I like too many things

Kai my Shayla </3

Original meme:

Requiem.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

when is omega getting his own game

🔴 KO-FI

Here's a list just off the top of my head, in no particular order. MASSIVE spoilers ahead.

-Wheeljack keeps making party drugs. This is not only accepted but wholly encouraged by the Autobots. He's made the bot equivalent to cocaine so strong it made grimlock physically unable to stop himself from running around the ship at mach 5. This was the basis for an entire episode. He's also made patches that give you a direct link to the Allspark that he passed out at a party specifically to get everyone as fucked up as physically possible. I cannot overemphasize that Optimus make no effort to stop this until things turn destructive on both occasions.

-Soundwave and Shockwave completely fucking hate each other and have a whole rivalry trying to be a better and more useful follower for Megatron than each other.

-Soundwave is a fucking memelord who will play clown music or dramatic riffs to dunk on people from the soundboard he has built into his hardware.

-theres a sort of liminal dimension referred to as Unspace that you can get stuck in and if you are there for too long you will straight up disintegrate. We see this happen to the entire crew aboard the arc from different timelines several times while the main timeline crew we follow tries to escape this fate, thus dooming dozens of other timelines.

-Cheetor is basically Allspark Jesus, and he's tired of all the fighting, so he tries to have Optimus and Megatron settle their differences once and for all. The chosen method for this was making them both play the Newlywed Game. They were both terrible at it, the MegOp Divorce agenda is alive and well.

-the Quintessons invade Cybertron and stick the entire population into a simulation a la The Matrix, which slowly drains their life force until they die. This kills countless unnamed Cybertronians, both Autobot and Decepticon, as well as Hound, who does not get to appear on screen.

-the Quintessons also catch Starscream, rip his face off, and modify him into an Eldritch tentacle beast with his brain attached to two other aliens, and then appoint that amalgamation as the judge that decides the fate of the universe in regards to whether they exterminate all life within it.

-Shockwave commits suicide for Megatron's approval. He launches his spark straight into the Allspark to taint it specifically as a last desperate fuck you to the autobots.

-Soundwave acquired laserbeak by just kind of grabbing a random bird out of the sky.

-Soundblaster is an ex-decepticon that left out of shame. That shame being Soundwave beating his ass in a beatboxing competition so fuckin hard he couldn't show his face around his faction anymore.

-The autobots keep starscream captive and try to get him to take a therapy session with the Arc's AI, and he starts out willing to actually give it a shot but said AI is kind of Stupid and screamer ends up tricking him into letting him escape through an air vent to go wreak havoc instead.

-Starscream also starts a suicide cult with the other Seekers, gains control of Vector Sigma and the Allspark, has the seekers forfeit their sparks to him, thus resulting in a cosmically powered Starscream. He uses that power to "remake" his followers into scraplets that he refers to as, with nothing but love in his tone, his "children."

-Shockwave and Wheeljack are shown to be ex lab partners. Shockwave has an army of drones that look exactly like his altmode that Wheeljack helped program. They are programmed to be able to break out into a coordinated dance number at any given time. Originally this was just to make Wheeljack laugh. Shockwave kept that function in throughout the entire war and initiates it the second there's a truce and Wheeljack asks to see it again.

-Shockwave kidnaps Wheeljack at one point for Science Under Duress purposes and Wheeljack is too invested in all the sweet fuckin tech Shockwave's been making while they were apart to really care that he's being held against his will, and then proceeds to escape without too much issue because he knows Shockwave well enough to know exactly how to disable everything.

-Bumblebee distracts the Decepticons by running in front of their surveillance cameras and shaking his ass in the most underwhelming way imaginable.

-Grimlock is only stupid when he's in his altmode because it takes a lot of power to sustain and he has to sacrifice some of his higher brain functions to keep it manageable. In robot mode he talks like he went to an Ivy League college and knows what champagne tastes like. He throws upscale parties every chance he gets.

-Grimlock also helped start an anticapitalist revolution with Bumblebee when he found an underground society of insect transformers that had a rigid caste system. This was within moments of finding out that the ultra wealthy were hoarding the limited energon reserves for themselves. Grimlock is a comrade and he does not fuck around.

-Skybyte is here and he sounds like Skeletor.

-Windblade and Slipstream are nemeses and somehow it's even more toxic yuri coded than Arcee and airachnid in tfp.

-speaking of Arcee, she's besties with Grimlock. They at one point have a physical fight over who gets to die to protect the other.

-hot rod and soundwave are forced to share leadership over the team of bots and cons that escaped the quintessons' simulation and it's packed with so much homoerotic tension its unreal.

-Maccadam is some kind of lovecraftian war machine that can unfold himself into a whole armory whenever he feels like it. We have no idea what his whole altmode looks like, all we see are the ominous shadows of the weapons on the walls. He uses this specifically as a threat to keep anyone from fighting in his bar bc he's insistent it remain neutral ground. He also can kinda just. See into the future. And casually drops prophecies that get written off as spoonerisms until they turn out to be relevant.

-Optimus Prime has horrific social anxiety that he can kind of power through when he's in a crisis, but the second things are chill and he has to give a speech at a party or something he simply does not know how to function.

-the entire planet of Velocitron gets taken over by cosmic rust and everyone inhabiting it that couldn't escape in time was killed horrifically.

-cosmos is a girl and she hangs out with a dude named Meteorfire who is, for all intents and purposes, just robot Steve Irwin.

-Astrotrain keeps closing doors in people's faces for the funny

-Megatron is killed by a version of himself from an alternate universe that went nuts and starting creating a master race of perfect Decepticons to inhabit Cybertron. Said perfect Decepticons were carbon copies of idw Tarn in all but personality.

-Acidstorm is canonically genderfluid and keeps switching between male and female seeker frames whenever they feel like it

-Kup, who had not been in the show at all until this point, decides to show up and narrate an entire episode like hes giving a political speech.

And, the infamous one we all know and love

A couple other things that are fun to mention

-There is a Cybertronian sport based on rugby that is called Cube because the "ball" is a cube. Bumblebee is obsessed.

-Optimus's frame didn't change at all when he got the matrix of leadership, he was already built like that

-During the Quintession takeover there is a team-building episode where Hot Rod, Clobber, Whirl, and Dead End do simulated training and get to level 504 and won't quit because they all just want to beat the high score. Meanwhile, Percepter walks in (he is missing his eyes by the way) carrying his own arm and says he just fell 182 floors of elevator shafts, then states that he is fine.

-There is a Quintession that collects soundwaves

-Grimlock wasn't originally a dinobot, he became a dino (the king of dinosaurs actually) by crashing on Earth alone during the Jurassic era and turned himself into a dinosaur, he was then buried under rock and knocked into stasis until Bee and Windblade woke him up in present times

Maybe, they use sounds to indicate stopping and going. Like, when they go to an intersection there is a ding or a buzzer to indicate they need to stop.

Or, perhaps, the road itself lights up when it's good to go. The road could be pressure-sensitive and connected to every road throughout the planet. Thus the road can give an indication to the Cybertronian others that are coming . So, when it's glowing then there is no one coming from the other direction, and it flashes when coming to an intersection or crossroad, changing color if that lane needs to stop. Maybe the flashing lights in the road could be like a language every Transformer knows so the flashing could indicate any hazards or upcoming changes.

Also, there are social courtesies on the roads as well, that would be similar to busy sidewalks for us.