#orbmanson7

yes excellent

OH SHIT BITCH

logan's playlist definitely needs a lot of interpretation and deep analysis to understand a lot of the meanings. like, it's so interesting because this playlist finally shows him opening up, and the others just need to make some effort to understand him, but of course the others might miss this opportunity.

Hooo boy this is an interesting ask, thank you so much!

To first off answer your question, yes, absolutely, Five has the potential to be a villain. Under those specific circumstances, debatable, and there’s a few different factors that could go into it, so lets go into them properly

First off, how is he ensuring his family’s safety, and also does that affect the apocalypse? Because let’s take that one first, if his family survived into the apocalypse with him, Five would not be the Five we know. Honestly, as much as the apocalypse would suck, I think all of them would be better adjusted? It’s one thing to survive on your own, it’s a different thing altogether to survive as a team. They’d learn to work together, they’d get better at not following Hargreeves’ rules and life plan and all of that, it would be miserable sometimes, but they’d have each other, and a lot better mental everything.

If it means the apocalypse never happens, then Five travels into the future to meet his ~30 year old siblings. It would be weird, and he’d probably like to get back, but when he discovers he can’t it won’t be life shattering, because he’s still got his siblings, he’s just their younger brother now. Either way, Five has no reason to get involved with the Commission

But let’s say for the sake of argument that the apocalypse still happens, Five is still the Five in the show, it’s just that his siblings aren’t at risk and so we take that away as a factor.

Well, you’re right, he’s got a lot less of a drive to succeed now. But also, I think he still does want to stop the apocalypse? Because that’s what ruined his life, and Five’s not without morals, even if he frequently puts them aside, given the choice he’d still choose to save everyone, he definitely cares about people as a whole. Like, the closer it gets to the apocalypse in the show the more he starts using “everyone” instead of his family, he criticises the Handler for letting everyone die, he sides with Luther because “there are billions of lives at stake, we’re past trying to save just one”. Five, with no other factors changed, still wants to save the world.

So let’s talk about what would get him to leave everything behind.

Would he do it if his life was at risk? Interesting question. Because I don’t think Five necessarily cares about the world more than he cares about himself, it’s more, he stopped thinking about his own life as a factor ages ago. He’s been driven by this task for so long, he doesn’t know what he is without it. And as we’ve talked about, after everything he went through in the apocalypse, and with the Commission, he really sees himself a lot more as a tool to complete a task than a person with a life. He has absolutely no qualms about throwing himself at a problem to try and get it fixed. I think in a straight up “it’s you or the world” he’d probably choose to save the world? But that’s on pretty shaky ground.

For example, the Handler’s offer. He comes back to work for the Commission, if his family is safe and he gets to stop being thirteen again. In the show, both Five and the Handler went into that agreement knowing it was just a matter of who double crossed the other first. But if that was legit? Well, he still disapproves of the entire planet dying, but he’s killed a lot of people by himself, he’s very good at compartmentalising his feelings away in that respect. And he doesn’t like looking thirteen, he hates that people see him as a child, hates that the only clothes that fit him are the Umbrella Academy uniforms. It’s just that his own body dysmorphia ranks so low on his list of priorities compared to the literal apocalypse. Like, you can see it, he wants to take that offer so badly, it’s why the Handler keeps dangling it in front of his face with things like getting him new adult fitted outfits. The main problem is the Commission part. If that offer came from someone he trusted more than the Handler, I think he’d take it. He may not like what he was doing to the world in the process, but getting to look like himself and go live with his family far away from all of this, that’s a pretty tempting choice.

Is there a timeline where Five continues to work for the Commission? I think only if it was the only way to save his family, as in, they’d be actively in danger and continue to be if and only if he refused to work for the Commission. He may be good at Commission work, but he hates the place, hates what they stand for, sees them only as a means to an end. He’s only worked for them to use them, if he was going to continue working for them past the point they’re no longer useful to him, they would have to have something pretty strong to use against him, and after everything, I think his family’s lives are the only thing strong enough.

Now, villain, antagonist, those are interesting words to use here. Because here’s the thing - to many many people, Five is already a villain. Like, just on screen, people Five has knowingly and deliberately killed to further his own goals:

All of the mercenaries the Commission sent after him, who didn’t know what they were there for, just that they had to kill whoever the tracker led them to

At least one person in Dallas, 1963

37 people from the Hindenburg case, as a way to get the Handler off his back

At least one person fleeing the Commission

At least three Commission agents in the theatre

That’s nearly 50 people right there. And if you count all the accidental deaths Five caused with his actions but didn’t give a shit about, or all the people he assassinated when working for the Commission, the number is easily in the hundreds

To the families of all those people, Five is a villain, it just depends on what narrative you’re looking at. Really, despite being the most driven out of all of them to save the world, Five doesn’t have the moral high ground over anyone in this show. Maybe the Handler, but it’s pretty subjective.

Now antagonist, that’s even more interesting. Because in order to be an antagonist, you have to be working against the goals of the protagonists. Well, who are the protagonists in this hypothetical narrative? If you want to keep any aspects of this story the same, it only makes sense for them to be the other Academy kids, right?

So here’s a narrative for you. The Commission gets the upper hand on Five. They find another way to cause the apocalypse that doesn’t rely on Vanya (it’s possible, there’s one point in the comics where Hazel and Cha Cha literally manage to blow up the earth with a bunch of nuclear weapons Hargreeves had been stockpiling, long story, but they could blow up the moon for the same result as in the show). The Commission just wants this whole situation to be over, so they give him a choice - Five can go live somewhere else with his family and ignore the fact that the apocalypse will happen, or the entire Hargreeves family can die right now. But Five has to convince them to go.

Now, what do you do, when your little brother who you haven’t seen in seventeen years, shows up with a bunch of mercenaries and says the apocalypse is about to happen, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you just have to go with him and you can all live far away from it if you go right now. Well, you might say yes, if you think he’s being threatened into this, especially if he says your own life depends on it. But if you’ve been raised a superhero, well, you’re a lot more likely to fight back.

And if you see how well he can fight, how willing he is to kill completely indiscriminately, well, you’d probably have a hard time trusting anything he says.

Luther isn’t going to go, because Luther’s duty is to save the world. He’s going to try everything he can to do that, regardless of what Five says.

Diego isn’t going to go, because he cares about these people, he cares about making a difference in the world and doing good. He can’t do that if everyone’s dead.

There’s nothing on earth that could make Allison leave her daughter, and even if she could take Claire with her, I don’t think Allison “trying to be a better person and fix her life” Hargreeves would be too happy about raising her daughter knowing she let Claire’s father die, letting Claire know she’s a coward who took the easy way out

Klaus might go. But Ben would be very very against it.

Vanya will hear Five out, but won’t be able to believe it, and even if she does, she’s got a life here too, and she’s not gonna be super psyched to leave everything just to go with her siblings who’ve always excluded her, and some of whom currently actively hate her.

And let’s be real, Five isn’t going to try and convince them if Five can try and force them. In canon, the only person he talks to is Vanya, and when she doesn’t immediately try to help him, he abandons that plan entirely. He only goes back to his family when he’s out of leads with no idea what to do.

Some of them are going to assume Five is being threatened and try to help him, which Five doesn’t want, because that puts them in more danger. Some of them are going to assume Five’s completely lost it, and is now a danger to them, and are going to try and stop him, which Five doesn’t want, because that’s just letting them all die in the apocalypse.

I little manga related rant about Teru because I keep rewatching the scene where he’s attacked in his apartment and Teru-san!

I don’t think Teru really changes until he confronts ???% when Mob is trying to confess to Tsubomi. Yes, he realized his mindset was wrong when Mob went and literally tossed him into the sky with his school, but that realization only sparked a superficial change. 

There’s this song animatic from @one-trash-man to the song The Last of the Real Ones that just... really fits how I imagine Teru seeing Mob (to the point I tried to write a little about it but lol)... it talks about someone being the sun and gold-plated and really really it fits the shallowness of Teru’s superficial changes throughout most of the series. 

What do we know about pre-Mob Teru primarily focuses around this lonely boy who puts on the airs of perfection to the point where he believes his own hype. He’s selfish and self-centered and honestly that doesn’t change during the first Claw arc. Yes, he calls Ritsu out on using his powers against other people, but he’s haughty about it, like he’s miles better than Ritsu despite hiding his shame under a mile of hair. He helps Mob, but he still obviously has no problem using his powers against other people, torturing the one adult in a very blasé manner while Mob stands by (and we know Mob is stressed because Ritsu’s gone and when Mob’s family is in danger his refusal to point his powers at people gets compromised and he primarily follows what’s happening. Case in point - the Claw espers he pinpointed and got to attacked first in S2E9. He reacted to their attacks. It takes a lot to make Mob fight a living human or nonviolent spirit). Teru is in charge, and Teru uses violence to get his way. 

His triple barrier is the last thing he uses to try and protect the prime minister. His other techniques are attacks (and he’s an idiot calling out his attacks like seriously).

But what about when ???% is cutting a line through the city, ignoring literally anything that’s in his path? When Teru is once again shown he’s no match for the sheer force of strength that is Mob’s unrestrained powers and ???% endangers other people?

Teru saves the other people. He knows that Mob would hate himself more if innocent civilians were hurt, and he rushes to protect them, letting ???% go to be dealt with by other people. And I think that’s the moment that Teru changed for real.

Because he realized first that he was pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and he tried to live in that insignificance the same way he did his protagonist narrative, relishing in the apparent smallness of his place in the world in comparison to someone like Mob. He put Mob on a pedestal basically. And it took Teru a second realization - that Mob really was just like him in that he could get worked up over something as “small” as a crush on a girl - for him to really, truly start working on how he sees the world and himself in it.

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