I really do like how The Beginning movie attempts to fix some plot/pacing issues of Episodes 1 and 2, but in fixing a very 'you need to have suspension of disbelief' moment in regards to how long the Hundred Power lasted on top of how fast they dealt with it, they create an entirely new problem, in that Isaac now has a skill issue so intense that it doesn't make sense.
In the original Episode 2, we visually see the hundred powers last for over 5 minutes, dragging out into even when the ice rink collapses. This in turn implies that the time it takes for Kotetsu and Barnaby to arrive at the Rink and THEN deal with that whole situation on top of the rink becoming unsteady, it's within ~10 minutes at best.
The movie attempts to rectify this power usage, splitting it up between two power uses, one use to get there, and another to try stop the rink from toppling. Pacing wise, the latter makes sense on paper.
But then you have Isaac, who failed to escape. And he genuinely has no excuse not to have escaped.
The pathways got cleared out, on top of it being heavily implied Barnaby and Kotetsu escorted Tony out the long way, taking the stairs down and out. However, Isaac is still stuck in the rink, banging on the windows for help. Isaac ran off by himself after Kotetsu put him down, and SHOULD have found one of the cleared out pathways that 100% exist because everyone made it out safely through them.
Searching for 10 minutes and somehow finding yourself back in the rink, sure, I guess that can happen. Trying to leave for an HOUR and FAILING??? I'm sorry Isaac you failed the natural selection test. Like, did you just give up? What are you doing? Isaac-
So Episode 2 is in a lose-lose situation. Either way, something won't be making sense (unless you can overclock hundred power or something).
Also don't mention the lion statue shhhhhh
Continuing from the conversation in the reblogs of the link below the keep-reading, since while the broad subject of "let's ramble about mental illness and substance abuse metaphors in this kids' show!" is still the same, I'm on to talking about a different character (Specifically, Fiddleford)/realized belatedly that the OP might appreciate this.
Everyone was doing coke in the 80s.
bonus image:
[edited: i adjusted the lineart - original lineless paintings are below the cut - i was t
So, Fiddleford and his memory gun.
It is, as usual, impossible to be 100% sure of much about the Portal era, considering that Ford's view of reality seems to have already started becoming distorted by the time he began writing Journal 3, and it is true that Fiddleford's signs of trauma after, say, the gremlobin incident, or his nerves when he realized what the probability of failure was, were actually pretty reasonable responses to the things that he was going through. However, Ford does act as though he's always been a bit concerned about Fiddleford's nerves, and when everything is taken into account, it seems more probable than not that the man does/did suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, probably in the OCD 'family.' Once I accept this premise, his story rapidly becomes a solid metaphor about the dangers of self-medicating.
Yes, yes, I know. The moral of the story is to deal with your problems...but nevertheless: the memory gun works as a metaphor for drugs and compulsions and how they don't really solve your problems, and it works especially well, I think, as a metaphor for alcohol and/or sedatives (Ativan, Valium, etc.). When used judiciously and with deliberate goals and limits, these things can be highly useful, or at least do more good than harm (alcohol is an antiseptic, for a lot of history it has been safer to drink than the average water supply, and it at least used to sometimes be 'prescribed' to people with certain heart problems who couldn't afford expensive medications, nerve pills are actual medicine, and as for the gun, we have the canon examples of the end of 'A Tale of Two Stans' and the finale). If you start to feel you need a drink after work every day to keep coping with your job, though, or needing a nightcap just to go to sleep...that can go real bad, and that's if you aren't developing this habit on top of OCD and/or one of its sister disorders. Fiddleford does appear to have such a disorder, and while he already had some ritualistic behavior (his Cubik's Cube, his alleged superstitions around graves, his tendency toward trichotillomania, the amount he checks and rechecks his work), he really loses control of himself when he gets access to the memory gun.
I suspect, between the temptation to instant relief it presented him every minute of every day and the secretive nature of it (no doctor supervising him, nobody frowning disapprovingly into his trash can, etc.) that memory gunning himself at the slightest inconvenience became both addictive drug and compulsion for him at some point, to the point that he was eventually frying his brain for even such a minor stressor as cutting himself shaving - or rather, for such seemingly minor stressors, since to him...who knows what that looked like? Anxiety Brain is wonderful at forming objectively sketchy connections that spiral into long chains of increasingly frantic 'reasoning.' From an outside viewer's perspective: it's a scratch, big deal. A path I could imagine Fiddleford's brain going along might run more like: "I cut myself shaving - why are my hands so shaky, why did that happen - were my hands even shaking, or was I just not paying attention? I can't do anything right! I can't even shave right, never mind raise a kid right! Which reminds me that I haven't seen my son in six months, I might as well have been cheating on my wife, I'm a terrible husband, a terrible father, just a terrible man, why didn't I do something before things got so out of control?? I could have stopped all of this, but now my Friend is out of his mind, he might end the world any day now, I don't know if my wife would have me back at this point if I even had the guts to go home and beg, and now I have this cult to run - but how can I run a cult when I can't even be man enough to face my own family? And it's slipping out of my control, I never meant things to go this far - They're all gonna turn on me, Stanford and Ivan and Emma-May are all gonna team up and murder me, oh God, it all makes sense now - !").
And then the gun made all that noise just...stop. He could sleep. He could run a cult. He could do things other than worry about Ford blowing up the planet any day now, or what was going on at home, or if the things he saw in the gremlobin's eyes could really happen. As soon as it started, he could just...make it all go away, as often as he wanted, at the click of a button. And by the time the side effects started becoming obvious, and he was losing his ability to speak properly and tearing his hair out without even remembering he'd done it and stealing clothes off scarecrows, well...thinking about those side effects, wondering if this thing he feels he cannot live without anymore could be responsible for them, was almost as distressing as thinking about all those motor accidents. Which, naturally, meant it was time for another mind wipe/drink....
So, there, started a couple of days ago and then delayed until I found this tab again though it is, you have it, @gravi-mania - the tale of how one could, if so inclined, warp the backstory of Gravity Falls into a story about bright young things whose lives fall apart courtesy of one of them getting too many uppers and the other getting too many downers. Make the framing device "Stan finally got out of prison after thirty years and went to visit his brother in the state hospital, where Ford laid eyes on him and immediately started yelling about portals and the end of the world and Stan doesn't even know what; as a result, Stan decides to stick around long enough to narrate the whole sorry tale, Prince of Tides-style, to the new doctor Ford seems to think is their nephew," and you could even get some super-depressing sober commentary on society and the justice system in there, too, along with at least very slightly lowering the research load, since sticking to that point of view would limit the scope of things to what he could see/what he knows about rather than going too deep into everyone else's heads and happenings. Though tbh, I suspect going with "yeah, let's just...not" is still the wisest possible course of action all around. really.
So, in today’s episode of “LycoRogue way overanalyzes things”, I think ZagToon has actually given us some pretty decent evidence to more-or-less lock-in when this special takes place.
The key to narrowing it all down relies on this quick shot that the Miraculous team deemed worthy to grace us with:
This is Adrien’s bodyguard starting up a meditation app just as the flight from Paris to NYC is about to take off. This, plus the sunset showcased in the next few scenes, will help us start to narrow it all down.
So, let’s actually start with their flight. Based on a quick Google search for “fights from Paris to NYC” I got this list of potentials in November (yes, just about all of them will then give you a pop-up stating that flights are restricted to/from US because of COVID, but we’ll ignore that right now).
The airline the animators created for the special has a design that seems to mimic Air France.
So, we’ll go with Air France’s listed nonstop flight - given that Alya mentions the “looooong” flight, we don’t see or hear anything about layovers, and everyone passes out, we’ll presume it’s a nonstop flight - and say that the class was on that plane for 8hrs and 40mins, more-or-less.
Okay. So we have the flight taking off at 15:55 (3:55pm). It is roughly an 8hr and 40 minute flight. This brings the class to 00:35 (12:35am) their time. At the latest, if we go with the 8hr 55min flight listed above, they’re arriving at 00:50 (12:50am). Add in the roughly 30min drive from JFK international airport in Queens to where they’re staying somewhere presumably around midtown Manhattan, and it’s past 1am their time. No wonder Ms. Mendeleiev wants them to go directly to bed when they get to their rooms!
Anyway, back on track. So, if they’re landing somewhere between 12:35am and 12:50am their time, that means it’s between 6:35pm (18:35) and 6:50pm (18:50) Eastern Time.
Now, we won’t get into things like “how the heck did they see the sunset on the plane and it was still happening as they drove into Manhattan when it probably takes an hour to make it through disembarking and Customs and weaving through a crowded JFK alone” because there are superheroes for friggen everything in this universe canon, so we can pretend 9/11 never happened and airport chaos isn’t as bad.
Plus, the “sunset” Adrien and Marinette watched was still mostly above the cloud line, so it was closer to “golden hour”.
Now, the attack on the plane from an American supervillain and the quick capture by the main NYC/East Coast superhero team pinpoints the flight as nearing its end. They’re probably only a couple of miles out from the coast. Especially since Majestia welcomes their arrival, the flight is probably close enough to being over American soil.
Further proof: the flight is making its decent into JFK as TechnoPirate is handed over to the authorities. Since the superhero team was flying faster than the plane’s cruising speed, it shouldn’t have taken them long to land and hand him over to the probably already awaiting SWAT team.
Okay, so we have established that the plane is probably coming into JFK International between 6:35pm and 6:50pm ET, and that they are in the Golden Hour leading to the official sunset as the plane descends. Which is also why the sun isn’t close enough to the horizon for an official “sunset” quite yet as they drive through what is presumably Broadway.
I mean, it’s not crucial that it’s Broadway, but it looks like they’re aiming for it to be...
Although this one marquee says “Roadway Musical”, so....
BACK ON TOPIC!
Okay, so it’s closing in on 7pm ET - or is closer to 7:20pm if you go with the 6:50 arrival and add in the 35min drive - and it’s the Golden Hour. Based on where the sun is, I’d maybe peg the sun to be officially setting (as in, touching the horizon and sinking below it) between 7:15 and 7:45pm (19:15 and 19:45).
Plug THAT information into timeanddate.com set for Manhattan, and you’re looking at the first week of September or even the last week of August.
Alternatively, you could argue that it could also be the last week of March/first week of April.
HOWEVER, when the class arrives at the hotel and Marinette and Adrien are first trapped by the dreaded Automatic Doors, we do see this shop sign in the background sporting a jack-o-lantern design. Halloween-themed stores like this are usually seasonal and don’t open until the end of August/start of September. Spirit, the largest Halloween-themed company in the US, has its “pop-up” stores open late-August through early-November. So we’re probably looking at those September dates over the March ones.
Especially since we also get this establishing shot of the class pulling up to the museum and the second show of Adrienette vs Automatic Doors where we clearly see that some of the trees are already changing color. This solidifies that the French-American Friendship Week is indeed during autumn.
Based on that evidence, the first week of September does seem a bit early. First of all, leaves don’t start changing in NY until the last week of September/1st two weeks of October, depending on how dry/cold the weather has been. So, what if we take the dialogue at face value and ignore that “sunset” is when the sun touches the horizon? What if we take it as “the start of Golden Hour when the sky becomes more of that orange hue”? In that case, we’re going back to the projected arrival time and using THOSE times against that one website.
The US premiere - which ended up being the world premiere - of this special was on September 25, which had a sunset time of 6:47pm. It could be a nice, neat way to have the air date be the canon date of this special and the class’s arrival within NYC. We can even bump it to the premiere on Disney Channel France and have it be Saturday, September 26th, with a sunset time of 6:45pm ET. This way it makes sense that Marinette wouldn’t already be with her class leading up to the bus departure, since it would be a Saturday and non-school day, as well as why Luka would be available to give her that ride at about 3pm (15:00) instead of being in school/just getting out of school himself.
Also, if Adrien still has the same schedule he did back in “Copycat”, he has fencing practices on Fridays.
We know that post-practice, Adrien tells Kagami that his class is going to NYC “tomorrow”, which would seem to confirm that the class is flying out Saturday afternoon. Kagami’s “I’ll see you tomorrow” and mention of "give us more time to practice” doesn’t necessarily mean fencing class and instead probably explains what they do for “dates” in this awkward “are we dating now?” limbo they’re in.
So, what do you think? Is their NYC trip from Saturday, September 26th through Monday, September 28th? Should we give more attention to the actual sunset times and have the trip be the first week of September?
Regardless of how we time the sunset, this trip IS in autumn, but it’s also after everything that’s happened in the first 3 seasons, which most likely means this is the start of a new school year. How do we feel about the entire class lucking into being in Miss Bustier’s class again; no new students and not losing anyone to a different class? What about the fact that Marinette and Adrien have officially been Ladybug and Chat Noir for a full year, and that Paris has been surviving Hawk Moth attacks apparently daily for that year? What about the fact that Adrien’s birthday is probably right around the corner again? You think they’ll do another episode focusing on that and how it differs from his birthday in “The Bubbler”?
What’s your theory on everything? Do you have more evidence to lock this date down further?
"Crowley kept the eagle lectern from the church in 1941"
Well yeah. Though... why was it ever an eagle?? Shouldn't it be a dove, for the Holy Spirit, or something?
*looks more closely*
Huh. Those are flames that bird is rising out of.
That's not an "Eagle Lecturn", that's a phoenix!
(Why'd he keep the book attached??)
[Edit] Ahh, I'm told Eagle Lecterns are common, at least in the UK. Probably here in the US too, looking at the examples from Wikipedia. Looks like they're usually standing on globes, and echoing the Tetramorph thing, for (usually) John. I DO get why John the Evangelist would be a symbol associated with a lectern used for sermons (though it's also probably just that Eagles with outstretched wings work better than lions and bulls as lecterns, on that front, eh?)
Even so, that's different than this lectern - they aren't usually rising out of flames! So this Eagle Lectern is still, I maintain, a Phoenix!
Exploring the Dark Side of Personal Reflection: Pitfalls and Strategies
Personal reflection is a powerful tool that allows us to examine our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It helps us to understand ourselves better, recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and make positive changes in our lives. However, while personal reflection can be a positive force for self-improvement, it also has a dark side. In this article, we will explore the dark side of personal…
As the months go by, the next impedement in life approaches. I fear this one in particular not because it's something I haven't faced, but moreso the fact that many things depend on the success of this one task. Could you say I'm feeling the pressure of relying on a best-case-scenario? Personally, this blog is probably a testament to worse things that've happened. In the meantime, I'm currently planning a plot to get me through until Movember.
So what else is new since our last pain-wracked post on this belatedly updated blog? Well, it's a public holiday today apparently, so here I am posting something for all your crackheads fans out there who can't get enough of this stuff I'm typing. And yes, I am still continuing the *other* blog, albeit the lustre of its content is starting to dull a bit.
In a more long-term sense, I am feeling some pressure to dive into the world of adult content, only to drown shortly after. Before you get all technical with me on what "adult content" is, let me just clarify that is SPECIFICALLY FOCUSSED on matter like cooking ability, new home options, actual hobbies. You know, things adults assume about each other at a generic social gathering.
While I am taking things one step at a time (see the first paragraph of this post), it still concerns me that I still don't have a reaction plan for these things. That is, what is my expected best case scenario? The all-inevitable worst case scenario? Variables to consider?
Some might think I'm overthinking and hyper-analysing some of life's most trivial matters. As with most things discussed on this blog, we'll turn this issue inside-out like a deep-fried turducken if we need to. Because what else is there to talk about these days? Politics, news, memes... It's all been done before.
And as I watch into the near-eternal sunset of time, I sigh heavily and cry a single tear as I think the thought: "Why do I have to be in this predicament?". Admittedly, I am the primary reason I am in these problematic situations, almost as if it's the call of destiny to strive frivolously for the next mirage that the desert of life has to offer. Perhaps I was better off giving up from the get-go? And then risk the loss of what could have been the next National Treasure? Yeah, the thought of Nick Cage didn't seem to help.
But nonetheless, we have no choice but to march on. In failure or success, for friend or enemy, time cares little for its participants. I think I've been on this morose road before last year, to which similar thoughts were thought of. I guess the only real option is to pick ourselves back up and walk the lonely road, the only one that I have ever known.
'Til next time, young padawan.
Who knows. Most probably the worst is yet to come.
