#so.. if anything's wrong or missing.. that's why

[hawkinslibrary]

soundtrack:  the vanishing of will byers -- part 1

[fairycosmos]

they should make a brain thats not obsessive or compulsive 😂😂😂😂😂😂

[titfairy]

Gelphie + NSFW texpost

Wicked For Good

[anordinarysenioryear]

I think the thing that gets me about Pearl this week is just how much her story reads like a neglected guard dog.

Gem is the boogieman, and she sets up a clear trap and alerts her allies. Grian, being Grian, sets it off and kills Pearl in the process. Her allies care about that process and Grian's mistake more than her death, because Pearl can afford to take the hit compared to them.

Jimmy kills all of their cows, and she shoots at him and warns her team that she is still staunchly loyal to. They don't even acknowledge this, even as Pearl shouts it out several times and goes up to make sure they can hear her. The cows die, and nothing else changes.

Obviously Pearl is fiercely loyal in the life series, so you could say this shouldn't matter to her. But that's addressed in the episode! She says she only ever trusts day one alliances, meaning she has dedicated herself to the Villies no matter what happens. Escape is never in her mind, no matter how her team treats her in the meantime.

And when she asserts some individuality? When she goes off on her own and tries to be helpful outside of her motif? She dies. Twice. Unceremoniously. To the laughter of the entire server. Like a dog made to do tricks.

She's obviously embarrassed by this, and clearly doesn't want to talk about it, preferring to run away from everyone (yet again, like a dog, and very reminiscent of double life as well). Her team goes to quite literally fetch her and bring her back, and this is I think the most tragic moment. Because they do, genuinely, cheer her up and take care of her. Grian acknowledges her embarrassment and doesn't push to learn the truth like Gem does, there's friendly banter, they're all a happy family again, and she's with a team that has her back.

They even watch, celebratory, as Ren loses his last life.

They even go to his funeral.

They even die together.

Pearl, on par with the rest of the server this point at yellow, dies because her "strong" team was being targeted. For a villainous cause she's never seemed to fully support.

It's funny how this all falls apart as soon as Pearl makes a more active contribution to the lighthouse and makes it prettier in her image. (Don't get me started on how that contribution was the subject of the banter, and how she was cheered up from her team laughing at her mistake right next to her.)

But it's all fine. Pearl is red now, and filled with the same bloodlust that her team has always had. Enraged, the Scarlet Pearl even comes out.

And oh, what an image the Scarlet Pearl has! One of murder and villainy, one who thrives off of chaos and isolation, one who has always been unhinged. This is who her team really wanted, this is who Gem is always trying to bring out, this is why Grian wanted her on his team.

To kill for them.

It doesn't get to go on for long, but the dynamic shift from Pearl going red is FASCINATING. From this point on, all pretenses are dropped.

Pearl is their guard dog.

Her team helps her, of course. But they also try to send her off at every opportunity. They see someone encroaching and they shout for Pearl to kill them without a second thought. Without even caring what she's doing (like when she's actively talking with Martyn, on her own.) Pearl may have the bloodlust now, but it's her team that channels theirs through her principally.

Etho's the only one who sees the situation like this, to the point that he offered help to Pearl after a clear plot to kill him (by the Villies, who say outright that they used Pearl), but his cries fall on deaf ears even after Pearl is gone.

Because she goes. She goes to Jimmy, invisible like her team told her to be. Armorless, like her team told her to be. She fights him from below, at a disadvantage, because was simply told to kill.

And she doesn't come back.

And the only reason a dog that loyal wouldn't come back is if it is dead.

[horizontalsplash]

riffing off of the concept that yugi was made for the purpose of housing atem’s soul, the worse option: yugi also having been made to heal/supplement the damaged parts of yami’s soul with the intention that he’d go with atem to the afterlife to continue that purpose, and in not doing that they both get completely fucked over spiritually and metaphysically

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[sleepyvib-es]

“maturing is realizing percy was the problem in botl” “annabeth was the problem” “rachel was a homewrecker”

[manyfandomsonelog]

Shoutout to Burn Gorman’s hopelessly tragic portrayal of Hermann Gottlieb in Pacific Rim: Uprising which will haunt me until the day I die