jasper

please talk to me about oliver!

[overl0oker]

i wanted to start a little oliver! fandom on tumblr but realised i have no artistic/writing talent to do it so i made a ship chart so that everyone knows to avoid me like the plague

(based mostly on the current west end revival with some slight influence by other versions)

[sapphiregem01]

And welcome back to Ozzy’s gotten hyperfixated on the seminiche musical he’s acting in rn and is making it everyone’s problem.

Today’s episode? Oliver! :D

[savoytrufflee]

oliver twist modern au where dodger and charley wear nike tracksuits, vape on tiktok live, and jeet birds

[overl0oker]

The Villies Deserved That (and here's why)

The rest of this post involves spoilers for Past Life Episode 7. Following the carnage of Past Life Episode 7, there has been a lot of unrest in the fandom in which genuine hatred has been shot towards Jimmy and the rest of the server for "ganging up" on the Villies. It's pretty obvious to me that a lot of the upset lies in the fact that Grian is the server favourite and gets the most viewers on his videos, meaning that his viewers are the majority in the fandom. This means that people, naturally, are on his side. The Life Series exists in a funny way so that you don't really have antagonists and protagonists usually - your protagonist is whoever you're watching, Scott in Last Life for example, and the antagonist is his enemy, Joel for example. However, I think most people can agree that, with a name like the Villies, they've set out their role clearly for everyone to see.

So it frustrates me to see people calling the Rejects the "villains" of the server. They are the antagonists of your perspective, sure, but to everyone else the Villies have always been the Villies. Enter: The Square Hole. This was a trap that had no point to it other than killing people. I've seen people say that the other players are at fault for falling in it, but lets be real, the square hole didn't dig itself and the Villies want the credit for making it and killing all those doofuses with it. I think a bit part of why the Villies defending confuses me so much is because they downplay what they've been building up the whole season - they ARE the villains. Gem says it at the end of the episode, they're still keeping it up, that this is usually how stories go; villains tend to lose. This should've been entirely expected.

I understand people's frustrations to an extent. I've been in the situation of watching a doomed trio where it seemed as though the entire server was against them and also didn't think it was very fun to watch (being the Bad Boys in Limited Life) but what I don't think people understand is that it was really only Jimmy that was going after the Villies the entire session and I kind of don't understand the "ganging up" people claimed happened? Let's run through all of the deaths that happened at the hands of the Villies; Pearl's first death, their own trap that Grian set off. Martyn(?)'s trap in the Watch Tower (which is not Pearl's base and therefore he had no reason to believe she would be the one to die from it, so he wasn't targetting her, he was just being a red life) and her third death, yet again another trap at the Watch Tower that wasn't targetting her in the slightest. We can all agree, then, that Pearl's first three deaths were silly, non-targetted and the wrong place at the wrong time situations. Okay? Okay.

Then Jimmy's TnT minecart kill on the Villies, and I've seen people say that people should've backed off when Pearl was on yellow, except… guys, this is a death game, and Gem was still on dark green and Grian on lime green. It even hitting them was unexpected from the perspective of a Reject, and lets rewind a few minutes to point out that Jimmy at this point was so desperate for a kill that he had, moments before, tried to kill Impulse and Cleo - with Martyn not aimed for but could've been caught in the crossfire - who are both his allies. I'm sure this is the instance that most point to where they believe the Villies were "ganged up" on, but as far as I can tell, 3 people were directly involved in it - and what do you know, those 3 people are all Rejects. Skizz was running distraction, Joel was guiding Jimmy into placing it in the right spot, and of course Jimmy set the minecart on them in the first place. Honestly, this was a glorious kill, getting all 3 members of the Rejects biggest problems at once. Now, the whole server (reasonably) doesn't like the Villies, so they all came to Jimmy to congratulate him. Lets take a pause to remember who Jimmy is; Jimmy who died first the first four seasons, one of which was to trying to push off a TnT minecart and failing miserably. Jimmy who I don't think has done anything cool in the Life Series maybe ever up until this point.

Villies watchers say that Jimmy came across as overconfident, cocky and annoying, but wouldnt you after you did something cool and you were genuinely impressed with yourself? The excitement radiating off of Joel and Jimmy's perspective in this moments was so real and reminded me that, as much as tension is high and lore is searched for in every moment, these are real people who just want to have fun playing a block game. Having fun they were, and the possibility of them feeling guilty over playing the game as it was intended to be played annoys me.

Then, Pearl's final death. Is it a hot take to say it was all her fault? I hope not. Is it a little mean to say it was a complete loss of aura when her teammates hyped her up, saying she was going to kill everyone, when she was actively threatening Jimmy in the chat… only to do perhaps one of the silliest things ever and go up against him completely armourless, with nowhere she could easily hide if he spotted her and shot back. It was pure aura that Jimmy hit someone invisible who was moving three times, and he deserved to be proud of that kill, and the sad part is that I don't think he was. I think the second that he realised it was Pearl and that he'd ended her series, he felt guilty about it, and this reminds me of a conversation I heard talked about where Pearl, on red, tries not to get into fights with other reds for fear of ending hers or their series in an unfulfilling way. If only she had taken her own advice.

Oh well! I think at the end of the day we shouldn't be sad about Pearl's series ending, other than Pearl viewers themselves because I feel the pain of not having a finale to watch from my main perspective (if the next episode even is a finale). At the end of the day she was already a winner, and if it could be avoided I would never really want a repeat winner. Considering how great he's done this season, I'm really hoping for a Jimmy win, but chances are Grian's going to hunt him down ruthlessly next session and his series will be over in the first ten minutes, and I'll be just as upset about that as the Villies are about Pearl's death. But I hope this short little post made it clear why the Villies deserved that and why no one should be hated on for what happened in Episode 7.

And a moment of silence for Ren, who I'm much more upset about in terms of ending the series. A non-winner who genuinely did so well his first two seasons, never forget the second place in Last Life and he was pretty high up there in Wild Life, to die to a silly trap. Unfulfilling deaths are kind of the worst in the Life Series, and the Gluten Guys having two - Tango's creeper death and Ren's trap death - is a big blow to them. Ren's death being overshadowed both in the fandom and in the series is sad to me, on top of the fact that when the Villies set the trap, they literally said "I'm waiting for this to end someone's series"… hm. Sounds like intent to end a series where Jimmy had none. But lets not be mad at anyone, this is a death game, people will die. Let's all stop being butthurt about it.

[overl0oker]

can we all agree to stop trying to make sense of the limited life family tree 😭 i can accept cleo etho scar & bdubs as a family but when bad boys & the rest of ties are brought into it it gets icky because of how many times theyve flirted with each other which... is hard to ignore...

ALSO a lot of it is definitely offhanded jokes ("tim are you my son" "yeah" "im a dad boys", grian calling scar dad) that making sense of it will kill all of your sanities. as a maker of confusing family trees i am trying to protect you all trust 🙏

[bloodpen-to-paper]

Pearl and Joel are same-age siblings that constantly antagonize each other

[overl0oker]

THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN SAYING SINCE JULY OF 2022. BIGGEST VOUCH