I will never forgive Treyarch for doing so little between Mason and Bell; just imagine the possibilities,
What about Mason, who, from the minute he saw Bell, sensed something off? The ticks, the empty eyes, the unsureness in their words, the empty-headed tailing of Adler—he's seen fucked up soldiers in his time, but this one felt too close to home. But he dismissed it; "Another one of Adler's lapdogs," he concluded. Wasn't his business—he came back for just one last job.
What about Mason, who, besides Woods, wasn't told what Bell was? Of course Hudson didn’t tell him; there was no way either of them would agree to something like this, and they were close enough to the operation as it is. He intentionally kept them busy in Kiev and with Perseus' lackeys, hoping they wouldn't have to catch on.
What about Mason, who felt his instincts screaming in his head as he talked to Bell, trying to ignore the same glazed over expression he had on Rebirth Island staring back at him? They wouldn't; Hudson wouldn't, he told himself.
What about Mason, who, stumbling into the safehouse after the shitshow in Cuba, found Bell strapped to a gurney with Adler forcing a syringe halfway down their eye? The scene was nauseatingly familiar, and he didn’t even hear Hudson trying to calm down a furious Woods, red specks of ticking numbers slowly starting to crowd his vision as he heard them scream bloody murder.
What about Mason realizing he should've just listened to his fucking instincts?
What about Mason, who grabbed Adler by the collar and almost punched him in his stupid glasses when he walks out of the office, only to stop when he's coolly informed the nukes were gonna be detonated from Solovetsky? He reluctantly let go, watching Bell slowly get up from the gurney, their chest heavy with the weight of a realization no one should ever have to go through.
What about Mason, who can't take his sights off of Bell as they fight their way through to the AA guns? He tried to ignore the cold sweat he felt watching them run to detonate the last gun with no regard for their own life, Adler urging them on.
What about Mason, who ran to help Woods lift the metal off of Bell, recoiling at the look of surprise on their face, like they didn't expect to be saved? He couldn't even look them in the eye, circling away from them as Adler went on his fucking speech about his "message to Perseus," wanting nothing more than to put a knife between his eyes right then and there and call it collateral.
What about Mason, who couldn't stand the way Adler zeroed in on them when he was done? He was helplessly frozen, watching as the asshole fed more bullshit to their fried brain.
"This is how wars are won, Bell."
What about Bell, who was spared Adler's bullet at the cliff? He held them by the shoulder, not-so-subtly implying that the only reason they were still alive was to continue doing what they were before—hunt down the remnants of Perseus without question or resistance—their life now property of the CIA.
What about Bell, who can't trust anyone in the safehouse anymore, now that they knew everyone was in on it? They felt defenseless—powerless, even—feeling the vicious gaze of everyone burn into their skin, as if this were their justified fate.
What about Bell, who struggled to function day after day? Every night, they woke up screaming from new horrifying memories; the unregulated dosage in the last ditch effort of an interrogation took its toll on them. The voice of Adler was now stuck in their head, commanding them even through a routine as rudimentary and personal as putting their clothes on.
What about Bell, who can't bear to look at themselves anymore? Whenever they pick their toothbrush up and flit their weary eyes up to the mirror, they find an unfamiliar reflection of themselves painted in grease stripes, staring back with hollow eyes. They recoil so hard they fling the toothbrush into the dirty sink, panting heavily as they try to hammer into their head that they were never in that sweaty, swampy hellhole.
What about Bell, desperate to do anything to make it all end? To stop hearing that fucking voice, to stop feeling so violated even in their most private of moments, to stop feeling the beady eyed stares of everyone the second they entered the room, to stop living a life that was no longer their own; but the voice always told them to put the gun down. And of course, they obeyed.
What about Bell, who only ever found refuge with Woods and Mason, seeing them routinely fight with Hudson over what happened to them? Apparently they were the only ones that weren't aware of this little endeavor, but what surprised them is seeing them stand up for them despite their sentiments towards Reds.
What about Bell, who didn't feel so unsafe when they sat near the pair of veterans to eat? They didn't say a word to the troubled soul, outside of offering water or asking for the spoon lying next to them. Nobody bothered them in those intervals. Not even Adler.
What about Bell finding the toothbrush back in its place in the small holder every morning?
What about Bell, who stared into the empty screen of the television by the board, unable to get up, struggling against phantom restraints? They'd been sitting there for hours—long after everyone had gone to sleep—watching their memory's footage of Vietnam play across the screen. The burning of their eyes prompted them to manually blink, not missing a moment of watching the soldiers gruesomely getting butchered in a war they were never part of. They couldn't tear their gaze away; not until a hand on their shoulder shook them back to reality.
“Once the Void left me, the two angels came. Pulled me from the light, to return to this chaotic room with its malodorous flavors. But gloriously free of the entirety of my sadness and failure, I am reborn.”
God I love bob and him being done so well in Thunderbolts brought a tear to my eye. While the bottom hands were meant to be Lindy’s, I love sentryagent/voidwalker so we can pretend its whoever we wants lifting bob up.
Dan Slott may be really, really, REALLY bad at writing a lot of things but my god I tell you if you need Spideytorch written he will bust out the yaoi skills without hesitation.
alluded to it in my last adlerbell rot post but i have such a complex over adler naming bell and i find it difficult to put into words. so here’s a very lengthy attempt:
most of the symbolism behind bell’s name is obvious and doesn’t need much stating: it’s indicative of adler’s ownership of bell, literally naming them like a pet, his property. obvious also that a bell was used in their conditioning; as well as a reference to the study of classical conditioning itself by pavlov, who similarly used a bell to condition behavioural responses in the test subject: a dog (hence the myriad dog imagery/symbolism in adlerbell fics… it’s like crack to me)
but the obvious aside it always hits me deepest as part of the “it wasn’t personal” narrative. it’s insanely personal- it’s intimate. i think i put adlerbell on a little bit of a pedestal to view everything about them through a vaguely romanticised lens, but to me it really is- in the most horrifically tragic and sickening way- romantic.
like, you’re bell, right? you trust this man, bell. he is your friend. you witnessed some of the worst atrocities of mankind and survived hell with him and he is your friend. he calls your name through the smoke and gunfire, as a bullet zips past your ear you hear it amidst the splitting of shrapnel, the tearing of screams silenced for but a moment. each time he extends his arm to pick you up, he calls you, bell. every time he directs you to a point of interest, he beckons you, bell. when he nudges you out of your cot in camp haskins, it’s your name he laughs, bell. when he praises you, and smiles at you in that wry, almost boyish way, and tells you how good of a job you’ve done, how we couldn’t have done it without you, how they should be thanking you- it’s your name, bookended, every time, a fondness notched into the welding that stamps you both together inseparably. bell. every single association you have to your name is whenever he pulls you close, helps you, praises you, saves you. your name alone a positive association- to the respect and affection he has for you. bell.
and it’s to the point. adler says their name at any given moment he can. he says it so often it’s infuriating. like deadass take a shot every time. it’s practically a trope in any fic featuring the two, that he utters their name every other line of dialogue. it’s the first thing he says to them at the start of the game- walking into the safehouse at west berlin- not a word, but their name. sure, obviously isn’t the first time he’s spoken to bell, knowing what came before- but it’s presumably bell’s first time walking around freely since mk ultra. that coupled with the trigger phrase must make for a very pliant response- when he says their name, it’s the same man, as far as bell knows, who fought with them back to back in vietnam. something thicker even than blood.
and i reckon adler likes it. mk ultra was a joint effort but bell’s past is based on his choosing, his memories. by no means did he have to pick their name, but he did. he chose to name the thing he’s helped create. it’s almost sick that the ‘closeness’ bell feels towards adler is really only partially synthetic- over a span of months adler really was there, every day, talking for hours and conditioning them over and over and over again. of course he’d name them. something something don’t name an animal you don’t want to get attached to. but it’s his animal. it’s his dog. they’re his bell.
and there’s something just so sickening and so adler that he could have named them anything else in the world- maybe something inconspicuous and plain, like john or jane; something sweet, something that reminds him of someone else, a song he likes, a nickname, an insult, or even something downright cruel. but i don’t think anything could be more cruel and tragically appropriate than calling them by the name of the instrument you used to condition them. to call them by the tool you used to enslave their mind. the very thing that reset their entire being to zero. a bell. not just their name- but the sound, ever ringing, in the back of their mind. the thing that echoes in the empty inside them, to remind them why it’s empty in the first place, its sole purpose to keep them chained in their loyalty to adler. bell.
like i said, i do really think adler likes it. for whatever reason. ownership, spite, just a way to rub salt in the wound any chance he gets, a small victory only he gets to revel in, right in their face. but bell is his. bell belongs to him. when he says their name, it’s the one he chose. time and patience came alongside that bell that rang perpetual in that lab. he’s said that name as many times as he rang it. maybe a part of adler’s as attached to that instrument as much as he is the person he named after it. i’m sure adler hears it chiming in the recesses of his own mind more than he’d care to admit. he’d been around to hear it as long as bell has, hadn’t he? maybe part of him has grown conditioned in his attachment to that instrument too.
but there must be a semblance of pride when he says it. really, to be able to beckon your dog by the name you chose for it. i wonder if a swell of maddened joy tugs at his blackened heart whenever he sees bell’s head perk up at the sound of their name, the one he chose, as implicit and unthinking, automatic, as though it truly were their own. since birth.
and like it couldn’t be enough that he took everything from them. and most importantly that he took them away from perseus- that he stole perseus’ most precious comrade right out from under him, and turned them to an unflinching loyal pup for himself. this isn’t about you, this isn’t about me, this is about millions of other fucking people. is it? when you croon and tut their name between every sentence, are you sure you don’t just like the satisfaction of saying it, knowing how deeply it disarms them? knowing how they are wholly yours, to their very core? to the name they introduce themselves as? to the one they flinch and come running whenever you say it?
ugh. it’s just- a name is so integral to one’s identity. it shapes their life. their personhood. and he didn’t just erase theirs, but he gave them a new one and made sure they’d like it. a conditioned response of pleasure whenever he’d say it. isn’t that intimate?
he took everything. every single shred of who they were. that not even their name is their own. that even their name, their name, belongs entirely to him.
this didn’t make sense, i wrote this mostly for myself, congrats if u read this far. i just wanted to have every single thought and feeling i had about it jotted in one place and file it away ajshsjksjsjsjs
@be-bisexual-eat-hot-chip-and-lie i believe you requested sens snoopy, a long long time ago?
my mental image of brady tkachuk is concerningly cartoonlike so i had to include him too
SO! It's July, which is disability pride month here in the United States where I live! I figured it would be appropriate to kick things off by talking about a character who has a mixed reputation, to say the least: Guy Gardner, Green Lantern. He's been around since the Silver Age of comics, and his characterization has been through some serious ups and downs over the years! But what if I told you that it's not inconsistent writing? What if I told you there is a lens with which to view his shifting behavioral patterns and at times abrasive and offensive personality that makes it all come into focus and make perfect sense, and it's all already there on the page? I'm here to give you that lens, and it's viewing Guy Gardner as a man who has suffered multiple traumatic brain injuries and managed to heal over time. Buckle up, this is probably going to be a long one, and it's pretty image heavy as I try to back up as much as I am claiming that I can.
So the first thing I will start with is establishing Guy's former baseline. This is not the post where I will go incredibly in-depth on Guy's full family history and his education, I'll save that for another time.
Here, I simply aim to sum up.
Guy Gardner met Hal Jordan for the first time in the 1991 title Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn, a volume that served as an updated backstory for the Silver Age hero after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Hal was in prison to serve a 90 day sentence for drunk driving. Guy Gardner was Hal Jordan's caseworker.
"What? Huh? That's Guy Gardner?" You, the hypothetical reader ask. What happened to him?!
A lot. A lot happened to him, and it took him from a man who gave the advice to "Use your rage! Don't let it use you!" to a man who is known as the rude angry ginger lantern.
First off, he got hit by a bus. No, I'm not being metaphorical or making a joke. See, he quit his job as a prison case worker because he didn't like how the job made him feel, especially after he was caught up in a prison riot and threatened with death at the hands of a prisoner there. So he put his second degree to use and he became a teacher. Specifically, he became a physical education teacher for disabled children.And then there was an earthquake, and he was hit by a bus while attempting to rescue one of the students on a field trip he was running, nearly dying in the process.
Now, I will say: he got better. This time. See, no sooner had he recovered from this incident, as he was filling in for Hal as Green Lantern he was exploded in the line of duty and sent to a parallel dimension. In that parallel dimension he was tortured, and Sinestro used a dangerous and severe form of mind control that, when it was finally broken, left Guy... well, the comics call him comatose, but he is conscious, he is just not responsive to the environment around him or able to care for himself.
For years, he remained in this state, with his care at a top-notch hospital paid for by fellow superheros. And then, during the Crisis on Infinite Earths event, a miracle happened. Guy regained consciousness.
But the Guy who came out of that vegetative state wasn't the same man who fell into it. Or at least, not exactly. He was angrier. His fuse was shorter. Perhaps most upsetting of all, one of the first actions he took upon regaining consciousness was attempted grave robbery.
"Gelpens, what the fuck," you ask me. I know. It's a lot. Bear with me here. See, he didn't wake up on his own. The Guardians of Oa woke him up, using their tremendous cosmic powers to attempt to heal his brain damage so they could deploy him to help during the Crisis.
Sure, Guy got his strength back. He was able to function as a Green Lantern. But he still wasn't the same as he was before his coma. He stayed angry, and confrontational, and was frequently known to make inappropriate comments that failed to fit the setting he was in or the bounds of good taste. He had a constant chip on his shoulder, very different from the man who was concerned about controlling his anger so it couldn't use him.
This all came to a head in a series of events that is frankly infamous in comics circles. Almost every fan I know of who knows Guy Gardner knows about the time Batman got fed up with his confrontational rude attitude and laid him out with a single punch to the face.
The thing people don't remember about that punch is that, seeing as it was the 90s, and comics writers had learned a few things about the brain, they decided to use it to make... let's call it a running joke. See, after Guy regained consciousness, he was much more like the guy he was before all that head trauma. He was polite, cared about being a team player and not trying to prove himself, he didn't go for lethal force!
Of course, this didn't last. No, the whole 'joke' here was that Batman punched him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he would occasionally jump from being a sweet, friendly team player to, in the words of the narration box the first time he got hit on the head again, his new old "thoroughly rotten" self (I know).
Slowly but surely though, Guy did get better, and start to stay better. His mood stabilized, he gained more self-control, he started making better plans and he was much less angry as a default. And it's kept going! This train keeps chugging along! He isn't so angry anymore! He has it under control!
And honestly? This moment, right here? This is the crowning jewel in my thesis, I think.
Guy has a Red Lantern ring and a Star Sapphire ring. For those of you less familiar with the extended Green Lantern lore, the Red Lanterns run off rage. The Star Sapphires are powered by love. Outside of willpower, the emotions that are the most powerful within him are his rage and anger, and his love for his friends. And what does he fuel them with, when it comes down to the wire? When willpower alone isn't enough?
The thing he hates most is being filled with rage. The thing he loves the most is his friends.
So. I don't think Guy was ever just an angry, sexist, rude asshole at his core. Is he the same as he was before the injury, before all that happened to him? Of course not. Nobody goes through life completely unchanged by what happens to them.
I think he injured his brain and lost his ability to regulate his emotions and impulses for a while. The road to recovery was far from smooth. It just took him some time to heal and be in a place to act like the man he wanted to be all along. But in my opinion? I think he's there now.
Haven't posted in a while, time for a comics rant.
I love booster gold. I love him so much, he's my favourite ever comics character. He has a couple of basic powers like flight and usually blasts, but spends a lot of time using force fields, which is incredibly cool. It makes him a pretty versatile fighter. Similarly I love his costume, colourful, recognisable and not too complicated (plus it has wrist gauntlets, I love wrist gauntlets), which is basically everything you need for a good super suit.
Outside of the basics, I love his premise. He's a time travelling super hero from the future. There's tonnes of room for great time travel related adventures, which are always incredibly entertaining. Plus plenty of space for fish out of water comedy. Furthermore, the idea of a normal guy coming back from the future with high tech stuff to be a hero, is incredibly amusing and one of the most original premises for a character.
I love everything about him, I love that he's on the JLI. I love that he has a little robot buddy (Skeetz). I love that his arch nemesis is called Dick Hertz.
Boosters story is genuinely amazing. He's brash and he's bold, a confident goofball, but also a massive nerd. He comes to the past as a fame seeker with a less than noble history, he's shaky and he's not great at being a hero. He can be arrogant, and over sure of himself, and at the start he really doesn't feel that he fits in. He feels like an imposter in a world of genuine heroes. As time goes on, booster gold the og fanboy turned superhero (honestly this premise is universally delightful - looking at you Gwenpool) becomes more and more selfless. It's the greatest example of fake it till you make it, booster stop trying to hit the A list, and he's relegated to the B-tier, saving the world time and again, without anyone even knowing. Booster turns from being the arrogantly begrudging "greatest hero you've never heard" of to having that title be a thing of pride, an honoured descriptor. Booster becomes a more genuine hero than most others, all because he knew the future was brighter, and because he wanted to help people here. For many reasons, this story is incredibly personally impactful for me, but there's one other thing that I need to talk about for Booster.
This is to the fandom. Booster Golds most important relationship have never been any of his brief flings, it has never been any of the crazy characters from across time, it has never even been his family. The most important relationship booster gold has is blue beetle. Booster and Ted have one of the greatest friendships in comics. They'll hang out all the time, just for fun. They joke around together. They work together when they can. But when times are tough they always turn up for each other. It's an inspiring friendship for the ages. I understand why many people like to claim this. There are not a lot of gay relationships in comics, and that sucks. But, can we please stop this nonsense of pretending every time two people have strong feelings for each other it's romantic. Can for once, we have some characters with a very impactful friendship, that outclasses romantic bonds. I am so tired of everything being romantic, and as weird as it sounds, alongside bill and Ted's excellent adventure and Shaun of the dead, booster gold gets to be one of those breaks. So please, just for once can we accept there is in fact a platonic explanation for this, Booster and Ted are best friends, and their relationship is what being best friends should look like.
