karaddin

@Mlle. Zabzie He actually gives us explicit answers on the inspirations for Oh I forgot to reply on the One Piece conspiracy theories front, I was mostly just laughing at them as I saw them and not having onto them but the one that really stuck in my mind was @Xray the EnforcerE Thanks for digging that up, I do remember it now it's pasted but it didn't sink in what it meant. Excellent idea on Augustine hating Cristabel, I think that's on the money as it fits too well with

X - I apparently missed

He's

Yeah, Edgerunners seems to have given people a taste of Night City which was enough to realise what an incredible world they constructed for the game. If Phantom Liberty isn't too far off and is well received I think it can finally put the negativity of the premature launch and inaccurate expectations (due to the initial marketing) behind it. Opinion even on Reddit is finally starting to shift with more people admitting they actually think it was great. On the Phantom Liberty front - I have one theory for where it could be going which I'll spoiler in case new players check out the thread, the spoilers are only for the already released stuff. One other thing I found on my latest play through was that there's a fair bit I'd been missing in the Star ending

The other thing there Amusingly on the thing, One Piece fandom have been going nuts about that this last week as well with conspiracy theories about what it means in that story.

Oh one question I don't think I've seen covered Which also reminds me of an idea I had based on the info from As Yet Unsent (so no Nona spoilers)

@Mlle. ZabzieYeah I don't think you're deeper down the rabbit hole than the hole actually is in this case. Did that even make sense? Lol. I saw in a thread on Reddit

Talented people are ridiculous lol, having things that work on multiple levels always feels so satisfying. Another note on one of the names I think one of my favourite conception of how the characters stand is I was braced for emotional punches at the end of the book, but the one that really caught me off guard early was

Bolded - whoops yes, I meant to include that detail lol. Those are their original eyes but they're swapped. Second part - Depends on how it works, the Mithraeum is several times further away from Earth than the edge of the observable universe. Without completely non linear travel that's an ungodly distance by the standards of every SF property that exists.

@Maia I don't think you're missing anything, pretty sure everything you had a question about is still a mystery @Xray the Enforcer adding to your summary list as of the end of Ht9 Additional information from As Yet Unsent, the bonus material added to the Ht9 ebook / paperback. I consider this part of Ht9 now but you might not

Well my trend of loving this series continues even as each book is radically different to the previous ones. Finished Nona and my only frustration is that I can't read the final book immediately. It's not quite the head fuck that Harrow was, but I suspect there's still a lot of layered depth that will need multiple reads to fully tease out, helpfully the audio book will add bonus interest to the second read. One nice detail I've already seen pointed out Another detail I saw about some of the chapter titles

Haven't caught up to the thread past here, but I wanted to chime in and say I absolutely parsed Rhaenyra as having a teen crush on Alicent, but didn't think there was any indication it was reciprocated. I don't think its jealousy however, rather the betrayal of doing this with the one friend she had without even giving her a heads up first - that seems entirely reasonable as something to drive a wedge there. And Viserys absolutely was cowardly but in a way that's very real and relatable, I don't damn him for it but it was a mistake.

Ashford was coming from a much lower starting point, so more room to improve. Drummer was made up of multiple book characters but none of them were "bad", book Ashford was just a bad character.

I really liked the moral choice given to Hughie along with the justification for it when viewing it alongside the others in that way. Turning into their fathers alongside projecting strength that's actually just a hollow shell covering up how empty and miserable they are is contrasted against the father that didn't give two shits about what other people thought but showed strength of character in prioritising his son during a painful period. That was pay off that's been coming since the first episode of season 1 - he blew up at his dad about the pizza rolls after Robin's death.

They're also in Homelander's home. Between not wanting to actually kill Maeve and not wanting to destroy Vought tower I think his restraint makes sense. The criticism seems more fair with SB, but it didn't bother me

Yeah, the end result of her using her powers looked similar but the mechanism was the opposite - crushing or imploding. Relevant in that it could simply be generalised telekinesis and that's just the only thing she's done with it so far. On the changes from this season we've lost Maeve from the good side which is actually pretty significant, Starlight out of the 7 which is mixed, A Train repowered which could be anything from irrelevant to very important, Ashley and Annika holding a secret from HL which he frequently kills over, Ryan joining HL and I think most importantly - HL now knowing he's able to openly murder without alienating his... Homechasers? Homemakers?

Low key favourite part of the episode was Noir acting all stoic then dipping the second Homelander walked out of the room lol

Given that in this episode we have him

There were technical problems with release of ep4 in some countries. In Aus it's meant to be up around midday and wasn't there till about 11pm, I think India was having the same problem.

Yeah it's the blend of it feeling real, having an actual point to make and being hilarious that makes the gore work. And that so much of what makes Homelander scary isn't his powers, it's that he's a petty vindictive asshole that just happens to have the power to carry out what many of them would want to do. And the mundane awful things that don't need his powers as much as the big ones that do

He really screwed up

I know it's hard to separate the actor from the character, but Stan Edgar is a great character on top of GE. The little we got of him last season was already good, but just in the first 3 episodes he's jumped up even more. Terrible person of course but excellent character. Every time Kimiko is happy on screen I just can't get past how pretty and "sunny" Karen Fukuhara is, she just lights up everything. The whole cast is phenomenal.

That's certainly opening with a bang

I was also unaware of the whole 3 stories playing out at the same time angle of the trilogy, and agree that quite a few things make more sense with that in mind. I suspect it also means that this first book is going to suffer from the lack of the connections to the other two stories and will improve on a reread after they are out. That said I still enjoyed it immensely. In addition to the two characters already mentioned above, the original theft of the dagger is still completely unexplained - no one in this book had even a clue who had done it, so I expect we'll get a POV in one of the other books that at least gives us confirmation of the faction/players behind that. Wert - on the moral ambiguity, or lack thereof, I think it worked well due to

Looks like we get to continue Petit Hughie's pattern of getting covered in blood, guts and other body fluids!