#repeatinglitanies

[destiniesfic]

Hope you’re doing well! May 26 is a lunar eclipse. Around two weeks later on June 10, there will be a solar eclipse! I see that as a sign to rewatch ep 5 of shadow and bone! 😊

The first eclipse was last night! I slept through it. But June 10th seems like a great day to rewatch ep 5! (Although isn't that any day? 😉)

[wittyno]

First of all, love your meta! Why do you think Reginald chose to suppress Vanya’s powers instead of (perhaps quietly) killing her off? In his mind, Vanya’s powers were uncontrollable and dangerous to everyone including herself

Thank you, Sadism? No that be too easy of an answer. Part of being an abuser is maintaining control and I think the death of a family member, as we see later with Ben, would seek to break that control. It would break the relative ignorance he had kept the kids in.

It also depends when their powers manifested. Where they like baby jack from the incredibles? Or where they older? Killing her would admit that he failed to control her. He thought, like a lot of abusers, that he could control the situation. He thought that if he compressed her powers and with that her that he could maintain control. Turns out when you compress people they have the tendency to be explode.

She was useful to him, it seems like she kept the peace (at least with five). It’s interesting because I think Vanya was the first one to grasp the larger picture of abuse that was going on. In Part, because she was isolate from the others. Yet she didn’t do or say anything because (1) she is a child, (2) because she loves her siblings, and (3) because she really is the glue. Second was probably five and unlike Vanya he rebelled. 

The problem was that Five went it alone and we saw how that turned out, there is definitely a theme of guilt with him that I’ll write a meta on at some point. Someone remind me. 

I’m back, my lovely bowling balls, which means it’s time for TUA. 

[badnovels]

[unavenged-robin]

Hargreeves siblings: who ends up crying at Vanya’s solo performance?

Probably not what you had in mind, sorry.

Somewhere between his thirtieth and thirty-fifth birthday, Five had come to the conclusion that reality did not really exist. It couldn’t.

Reality, as it is, is just the immediate consequence of a series of irrelevant and often disconnected actions, and given the extreme variability of a person's behaviour it would be illogical to assume that there is only one reality to live in. No, there have to be a lot of them, and they all stand one jump away from each other.

One jump, and he’s thirteen, really thirteen, and he never tries time traveling.

One jump, and he’s still thirteen, and his siblings are sixteen and still all alive.

One jump, and he’s there to save Ben.

One jump, and he dies before he can come back to save them all.

One jump, and he’s here, in this theatre, and he was so close to stop the whole thing, but he’s failed, and now it’s just him and Vanya, and the world outside is collapsing on itself, the earth is shaking and the buildings are crumbling down, their house is a pile of ruins and their siblings are dead bodies in the dust.

But Vanya’s playing her violin with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips, and the music is just so beautiful. They’re the last two living being on a dying planet and Five shouldn’t be here in the first place but he is, and he’s crying, not because he’s mourning his brothers and sister ― god knows for how long he mourned them already, maybe he never stopped, not even when he saw them alive again ― no, he’s crying because the Earth is ending in minutes and it has the best background music a dying planet could ask for.

Has Vanya always been so good at playing? He can’t remember. Childhood is a long lost memory that time and loneliness have gnawed away from him.

“I looked for you”, Five says, and he’s screaming and whispering at the same time. He knows that the world will end with the violin’s last chord and he needs to tell this to her, he needs to make her understand. He loved her. He loved them all. He still does.

“You were not at the house”, he goes on, and Vanya doesn’t look at him, but he knows she’s listening. “You were not with them and I looked for you everywhere, but I couldn’t find your body and I knew you were still alive.”

For years he had looked for her. Because why not?

Back then he had not known that she had been the cause of everything, but now he does. And it makes no sense. She ended the world but she survived. Then why had he never found her? Where was she? The idea of never having been alone in his post-apocalyptic future is, for some reason, even more frightening than the memory of the decades spent by himself.

“Were you there?”, he yells, and he’s angry now, even though he's still crying, and it’s stupid because this Vanya cannot answer, this Vanya cannot know. But this Vanya is all he's got, and she’s killed their siblings, and she’s going to kill him, and she had left him alone. “Answer me! Were you there with me?”

Vanya doesn’t answer. She only opens her eyes when she stops playing, and as the last vibration of her bow stretches towards Five, she winks. Afterwards there's only darkness.

[worryinglyinnocent]

TUA never delved or explained how or why the spontaneous births of 43 children happened. But do you have any theories? I suspect Reginald may have something to do with it

I’m pretty sure that Reginald caused them. We know so little about Reginald, just that little bit at the beginning of episode ten which implies he’s travelled in time and/or space to get where he is now. When he released the light out of that little glowing jar, I think that was the catalyst. Also, how on earth did he know that the kids would have powers that he could then exploit, unless he caused them in the first place?

My theory is quite convoluted but is thus:

Reg is from an alternate timeline. I believe that scene at the beginning with the dying wife was from an alternate 2019. It’s alternate because of the steampunk-ish vibe. Bear with me here, it’ll make sense, I promise.

That 2019 is in the middle of an apocalypse. Hell, this apocalypse is likely the reason his wife is dying.

Reg is determined to stop the apocalypse, and decides he needs a superhero team to prevent it. He releases the lights, sending them back into the past, knowing that they will cause the spontaneous births. 

He himself travels back in the past in order to reap the fruits of his labour. 

As we know from Five and the Commission, time travel isn’t really an exact science, and Reg a) managed to land in the past way before his little lights would come to fruition and b) altered the course of history in doing so, meaning that we get to the TUA present time, instead of the future being a steampunk-ish world like the one that Reg came from. 

(This might also explain the lack of cell-phones, computers and internet in what is supposed to be 2019.)

Reg’s time travelling mean that he won’t age - I’ve seen many theories stating that adult-Five-in-a-teen’s-body will not age any further now he’s back in the past - so he just waits around and bides his time and performs genetic experiments on countless chimpanzees until he creates Pogo and in 1989, the 43 spontaneous births occur and he starts gathering them up. 

Reg sets about attempting to prevent the apocalypse that killed his wife in alternate 2019. This is how he knows when the apocalypse is going to be, and when to stage his murder. 

HOWEVER. In meddling with the past, Reg has not only stopped the original apocalypse that killed his wife, but created an entirely new apocalypse caused by Vanya! 

How’s that for efficiency? Stop one apocalypse by causing another!

TL;DR - Reg is from the future and purposefully caused the births in order to create a superhero team. 

I told you it was a convoluted theory, but hopefully it makes sense…

[igpitn]

From Aidan’s tweets, it seems that Tv show Five viewed mom more as a machine than a mom.

yeah this is how i feel too!!!! like.... grace was designed by reginald, who he doesn’t trust/respect. i don’t think he really saw her as a mother figure

[gizkasparadise]

Have you read To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo? It can be categorized as a little mermaid retelling. But with the heroine being a literal heart-wrencher and the hero being an accomplished siren-killer/pirate prince, it tends to deviate from the normal retelling. Expect romance, the enemies to lovers kind. And if ur tired of series, fear not. It’s a stand-alone novel 😊

i haven’t! but i’ll add it to the list, #bless standalone novels t b h !!

[pinchtheprincess]

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