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rachelbethhines · 3 years

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Vintage Shows to Watch While You Wait for the Next Episode of WandaVision - The 60s

So the 60s is the era that Wandavision pulls most heavily from for it’s inspiration. So much so that one could make the argument that each of the first three episodes are all set in the 1960s. Episode one pulls from the early 60s with multiple Dick Van Dyke refences, episode two is very Bewitched inspired, and episode three is aesthetically very similar to The Brady Bunch which started in ‘69. As such it was hard to narrow down the list for this decade and I had to get creative in some ways.

1. The Andy Griffith Show (1960 - 1968)

The Andy Griffith Show gets kind of a bad rap now a days for being, supposedly, a conservative’s wet dream. People claiming it as such have apparently never actually seen the series. Oh yes, it’s very much set in white rural 60s America and will occasionally present the obliviously outdated joke, but the story of a widowed sheriff being the only sane man in a small town full of lovable lunatics, who prefers to solve his and others problems with negotiation and hair brained schemes as opposed to violence has far more in common with modern day Steven Universe than whatever genocidal fantasy fake rednecks have in their heads.

As the gif above shows Andy Griffith was very subtlety progressive for its time. Andy was a stanch pacifist, pro-gun control, treated drug addicts and prisoners with respect, and all the women he would date had careers, ect. and so on. It’s not a satire making any sort of grand political statements but the series had a moral center that was far more left than many realize.

But if it’s not a satire, then what type of comedy is it?

The Andy Griffith Show excels in what I like to call, ‘awkward comedy’. See everyone in Mayberry is far too nice to just come out and tell a character they’re making an ass of themselves, so therefore whoever is the idiot punching bag of the episode’s focus must slowly unravel as everyone looks on in helpless pity until said character realizes the folly of their ways and the townsfolk come together to make them feel happy and accepted once more. Wandavision takes this polite idyllic awkwardness and plays it up for horror instead of laughs.

2. The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 - 1966)

The creators of Wandavision actually met with Dick Van Dyke himself to pick his brain and learn how sitcoms were made back then. Paul Bentley also took inspiration from Van Dyke in his performance of the sitcom version of Vision, while Olsen stated Mary Tylor Moore had a heavy influence on her character of Wanda. But more than just being a point of homage, The Dick Van Dyke Show was hugely influential in modernizing the family sitcom and breaking a lot of the unspoken traditions and ‘rules’ of the 50s television era. It’s also just really, really funny.

3.The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962 - 1965)

Bit of a cheat here. Alfred Hitchcock Presents actually started in 1955 as a half hour anthology show, but in ‘62 the show got a revamp and was extended into a full hour tv series. I knew I wanted The Twilight Zone to be covered in my episode one recap, but ‘The Master of Suspense’ couldn’t be forgotten. While The Twilight Zone reveled in the surreal and supernatural, Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the thriller genre and made real life seem dangerous, horrifying, and other worldly.

4. Doctor Who (1963 - present day) vs Star Trek (1966 - present day)

Just like how westerns dominated the air waves during the 50s, science fiction was the center of the cultural zeitgeist of the 60s. From Lost in Space to My Favorite Martian, space aliens and robots were everywhere. So naturally I had to name drop the two sci-fi juggernauts that still air to this today. If you thought that the rivalry between Star Wars and Star Trek was bad then you’ve never seen a chat full of Whovians and Trekkies duking it out over who is the better monster, the Borg or the Cyberman. But which one has the more influence over Wandavision?

Well Star Trek owes it’s existence to sitcoms. As with The Twilight Zone before it, Star Trek was produced by Desilu Productions and it’s co-founder and CEO, Lucille Ball, was the series biggest supporter behind the scenes, lobbying for it when it faced early cancelation. As with all things sitcomy, everything ties back to I Love Lucy in the end. However despite that little backstory, it would seem that the series has very little to do with Wandavision itself beyond being quintessentially American.

I would argue that Wandavision owes much to Doctor Who though. Arguably more so than any show mentioned in this retrospective. Time travel, alternate realities, trouble in quite suburbia, brainwashing, people coming back from the dead, ect... just about every trope you can find in Wandavision has also appeared in Doctor Who at some point. As a series that can go anywhere and do anything, Doctor Who was a pioneer of marrying genres in new and interesting ways.

5. Bewitched (1964 - 1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 1970)

It’s hard to pick one series over another because they’re essentially the same show. A mortal man falls in love with a magical girl who upends their lives with magic filled hijinks as they try their best not to have their secret discovered by the rest of the world. And both have their fingerprints all over the DNA of Wandavision.

There’s only two core differences; Samantha and Jeannie have completely different personalities, with Sam being confident and knowledgeable and Jeannie being naïve and oblivious, along with their relationships with their respective men, Sam and Darrin being married and in love at the start of the series and Jeannie chasing after Tony in the beginning in a will they/won’t they affair, finally only getting together in the last season.

6. The Munsters (1964 - 1966) vs The Adams Family (1964 - 1966)

Fans of these two shows are forever sadden that there never was a crossover between them. Because they’d fit perfectly together. Both shows are about a surreal and macabre family living in American suburbia and disrupting the lives of their neighbors with their otherworldly hijinks. Sound familiar?

The main difference between the two shows is the way the characters viewed their placement in the world they inhabit.

The Munsters were always oblivious to the fact that didn’t fit in. They just automatically assumed everyone had the same personal tastes as them. Whenever they encountered anyone who behaved strangely around them they would write that person off as being the odd one rather than questioning themselves. As such the main cast was structured like a stereotypical sitcom family who just happened to be classic movie monsters.

The Addams were well aware that they were abnormal and they loved it! They lived life with in their own little world and didn’t care what anyone thought of them. As such the characters were far more colorful and quirky as individuals but there was little in the way of refences to other horror franchises beyond just a general love of the twisted and strange.

7. Green Acres (1965 - 1971) and the Rual-verse (1962 - 1971)

So the MCU is not the first franchise to bring viewers an interconnected universe to the small screen. Far from it, as sitcoms had been doing this for decades, starting with the ‘rualverse’. Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres were all produced by the same company and were treated as spinoffs of each other, complete with crossovers and shared characters and sets.

Of the three, the last show, Green Acres, has the most in common with Wandavision. A well to do businessman and his lovely socialite wife settle down in small town America on a farm in order to get away from the stresses of city life, only to find new stresses in the country. Eva Gabor, herself a natural Hungarian, plays the character of Lisa as Hungarian making her one of the few non-native born Americans on tv screens during the cold war. Despite her posh nature and original protests to the move, Lisa assimilates to the rural life far easier than her husband, Oliver. Who, as the main comedic thread, can’t comprehend his new quirky neighbors’ odd and often illogical behavior.

8. Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) and Get Smart (1965 - 1969)

So as comic fans have been quick to point out, it’s looking like both A.I.M. (Hydra) and Sword (Shield) will be players in the story of Wandavision. To commemorate that here’s two shows to represent those opposing sides. Although in truth, neither series has anything else in common with each other but I need to condense things down someway.

In Hydra’s corner we got Hogan’s Heroes. A show all about taking down Nazis from within.

I love, love, love, ‘robin hood’ comedies where a group of con artists try week after to week to pull one over the establishment. The Phil Silvers Show, Mchale's Navy, and Top Cat, just to name a few examples are all childhood favorites of mine. However while those shows had a lot of morally ambiguous characters, Hogan’s Heroes has very clear cut good guys and bad guys, cause the bad guys are Nazis and the show relentless makes fun of the third reich as should we all. In fact I was watching Hogan’s Heroes while waiting for the GA run off election results. Fortunately my home state decided to kick out our own brand of Nazis this year.

For Shield, we got the ultimate spy spoof, Get Smart. Starring, Inspector Gadget himself, Don Adams, as the bumbling Maxwell Smart. Get Smart, is a hilarious send up of Cold War espionage but the real selling point of the show, imho, is Max and his co-worker 99′s relationship. You can cut the sexual tension in the air with a knife all while laughing your ass off.

9. Batman (1966 - 1968)

First was Superman and then came Batman. Yet while Superman was a serious action show, Batman was a straight up comedy. Showcasing that superheroes could indeed be funny.

Also shout out for Batman being the only show on this list to have an actual crossover with it’s competitor, The Green Hornet.

10. Julia (1968 - 1971)

Since episode two features the first appearances of Herb and Monica, let’s highlight the first black led sitcom since the cancelation of Amos ‘n Andy over a decade earlier. The show focuses on single mother and military nurse, Julia, as she tries to live her life without her recently decease husband, who was killed in Vietnam, as she tries to raise their six year old son on her own.

The series is cute. It’s more of a throw back to earlier family sitcoms where there’s no fantasy and life lessons are the name of the game. It’s the fact that the main character is a single black woman is what made the show so subversive and important at the time.

Runner Ups

There’s much good stuff in the 60s, so here’s some others that didn’t make the cut but I would recommend anyways.

Car 54, Where Are You? (1961 - 1963)

I call this the Brooklynn 99 of the 1960s. Bumbling but well meaning Officer Toody longs to do good in the world and help anyone in need, but often screws things up with his ill thought out schemes. He often drags his best friend and partner, the competent but anxiety riddled, Muldoon into his escapades.

Mr. Ed (1961 - 1966)

The grandfather of the sarcastic talking pet trope.

The Jetsons (1962 - 1963 and 1985 - 1987)

Hanna-Barbera often took popular sitcoms and just repackaged them as cartoons with a fantasy theme to them. The Jetsons has no singular show that it rips-off but is rather more a grab bag of sitcom tropes that feature, robots, computers, and flying cars.

The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965)

The Outer Limits was The Twilight Zone’s biggest competitor in terms of being a sic-fi/horror anthology series.

Gillian’s Island (1964 - 1967)

The only comparison to WandaVision I could think of was that this is a sitcom about people being trapped in one place. But by that point I was running out of room on the list. Still it’s one of the funniest shows on here.

So yeah, this took longer than expected cause there’s a lot, here. Hopefully the 70s will be easier. Which I’ll post on Friday.

#wandavision #sitcoms #1960s #dick van dyke #bewitched

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airgetlamhh · 3 years

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Thoughts on Lostbelt 3

So, Lostbelt 3.

Just came out, and this time I played it in good time. Hopefully that’ll continue! Spoilers ahead for Lostbelt 3, and also for Qin Shi Huang’s interlude which has yet to come to NA. I’ll mark that section specifically so people can skip over it.

You might remember that I did one of these for Lostbelt 2, and if you haven’t seen that you can find it here. These are freeform and have no real set structure, they’re just one big post for me to gather and explain all my thoughts about the story. I’ll talk about characters, themes, pacing, etc. as they occur to me, and so expect this to be fairly chonky.

Now, once again, I’m going to lay out the thesis statement ahead of time, so people can feel free to skip over or read as they please. I expect this will be somewhat more controversial than my opinion about Gotterdammerung.

Lostbelt 3, the Synchronized Intelligence Nation, is bad.

I had wondered how to start this, but over time my thoughts kept coming back to the pacing. There are sixteen chapters in the Lostbelt, and almost nothing of any consequence whatsoever happens for the first eight. We fight Akuta, she runs, we fight Akuta, she runs, we spent like eight battles fighting the beasts Koyanskaya let loose and they amount to nothing and have no plot relevance whatsoever, we fight Xiang Yu and then he runs, and then we fight Xiang Yu and Lanling and then we’re forced into a truce and then nothing happens until Spartacus leads the people of the Lostbelt to rebellion and Qin drops the meteor and the march to Xiangyang begins.

Nothing happens.

Obviously that’s an exaggeration, there some events. Qin examines the Shadow Border, we meet some of the characters, but that’s all, really. A solid half of the Lostbelt is almost entirely useless faffing about, and then it rams the accelerator so absolutely nothing has any time to land and we speedrun our way through it. To put it in perspective, it’s one chapter shorter than Gotterdammerung, which was already five chapters shorter than Anastasia, and it feels significantly shorter than Gotterdammerung too. I complained in my write-up of that that it felt like things just happened for no reason, but at least things happened. In comparison, half of Lostbelt 3 feels bereft of content, the only important events of which could be condensed into about three chapters tops.

It feels like it’s a mid-year 1 Singularity. We have detours to kill random beasts unrelated to the actual plot, we get interrupted by fights as we try to talk, we faff about for ages and then speedrun our way to the actual climax. By the end of the Lostbelt, I was left with a lingering sense of “Wait, is that it?”

Moving on from the pacing, I think I should probably address the characters next. This is likely to be the largest section, since so much of the issues in the Lostbelt come from the characters and it’s only by talking about the characters that I can really engage with the themes. I’ll start from the least relevant and work my way up, meaning that I’ll be addressing basically the entire conglomerate of characters that aren’t Qin, Yu, Xiang Yu, Spartacus, Liangyu or of course Jing Ke.

Red Hare and Chen Gong, they’re comedy, make no mistake. They’re there to add a bit of humor to scenes and it’s fine, they’re funny. It’s a mistake, in my opinion, to follow such a powerful scene as Spartacus saving the villagers and it inspiring them so much that the Lostbelt reconnects with the Throne of Heroes by having it result in nothing but comic relief, but they’re inoffensive.

Koyanskaya, she’s Koyanskaya. There’s a bit more hinting about her true nature here, but besides that she’s exactly the same. Nothing much happens besides that truly gratuitous torture scene that made me glad FGO’s story isn’t voiced, because it really was just deeply uncomfortable. I think that after two chapters and a prologue full of her being untouchable and smug and constantly ahead of everyone she did need to stumble a bit, but having her get punked by Shuwen and then gruesomely and gratuitously tortured while she screams and begs for help was completely unnecessary.

Han Xin and Li Shuwen, they’re fine. I’m not much of a fan of the whole stuff about Li Shuwen being so powerful as to stand up to four Servants, three of whom are meant to be insane powerhouses in their own right, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Han Xin when he’s allowed to just go apeshit at the end is one of the very few genuine delights about the Lostbelt, I really enjoyed him.

Lanling is a disappointment not because he’s badly written, but because he’s barely written. We start the Lostbelt to a flashback of his death and it sets us up to expect a bunch from him, but all that we really get is that he’s loyal to Yu. His only purpose in the story is to function as a connection for her outside of Xiang Yu, and boy howdy does this whole thing fail, we’ll get to that too. If he’d had more time, I expect he’d be quite good, but as it is he’s barely in the story and his only major character moment outside of Yu is when he tries assassinating Guda and admits he’s not really built for it.

Mordred and Nezha are there respectively to bounce off Spartacus and to reveal that Xiang Yu is based on her body respectively. That’s it. They vanish from the story for a good few chapters and I didn’t notice because Nezha becomes irrelevant as soon as you meet Xiang Yu and Mordred becomes irrelevant as soon as Spartacus died. You could remove both and the story would change not at all, and while I do think that Mordred’s role in giving Spartacus someone to bounce off of was nice and I enjoyed their interactions, introducing a whole character just to bounce off another means that when the other character is gone, the one you’ve introduced is just there. It’s insanely noticeable with Mordred.

Gordolf is a genuine delight. I think my honest favorite scene besides Spartacus’s in the chapter is when he and Guda have to decide who gets the only dose of antidote. Guda flat out telling them what hand they’d throw was perfectly in character but I genuinely adored Gordolf completely throwing the match and faking that it was an accident and that Guda got the antidote fair and square, after having it pointed out that he never once tried to lord it over Guda that he saved their life from the poison. When Guda forces him to drink it, Gordolf’s complete dedication to getting them the antidote and refusing to let Guda die because he’s the director and he is personally responsible for all their safety, that’s good stuff. I love Gordolf very very much, and I think that this Lostbelt really gives him some shining moments that emphasize why he’s so wonderful.

I think that is basically all the minor characters barring the village boy, who I will get to in a bit, but if you’re noticing a trend it’s that they’re mostly fine, inoffensive. Nothing stands out as truly genuinely very bad, but for the most part they’re all wasted potential. They exist to fulfil exactly one role, and then hang around long past their welcome in most cases, with Han Xin, Li Shuwen, and Lanling managing to avoid that, albeit in the first two more due to their overall lack of presence until the very end.

Now, Liangyu. Here’s where things start to break down a bit.

In this Lostbelt, Qin Liangyu is a warrior who distinguished herself enough to be frozen in Mt. Li, where Qin keeps their heroes to be used when necessary. Alongside Han Xin, she’s defrosted to handle the Chaldea threat. Her major point of focus in the chapter is engaging with the “Confucianism” that Chaldea represents. She’s the one who hears the poem first, she’s who reports it to Qin, she’s who steals the Shadow Border and who ends up confronting Chaldea first when they get to Xiangyang. When we finally get to hear her conviction, why she is so willing to fight for her home...

It’s revealed that Qin destroyed her village, her family. They had been inspired, not to rebel, but to simply seek to govern themselves and live as a nation outside of Qin’s domain. Qin’s response was to fire a meteor at their village. When the instigator escaped, he tried to do it again, and that was why Liangyu fights. To avoid the needless death and suffering that is guaranteed by opposing Qin.

No one is horrified by this. No one reacts to her blaming the victims for wanting a better life. No one points out that her loyalty comes entirely from a place of fear and loss, that Qin took away everything she held dear and then threatened to do it again and again and again. She fights because Qin would otherwise wipe out everyone, and this is heralded as splendid loyalty and honest devotion, despite the fact that it’s effectively the same logic as why someone might not resist their abusive partner. That is all Liangyu is meant to do, show us some kind of loyalty and validity to Qin’s path, and they even have Mashu lost for words when she is confronted. All to show us that true loyalty is submission, and that it’s a valid and good reason to fight, to be too scared of the tyrant above you wiping out everything if you don’t. Not something to oppose Qin for, but something to commend them for inspiring.

That reading, despite being a clearly obvious one, isn’t ever once entertained by the story. No one points out Qin’s tyranny as the starting point for Liangyu’s suffering, even though it clearly is. It’s not that it’s refuted, it just never once comes up, because the characters acknowledging it or challenging it would hurt the clumsy point it really wants to make.

As a digression, this Lostbelt is a step back for Mashu. Her climatic character moment in Part 1 is rejecting a world without suffering and having the purest conviction necessary to block Ars Almodel Salomonis, but now she’s shaken and starts thinking that maybe that was a mistake all because it was only a possible future she rejected with Goetia, instead of the actual people in front of her? I can’t see that as anything but a regression, considering it was a point that her conviction was able to overcome the most powerful attack in the series even as it destroyed her body to protect those behind her. It’s done almost entirely to make us question whether or not Qin has a point, and given that the answer to that is a resounding and obvious “no” all it ends up doing is taking a hammer to Mashu’s solidly built up character every time she responds to an obviously flawed argument with “...” to give it unearned validity.

Spartacus next. He is an honest to goodness genuine joy. There are a few bright spots in this Lostbelt and Spartacus is one of them. He is very well written, allowed to think and philosophize about the nature of rebellion and whether it’s needed, and his musings on why he rebelled and whether or not it was justified to rebel against Qin when their people smiled so innocently like he’d always hoped for was unironically fantastic character work. His sacrifice reigniting the will to ask for more inside the people to the point of connecting to the Throne once more is absolutely fantastic, and his interactions with Mordred are great too. I absolutely do not have a single bad thing to say about him, he’s just wonderful.

Jing Ke. She’s a delight. She is a constant denier of everything that Qin suggests, and she functions as a beacon of good sense in the chapter. Where others are falling prey to some nonsense writing that makes them wonder if they’re doing the right thing, Jing is constantly pointing out the horrible, horrible tyranny going on, and constantly reminding people that Qin is in fact, a monster. Her final moments, getting to trick Qin into downloading a virus, arguing against them on philosophical grounds and then mocking them when they’re surprised that she would use that as a chance to kill them, and the argument itself of humanity’s virtues being in its ability to communicate and progress even if they don’t have a certainty of peace ahead of them, all of it was great. I’m sad she died and never got a chance to see Guda again in the Lostbelt, but all in all, she was well written.

Xiang Yu and Yu Meiren. This is where things get really, truly, genuinely disappointing. As concepts, they’re really cool. Xiang Yu as a machine built from the body of a god with the ability to calculate and compute the future giving him an inhuman mindset is a really neat idea, as is Meiren being effectively a True Ancestor. Them finding love as two non-humans who understood each other where no one else did is good in theory.

In practice, Xiang Yu and Yu Meiren’s romance, the emotional core of the chapter, is without question the worst romance written in the Lostbelts thus far, and probably the worst romance in the game. It isn’t until chapter 13 of this 16 chapter game that we get any exploration of it at all beyond Meiren being devoted to Xiang Yu to the point that she completely cripples her own agency as an interesting and individual character to work entirely for Qin when they threaten Xiang Yu’s life, and the exploration we do get is just...explaining how Xiang Yu is a robot and how he lived in Panhuman History. No examination of their mutual feelings, just Meiren describing how her Xiang Yu lived.

This Lostbelt is not a reuniting of lovers long past. This is Meiren finding a man who shared an origin with her lover and devoting herself entirely to him, even though they aren’t the same person at all. This could have been an incredible hook!

Imagine if this Lostbelt looked at Meiren’s two thousand years of stagnation in mourning for Xiang Yu and her sole desire being to be reunited with him and then it gave her her wish. She betrayed her own history for the Lostbelt’s, because it gave her a chance to see her beloved again, but this Xiang Yu is not her Xiang Yu. He doesn’t even answer to the same name, doesn’t recognise her at all. Having thrown away everything that connected her to Panhuman History just to see her beloved again, she is now trapped in a world she doesn’t recognise with a man who isn’t her Xiang Yu, her sole connection being...Gao Changgong, a regular human from Panhuman History. The greatest of ironies, her only meaningful connection being one of the humans she hates, because she sacrificed everything for a man who doesn’t even know her name.

Lostbelt 3 is a story about stagnation and the dangers of easy ignorance, but Meiren’s story doesn’t engage with that central theme whatsoever. Hers is a story entirely about how she merely existed just to exist before she met Xiang Yu and after he died, and her only experience being happy was with him. A few short years in literal millennia of existence are all that she cares about, and indeed she doesn’t change even slightly over all those years. And despite this stagnation leading her to consign her own history to death, the history that her Xiang Yu is from and fought for, the story never once engages with that. She is, in fact, rewarded in the end by becoming a Heroic Spirit and getting reunited with her Xiang Yu.

And really, that’s what gets me. They have a perfect setup to tie into the theme of the Lostbelt, how an uncertain future of progression is sincerely better than a stagnant peace born of ignorance, and they don’t tie their Crypter into it nearly as well as LB1 or even LB2. Kadoc is obsessed with conflict and overcoming Guda to prove his own strength in a reflection of how Lostbelt 1 is a hellscape where might makes right, and Ophelia is stuck doing nothing but following her role without a choice in a reflection of Surtr existing only to fulfill his role, being capable only of destruction and incapable of changing that. In contrast...Meiren doesn’t engage with SIN’s theme of the worthiness of peace at the cost of stagnation at all, really.

I’m talking a lot about what she could be instead of what she is, because what she is is obsessed with Xiang Yu. Her sole concern in every single appearance besides her single moment of independent characterization with Gao on his deathbed is Xiang Yu. She sacrifices her initial independence to obey Qin for Xiang Yu’s sake, she fights for nothing more than Xiang Yu’s sake, she wants nothing more than to be with Xiang Yu forever, even if it’s not her Xiang Yu, even if it’s sacrificing the world her Xiang Yu fought for. She chooses the peace of stagnation and is never once punished or even questioned for it. She tells Lostbelt Xiang Yu about his history in her world, and then he tells her that he understands why her Xiang Yu loves her, and then decides on the spot that he loves her too. That’s it.

Every other existing romance that they play back into in Fate is one that they put effort into selling. I mean, just think about Sigurd and Bryn! Imagine if, instead of all the little touches and bits in the chapter where they go in hard on selling that Sigurd and Bryn are madly in love with each other, they just didn’t have that. Imagine if Kadoc and Anastasia barely interacted except for Kadoc telling Anastasia how her past went. It really feels like Urobuchi looked at Meiren and Xiang Yu’s existing famous romance and decided that he just didn’t need to sell it, even though it literally wasn’t the same people involved.

And to be clear, I understand the intention. Xiang Yu has an alien mindset because of his calculation of the future, and this alien mindset means that he does things that are hard to understand for us. But at the end of the day, Lostbelt Xiang Yu hears a single story about himself in Panhuman History and decides that it makes sense that, given everything he and Meiren experienced there, that they would fall in love. And then he chooses to fall in love too, in the span of a single conversation. That isn’t believable, but more to the point it isn’t satisfying. This isn’t a great reuniting of lovers, it’s Meiren telling a stranger how a hypothetical alternate timeline version of him lived and him deciding he loves her because of that one single story.

And the way this love is represented is...it’s kinda typical Urobuchi. Meiren’s tragedy is undersold and given second billing to talking about how tragic Xiang Yu’s life was and how bad it made her feel and how she wished she could have done something, while LB Xiang Yu ignores her plea to stay and to not fight anymore by declaring that he must fight for the Lostbelt because of his programming, not for her, and then after he’s defeated and Guda beats Qin he declares that he’s actually madly in love with Meiren and will ignore her stated wishes again to fight until he dies, whereupon he promptly talks about dying with regret for leaving Meiren behind and quotes the poem and everyone claps. This great romance begins by Meiren telling Xiang Yu about how sad his life was in her history, is defined solely by Xiang Yu doing anything he wants at any time while Meiren feels sad about it, and ends with Xiang Yu ignoring Meiren’s wishes to sacrifice himself for absolutely nothing and to have it later revealed he knew exactly how she would react to this and did it anyway.

It’s not that I don’t buy the romance, it’s that I can’t buy it. It’s every terrible romance you’ve seen in fiction before where there’s no chemistry to sell it but the author keeps telling you how perfect they are for each other, only in this case the author tells you how perfect Meiren and Panhistory Xiang Yu are for each other and then shrugs and decides that Lostbelt Xiang Yu is basically the same anyway so it works. And it really, really does not.

The Xiang Yu of Panhistory is somewhat interesting from what we hear in the chapter, but Lostbelt Xiang Yu is very bland and Yu Meiren is just a tragically wasted character. Instead of a story of being shaken out of stagnation and learning to grow and move forward, we get a story of stagnation being the good and right choice for her. Instead of a story of trying to make the past happen again instead of acknowledging that they are two different people who cannot simply pretend everything is as it was, we get a story where Lostbelt Xiang Yu decides it makes sense that an alternate universe version of himself would fall in love with Meiren, and then skips all the actual development to decide he’s madly in love with her too. Instead of a story of Meiren realizing that her closest connection for the longest time was a living human and that she can live for more than just the memory of a man long dead, we get Meiren’s character being solely, completely about Xiang Yu from beginning to end, and even later in Chaldea where she exists for nothing more than “haha married couple” jokes.

There is, to be clear, an attempt at relating this to the other theme of the chapter, humanity. Meiren and Xiang Yu are both discriminated against for their inhumanity, and it’s pointed out that they’re so fitting for each other because they, as non-humans, understood each other. I think this could have worked if it was given more emphasis, but as it stands it just kinda...isn’t. It, and they, take a backseat to Qin’s emphasis on this theme, so all this theme does for them is another justification as to why they are totally in love and why Urobuchi doesn’t have to write them actually being in love.

And then Xiang Yu dies, and Meiren goes crazy because her entire world and every facet of her character revolves around one man, and we have to kill her because he ignored her pleas and then died knowing he would die and knowing she would go crazy when he died. This, after spending the entire chapter from the first time we meet her being completely ineffective and failing at every turn, only becoming a threat once she devours her own Servant and even then only for a few minutes before she ceases to be relevant. Thanks, Urobuchi. Love it when you write women.

It’s a genuine disappointment, because you could do so much with Meiren and Lostbelt Xiang Yu bonding as themselves, not as Meiren from 2000 years ago and Xiang Yu from Panhistory, and with Meiren being able to honour her love without letting it chain her down to stagnation like it did in practice. But they don’t do any of that. They tell us that this great romance exists without putting in any of the work, and then expect it to work. And for me? It didn’t, at all. It is again, without a doubt the worst romance in this arc, and probably the worst romance in FGO.

Finally, Qin.

I think Qin is a fantastic villain. They are completely, utterly loathsome in every way, and the early chapters with Spartacus and Jing Ke around really highlight it. Spartacus’s musings about rebellion culminate in a reassurance that it is in fact right and just to rebel against the oppressor that is Qin despite the peace they offer, and Jing Ke consistently and constantly responds to all their justifications by pointing out what absolute drivel they are. It is a sincerely excellent setup for a Lostbelt King that isn’t a tragic case of someone trying to save what they can after a horrible accident, but one who in their arrogance created a hellscape that was pruned solely due to their own tyranny. Qin is the perfect balance of hypocritical and arrogant and cruel while being utterly convinced of their own perfection to make a fantastic villain to break out of the “tragic king after apocalypse” type we’d had for the first two Lostbelts, and has the perfect ingredients to a tie-in back to Goetia and how Goetia earned the title of “King of Humans” in their final moments.

But, unfortunately, the chapter starts softening up on them as it goes on. Where before, we had people calling them out for tyranny and obvious wrongdoing, by the end we have Holmes praising them for shouldering the difficult responsibility of humanity all by themselves and being the one we get on our Lostbelt CE, a spot reserved before for the inhabitants of the Lostbelt that we befriend. Because, ultimately, the Lostbelt doesn’t want to condemn Qin.

What Qin does is monstrous in the extreme, but by the end of the Lostbelt it feels like the game has forgotten that. Instead of pointing out the obvious problem in Liangyu’s loyalty being based on the certainty that Qin would murder everyone if she didn’t do it for them, Mashu and Guda have to just accept that it’s valid. Instead of reminding themselves of Spartacus and Jing Ke’s rejection of Qin as a tyrant, they praise them for taking over the responsibility of humanity. Instead of having the Lostbelt represented by the boy who dared to look up and dream of something more, it’s instead represented by Qin descending to live among humanity in their final days. Even Qin’s final act for Meiren has them claim without irony that they guide their people by the light of reason, when the entire chapter has been about how Qin uses threats of incredible violence to control everyone and how they had to conquer the world by force to enact this horrible regime, and no one points out the shocking hypocrisy in Qin claiming that they guide through reason instead of, you know. Giant meteors.

I didn’t name that boy, because the story doesn’t name that boy. In a story that is ostensibly about the horror of humanity being stripped of everything that makes them an individual and showing us that the spark and drive to be different and to learn and grow and change still exists even after over two thousand years of Qin trying to stamp it out, they don’t name the boy. This isn’t because names don’t exist in Qin’s empire, because explicitly the heroes are all named, and implicitly such a massive divergence would need to be highlighted in some way, so it’s not an intentional dehumanization which would actually fit.

Instead, despite this child being the first citizen who dares to enjoy a poem and who dares to step outside the boundaries of his village, despite him being proof positive that Qin’s tireless attempts at stamping out the human spirit are doomed to failure even after ruling the entire world for hundreds of years, despite him being inspired by Spartacus’s cry of rebellion against the tyranny of the world he was born in...he doesn’t have a name. And that really hurts the Lostbelt, I feel, because it just doesn’t take the time to even name our Lostbelt friend. He is, ultimately, not important. The symbol of the Lostbelt is Qin as the ultimate human, despite the entire point of the Lostbelt being that it’s a rejection of this concept, that Qin’s choice of becoming the one and only human is wrong and that the individuality of Panhistory is superior. Instead of enshrining the boy who dared to be different in the CE, pride of place is given to Qin.

That’s my biggest issue with Qin, really. We are given a perfect setup for Qin as a villain and indeed do reject their whole worldview and ideals and everything as being completely wrong, to the point that Holmes even rejects the idea that they are a human. In the final parts of the chapter, Holmes declares that the defense Qin dedicated themselves to is the domain of a god, and that despite their insistence that they did so as the only human and that they rejected becoming a god, ultimately they were deluding themselves, having simply taken on the role of a god while declaring themselves a human. This is the harshest condemnation that Qin ever gets and the final culmination of theme of humanity and what it really is that’s there throughout the Lostbelt, a complete and total rejection of the idea that one can do what Qin did and still claim to be human.

But instead of engaging with this, the story softens up on Qin by the end because it wants you to roll for them. It’s exactly what happened with Skadi, a solid character and path built up from the beginning and then swerving towards the end to make them more likeable. That Qin is the one on our Lostbelt CE and that it’s all about how Qin did their best to “shoulder the responsibility” for mankind instead of highlighting their tyranny is just kinda emblematic of how the story treats it once Jing Ke is gone, because when she’s not in the party people stop pointing out the obvious tyranny going on, and when she’s dead everyone starts acting like Qin is almost reasonable and that their path was a valid one that wasn’t so wrong, even though theirs was more right. It even completely ignores Koyanskaya pointing out that Qin loves humanity like an owner loves its pets, not as actual individuals, but this love is treated as completely valid thereafter instead of being a huge problem.

Big Big Spoilers For Qin’s Interlude Now, Skip Ahead To The Next Bolded Section If You Don’t Want To See Them

One of the reasons I’m so harsh on them for what could, in context, be seen as relatively minor softening up on Qin compared to the actual defeat we deal them is because of this Interlude. As a brief overview, Qin completely ignores the ending of their Lostbelt, which lasts for three months despite every other Lostbelt lasting a day at most before it vanishes and the implication of the final chapter being that it’s ending soon, returns to Epang Palace despite it having been destroyed and corrupted with a virus and despite having promised to live as a human on the ground with the rest of the world until the end, and then uses the data on the Shadow Border that somehow survived the virus and destruction of the palace to somehow construct a machine that allows them to create Singularities.

They then use this to create a bunch of Singularities related to “what-ifs” where they were a cruel king who ruled over Xiangyang and murdered all their subjects so they can piggyback on the Human Order instead of being destroyed with their Lostbelt and everyone in it, and then keeps the Singularities around as time bombs to destroy Panhistory like Goetia did if they ever feel like Guda might lose. When this is figured out, no one in the know bothers to tell Guda to protect their feelings, and no one intervenes in any way or challenges Qin in any regard besides telling them to believe in Guda.

This interlude turned Qin into the most loathsome character in the game for me. They declared they would put it all on the line challenging Guda and then lost and stepped aside, even helping to destroy the Tree of Fantasy, and even having Da Vinci praise their grace in stepping aside when it was clear that they had lost. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Qin lied. Qin pulled the trigger on everyone in their entire world and then decided that they didn’t actually want to uphold their end of the bargain, so they abandoned the people they swore to live alongside until the end and constructed a scenario where they have the sole authority to destroy all of human history forever if they feel like it, something made possible only because author fiat dictated that they still had the data and the capacity to use it after the twofold destruction of the Epang Palace and only because author fiat dictated that their Lostbelt lasted for months after the Tree was destroyed when every other Lostbelt disappears after hours. And all this happens because fundamentally, they don’t want Qin to be wrong, and they don’t think Qin was wrong. They pay lip service to the idea, but the end result is that Qin is always meant to have a point, and that despite having people point out their obvious hypocrisy at ther start like Jing Ke, by the end of the Lostbelt and beyond you are meant to take them at face value as a Hard Enby Making Hard Decisions doing their best to save the entire world.

SPOILERS FOR THE INTERLUDE OVER, YOU’RE SAFE NOW

To begin the summary for Qin as a character, I’d like to point out Fate’s relationship with Great Man theory. This theory is, in brief, a suggestion that the course of history is largely influenced by exceptional individuals and leaders that exert their will on the world as a result of their own superb capabilities, such as being more intelligent, charismatic, powerful etc. than all other men around them. This is obviously a theory with a bunch of holes, but what’s interesting is that Fate has always engaged with this idea and has always refuted it conclusively.

In Fate, if you are a single human trying to save the world, you will fail. Kiritsugu’s chasing of the Grail and his ultimate failure because of his own flaws making it physically impossible for him to consider a path to salvation that didn’t involve killing is a rejection of Great Man theory. Shirou understanding that one single person cannot possibly save everyone in the world is a rejection of Great Man theory. Amakusa’s inability to save the world in any way besides erasing free will is a rejection of Great Man theory. Goetia’s decision to erase history and start again to make something better and his ultimate defeat is a massive rejection of Great Man theory. Zelretch, for all his insane power, is literally paralyzed by that selfsame power into not being able to do anything, while someone like Aoko who doesn’t think of anything but what’s right in front of her is actually able to accomplish things because she doesn’t try transcending the limits of what a human is capable of. It is one of the Nasuverse’s most consistent themes, that it is fundamentally wrong and doomed to fail if you ever attempt to impress your will on the entire world in a misguided attempt to save it.

And yet Qin simply doesn’t engage with that. Qin is Great Man theory distilled into a character, and by the end of the Lostbelt and beyond the game gives up on challenging that. They declare themselves as the ultimate human with the sole responsibility to administrate mankind and despite losing, the game respects them and their path and refuses to condemn them the same way that it condemned Ivan for doing all he could to save his people, even if it meant inflicting his own ideas on the entire human race. And that’s a consistent problem with the last two Lostbelts, but it sticks out more for Qin because Qin didn’t face an apocalypse. Qin brought the world to an end with their own two hands, but the game simply cannot keep up the condemnation as much as it should, because it wants you to like them and wants you to roll them and spend money to do so. And that’s where Qin falters for me. They’re a fantastic villain, but the game doesn’t let them be a villain, regardless of how much it clashes not just with FGO’s themes, but with one of the overarching ideas behind a lot of stuff in the Nasuverse as a whole.

I’ve basically talked about the thematics and the characters together in the last section, so this is just me talking about its construction as a story here as a short(er) final roundup.

It’s badly written, really. Like I mentioned earlier, basically nothing happens for about half the chapter and then the latter half puts the pedal to the metal and speedruns its way through everything. Nothing is given the time or dedication it needs besides Spartacus’s sacrifice in the chapter, I feel, and that works to its extreme detriment.

In terms of things that happen, it strained my sense of disbelief as bad or worse than Lostbelt 2 did. I knew it was going to be rough when Mordred, one of the Knights of the Round Table who was easily able to go toe-to-toe with Siegfried and stomp most people she fought in previous appearances, ends up firing her Noble Phantasm at Xiang Yu and doing no damage whatsoever despite being a direct hit, and then Xiang Yu ends up defeating a group of four Servants including powerhouses like Mordred and Spartacus without breaking a sweat and explicitly while holding back.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, that I’m starting to sound like some BLer who cares for nothing besides calculations and VS debates and whatnot, but that’s not what I’m about. I don’t care to argue whether my favorite Servant could beat Goku or not, partially because the answer is an obvious yes because they’re my favorite, but mostly because that’s just not really relevant for a story.

What is relevant, however, is the idea of suspension of disbelief. In telling a story, you don’t need to be realistic, but you need to be consistent. Having internal consistency is a vital part of selling your work to the audience, because if they start thinking that anything can happen at any time because the author wants it to happen, they can get pulled out of the story real quick. If you introduce someone as being Double God and being able to wipe the floor with every single one of the protagonists without breaking a sweat, you have to make sure that when or if they are defeated, their defeat is internally consistent. Either they lose their strength somehow, or the protagonists find some way to power up or change their tactics or do something different to defeat them next time they fight. When you pull a victory or defeat out of your ass without some kind of internal consistency, you had better make sure that you’ve got your themes on point, because if you’ve failed in making something internally consistent and you can’t justify the event happening because it fits perfectly with the themes of the work, then it takes people out real quick.

That’s where this Lostbelt falls down really hard in terms of story construction outside of its characters, because it has neither. Xiang Yu is introduced as an unstoppable murdermachine that we can only hold off temporarily or wait for him to retreat, even when that means devaluing our own Servants’ capabilities and making Mordred who is a Knight of the Round table look like a chump. But then later, Spartacus vaporizes a meteor with nothing but his Noble Phantasm, except Xiang Yu was just straight up too much for him, even though Xiang Yu is pretty much the greatest symbol of Qin’s oppression and its source, the incredible violence that they are willing and able to visit upon anyone at any time if they feel like it. Spartacus loses horribly to one symbol and then annihilates the other and it feels weird.

Later, we’re also introduced to Meiren being a True Ancestor with infinite mana who curses us so badly that we only survive with Koyanskaya’s aid. Even Koyanskaya is urging us to run and there’s explicitly nothing we can do to her. That’s fine! It’s a good setup for a really tough boss! But what it means is that now we have two people set up as completely unbeatable even with all the help we have, including Red Hare and Chen Gong. That’s an awkward setup that really needs a solid resolution, especially when the final battle with them is fighting both, together, while both are completely fresh and Chaldea has just fought their way through Xiangyang, defeating Liangyu, Han Xin and the royal guards, and Li Shuwen.

And the game doesn’t engage with it. We beat them both despite them both individually being able to wipe us out earlier in the chapter, and despite nothing having changed for us. If anything, they should have the advantage of conviction, or at least Xiang Yu should. But we beat them and Nezha gives some nonsense about how Xiang Yu lost because he never had any rivals to fight against, despite him having been used to conquer the world, and despite him having fought alongside the great heroes enshrined in Mt. Li during these conquests. Meiren isn’t even acknowledged, which isn’t much of a surprise, but it is disappointing. Despite her being held up as an insurmountable threat at first, she’s not even considered worth mentioning in favor of talking about Xiang Yu.

That problem continues along with Qin, who comes at us with a Grand class Saint Graph and whom we end up defeating all by ourselves, not as a battle of wills but flat out defeating them, even though we only have Mashu, Red Hare, Nezha, and Mordred who have all been exhausted fighting through all of Xiangyang. People are hyped up as insanely dangerous and then lose not because of the thematics and not because the story has constructed things so that their loss makes sense, but just because the author says it happens. All the battles are handled with in-game battles, which the game grew out of a long, long time ago. The difference between the climactic battles with Ivan and Surtr and the climactic battle with Qin in terms of actual writing is night and day, and the sole saving grace, that it is explicitly characterized as a conflict between the two philosophies and a battle of which one comes out on top, just isn’t enough to overcome the insane hype of being on par with a Grand that Qin gets for absolutely no reason. It devalues Grands and it made the victory against them feel unearned even with the idea that it’s a conflict of philosophies, which I usually eat up. To compare it to the great example of that in Fate, it feels like Shirou VS Archer, except instead of the point being that Archer cannot bring himself to fully deny Shirou’s ideals and is defeated by Shirou reminding him of their beauty even though he wields the power to crush Shirou instantly if he wanted, it’s like Shirou proved his point about ideals by beating Archer up fair and square. It just isn’t nearly as well written.

It isn’t all bad. Like I mentioned, Spartacus, Jing Ke, Gordolf, they were all genuine delights that I loved. The meteor, the assassination, those were both excellent scenes. But overall, the Lostbelt was half nothing happening and then the latter half made up of one or two cool moments with a hell of a lot of bad shit connecting them. Its theme of stagnation is indecisive and muddled because of Qin and Meiren, its theme of humanity has its conclusion ignored and conflicts with the overall idea of Great Men in the Nasuverse, its treatment of its female characters barring Jing is uncomfortable at best, and it tries to sell us a romance without putting in any of the actual legwork to make it believable.

I wish Lostbelt 3 had been better. I can see easy routes to make it better. But more than anything I wish that Meiren had been done better. She’s an immortal True Ancestor who has lived for thousands of years and seen the birth of modern humanity, living through so much of our history, and instead of having a story of learning how to break free of her stagnation she’s just obsessed with a male character who isn’t remotely as focused on her to the extent that every choice and decision she makes in the chapter is focused entirely around him. It’s just...uncomfortable.

For all the hooks she had as a character, Meiren is reduced to an accessory for her man, and I think that’s a crying shame.

#FGO #Fate/Grand Order #Fate Grand Order #cosmos in the lostbelt #Synchronized Intelligence Nation #SIN #lostbelt #FGO spoilers #Lostbelt 3 #Shi Huang Di #Qin Shi Huang #Xiang Yu

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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

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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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metaphortunes · 4 years

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Howdy friends, I’ve written a few short stories that I wanted to throw out into the ether. And I went back and tagged all my previous writing posts with the tag “metaphortune writes” for easy finding!

Here’s a short story about small towns, the priorities of young people, the sweetness of summer, and siblings. I didn’t edit it at all so my apologies in advance for any grammar failures!

The Big Slush machine went out on Sunday, April 14th, 2005. If we’re being honest here, it was the only reason my sister and I went to Johnson’s Fuel Mart. Their soda fountain tasted like it dumped about as much plastic into every cup as it did soda syrup. Their candy was tremendously overpriced, they had 1 brand of chips, Big Harold’s, and they cleaned the floors about once every 2 years. But the Big Slushes were heaven.

Suffice to say, April 14th was the end of an era for us. Each passing week we drifted farther and farther from knowing those floors like the back of our hands. Our ability to use the Big Slush machine with surgical precision faded and we reverted to slushie peasants. Mona, the main evening clerk slowly forgot our names, and our allowances stayed in our pockets more than ever.

One Tuesday, July 14th, I walked to Frantz Park down on Alpine Road. The benches were covered in droplets of a syrupy, sappy resin from a tree I’d never learned the name of. After sitting on the 40-year-old swings for a while, rusty chains and all, I walked through the outfield of the baseball diamond.

There was a windstorm that blew through town on July 12th, so it was no surprise when, deep into center-field, I saw a few pieces of trash had blown into the grass. A 3ft long Walgreens receipt, a fast food wrapper, and the item that caught my attention. A full two months after the Big Slush machine went out, there it was. In pristine condition, a clear plastic Big Slush cup. 34 fluid ounces with a flared rim. No lid, no straw, just the cup.

Obviously, I was elated. I picked up the cup and started fast-walking home. Throughout the walk my mind was fixated on what I believed to be the one possible explanation for how the pristine Big Slush cup came to be there: somewhere in our 15 stoplight town, there was a new Big Slush machine.

Nora shared my enthusiasm for the cup, but was more skeptical of my hypothesis. Realistically speaking, there weren’t many other places that would’ve had the machine. Not to mention, would they have the good flavors? Blue Raspberry, White Cherry, and Cola? Would it even be worth it if the machine had the disappointment of Grape or the medicine taste of Strawberry? It was purely speculation, but our teenage minds raced.

The next day, geared up with a list of all the businesses we thought could have a Big Slush machine, we set out to find it. First, we walked up State Route 117 to the small grocery, Three Bear Market. No luck there, but they were having a sale on gum. Blowing giant, sticky bubbles, we walked to the next business. Cutting across the alley between State Route 117 and Terrence Street, we made it to McAllen’s Bakery. No luck there, but the owner was very nice and complimented our backpacks.

We took Terrence Street to Alpine Road and stopped for a short break at Frantz Park. The benches were still sappy, the swings were still rusty. Funny how things don’t change overnight. We walked the outfield of the baseball diamond looking for any other pieces of evidence, but alas, there was no trash to be found. That’s probably good in the grand scheme of things, but we were disappointed.

Walking through the streets with Nora was a slightly blissful experience. Not quite a full on sort of bliss where everything in the world is great and nothing ever hurts; but a soft, warm filter on everything. That’s the benefit of having a good relationship with your older sibling, having them around is like a blanket of security. Nothing can ever go THAT wrong when they’re with you.

We’d taken Alpine to First, then First to Reagan. On Reagan was the first gas station built in town, the Marathon, formerly known as the Brachston Pump Station. Marathon bought it up in 1996, installed all new pumps, remodeled the inside, and removed any character the building had had. Oh, and they didn’t have a Big Slush machine. Probably worth mentioning that.

From the Marathon on Reagan, we walked a block or so down the Walgreens. Walgreens having a slushie was a long shot, but didn’t pharmacies used to have soda fountains back in the day? It wasn’t THAT absurd. We wandered around the building to find exactly zero Big Slush machines. The clerks, disenchanted college dropouts, paid exactly zero attention to us.

The last place we tried was the only other gas station in town, Stop-N-Go. We had to walk the entire rest of the way down Reagan to where it dead-ended into Marshall Street and walk Marshall Street until it dead-ended into Montgomery Avenue. That all ends up being about a mile’s walk, but we were determined. We entered through the oddly heavy steel and glass door and asked the clerk. They didn’t have one.

However, the clerk, Henry, was also a fan. Or at least pretended to like them. As a favor to the owner, Henry worked one night at the other Stop-N-Go, about 4 miles away in Hallston back in 2003. He remembered them having a slushie machine, but couldn’t remember what type. We figured that even if it was there in 2003, it probably wasn’t there today, and slunk out of the store. But Henry came out after us and said “let me call the other store and ask them for you, alright?”

The clerk on the other end seemed very confused, but eventually was able to confirm the news we were so adamant on receiving: they had a Big Slush machine in working order! We expressed our joy and gratitude to Henry after he hung of the phone, he said he was “stoked it worked out for you.” We were stoked too, Henry.

We took Montgomery down to Fourth and ended up back home. Our parents wouldn’t be home from work for a few hours, which gave us time to plot exactly how we’d ask them to drive us 4 miles to go to a gas station. The plotting was all for naught, as they were tremendously unimpressed. “Next time we’re out that way, we’ll go” they said. But the reality of the situation was that we’d only been to Hallston a few times. It was in the opposite direction of Wrexham, the small city we’d go to from time to time.

Luckily, Nora remembered a fact that I had failed to remember. The rails-to-trails bike path that went through our town also went through Hallston. Neither of us were really that interested in biking, but if it meant getting a Big Slush? We’d have biked 20 miles one way. We got our bikes out for the first time in weeks that day, inflated the tires, tested our helmets, and set off.

Four miles is a hell of a bike ride when you haven’t biked in weeks. It was all flat land surrounded by farmer’s fields, but it was still 4 miles in the heat of July. Luckily, we had a frosty goal to keep our minds set on. Whenever we faltered or slowed down, the other would just say “Big Slush!!!” in a sort of TV commercial announcer voice. After a half an hour or so, we made it to the Hallston. Neither of us really knew where the Stop-N-Go was, but we fortune favored us. A Stop-N-Go fuel truck was stopping-n-going at the the traffic light near the bike path. We sped to follow it.

The truck took a left onto the state route and turned into the Stop-N-Go. Success! We found ourselves in the parking lot, shouting “Big Slush!!!” at each other in the aforementioned voice. We opened the surprisingly light (or just well maintained) steel and glass door and saw a large sign hanging from the ceiling that said “DRINKS” in Comic Sans. We walked towards the sign and found our holy grail. The Big Slush machine.

There it sat on a red counter, humming away and constantly rotating the slush inside. Condensation sat on the plastic windows to view each of the three flavors churning, and we parsed the flavor selection. Strawberry (aka medicine), Grape (aka disappointment), and White Cherry. As Meatloaf didn’t say: 1 out of 3 ain’t bad. But as we approached the machine, our hearts sunk. The White Cherry flavor was out of order.

We literally ran to the counter to ask the incredibly confused clerk what was happening and when it would be fixed. There was an error with the ratios of the newest White Cherry syrup batches which made the slushies too hard to fit through a straw. We begged the clerk to just turn it on and let us have some, we didn’t care that they’d be hard, we didn’t care how long it’d take, and we’d wait around; but the clerk refused.

Ultimately, we’d come too far for this to happen. We were going to drink a Big Slush and that was going to be the end of it. We swallowed our unhappiness and decided to get the flavors of medicine and disappointment. I got the Grape, Nora got the Strawberry. Honestly, they were not great. The Grape still tasted like the inside of a shoe, and the Strawberry still tasted like it was a slushie version of children’s liquid ibuprofen. But they still quenched a primal desire in us. Can you call a desire for a slushie a primal desire? Sure, why not.

The rest of the summer break, we’d bike to Hallston two or three times a week. Biking got easier each time we went, the rides got quicker, we had to shout “Big Slush!!!” at each other less. The White Cherry flavor never came back, but we learned to appreciate the Grape and Strawberry flavors. If we mixed the two, it almost tasted good for some reason. Grape and Strawberry isn’t exactly a combination you’d expect to taste cohesive and fulfilling, and yet, here we were.

Eventually the school year and extra-curriculars caught up with us and we were lucky to make it to the Hallston Stop-N-Go once a week. Our enthusiasm never waned, though. Each time, we hoped that they’d have finally gotten another flavor to replace the White Cherry, and yet, even a year after, they hadn’t. Strawberry and Grape. Medicine and Disappointment. Nora and Jamie.

#metaphortune writes

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ask-the-dancing-demon · 5 years

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Alright, time for an explanation

Or as best of an explanation I can give at this point.

So, yeah I’ve been pretty much absent from this blog for like what? 2 years? 2 and a half?? I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but needless to say, it’s been a hot minute.

So, where to start?

Well, I should probably say why I got so sluggish with this whole thing.

So, one reason is that I had started working as I had some tuition I needed to pay off and just to get some income in general. The hours , though supposed to be part-time, got weird. Like, work 8-10 hours one day and an hour and a half the next. This not only made my pay really fucked up, but also (and more importantly) had me just too dead to do anything else once I got home.

In fact, even my days off were just me resting and not really wanting to do any big art projects. Which brings me to my next reason:

If all of you who’ve been here remember where we left off, I was working my way up to revealing a very important character. And how I wanted to do it, was I wanted to have this entire comic laid out to introduce him the way I wanted to, drop some exposition, and set up future character arcs.

However, the little project balloon up a little too much. And by a little too much, I mean it took ages just for one strip of panels. Like a couple of weeks for like 5 panels-which there were 5 panels for each part, and there ended up being more 20 parts- I also had very little skill/experience with making anything in a comic structure (I still do, but I’m branching out and am better at it) so everything is in a top-down format and it added to how time-consuming it all was.

So, with everything moving at a snail’s pace, and the number of people coming aboard to see what this blog had to offer I started getting anxious about doing anything on here knowing that the more time I stalled, the more I was just disappointing everyone here. And then, the project ended up needing more panels than I was anticipating, therefore extending my workload tenfold. At some point, that anxiety spread to what I was working on and I could barely focus on what I was doing and kept worrying about how much I wasn’t getting done, how I wasn’t able to do anything else, all the details I was trying to put in that weren’t going well , etc., etc.

Eventually I just kinda sat around worrying about what I was gonna do about this whole thing while simultaneously getting absolutely nothing done.

And then that, combined with my shitty work situation making me practically depressed basically had me sitting on the whole project barely touching tumblr at all. for like two years. I mostly just kept to DeviantArt for a lot of my stuff.

Of course, during those two years, Bendy and the Ink Machine continued, ended, and is getting another game. And through all that time with the progression of the plot and such, I kept getting more and more headcanons and ideas that all tied into this blog’s AU

But I couldn’t show them, because they would be spoilers and would take place after what I was doing. Which meant I’d have to do that first. Which brought back the problems I mentioned before.

Now, even my DeviantArt content is starting to dry up, because of all the things I have to withhold until the stuff is finished.

Finally, I just go fed up with putting the ideas on hold and not getting shit done. And I finally came to the conclusion that I had been too inexperienced to try taking on a project that fricking big and honestly shame on me for that

So, here’s what I’ve decided.

I went ahead and decided to condense the project down to something that I could accomplish. I was originally going to have this character exit at the end, and only sometimes be available to for asks, but the amount of work that entail, if I wanted to get the points I wanted across, would basically put me back to square one. So, instead of doing that, everyone will get to ask him all the stuff they want in order to further this story.

Also, the way I’ll be doing answers will be slightly different; in that it’ll be a bit less of just answering questions with a bit of lore thrown in, and more of asks helping to guide the story. I’ll still give you guys a lot of fun input, though don’t worry! ;)

Next, the characters won’t be quite the same as we left of. You know, having a thousand and two ideas bouncing around your head for a while tends to lead to a few changes in how you do these characters. There’s been a good deal of character development, and a few dynamics have changed, so these characters may act a bit differently than expected.(how many times can i say characters in one paragraph???)

Next, fair warning about how the comic will look. I did have a few parts of it finished before trimming it down. Some parts had all the shading and dialogue and stuff finished, while some parts just had some lineart done (i did lineart for the fudkigng background why did i do that that was such a bad idea D:) Some panels will have the original lineart from 2 years ago-that i did not touch outside of cleaning- and others will be my recent style, so it might look kinda wonky with my old art and current skill right next to each other so just bear with me on it.

And finally, the last thing I need to say is that the amount I had condensed everything down to is almost finished- like, ready to go up within the next week finished. Hell, it could maybe even be finished within the next few days(but probably not because i nitpick like a mofo so it’ll probably be next week)

Sorry for the wait, all this time guys, I promise your patience will be rewarded

I might open the asks for anyone who has anymore questions for me, about this, or about the blog. What do you guys think?

#mun speaks #shut up grem #thats a lot of words 0.0

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twisted-petal · 7 years

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Death Continued: Part 5

... "And in case you're still reading... You weren't hiding anyone... When I warned you about my ability to figure shit out, I was giving you the chance to come clean... I told you I just wanted to know. We could have worked something out. Something more pleasant. And YOU... I can't even be vague enough on here for you. You should have listened before...

Gods I could go on forever... Just to finally be heard. For my words to finally be understood? It's not as though I ask for much action, or even a physical presence... A voice, an ear, or some lines of text.

Just stop fighting me... Stop lying... Stop fucking flirting, and stop trying to fix me! I just want some fucking honesty and support! I try so hard to do whatever I can for any of you who come to me. I have sacrificed a great deal for some. The least you could do is humour me for a bit...

/vent

Going to make this last bit quick; FB keeps trying to crash my phone and not posting this, and making me rewrite shit and I need to stop c-c

If you really need to comment or ask a question or whatever, I just ask that you do so in private and just be nice. Please? I've been avoiding social media and my phone in general (save those I felt I could trust and felt safest around...). I don't want to deal with any more crap. I just want to feel normal again, and a lot of people I've been going to or who have come up to me have not made that any easier. I can only hope I've made it clear to any of you, personally, that I have appreciate what little you were able to do for me. Especially not knowing the details about him or anything else that happened last year. I was so determined to fight everything without being too much of a burden, by trying to be sneaky in my search for help.

I didn't want pity! I thought that the less you all knew, the easier it would be to find a friend willing to give me the time, and once things went south it made things worse... For myself and those involved. I hope that it doesn't stick to any one of you, now that I've left you alone or you've left me behind. I get it... Still don't like it. Doesn't make it any less my fault.

If I get any of your usual responses I *will* get pissed off. Don't want to deal with any shit... I've had enough..."

The feedback from the was... Mostly undesirable. I got the responses I specifically asked not to receive, was promised more attention from those who lost contact with me and never received it, and all males tried taking advantage of my "vulnerability". I'm not an idiot...

On October 28th, I went to a Halloween party with my landlady and a friend of hers. She was on her phone the entire time, her friend vanished to go hit some dabs or whatever-the-fuck, and a gal mistook me for an ex's ex (I don't believe they're together) as we wore similar outfits (I saw her go by once that night), and so smacked my ass. Discomfort and awkwardness around. We were at Johnny B's, which added to the anxiety as I worried I would run into a different ex: If I am not friends with my exes, I am more or less terrified to run into them.

I wanted out of here... Around 1:30 I was convincing Corey to come take me home, as I was wearing a corset and fluffy skirt, shoes with heels (hate heels...), it was cold, and my ankle didn't let the cold or the shoes (I was wearing my cosplay from RTX). He finally agreed to come get me, and I invited him in to come chat as we used to - we were not together.

We fell asleep after I curled up to him, still not feeling all that great from my trip to Portland, which I told him. He rarely stayed a whole night, let alone not demand sex. I woke up to him yanking my pants down...

I have been called a liar, a whore, and accused of begging for attention by calling rape. Gods forbid I seek attention or support from those around me at all... I have lost many friends over this.

March 18th it was brought to me attention (in an irritating and vague way) that he had been arrested for sexual abuse. Because of my cowardice, he attacked someone else and on March 8th he was admitted to the local jailhouse. There are now three counts under his name. I don't know if it's from the same gal or others speaking up, but I wish I had the courage and finances to add to his sentence... His bail is set to $50,000 with no release date posted.

I have grown colder and bitchier than ever before, trying to explain to some why this is the case and faced with zero patience, tolerance, or support. Through everything, I have been alone.

I smoked heavily after this, trying to forget. Cut myself off from everyone around me. Eventually I started reaching out to those I was most comfortable around and now they are gone. I am too broken to them...

Puppy insisted I stay with him for a week up in Portland. My stay started off terribly... There were mobs going around to prostest Trump: Breaking windows, starting fires, vandalizing and shit, and he lived a few blocks from where they rallies took place. I kept him up-to-date on when my bus left and when I would arrive - texting him several times as the bus entered the city and I grew closer to the station.

Waiting outside the station, bums who frequented there would ooze closer and a couple confronted me. He assured me he was on his way with his friend (who I was eager to finally meet). Discomfort and anxiety increasing as I was surrounded by these strange people trying to talk to me, I finally made my own way to his place; Puppy's place wasn't all that for from the station, just across the street and over a small bridge.

He finally made it to the station just a few minutes after I got to his complex - he was furious. I was scared and alone... He knew when I would be there! I kept him up-to-date! Why wasn't he just there...... Why would he leave me waiting like that... Alone...

I very much enjoyed the short time I was able to spend with him... He had to work, but we had a couple days to venture out. He also forgot what day I was leaving... It felt like he wasn't at all pleased with my visit... I was mopey and slow from not feeling well, and I wasn't smiling much... I completely destroyed my time with him...

I spent my days watching videos to help me smile more, reading one of the books I got at Powell's, and cleaning his apartment. I swear that boy hadn't cleaned since the day he moved in. It was the least I could do for him - I wanted to feel useful again and care for him as he cared for me... I wanted him to feel relaxed and comfortable and come back to a clean environment. I wanted to see him smile... His smile is my absolute favorite sight, and he always hid it from me because he doesn't like his smile lines. I adore him. Every inch of him... He was my muse, my comfort, my confidence, and my joy.

I don't need him for these feelings, but he was a major source of these that I greatly welcomed - I appreciated his presence far more than he could ever understand or that would matter to him... I wish I could have done the same for him... He's so hard on himself... If he wasn't such a poop-face. But it doesn't matter... He has made it perfectly clear that I am too broken for him... Saying he just wants to focus on himself, only to inform me he's found someone he wants to get close to... Always when I start smiling inside again... I truly wish him luck in finding a mate that will allow him to see all the amazing colors in life that he's missing. I wonder if he ever figured out what those new colors I showed him meant... I hope they weren't bad colors...

- Sidenote: He told me once long ago so I can't remember the name or details exactly, but he sees moods/feelings as color: Synesthesia, I believe. I looked it up to be sure, but there are several different types of color associated sensory conditions, and I don't know all he experiences.... Sensory experience* sounds much better than "condition". Wiki says it's a "phenomenon".

Honestly... I could write just as much as I have now about all he means to me and my interactions with him on the two and a half years I've known him... So...

We visited Powell's, checked out the art store near his place, and took a bus to the comic and pet shops he goes to. I picked up a few books and comics that I very much want to complete, and I had such a great time being out and about with him. I had shut myself away after what had happened... I'd been feeling so dead inside. Still a bit of a shut-in, but I'm finally getting out more to get some things done.

Living with who I am... I continue to struggle with feeling at all decent about myself... Corey being in jail has made job searching easier, as I no longer live around the area he frequented and there's no chance of bumping into him, but my legs have grown weak since my accident at Michaels and it has made me a tad lazy... It doesn't take much anymore for my ankle to start hurting, and my knees have grown a tad wobbly. My confidence is still shot, depression less crippling but still heavy, and I'm just not the bad-ass chick with the smile that brightens any room, anymore...

Actually... There are so many more details I want to get into - of my recent days and those from events I've already described - but I feel I've said enough... I have no one to talk with and I just wish to speak. For someone to finally listen to me and sympathize in some way. To not be spoken to in a textbook, regurgitated manner. I miss having someone to connect with... A back-and-forth conversation about anything: troubles, success, interests, displeasures, complains, approvals - everything.

Ducky told me long ago that it is important to vent... Before he and I got together I bottled up everything and he saw how it was destroying me. Those years before him have been condensed and intensified this year and a fouth, with all that has happened in this short time... There is so much left unsaid.

Today (upon writing this) the family gets together to pick what they want of Grams' old possessions... I have been drinking this afternoon... I'd picked up drinking so I could grow sleepy enough to pass out as my roommate games late into the night and I cannot find sleep. Today I drink for stress and anxiety and sadness. This will not become a habit; I have always been good at avoiding being consumed by addictive substances.

As much as I repeat to myself on a daily basis that I should not exist, I will live on and continue to fight. And no; my roommate does not comfort me, console, or converse with me. He is just there. Sharing a room with a dude suuuuuuucks and I am glad I did not accept his confession. He has proven to be disgusting, wasteful, and inconsiderate. I am still thankful for the invitation to stay here, though. It's just difficult and tiring...

고맙습니다, thank you.

([I hope I wrote that right, I'm still learning and have found too many ways to say the same thing... 고마 ㅝㅛ?)]

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