i am unbroken. i carry many.

i will briefly touch on some things i liked first:

i love the art. this style has suited a marble hornets series so well, and this issue didn't disappoint artistically

i love that jessica got to be central to things, and i love that she and taylor still got to have some joy and peace after everything. it isn't perfect, but it's something they're clearly making the most of.

some things i didn't necessarily mind. not that i particularly enjoyed them, but they're aspects of the series that i didn't dislike:

i'm okay that we didn't kill the operator. it's this ancient, evil entity and i don't think it's inherently a bad writing choice to not kill it. obviously the characters want to kill it, like anyone in that situation would, but it's easier said than done and i don't have a problem with that.

i'm okay that we didn't see present-day tim. from a canon perspective, assuming he remembers enough about it, there's no way he'd want to go near rosswood or get involved. it makes sense. from a meta perspective, i know there's Lore about tim's involvement and feelings towards marble hornets that i don't particularly care to know the details of, but maybe that contributed, maybe not. canonically it makes enough sense to me that i don't really care if there's a meta reason or not.

i'm okay that brian wasn't a big part in this. if he was going to be super important, his story probably wouldn't have been in a ".5" issue. i think 3.5 is essential reading, but i saw it as an added bonus that they explored ark lore via brian's story, not something they failed to follow through on. we got info on the ark and got some closure into what happened to brian after he fell, and what happened to alex and jay. if this was gonna be the brian, alex, and jay show, we wouldn't have focused so much on jessica, so i never expected the og guys to play a huge role.

i'm okay that we didn't find out what exactly skully is and the details of how they function. they're a mysterious entity like the operator and i don't see the issue with having questions about them. of course, i would have loved a whole skully lore dump because i love them, but not getting skully lore isn't what left me disappointed with issue 5.

now, what i didn't like:

i didn't care for adam and david. it's not because they're comic-only characters. i was very invested in taylor. i feel that taylor was much better written, more interesting, and i cared because she was so deeply involved with the story and with jessica. adam and david serve what purpose? showing off the curse of the film students? they barely impact the story. they show up near the end and mess everything up. neat. i know there were attempts and fleshing them out and making me care about them with that classroom flashback at the start of issue 5, and i get it, but they felt like they were there to be there. i didn't care about them, and didn't care much about their deaths like i would have if taylor had died. idk maybe i'm heartless.

i didn't like jessica's death. there's something to be said for an unsatisfactory death. that's how it goes in real life. there are abrupt deaths in fiction that i feel like are done well- they fit the story arc and there's a statement to be made with an unpoetic end- but jessica's just felt frustrating. she's been through so much, she was getting all hyped up by skully, and then she just gets slimed by some guy she doesn't even know? sure, she gets to hang with taylor as part of skully, but that doesn't change the fact that her death was very disappointing for me. it felt like it was for nothing and was a disappointing end to her character (as we know it- i know she lives on in skully).

i didn't like how they handled jessica being part of skully. after this death scene, now we have jessica just being able to hang out with taylor sometimes? so what was even the point then? and if people's minds in skully could so fully form and stay, for lack of a better term, "in control" of skully, why are we only seeing it now when jessica wants to visit taylor? if that was possible, surely someone like jay would have tried to communicate? i would say maybe it's because jessica was such a recent addition to skully, but the ending implies that time has passed and skully-jessica says she'll be able to stick around for a bit. so i don't know.

while i'm fine with the fact that they didn't kill the operator, that failure to do so fell flat. they built up the concept of confronting and killing the operator, and it didn't feel like there was a developed end to that journey. it was, like, "well actually idk how to kill it, but we know we have to, so we'll just keep trying in a vague way that isn't really explained or touched on!" instead of trying anything and expanding upon that failure, or implying that skully had some kind of plan or things to try or information that even implied that the operator could be killed in the first place. it just felt like 'oh yeah we gotta kill it eventually somehow and we'll try but who knows the end!'