Mel and Jayce are kindred spirits and more alike than meets the eye.
I think Mel saw herself in Jayce during his trial. Jayce has the optimism and naivety that was stripped from her when she was banished, and here he is about to face the same fate.
- Both rejected by their homeland and ridiculed for her ideas.
- Jayce’s experiments with magic being seen as dangerous, Mel’s aversion to violence seen as dangerous and putting her family’s security at risk.
- The council’s disbelief in Jayce’s ability to even make Hextech successful, Ambessa not believing Mel is worthy of ruling by her side
- Both of them were doubted, publicly humiliated, pitied, and punished for disturbing the status quo
Mel is just as much of an idealist as Jayce, and he represents the person Mel is deep inside underneath the masks and armor she’s put up.
Part of why Mel wants to help Jayce succeed is because that’s what she wish someone did for her younger self. They both want to make the world better than it is and believe in pushing for progress.
So, I did Latin for 7 years. WAIT, STOP HEAR ME OUT!
I did my final school exam on Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the one thing that significantly shaped my view on media was Ovid's understanding of love.
When we think about romance and romantic love today, we tend to think of it as a saving grace, something that completes you. Falling in love in fiction implies a positive bond, something that will eventually help you. There are whole subgenres on the idea that "Love can save you"; "The Power of Love" is a pretty famous trope, right?
Now, Ovid also saw falling in love as a strong but, alas not always one that saves you. In almost every myth he reinterpreted in his "Metamorphoses" love creates - but only through destruction. Here, love is a force of nature, something even the gods aren't immune against. Love is rapturous and terrifying, more an uncontrollable forest fire than a tender candle flame. Love is complicated, the very act of falling so big that no one can even measure the effects it will have on the individual, the community, the world.
One of my favourite scenes in the poetic cycle tells the story about Apollo arguing with Cupido (son of Venus, basically her right hand). It goes like this:
Young Apollo just slew a beast. Standing on it, bloody bow in hand, he spots Cupido and brags: "Look at my skill, my power. I am the element tipping scales in wars, only one hit with my arrow is enough to kill the most gigantic monsters. What can you do with your weak bow, your mediocre arrows? Love, this feeble thing? Forever I will be the better archer between the both of us."
And Cupido, angry, just smiles: "My arrow may not kill any beast in one strike, but it'll strike you. And it'll destroy.
And it does. Apollo gets hit by an arrow and immediately falls in love with the nymph Daphne. Cupido also hits her with an arrow, not one for love but for eternal hate.
Long story short: Apollo runs after her, she begs her father, a river, to help her. He transforms her into a laurel tree, causing Apollo's heart to break. This is why he gets portrayed with a laurel crown in mythological pictures. He wears it to never forget his first love.
This, btw, is one of a gazillion stories where Apollo falls in love with someone and that person dies, gets transformed into flora or eternally hates him. Just because he messed with Cupido once (1)! Cupido and his mother Venus are incredibly petty and power hungry. Ovid's message is rather clear: do not fuck with love! Do not underestimate it! Don't try controlling the forest fire, you will burn yourself.
Love and the loss of it, in Ovids works, is more often than not associated with pain, sometimes implied to be worse than death, sometimes implied to be better than heaven. It creates, it destroys, it lets you learn and fall and stand up again. Love isn't something positive (or negative) - it just is. And you have to deal with that, whether you like it or not.
And I love the implications with this conceptualisation, because love hurts although it may be right, it may be cute, it may be essential. "Uwu such a cute romance sto-" NO. Cute? Love isn't cute, love is bigger than your tiny, short, pathetic life. Love is uncontrollable. Love is chaos.
Sooo, this is a fandom post after all, so I'll get to Stolitz now. If you're just here for me fangirling about Ovid (love that guy, we stan someone that knows his metrics), you can check out now. Hope you had fun reading!
If you think about love like Ovid things about it, isn't it oh-so-understandable why Blitzø fears it so much? It ties you to someone, you float in an ocean and everywhere you look, you see only horizon and waves. And for someone that only has experience with how love destroys (flashback with Fizz birthday, also whatever the fuck happened with his twin sister Barbie) falling of course feels like fucking drowning. You try to act normal, as if there would be normal ground under your feet. You don't try to swim (why bother? Never worked out anyway) and because you don't even try, you start sinking, choking on your own infatuation, with no safe haven, no anchor, no land in sight. You're alone, lungs filling with water, slowly losing consciousness while the sounds of the earth above you are getting quieter, the world desaturated of its colour.
"Are you afraid to love people, Blitzy?" - Of course he is? Why wouldn't he? Are you afraid of forest fires?
And to add on that: he feels completely alone in his own conscious, his emotions for Stolas. Because like hell he'd be vulnerable in front of his friends or crush. He's way to deep anyway, everything is dark blue. No one will hear you and even if: you would not want them to listen. Blitzø wants to drown in silence, not having a say in if he drowns at all because, like I said, love is way too big for you to control.
Similar with Stolas, although his view on the fire isn't that pessimistic. He knows how powerful emotions are and doesn't even try to contain them. At first, he almost revels in the waves. Did you ever swim at night, the stars above you multiplied by the water below you? There is nothing but the waves and the stars and the sky. There is nothing, there is everything. Stolas likes loving, he sees beauty and contempt in it. But eventually he sees that there isn't land in sight, that you alone cannot survive this vastness of nature also.
You cannot control the Ocean, cannot control the forest fire, but you can try to coordinate. This is the only way to survive this terrifying ordeal called love.
So he swims, tries to swim at least and he looks for Blitzø, realising they'll both go down with this relationship if they won't find the other between the waves. And he swims and swims, screaming, while Blitzø drowns him out. He cannot hear him, because he cannot accept that pretending there is land under your feet won't magically make the ocean disappear. He'd need to swim, but what good did that ever cause him?
Brought to you by Shower Brain (that bitch) and yesterday's missed maths exam...
Let's talk about Thought Nose Soup.
First, thoughts. Thoughts should be solid things, easy to grab. Like marbles. So you've got a bunch of thought marbles rolling around in your brain, doing their thing.
Most of the time, thoughts are just doing their own thing. Some of you might have will ordered minds. Let's imagine that as a running track, all the marbles in their lane. Other minds can be more like bumper cars, thoughts colliding into each other and sometimes sparking new thoughts. Writers know that one.
(it must be nice, having an edge to your thought holding pen)
When you want to focus on a thought, you pluck it out of the holding pen. Maybe you hold it up to light, examine it, smash it open to see what's inside.
Interrogate it to learn its intentions.
Cradle it like a flame that you need to grow.
Eventually, though, you're probably gonna drop it in a marble run and follow it until a conclusion is reached.
Multiply you by 1 and a process has occurred.
Just drop it in one of these and watch it go.
(idle musings about dinner go in, a craving for beef Stroganoff comes out)
Me, I'm ADHD, so my run is more like those marble race videos with the multiple at once and the randomisation elements that help change marble order when changing direction. Sometimes a marble gets left behind or lost. Sometimes some arsehole comes from offscreen to chuck in some extras just because.
Sometimes the thought i forgot up the track comes in like a wrecking ball and destroys the whole thing...
(You were not that big when i forgot about you)
Which brings us to thought soup! The phenomena where the entire apparatus attempts to liquify!!
Hip hip, hooray!
So now half the thought marbles in your holding pens have vanished. The half remaining have turned to gel and are sinking into the custard of your brain. And you're there trying to gently scoop them out with a fork.
Once you do get them out and into the run, they're sluggish and squishy. And the run itself is half melted, so they don't always come out where they're supposed to.
Or at all.
And then there's times you've been suffering a cold all through study week, forget how you planned to finish this, and have started wondering about making meatball soup...
(the last image i had prepared earlier)
...The cold induced snot is what turns thought soup into thought nose soup.
Every episode of Redemption the plan seems to be to get an Engineered Public Confession from the evil person. From the military guy over the walkies to his workers now to debra over her livestream it seems... less thought out?
Thought soup for 3x07 and why this episode did NOT disappoint
1- For me, the best thing about this episode was clearly that we got more Eve AND dark Eve. The look in her eyes when she was crushing Dasha said it all. She was excited to kill again, excited to follow in Villanelle's footsteps and work on the same kill as her.
2- The villaneve meetup. It wasn't what we expected but it was still pretty great. As we say in French, they were separated only to find eachother better next episode. If they had met "for real" on the platform, I'm afraid it would've been a brief encounter as Villanelle had important stuff to do, she had a place to go and a train to catch, Eve surprised her. When they meet next episode it'll be voluntary (probably on both parts), they'll be focused on eachother. The way they reacted to seeing eachother again really proves they've grown. I was also happy to find that obsession again. It felt different, good different, like it was an old dance they knew every step to, both in the chase and in the meeting.
3- This was a turning point for Konstantin. His plan is going to shit, which means his two daughters-Irina and Villanelle- will have to fend for themselves. For Villanelle, that means going back to Eve.
4- This was also a breakthrough for Carolyn. She's finally letting her anger out, and realizing not only all she's loosing, but also that if she doesn't back off she might be next on the Twelve's hit list.
5- Now a little color and outfit analysis. Villanelle wore a lot of green this episode. Green symbolises growth, hope and jealousy. For me, when Villanelle wears green, it also represents vulnerability.
Let's take a look at 2 of the other times Villanelle wore green.
The green skirt. She wore this when she was the most vulnerable: meeting her family. She had hoped to reconnect with them, to see where she belonged and where she came from. This was a sign of growth in Villanelle's character. She was opening herself up, giving into her fears and desires. She might have been a little jealous of the life she never had. Notice she was wearing a top in hotter colors that reminded of the tones her family wore, she was trying to fit in.
The green gown. She wore this at yet another time where she was vulnerable. Actually, it was the fit time she let herself cry (that we know of). That was growth. She had hoped for Eve to come, but she didn't, and she got jealous of the attention she didn't get from her.
Now in this episode, she was reminded of her mom, and we also saw (maybe) some jealousy when she realized even Dasha had family. Her growth came in three shapes: first, her relationship with Eve (and also Konstantin), her personal growth, and her wanting to grow out of the Twelve. However, what I found most interesting about her outfits this episode was their shape.
They were bulky, and her golf one even looked like grass, or a bush camouflage outfit. They hid her. They hid her shape and her scars, they hid her desires, what she's really trying to do.
Now for Eve's outfit. This was reminded me a lot of one of her outfits from season 1.
Odly enough, in both episodes she chases Villanelle in other cities, she asks Konstantin for information, and Konstantin ends up nearly dying. One of Villanelle's "mother figures" (Dasha in this episode, Anna in season 1) also gets hurt. I found the parallel interesting.
Irina's outfits. First time we see her this time, after she's killed for the first time and is in "prison" (detention center), she's wearing a blue turtleneck that resembles a lot the one Villanelle was wearing when she saw her family for the first time time.
Then, she's wearing an all red shirt. The last time she saw Villanelle and told her about her father's plans, Villanelle was also wearing an all red shirt (fancier and with buttons but).
I was talking about this with @strangled-by-jodie-comer and we found it very interesting. It's as if they were trading places. Irina is becoming the killer, and Villanelle wants to escape with her almost-father Konstantin, like Irina wanted to do in the beginning of the season.
Finally, there was some more red (that turns to black) in Geraldine's and Carolyn's outfits, but I'll let @strangled-by-jodie-comer develop on that if she wants to as it was her who brought it up to my attention.
6- In conclusion, a lot happened, some plot holes are slowly getting filled (like what Carolyn said to V in the prison, I was happy they addressed that), and there's clearly a lot of detail being put into this episode.
Feel free to add to my soup, I might later but for now after my first watch this is what stood out to me.
My instinct is to let the music speak for itself, but I worry that it would be submerged in the media ocean. Also, 'new album' is just two words, but for me it's a huge deal. Some of the songs on this collection were started ten years ago. For all that time, the album has been occupying my headspace. If there was ever a moment when I wasn't doing anything, then I was supposed to be working on my album. My brain needed defragging and the space needed cleaning out for new projects. I'm thinking of storing my spare change in there.
So in an attempt to attach a coloured buoy to it I'm writing a little piece here. What is there to say, though? For me, the music does speak for itself. It's probably a truer representation of my thoughts and feelings than you'd get in a conversation with me. Time and again I write songs only to realise that they are the expression of some subconscious working-out that wasn't finished enough to bubble to the surface yet. For instance, I wrote Truly, Madly, Just Me before I adopted the label 'aromantic'. I'm suspecting now that I may have certain autistic traits, and there's a song I wrote about that, too.
Another thing that makes me wary of commentating on my songs is that I don't want to fix an interpretation in the listener's mind. So I'll talk a little about the production instead. My thinking was to produce a more collaborative suite of songs than usual, rather than having every sound prepared by me. However, by the time I'd finished incorporating Alan, Namtao and Kate's performances they'd been processed to blazes anyway. This is not in any way to denigrate their kind contributions! It wouldn't sound the same without them. But it does all sound like a wander through my mind, and the library of memory collages I keep in there and the distorted and tinted windows I look out at the world through.
And the video? There'll be more on that in due course (including a behind-the-scenes making-of!). It seemed sensible to promote the album, and after lockdown I'd missed making videos with my friends. So I went to town on this one. It's the most expensive thing I've ever made, and took eighteen months to edit.
Two similar phrases: art is never finished, only abandoned (attributed to Leonardo da Vinci); and 'perfect' is the opposite of 'finished'. I sincerely hope you enjoy this new suite of music, and find it interesting.
