𝔡𝔢𝔢𝔯

I watched Nosferatu (2024) in Feb and immediately knew I'd have to recreate this scene with Will and Vecna at some point. 🧛

(The final panel is super rushed and I'm not happy with how it turned out, but overall I'm pleased I got this done in time for Halloween for once!)

the hints are more vague this time and. lex, being a semi-open bisexual from metropolis, goes "oh i know exactly what's going on here. this boy is gay and repressed in smallville" and he starts doing everything in his power to (extremely gently, if you force open a clam you kill it) get clark kent to come out.

he's got clark sitting there sweating, and eventually clark freaks out and confesses I'M AN ALIEN!!!!!

Also, it's not even 2003 yet, so it'd be absolutely terrifying to exist in Kansas. Unsure if I can reasonably write that. Unless I just make it crack.

Brian Kinney + perfect quotes (part 2)

Brian Kinney + perfect quotes (part 3)

Brian Kinney + perfect quotes (part 4)

Brian Kinney + perfect quotes (part 5)

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

“We used a numerical simulation of TRAPPIST-1 [a dwarf star with orbiting planets] to play a piano note every time a planet passes in front of the star (a ‘transit’) and a drum every time a faster inner planet overtakes its outer neighbour (a ‘conjunction’). To assign pitches, we simply scaled up the orbital frequencies by 212 million times to bring them into the human hearing range. The TRAPPIST-1 system is a resonant chain which means that the periods of the planets’ orbits are very close to whole number ratios (ex. 3:2, 4:3). This is exactly what makes two musical notes sound consonant when played together and as a result, TRAPPIST-1 creates a beautiful, but slightly twisted harmony. For the same reason, the transits and conjunctions occur in a steady, repeating pattern. The crackling sound heard towards the end is Kepler’s K2 lightcurve data of the star’s observed brightness sped up by many times.” (Data translated by SYSTEM Sounds)

- we first meet danielle and she tortures sayid — first island golf game!

- the hatch goes into lockdown and locke gets his leg trapped — jack v sawyer poker game (pissing contest)

- sayid finds and tortures ben (henry gale) — sawyer and hurley hunt down an annoying tree frog

preordering a game does *not* say “i trust this dev and they deserve my money to use to make the game that much better”

what it says is “hey boardroom, i will throw money at anything with this logo, even before i know what the game is like”

that boardroom sees that trend. they see theyve made their money back within 2 months of the game being announced… so the next time a lead comes to them and says “we would like to make this game, heres a budget and a timeline” the execs say “well last time we gave you 100 bucks and a full month, but your fans dont really /care/ what game you make, as long as it has our brand. so heres 75 bucks and 3 weeks. make it marketable”

this means more “pre-order exclusives” like cosmetics or different art, filler stuff that a side team can pump out in hours. every store, every platform will have their own version.

pre-orders do nothing but incentivise the shitty money-sponge practices we all hate in games. the point of a pre-order used to be to ensure you got your physical copy, but with most games being digital license anyway, that worry is unrealistic.

However when you wait for reviews, what you show that boardroom is “what we put out actually matters. if we make a shit game, we get shit sales. when we only give a team 2 weeks and a fiver we get shit reviews.”

like i DO like the jokes and memes, don't get me wrong, but like

there's SO MUCH to his character and he really does tie into goncharov's main themes

like. we're told early on the he was put into a mental institution as a young man due to his breakdown and inconsolable grief at losing his older brother giorno (who was his only living family and basically a father figure to him!)

wherein he was mistreated and was HEAVILY IMPLIED to be scheduled for a lobotomy before he escaped. (in fact, some interpretations say he actually received and survived the lobotomy, citing his manner of speaking and his lack of impulse control. but that's a whole separate discussion because i can honestly see both sides)

and then he turns to a life of crime because that's basically the only option he had left, after being deprived of so many opportunities in his youth (and the fear of being caught and involuntarily institutionalized again)

and him eventually leaning into the role of "violent madman" that the world thrust onto him for showing signs of mental illness in a way that was nonviolent, but was loud and inconvenient and impossible for those around him to simply push away.

and him taking his rage out at the same world that not only killed his brother but forced him to undergo years of psychiatric abuse and basically dehumanization

(like seriously, how do SO MANY people miss the connection between him using an icepick as a weapon and the concept of an ICEPICK lobotomy)

which. yknow. ties heavily into the film's theme of people being pushed to society's margins and forced into a life of crime, instead of given the help they desperately needed

and then like.

his fucking death scene. he tries to put a stop to the cycle of senseless violence, taking the fall for andrey, telling michailov that *he* was the one who killed luciana

him kneeling down and allowing michailov to bash him through the skull with his very own icepick. it's more lobotomy symbolism; dying from the very thing he spent his whole life running from. further driving home the film's themes of repeating cycles and futility

and then, to drive it all home, that sacrifice didn't even end up stopping the cycle of violence! because andrey viewed joe as basically an older brother (mirroring joe and giorno) and tried to get revenge on michailov for killing joe.

We don't know how old Robby was when his mother abandoned him but we can infer by the way he speaks of it that he was old enough to remember. He was either dumped at his grandmother's, or the state got involved when he was abandoned and he was placed with her.

The thing about childhood development is that we learn so much from our first interactions with our parents. There's a saying that you don't really become "people" until you turn five because that's when a child really begins to gain consciousness of the world around them. But in terms of SEL (Social Emotional Learning), those lessons begin very early.

If his mother couldn't be bothered to love him the way she should have, then Robby never learned that he should love himself. His grandmother, however, most likely taught him to love others, even through loving him. We've seen his capacity to love others. He's compassionate, empathetic, and deeply caring. It's like if you spent your early formative years with a parent who called you ugly and then as you aged you lived with someone who saw beauty, you would learn to see beauty as well. But not in yourself. It doesn't matter how often someone tells you that you're beautiful, you are unable to believe them, but as soon as someone tries to say that another person isn't, you can cut in and correct it. This is the same thing. Objectively, Robby knows love. Subjectively, it's foreign to him.

His SEL has been stunted by a mother who abandoned him. Judging by the percentages of mothers who abandon their children, chances are that while in her care, she neglected him as well.

All of this culminates into an adult with a capacity to love and care for other people, but not for himself.

If his mother rejected him, there must be something fundamentally wrong with him, right? At least that's what he is thinking.

Never mind that his father isn't mentioned at all. He's obviously not in the picture, otherwise Robby would have gone to him and not his grandmother. Now we have two parents that have rejected and abandoned him.

Keep in mind his empathy for Baby Jane Doe -- an infant also rejected by her mother.

Robby needs to feel useful in order to feel like he can be deserving of kindness and grace. Which could be another symptom of his mother abandoning him and/or the time he did spend with her prior. She may have demanded things from him. Potentially only showed kindness or gave praise when he was useful to her.

That's another lesson learned.

Unfortunately, by the time he gets to his grandmother, these things are ingrained. I've been using C-PTSD to describe a lot of his symptoms, and I've received a little pushback for that, but I'm holding my ground with this. Especially with the new information we have. This is childhood trauma, and it deeply shapes a person's mental health and their life experience.

Robby can't love himself but he knows what it is. He's begging without saying for someone to love him. He needs to feel useful to feel deserving. If he does decide to end it all, maybe if he leaves the ED a little better, then someone will look upon his portrait with the same love he looks upon Adamson's. If he can be useful, then maybe someone will finally love him. But Dana told him in 2x12 that he wasn't needed. She didn't mean it like that, but to a mentally ill person, it's going to be read in the worst way possible. And all Robby wanted was reassurance that he's useful and thus loved.

The thing is, he is loved. But he's been so damaged by his mother that he can't see it. Knowing how to love and knowing how to be loved are two completely separate things.