karaddin

Give me more of that Paco drugged hallucination quest, that one was great lol.

I think the bard is a long way beyond caring about what we think lol, to the point I don't even view arguing about the intent as relevant. Its just the effect as mormont said.

Yeah, thats why I feel its important context that I didn't get that initial negative association because I didn't even try it then. I also didn't have any hype from the marketing so no huge expectations of it blowing my mind - if anything I had a very negative view from some of the early social media marketing so discovering that the actual story wasn't edgelord shit but pretty much the opposite really sucked me in.

Its been sitting at the top for me since I first played it in 1.3 and I'm not just restricting that to RPGs.

Yeah you'd need to know the play (Merchant of Venice) to really get it. Its the terrible no good horrible Jewish character Shylock that's trying to extract his pound of flesh from the poor noble main character that's an absolute asshole to him. Its basically every negative stereotype of Jews up to and including the kitchen sink. The climax of the play is them outwitting the dastardly Shylock with everyone laughing at him essentially. Its been a long time since I covered it in school but even at like 15 I was all 'this....this is pretty out there'.

Yeah what Arakasi said. As I said back at the time of that episode, if the person would survive in the real world if we could magically fix their wounds immediately then they hadn't experienced brain death and I'm assuming soul death in the series occurs at or after that point. She may have been temporarily unconscious but she wasn't out for long enough she couldn't have been resuscitated (given the aforementioned magic wound healing).

Trust that when a Forsaken dies they are actually dead. I don't think its worth it in this case, but that's not negligible.

I'm not sure the connection actually makes that much sense, but I'm also not sure it needs to lol. Why does crossing streams of balefire link the souls of the people that wove it? I guess if each balefire is trying to undo the other balefire it can do something funky, but would it happen if they were both saidin balefire? What about saidin and saidar balefire? Or is it just some weird fluke of saidin + TP?

Yeah, the absolute best case interpretation for him is that he thought he was doing 1 thing and was completely blind to the other thing and that's just not good enough. Was he in hot water over another one a few months ago? I have vague memories of a UK cartoon that was in a similar "maybe he didn't realize what he was doing but he needs to do better if so" situation. ETA: Nope, was a different UK cartoonist - Martin Rowson. Essentially the same 'best case here is you need to be better versed in visual tropes that you're using which just isn't good enough' with anti-semitic shit back in April/May. ETA2: The fact that there had already been one cartoonist in that situation this year just makes it even less acceptable now, then when you factor in the fraught situation...you should be damn fucking sure you're not playing to something you don't mean to so its hard to give good faith to think its not actually intended.

He is pretty dismissive of them later lol. I actually saw a theory on this that I thought seemed a pretty good match which is that Saul was originally going to be Weyland (cant remember if the theory was Sr or Jr) but that was rewritten fairly late, after Keanu had recorded his lines. Given Johnny was friends with Sr there would have been dialogue there that absolutely doesn't fit Saul being someone else completely, so the result was Johnny taking a break to prepare the hotel. Some of the tracks on Growl FM are great, wasn't expecting to love it as much as I do.

Yeah, I think having one true believer is valuable, especially when the motivation that makes him a true believer is also somewhat sympathetic. Also if they want to keep the way Rand wins in the end, he needs someone to be struggling over Callandor with him right? I actually don't remember aMoL that well either, but I thought that was relevant to beating the DO not just Rand stealing his body.

Hard to picture Taimandred stupidly fighting people with swords though, so I wonder what the original plan would have looked like. I will die in the Taimandred hill. Much like both Taim and Demandred died on a hill.

I think the big one that needed more time was Egwene. If she's already a broken damane by the time Rand gets there he's going to need to kill her in self defense which is going to have a huge impact on him. There would have been a slow chipping away at all of them though. It's all building on the cold open in the finale - LTT shares the pain and regret that Ishy feels about the cycle of souls and endlessly fighting each other. Ishy knows this from what LTT says to him about not wanting to do this again, and he's trying to grab onto that. The part he's missing is the the difference between them - that while they both regret it, the Dragon doesn't get broken by it. I thought it was an illusion at first, it's sandwiched between his own illusion of himself and the dragon banner, and he specifically comments about the simplicity of the first illusion. I've changed my mind now though, his "I'll try again in the next life" is about his own next life and his death being an illusion doesn't jive with that. His peace as he died also seemed sincere. So I think a basic illusion with the power in general is what he's calling a "simple" illusion, legitimately dying in full knowledge he'll be brought back in short order but with Rand having the full impact of thinking he'd killed him is the best fit for everything we saw imo. That's a much more sophisticated illusion. I'm assuming the show will hand wave it in some way to continue using Fares Fares in the role because I think continuity makes sense in the visual medium, but mostly just because he was fantastic in the role.

The Muppet scene was hilarious, I would have been happy with the episode just from that. That said the revelation about what exactly happened at the end of 4 and them reckoning with that isn't filler.

I haven't gone back to it yet, that was months ago and it took me ages to get the PS5 fixed so I would have lost some of the other muscle memory with the controller I started to gain lol. BG3 and Cyberpunk have hogged my time since I got it back anyway. I was through the first area into the church with 3 bosses down, but felt I had to learn parrying to keep going - my 500 hours in Elden Ring I avoided ever using a shield haha, the pistol parry was needed for the feral hunter though.

Same. As a make shift weapon in the season finale its fine, but his weapon for the rest of the series? I'll mock that as well.

The two scenes do make sense to compare as they're very similar on a high level - purchasing a high tech gadget during which the seller gets the player character/companion to sit down and tries to renege on the already agreed upon price. I get the idea of using the comparison to get people that wrote off Cyberpunk to give it another chance, but sentiment has largely turned the corner already now so it's not really that needed.

There's one contrasting the main part of the pick up with a similar meeting in Starfield that I have to assume isn't the strongest scene in the game, but the comparison isn't flattering lol.

Yup that's absolutely part of the problem. "If you don't know, vote no" is absurdly simple and as a consequence.... It's effective.

I didn't want to answer first and bias the responses but I guess once someone has answered that goes out the window anyway, so for me... Very similar for essentially the same reason (which doesn't surprise me, I think we're pretty close on our interpretations of the books) but not the same one. It's Rand on the mountain at the end of the TGS for me, it's game over at that moment if he doesn't turn back to being human and feeling love. It's the climax of all the internal mistakes Rand had been making about how he needed to be to win, all the well meaning bad advice that almost cost the world, but not all the mistakes he's making like the list as you point out. It's also another of the parts that were written by Jordan right?

I just never had an issue with the shield holding because 1) it felt like a very short time to me, I'm not sure what's making it feel long to others (Daniel Greene interpreted it as 5-10 minutes) but either I'm missing something that says it was longer or they are missing something that says it's short, much more importantly 2) Ishy isn't actually trying to break it. He's trying to scare Egwene into abandoning Rand, not destroy the shield and kill them. He's already accepted that Lanfear completely fucked him, is making a half hearted play to still make it work but has resigned himself to waiting for the next life - his own, not Rand's. The other 5 arriving on the roof top isn't an overwhelming force he can't beat, but it's what rallies Rand to say that he has never and will never turn. Ta'veren interactions are a nice way to make the power of friendship a literal power though I get the impression I see some of the book details quite different to some, so a question to you all that may help illuminate where we diverge: What do you interpret as the decisive moment that wins the last battle in the books? Which is not to say the other moments don't matter, they're all important, but if you have to point to 1 specific tipping point what is it?

Yeah I'm pretty confident they're doing the work to set it up, and it feels even more likely than it did before s1 even started that they'll do exactly what we speculated back then - Rand with all 3 of them and Elayne+Avi also involved. The main risk of that approach is that it feels like it's just catering to male fantasy, but 1) that argument against it always felt.... Very questionable to this queer woman, like our very existence is judged by whether men like it when I really don't give a fuck and 2) given a lot of men's reactions to the series so far it doesn't feel like there's much risk of the show doing it in a way that feeds into that lol On the "avengers assemble" tower thing - there was a comment I just saw on Reddit by the book expert consultant it gives the strong impression it's going to be a very long time before we see them all together again, and that was part of why they really wanted to emphasize the importance of them all working together in a matter that's obvious in the visuals.

I'm certainly going to agree that Albo/the yes campaign did a poor job of selling it to voters, but I think it's a bit rich to act like campaigning badly is equivalent to running the campaign against it. He should have canned it as soon as Dutton started campaigning against it and the polling tanked, but Dutton is still worse. And unlike many of the no voters I don't even give him the out that he was made to be concerned about the details. At least the political opportunism on his part doesn't seem to have worked out for winning him votes even if it succeeded at tanking the referendum. The sooner we can get him out of the coalition leadership the better for the country.

Yeah. Not much more to say than yeah, and fuck.

This is my primary objection yeah, but I'm also arguing that its counter productive. Its not just that its morally wrong, its also a strategic mistake.