Why is it that people are so excited about Brand New Day making Peter miserable when everyone who has read recent comics can tell you how exhausting it is to see Peter always miserable?
Oh, I've been arguing in those trenches since the actual Brand New Day comics were released. Earlier, in fact, going back to Joe Quesada's logic for having Peter sell his marriage to the devil in the first place.
Peter Parker is the kind of character who attracts a large "He's just like me for real" following among lonely, miserable people. At his most basic, he's an economically unsuccessful white tech bro who struggles to pay rent and is unlucky in love. So he's very relatable to economically unsuccessful white tech bros who struggle to pay rent and are unlucky in love.
The arguments way back when for why BND was a good thing amounted to, "If Peter has a steady romance, how am I supposed to relate to him when I'LL NEVER have a steady romance!? If he has a successful career, how am I supposed to relate to him when I'LL NEVER have a successful career!? If he has kids, how am I supposed to relate to him when I'LL NEVER have kids!?" Etc. etc.
There is a not-insignificant portion of the Spider-fandom that likes Peter because he's a loser, and they feel like losers too. If Peter becomes a winner, he stops being their guy. He's supposed to stay miserable because they're miserable and they want a hero who represents that misery.
Which is still somehow better than Joey Q's actual motive, which is that Spider-Man shouldn't be allowed to grow up. He should just stay immortally young forever, his inexperienced youth frozen and sealed permanent into him inside the never-changing sliding timescale.
I still remember him making a snippy comment about "SOME PEOPLE just want Spider-Man to GROW OLD AND DIE!!!" when questioned on this. Joey Q. was very much not of the opinion that heroes should age with their audience. Stan Lee was, and that was the "mistake" Joey Q sought to correct.
You know, coming back to this, I do think it's interesting how I've seen people praise Jessica Jones' character development in Born Again in part because she married Luke Cage and had a kid, whereas people are excited for Peter Parker to be miserable and alone in Brand New Day.
I'm not necessarily saying Jessica letting go of her trauma and finally finding love and a new family is necessarily a bad thing. But it is unusual how people like Jessica pulling herself out of her shitty life while wanting Peter stuck in his.
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What do you think of candy-themed worlds? I dunno if it's just me, but I actually find them kind of unnerving. Like, Sugar Rush in Wreck-It-Ralph is a really unsettling place to be, even before you learn exactly who's in charge of it.
It depends on how creative they are. I really liked Sugar Rush due to its commitment to the bit, personally.
I mean, it's weird when there are living organisms made of food. But if you stop and think about it, isn't all food made of living organisms anyway?
Really, what unnerves me about Sugar Rush is how both artificial and alive it feels at the same time.
Like, the day/night cycle there confuses me. Why is there a sun? Why does it make this candy stuff look more alive? Candy is man-made, so the prospect of it having chlorophil or whatever plants use to feed off the sun's rays seems weird to me. It's also so child-like until it isn't?
God, I sound like a total weirdo here thinking about all this, don't I?
All Legend of Zelda games actually take place within a span of about ten or so years. It's the same Link and Zelda in every game. At the end of each game, Link goes into witness protection and changes where he lives. Zelda has to pretend not to know him.
Every Ganon is a different person. "Ganon" is actually the Hylian word for "Nemesis" and gets applied to many different foes who menace Hyrule across this ten-year period. Any seeming connection between the Ganons is purely coincidental.
When I become a Star Wars character, I'm going to make sure my first appearance clearly shows me being killed at the end of the film at the ripe old age of 97.
That way all of my subsequent appearances have to be prequels where, no matter what shit I pull, I'm guaranteed to always ride off into the sunset cackling "Can't kill me! I DIE IN A DIFFERENT MOVIE!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
97 isn't exactly that old if you're an alien though. If you end up the same species as Grogu and Yoda, you'd have literally centuries of your life cut short.
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When I become a Star Wars character, I'm going to make sure my first appearance clearly shows me being killed at the end of the film at the ripe old age of 97.
That way all of my subsequent appearances have to be prequels where, no matter what shit I pull, I'm guaranteed to always ride off into the sunset cackling "Can't kill me! I DIE IN A DIFFERENT MOVIE!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
When I become a Star Wars character, I'm going to make sure my first appearance clearly shows me being killed at the end of the film at the ripe old age of 97.
That way all of my subsequent appearances have to be prequels where, no matter what shit I pull, I'm guaranteed to always ride off into the sunset cackling "Can't kill me! I DIE IN A DIFFERENT MOVIE!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
This episode doesn't advance the story much because it wants to take time for character pieces. There are two major character pieces here, one for the Fisks and one for Matt.
It's a little hit-or-miss. Its heart is in the right place, I think, but it doesn't quite understand what it's trying to talk about.
The framing of this episode surrounds Vanessa Fisk's hospitalization after taking that shrapnel to the head last episode.
Episode 4 left Vanessa in critical condition, the question hanging uncertainly in the air as to whether she'll be saved or not. So it's only natural that we begin episode 5 by taking her to the hospital.
Her condition allows the show to delve into the drama between Wilson and Vanessa, which is mainly handled by revisiting this painting, which has played a significant role over the course of their marriage.
This painting serves as the vehicle for Vanessa's entire journey through this episode.
As I've mentioned before, I've never been particularly invested in the Fisks' marriage, and Vanessa's a hard character to read due to her knack for stone-faced stoicism. It feels like there are a million different things going on behind her eyes that she never lets anyone catch so much as a glimpse of.
But I guess we'll never know what those are, because this is the end for her.
We get to see her argue with the art gallery's curator about the artistic merits of this painting.
The curator doesn't want to display it but Vanessa disagrees. I believe the painting, in this case, serves as a metaphor for Wilson. The idea behind their disagreement here is that Vanessa has an eye for finding beauty in things that others may not.
She sees something here in this painting that the curator doesn't, just as she sees something in Wilson that most wouldn't.
But that's about as deep as the character study on Vanessa goes. The rest of it is just Wilson and Vanessa reminiscing about the day Vanessa hung this painting and met Wilson at her gallery, which we already know about.
Though we learn little about Vanessa that can be considered new, there's a lot of emotional beats here to let you feel how much they love each other. Their entire trajectory through this episode is setting up how mad Wilson will be when she dies at its end.
Pre-emptively grieving the death of Wilson's Wife through the parts of her that most pertain to him.
I need to reiterate that the journey to Vanessa's death is so fucking weird. Like. Okay.
Bullseye: You think she's dead?
Daredevil: I don't know. Come on.
Bullseye: If she is, it all balances. Your friend, Fisk's wife. Scales settled. And I'm ready for judgment.
So.
I think we need to talk about women in refrigerators for a moment. There's a lot of debate out there for what constitutes a "fridging", because it's really more of a critical vibe than a clearly-defined literary mechanism.
But one thing I've always considered when thinking about the concept is how much a female character's death is about her, versus the extent to which it is simply a stepping stone in a male character's story.
And for Vanessa, that's... weirdly complicated in a way that it didn't really need to be.
Vanessa got Bullseye out of prison, used him to kill Foggy, then abandoned him to incarceration. It's easy to paint a line from there to this moment, where Bullseye kills Vanessa for revenge. Especially since he's repentful for killing Foggy and wants to kill someone about it to redeem himself, targeting Vanessa makes so much sense.
Instead, episode 4 made a point to have Bullseye insist that his beef is actually with Wilson. He's not after Vanessa at all, in fact! He's trying to make amends for killign Foggy, to balance the cosmic scales by "doing one good deed", which is to kill Wilson because he's such a bad guy.
It's not about Vanessa at all, the show insists.
She's only dead now because she happened to be standing next to Wilson when Bullseye tried to kill him, and got caught in the crossfire.
Okay, but why, though? If "And then Bullseye killed Vanessa" was where you were going with this, why not just let Bullseye carry out his vendetta against Vanessa? Why are we taking the narrative impetus in Vanessa's death away from her and threading it through Wilson instead of just letting Vanessa reap what she's sown?
Why did we do this? Why bend over backwards to make it about him? What a weird choice.
...
But also, like. Why did we do this at all? Like. The show is killing off Vanessa to make Wilson mad. They specifically removed the way that her death would be about her, so now it's just about enraging Wilson.
Why, though?
The immediate and obvious consequence is that WIlson is going to be really mad. But Wilson is always really mad. All the time. In every scene. He is defined by being really mad about everything. It's his only emotion outside of the scenes he shares with Vanessa. He's a raging manbaby who screams and hits things; That is the totality of his character.
I don't know what difference a 15% increase in Wilson's day-to-day state of homicidal fury is really going to make in the show. Maybe it will motivate a 25% increase in abusing his power to crack down with his private military, beyond the abuse of power and private military crackdown he was already performing.
I really don't see what could possibly come from this that wouldn't have happened anyway. Vanessa is dead so that a constantly angry man can be angry about it for a little while until he finds something else to be angry about, I guess.
Weird choice, show.
But. Okay. That's just one of the three plots running through this episode. The really chonky bit that the show wants to talk about is Daredevil and Bullseye, and Matt's flashback to his experiences with Foggy.
In the flashback, Matt and Foggy take on a client who turns out to be an old acquaintance of Foggy's. Lionel here's gotten himself in a mess of trouble. He's looking at 10-to-12 years in prison for a laundry list of crimes.
As his representation, Matt and Foggy feel his best option is to avoid trial and instead plea bargain down to 5-6 years.
There's just one problem.
Lionel's in with Fisk's crew, and Fisk's looking to silence him. He won't survive a night in prison.
This provokes an argument between Matt and Foggy on the merits of representing a gulity man. Foggy finds a clerical error on a warrant that could be used to get Lionel off on technicality.
The warrant says 536 West 49th Street but his actual place of residence is 536 1/2 West 49th Street. If they use this, they can invalidate all evidence from his arrest as "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree", a legal term referring to evidence that cannot be submitted to court because it was obtained illegally.
I should note that I'm not a lawyer but I don't think this would actually work. The legal system is not a game of technicality Gotchas. It's very hard to go, "Ha-ha, you didn't cross a 't' so that means my client is innocent!"
Fruit of the Poisonous Tree has a fairly broad exception in its standards called "Inevitable Discovery". If the prosecution can reasonably argue that they would have obtained the evidence anyway even had the illegal search not been carried out, then it's no longer Fruit of the Poisonous Tree and can be submitted anyway.
So the obvious prosecutorial counterargument here is that if they discovered the clerical error, they'd have just reprinted the warrant with the error fixed and still searched the building anyway. They still hit the place they meant to hit and got the guy they meant to get, so what does a typo matter?
But sure. Within the logic of the show, Foggy just made a huge discovery that can crack this case wide open and secure a full acquittal of all charges. The question is... Should he?
This is a long scene but their discussion is so, so important. It's basically what Matt's portion of the episode revolves around.
Matt: Oh come on, Foggy. It's not like he deserves to walk.
Foggy: I don't recall the word "deserve" coming up in law school.
Matt: He's in bed with the mob, he's selling drugs, he's poisoning the neighborhood!
Foggy: Yeah, but--
Matt: But what!? He was also a raging prick to you when you were kids! You want to spring the guy who calls you Foggy the Fembot?
Foggy: Heh, no, I don't. But Matt, we are his attorneys.
Matt: We're... associates.
Foggy: Don't get technical.
...
Foggy: Lionel, he had a hard life, Matt.
Matt: (sarcastic) Aww, cue the violin.
Foggy: His dad, he was not a good guy. And his mom, Suzanne, she drank. A lot. She died when we were in eighth grade. Cirrhosis. Liver failure.
Matt: (frustrated sigh)
Foggy: He never had a chance!
Matt: His brother did, though. What was his name? Connor?
Foggy: Connor was younger. Lionel took the brunt of it. I didn't like him--
Matt: --and you want to let him out to continue to do horrendous things to a whole bunch of new people.
Foggy: I want to do the right thing.
Matt: I don't know, Foggy. I don't know. You sell drugs, you're trafficking firearms, you get caught. I'm sorry. There are consequences.
Foggy: His crew, whoever he was working with, they're going to kill him when he's inside.
Matt: Yeah, that might be the definition of consequences.
Foggy: But does the punishment fit the crime?
Matt: Crimes past, present, or future?
Foggy: So you think we should ignore it?
Matt: Ignore what?
Foggy: It's our job to represent our clients to the best of our abilities. Suppressing evidence--
Matt: Objection! "Suppressing" is questionable, one might even say inflammatory phrasing in this particular instance, Counselor.
Foggy: Aren't you supposed to be the Catholic one here?
Matt: Oh, come on! Alright so, fine, you want to go with guilt now?
Foggy: How about mercy? There's got to be something about that in the Bible. Second chances? Redemption? All I know is, if he goes to jail, he dies.
Matt: And all I know is, that might not be our problem.
Foggy: Unfortunately, it is now.
And it's also where we see some of the ways the show struggles to actually agree with the high-minded ideals its hero espouses. In this case, Foggy rather than Matt.
Matt is cast in the role of the cynical antagonist. Foggy is positioned as the idealist here, arguing with Matt about whether or not they have a duty to represent their client's interest to the best of their ability.
This argument is wild. Matt is meant to be flawed here; It's setting the stage for the way he engages with the wounded Bullseye, now reliant on Daredevil to get him to safety. The burning question of the episode is why not just leave Bullseye to die?
Matt doesn't owe Bullseye anything. He hates this man. Bullseye killed his best friend. Bullseye got himself shot trying to murder Wilson. Matt would be well within his rights to let Bullseye bleed out or be taken by the AVTF. There is no good reason to help him.
Even Bullseye thinks Matt's crazy for doing this.
But the show draws a subtle parallel between Lionel and Bullseye. There's a really interesting idea here.
Unfortunately, that idea gets buried in the way Matt steamrolls over Foggy in the scene where Foggy's thematically supposed to be right. Foggy presents the idea that an attorney's foremost duty is to represent the interests of their client, whether innocent or guilty. Which. Like.
Is correct.
Foggy is correct. But the show is so copagandic that it struggles to come up with a compelling reason for why Foggy would be right.
And it's frankly wild that Matt made it this far as an attorney with a mindset like his. He just sounds like a cop throughout this argument. What did he think his job was?
The role of a defense attorney is to be the one person the accused has in their corner representing their interests even when no one else well. Everybody has a right to fair representation in court. That's how due process works, and due process is the foundation of criminal justice.
Even when the accused is guilty, even when they're convicted, it's an attorney's duty to represent their human rights. To make sure they're being treated humanely and facing a punishment that's fair.
It's not because "that's the job". It's because universal human rights are universal human rights, regardless of what you're accused of. Regardless of what you're convicted of. Every person deserves equal access to justice. Even the condemned. If you can't believe in that, then go be a cop because you don't belong in defense law.
But it all falls flat because they're talking about getting a gun smuggler off on a technicality. Cop shows love the idea that lawyers just walk around getting guilty people off on technicalities, when in real life those "technicalities" are violations of Constitutional Rights for the accused, who is legally innocent until proven guilty.
It's not so much, "Haha, the cops found my drug running business but because they misspelled my name, I get off scot free!"
It's more, "The warrant was supposed to be for a house two doors down from mine but they kicked in my door instead. Then, after arresting me even though I wasn't the guy they were looking for, all the drugs the cops were looking for miraculously appeared in my living room even though they had the wrong person and house!" Those are the kinds of "technicalities" that lead people to walking free.
But you wouldn't know that from the way cop shows talk about it, and Born Again is very much written from the copaganda mindset.
So Foggy loses the argument and instead has to resort to guilt-tripping Matt about his Catholicism. Which, given that Matt last episode threatened a priest into revealing information from a private confession between man and God, I'm not even sure he believes in that very much either.
Nonetheless, as weird as it is that Matt would believe that the wicked must be scoured from this earth as a defense attorney, this conflict exists to cast him in the wrong and contrast with his actions in the present. Foggy ultimately wins out, not only getting Lionel out of prison but also, uh....
Pilfering his and Matt's coffers that they were going to use to open their law firm, so he can give Lionel money to start over.
Which does seem a bit above and beyond the call of legal representation. But Foggy's hoping for the best. He gives Lionel the chance to get out of here before Buck comes gunning for him, hoping Lionel will be able to start a new life over somewhere else.
Again, the show understands the basic premise that "A lawyer advocates for his client's interest," but I'm not sure it really understands why. The message here seems to be about having faith in people's ability to change.
Which is a good thing to have but isn't really what defense law is about either. It's not about punishing or redeeming the guilty. It's about upholding the universal human rights that are guaranteed to everyone.
The job of an attorney isn't to see that a drug dealer gets clean and finds work and reforms his place in society. The job of an attorney is to make sure that the drug dealer has a fair chance to make his case, receives a fair sentence if convicted, and doesn't get beaten and starved by prison guards once he enters the system.
Neither punishment nor rehabilitation is the role of defense law. But the show is centering the argument of punitive justice versus restorative justice around the lawyers of a man who, and I cannot stress this enough, has not been convicted of anything. And thanks to the actions of his lawyer, never will be.
But as I said, this is the lens through which we're meant to understand Matt helping Bullseye.
Or, at least, it should be? But Matt actually proposes an alternative explanation, which is just that he feels guilty for pushing Bullseye off a roof in the series premiere. Helping Bullseye is his penance to wash clean the sin of trying to kill Bullseye.
That's what he says, anyways. But the shadow of Foggy and Lionel hangs over his actions all the same.
As it should. If the show actually understood defense law better, you could see the parallel it desperately wants to have at play here. That Daredevil is acting as Bullseye's counsel now. The one person that even a guilty person will always have in their corner.
Because everyone, even Bullseye, is deserving of their basic human rights. And who else is going to see to Bullseye's?
Bullseye in the present offers argument against Foggy's efforts to help Lionel, and it's probably the best scene in the episode.
Bullseye: We're all doing the same thing here. Acting something out. Scratching some kind of itch. But the worst part is when you think you've got it beat. You think, "Ahh... I outran it." Then you turn the corner, BAM, there it is staring you right in the face. Only it's worse this time. And you know it was always going to be there.
On the topic of rehabilitating people, Bullseye takes an interesting stance. His position is that it's ultimately fruitless because the bill always comes due in the end. The consequences for your actions are always waiting for you out there, no matter how hard you try to get away from them.
It's an incredibly cynical and hopelessly fatalistic way to look at things. But it also makes sense as the perspective of someone trying to convince Matt to save himself and leave him to die.
It's also aggravating because. Like. Yeah, that's why Vanessa's death should have been about Bullseye's revenge. And not because she was standing too close to Wilson. This is the perfect argument to make after Bullseye killed Vanessa on purpose, in the episode that is about the medical fight to keep Vanessa alive.
The shadow of his words should hang over Vanessa like the shroud of death here, but it doesn't. Because she's presented as collateral damage, rather than a murderer reaping what she's sown.
All the same, Bullseye's cynicism slams into Foggy's altruism, battling it out in Matt's heart. Resulting in a kinda goofy resolution where Bullseye wins and Matt says, "I can't save you."
But then he remembers Foggy giving Lionel the money. Suddenly, because Foggy did that, Matt turns around and says, "I must save you!"
Because he remembers Foggy saying that they should do this for "not just our future", and urging him to value mercy.
While I have my beefs with how the show handles the duty of a defense attorney, I do think it's on the right track with its proclamations of mercy. This is the closest it gets to understanding the role of the attorney as advocate for both the accused and the condemned.
He's going to have a hell of a time explaining this to Karen, however.
I think argument can be made as to whether Matt's or Vanessa's story can be considered the A-Plot but there's also a C-Plot as well.
Daniel's trying to fend off the press while Vanessa's in the hospital. I particularly like the angry response he gives a reporter, "Is she dead? What kind of sick fucking question is that?"
Vanessa is an important political figure. Whether she lives or dies is breaking news.
The way the press swarm the hospital looking for their scoop is ghoulish, but in a very real way that speaks to the nature of the press. Under capitalism, this is what the press are.
Every news corporation is a business, and breaking stories are the products they exist to sell. Getting ahead of the competition is good for business, and falling behind the competition is bad. Under those circumstances, unethical behavior is easy to justify if it pays off.
When reporters are salespeople pushing product, there's no room in the business model for human dignity.
Daniel's plot pertains to his developing bromance with Buck. Daniel thinks that BB leaked the hospital to the press. So when Buck asks him to come get hot dogs with him, there's a lot of tension around the invitation.
Daniel and Buck bonded over Daniel getting Buck to try New York hot dogs before, so it's a sweet moment. But also one thick with tension.
Because we know that Buck is Fisk's triggerman. If Fisk decides that Daniel needs to go, Buck's probably going to be the one who does the deed. And it's easy to imagine how he'd do it exactly like this.
Get hot dogs. Drive out to a secluded area. Eat the hot dogs and have a bit of casual conversation. Circle around Daniel while he's enjoying his last meal. And then put two in the back of his head.
We can easily imagine that. And so can Daniel. He's under no illusions about how dangerous this is for him.
Honestly, I think Buck was testing Daniel here. There's a moment where Buck goes into a lumber shop to get a power saw and a shovel, and he leaves Daniel to mind the car.
The supplies are, of course, to bury a body.
Just not Daniel's. It's the First Mate that they're burying.
But Buck plays things very cool. He doesn't answer Daniel's questions and gives only short, curt instructions. It's easy to imagine how Daniel might think he's being taken to his own execution, and Buck does little to avoid giving that impression.
So I think this was a test of loyalty. If Daniel had tried to run, if he had shown Buck that kind of proof of a guilty conscience, he would have been a dead man.
Their C-Plot is relatively minor compared to Vanessa's and Matt's plots. Still, it's nice to see Buck and Daniel hanging out some more.
So, I recall you saying you didn't watch Season 3 of the original Daredevil, so I thought I'd provide you with some context of what happened there that might help you understand why Bullseye hates Wilson Fisk just as much as he hates Vanessa. This might be a bit of a long post though, so fair warning.
During the original show, Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter was an FBI agent who, while a ruthless killer and exceptional marksman, had issues with apathy, lack of morals and being an actual good person. Dex knew that he had issues and was doing his best to try to deal with his demons, getting therapy as a kid, creating a rigid structure he doesn't deviate from so things don't go wrong, and listens to his therapist's old tapes to calm himself during moments of duress. However, he still struggles with his inner demons and can't really act on his murderous impulses.
However, Dex's biggest weakness is that he needs a "North Star" in his life to guide his life in a good direction, because he doesn't know how to live life if he doesn't. After his first therapist dies, Dex starts stalking a woman named Julie Barnes and trying to know everything about her to make her his "North Star" in a twisted and fucked-up sort of way.
Around this time, Dex is assigned to watch over Wilson Fisk when he's moved from his prison cell to a penthouse suite in New York, where he begins his second rise to power and plots to eliminate Matt, Karen and Foggy as well as anyone else who wronged him in the past or stands in his way in the present. He becomes interested in Dex and looks into his past and sees him ripe for emotional manipulation. Fisk praises Dex for his heroism (that being when Dex murdered several members of an Albanian crime syndicate who ambushed a convoy transporting Fisk from prison), and encourages him to embrace his psychopathic tendencies. Fisk also arranges to have Julie killed and disposed of so that Dex is reliant entirely on him for emotional support and approval (especially when he makes it seem like Julie rejected him for good after trying to make things better with her after admitting to his stalking of her and other issues).
Under Fisk's orders, Dex then spends the rest of the season impersonating Daredevil and acting as Fisk's personal hitman, both to kill Fisk's rivals and to discredit Daredevil as a whole. Dex more-or-less is enjoying being the worst version of himself. It's only when Fisk starts keeping Dex at an arm's length after he fails to kill Karen on Fisk's orders (after Fisk found out that Karen was responsible for killing Wesley), and later learns from Matt that Fisk killed Julie. At that point, he goes berserk and tries to kill Fisk and Vanessa in the finale out of revenge, before Fisk (briefly) breaks his spine and he's sent to the hospital/mental facility Vanessa finds him in during Born Again's first season.
So yeah, between what happened before and how Vanessa used him to kill Foggy, Bullseye does have a lot of personal reasons to want to kill both or either one of the Fisks. He claims he's doing it to "balance the scales", and given how fucked up things are inside his head, he could very well believe it at this point. But the reason Dex wants to hurt/murder Fisk goes way back.
I do wonder about Bubble. Him being gone from the end credits alongside Caine imply his deletion took Bubble out too. But if you look at the coding scene, you can see that Chef Bubble is the lastly added running program in Caines folder, which might imply that every time Bubble got popped Caine actually deleted him. Which might imply Bubble can simply come back from deletion.
It's entirely possible that Bubble's gone too, yeah. In fact, whether or not Bubble is the Blue Core like I think he is, the answer to that question doesn't answer whether or not Bubble's gone.
Bubble can be the Blue Core and still be taken out by Caine's deletion considering how they're interwoven. We see both the Red and Blue Cores in Caine's eyes when he's glitching out. The Blue Core is slaved to the Red Core.
Nuking the Red Core might set the Blue Core free. Or it might take the Blue Core with it.
And that's all if Bubble even is the Blue Core. He might just be another NPC Caine wrote. One that gives voice to Caine's personal doubts and fears.
There's really no way to know until episode 9 comes out.
For what it's worth, Gooseworx has said on her own Tumblr account that Bubble was deleted alongside Caine. So unless she's trolling and/or lying to us pretty sure Bubble's gone for good.
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So, now that you're into the Amazing Digital Circus, I gotta know: which episode have you enjoyed the most so far?
Well, episode 8 notwithstanding since it's hard to compete with what is essentially "Climactic finale, Part 1", I'd say 5. We got a lot of good character beats there, and it was nice to see the cast really open up in a way they hadn't gotten the chance to prior to it.
Plus the evil softball crew were hilarious.
And the fact that they played softball instead of baseball! I rarely get to see fictional characters play softball.
Softball is generally considered "baseball for girls"; a more delicate girly counterpart for women. With all the same disparagement intended as when people sneer about cheerleading even though it's actually a tremendously difficult athletic activity.
Even the name "softball" implies a much gentler game, even though getting hit by a softball isn't really any different than a baseball. At least they didn't settle on "kitten baseball", another name that got floated around.
But the Digital Circus crew consists of 3 women, 1 enby, and 2 men, and it was Ragatha's idea based on her own history of playing softball. So they got to play softball! I just thought that was neat.
I did mention before that from a "Ragatha's Day in the Limelight episode" that I felt "Untitled" kinda failed to do what it set out to do. But I can't deny that the episode overall is pretty fun, and has some nice foreshadowing in it.
Also, that "Intermission Time" song will never not be stuck in my head.
For some reason, I'm imagining this happening in Majora's Mask, where you'd be the one guy who slept through the moon nearly falling on Termina for three straight days, only to finally wake up on the fourth day when all the danger's over and wonder why everyone's gathered in the town square.
As a newcomer who just joined the Digital Circus fandom and missed all of the discourse, this has probably already been proposed. But here's my pet theory for the Digital Circus cast.
I don't think there are any humans trapped in this simulation.'
I think the headset scanned the brains of people who put it on and constructed digital avatars from their memories and personalities and ideas. But I think those avatars exist within the circus independently of the humans that were scanned.
So. Like. The real Pomni probably put on the headset and nothing happened, and then she took it off and went, 'Huh. Weird." Then went about her life.
But when she did that, a digital homonculus of her memories and personality was loaded into the program.
I think that's why there isn't really a way for them to leave the digital environment. It's not a place you can enter or leave, any more than a Sim could leave their game.
That's my wild, probably incorrect theory, anyways!
You'd be surprised how many people have reached the same conclusion you have. It's so widespread that when I was visiting friends upstate, they outright called it the "SOMA theory". In my experience, it feels a lot like the Black Mirror episode "USS Callister", which also had to do with digital recreations of real people being forced to go on adventures on the whim of an abusive authority figure in his own digital world he made.
While I'm not necessarily subscribed to the theory, it would make sense overall. After all, how would all these real-life people keep disappearing into the Digital Circus without anybody noticing and shutting the program down? Especially somone as wealthy and (most likely) connected as Ragatha?
Wonder Man season 2 should reveal that Doorman's being hunted by Damage Control but remains at large. Not because they can't find him, mind you.
Heyerdahl: Why haven't we brought this guy in already? He is famously a dangerous enhanced individual.
Cleary: We have, sir. Many times.
Heyerdahl: And?
Cleary: And every prison cell we've tried to put him in has had the same fatal flaw in its design.
Heyerdahl: What's that?
Cleary: It's made of walls.
Fun idea, but unfortunately the end of Doorman's episode reveals that he's already under observation by Damage Control, which all but states that he's imprisoned by them already...
After hearing all the buzz around the latest episode, I finally watched Amazing Digital Circus. It's pretty neat. Ragatha became a fast fave, though I do think there were some missteps in her arc. I'm also curious about Jax.
Specifically, Ragatha's flaw is presented as toxic positivity. She's trying too hard to be upbeat and positive all the time, to the detriment of both herself and everyone around her.
But I don't feel like we really get to see that prior to her being confronted about it. She didn't strike me as overbearingly nice prior to being confronted about it; She just seemed like she was trying to make the best of a bad situation and keep everyone's spirits high.
It doesn't feel like we really got a good opportunity to examine the way trying to stay positive despite everything and refusing to acknowledge an ugly reality can be harmful. Everyone just dogged on her for being too nice, and then she poured out her feelings to Kinger, and then she went on being nice.
So that bothered me. But she's still a lot of fun and she does get a good bit of screentime so I can forgive it. Even if finding out that she's the longest-running member of this crew apart from Kinger only cemented my opinion that Ragatha did nothing wrong, and has just been trying to help the newer arrivals keep their morale up.
She is being a responsible senpai.
And then there's Jax. Jax is an asshole with hidden depths mostly pertaining to his personal traumas, though he keeps his mouth shut about what those traumas are. We've gotten a good glimpse of it through his behavior and body language; He was friends with Kaufmo and the froggy person, both of whom Abstracted and left him alone.
So Jax is hurtling and he's scared to get close to anyone he might just lose someday. That much is strongly implied.
But Jax also seems to be overly concerned with gender roles. He's the only one in the group who talks about it, describing himself as "peak male performance" and "the pinnacle of masculinity", or referring to the others as "ladies", or describing himself and Pomni as a "straight couple".
Setting aside that Zooble is a walking metaphor for non-binary, Gender seems to be on Jax's mind moreso than the others.
And I wonder if that's where some of his hostility is coming from? With Kaufmo gone, Jax is the only man in the group. Other than Kinger, who's not exactly in a condition to be Jax's buddy, and Caine, the AI controlling their lives. Jax's social options are down to Pomni, Gangle, Ragatha, and Zooble. Three women. And Zooble.
Jax is now a rooster in a henhouse, and I can't help but wonder if part of the reason he makes such an ass of himself is that he feels emasculated. As if his only options at this point are to either keep to himself or become "one of the gals".
A feeling that was not dissuaded when Zooble, Gangle, Ragatha, and Kingle all voted to literally emasculate him in retaliation for his bullshit.
A rare middle finger from Ragatha demonstrating that she is not, in fact, delusionally nice. She is entirely capable of flipping someone off. She just doesn't see how doing so would be helpful most of the time. That's not really a character flaw! But I digress.
Jax plays the troublemaker because he doesn't want anyone getting too close, but there's also no indication that this is a new development with him. He was already like this from the start; We have never known a Jax who wasn't a dick. And no one's said anything about Jax recently changing; Ragatha has mentioned only that she blames herself for his behavior, considering his antisocial personality a failing on her part.
So it's difficult to entirely contribute Kaufmo and frog person's Abstractions as being the motivating cause of Jax's behavior. It feels like both were true; That before Kaufmo and frog person Abstracted, Jax was Besties with them and picked on the girls and Zooble.
It feels like his fear of losing someone again motivates his behavior towards Pomni in the later episodes. The way he tries to keep her at arm's length and doesn't want her getting too close. But I feel like his behavior towards Gangle, Ragatha, and Zooble (as well as Pomni in the early episodes, like when he threw her out of a moving vehicle) is coming from somewhere else.
A part of him that just isn't comfortable being accepted into a social group of women and Zooble, and instead feels the need to lash out?
Yeah, I have issues with how the show handles Ragatha too. She's honestly my least favorite character of the Players because she's kind of...boring. I get that she's supposed to be a nice character who gets misconstrued as being facetious, but we barely get any real introspection into her, so she doesn't really grow or change compared to everyone else. And it's not her fault by any means. The show just seems actively disinterested in focusing on her compared to the other players.
Like, prior to "Beach Episode", all of the characters had an episode to focus on them and their hidden depths. The Pilot and Candy Carrier Chaos focused on Pomni and her getting used to the Circus. The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor focused on Kinger struggling with his mental faculties and Zooble's body dysmorphia, Fast-Food Masquerade focused on Gangle and how relying on her comedy/manic mask to be social isn't necessarily a good thing, and They All Get Guns focused on Jax developing his budding friendship with Pomni...until he tries to stop it dead in its tracks out of fear and insecurity.
Ragatha's day in the limelight is supposed to be Untitled...but that episode's status as a "lightning-round adventure" event leaves very little room for individualization amongst the cast, much less Ragatha herself. The most we get is that she exposition dumps about her past regarding her wealthy farm upbringing and her abusive mother during her time at the bar (and while high on Stupid Sauce in the prior episode to a lesser extent), and...that's it. Even the "Good Ol' Softball" adventure that Ragatha picked doesn't really center on her specifically, in lieu of giving us wacky antics with the Evil Big Tops and Jax in his maid outfit.
Honestly, Ragatha kinda feels like the Cyclops to Jax's Wolverine. She has potential to develop and become a really interesting well-rounded person within a quirky cast of characters. But because the show is so focused on everyone else (especially Jax), she feels like an afterthought in the overall narrative. It's not like she flat-out sucks or anything, it's just that the story doesn't give her much of a chance to expand herself as much as everyone else.
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My conspiracy theory is that I think the wealthy are pushing AI so hard despite how much money it's losing because they're more interested in its potential for social engineering than profiteering.
Their plan, as I see it, is to make AI into the new pastors. The new town criers. The sources of information around whom everybody congregates.
They want people to stop talking to each other and talk to Grok. To stop educating themselves and learn from Grok. They want ownership of the knowledge in your brain.
The benefits of this are many. If Grok tells you what to think and believe, then whoever controls Grok controls you.
"Hey Grok, are business leaders mistreating the working class?" The business leader who owns Grok says no! Business leaders have been more than fair with the working class. Be sure to report any rabble-rousers whispering about unions to your local manager.
"Hey Grok? Are we committing a genocide in the foreign war?" The political leaders who own Grok say no! What a thing to even suggest! In fact, the foreign war ended three months ago, and everyone's doing fine. Don't even spare another second of worry about it.
"Hey, Grok? What can be done to help the homeless?" The capitalists who own Grok say nothing! People are homeless because they made bad choices. This is their divine karmic punishment for the slovenly lives they led. You shouldn't waste any of your empathy on the sinful and the wicked. You just keep on being a good person.
Despite their claims to the contrary, I think the owners of this country despise the internet and everything it stands for. Every TV program they've bought, every celebrity they've bribed, every newspaper story they've caught and killed, every library they've cut funding for in their desperation to control the information they get...it's all undermined when someone can just Google it and find the truth without a paywall. Or watch a YouTube video that educates them on how badly they're getting fucked by the system.
So the owners' solution was to turn the Internet into nothing more than a billboard. One giant billboard that's partially filled with ads for products nobody wants, and the other half defaced with hate speech graffiti. But it's not enough. Internet users know how to deal with their bullshit. So they have to come up with something new that tricks them into giving away their autonomy. So their best bet was to create their own shitty version of J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man and hope that enough stupid people take the bait and give them money to use it.
And lo and behold, it actually has. As it turns out, people are either genuinely stupid enough to think that LLM's have sentience and want to enact their cyber-romance fanfic dreams, or are adopting it out of fear of being humiliated by not getting on the newest hype train and watching it take off without them. And that basic instinct without self-reflection is resulting in mass control over knowledge that newspaper tycoons in the 20th century could only dream of.
Picture this: Spider-Man and the Punisher in the same movie.
Get Daredevil in there too for the full trio.
Spider-Man and Daredevil both have their own dynamics with the Punisher, and it gets really interesting when all three of them are together. Because Daredevil's dynamic is that he wants to save Frank's soul. He sees Frank as a broken, lost man who needs spiritual guidance to find his way back to the light.
Spider-Man's dynamic is that the Punisher is a fucking murderer and needs to be punched in the head, then locked away.
So when you get Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Punisher in a room together, you get a spicy recipe for conflict.
We might not have gotten Daredevil but we did get the Hand...weirdly enough. Not sure what that old ninja cabal wants with our wall-crawler, but the action and costuming looks cooler than the original show, so that should be interesting. Especially since this is being directed by the same dude who did Shang-Chi (and parts of Wonder Man).