please send wine

“And then you show up from the side, and stare at that guy for a couple seconds before attacking.”

“Shouldn’t I surprise attack right away?”

“No no no, you have to give him time to call you a clever girl.”

“Ooh, I do want that.”

A Jumanji can be dangerous and high-stakes (to the characters), but it doesn't need to have a metaphor or lesson, it can easily just be a "Would this be fucked up or what?" situation (e.g. a lotta Goosebumps stories). If there IS a lesson/metaphor, it will be on a smaller scale like psychological issues (e.g. Magnus Archives), family/relationship issues (e.g. Zathura), or about a specific topic (e.g. Magic School Bus). Large-scale social issues may be present (after all, Everything Is Political), but they take a definite backseat.

saw

the cabin in the woods

labrynth (1986)

and

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

the "annotated" to me indicated that this isnt just the hack, 3 is passing around the full helpme.file with MB's diary excerpts and everything. MB rogue construct folk hero confirmed.

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

That’s why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.

So after the grad student cut down the tree and discovered it was the oldest tree in the world he quit studying forestry and went to study salt flats (can’t cut down the oldest trees in the world on salt flats no siree none of that happening) and he was being interviewed about his research, but in the middle of the interview the reporter just stops and says “wait aren’t the guy that…”

Xena: Not to worry, I have a solution!

Gabriella: Is it murder?

Xena: I mean, its not-not… Yes, its murder, but for a good cause.

Grabriella: *angry pout*

Xena: Very well emotional-support-bard. We shall try wacky shenanigans first.

Gabriella: Don’t worry Xena, we’ll get you thirty days without murder for sure this time!

She was a warlord. She was worse than any of the creeps that worked for her. I think a lot of the good men — namely, Hercules — made her see the light. Then she didn’t want to kill people any more, mate. She wanted to love people instead.

But she’d done such terrible things in her past — she knew she was irredeemable. She was a flawed hero.