#pointless meta

[hollcwboy]

the layers to this statement…

[marzipanandminutiae]

How did Eleanor Cushing get cholera, but not Carter or Edith? They were all living in the same house, and presumably drinking from the same water source. However, Wikipedia says that undercooked shellfish can also be a common source of the bacteria

I now headcanon that Edith and her father were saved by being a literal child and therefore not invited to dinner parties, and not liking oysters, respectively

[confirmedjohnlock]

more watson flat weirdness

so! we know the watson flat was filmed at 10 wordsworth avenue (in cardiff), and we’ve been noticing that the way the flat appears in tst is wrong. I did some research and found that the house is registered to two film service companies for “television programme production activities”. it’s meant to film tv shows in, had been for years, and nobody lives there. so why did arwel find it “easier” to build and decorate a replica set of the entire ground floor than to return to a house they’ve filmed in before (especially since there were no wild shots in tst that would require difficult accommodations)?

here’s the house from the outside (middle), in google earth street view:

as you can see, their flat is between two other houses, on the lower half (I highly doubt they own the whole house). yet in this picture of the set, we see that their kitchen has skylights and a slanted roof, like an addition might. 

then, looking at the aerial view, it’s clear that while the house does have additions that could easily have slanted roofs, the kitchen in this set obviously should fit within the main/original building, under three other stories.

my answer to why they built the set, since it clearly isn’t accurate to the real building they have used before and could easily use again: they wanted to have it be not-quite-right, just an extrapolated version sherlock could have gotten from the few pictures he’s seen that were taken inside the flat. the character visualizing their house (sherlock) has clearly never been inside before.

[sallyjessyrofl]

I’m watching Escaflowne and writing down some more thoughts because transcribing sources from 1894 is proving a real drag atm & crazy personal shit is going down too. So I’m gonna over-intellectualise the shit out of this anime from the mid-1990s. 

Half formed incoherency on race, history, and technology in Gaea I guess? 

Is it just me or is a lot of the anti-beastmen & non-humanoid rhetoric that we see in Zaibach, Asturia maybe too idk (?) basically...not at all prevalent in Fanelia? I mean Folken makes a point out of utilising and weaponising these very distinct races - beastmen, doppelgangers - and so on. A lot of that must come from his upbringing in Fanelia, right? From what we can see King Goau was p chill with having a beastgirl hang around Van - whether she was considered a playmate or a pet would be worth considering I guess? - but Van at least considers Merle family. And the royal family maintains links to a beastmen clan that surrounds/lives in Fanelia’s forests and seems to respect their indigenous land-claims and customary rights- something we see is a problem elsewhere in Gaea (the flashback to Naria and Eriya’s parents being slaughtered suggests that there are often clashes over these kind of issues). 

There’s something about Fanelia as this pre-industrial ecological utopia, and Van/Folken at the head of it, in particular, with their refusal to fight/kill dragons, that’s interesting. The way in which Fanelia is broadly modelled both aesthetically and politically on feudal Japan is interesting here, too. (IDK if we can extend the beastmen in Escaflowne to be representative of the Ainu peoples bc honestly I don’t know enough about Japanese or Ainu history to be sure). But there’s definitely a heavily moralised contrast between Zaibach and Fanelia as different stages in human history, a fairly basic one that has a lot to do with technology, nature, and displaced people(s) -- whereas in Fanelia the beastmen seem to live beside humans (even if this is a relationship where human regal sovereignty is taken to be ultimately supreme), in Zaibach they are commodified and weaponised. Folken does this through science (the Intensified Luck program, whatever weird plot device that was), and it is only with the death of Naria and Eriya that he sees science for (in the Escaflowne universe) what it is: corrupt and corrupting. It’s the downfall of the Draconians, too: to utilise technology to try and surpass and master nature. Van almost does this, too, when he tries to ‘master’ Escaflowne. 

Blah blah blah. 

[stock98765]

anyway, lisa is a cool character, because she reminds me of chara a lot. but like, with their main personality things reversed. like, chara is really malicious, but they also give off hints of being really sad (the main reason i think that is the fact that they killed themself by eating flowers and, like, dying slowly instead of just fuckin stabbing themself or something). lisa is depressed and tortured, and because of that she became a darker person than she might have otherwise been (like i get her reasoning behind it completely, and i’d never put the blame on her for anything she does like this, but asking buzzo to cut up her face when he really didn’t want to and then giving him the nickname buzzo afterwards is p twisted).

and, like, they both have influences on the main characters even tho they’ve never met and lived at different times. maybe i’m just dumb for not having played lisa: the first before i played the painful, but i do get the impression that the hallucinations of lisa all around were supposed to really, really look like buddy. i honestly had a lot of confusion about who was who until the very end, which affected how i interpreted all the interactions in the game. which, really, in retrospect, i wonder if toby was influenced by this game at all, or if it was just a coincidence.

the biggest difference tho is that i actually just think chara is the source of pretty much all of the bad shit that goes on in undertale aside from the war stuff. like, if they had any sort of past or anything, it wasn’t explained. with lisa, she technically was the reason there was a main antagonist, but he was just doing his own thing, carrying out his own grudges, with no indication that that would ever have been what lisa wanted (i mean. he maybe thought it was. but like i can’t say i hold his sense of reality in very high regards tbh). instead the cause for bad shit in lisa was marty (fuck that garbage) and a general sense of entitlement to women’s lives (and even their deaths). and lisa was trapped in the center of it all, and they tried to trap buddy too, but she was too tough for them to break. in a similar way where flowey and chara try to break down frisk’s will, but they are too determined and stuff. just like. in very different literal ways, since buddy’s best options were the exact same as frisk’s worst lol.

anyway, point is. buddy is cool. and i have a half-formed and probably completely incorrect headcanon that lisa was the one sending her those messages in pink.

[nekohooch]

I know I have said it before but I am so in love with the fact that FMAs Lust is the embodiment of a beautiful, voluptuous, sexy woman with bedroom eyes wearing a clinging dress. But though she is all that and gives the impression of being a being for sexual lust, she is actually vicious and cruel and so full of -Blood Lust- she laughed as she was being destroyed. I have never seen another form of media that has interpreted a character based on the seven deadly sins Lust in such a violent, inventive, and clever way and I am so glad that Arakawa did it that way.

[xero-sky]

I've seen the comparisons between Pacific Rim and Godzilla 2014, and some of them make me laugh.

The only thing these films have in common giant monsters and humans.

G14 is an old-school kaiju movie.  It's about the giant monsters, with people explaining and framing their story.  The climax of the film is Godzilla fighting the MUTOs and killing them.  The humans do their best, but they aren't driving the film forward -- nothing they do really affects the monsters at all, except for the fact that setting off a nuke may revitalize Big G at the end.

And all of that is pretty standard for a kaiju movie.  In some of them, like the first, humans do manage to kill the big monster themselves, but usually it's only as an adjunct to whatever the monsters themselves are doing.  Ford burns the nest, and Godzilla takes out the MUTOs.  As a kaiju film, it fits perfectly in the tradition.  Massive forces are in motion, and, for the most part, humans are doing good if they can just stay out of the way.

Pacific Rim, on the other hand, is a war movie.  An old-school war movie, like the ones from WW2, where the enemy is largely faceless and implacable, and the focus of the film is on Our Heroes, who have to overcome tragedy, adversity, and their own personal conflicts to defeat the enemy and save the day.

Del Toro has said as much, and you can see it in the sets and costumes.  You could reasonably take all these characters (or slight modifications thereof) and plant them in any WW2 movie about bombers and fighter escorts, and they'd still work the same.

So don't fault one film for not being like the other.  They aren't.  They've got kaiju, humans, military themes, and the destruction of San Francisco in common.  That's more than a lot of movies, but not enough to use one as a stick to beat the other with.

[agnesmontague]

while we're still on the subject of luteces, in particular rosalind...

just why is she so obsessed with being with robert? why is she so willing to do anything, including crime, to stay with her "brother"? she sat through fucking 122 times of booker dewitt failing his miserable ass just because robert wanted to make amends and threatened to leave her if she didn't let him, and almost destroyed universes trying to pull him through...to be fair, it is an exciting opportunity as a scientist to be able to connect with your double and study with him, but...what could she have possibly have seen in robert that she went through so much pains for it, when robert himself seemed clearly afraid/reluctant to do it at first?

could it be because she was lonely? a form of narcissism perhaps? or was there a more logical explanation? it's been strongly hinted at that the two communicated many times, even before robert jumped through the tear, so they probably got to know each other better in time...

probably my favorite thing about their whole relationship is that she clearly has the upper hand though: she makes him wear the sandwich board during the coin toss, she doesn't help him row, everything about them suggests that rosalind is dominant. it could be simply that she didn't want to have anything to do with the whole affair but since she was forced to by robert, she just makes him do the dirty jobs. and robert accepts it. nothing about their banter or conversations or interactions suggests any hostility between the two of them or any bitterness on robert's part; they're very affable towards each other, despite the fact that rosalind is rather uncooperative during the entire ordeal. the fact that they spent 16 years together before the incident must have helped greatly in their relations as well (as well as sleeping in the same bed, hehehehehehe). 

i really really wish i could write more about robert too but everything in the game is from rosalind's perspective so it's hard...i would really like some robert voxophones in burial at sea ep 2 but it's....not likely, i guess? when will we ever get to know robert's side of the story, anyway?

some more things i ache to know: elizabeth's and rosalind's interactions, rosalind's relationship with constance, the luteces' opinions on the vox (it's been shown in burial at sea that they do have, both of them, a rather low opinion of comstock, so that's a bit hopeful), etc.....i just want an entire spinoff about the luteces, they're so damn fucking important to me you can't even fathom.