the Cheddar Priest, he thought he had it all figured out, but he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Back in the present day, Alucard is on the shooting range with Seras, teaching her how to shoot. Seras already knows how to fire a gun, but Al wants her to hit targets at greater distances, using The Force a vampiric “third eye.” He demonstrates by shooting a target one kilometer away, and hitting it perfectly. For some reason, Integra is reading the paper nearby, and reminiscing about the her first meeting with Alucard ten years ago. For some reason, she takes umbrage with the idea that she’s not still a “little girl” like she was back then. Seras even ribs her a bit, which ticks Integra off. Of course, Seras wouldn’t think Integra’s a “little girl”. Integra’s a few years older than she is.

The main point of all of this is that it establishes why Alucard works for Integra, and what they did with Seras after Alucard turned her into a vampire. One way or another, Seras is just drafted to fight the Vampire Wars, or whatever they call it. I find this kind of unsatisfying, because the anime didn’t expand on it either. Seras just wakes up in the mansion, and Integra tosses her a uniform and says “Get dressed, kid, your shift starts in twenty minutes.”

I think Seras wants to work for the Hellsing Organization, partly because she has nowhere else to go, and partly because she admires Alucard and wants to join his cause. But it’s never established that Seras has a choice in the matter. It’s implied that Alucard is magically bound to the Hellsing family. Integra called him “the research” that her “father and the others were doing.” Like, you can’t just have a vampire work for you, you have to do stuff to him to make him obey. I don’t think they’re mind-controlling Al per se. He seems fully aware of what his role is, and he’s totally comfortable in it. But he’s not just doing this voluntarily, either. Integra has some sort of power over him, and my assumption is that Seras inherited that same quality when Alucard turned her. So now she’s bound to Integra’s orders in the same way.

But there’s a lot of unanswered questions in this. I would think Alucard would be expressly forbidden from making his own ghouls or vampire broods. Yet he drank Seras’ blood without any problems. Maybe he’s allowed to do it if he has permission? That might be it. But then he brings her back to Integra, and I assume she has to make the decision to either keep Seras or destroy her. I mean, Seras is handy to have on the team, sure, but if this was a good idea, why didn’t they have Alucard do this before? I guess the situation just never came up.

I think a lot about what might have happened if the Cheddar Priest had turned her into a vampire. Would she have become loyal to him? He said she would have free will, but she’s pretty deferential to Alucard, so what’s that about? And if she had become a vampire and turned against the Priest, would Al have allowed her to live? He was on a mission to destroy vampires, so I would think he would have shot first and asked questions later. Well, let’s move on.

Chapter 3 jumps ahead to August 12, so Seras has been with the team for a little over a month now. A bunch of murders have taken place in Birmingham (England, not Alabama), and this time no one waits around to call in Hellsing, though they are still surprised to find out she’s a woman.

This time, the culprit is on the move, and Integra deduces that they’re choosing specific households full of “devout Christians” and spacious walls to write “blasphemous anti-Christian messages.” Since they’re moving along Route 17, Integra has a rough idea of where they’ll strike next.

I don’t know what the point of the “blasphemous messages” or seemingly ritual killings is supposed to be, since the killers are just this young vampire couple who only seem to be interested in this for immortality and power. Their goal seems to be to kill thirteen families, and “they’ll” see to it that they get stronger. I don’t know if this means some other party has put them up to this, or maybe they mean “they” as in all the families they’re killing. It’s like this is an initiation ritual or something, except we’ve already seen Seras become a vampire, and she didn’t have to do anything like this to seal the deal.

Then again, maybe the point of this chapter is to demonstrate that vampires take a while to get all their powers. When Alucard confronts them, he scolds them, not for their string of murders, but for their lack of conviction, and their inability to transform or fight without guns. So maybe this couple was trying to jumpstart the process by feeding on several dozen people in a short span of time. But Al seems to think that isn’t how it works. I don’t fully understand his moral code, but he doesn’t seem to object to vampires on principle. Being a vampire is fine with him, so long as you have a purpose to it. If you’re only in it for immortality and power, with no other reason, then he doesn’t respect you. Seras wanted to live, but not necessarily forever, and I think she wanted power, but only enough to fight against evil. That’s what sets her apart in Alucard’s eyes.

So he kills the boy, but the girl escapes out the window, but Alucard already had that move scouted.

I’m not sure who’s saying “No!” here. Maybe the girl vampire running down the road. Anyway, Alucard put Seras on the roof of the house before he went inside, just in case anyone tried to make a break for it. So all she has to do is shoot down the runner before she’s out of range. Except she’s 600 meters away, it’s night time, and Seras doesn’t have a scope for her gun. But Al reminds her to use her “third eye” and it works.

After it’s over, Seras realizes that she didn’t even feel the recoil of the gun, and she can see in the dark with no trouble at all. She wonders what’s happening to her, but that seems like a dumb question to ask one month after turning into a vampire. I’m guessing the first few weeks of it didn’t feel all that different to her, and she probably knew she’d get stronger and better at shooting guns, but now that it’s actually happening it feels a lot stranger than she expected it to be. In the anime, Seras also points out that she can hear Alucard talking to her in her mind, which is also weird, but I guess she’s got plenty of other weird stuff to process now.

Back at the base, Integra considers the recent increase in vampire attacks. They’re all jobbers, like this couple Al and Seras killed, and none of them have any particular agenda, except to kill people. She begins to wonder if someone’s making all these vampires just to cause trouble. Hmmm...

So, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, but this foreshadows Milennium quite nicely, but are we saying Milennium made vampires out of that boy and girl? Were they behind the Cheddar Priest as well? Also, “two” doesn’t seem like a huge increase in vampire incidents, so I guess there have been some other vampires running around between Chapters 1 and 3. Oh well.

#hellsing #2021hellsingliveblog #alucard #seras victoria #sir integra hellsing #peter farguson... is not invited #haha you're not in the hellsing manga farguson you suck

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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

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mtmte liveblog issue 35

ooooh baby functionist universe time

the cover with the neon ‘everything is fine’ sign is rlly good but also the pile of dead data stick bots makes me so sad omg noooo they're so cute leave them alone :(

minimus and rewind...! its so cool seeing them interact

also I just love the crowd shot, and you can immediately see that there are a ton of data stick bots like rewind around - which isn't what we’re used to at all

also some good ole totalitarian govt stuff like the ‘you are our eyes’ sign (which, in retrospect, is fucking evil damnnnn)

also I'm so [eyezoom] on this functionist universe stuff bc like, this is basically the only time we ever see dominus be a character (rather than hearing abt him thru other characters), and even so he remains pretty ambiguous

like, minimus clearly isn't thrilled that dominus didn't show up to see him at the space airport or w/e when they've been apart for two million years - and even tho we later see why he didn't show up, it still shows that there's some tension there

the amount of crowd shots in this issue is insane

oooof, the fact that they sold luna 2 - and to the black box consortia, who we just heard about last chapter when they previously got into a space battle w/the galactic council and the djd

fu!minimus being part of the primal vanguard is interesting, I wanna see more about that. what was he doing w/them for 2 million years?

rewind just casually saying this completely fucked stuff, like that the govt ‘outlawed the intellectual class’ and ‘deported the knock-offs’ (which I'm assuming is cold constructed bots?)

I really like the sense we get thru minimus and rewind’s convo that all of this fucked up stuff has happened slowly enough that its become almost normal - like, they talk about it casually, even though its clear they don't necessarily agree with any of it

plus the sense of ‘even if things get really bad ill be okay’ that both rewind and minimus seem to adhere to - rewind having been upgraded from being in the disposable class due to his connection w/dominus, and minimus saying ‘I like to think that obsolescence is something that happens to other people’

I love all the fucked up signage this issue. ‘take pride in being a means to an end,’ yikes

god and the fact that there isn't MORE data sticks, there's just LESS of other alt modes bc of how many alt modes the govt has wiped out completely...

oof, and continuing the whole ‘slow change’ thing - minimus saying that ‘the council never touches the astro class,’ and maybe that used to be true, but the govt will keep pushing that line, clearly...

and we get to see minimus’s alt mode! altho we the readers know that this isn't minimus’s true form...

‘amazing, the lengths some people will go to cross class boundaries,’ minimus says, as if he isn't doing exactly what rewinds describing, but even moreso as a loadbearer wearing an entire suit of armor

and then the casual public execution of the last lunabot...oof.

love the ‘cybertron. the present day’ text overlay...I was so confused about this when I first read it lmao. I figured it had to be some sort of au/quantum nonsense but STILL

back on the lost light, chromedome is going full kool-aid man on rewinds door

mannnnn I absolutely love the plotline of rewind 2 and chromedome 1...im so glad the story acknowledges that they ARE different, they did experience different stuff on their own lost lights, and rewind 2 being a quantum duplicate doesn't mean he had the same experiences as rewind 1...

and I love so much that chromedome just Doesn't Get It, bc of course he wouldn't - he’s too relieved that rewind is back to even consider that its not quite the same, that the rewind he was forced to blow up is still dead (which is a fucked up thought, so of course chromedome, the master of pushing the past away and moving right along, would want to avoid thinking about that in favor of continuing his relationship w/rewind 2)

it also makes a lot of sense that rewind, who records everything and puts a huge emphasis on history/the past, would be hyperaware of all the differences between him and rewind 1, and his chromedome and this chromedome

AUGHHHH and chromedome referring to an offer he made to rewind that was pretty clearly ‘if your memories of the djd slaughter are too much, I can remove them for you’ ooooof...I love these two so much, like...their absolute opposite approaches to trauma is fascinating

oooh mannnnn and then rewind starts ‘remembering’ stuff from the functionist universe...the plot thickens...!

I really like how one of the main ‘things’ in a lot of tf universes is energon/energy shortages, its interesting when the angle is kinda like, ‘energon is a finite resource and the methods to obtain more often involve destroying other planets,’ that's a pretty unique, alien problem for the tfs to have

it also makes sense that the functionists would form partially in response to that (perceived) shortage, and any sort of scarcity would push them further into their extremist views

I like how expressive the characters with visors are...its cute...

poor rewind has to go thru So Much

WHY can just anyone go into the morgue and touch the dead bodies. I mean I guess megatron being one of the captains explains why he’s in there, but that still shouldn't be allowed

‘megatron mountain’ vhbjdkshfbjskfbhhk that's so fucking funnyyyyy I love rodimus....I quote that line a lot, especially when watching g1 lmao

the fact that swerve diluting his engex bc he’s a cheapskate saved everyone's s lives is amazing lmao

also like...damn brainstorm sure tried to murder Literally Everyone huh. like I guess the logic would be that if he succeeded in changing the past it wouldn't matter that they had died there cause the timeline wouldn't exist, but STILL. I guess that shows how confident brainstorm was in his plan

it makes so much sense somehow that rung doesn't drink. and we’ve seen firsthand why magnus doesn't lol

mannnn that panel of brainstorm shooting magnus with some wacky beam and causing the magnus armor to fall off in vehicle mode...Super Cool, just peak mad scientist vibes there

ok but if minimus switches to alt mode when ultra magnus does - as we see here, where minesweeper-minimus is inside big-ole-car-magnus - does that mean that inside the minesweeper is turbofox-minimus?? I want to seeeee

ghsdufjkbvksadfbhjs the panels of rodimus telling megatron that brainstorm time travelled are so fucking funny

and megatrons rant about how absolutely bonkers the lost light is....hvbhjdskfbasjh that's so funny oh my god. like yeah dude you're right and you gotta roll w/it sorry

'on this ship, a minor breakdown is practically a rite of passage’ vbjdsnfbkasdfn its true and I love it

goddddddd it kills me how at this point in the story its So Obvious to everyone that brainstorm travelled back in time to do evil decepticon double agent stuff - and we as the reader can even buy that bc brainstorm has been so sketchy until now, and nothing he’s done contradicts what rodimus suggests - but it turns out in the end, it was all just for love. AUGHHHHHHHH its about the LOVE!!!! that's why I love this arc so much.

back in the functionist universe - god I cant believe rewind waited until Now to reveal to minimus that dominus has a tv face...like I get that that's a difficult topic to bring up in conversation but like, a little sooner might've been good hbvhjkdhnfbjaksl

oh man it hurts...rewind saying that they're in a ‘blind spot...’ oh man :(

rebel rewind, tho!! I love it sm

oh man and rewind never even broke the news about dominus to minimus oof. that's a tough reveal

MANNN I really like the whole ‘flathead’ thing, its so awful and brutal. its such a logical extension of empurata, and as dominus says, once people get used to seeing empurata’d bots, it loses its punch...and the flatheads thing is even more invasive

and writing wise, both empurata and the tv-heads are such good devices to show evil govt bs. I talk abt it a lot but I like all the ways jro gets creative with the ‘alien robots’ thing; a lot of these concepts wouldn't work at all with humans or other organic aliens

GODDD and dominus’s chilling speech being interrupted by the functionist propaganda....fucking horrifying I love it

also seeing dominus here is fascinating - clearly the council managed to pin him down enough to turn him into a flathead, but they never discovered his true alt mode...same with minimus, actually

the cog is so fucking ominous. just floating there...

and the council is scary too! their names, and the fact that they all look the same...seems about right for an evil alien governing body

mannnnnnn and then the reveal that the data slug alt-modes will be ‘recalled’ next...rewind noooooo...and the one council guy even admitted that they still served some purpose in society, BUT that their ability to mass store data made them dangerous to the goverment...evil!!

meanwhile, rodimus doesn't know enough about science to be appropriately frightened about their timeline being wiped from existence, so he’s having a grand ole time

‘no one’s nodding, perceptor’ bvhjdbfasdfhbk their expressions....the lost light command crew are all clearly team ‘leave the science to the scientists’ lmao

I do love the paradox stuff, and brainstorm’s way around it all

‘so I'm not allowed to take an interest in magic?’ hvbjhsdkfbjhkdf ily sm rodimus

but also like....rodimus suggests a parallel universe could've formed and perceptor is like ‘no way, that's not scientifically possible,’ as if brainstorm didn't basically defy science by time travelling at all...and more to the point, functionist cybertron DID get created, so rodimus was actually RIGHT this time

love that we’re already seeing perceptor’s admiration for brainstorm and his invention even here....sapiosexual mfer

a time travel chase....so beautiful...I love sci-fi so much

seriously time travel is one of my favorite tropes ever, this arc was inevitably gonna be my fav

‘he’s going to kill orion pax.’ DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN

meanwhile, on functionist cybertron...aw, is that bulkhead? great cameo! oh wait what's going on with all the data sticks...? uh oh!

the fact that their heads just EXPLODE....soooo fucked!!

god and then the council picks up their dead bodies, for...probably something evil, I’d assume

god and then dominus got even more fucked....

‘there are certain words you cant afford to lose’ ;_; REWIND....GODDD IM SAD

GOD GOD GOD the reveal that minimus has CAMERAS in his EYES GODDDDDDDDDDDD that's so FUCKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and rewinds reaction...ME TOO BITCH TF!!!!!!

all the ‘you are our eyes’ messages are even worse now huh!!

they did it while minimus was asleep...that's so fuckedddd

FUCKKKK and then rewind’s impassioned rebel speech, which I adore.....rewind ily sm...he’s such a good revolutionary, I wish we could've seen him leading an anti-funtionist rebellion....BUT THEN ‘oh? what about the back up?’ and its just like HHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and then his head starts smoking and we see another billboard, but this time it says ‘WE are your eyes’ - is the implication that everyone is now a surveilling spy, whether they like it or now, so now it’s ‘we?’ like, we’re all in it together, spying on each other! ooooof

also. this is like the third time rewind has died on-screen in this series lmao (well, if you count the fake-out death where he thought he’d be cancelled out during slaughterhouse)...he ALMOST died in issue 12 too....poor rewind

‘the custom-made now’ is such a great title. jro always killin it w/the titles

plus ‘elegant chaos’ is such a cool arc name. fucking epic

M A N NNNNNNNN THIS ISSUE WAS BALLER...this ARC is baller....I talked a lot hvbhdjkhfndsak lmao but there's so much to talk abt!!! I love the look into the functionist universe, I love seeing alternate versions of characters and settings so much, and I love time travel, so this issue is basically made for me

plus I fuckign love alien robot politics and seeing the absolute control the govt has over cybertronian society in the functionist universe is fascinating - plus from a storytelling standpoint, I think it was brilliant to show the ‘other side,’ aka what things would've been like without the war...which is something ill talk about later when its more directly addressed in the story but man do I enjoy that

basically I love this arccccc I cant wait to read more hhhhhhh

#lj rereads mtmte

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tiptoe39 · 4 years

Photo

That is just so sickeningly sweet. They’re adorable.

Two things to talk about here. One, Yanli’s narratively convenient illness, which reappears regularly. This time, it’s used to bring Yanli and Wen Qing into the same room together, so we can have the following moment:

Wen Qing has a moment, looking at the two siblings, and is thinking about her own relationship with Wen Ning. I don’t think it goes to far to say that she’s a little jealous; even with Yanli being sort of frail, she and Wei Wuxian are clearly able to connect on the same level. Wen Qing doesn’t have that luxury with Wen Ning; his issues, and their family situation, mean she has to watch out for him and protect him constantly. He will never be able to keep up with her intellect, and she will never be able to talk to him as an equal.

(As I liveblog this, I’m finding this concept of “treating people as equals” surprisingly relevant. I guess you could call it the theme of the story -- how do you treat the people above you, the people below you, the people you admire and love, and the people you scorn? We’ll see all of this.)

Anyway, Wen Qing watches them, then puts her head down. When Jiang Cheng thanks her for helping Yanli, she shrugs it off. It’s fair to say that keeping her head down keeps her safe -- surely that’s the case in a physical sense considering the Wen clan. But it’s also protecting her emotionally. Wen Qing has long since learned not to hope for too much. The one dream she has, she mentioned in the earlier scene -- to take Wen Ning and get away from everything. Thoughts of romance, or dreams of having a different relationship with her brother, are non-starters. We’ll see whether or not any of that changes as we go along.

#there's also the interpretation that wen qing just thinks jiang cheng is a dork #but let me be deep that's what liveblogging is all about #wen qing #tippy liveblogs the untamed #untamed episode 5 #the untamed episode 5 #the untamed rewatch #untamed #the untamed #mdzs #cql

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lotus-mirage · 4 years

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Untamed episode 25 liveblog!

right let’s see what goes downhill next

The slow romantic zooming on Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan is kind of funny - mostly because I wasn’t expecting him at all

Oh he’s actually excited that’s kind of adorable. I guess they have been working things out. Sort of.

Aaand the fluffier romcom-esque bit has ended again. Darn.

The way wwx waved at his sister by shaking his flute around was really funny.

Wow Meng Yao is being given a lot of speeches. I kind of feel like this could easily be setting him up to take the fall when something goes wrong.

They what

the ‘special activity’ involves chained members of a defeated clan standing in front of the targets

I see

I’m feeling a little less charitable towards Meng Yao with his smile at that

That’s a good way around it, I guess - if you jump high enough then they’re not blocking the path and in less danger

I’m kind of halfway hoping it goes the superhero comic route and they shoot the chains, but I also feel like that’s not going to happen

Oh, are they leading them somewhere else? That’s good. Nice job dude.

Again with the borrowing of the headband? In public this time?? Discretion, seriously.

Oh, wait - the prisoners are still there. Darn.

Uh. We know he’s a good archer, but there are people’s lives on the line here. I feel like blindfolding himself is not a good plan.

Was this what he wanted the headband for? I feel like it’d be too narrow.

Six at once!?

Good show, but terribly risky

Wait, seriously? He’s gonna do that for the whole hunt?

I guess it did sort of pay off - the rest of the shooting got cancelled.

He’s not leaking magic while playing - not sure if he’s just making music?

Okay! Evidently not.

...Did Lan Wangji get that close without hearing him?

Okay the romantic staring is a little funny when you notice how long it goes on. Sweet, though.

That’s not really enough foliage to hide two people in stark clothing.

Is Jin Zixuan trying to flirt? I honestly cannot tell.

Uhuh. And there’s absolutely no way that declaring that you will be using the ‘dirty malign tricks’ could possibly come back to bite you? Particularly when antagonizing the clan that seems to currently be the strongest??

Ohhh dear

Okay! So the whole ‘ill-tempered’ thing that LWJ was concerned about was not, in fact avoided! Previous examples of what I assumed to be this were probably just trauma! This is something else that bodes very very badly!

Ooooh Jiang Yanli’s angry

Yes yes get him

Yes yes yes

Wait, Meng Yao’s father was the sect leader, isn’t he? I guess calling Madame Jin ‘mother’ must be a formality - she certainly doesn’t seem to like him much.

And jeez, this little spat turned into like. A quarrel between major sects. Holy crud.

Woooow. Even Madame Jin is doing the ‘gossip 7 feet away from the subject’ thing.

Pfft, and now Jin Zixuan is having his confession in front of several major clan higher-ups. I guess pressure is helpful in this case?

Wow okay she doesn’t even bow back to wwx. Wasn’t she going on about politeness?

Hmm. That last comment from Meng Yao had some pretty ominous music behind it.

This forest does not have enough low vegetation for this much eavesdropping

!!!! Wen Qing!!!

She doesn’t look to be doing too well.

Yikes, from a clan that’s always going on about manners...

This is the longest series of stares I think we’ve seen from people who are not romantically coded

Well that’s an interesting conversation

There are implications there, but I sure don’t know what they are. Besides the obvious, of course.

End notes:

Well, reputations for both the Jiang clan as a whole and WWX are being damaged. Not unexpected, but y’know. Still hurts to watch.

Jin Zixuan is growing on me! Although I guess I’m mostly laughing at him now, even if it’s vaguely fond.

WWX’s outburst was worrying, but so are a lot of things lately, so that’s just filed away under ‘ominous WWX things’.

I’m happy to see Wen Qing back! Although she doesn’t seem to be doing too well, and I’m not sure our protagonists are going to be able to improve her situation (long term) very much. Politics have proven not to be their strong points. Little bit worrisome that she’s still by herself, although I do wonder how she got away if some of the Wen remnants are still in chains.

#the untamed #mdzs #untamed liveblog #my thoughts

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toooldforfandom-liveblogs · 4 years

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RWBY S07E09 - "As Above, So Below"

I feel my poor English skills are failing me once again since I can't parse the title. Is it about comparing Atlas and Mantle? Maybe saying that both are the same? In any case, the previous episode was very setup heavy so my main hope is that there's some payoff for that setup. Let's do this!

Is Watts plan to destroy the kingdom via Grimm attrition? Just keep lowering the mood until the Grimm can't be contained anymore? That feels weirdly risky considering he's in Atlas too.

That must've been an awkward re-entry into the room for Penny and Winter.

I mean... he's right. It's also been one of the main questions this season, with all of RWBY expressing opinions about this.

Oooh, this is fun. I thought turning off the heating was part of Jacques/Watts plan but it looks like the Doctor is doing things on his own again.

Relatable content from Jacques. Who'd have thought.

Aw, Penny.

Jacques is on the verge of having a panic attack. I like that they are animating background details like that.

Can't deny I wanted to see how Ironwood got out of doing the truth test but this is great too.

So expressive!

* facepalm * Oh Jacques, you stupid, stupid man.

Yesss, suffer. What a disgraceful rat.

oh my god this is amazing

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I didn't expect to laugh out loud in a scene where Jacques finally gets what he deserves but there you go.

...that seems ill-adviced.

For a second I thought it was going to _really_ blow up there.

I can't stop laughing at Jacques. "It was only about the election, the murders were an accident!"

This is _so_ good.

Time for Penny to go into the mainframe Hackers (1995) style

Welp. He had the opportunity to show that he cares about the people but nope.

Robyn is my hero.

Whoops, that's confidential.

And suddenly Ironwood's paranoid levels just increased because only his _most_ trusted know about it. It's amazing that at the start I was convinced that one of the Ace Ops was going to betray Ironwood and in the end it was Yang and Blake.

I do wish he told Robyn though, her "down to earth" perspective would be really useful.

Oh no. This is the worst possible response.

Is it automatic or orchestrated by Watts?

I can't believe Penny lied. This isn't "exactly like beacon," this is "Beacon was a drop in the ocean compared to the disaster that Mantle is about to become"

I wish they had shown the robots being actually effective at least once before this. If only to have at least some sort of tension here instead of just counting down the minutes until the _real_ help arrives.

Ruby and Weiss look weirdly blank here.

Oh. That's interesting.

This is... not what I expected.

l mean, it's very good that it _is_ happening, but I thought Ironwood was going to cling to his secrets up to the last possible moment. But, of course, we already had a "bad" headmaster, it would have been a bit of a repeat to have to fight yet another one.

Aw.

Those green eyes...

I just went back to V3 and... is that Neo?

Welp.

Narrator: He doesn't

Also, that interaction was cute. I remember some people exploding about White Rose on twitter after maybe this episode? I wonder if it was because of this.

Cute.

Please tell me Ren is re-evaluating his choices after seeing Ironwood flip.

He looks shell-shocked. What is the truth going to do to him? He _could_ give up, every thing he has done has been because he really believed Salem could be defeated. All the sacrifices, every thing he gave up "for the greater good" could be useless from a certain point of view.

I think it's important too that it's Oscar who's telling Ironwood, not Ruby. There has to be a plot reason why they switched characters.

...that's very Ozpin.

Did they merge already without Oscar noticing? This plus his scene with Ruby earlier makes me think Oscar's drama is going to have a bit more focus next season.

He reacted surprisingly well, but another flip would have maybe too much? But there's still enough episodes left that something could happen but with Neo there I feel there won't be enough time to slowly deliberate what to do.

I had to rewind a couple of seconds to realize Weiss is keeping Ruby, herself and Vine upright since there seem to be no summons outside.

I still think Clover is too cool. Like wow, this is action movie hero material. Maybe his good luck is going to fail him at some point and Qrow is going to save him?

I was wondering where Penny was but since she can fly there's no need for her to be here.

Ruby can literally just fly now.

He's so happy.

I still don't like her dumb outfit but her facial expressions are great. I wonder what they were looking for inside Schnee Manor. They don't really care about Watts plan, or the Grimm or even about Ironwood's Amity project.

But infiltrating Jacques's dinner party feels a bit too much to find out where Ruby is, especially if they didn't know if she was actually around. I guess news of Atlas new huntsmen got around.

This episode took almost all the balls the writers had in the air and gracefully put them down, just so they could start juggling chainsaws.

The arrest of Jacques was one of the most satisfying scenes yet in this show. He’s had it coming for years, and how great was it that it was Weiss of all people who did it? Just amazing.

With Jacques arrest the election plot is over (with maybe Robyn getting a seat in the council later on,) Ruby’s secret is also in the open, along with Ironwood’s. The “internal” conflict seems to be over, leaving only the external ones, with Neo and Cinder, and Watts and Tyrian. And the Grimm but those are just fodder for fight scenes instead of plot progression.

I’m always a bit disappointed after a fight since they are mostly spectacle but I’m looking forward towards a Cinder/Ruby one. Penny and Tyrian could also be interesting. Although that one depends on Penny expressing what she feels during the fight. But she’s too powerful for any character on their own so I guess she’ll be stuck fighting Grimm.

Robyn’s place in the story seems to be over now that she knows the truth. There’s no reason for her to oppose Ironwood, especially now that the general wants to save Mantle, and without that she’s just one more body to throw into the battle. I hope I’m wrong and she and her team end up being more than one more fight scene.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the remaining plot threads get resolved. There’s Winter’s maiden status, Watts and Tyrian “real” aim (the staff?), Whitley (although I expect little more than one scene with Weiss at the end of the season) and… well, Atlas has to go down in flames somehow, right? Maybe there’ll be a choice to make there, lose Atlas or lose something else.

What else, what else. Oh right, Oscar. He seems to have merged or begun that process. There’s not a lot of time left in the season to explore that but maybe he’ll realize what’s happening just before the end to set up that plot thread for next volume. His interaction with Ruby was just cute enough to trigger my “this will lead to pain somehow” alarms because nothing nice is free in RWBY.

I think that’s all for now, until next time!

PS: I recently made a Patreon, please check it out if you want to support me and these liveblogs more directly.

#rwby #rwby liveblog #rwby v07e09

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wolffyluna · 4 years

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TMA Liveblog: Up To Ep 40

I’ve finished season 1! And can I just say: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(Edit: I meant to post this yesterday, but apparently this got stuck in my drafts. It’s been freed now, hopefully.)

I’m in an awkward position with this liveblog. You see, I like to write up my thoughts about a few episodes at a time, not one by one. So I had some thoughts and theories relating to Taken Ill and Lost and Found-- that got more or less confirmed by Human Remains. So I don’t get to sound as smart and with it any more. (Also, there’s been so much in these episodes that I might be forgetting to say something.)

The thing that got confirmed by Human Remains was the question of how the Masquerade works in this setting. ...which is actually two questions, really. One: Is the masquerade supernaturally or mundanely enforced or both? That is, is the masquerade enforced by people being supernaturally bad at noticing the supernatural (a lá Changeling the Lost) or by mundane means of tampering with files and shutting up witnesses (a lá Vampire the Masquerade, though there is some supernatural enforcement there too.) Two: How harshly is the Masquerade enforced? Are people who find out about the Masquerade told ‘please don’t spread it, okay?’, or do people get “shut up.”

By Taken Ill, I was pretty sure the Masquerade was at least partially mundanely enforced. Losing ~20 people ‘in the system’ is pretty fucked up, to the point where hiding their deaths is almost less malicious? And if you wanted to cover up a horrific outbreak at a care home-- making the paperwork look like it was decommissioned earlier is not a bad way to do it. (As would be any living casualties having ‘work place accidents’). I wasn’t so sure about how strongly it was enforced, but their definitely seemed to be at least blackmail (for ex in Old Passages)

...and then we found poor old Gertrude. And well. That answers both questions.

(Also, Gertrude might have been working with the Lightless Flame? Or having someone else work it on her? One of the two? Argh?)

I’m worried about real!Sasha. I hope she’s... okay. Going to be okay. Going to be okay as she can be.

I also have precisely zero clue what was going on in Sasha and Elias’ end of the Institute. See, Jon and Martin seem like pretty reliable witnesses. They have no reason to lie. Tim was off his face-- but again, no reason to lie. Elias is evasive and I do not trust him not to lie. And Fake!Sasha is obviously a lying liar who lies? So I have no fucking clue what was going on there, because all the narrators are unreliable and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghh.

(Also can I say I do not trust Elias? He keeps trying to avoid finding or proving the supernatural in a way that is fucking weird.)

Also, uhm, I’m worried about Jon and Tim. ...not just mentally speaking (though I am super worried about that too), but physically speaking? If I have understood the chain of events right, Jon and Tim opened a trapdoor, had a bunch of worms fall on their heads, and then got CO2-ed to heck and back? Like, I’m pretty sure that much CO2 would fuck you up for awhile on it’s own-- but the quarantine was only ~24 hours, which seems alarmingly short? And pretty darn short for the medical treatment they probably need. Like, they had worms burrowing in their flesh? That would be a lot of open wounds, and fairly deep ones too. Do Jon and Tim have enough blood in them? How are their wounds being kept clean? How much antibiotics are they on, and is it enough? Also, what sort of quarantine is only 24 hours, jeegus.

I’m also worried about everyone’s mental states, too. It’s interesting, because we keep seeing people have obsessive, paranoid, unhealthy ways of dealing with fear/danger-- that work because of the danger they are in. Jon’s ‘I have to know EVERYTHING’ may not be working out for him so hot, but it’s not going badly, and Martin hiding fire extinguishers everywhere and the corkscrew actually saved multiple people. But it’s still hurting them, it’s just stopping them from being dead. (Tim’s bizarre chipperness probably also counts as this too, but I can’t put as firm a finger on it.)

I made a comment a little while ago about how I’d avoided The Magnus Archives, because I thought it had a lot of blood and screaming in it, and I don’t do well with those, but it turns out it’s a much more quiet form of horror, and that’s fine with me-- yeah. Was Infestation arguably ‘worth it’? I’d say so. But goddamn. Jeez. No. All you need is fire and it’d be the full Wolffy Nope Trifecta (and I’m going to count the fire alarm for a good portion of the fire nope, because seriously.)

...but honestly “I feel like I’m being watched” was scarier.

Because it is traditional, it is time for some rampant tinfoil hattery: I think Michael Knifehands and the fractal weird shit are connected. Michael Knifehands sounds alarmingly like the person who replaced Graeme, except for being too tall. The thing that came out of the Ming vase is maybe less clearly Michael like, but it’s still a distinct possibility. And on a more tinfoil level: the statements with fractals seem to be the statements were fear of insanity, the fear of ‘reality is falling apart, and I don’t know if it’s just for me or if it’s for everybody, and both are terrifying’ seem to show up in fractal statements (eg Ivo Lensik’s father and Ming vase guy.) If I recall the spoilers I failed to dodge correctly, Michael has something to do with insanity. And on an even more tinfoil hat level: Fake!Sasha seems to only know about Sasha through observation. They kinda skip over details and are vague in odd places that imply it, anyway. Fake!Sasha is hella associated with the fractal table. ...and Fake!Sasha knows who Michael is, which implies either they’ve been watching Sasha for a long time, or they know Michael independently.

Also: Spiders and worms are not only separate things, but they are antagonistic towards each other. A spider is why the Archive team found the worms early than the worms planned.

Is Mikhaele a Michael? Because if there are two Michaels and a Mikhaele: what the heck, real Jon?

Also, I’m really confused by the statements not!Sasha(?) decided to steal. Stealing original!Sasha’s statement makes sense: it contains important information, and it could potentially be used to prove fake!Sasha is fake. But I’m a bit boggled by the calliope organ one being stolen, because it implies it’s important... and really, the calliope one? That’s an important one? Really? ...I’ll admit, part of my bafflement is because I found that episode negative levels of scary, because the morning before I listened to it, I encountered this:

youtube

Which kind of undercut the episode a touch. Just a tad.

And finally, I’m kicking myself a bit. You see, through the first season, I was playing a fun game called “Real Or Not?”, where I tried to guess which episodes contained real events, because maybe some where fake. ...and apparently all or most of the episodes are real. (Or, in universe real. You know what I mean.) We only heard the real ones! Which makes sense from a story telling perspective, but now it means I have to treat all of them as real. I can’t selectively ignore any of them any more. My theories have to be wholly consistent now. Damn!

#premium original content #wolffy listens to tma #the magnus archives

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journeysintowebcomics · 4 years

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Worm Liveblog #117

UPDATE 117: No Help for Anybody

Last time Francis had a feeling they had been transported into another world altogether, thanks to the Simurgh causing havoc and what not. It was shown she has the capacity of making portals, after all! Now let’s continue.

The two-or-maybe-three-if-Cody-is-Ballistic Travelers are exploring the neighborhood, trying to find help for those who need medical attention. There are monsters prowling around, and there’s a lot of noise out there that hint things are looking mighty bad. If they go in the wrong direction, I really don’t think they’ll be okay. They have no powers for the time being, after all.

During their walk, they hear something that sounded like a scream. Marissa immediately suggests they should go help whoever screamed, while Cody argued that’d be putting themselves in danger and therefore should ignore the scream. Francis, being the tie-breaker, decides to go help whoever screamed – not because he’s feeling particularly charitable, but because there’s a small chance whoever is in need of help has medical knowledge they can take advantage of. Good reason as any to go help someone, really!

Without waiting for Cody to argue this further, Francis starts running in direction of where the scream came from.

Turns out the screaming came from a fast food restaurant that has been boarded up. Inside there are a few people, trying to be safe from the monsters roaming outside, but they weren’t successful. One of the people is currently trapped by one of the monsters. Say...

The monsters included a man with a neck three times the usual length and a gnarled hump on his back that was plated in armor. His arms split in two at the elbow, with one set of hands and one set of limbs that ended in built-in scythes. He was perched on a table, cackling. His jacket was clearly borrowed, ill-fitting around his hump, and he kept having to push the sleeves up so they wouldn’t cover his hands or weapons.

His partner held their victim, the ninth person in the room. She was big, maybe seven feet tall, and heavy in a way that met some middle ground between being muscular and being fat. Big boned might have been the most apt way to describe her, in a literal sense. Her skin was thick, her features blunt: she had a porcine nose and cauliflower ears, her fingers were stubby and her lips so fat that they curled away from her comparatively tiny teeth. She might have weighed four hundred pounds, and the way she was easily holding her victim in the air suggested she was strong enough to kill someone with one good punch. She wore only a set of grays that looked like a prisoner uniform. He could make out the first half of the word that was printed across her shoulders: GWER-.

Rounding out the group was a young woman. Something was off about her, besides the obvious physical changes. Thick black horizontal lines striped her body, crossing her eyes like a blindfold, extending from the corners of her mouth, lining her chin and tracing down her neck. By the time they reached her fingers, her skin was more black than white. She wore the same prison grays, but had donned a jacket and boots. Her blond hair was straight, her bangs cut severely across her forehead.

I’m sorry for copypasting everything, but I wanted to get the descriptions here. It’s weird...they’re not as...inhuman as I expected when it was mentioned they were monsters. Frankly, they don’t sound too dissimilar to how some parahumans look like, especially those that suffer strong mutations. I also notice they have some sort of clothing, hm...

Could it be these monsters were brought from another world with parahumans? That the Simurgh targeted a parahuman prison, and brought its inhabitants here? I mean, it’s not too farfetched. Parahumans can look real strange, like Crawler. Compared to him, these aren’t too bad.

It seems like one of these three isn’t entirely on board with the ‘tormenting civilians’ thing. Matryoshka, she’s called. The other two push a civilian towards her, expecting her to do something. Most likely use her power, with effects currently unknown to the Travelers and to me.

Looks like Matryoshka can...fold people into herself? Perhaps as a manner of storage, or to take something from them? Sure would fit her name. It’s temporary, though, at most a couple hours, and these three intend to use her powers to escape the quarantine. They’re as good as dead, there’s no way they’ll be captured and sent to the Birdcage. Given how they arrived into this world, they’re going to be executed.

Now that I think about it, the Travelers are real lucky they’re alive in the present How exactly did they manage to escape the quarantine? They don’t even have powers right now, they’re just civilians! Even harder to escape! Maybe they found a guard who sympathizes with them, someone who wasn’t aware they’re incredibly dangerous or didn’t have the willpower not to help them. Hm.

Since there’s a chance one of the people Matryoshka is about to fold may have medical knowledge to save Noelle and Luke, Francis jumps forth, going right ahead and stabbing one of the monsters-or-most-likely-parahumans. Good thing he carried a long weapon! Lets him keep his distance. He does rather well, for someone who would be pretty doomed in any other situation. The guy with the scythes is defeated, Matryoshka is targeted next.

No, Krouse made himself stop, took an account of what he was doing. He was getting carried away. He turned to run.

That reminds me, what is everyone else in this place doing? Are Mars and Cody hiding and letting Francis put himself in danger? I mean, that’s kind of the right thing to do – putting yourself in deadly danger is not smart – but I admit by now I expected someone to have intervened and tried to take Francis away.

The guy with the hump says Francis is brave and stupid – guilty as charged, really – and apparently decide to take him along? They’re talking a language I’m not sure if it��s invented or if it exists. Putting it into Google Translator gives me Gaelic, but it doesn’t give me a translation anyway. I guess that means it’s gibberish Mr. Wildbow made up?

Turns out Matroyshka does kind of absorb things from the people she folds! No indication if she decides what she takes or not. Either way, the monsters pin Francis down, and due to the stress of having the Simurgh’s weird-ass singing and having a scythe on his face, he kind of lets himself be taken by the song, and starts to reminisce.

“Noelle,” he mumbled.

“Francis?”

He winced. “Call me Krouse. Everyone but my mom does.”

“Krouse,” Noelle tried the word. “Okay. You want something?”

“Just wanted to talk. When we were marking each other’s papers in class, I got yours. I just wanted to say I like the way you think.”

Sounds like this may be the first time Francis and Noelle met. So that may be how the Simurgh manipulates people’s emotions to make them lash out and react...she makes them remember specific moments. Alright!

This first meeting didn’t really go well. Noelle and Francis certainly didn’t hit off right away, she seems to have been kind of cold towards him when he compliments her way of thinking. Mars soon approaches, and she’s also cold. I mean, I can certainly imagine Francis is kind of grating because...he’s kind of a jerk, but part of me wonders if this memory was tampered somehow. Wouldn’t be out of the question when it’s about the Simurgh making remember stuff.

“So I know exactly what to watch out for with you,” Marissa said. “At any given point in time, you’re pulling some nefarious prank, you’re manipulating others to get what you want, you’re making someone else look bad-”

Tampered or not, she’s saying the truth, haha!

This little flashback also shows how Francis got into the gaming group, she overhead them talking about it, and looks like Noelle got curious about if Francis played. Looks like Francis already knew Luke somewhat, too. Friends already? Regardless, the flashback is over when Mars screams, and not in the memory.

There’s Mars! Currently getting tossed around like a ragdoll. No sign of Cody. Maybe he died already. So, it seems it’s not Mars getting thrown around what made Francis fight again, it’s that they interrupted his reminiscing. Geez! And so he reacts like many people would like to react when someone wakes them up from a pleasant dream: displeased. And by displeased I mean holy crap, Francis, don’t stick your fingers into someone’s fresh wound.

He doesn’t hold himself back! He cuts the scythe guy’s throat. I’m blaming the Simurgh for this rather sudden burst of violence.

There’s Cody! Backed into a corner. Matryoshka doesn’t seem to be doing well, and the other monster is getting closer to Francis. Once he tells everyone to run and scatter, he runs too, and the monster keeps chasing him, without much trouble, until he has no option but to fight.

He stabbed at her hand with the knife, and felt a fierce agony tear through his own hand.

Blood welled out from his palm, warm as it ran down his arm to his elbow. Krouse screamed.

No, he didn’t stab himself in his own hand while he was trying to fight back – although I’m sure that’d happen to a lot of people. What happens is that this woman’s parahuman power is to reflect back damage. Doesn’t make her impervious, it just reflects back. That’s going to be a pain to fight, no pun intended.

Or not! A pair of parahumans take care of this, and not lightly. They pretty much set her on fire, and it doesn’t seem like the damage reflection activated, or they had a way to counter it. Oh well. What matters is that that woman is now deceased, and Francis is in no danger anymore.

His immediate action is to ask for help for Noelle. He doesn’t get to ask for it before getting interrupted.

“That was reckless,” Myrddin said, speaking over Krouse. “Attacking when we didn’t know the particulars of her power.”

I mean, when has Francis ever done something that’s a good idea against people with powers. Some things never change. One paragraph later, it turns out that was directed at the guy who set her on fire, not at Francis. Anyway! Brushing aside this embarrassing moment for me!

Francis keeps asking for help, they keep ignoring his words, instead notifying Dragon someone is in need of medical attention.

“Two hundred feet away, down your four o’clock, Armsmaster.”

Oh! This is Armsmaster! How neat. Here, let me amend what I said not long ago: “I mean, when has Armsmaster ever done something that’s a good idea at all”. Not thinking things through was his MO. He’s somewhat getting better at that now that Dragon is around.

“How are we for exposure?”

“You two are good for another seventeen minutes at the exposure you’re facing. Twenty if we push it. I can have a flight unit to you shortly.”

Aha, so it’s at least seventeen minutes before someone exposed to the Simurgh’s song is considered doomed and needs to be killed, I think. Well there’s absolutely no doubt to me by now Francis and pals have crossed the threshold already. It must have been around a couple hours. Funny how life can change that much in the matter of just a couple hours.

The fight against the Simurgh is going well, somehow, and they’re doubling down quarantine, most likely to ensure any parahumans brought by the portals don’t escape the perimeter. Dragon also notifies they’re taking some sort of measure, and the parahuman who is with Armsmaster – Myrddin, she’s called. I think I have heard that name before? – doesn’t like that measure, even asking Dragon to argue back. Dragon, in all her AI glory, states she’s just following orders.

I was about to ask if Armsmaster and Myrddin just ignoring Francis standing right there to a side, but then I reread and noticed Francis seems to have been turned into some kind of ghost. Trying to keep him hidden from the heroes, hm! Not that it’s a bad thing, Francis may be left for dead for all the exposure to the Simurgh. No wonder he wasn’t being listened to, he’s like...transparent now.

Among the rubble of the stuff that fell into this world, there’s a building that seems to have been part of a laboratory. Armsmaster wants to take a look and deduce from where all this came from, but Myrddin insists they have to get done with their task and get out. Minimize exposure, you know! And since the consequence of not doing that is, you know, death, I agree with her.

“I get bad interactions if I transition something in of one of my dimensions and back, or if I take things out of one dimension and put them into another. It doesn’t compartmentalize into the dimension properly if it’s been elsewhere too recently. Whether these people and objects came from somewhere halfway across the globe or some pocket dimension, I don’t think we want to test our luck and risk something disastrous.”

Krouse startled at that. Is that what happened to me? Some bad interaction of interdimensional crap?

Pretty unlikely. If Myrddin had used her power on him, I think she’d have said something, or Armsmaster would have noticed. Unless Francis means he being in this world in the first place, in which case, yeah, that’s what happened to you. Blame the flying Endbringer over there.

Is Armsmaster suggesting to use white phosphor for something? Because that’s not a good omen. My immediate thought is that he’s suggesting they use white phosphor to obliterate the perimeter. Needless to say, everyone and everything inside is toast if they do. I once read a book that had white phosphorus used, and the description of the effect was anything but pleasant. Better get out while you can, Francis, seems to me time’s running out.

Once Myrddin and Armsmaster leave, Francis is once again taken by his memories, this time of a less happy moment, when Noelle is unhappy and he doesn’t know why. She’s even saying the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ routine. They’re a pair, so this can’t be a breakup – a successful one, at least. The wording does hint she wants to get away from him, and that he has been a great person.

When she said she herself was why she wanted to break up, she meant it. Francis doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about, but judging by...

“Someone said, a little while ago,” Noelle spoke without looking at Krouse, “That I can’t really forge a good relationship with others until I have a good relationship with myself.”

...this, there’s something about herself she doesn’t like. Must be something rather big, if she can’t bring herself to have good relationship with others because of it.

Francis is being nice for once and is trying his best to be encouraging, telling her that she’s fantastic, but she insists they shouldn’t date. That opinion doesn’t change when Francis adds Noelle’s been happier ever since they started dating, and it’s not a platitude, Mars has said that too. But if Noelle says they should break up because this is bad for her, then he’s willing to accept it. Seriously, this has got to be the nicest Francis has been towards anyone in this entire story.

He even offers to leave the gaming team. She doesn’t want him to, and even tells him to forget she even mentioned this, conveniently leaving her thoughts a mystery to the reader. What could it be she’s feeling about herself that makes her dislike herself so much?

The memory ends, and Francis finds himself already rooting into the fallen laboratory, deciding to look around to see if there’s anything that could be of help, like a first aid kit. Well that’s going to be useful for Luke, but Noelle’s going to need something far better than that, if he finds any.

His eyes settled on a metal briefcase beneath the desk, within a few feet of the dead man’s hand.

His fingers crossed for a portable case of medical supplies, he set it down on the desk and popped it open. Disappointment overwhelmed him.

Six metal canisters recessed in black foam with slots cut out to hold them, paperwork was set in a flap in the lid.

He swore.

…newly purchased superpowers…

...

...well seeing how Alexandria got better from a terminal disease after getting superpowers, I guess that counts as something far better. She got a much worse deal than Alexandria did, though. Everything in Worm has been a continuous source of grief for her. She’s not happy with Francis because of how she feels about herself, she gets concussions and internal bleeding, and when she gets to have some sort of superpower, she gets one that’s so bad she has to be locked in a vault out of fear she’s going to destroy everything. Worm treats Noelle rather cruelly.

Also, I absolutely love how Armsmaster almost may have been able to stop the creation of an entire villain team if he had been allowed to check the laboratory. Thanks a lot, Myrddin, you are indirectly responsible for the creation of like five new villains. Stellar work. At least Armsmaster only created one!

Francis confirms these are certainly superpowers in a vial – courtesy of Cauldron, no doubt. Does Cauldron know the Travelers gained their powers from their serums? I imagine they may know, surely they must keep a record of what powers get sold.

Taking the metal case with him, Francis decides to return back to the rest of his friends and also Cody, unwittingly kickstarting some rather unfun days for them all except whoever won’t be part of the Travelers. Fun how a series of coincidences led to that. Seriously, so much happened because Francis was in the right place at the right time.

I’m still unsure what happened with Francis turning all intangible and invisible earlier, though. Was it really Myrddin, accidentally doing that? Or was it someone else? I don’t have it clear at all, I admit. If someone can send me a message about it I’d be real grateful.

Ending the update here!

Next time: next update

#worm #worm liveblog #webserial #liveblog #webserial liveblog

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blookmallow · 4 years

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i dont have the energy to go through all my outlast 2 screenshots right now, i have one liveblog post drafted that i was working on before, and now i have a huge pile of screenshots to go through again so there’ll be. at LEAST two more... play by play type posts lmao

so anyway the order’s gonna be kinda weird but my brain is screaming and ive been going through wiki pages for like 2 hours so heres. some thoughts and a lot of questions and some observations i think im. sort of starting to get it,

---

ok so... knoth believed the antichrist was going to be born, apparently he DID think it was going to be from one of his own people, but then. blake and lynn obviously aren’t from his people so i have no idea why he suddenly decided it was on them

marta was his “angel of death” hitman going around murdering people in the name of god

people who got sick (definitely STDs, believed to be the Curse of Sin or whatever but it might have just been anyone who was diseased at all) got banished to the scalled village where they all got HORRIFICALLY sick and infected and have completely lost their minds now abandoned by the church

val broke off from knoth’s church and started the heretics cult, they seem to be. satanists now and are trying to allow the birth of the anti christ but are also constantly trying to kill me to death too

according to the wiki val is almost definitely a trans woman, which. the Only trans character in outlast is a woman who is a violent sexual predator who might be a devil worshipper and has wet dreams about child murder. granted everyone in outlast is fucked up but THAT’S A PARTICULAR KIND OF FUCKED UP

lynn was not visibly pregnant when they crashed, blake claims they hadn’t been sexually active in months so if she was pregnant, it’s not his child. when he finds her again she’s not only very visibly pregnant, but actively going into labor. she calls it “our baby.” blake doesn’t have the chance to ask her how this happened. this is never fucking explained : )

like it doesn’t look like lynn was just like.... reverse c-sectioned and even if someone raped her to force pregnancy she wouldn’t have gone through an entire 9 month pregnancy in ONE NIGHT, so what the FUCK was that about

the wiki mentions its possible the baby isn’t actually real, it apparently doesn’t cast a shadow and lynn has the “there’s nothing there” line, but even if blake hallucinated the pregnancy and the baby (which. at least would explain how the process of “giving birth” took like 3 seconds and she became suddenly 9 months pregnant in one day) why would lynn be reacting as if she was pregnant too. or if they both hallucinated it why did she say “there’s nothing there,” wouldn’t she be able to see it too

anyway jessica, lynn, and blake were all friends in. high school middle school whatever age. it seems like there was some kind of love triangle going on, jessica seems into blake in the flashbacks, blake seems unsure

he starts getting lynn and jessica confused near the end so he might’ve had some kind of feelings for her though, the wiki mentions his complete obsession with saving lynn might have been partly fueled by “i couldn’t save jessica but im going to save lynn im not going to lose them both i HAVE to succeed this time” to the point that they just kind of became the same person in his head by the end

there’s some weird parallels with jessica playfully jumping on him and val pinning him down so its very possible jessica was acting... sexually aggressive toward him, on a much smaller scale of course, but enough that val’s assault triggered the memory

jessica was almost definitely being molested by one of their teachers/church leaders/whatever and blake seems to blame himself for not doing anything about it

i thought jessica killed herself and blake felt responsible for it, maybe figuring the abuse she was enduring from the teacher (and possibly her father, she reacts very afraid when he threatens to call her father) might have been one of the causes, and he didn’t help her

but the wiki says the teacher actually may have killed jessica and forced blake to help cover it up as a suicide, hence... finding her on the stairs. which i guess makes sense too

but the whole flashback thing is never explained?? i guess maybe it really was just trauma manifesting in really fucked up ways and like, that’s still narratively interesting but the fact that it kept crossing over into the real world (the recordings from the flashbacks showed up as corrupted files, so Something happened and it wasn’t just in blake’s head, frequently you get stuck somewhere you can’t escape from, get pulled into the other world, wake up somewhere else entirely) means it’s not just internal so why the FUCK is he crossing dimensions. they don’t tell you!!! i had to go digging on the wiki to figure this shit out

from the wiki:

“The "apocalypse" Blake had witnessed, as well as the nightmarish flashbacks to his childhood, were all just hallucinations induced by the Murkoff Corporation's local Radio Towers.“

WHAT???? IT WAS MURKOFF THE WHOLE TIME

but like. are you telling me it was all a hallucination that was just kind of vaguely mentioned Once. the big reveal/the truth behind it all was literally just hinted about in One Note/One weird encounter with a distant radio tower in ONE SCENE randomly in the middle of the game and never expanded on. what the FUCK kind of writing/game design is THAT

it looks like the “voice of God” knoth was hearing was actually the murkoff frequencies too, but like. fucking why. why were they telling this guy to kill babies and create a murder cult. was it just a “how far can we take this” experiment like the “how badly can we fuck someone’s mind up if we take away their meds and exacerbate their mental illness” thing at mount massive. i mean i guess a corporation that would do That would also probably fuck with a bunch of hyper religious hillbillies too but it just seems way too convoluted for “idk just wanted to see what would happen”

and “maybe if we hide subliminal messages in the radio frequencies we can convince some random guy we’re the voice of God” is. way too specific to actually Work, i guess maybe if they could induce hallucinations they could maybe manipulate peoples’ minds that much more efficiently but like. still. it doesnt fucking make sense!!!!!! why would it manifest as “flashbacks of childhood trauma” in blake and “suddenly im pregnant” in lynn and “God Said I Gotta Kill Everyone” in knoth and “satan said i gotta fuck everyone” in val NONE OF THAT MAKES ANY FUCKING SENSE!!!

APPARENTLY there’s a whole mess of comics that go along with this and hopefully explain shit a little bit more but “explaining what the fuck happened in your game by means of a side comic that isn’t mentioned in said game” is : )

I DONT KNOW. iM SO TIRED ITS 1 AM SOMEHOW

ill go through all my screenshots and shit later maybe that’ll help. something :’) god. I MEAN TO BE FAIR, outlast’s strengths have never been its story telling, it’s a great game for being absolutely scared out of your fucking mind and boy did they ever deliver on that front so like... i guess ultimately i got what i wanted out of it but im still CONFUSED,

i should really have expected this though lmao this is the same thing that happened at the end of outlast 1 i didnt understand anything until 900 wiki pages later and still hated the ending even when i finally did sort of almost understand it

#lucy plays outlast 2 #im losing coherency i dont know if any of this makes sense bUT NEITHER DID THE GAME

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zetalial · 5 years

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Watching Fairy Tail! Episode 2

Hey, second part of my blind watch. Enjoy!

Oh so the introduction thingy is every episode. Cool, it’s pretty likeable.

So the episode begins with Lucy and Natsu arriving at the Fairy Tail guild. Aww, I was hoping they’d take a bit longer and we’d see them travelling together a little first. Oh well!

Natsu immediately gets into a fight with some of the other members and we’re introduced to a bunch of names. No chance I’m remembering any of them now even if they do have their own little quirks.

Lucy is still absolutely starry-eyed as she watches everything going on, which I like. Eventually someone notices she’s new here and she’s immediately accepted into the guild. Wow, that was easy. My dreams of her doing some form of entrance exam are dashed. C’mon, is this even a real shonen without a super-dramatic early test? Next you’ll tell me there’s no tournament arc.

The Guild master is a little old man who can transform into some sort of big monster and he ends the guild fight - a very normal occurrence apparently - and he gives a brief speech on the values of the guild. Something about individuals being able to each explore their own path as a wizard and being able to achieve their true potential, such values are why the guild is currently flourishing, with its many unique members. (Sorry if I’m getting details wrong by the way, this is all from memory). Anyway, Lucy is impressed and she gets the guild’s mark stamped on her hand.

Oh, more backstory for Natsu is nice. So he was actually raised by a dragon but the dragon in question has disappeared and he’s made it his mission to look for him. It’s his dragon-father. Alright it’s interesting enough and love all the cute looks at young Natsu cuddling up to the massive beast. Natsu doesn’t seem too bitter about his disappearance or anything although the dragon was his only family. It’s more like he wants to find him so he can thank him for taking care of him or something like that. Either way, Natsu otherwise doesn’t have any family so he now considers the guild to be his family.

That ties into this episode’s plot. A boy has lost his father who is a guild member who went on a dangerous quest. Although everyone else says not to worry, Natsu quickly decides to help out. Lucy comes along with him - I guess she’s feeling a bit lost amidst all these new people. Natsu, now that he’s taken her to the guild, seems pretty unconcerned with her, though he doesn’t mind her tagging along.

The rest of the episode is pretty straightforward - they go to an icy mountain, meet a monster, fight the monster and find the man they were looking for. The humour is actually pretty nice here though, Lucy argues with Natsu while hiding inside a clock summon who has the most pleasant tone as he relays Lucy’s words. Plus there’s Lucy’s line about how he feels motion sickness on every form of transportation except Happy and Natsu just retorts that Happy isn’t a method of transportation, he’s a friend. What charming ill-logic.

Yeah the interaction between these Natsu and Lucy is the highlight of the show so far. The fight is showing off Natsu’s skills some more while Lucy watches.

So, my friend, @drrockbell warned me that Fairy Tail will have quite a bit of fanservice. I’ll be watching out for it. Nothing too irksome on that front yet. So far, Lucy has been saved by Natsu twice in two episodes with her summon having been fairly useless in the fight in this case. I don’t mind too much yet but hopefully it’s not every episode. Both the enemies seemed to be taken by her physical appearance as well which is slightly annoying but I won’t call it an issue yet.

And yeah, those are my thoughts for now. Coming up, I’d love to learn more about magic still, learn more about Lucy and Natsu’s backstories and maybe have a quest that takes place over a couple episodes. I guess I should be more interested in the other guild characters? Eh, I’d need to see more of them, I can’t even recall any of their names. Therefore, more Natsu and Lucy! Or just Lucy? Natsu is fine but I’m not sold on him yet.

Huh, this turned out longer than the ep 1 liveblog? I have got to learn to say less.

#fairy tail #liveblog #With the humour lines I don't know if they always translate accurately #for the record I'm watching dubbed #enjoying it so far #if that isn't clear #issues are all minor things presently

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stupidpianist · 5 years

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14 november 2018

It’s 16:48 right now and I’m in the music library. Idea for the Mastodon account to track ‘daily movements’ with more accurate timestamping is working well, really simplifies the process and I’m able to get a lot more precision/small details I would’ve neglected to include through that, but I’m feeling like doing today’s liveblog in a more paragraph-oriented format, sans timestamps?? ‘Throwing the timestamps out the window’ today, just feel like writing ‘off the dome’ in a less structured way, though still linear, hope that’s okay with y’all, if not, please feel free to skip today’s liveblog, please, please, come right this way, right this way, right on out of this paragraph and into whatever other thing you’re reading, pay no attention to little old me.

Woke at a semi-reliable time after ‘sleeping aggressively,’ I feel, really ‘hard’ sleep again. Woke with really heavy eyelids, which is unusual for me, usually if I’m tired I’ll just fall right back asleep, or if I know I need to wake up, I’ll feel groggy, but not tired, just ‘out of it.’ NOT TODAY, THOUGH!!! Today I was just all, whoa, it’s actually a struggle to keep my eyes open. Still somehow scrounged up the energy to make my way to the bathroom to brush, made some oatmeal, took a G Fuel ‘to the face,’ stared at my computer in catatonia until I had my meeting with one of my professors who’s helping me with recommendation letters. Oh, I also showered, yeah, that’s important, yes. Morning was spent in a state of complete stupor, entire head felt heavy and ‘anvil-like,’ I think, felt really cloudy.

Was the first actually cold day of the season, I think!! Which was exciting, I’ve been waiting for winter for a long time, if I can say something like that. Feels good to ‘don’ the ‘big puffy white jacket’ for another year. I’ve had that thing for, like, what, five, six years now at least?? Always said that once it finally wears out completely I’m going to get it repaired rather than buy a new one, that thing is staying with me ‘til the bitter end.’ Considered getting Five Hour Energy en route to campus but decided against it, and just walked while listening to Kero Kero Bonito while trying to regain some kind of cognitive ability before the meeting.

I guess as a way of ‘self-therapy’ for my unacceptably groggy state I decided on Knausgaard over Foucault to read while sitting outside the professor’s office, which is my favourite office. I wrote about it in a prose poem thing a while back, let me find it, wait:

‘My professor, Maggie, pinches at papers on her desk, and I notice a stunning array of mugs and thermoses that line this massive wooden table against her back wall. There’s one student in her class who sits in front of me and uses a MacBook Pro with a pink, soft-finish case. Without fail, at some point in every lecture, she’ll open a tab in Chrome, and start playing gigantic, full-screen, thirty-by-sixteen games of Minesweeper with such speed, efficiency, accuracy, that I’m more than blown away. On some days she managed a poker game simultaneously, and still continued to take detailed notes.

As I stand in Maggie’s office, Maggie glances up at me and says a few more things, and I thank her, then turn and leave. The floor is linoleum, and my boots make ridiculous, annoying, squeaky squelches.’

Could do with some severe editing, I feel… No longer feel ‘happy’ that I wrote this in much capacity, except for concept. Wait, let me just do a quick rewrite:

‘I’m noticing this stunning array of mugs and thermoses that line the massive wooden table against my professor Maggie’s back wall. There’s one student in the class who sits in front of me and uses a MacBook Pro with a pink, soft-finish case. Without fail, at some point during the lecture, she’ll open a new tab in Chrome, and start playing gigantic, full-screen, thirty-by-sixteen games of Minesweeper. Sometimes she managed a poker game simultaneously.

I’m standing in front of Maggie’s desk. Maggie glances up at me and says a few more things, and I thank her, then turn, and leave. The floor is linoleum. My boots make ridiculous, annoying, squelching sounds.’

Hm. Still ‘not happy with this,’ but it feels marginally better? I’ll come back to it, don’t want to ‘abandon’ this topic ‘quite yet,’ feel like ‘there’s something there,’ just haven’t really ‘teased it out’ at all.

So yeah, yeah, I met with Maggie, which took a few minutes. She informed me of the next Miltonmas, her annual celebration of Milton’s birthday, and also informs me that he’s turning 410 years old this year. Feel ‘tremendous levels of excitement,’ might ask A if she wants to go? Seems unlikely that she’ll want to for a myriad of reasons but I’m not gonna miss it unless I’m, like, severely ill.

Jesus as I’m writing this I still feel so so so out of it, probably had one too many beers last night for sure. Need to be up really early tomorrow for a work shift, so I can’t be going to bed late tonight, which is sort of, like, a blessing, so even if I wanted to stay up for whatever reason now I can’t.

After the meeting with Maggie, which went well, as they always do, Corrina OH YEAH WAIT, it’s definitely spelled Corrina unless she intentionally misspelled it on her laptop, I SAW HER NAME on her MACBOOK when we played DUNGEON WORLD LAST NIGHT yeah okay so now we know her REAL NAME AAAAAND we know how to SPELL IT yes so CORRINA was all like, ‘who wants poutine’ on the group chat with Michael, Corrina, Jasleen, Astoria, I, and I was all like, ‘yeah i want poutine’ and she was all like ‘okay meet me at the Starbucks in Eaton Centre and I went all ‘yeah okay.’ So my dumb butt walks to Eaton Centre only instead I go into Place Montreal Trust and I wait by the Starbucks, and Corrina goes all, ‘where are you’ and I go all ‘wait holy crap I’m such an idiot hold on I’m in the wrong building’ so I cross the street and Corrina finds me and we get this gigantic plate of poutine.

Sorry to report: did not taste very good. No no, probably, maybe, like, a light four out of ten? Disappointed. Second bad poutine in a row, need to pay Belle Province ‘a little visit’ to remedy the situation, need some good poutine in my stomach before I risk more bad poutine. So we finish the poutine and then decide to get caffeinated, something I really, really needed given my mental state of just complete BLAUGH, so we head to Starbucks and I completely overspend on a peppermint mocha. God those holiday drinks really GET ME, I love them SO MUCH, everything about the holiday season I ADORE. Tinsel, the music, the atmosphere, the ostensible snow, the wreaths, yeah yeah ALL OF IT, gimme, just-- gimme.

Then knew I needed to practice, even in my semi-conscious-but-more-verging-on-unconscious state, so I say bye to Corrina, who heads back to work, and I take the trek to McLennan, where I check out a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. There’s an amazing website which features a myriad of English translations of each poem, so I’ll be able to cross-reference all of them whilst trying to keep up with the original French. Feel excited to be ‘getting in on this’ finally, haven’t actively read poetry in a really long time, now that I think about it…

Side note: the computer that I used, or, rather, the section of McLennan in which the computer I used was in smelled like poop. Not even like body odour or anything, like, straight up feces. Was really bad, that’s when I decided I’d just use the computer to see where the Baudelaire book was, and then ‘get the heck out’ and not update the liveblog, would save that for the ‘safety’ of the music library, which I mostly prefer to McLennan anyways.

Is now 17:16. Blasting Igorr through headphones, really don’t want to go practice but know it’ll be good, or, at least, like, mildly fun. Maybe I’ll throw some Schubert under the fingers, or something?? I don’t know, I don’t have many days until I need to record prescreenings, but I’m feeling confident, maybe I’ll take a ‘rest day’ and focus on pieces I don’t need to prepare?? Keep the pieces that I need to record’ fresh’ and not just repeated to hell?

OH OH I know what I’m gonna do. Gonna print out some Thalberg to read. Never get tired of Thalberg. Thalberg, my love. Oh-so-neglected. Hahahahah I’m just spouting nonsense right now, need to leave the computer before my brain further devolves. OKAY onto the PRACTICE ROOMS see you later for the first inaugural ‘Soundtrack of the Day’

20:40: Watching livestream of Megan Boyle reading entirety of Liveblog over ~52 hours without stopping; will not be updating this liveblog any more tonight, please also tune in to the stream, link in Megan’s Twitter

#liveblog #blog #writing

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keyofjetwolf · 6 years

Text

Jet Wolf Summarizes Act 48

The manga and I kind of hate each other. This is unfortunate, but still, I’m determined to come out of this with something. Rather than spend energy on a liveblog that’s increasingly negative, I’m reading each manga act (mostly) silently, and then writing up summaries at the end. I won’t pull my punches. There’s going to be criticism and snark about the manga, either wholesale or in details. If that isn’t a thing you feel like reading, please skip this post!

I had some measure of hope for the Dream arc. I’d heard a lot of passing thoughts about the manga during my years working on this project, and near universally among them was “The Dream arc is fantastic.” Alongside being told how it was unlike the SuperS season, and yeah, I’d sort of nurtured it in my heart a little, sheltered it, held it close. I didn’t talk about it. It seemed too complicated, too personal, almost. Even when I did finally begin the manga, and came to realize that it was never going to be more than an excruciating test of stubbornness, I still clutched my tiny hope to me. Maybe something good could yet grow from all this.

I am, sometimes, an idiot.

We open with Nehellenia, and what must surely be one of the clunkiest fucking introduction speeches in history. Nehellenia tries to spin the reincarnation of the Senshi as something Queen Serenity specifically did to try and fuck with her. That makes about as much sense as you’d expect of a universe-shifting plot point conceived, at best, two issues before its reveal. Still, is it meant to be taken as gospel, or is it meant to reflect on Nehellenia’s entirely self-centered state of mind? We see in flashback that Nehellenia shows up and literally nobody knows who the fuck she is, and then Serenity imprisons her about six seconds later, not to be seen again for a thousand years or so. Would Serenity have legitimately worried that much about someone who was functionally a magazine salesman who never even got out a pitch before getting the door slammed in her face? On the day of the birth of her first and only child?

BUT THEN WE COME BACK TO HOW THIS IS TAKEUCHI SO IS IT REALISTIC TO EVEN CONSIDER IT’S WORKING ON MULTIPLE LAYERS AND NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN PRECISELY AT FACE VALUE

PROBABLY NOT (*)

(*) But I do want to take a second to acknowledge how this ABSOLUTELY fits my take on Nehellenia at the end of SuperS, and I’m considering shifting my conclusion on the creators on this from “lucky accident” to “trying to build something worthwhile from the steaming pile of shit we were given”.

Anyway, there’s a lot about child soldiers that’s super fucked up and then Seanan made it even more fucked up because Seanan.

BUT THEY’RE CUTE SO WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING OR MORAL IMPLICATIONS

The Senshi then argue about whether it was a curse that everything went to shit in the SilMil or if it was destiny. I’m really not sure what difference it makes. They don’t seem to either. That philosophical discussion we nearly considered having was enlightening guys, thanks for bringing it up!

Nehellenia kills Usagi, I guess, but only a little. Not to worry! You know those Senshi who have devoted themselves since childhoods past to fighting for their Princess no matter what? THEY’RE ON THIS

OH GOD DAMMIT

The girls scream and cry and do nothing. With his superior penis will, Mamoru fights through his cursed illness. YOU KNOW THE SAME ONE USAGI IS SUCCUMBING TO DESPITE HAVING HAD IT FOR MAYBE A FIFTH AS LONG AS MAMORU. Using the power of his penis love, Mamoru gives Usagi a good dicking the strength and will to also fight back.

Usagi then says what is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard her say.

WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF LOGICAL FALLACY BULLSHIT IS THIS

YOU CAN’T JUST SAY THE WORD “POWER” EIGHTY-SEVEN TIMES IN A SPEECH AND HOPE IT MAKES SENSE USAGI

(Want to enjoy this a thousand percent more? Continue my trend! Replace every instance of “power” in that speech with “penis”. YOU’RE WELCOME.)

Then Usagi powers everyone else up, I think kind of? SHE TAKES THEM DRESS SHOPPING ANYWAY. The manga Senshi have never been more accurately represented as the paper dolls they so clearly are. The cats are also teleported in for no reason other than to be morphed into the human form they all so clearly needed to possess, immediately followed by my doubled over retching. Then tiny Senshi versions appear! They’re “Sailor Power Guardians”! Because reasons! All the Senshi get a power up courtesy of their vacation home timeshares!

WE INTERRUPT THIS MANGA SUMMARY TO REMIND YOU OF THE DREAM ARC SENSHI POWER-UP ORDER OF OPERATIONS:

Mamoru alone powers through a debilitating cursed illness that has been weakening him approximately five times longer than anyone else.

Mamoru gives Usagi the strength and will to fight against Nehellenia’s curse.

Usagi is filled with the penis power of love.

Usagi gives her friends prom dresses.

The Senshi have a group hallucination that involves miniature floating versions of themselves.

These mini-thems tell them they have to beg HOUSES ON OTHER PLANETS for permission to temporarily not suck.

Power which they then must immediately give to Usagi.

IF I EVER HARNESS THE ABILITY TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME THE VERY FIRST THING I WILL DO IS GO FIND THE JET WOLF WHO DARED HOLD OUT HOPE FOR THIS MANGA ARC AND PUNCH HER

WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED MANGA SUMMARY

Usagi becomes Eternal Sailor Moon, and I discover that, regrettably, once again I am neither dead nor done.

#JW reads Sailor Moon #sm manga dream #sm manga act 48 #jet wolf versus the manga #jet wolf summarizes the manga #a novel by jet wolf

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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

Text

mtmte liveblog issues 4&5

its delphi time babey

I'm sorry but drift & co look like such fuckin nerds on their scooter things on the cover lmaooo

oh god. seeing the first page just reminded me of how horribly confused i was for this whole little arc the first time i read it. i was like ok, who are all these new characters, and also why does everyone look so similar

anyways now i now what's going on. i love first aid

love the running continuity of rung being the literal only psychologist on cybertron (except for fr*id but that's later). no wonder everyone's fucked up they all have to share a single therapist

ok i find it extremely funny that first aid was demoted from doctor to nurse, as if that's a thing that happens EVER - I mean it'd be one thing if first aid was a nurse practitioner (which i doubt is a position that exists here), at least that demotion would make sense, but like...the doctors i work with don't know how to do most nurse stuff (like BP, cathing, vaccinations, hell even using some of the thermometers - that's all stuff nurses/etc do), so demoting one to a nurse would be a disaster (just like promoting a really good nurse to a doctor would be a bad idea). anyways i know I'm being pedantic but it Be like that when you work in the medical field and read something that has medicine-related stuff in it

i love swerve giving ratchet the tiniest free drink ever lmaooo

is that skids being a rowdy drunk in the bg lmaoooo

unironically i love medical statistics. keep it comin

i love magnus’s giant sternal chestpiece thing. its like a bird’s sternum but without the massive pec muscles attached

i love magnus and rodimus’s dynamic so much

oh pipes....im so sorry but this fun space adventure is going to be not so much fun for you

ratchets ideologies are certainly interesting, and i liked seeing how they changed over the course of the story

drift: why would i be SCARED of the DJD, I've got a SWORD, two swords even,

hvbhajkhfbsdjkf pipes really said ‘oi, you two - what's this, then?’ that's the most british fucking thing, that's literally something i say when I'm doing an overexaggerated british accent, oh my god,

PIPES IS SUCH A TINY DUMBASS. ILY SIR BUT WHAT ARE YOU DOING

aaaand now you're covered in dead bodies, pipes. look at your life, look at your choices

drift epic sword moments

drift confirmed for the kinda weird guy who has katanas that he uses to like, cut up fruit and water bottles in his backyard while rodimus films him

‘i thought i heard...bickering’ lmaooooo

ah, so its covid

this arc is how i feel working in healthcare lmaooo especially now that i probably have covid

so rewind condensed the entire war into an 11 second long cringe compilation. nice

seeing the mechanical stuff past tailgate’s visor is so cool

poor tailgate, this guy is getting slammed with history from multiple sides. and like, bias is inevitable in ANY sort of recounting of events, especially controversial historical events, so poor tg just kinda has to take it all in and decide who to listen to

that’s...not really how immunity works, guys. also, you shouldn't be exposed to so much disease with proper ppe usage

is there even such thing as ppe in the transformers universe?? there are fluid- and contact-transmitted illnesses, so there SHOULD be

is there even OSHA in this universe??????? unbelievable

first aid, holding a giant fucking claw clamp: we haven't tried EVERYTHING............

first aid read a human wikihow article on how to jumpstart a car and took notes

i love tailgate’s ‘mom says its my turn on the xbox’ pose

tailgate has a point - he’s from pre-war times, where things weren't as grey so of course he would try to divide the two sides into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’

CYCLONUS BE NICE DONT HIT UR FUTURE HUSBAND

go get some character development and then maybe you'll feel better

seeing the word quarantine is making me twitchy w/my possible month-long complete isolation quarantine on the horizon

drift pulling his swords on pipes and ratchet pushing down drift’s arms...lmao

poor pipes...even tho this is completely his fault, its still rough

also jesus, pharma and ratchet look so goddamn similar, reading this was so confusing the first time around

drifts idea of subduing pipes involves turning into a cool car and also posing with his sword

also. never gonna be over drift’s massive thighs. jesus man

ooof now drift has the rona. ouch

poor drift, his covid realization is getting overshadowed by pharma being flung around

first aid bustin thru w/the epic medical nipple clamps and some Big Boi Backup

ok that's an epic pre-beatdown speech from fort max right there, daym

im just gonna continue on w/issue 5 now for continuity’s sake. yay!

the cover of tailgate in magnus’s autobot school is so cute

and we open with an incredible shot of fort max str8 up ripping a guy in half. i mean, to be fair, he DID just give an epic speech about how much he was gonna do that, and he certainly followed thru

yeahhhhh, fort max is not doing so well atm

when he puts that dudes head in his chest vent thing and then snaps it shut....man

also i fucking LOVE when their faces are shaded all in black w/only the eyes/mouth fully drawn...fantastic stuff

ratchet: phew i am not equipped to deal w/this level of Fucked Up Mental Trauma. u good m8?

ratchet is already writing up a referral to rung for fort max as this is happening

drift is just laying on the ground dying like, oh hey yeahh I'm still here too

i fucking love when punctuation is drawn in story - like here where first aid has a little ? over his head....fav

ratchet holding drifts hand ;_;

ok tbh ambulon having switched sides 10 yrs ago is wild bc like, 10 years is barely any time for these guys, especially in a war that lasted 4 million years. that would be like a human switching sides in a war like, 3 months before it ends. probably. i sense some math bs, I'm just extrapolating here

all that mexican standoff shit is going down and first aid is just like But That's None Of My Business

ah so ambulon is an asymptomatic carrier

and there's first aid with the save! iconic

pharma calling ratchet ‘buddy’ hbvakjdsbfhkasdf

ooooh i love that they figured it out - and i love that twist, that transforming is what triggers the start of symptoms. remember when drift turned into a cool car? yep

s/o to Ambulon Transformers for helping me in my medical terminology courses, bc now ill always remember: Leg(tm)

also this explanation makes a ton more sense (in universe, at least) than the whole ‘i guess we as medical staff have been exposed to enough Germz that we’re more immune to this or something’ theory

ah, i love the meaningless (to me) alien robot medical jargon

drift and ratchet hhhhhhhhh

‘I'm too wide’ fort max L O R G E

also once again drift is forgotten in favor of a bunch of other dramatic stuff happening vbhjksdfbjhskdf

godddd i love tailgates little flashbacks where we see how Important and Special he is, complete with his ‘bomb disposal’ arm label...augh its so good!

and tailgate’s autopedia page even reflects his lies! like, did tailgate go edit that first thing upon waking up??? seriously, I'm fascinated by tailgate’s meticulous dedication to his fake life

also the fact that ultra magnus believes everything he read on autopedia is amazing lmao

ultra magnus: you think somebody would just go on the internet and tell lies?

fuckgin love magnus’s long ass name/title placard

tailgate hvbahjkdfbjhaskf i mean, he’s gotten the abridged version of everything else, of course he would assume that’d be the case here too...but not on magnus’s watch

magnus cant even say ‘fun’ hvukdasdbjfkjsadf i love my uptight law dad

love rung implying that upon questioning, he would easily divulge a patient’s name and maybe even information about said patient’s treatment while under him....love the disregard for patient confidentiality and hipaa in general

not that hipaa seems to exist here, at least not in a fully realized form

also i mean the above genuinely, i think rung’s tendency towards at least slight malpractice is very interesting

poor red alert....super bad luck that HE was the guy to get roped up in that overlord business

I'm glad that, at the very least, red alert was able to prove that he was Actually hearing something to rung, rather than get brushed off completely

god magnus and tailgate’s interactions are golden

also tg is much more sarcastic/quippy than anyone gives him credit for tbh

‘thought warfare,’ ultra magnus says with complete seriousness. god i fucking love this comic

now i can tell pharma apart from ratchet bc pharma has let his true Petty Bitch nature emerge and you can see it in his expressions

the whole ‘tarn is addicted to transforming’ thing didn't really go anywhere, right? i feel like i noticed that on my second readthru as well

also pharma is such an interesting character given the context of him like, trying to strike a bargain w/the djd to keep them from destroying delphi, but that arrangement inevitably kinda making him lose it as the situation escalates. he’s also just really entertaining bc i feel like he kins the joker or st and probably gets into really heated arguments w/people on twitter about just abt anything

‘sound bomb’ i love this comic

another important facet of pharma’s character becomes clear around this time as well - how he’s really into ratchet. i also choose to read them as awful exes tbh, it makes their dynamic even more entertaining

‘killmaster, with the wand’ is one of my favorite running remarks lmao

also, was killmaster even a character before mtmte? or, if he was, was he an important one? it would crack me up the most if he literally didn't exist at all, but any way you spin it is still funny

ratchet’s tiny humansona facing off against pharma is wild

‘I'm miles from anyone i truly care about’ brutal, ratchet, drift is dying like 2 floors away (im p sure)

SUDDENLY DRIFT IS HERE, ACTUALLY

oh don't worry first aid, that sure isn't the last we’ll be seeing of pharma

so like, did first aid save everyone by posting that data log to his wreckers fan blog or something? lmao love it

i love the pretty fucked up reveal of ratchet having stolen pharma’s hands. like, damn dude.

and that wraps up the delphi arc! our first true ‘arc’ of mtmte, and a fantastic one at that. short and snappy and fresh, with some very clever writing and cool new characters, and a lot of great plot threads to be picked up later. plus, we got to see the beginnings of drift and ratchet’s whole thing (and ratchet and pharmas whole thing). and the lost light gets some much needed extra medical staff, so everyone wins!

well, we’ll see how fort max feels about this all pretty soon.....

#lj rereads mtmte #love me some delphi

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