#*pterodactyl noises*

[captainodonoghue]

Actual footage of me (this man will kill me! HOW DARE HE!!! LOOKING LIKE THIS! I want more!):

(also, he looks so much like Pierce Brosnan here!!!!)

[sunsetandthemoon]

“It’s good I’m here watching you practice. Do you not like it? Come on. Who wouldn’t like that?”

MY SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2022-2023)  

[milevenstancyendgame]

They are getting married.

[irrolyphant]

Justified: City Primeval • 1x05 You Good? trailer

[kingthunder]

The Calling and how it’s possibly related to Secret Worlds and Chords

So let’s talk about Ruin (again) and one possible interpretation of The Calling and how it’s related to both Secret Worlds and Chords.

In Secret Worlds, we have two people (the lover (Joey) and the daughter (Madeleine)) being young and wild. Fire imagery is repeated constantly, especially in relation to the daughter. The lover asks for a light, and she gives him her fire—not a literal flame, but her essence, the life burning inside her. “Just watch me burn,” she says.

At the end of the song, the instrumentation moves seamlessly into the intro of The Calling, the first indication that these two songs are linked. Right away we meet a woman who used to be “dauntless” and “burn so bright,” who’s coming to the river to wring the last of her embers out—this is the daughter from Secret Worlds. Only something has happened, there’s “something changed” (the line from Secret Worlds where they’re fearful about the future). But what is it? We’re wondering that, and so is she, as she looks at herself in the water. “Who’s this? What changed?”

It becomes clear that there’s a relationship in The Calling that caused a lot of pain and brought the daughter to this place of desolation. Initially I wondered if it was the romance begun in Secret Worlds, but there are some other lines here that make me suspect something different is going on.

I think it’s about a woman who was emotionally abused (whether intentionally or not) by her mother. And here’s why:

 First, looking at her face and seeing an “unwanted daughter.” Then the line, “You’ll never get your dinner if you don’t learn how to get along”—I don’t think she’s saying this to someone, I think this is her parroting back a line that was said to her, over and over, something a controlling parent would say to her feisty (firey) daughter. And one of the kickers to me: “And when I think I’m fine you’ll visit, And then you happen to me, you happen to me all over again.” Why would an ex visit, and not just once, but multiple times as this line seems to indicate? Because it’s not an ex, it’s her mother, who feels entitled to drop by whenever she wants, whether her daughter wants it or not.

So, what form did this abuse take, and what has it done to her?

If the daughter is fire, the mother is water. The mother has been trying to dictate her daughter’s life and force her onto a path that she doesn’t want. And the daughter tried to please her mother, she “really fucking tried,” but all that’s happened is that she’s managed to twist herself into someone she doesn’t even recognize anymore and doesn’t want to be. Her fire is being put out.

But she’s had enough! She’s ready to take her life back. To “shoulder the sky” and “open her [those] eyes” and see “how much she [you] can be.” But to do that, she first has to metaphorically drown that twisted reflection of herself that she’s become. “Do you like my dress? It’s got pockets,” she says, bitter amusement creeping into her voice, alluding to Virginia Woolf who went to the river to drown herself by putting rocks in her pockets. And then we “watch that woman drown” as her voice just absolutely soars—she’s finally cast off the person her mother wanted her to be, made her into. And how does this relate to Chords?

I think that Chords is the situation from the mother’s perspective.

The entire song is about a mother singing about how she fucked everything up while her partner assures her that hey it wasn’t that bad. But we see so many admissions from her—the “days she [I] couldn’t cope,” the drinks she needed, how her kids think she’s a “nightmare” and she “pushed them all” and had “no notion what to do,” and that she “raged so much (you did) but so did they.”

Then we get into the explicit: Go tell them how we failed you And gift to us all your blame Cos we’ll be all that you hate about yourself

and

Tell them that we never cared Go tell them how we fucked you up And oh my god it’s so unfair

And the mother (and her partner) tries to make herself feel better by saying it all came from a place of love and that the kids will be fine, but as we saw in The Calling, the daughter is Not Fine. She does blame her mother, she hates things about herself that are a direct result of her mother’s influence, she does feel fucked up.

“They are my rascals I can’t let them walk away,” the mother sings in Chords. In Secret Worlds, the daughter referred to herself as a “dirty rascal,” internalizing that derogatory term in a way that maybe her mother didn’t intend, but that did real harm anyway. The mother doesn’t want her kids to walk away—she drops by to “visit” her daughter (”when I think I’m fine you’ll visit”), smothering, not letting her daughter have enough space. And all the imagery in Chords is water—oceans, waves—in direct opposition to the daughter’s fire. The mother never understood her, this was doomed from the start.

“But Chords is about letting your kids go!” you might say. Well, yes, that’s what the parents are saying. But to me the entire thing reads as apologia for the parents, the mother and father sugarcoating their actions to downplay the family disharmony. “We let you move out to make it on your own!” they say, “Look what a good job we did!” But meanwhile dear old mom is dropping in on the kids whenever she damn well feels like it.

Whew!

(obviously this is only one possible interpretation of any of these songs, and particularly Chords, which is incredibly layered and nuanced and I could write another essay about)

Join me next time when I try to link “Pick your chords well, loves, but sing your notes off-key” (Chords) to “I play our song to see if it’s in tune” (Ruin) and then we see if this entire arc could possibly be read as some kind of trans narrative.

[trcelyneart]

@creamberryseason THIS IS NOT A DRILL CANON GENDERBENT YU AND KAY

[lets-steal-an-archive]

[ageless-aislynn]

I AM SCREAMING, MY FRIENDS. I just saw the sneak peek from Halo 1x09 that’s on Paramount+ at the end of the Halo the Series Declassified for 1x08 and if I had a way to show you that part of the video, I would. As it is, though, here are some screencaps I took from it under the cut.

UPDATE! Paramount+ put the episode of Declassified on their Youtube channel so I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post. 😍

Needless to say, SPOILERS for Halo 1x09.

Click for Spartan sized pictures. 😉

First off, Kai, honey bear, I love you to distraction but please STOP TAKING YOUR HELMET OFF at times like this. Baby, please. I love seeing your pretty face but not when somebody is threatening to shoot you in it.

*breath*

That said, okay, so, um, whyyyyyy would Vannak and Riz think that holding Kai hostage is the way to get John to surrender? Yeah, probably just because she’s on his side and they know he wouldn’t let a member of his team die and...  Wait, what’s that sound?

Oh yeah, that’s the sound of my JOHN/KAI SHIPPER GOGGLES FLYING ONTO MY FACE. I ain’t even sorry right now.

My fields are watered, my crops are flourishing, my heart is full. 😉 Your mileage may vary but this is totally how I’m choosing to interpret this scene for right now. Vannak and Riz know how John feels about Kai. Back pre-Halsey’s Order 66*, they used to roll their eyes and make sarcastic heart hands at each other behind their backs. *slaps desk* ⭐💖⭐

*I saw somebody call that her Order 66 but I’ve read SO MUCH Halo stuff recently and now I can’t find who said it. If it was you, please let me know so I can credit you for calling it that because it’s perfect! 😎

UPDATE: It was @caffeinated-bitterness​ here! Yes, that is so spot-on! 😎👍

29:50 is where the sneak peek for 1x09 starts! ⭐💖⭐