#livewatch thoughts

Episode 1

This show is doing exactly what I need it to do right off the bat (thank you @dangermousie​ but also why did I let you tempt me into a live airing show with only one episode out!?!??)

First off we start with sickly sweet couply nonsense and then devolve right into the **MurDer** 

Con, right off the bat is yes, we are gonna fridge a girl to get some man angst and motivation. Its going to be the premise of the show. Perfectly fine if that isn’t your thing (it’s an annoyance in my book) so warning in advance - and the fridging is violent and shown pretty early on and repeatedly.

Pro is that the character work going on is exquisite. Shiro is a young Yakuza boss shown in bed with another man. Everything about him screams danger and he weilds a sultry sexuality like a weapon, always calculating. Ichiro is an undercover cop tasked with getting close to him - but also desperate to solve the case of the missing girl - his mentor on the force.

The air between the two positively crackles with intensity and it is so. very. very. gay.

The show is revealing so much, in expert and interesting ways, about our characters. We are given a fight montage and instead of just violence, we are given a host of backstory on Ichiro in a course of stream-of-consciousness flashes revealing him in ever more disturbing layers.

And then there is Shiro’s dangerous and callous disregard for his own well-being that seems less fatalism and more assurance of his own capabilities (but also a healthy dollop of fatalism).

**mild spoilers** I do appreciate that we aren’t going to mess around with a fake identity/ betrayal/ lies story-line right off the bat. Shiro is just too smart for it, reading Ichiro like a book, and too cleverly manipulative. (The bit with Shiro using his watch to make Ichiro lose his fight but then, honorably, not making him satisfy their bet in order to get info out of Ichiro is so incredibly rich a characterization.)

So, instead, when they meet at the grave of the missing officer - Ichiro’s mentor and Shiro’s sister - they enter a partnership eyes-wide-open.  They decide to work together fully knowing what they other is because they both want to solve The Murder.

This is what I want. A team-up that fulfills my competence kink of a well-matched pair that are equally dangerous in their realms. I don’t think it an accident that the end of the opening fluffy montage, when the soundtrack switches to a more dangerous theme, our protagonists are shown, matching step for step as they stalk forward together.

look. my sibling hasn’t worked with silver yet, but given the metals that they have worked with ― there is no way that necklace got melted down in the however little seconds they had. i know it was little, but being the sibling of an apprentice blacksmith, i cannot suspend my disbelief for this. sorry.

uuuuuhhhhhhh does anyone know why people think the shifter in this episode was a sk*nw*lker? or was that just us being dum-dums? was there something we missed? like i looked it up and apparently they’re mentioned in the episode, but i don’t remember that happening, so . . . . ??

i have none. no thoughts, head empty, self tired.    ok but in all honesty, i did like dean being afraid of plane rides; as with the previous episode, it makes him more of a person as opposed to just a loose collection of Straight Macho Man character traits. also we got more moments with sam and dean being lil shits to each other! that was fun, i liked it :D

while i get that one-off characters are that for a reason, i do wish amanda and/or jerry would come back some other episode. it’d be nice to see them again. and, speaking of jerry, it was really cool to see that yeah! hunting these monsters does have a postive affect on people! we’ve never met him before, but john and dean have, and he definitely remembers the help they gave him ― this is proof that, in the long run, being a hunter is worth it.    . . . of course, it’d be more impactful evidence if we got more characters like jerry, but i’ll take what i can get.

anyway, that was episode four ― i don’t know if we’ll do ep5, because like i said above, i’m really tired! also i still gotta do the dishes before i go to bed, so there’s that. in any case, whenever we watch next, we’ll see you then. so long!

the things that stuck out to me the most this episode were the first hints that dean actually is good around kids, or at least that he is to a certain extent/he can be. this is not because it means i can make children adopt dean in my fanfiction, i don’t know what you’re talking about ― no, this is because we now have more characterization for dean aside from “rough and tumble macho hunter dude who thinks with his dick all the time”. i mean, obviously those other things still hold true, but isn’t it lovely to see the duality of man? :D

alrighty. so. i know that moffat and gatiss have said multiple times while the show was airing that johnlock was Not gonna happen, but i just ― if you didn’t want it to blow up like that, why would you have multiple characters within the first episode draw attention specifically to the idea that the two of them are together in some way? just. Decisions were made, is what i’m saying. maybe not the best Decisions.

sherlock’s an asshole. just ― straight up, he’s an asshole. but he’s kind of a funny asshole so i guess it’s okay (question mark question mark). john is . . . . . . uh, there. not a good sign that one of your main characters’ impact on me was just “he was there”.

i’m honestly not much for mysteries and solving them myself, so sherlock probably isn’t the best show for me to watch. *nervous laughter* anyway. i’ve been tired as fuck all day, so i’m gonna do my language and go to bed. maybe i’ll do episode two of sherlock tomorrow, but i make no guarantees. see y’all next time.

hmm. so. we love cultural appropriation :)

actually i don’t know if “appropriation” is the right word to use here. but the point is the writers of spn used a creature in their narrative that they had no right to. didn’t like it, not looking forward to the other instances in which it happens.