patron saint of remembering. patron saint of holding something close. patron saint of holding on for too long. for a saint, a relic is often a part of the body, kept for some physical memento of their holiness. they are all in your hands, now: does it feel like remembrance? does it feel sanctified? are the dust and blood as precious as they're supposed to be?
you are the patron saint of empty spaces, cavernous rooms, moments that last for days. for some people, the emptiness is horrible, something that they need to fill: you, its patron, try to search within it for peace. there is nothing there. there is never anything there. even the emptiness is not a presence of its own. the only thing there is you.
If the Commission’s main mission was to ensure that the apocalypse came to fruition, this could only be because Founder Five, who created the Commission, realized at some point that the marigold and the family’s birth was the catalyst for the end of the world (maybe he visited the diner). Founder Five created the Commission and set about ensuring the apocalypse in every timeline, the traumatic dystopia that raised him, in order to save the lives of his family.
Founder Five tried his whole life to find his way back to his original family and his original jump, willfully complicit in the annihilation of several worlds along the way. He urges Five not to save the world, in an effort to save their family, but does not tell Five why.
Five’s drive to save the world is rooted in his drive to save his family. He originally sets out to stop the apocalypse in our main timeline so that his family does not die and he does not find them in the rubble. Founder Five’s warning is consistent with the fact that the apocalypse happens because the family lives. For Five to resign and urge his family to sacrifice themselves in order to save the world for the rest of humanity is misaligned with his main character motivation in every iteration of himself and in every timeline. It negates the complex character work, the antihero air to all our characters, and the plot development that led up to the last episode. And honestly, it was just very lazy writing.
friendly reminder that characters don't need to be saints to be entertaining. and telling a story does not mean endorsement. art does not need to be all about morally good people.
IDK if this was meant as hyperbole but it's literally true:
Adult literacy is low.
Child literacy is low.
Information literacy has shifted dramatically in the last decade, but reputable information sources like research journals and factual news reporting have been unable to keep pace.
We are genuinely in a crisis of media literacy, with ever fewer genuinely factual resources available in the style and language used by contemporary audiences.
It may sound condescending, but we genuinely need to remind people, or worse, explain to them for the first time that art is not evidence of real world behaviour.
So, thank you, for this reminder. Genuinely.
You're correct:
Art does not need to feature exclusively morally pure characters. Art is not proof of the creator's secret, violent desires.
sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute
Years back, I was working at a specialty store, and we got this HUGE crate of plushy toys. They were all insanely cute and squishy. I knew kids would go nuts for them, as it was the first week of December, so parents and grandparents often had kids with them while shopping for furniture, lamps, cooking equipment, lights, etc.
One night, I was working my last hour of my shift covering the Customer Service desk, which meant when I wasn't busy, I was supposed to help clean up around the cash registers, including taking back items people changed their minds about at the checkout. Earlier, I had witnessed a kid carrying thos cute plushy toy. It was a brown and white hedgehog. The kid, at the checkout, saw a remote control car and he told his dad he qanted it. The dad told him, "The plushy or the car- you can't have both" (by the way, I respect boundaries with kids and parents sticking to their guns about it), and the kid picked the car.
So, I'm cleaning up, have less than an hour left of my shift, and I see the little plushy hedgehog. Somehow, he never got put back nor had anyone else seen him and decided to buy him. He was just sitting there, slumped to the side, unattended.
It's Christmas and I'm a sentimental old sap at heart. My brain starts replaying the scene from RUDOLPH where he's on the Island of Misfot Toys, and is told a toy is never truly happy until it is loved. I picked him up and quickly took him back to the bin with the plushies but... It was empty. He was literally the last plushy toy and my boss was about to wheel the bin out. We weren't getting any more toys till November, so that meant any toys left at this point needed to sell or they'd be sent to the dump.
I brought the little hedgehog to the front, figuring someone would see him with the candy, candles, & Christmas brick-a-brack, and fall in love with him. When I finished my shift, I went to ask my manager a question and as I passed the Christmas candle display - there he sat, the sad little slumped over hedgehog plushy. No one had bought him, or even moved him.
My manager, Phillip, saw me and the hedgehog. He asked how the hedgehog got there. I told him how I'd put him there when the bin got sent back, and he was the only plushy left. Philip had kids, I figured he'd probably get sentimental and buy it for his kids. Nope. He shrugged and said he'd send it back to be disposed of.
That night, I came home with a plushy hedgehog in my passenger seat. My mom saw him and just thought he was the cutest little hedgehog and asked what I wanted to do with him. I told her the story, then added I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with him.
My mom is a child psychiatrist, specializing in children with PTSD and brain damage that results in learning problems/issues with processing their emotions. She asked if she could have the plushy hedgehog (even offered to pay me for him, she didn't expect me to just give him over), so kids could hug him when they were upset in session.
Murphy, the plushy hedgehog that still slumps a little to the left when seated, has been hugged by hundreds of kids. Little girls have held him tight while explaining about bullies, little boys have held him tight while crying over their panic attacks, younger siblings have held him to whisper secrets while elder siblings and parents talk about self-soothing techniques, teenagers have hugged Murphy while talking about the worst day of their lives. Murphy has also been hugged by kids excitedly chatting about a new friend at school, a teen girl excited to be called by her name instead of her dead-name, little kids proudly saying they've mastered their ABCs, and even staff members who just need to come chat over a case they are having trouble with.
Every now and then, my mom brings Murphy home for a weekend. He gets washed (she calls it a Spa Weekend, to her coworkers, all of them laughing), dried, and sits outside with my mom in the sunshine to get aired out, then on Monday, they are back to work. Some kids even just ask to hold Murphy while they talk, no matter their mood or what they want to talk about. They just want to hug Murphy.
So yes. Plushies are made for one purpose. To be hugged and loved. To be a comfort.
Ben Hargreeves is the worst written best character and I can prove it
This is a poorly organized meta/essay about my baby boy who got massacred. Originally posted in the discord server so some of y'all have seen it already.
Let me be clear: this is a love letter to my favourite Hargreeves boy. I could write him better. I could fix him (narratively).
Here's why Ben is a great character who, paradoxically, was very badly written.
Umbrella Ben
Listen. Listen to me. Ben Hargreeves was, from the moment I saw him, my absolute favourite character. He's already dead? Doomed by the narrative before the narrative even begins? Also, an East Asian character in the year of our Lord 2018?? I was on board. And Brelly Ben gets a lot of good moments! You know that scene where Klaus is in the motel closet, tied up, and Ben says something like, "How does it feel being helpless? This is how I feel, watching my brother piss his life away." Um, hello?? That's such a delicious line.
Because up until this point Ben's been kind of quiet, in that dead broody way, or we saw his young self being soft and reluctant. But suddenly we realize, oh, Ben isn't nice. In fact, he's kind of nasty to his addict brother, and you get this kernel of a glimpse into his character. This is a character who might have been soft-spoken in life, but death and the years since have shredded him down to all his razor edges. He's still that bookish little Ben, except he's not little and he's frustrated, angry, traumatized, and in pain.
And season 2 builds on this! He's willing to violate Klaus's personal boundaries just for a taste of life again. Holy shit that's so delicious. My problem is that, especially in season 2, this isn't explored nearly as much as it could be. Ben's possession shenanigans are mostly played for comedy, when in fact we could be delving into the implications of Ben's character and his relationship with Klaus. You have this character who's kind, who (from what we know so far) represented the "good" of the academy, who loves his brother so so hard and it hurts him so bad to see Klaus hit rock bottom every time. The little "I missed you guys" in season 2? Devastating. And yet despite his goodness he is capable of being a bad person, and he repeatedly hurts those around him (namely Klaus).
So surely this is part of his arc, right? This is going to be explored and resolved. Right?
The Season 2 Ending
So the thing is, I didn't immediately hate the way they had Ben move on / die to save Viktor. I was sad to see my favourite character go, but also excited to see where the writers would take that storyline. Because, obviously, it wasn't over. Right? Obviously Ben's arc isn't finished, he hasn't resolved his frustrations, his complicated relationship with Klaus is never fully untangled, plus the rest of the family never get a moment of real closure with him (except maybe Diego). So clearly, it wasn't over. Right?
Well, in light of season 4, I can confidently come back and say that killing Brelly Ben off here was a stupidass decision.
And here's why: you've effectively splintered his arc in half. Starting from season 3, Ben is an entirely different character, with an entirely different arc that needs to be built from the ground up. While everyone else gets 4 seasons of development, Ben only gets 2, both times. And I'm so not over the fact that his arc isn't over. We saw Ben do some reprehensible shit to Klaus, especially in season 2 with all that possession shit! And we just. Never hear from him again? That's bullshit.
But anyway, since we're here, let's make peace with being here. Hey, Justin H Min is still playing a version of Ben, and he seems interesting, if way different! Surely this will have some interesting implications.
Sparrow Ben
Oh god, Sparrow Ben. In terms of Ben's character writing, season 3 is... fine. Like I said, it suffers from effectively fracturing his arc in half and having to start over, and this isn't the complicated, kind but frustrated and prickly ghost Ben I originally fell in love with. But ok, I do like Justin, and EA rep is still a win to me, so let's go with the flow.
For the most part, season 3 does a solid job. We get some solid beats relating to Ben's ambition and inferiority complex being Number 2. There's a bit of overacting on Justin's part, but hey, that's camp. (I think. I have no idea if I'm using that word right. Am I hip with the kids?)
I really, really loved Ben's moment with Sloane as she's getting married, because it highlights the core of this Ben's character: someone who desperately yearns for family but has forced himself to be all hard shell and soldier. In a way, he's the other end of Brelly Ben's spectrum. (Like forsterite and fayalite - all Mg on one end, Fe on the other.) How much of this Ben is family softness, how much of it is defense mechanism and lashing out?
And then of course - the thing I've been craving so badly - the in-universe comparison to Brelly Ben. This was done... underwhelmingly, if I'm honest. I liked that Ben had a moment of crisis where he couldn't live up to the Umbrellas' dead version of himself, and his moment with Klaus was nice, but in light of season 4 it becomes clear that we could have had more. I wanted him to have an entire arc about it - after all, it's a pretty significant aspect of your character to be "the worse version of yourself from another timeline." (Refer to @vyther16's Gongye Jiwu fic.) I feel like there's a lot of meta you could pull from that, about how your siblings who aren't your siblings look at you and see someone different. Someone you won't be. Someone you can't be, even if you tried, so why bother trying? And they really don't dig through that at all, which is disappointing.
The tentacle samurai fight is badass, though.
Season 4
Oh buddy oh boy. There's so much dumpster fire here, but I'll start with the season 3 loose ends and then move on to season 4's own problems.
1) Sloane. Luther picks Ben up from prison, so I thought they might have an interesting bonding moment over Sloane - after all, they're the two people who cared most about her. But actually no, apparently Ben doesn't give a shit about the one real sister he actually had left at the end of s3.
2) The subway thing. Wasn't he in Korea? My grasping-at-straws ass truly thought that might have been Brelly Ben in the reset timeline, and we'd get a Ben-Ben confrontation or a battle in the minds thing. But I guess that doesn't matter.
3) The Jennifer Incident. So we all know that everyone forgetting about an incident they explicitly reference is stupid, right? Especially because the name Jennifer only exists because they reference it in s3. Ben obsessively draws Jennifer, and then he doesn't recognize or know her? Kill me.
The continuation of his arc is also just sloppy, if it even exists. No more identity crisis about being the worse Ben, no more secret yearning for family or inferiority complex about being a good soldier. Suddenly his arc amounts to, uh, being an asshole and getting hit with sex pollen so powerful it ends the world.
And look, there is a world where Sparrow Ben spiking everyone with marigold could parallel with Brelly Ben's consent problems with Klaus. There is a world where Sparrow Ben dying because of Jennifer could echo Brelly Ben's death in a haunting, tragic, destined kind of way.
But, uh, none of that happens. Here we are, finally getting a Ben-centric season, and it's this. Being relegated to a plot device in your own season. Looking back and realizing that you were always the plot device, even in season 2. Carrying all that tragedy in your little ghost body and being treated like Chekov's waterlogged gun.
And I can't help but look back at season 1, Klaus trying so desperately to prove Ben's existence, and contrast it with the literal next season where a single throwaway line from Klaus sidelines Ben for a whole season. And then he dies. And he dies again.
Fucking hell.
It feels like I'm being made a fool of. Oh, you cared about this East Asian character? You wanted him to have narrative weight and character presence instead of being a plot device for the benefit of his White brothers? Idiot.
Because you'll still be here anyway, right? You'll grasp onto your crumbs for a cool EA character, you'll let us run a character through a trash compactor and keep pretending he's a good character because you latched onto this one East Asian protagonist and you don't want to admit that maybe you should have let go years before.
Perhaps one could assume that it was Five himself that created the infinite timelines because his power is specifically being able to travel through space and time and therefore this alone opens up the possibility of other timelines. And perhaps one could be led to the understandable conclusion that when Five time traveled forward for the first time he split the timeline into all possible multitudes and this was the catalyst for the apocalypse itself. But that would be too simple and direct of an explanation.
Let me get this straight. Reginald and Abigail are alien scientists (and also maybe robots?) whose origins are never explored or explained. Abigail creates both marigold and durango somehow, then dies. Reginald is so overcome with grief that he goes to earth and finds a portal to space and time and decides to make it his mission to go through this portal to formulate a new timeline in which Abigail is still alive. He releases marigold haphazardly on earth and it goes into the atmosphere and somehow at will infects specifically 43 women and impregnates them immediately (instead of giving them powers).
At this time, the introduction of marigold into the atmosphere splits the timeline into infinite timelines despite this time portal existing beforehand. After finding this random portal in the sky and not understanding it Reginald deduces that there is a specific set of rules in order to use this portal that involves the element his wife literally just created. Reginald searches for and acquires 7 of these powered children with marigold specifically because according to the rules he only needs 6 of them but wants one for extra just in case. We never hear about the other 36 powered children in the original timeline despite the reasonable assumption that they may have caused some trouble at some point.
Reginald prohibits Five from traveling through time most likely because he does not want him to fuck up his plan, but he is such a bad father that Five says fuck you and does it anyway. Reginald only has six kids now that Five is gone and moves on thinking everything will be fine. Meanwhile, the extremely dangerous element durango has been released somehow in a way that is never explained and infects literally only one child. It is never really made clear whether Reginald keeps this child, Jennifer, in a container or whether or not he is trying to obtain the container to kill her. Reginald kills Jennifer and Ben before they can end the world and now only has five children left so he just gives up on his dream I guess instead of trying to find any of the other special children to kidnap and indoctrinate. He runs the umbrella academy into the ground and gives them all irreparable trauma and then 10 years later decides to off himself either to entice his children to figure out the mystery or just because he failed at everything at life. But since he killed Jennifer he couldn’t have known Viktor might cause an apocalypse unless he just had a bad feeling since five time traveled and he traumatized his children and recognized this as a whoopsie.
In season 3 alternate Reginald has the same scheme and just got different children and did slightly better at it and when the umbrellas kill most of the sparrows he decides who cares 6 is enough and goes on his merry way to activate the portal in hotel oblivion. In season 4, Abigail is alive but has survivors guilt and decides she needs to see her creation through and end all the alternate timelines, seemingly having infinite knowledge of all the timelines even though she wasn’t there, so she tries to cause the apocalypse in increasingly confusing ways. Reginald and Abigail die unceremoniously without consequence for their actions and without any semblance of explanation for their origins.
did anyone on the TUA writing team consider that they could have improved their ending tenfold simply by giving us a granule of hope or allusion in the ending at all?
consider the post credits scene instead of being a glimpse of CGId marigolds instead being:
the ring of a bell on the park path, we pan up and see the little girl with the bicycle (hell, maybe it’s actually little Grace), similar outfit but now in color.
She stops and pouts. “You’re late.”
Klaus, from off screen: “Geez, always a critic.”
He walks up to the girl and ruffles her on the head. In the distance, we hear laughing. They walk off together, toward where it is implied their family is waiting for them.
