Currently thinking about Mike Madhouse,,,. He fascinates me
So they claim he drank so much of that energy drink his “skin turned green”, right, yeah?
And I have. Questions about that! Doubts even!
My thoughts are,, there are. A few different options for what I think actually happened with all that and stuff. So.
1. Given the world they exist in… it might have. It seems to be within reason that if there’s such a thing as abyss sourced ingredients for coffee shop shit in a town full of Cryptids and abnormal humans that there could be an energy drink that can turn you green.
2. The idea that the drink turned him green could have come about after his death! Like, he seems to have kept on broadcasting after his death (hence the “ghost channel” you check out at the start), it seems possible that he might have mentioned “his skin being green” on one of said broadcasts because, well, it is now that he’s a ghost! Or one of those “cryptid sighting” pictures was posted, or a ghost hunter stumbled upon him and started talking about it. So the news stories/people picked it up and now that’s what people believe is true
3. It was entirely made up to sensationalise the news, though they neglected to actually talk about the guy himself apparently.
And then there’s the fourth option my friend suggested which. Well
4. It’s a mix of two and three, with the stories reporting they turned his skin green and Madhouse — his memory muddled as it was by his death — believed it.
I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.
I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.
The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...
Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.
I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.
And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?
It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.
To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.
In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.
Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.
So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.
What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.
Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?
this is a very rough and scribbly comic, but sometimes that's all a comic is going to end up being lmao. the guy with the jacket is darren, glasses is andy. not featured, andy's dead brother who nevertheless insists on haunting the subtext
it's like. louis attempted to tell this story to daniel the first time, broke down, and attacked him before he could finish it.
and then decades later he's convinced himself that it was leaving the story unresolved that's holding him back from living his life fully now. so he invites daniel back again. and louis is sitting poised and put together, confident in his ability to recite his history in a pretty, poignant, neat little narrative that will resolve all the guilt and yearning and emptiness inside of him. that if he can just tell a compelling, satisfying story, maybe it will actually be that, and not the life he lived through, with all the pitfalls of his own failures lurking inside.
and then season 1 ends with him once again being forced to confront that the story he wants to imagine and the life he actually lived aren't the same thing. the boundaries around his narrative are shredded and he's left exposed, and subsequently able to face his past for the first time since that original interview. and you think, you think, "well this is it. they've crossed the event horizon. there's no use hiding the truth anymore, not after it's come flooding out into the open like this"
and then season 2 opens. not only is it back to the original, practiced distance, we now have armand literally enforcing that distance. a man sitting at the table who's interjections must be disregarded, an intentional interruption to the flow of the story. he doesn't exist to aid or add detail, he exists to distract louis when he gets too deep in the story. the only time we do get louis allowing any deep truth to come out is when armand leaves the room.
it's like. louis wants a story that's true, and the truth is what he's convinced will leave him satisfied. armand wants a story that will satisfy louis, to the extent louis will accept it's true.
Cap's got a new voice claim! feat. a tiny bit of Sparrows n her's unchanged vc because 1. it's cute to hear them together and 2. I snorted. The vibes are so different
[songs: So Familiar by Jean Castel and Driving Myself Home by Rose Betts]
I was REALLY REALLY curious about some of the logistics of the whole adrenaline-fear-thing Bruce stuck in Jason, so I went down a rabbit hole of googling! From what I was seeing of other people's posts, it seems like general consensus is that there's a chip in Jason's head that's making the
disclaimer: I'm not a medical professional. I googled this and looked at articles and research papers but I definitely could have misunderstood things! talk to a doctor for better info!
As I listed in another post, adrenaline gets triggered in the body for multiple reasons, one of the most obvious being fear. Keep that in mind.
So, first off, when adrenaline hits your system, it does a ton of things: your sensitivity to pain decreases, your pupils get bigger, your vision gets better, your heart starts racing, your blood pressure increases, your hearing improves, your digestion slows down, the air passages in your lungs expand, your blood gets redistributed to your muscles, and your blood glucose levels increase.
(Your adrenal glands, of which the average person has two, are on the top of each kidney, btw. That's where they link up with the endocrine system.)
Short-term, these things can help you escape a situation your brain decides is dangerous. But if they go on for a long time, well... I think you can guess.
Generally, anxiety/fear -> panic attack -> hyperventilation, and if the hyperventilation goes on for too long it can increase the levels of oxygen in your blood to dangerous amounts. Most people would pass out before this got to the point that it could cause death, and because they're unconscious, the body has a chance to get breathing back to normal levels (though of course you'd most likely have negative side-effects after this).
Most importantly: Adrenaline is straight-up toxic in huge quantities. As in, it will kill you if there's a massive amount for a long time. I can't get a reliable source on how long this takes or exactly how much it takes to kill you, but there are cases of people dying during surgery when accidentally given massive amounts of epinephrine (adrenaline). And there are definitely reports of people straight up dying of fright (of note is that most of those people had varying conditions that weakened their hearts already). Basically, adrenaline ends up opening the heart to calcium, and if too much calcium builds up it impedes the heart's ability to work, thus damaging it, and eventually the whole system collapses. I couldn't find any real time estimates on how long the calcium build-up takes 🤷♀️
So you can imagine, if you decided to, say, make a little computer chip that forced your brain into feeling fear every time it sensed adrenaline hitting the system, then the obvious result you're going to get is... more adrenaline entering the system. Which then kicks off the next wave of fear! Is it worse than the first? Possibly! That fear kicks more adrenaline into overdrive, which means more fear which means more adrenaline, which means more fear which means more adrenaline which means more fear which means more adrenaline which means more fear which means more adrenaline which means more fear which means more adrenaline which means more fear which means more adrenaline which means more fear which means more adrenaline and so on and so forth!
And that is to say nothing of the fact that - if we work under the assumption that Bruce put a chip in Jason's brain to cause the fear response to adrenaline being released - it means HE PUT A CHIP IN JASON'S BRAIN. HE PERFORMED BRAIN SURGERY!!! THE MAN WHO DITCHED MEDICAL SCHOOL PERFORMED A BRAIN OPERATION!!! TO PUT SOMETHING INTO SOMEONE'S BRAIN!!!!
conclusion: realistically, jason would be dead by the end of the day. if we go by dc logic, he'll probably turn into a speedster (kidding! I'm kidding. though you could make a case of adrenaline = hysterical strength which means tons of adrenaline = superman strength. probably not going to happen.)
Thank you for listening to my tedtalk on why bruce wayne is a fucking moron (and dc writers don't give a shit about biology 🫣)
if the rumors are true (the rumors being facts that people know about curt’s fate because he was a real life human being who lived and uh. died.) and curt’s death is happening this early on in the series, then literally the only thing that will get me to keep watching is if episode three ends with bucky realizing that curt is dead and staring off into space with the same empty longing that he stared at curt with when he rode away in the back of that truck, which is the same stare that he gave him when he first saw him alive after the mission, and will now be the stare that he gives whenever curt’s name is mentioned and he’s reminded that he’s lost the only person in the world that could get him to feel something.
and then, and this is important, i need episode four in its entirety to be a flashback of their time at bootcamp in walla walla. for curt’s death to matter, i need to see whatever earned curt such a tender spot in bucky’s heart. i need to see their shenanigans and get to know their inside jokes and i need to see all of their time spent together (how many other times have they snuck off on their own? when was the first?)
if they want to give curt’s death the weight that it deserves, i need to watch bucky fall in love with him. and then i need to see it brought to the present. show us the kiss they shared after curt threw that punch and knocked feeling back into bucky. show us the lighthearted drunken kisses that bucky left on curt’s cheek after giving those british bastards what they asked for. show us the tiny moment of intimacy that they got to share before this final mission. show us a last kiss that they don’t know is their last kiss, softened by curt joking, always joking, that he’ll be bucky’s guardian angel when this is all over.
and then, and only then, we can return to bucky in the present, learning what it means for it to be all over.
I can't get over how that post is just seriously bizarre maybe it would sound less crazy if their reasons weren't He had a feminine username and worked in tech and was a leftist
Rewatched the episode of House MD where Kutner dies and I honestly think instead of killing his character off, they should have said that Kutner got a job as physician to then President Barack Obama and that's why he was leaving. Objectively funnier since his actor did leave the show to work for Obama and I know it would have driven House nuts that Kutner was ditching to go play doctor with the President instead of getting verbally abused for House's amusement.
kinda wild to me that one of the most compelling aspects of both Chuuya and Kunikida's characters to me, that I never really see talked about, is how they're heavily set on a doomed crash course towards complete and utter destruction, and how I am so, so worried for them both.....
just a thought but like. if akiyama, who’s established as being a bizarrely talented investigator in y5, suspected kiryu’s death to have been faked (or at least “fishy” in his own words) basically on the fucking Spot, i feel like it just makes sense that majima would’ve been just as quick, if not quicker to see where shit wasn’t adding up and become skeptical that the whole thing was a coverup. reason being, in y5 he put shit together and figured out the grand scheme going on so damn early most people didn’t even suspect yet that there was any scheme going on. he then faked his own death well enough to get it in the papers and had masterminded himself all the way to the final boss (with some help of course) before things backfired on him. so he’s got some crazy good skills when it comes to reading people, figuring out their intentions, putting puzzle pieces together, etc– way better than he wants people knowing, generally– and he knows the hallmark signs of a faked death because he’s literally done it before. all that on top of knowing kiryu like the back of his hand and knowing damn well how hard this man is to kill, and how prone to running away from shit for the sake of the safety of people he cares about (for better or for worse) he is. he could absolutely put together that, if given the opportunity by some faction or powerful individual, kiryu would sacrifice his identity and status as a legit living person for the assured safety of others, or for yakuza tensions to diminish, or maybe even as an act of self-flagellation.
tldr: I think the reasons majima didn’t go rogue/apeshit after kiryu’s alleged death are that A) for once he has saejima around to reign him in and make it feel less like Everything has been lost, B) I think he’s legitimately known pretty much all along that kiryu didn’t die that day; nor would he believe it unless he saw it with his own eye.
yo, respectfully, i don't understand why some of yall are so worried about jim and olu kissing other people?
we already got "see, we don't own each other" from lucius & pete in s1, the writers seem comfortable writing not-entirely-monogamous relationships. and like. they both clearly still have feelings for each other, i'm sure they'll be fine my dudes
Very tragic that we never got to see Luz and Hunter kick Philip's ass like it was set-up in TTT... we never got any payoff for the Lunter hints in SAI and the Caleb/Evelyn parallels that were established in HP and made more apparent in HM... very disheartening that TOH got cancelled after TTT aired, now we'll never know how it ends 😔