Okay, IRL, this might not be super unpopular, But here on reddit? Oh boy. Anytime the topic of zodiac signs or astrology appear on reddit, these reddit freaks act like it’s their kryptonite.
I couldn’t tell you how many times i’ve seen a comment or post involving the same scenario. “She thought she could guess my zodiac sign based on my personality, but I actually told her the wrong zodiac sign was correct, and she told me how she knew what it was right…” Ok bro you want a cookie for being a fucking nerd and trying to embarrass someone for their own personal interests?
Like listening to these people repeat that same dumbass scenario as if it’s the ultimate argumentative checkmate is so cringy. “And then everybody clapped” vibes.
As far as beliefs go, astrology is pretty tame I feel, and it can honestly be fairly entertaining to hear about at times. Do I believe in it? No. Will I openly shit on it? Also no. Just like I would never openly shit on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc., even though the beliefs within those religions are almost more unbelievable than astrology.
I also feel that reddit seriously over sensationalizes these people’s thoughts on astrology. “How can you base your whole life off stars? You think you’re not compatible with someone cause of a made-up label?” Like 9/10 times people who dabble in astrology are not gonna discount a romantic partner solely on sign, or dictate their life around star position. That would insane. Obviously there are some people who may do that, but the vast majority of people who talk about astrology are not nearly as invested in it as reddit makes it seem.
In conclusion, I actually find that astrology can be entertaining and interesting, and find it cringy when people are so quick to shit on it. It almost makes them look insecure with their own intelligence🤷.

Hello! This is the second Master List of my UbeLand fanfics. Aside from the three previous "timelines", included here are some other additional ones:
D) GenSense - Fics featuring Sense and Genau. Some of the GenSense take place in other previous timelines (particularly "Empathy" and "AUbeLand", but they're collected here together.
E) Crackships - Fics featuring insanity. Stark/Linnie, Aura/Himmel, Seed Rat/Still, stuff like that.
NOTE: Each link below leads to the original post where each story showed up first. Hence, I used the title of the original posts for each link.
MAIN FIC

1. Übel by sciamano240
   
2. ÜbeLand Caught You Staring (@hana)
   
3. Übel [art by Jiuwujiang]
   
4. Land and Übel's first date by u/souo_o
   
5. Land and Übel's first date continued by u/souo_o
   
6. Suspects on the Run ÜbeLand (@hakuyori.bsky.social)
   
7. Kanne & Lawine trying to piss off old man Richter (by icarus2010741)
   
8. ÜbeLand Dynamic (@koo_ke1)
   
9. Sinister Dance ÜbeLand (@A_OKartworks)
   
10. ÜbeLand (@dashimakick)
    
11. ÜbeLand (@8310sub)
    
12. Peace of Mind ÜbeLand (tema_pee)
    
13. Übel (by u/syagare_)
    
14. Side By Side ÜbeLand (@dashimakick)
    
15. “It smells good…” (@mai_ameinu)
    
16. Land and Übel by @森戸蒼
    
17. “Hey Four Eyes”ÜbeLand (@M_0J_4)
    
18. Serie is a wingwoman for real
    

EMPATHY FIC

1. Smooch ÜbeLand (@fenfenfen_Naku)
   
2. Choosing the best hairstyle ÜbeLand (@catgerden)
   
3. Something must have happened 🤣 by 810eru
   
4. Übel Sketch [oc]
   
5. What got Übel looking at you like this? (@森戸蒼)
   
6. Tom and Jerry ÜbeLand u/dyskdance
   
7. After The Ball ÜbeLand u/dashimakick
   
8. Double the fun ÜbeLand (@sxolxis)
   
9. That smile. That damned smile. ( u/NAKA_u_MA on Twitter)
   
10. Smile For The Camera ÜbeLand (@二次ろい )
    
11. One Last Dance ÜbeLand (@Arsum_0731)
    
12. (Nice) Ubel and Land's kids by catgerden
    
13. Kinky ÜbeLand (@no_name_illust)
    
14. Lan-Ube (By u/Hanauta1110)
    
15. ÜbeLand (@OdangoDango13)
    
16. Ubel fanart made by me X/Ig u/mafiyuu
    
17. Übel wants to make Land blush (@hikentai0112)
    
18. Elegant Dance ÜbeLand (@Humica)
    
19. Ubel by 極道畫師
    
20. Ubel and Land fam by catgerden
    
21. ÜbeLand (@sakura_1110ssmm)
    
22. ÜbeLand (@yarehasu_yare)
    
23. Tea Date ÜbeLand (@hskyka)
    
24. Ubeland (by u/nyanmeras on twt)
    
25. Water ice By nyoro
    
26. “We’re Married After All” ÜbeLand (@SunSun_x2x2)
    
27. UbeLand on a night out (Humica on Pixiv)
    
28. Land and Übel by u/sakura_1110ssmm
    
29. Guy talk. (By u/fumishichi777, TL by @spinning_donuts)
    
30. Contemplating Thoughts ÜbeLand (@ぽこるる)
    
31. Long-Haired Übel (@dodobo_)
    
32. Übel by monokarumaru
    
33. “Got your Glasses” ÜbeLand (sayaponillustr1)
    
34. Land and Übel by u/dashimakick
    
35. FanArt of Ubel by me
    
36. On the Wall (@perutore15)
    
37. Übel pie
    
38. Land and Übel by u/From white rain
    
39. The cutest couple (@happy_14_p)
    
40. Couple Goals ÜbeLand (@Ha_chika)
    
41. Übeland Children. [X: u/OdangoDango13]
    
42. Übel & Land u/nyanmeras
    

AUBELAND

1. Land and Übel in the morning by u/Inkspirate_art
   
2. Modern goth Ubel (by nest_virgo)
   
3. "School Trip" by perutore15
   
4. Übel working out (by 櫻アイ)
   
5. Land going to a summer festival with Übel (by みつかん)
   
6. Kiki’s Delivery Service x UbeLand (@syaparinton)
   
7. Übel doing a standing split (by 櫻アイ)
   
8. Swimsuit Übel (by u/Icoochu)
   
9. Land Biggest Fan (@maru)
   
10. Goth Ubel by me
    
11. Ubel : Don't be afraid (by me)
    
12. Übel in the morning (by 櫻アイ)
    
13. Ubel & Land school parody by dashimakick
    
14. Pouting Übel (by 櫻アイ)
    
15. “Are you trying to woo me?” “Does it look like it?” ÜbeLand (@syaparinton)
    
16. "I know that girl. She's the delivery girl." (by u/syaparinton)
    
17. Dark and scary (@neneko0814)
    
18. ジジの危機 (by u/syaparinton)
    
19. Übel Twintails (@natsu08kankitsu)
    
20. “Could you stop following me?” (Übel: @_yusura_uni, Land: @popo_po_techi)
    
21. We've done it people, Übel Eats is real now (@Neneko0814)
    
22. Will you trust her to cut your hair? (By 屁葛Pig)
    
23. 'What are you staring at?' (Übel by Edgar_syu)
    
24. Übel with the drip (@inkspirate_art)
    
25. Cigar Kiss ÜbeLand (@catgerden)
    
26. Frieren x kimono by u/picowan11
    
27. Übel gets a job by u/natsu08kankitsu
    
28. Übel at Home (@natsu08kankitsu)
    
29. ÜbeLand (@富士茄 鷹)
    
30. Ubel by fatzhai88
    
31. Y2K Ubel and Land by iohc_choi
    
32. (Nice) Sexy Übel [art by eternals]
    
33. 子供の日のフリーレン (art by u/ryosuketarou) (AKA, Tiny UbeLand #1)
    
34. Smol ÜbeLand (@non20non22) (AKA, Tiny UbeLand #2)
    
35. Casual Übel (@MrOhMyTIGHT)
    
36. Slave Übel Star Wars/Frieren crossover by u/dismaidenart
    
37. Übel in school uniform (by CeNanGam)
    
38. Frieren's Time Passage (Fan-Animation I made) (AKA, Frieren Meets Guardsman Veers)
    
39. ÜbelDelivery (@Edgar_Syu)
    
40. Behind the scene part 2 (@tentenchan2525)
    
41. I drew Übel!
    
42. High schoolers cleaning the pool (By u/perutore15)
    
43. GojoHime X ÜbeLand CrossOver u/ehfhdehfhd2
    
44. Bunny Girl Übel (by みつかん)
    
45. Last train home (by u/perutore15)
    
46. 🐱ÜbeLand (@BoHumbo)
    
47. Tsuyübel (@bchan1582)
    
48. Übel in the morning (by Sushispin)
    
49. Drive Responsibly ÜbeLand (@Heartbreak_Juan)
    
50. High School ÜbeLand (@hikentai0112)
    
51. Land X Ubel School AU (By u/8310sub, TL by @spinning_donuts)
    
52. Frieren with the girls (by u/perutore15)
    

GENSENSE

1. Mangaka Sense by u/ko_da_yo
2. If Sense had different hairstyles (@inoino1008)
3. " Dance like a Genau, sting like a Sense" ( 石津忠 on Pixiv, u/ishitsu on Twitter)
4. pretty Sense i commissioned last week 💙 link under the image (Art by Timebreaker, link to their twitteX is under this image)
5. Sense (@dodobo_)
6. Sense going to school (@mwoji_0)
7. Sense (art by me)
8. Sense’s morning routine (@jjbz135860)

CRACKSHIPS

1. Aura dreaming (@mutsu_XXXX)
2. Laughing Aura (by u/mutsu_XXXX)
3. Aura, wear a bunny suit. (@kaibashira4080)
4. High School Girls Frieren & Aura (by u/mutsu_emine)
5. What did she see? (@j02ggogpq6duegu)
6. Demon maid cafe (@ryosuketarou)
7. Fern at the concert (By u/J02GGOgpQ6dueGu)

Are you taking care of your 6 human needs?
Remember that they all are very important for you to be happy without pornography.
So if you are taking care of them - you will quit your addiction much faster, because you will not need fake source of pleasure to be happy.
You will already be happy!

Here are 6 human needs description and tips:

• CERTAINTY

Gives you confidence, sense of security and trust.
If you don't have it - you will feel a lot of pressure, stress and anxiety, because you don't trust anyone or everything that is happening in the world or around you. (You will feel bad)
However - if you have too much certainty - you will feel BORED and Overwhelmed. That's a feeling of being stuck in a predictable, boring routine.
And in many cases, including mine - boredom is one of the main triggers for addiction, because you will tend to look for something that can excites you. And nothing can excites you more than something that gives you so much PLEASURE!
Bad Certainty Behavior: Overeating, control of others, binge watch TV/Netfilx/Anime, procrastination, etc..
Manage your certainty by - cleaning, developing empowering rituals(workout, exercise, meditation, reading, etc), focusing on the things you want in life, instead of listening or following others.
​

• UNCERTAINTY / VARIETY

You might be asking - ''but why the Heck I need Uncertainty?''
That's the FUN part. It will get you out of the BOREDOM of certainty.
Our human needs are built in a very strange way, that they actually are in conflict with each other. But if you look deep - you will understand that it is exactly what gives your life Drive and Excitement!
That's why you need Uncertainty, or in other words - Variety.
You need to have something unpredictable happening in your life, or else - it will be boring!
That's like - eating one and the same dish all the time. Very soon - you will get bored or even sick of it!
Bad Uncertainty Behavior: Overwhelm, drug, intoxication, change TV channels/Anime/Netfilx, Self sabotage, create drama and problems.
Manage your Uncertainty by: new challenges, changing the meaning of events, hobbies, be creative, learn and discover new things
​

• LOVE & CONNECTION

In short - if you don't care about this - you will feel LONELY.
And loneliness is the MAIN triggereason for you to stay in this addiction! No matter you like it or not!
Love & Connection is when you feel that someone is actually caring about you. Or supports you in a certain way.
We all need this feeling! Or else - we will feel very Lonely.
Bad Love & Connection Behavior: being needy, self harm, unhealthy/toxic relationships
Manage Love & Connection by: sharing, supporting others, connect through nature, faith, loving and respecting yourself, independent relationships
Tip: If you can't create relationships right now for one reason or another - Spirituality and connection with God also takes part of this Human Need!
​

• 𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗜𝗙𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗡𝗖𝗘

This human need is all about being heard, noticed, recognized and simply - listened.
It is the feeling of being unique, special and being needed.
If you don't have it - you will feel worthless and depressed.
Bad Significance Behavior: People can often raise their sense of significance by using alcohol, engage into arguments, talk gossips, being victim, tell sad stories about self, rebellion or surround yourself with people who seems less skilled or attractive, so you can stand out.
This approach is neither good nor healthy.
Manage your Significance by: directing your competitive nature into healthy activities, like sports, mastering new skill, speaking up, mastering a craft or field, achieving goal or volunteering.
​

• 𝗚𝗥𝗢𝗪𝗧𝗛

"𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘭𝘭 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦." 𝙏𝙤𝙣𝙮 𝙍𝙤𝙗𝙗𝙞𝙣𝙨
If you are not growing as an individual - sooner or later it will make you feel bad, or even worthless. Especially if you have friends, or someone you know, who are doing better than you and are completely succeeding in life, while you are not moving at all.
Don't worry - you can become someone you always wanted to be, if you will take this human need seriously!
Bad Growth Behavior: Gathering information without applying. (Learning is cool and might be very exciting, but without applying it in real life - it is worthless.)
People whose core need is growth are always striving to be better and learn more.
Manage your Growth by: self development, leaning & practicing, pursuit of mastery, teaching others (The more you teach - the better you learn)
Don't forget emotional and spiritual growth as well!
​

• 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗥𝗜𝗕𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡

Last but not least - feeling of doing something MEANINGFUL.
It is a sense of service and focus on helping, giving and supporting others.
Colleagues, schoolmates, people in college, your family, friends, or just random person on street...
Giving back is the best way to fulfill this need. The closer the cause is to your heart, the more fulfilled you will feel.
Bad Contribution Behavior: Giving to get, being a martyr, not taking care of self
Manage your Contribution by: volunteering, donating, helping people (I believe animals can be included as well)
Tip: help people who are struggling to start quitting porn addiction. While you are still not done with this - you are way ahead of those who are only starting, right?
Go ahead and help others! Keep others accountable and you will feel better as well!
View Poll

Found this article after doing a quick deep-dive after this post from u/evilez:
https://www.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/1d33m4l/does_anybody_remember_what_podcast_this_was/
"Hello fine ladies and gentlemen! I remember listening to a podcast less than a year ago. The main subject of the podcast was UFOs (I think)... anyways the guest told a story that a congressman or senator wrote a bill that was against the CIA or going to defund the CIA, in the 80's... and shortly thereafter, someone broke into his home, dragged his wife out into the street and stuck a gun in her mouth and told her to kill the bill."
Some light Googling brought up this article about the history of the CIA, the OSS, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's attempts at defunding the agency in the 90s.
Here's an article about that attempt brought by Moynihan published on the Carnegie Endowment Website on December 20, 2005.
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2005/12/the-case-for-abolishing-the-cia?lang=en
Here's the New Yorker piece about all of this from October 3rd, 2022.

Spooked -- What’s wrong with the C.I.A.? -- By Amy Davidson Sorkin -- October 3, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/has-the-cia-done-more-harm-than-good
According to the article regarding the resuscitation of the OSS as the CIA immediately following Roswell and the Twining Memo:
"Many of its officers moved straight to the new C.I.A. Most consequentially, perhaps, four future directors of the C.I.A. were O.S.S. veterans: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey."
Here's the New Yorker article in full:
"On January 4, 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of New York, introduced a bill called the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. It had been a rough stretch for the C.I.A. The year before, Aldrich Ames, a longtime officer, had been convicted of being a longtime mole for Soviet (and then Russian) intelligence. Despite having a reputation among his colleagues as a problem drinker who appeared to live far beyond his means, Ames had been given high-level assignments with access to the names of American sources in the U.S.S.R. When the F.B.I. finally arrested him, he was in the Jaguar he used for commuting to work at Langley; by then, he was responsible for the death of at least ten agents. Moynihan said that the case was such a flamboyant display of incompetence that it might actually be a distraction from “the most fundamental defects of the C.I.A.” He meant that the agency—in what he considered to be its “defining failure”—had both missed the fact that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and done little to hasten its end.
He gave a diagnosis for what had gone wrong. “Secrecy keeps mistakes secret,” he said. “Secrecy is a disease. It causes a hardening of the arteries of the mind.” He quoted John le Carré on that point, adding that the best information actually came from the likes of area specialists, diplomats, historians, and journalists. If the C.I.A. was disbanded, he said, the State Department could pick up the intelligence work, and do a better job.
Moynihan was, in some respects, being disingenuous. As he well knew, even if his bill had passed, spies and spying wouldn’t have gone away. The State Department already had its own mini agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Departments of Energy and Treasury each had one, too. The Defense Intelligence Agency conducted clandestine operations; U.S. Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the Office of Naval Intelligence kept themselves busy as well. The National Security Agency was nearly two decades away from the revelation, by Edward Snowden, a contractor and a former C.I.A. employee, that it had collected information about the phone calls of most Americans, but it was a behemoth even in Moynihan’s time. So was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There were about a dozen agencies then; now, after reforms that were supposed to streamline things, there are eighteen, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (O.D.N.I.), a sort of meta-C.I.A. that has a couple of thousand employees, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Drug Enforcement Administration (which currently has foreign offices in sixty-nine countries) has an Office of National Security Intelligence. Four million people in the United States now have security clearances.
It can be hard to sort out which agencies do what; players in the espionage business aren’t always good with boundaries. Both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. make use of satellite resources, including commercial ones, but there is a separate agency in charge of a spy-satellite fleet, the National Reconnaissance Office—not to be confused with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which deals with both space-based and ground-level imaging, or with Space Delta 18, the nation’s newest intelligence agency, which is attached to the Space Force. Abolishing the C.I.A. might do nothing more than reconfigure the turf wars.
[NOTE: both Sean Kirkpatrick and David Grusch worked for the NRO and at least Grusch worked for the NGA]
As the senator from New York also knew, a large proportion of the C.I.A.’s resources are devoted not to intelligence gathering but to covert operations, some of which look like military operations. In “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence” (Princeton)—one of several recent books that coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the agency’s founding—Amy B. Zegart, a political scientist at Stanford, writes that it’s “getting harder to know just where the CIA’s role ends and the military’s role begins.” Yet the agency’s paramilitary pursuits and related covert activities go back decades. They include the botched Bay of Pigs landing, the brutal Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and a long list of assassination attempts, coup plots, the mining of a harbor (with explosive devices the agency built itself), and drone strikes. These operations have very seldom ended well.
Moynihan’s bill had no more luck than another that he introduced the same day, aimed at ending Major League Baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws. In each case, people understood that there was a problem, but both institutions were protected by the sense that there was something essential, and perhaps authentically American, about them, including their very brokenness. A sudden turn of events can convince even the C.I.A.’s most sober critics that the agency will save us all, whether from terrorists or from Donald Trump. But, seventy-five years in, it’s far from clear whether the C.I.A. is good at its job, or what that job is or should be, or how we could get rid of the agency if we wanted to.
How did we end up with the C.I.A.? A familiar explanation is that the shock of Pearl Harbor made the United States realize it needed more spies; the Office of Strategic Services was formed and jumped into action; and, when the war ended, the O.S.S. evolved seamlessly into the C.I.A., ready to go out and win the Cold War. But that narrative isn’t quite right, particularly regarding the relationship between the O.S.S. and the C.I.A.
[NOTE: We know how ended up with the CIA. ROSWELL.]
The United States has always used spies of some sort. George Washington had a discretionary espionage budget for which he didn’t have to turn in receipts. In the early part of the twentieth century, the State Department had an intelligence-analysis unit, along with a cryptography group called the Black Chamber, which operated out of a brownstone in New York’s Murray Hill until it was shut down, in 1929. The Army and the Navy had cryptography and reconnaissance units, too. When the Second World War began, their operations ramped up dramatically, and, as Nicholas Reynolds recounts in “Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence” (Mariner), these units, not the O.S.S., handled most of the code-breaking. The problem became the volume of raw intelligence. The task of making sense of it and of turning it into something that policymakers could use went to an office within the Army’s military-intelligence division (or G-2), which, Reynolds says, produced “the country’s best strategic intelligence” during the war. That office’s work was directed by Alfred McCormack, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone and a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Many of the people he brought in were young corporate lawyers; the theory was that their training in plowing through mountains of documents made them ideal intelligence analysts.
William J. Donovan, who led and largely conceived of the O.S.S., was also a Wall Street lawyer, but one with an aversion to the “legalistic.” What Donovan envisioned was essentially an array of commando units that would operate stealthily and behind enemy lines. In practice, what he tried to build, according to a colleague, was a “private army.” His escapades often risked too much and gained too little. In late 1943, one of his own officers wrote to him that “the set-up has been incredibly wasteful in manpower and, except for a few spotty accomplishments, has been a national failure.” And it had produced “chaos in the field.” Donovan’s nickname was Wild Bill, but his staff called him Seabiscuit, after the thoroughbred, because of his tendency to race around, engaging in what was basically war tourism. In the end, though, the O.S.S. made real contributions, including through its contacts with the French Resistance. But Donovan’s complaint about D Day was that there was “too much planning.” Counterintelligence and strategic thinking bored him, and the O.S.S.’s analysis division was seen as secondary to its operations.
When Harry Truman became President, in April, 1945, he took a look at the O.S.S. and, in September, 1945, abolished it. About two years later, he signed the National Security Act, which established the C.I.A. (and the Department of Defense), but he didn’t want the new agency to be like the group Donovan had run. Instead, it was supposed to do what its name suggested: centralize the intelligence that various agencies gathered, analyze it, and turn it into something the President could use.
[NOTE: I tried doing some research after reading something yesterday about how the NSA was developed in 1952 under Project Sigma to try and decode "alien" communications. If anyone can offer anything, you'd be helping humanity.]
“It was not intended as a ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Outfit!,” Truman later wrote. He also had to deal with public apprehensions that he might create what a Chicago Tribune headline called a “Super Gestapo Agency”—which is why, in its charter, the C.I.A. was banned from domestic spying.
Reynolds’s book is the best of the recent batch, and the most readable. It does not retrofit the history of the O.S.S. around the assumption that the C.I.A. was the inevitable lead postwar intelligence agency. There were other contenders, including a version of McCormack’s office in the State Department—something like what Moynihan wanted. J. Edgar Hoover argued that “World Wide Intelligence” should be turned over to the F.B.I., with military intelligence subservient to him. In some alternative history, he might have pulled that off; by 1943, he was running undercover operations in twenty Latin American countries. And so things could have been worse.
[WHAT UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS WERE WE RUNNING IN LATIN AMERICANS COUNTRIES IN 1943.]
Donovan was an adept publicist, but what mattered most, in the end, was that he was good, or lucky, when it came to hiring people. Despite the “pale, male, and Yale” stereotype, the O.S.S. was somewhat more diverse than other units, and certainly more eclectic. Among its ranks were Ralph Bunche, Herbert Marcuse, and Julia Child. Many of its officers moved straight to the new C.I.A. Most consequentially, perhaps, four future directors of the C.I.A. were O.S.S. veterans: Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Each seems to have had glory-day memories of the O.S.S., which is to say that each, in various ways, was afflicted with what a general in Army intelligence called “the screwball Donovan effect.” Casey, who put a picture of Donovan on his wall, said of his old boss, “We all glowed in his presence.” Wild Bill lost the bureaucratic fight but won the personnel and mythology wars.
And, of course, the agency found customers and collaborators in the White House. There was no mention of covert action in the law that chartered the C.I.A., but Presidents—starting with Truman—began using it that way. One of the agency’s first operations involved meddling in the 1948 Italian election, to insure the victory of the Christian Democrats. The subsidies and outright bribery of Italian politicians, some of them on the far, far right, continued into the nineteen-seventies.
Almost from its creation, though, there was a sense that something about the C.I.A. was off. The split between covert action and intelligence gathering and analysis was part of it. The director of the agency was also supposed to be the leader of U.S. intelligence as a whole, but, invariably, the person in the job seemed more invested in preëminence than in coördination. That setup remained in place until the establishment of the O.D.N.I., in 2004, a move that thus far has mostly continued a tradition of trying to deal with the C.I.A.’s dysfunction by setting up ever more agencies, offices, and centers. (The N.S.A. was established, in 1952, in response to a series of cryptography-related failures.) “Legacy of Ashes,” Tim Weiner’s 2008 history of the C.I.A.—and still an invaluable overview—takes its title from a lament by Eisenhower about what he’d be leaving his successors if the “faulty” structure of American intelligence wasn’t changed. Since Weiner’s book was published, the ashes, and the agencies, have only been piling up.
Zegart’s “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” aims to bring that history to the present. Zegart has served as an adviser to intelligence agencies, and she provides a decent guide to our current bureaucracy. Throughout, her book is clear and well organized—maybe a little too well organized, one feels, after taking in the “Seven Deadly Biases” of intelligence analysis, the “Four Main Adversaries” and the “Five Types of Attack” in the crypto area, and the “Three Words, Four Types” that define covert action. (The covert-action words, incidentally, are “influence,” “acknowledged,” and “abroad.”) Not a few paragraphs read like PowerPoint charts; contradictions are displayed without really being reckoned with. She observes that the balance between “hunting” and “gathering” seems off, but, in her telling, the fact that Presidents of both parties regularly turn to the C.I.A. for paramilitary and other covert tasks constitutes proof that doing so is part of the order of things. The impression she leaves is that if it all goes wrong, it’s because some checklist has been missed. One of the top priorities of U.S. intelligence today, she thinks, should be persuading tech companies to get with the program and help out. She moots the creation of yet another agency, to deal with OSINT—open-source intelligence.
In one chapter, Zegart provides a list of scandals involving spying within the U.S. by various intelligence agencies—notably the N.S.A., the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. “All of these activities violated American law,” she writes. “But that’s the point: domestic laws forbid this kind of surveillance of Americans.” How is that the point, exactly? She depicts the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report, which detailed profound abuses in the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, as a they-said, the-agency-said, who-knows case. She turns it into a parable about the problems with Congress—suggesting that, although the committee structure may have needed rejiggering, the moral compass of those involved in the program of torture was just fine.
Another new volume, “A Question of Standing: A History of the CIA” (Oxford), by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Edinburgh, offers the insights of a more distant observer. He can be astute about how “false memories” of the O.S.S.’s accomplishments have led the C.I.A. astray. Part of his argument is that the agency has acted as if its influence depended on its standing with whoever is in the White House, thus motivating it to offer Presidents quick fixes that fix nothing. The net effect is to reduce its standing, and that of the U.S., with the public at home and abroad. But Jeffreys-Jones is prone to rash generalizations and pronouncements. He theorizes that, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, may have been susceptible to “war mongering” due to her status as “a descendant of slaves,” and that the working-class background of the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, made him more likely to vouch for the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war. “Social mobility so often leads to conformity,” warns Jeffreys-Jones, himself the son of an academic historian.
During the Vietnam War, the C.I.A. had discouraging intelligence to offer, and, when successive Administrations didn’t want to hear it, focussed on being helpful by providing those supposedly quick fixes. That meant abetting a coup in 1963, spying on antiwar protesters, and launching the Phoenix Program, an anti-Vietcong campaign marked by torture and by arbitrary executions; in total, more than twenty thousand people were killed under Phoenix’s auspices.
Phoenix was run by William Colby, the O.S.S. alum, who was soon promoted to C.I.A. director. At lower levels, discontent about Vietnam fueled leaks. In December, 1974, the journalist Seymour Hersh told the agency that he was about to publish a story in the Times exposing its domestic spying. Whether in a miscalculation or (as Jeffreys-Jones somewhat breathlessly speculates) as an act of personal expiation, Colby gave Hersh partial confirmation. Amid the scandals and the Congressional hearings that followed, Colby angered some of his colleagues, and Henry Kissinger, by laying bare even more. It emerged that, in 1973, Colby’s predecessor had asked senior agency officials to produce a list of things the C.I.A. had done that might have been unlawful. The resulting document, covering just the prior fifteen years, was known in-house as “The Family Jewels,” and was almost seven hundred pages long.
The question of how much it matters who works at the C.I.A. is a perennial one. The influence of Donovan’s acolytes shows that decisions about whom you recruit can, in a formative period or at a critical juncture, make a big difference. But, once an institutional culture has become entrenched, it can be easier to see how the institution shapes the people within it than vice versa.
“Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage” (Putnam), by Nathalia Holt, comes at the question from a different angle. It’s about five women who worked for the early C.I.A.; three also worked at the O.S.S., and one, Eloise Page, began her career as Bill Donovan’s secretary. Holt is also the author of “Rise of the Rocket Girls,” about women in the early years of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and “The Queens of Animation,” about women at the Walt Disney Company. Her book contains fine material for a beautifully art-directed streaming series, with set pieces in postwar Paris, nineteen-fifties Baghdad, and nineteen-seventies Greece, where Page was the C.I.A.’s first woman station chief. It even has a framing device in the form of the “Petticoat Panel,” a working group of C.I.A. women that convened in 1953 to document their unequal pay and treatment. Holt quotes the transcript of the meeting at which the leadership of the agency summarily rejected their findings. Helms, the future director, says, “It is just nonsense for these gals to come on here and think that the government is going to fall apart because their brains aren’t going to be used to the maximum.” (In 1977, Helms was convicted of lying to Congress about the C.I.A.’s machinations in Chile.) What the book is not, unfortunately, is a coherent history of the C.I.A., of the era it depicts, or even of these women’s work.
Holt’s research does turn up evidence that Jane Burrell, one of her subjects, was the first C.I.A. officer to die in the line of duty, in a plane crash in France, in 1948, a fact that the agency itself apparently missed. Holt ends her book with a call for a star honoring Burrell to be added to the C.I.A.’s memorial wall. Of the hundred and thirty-seven officers represented there, she writes, forty-five died accidentally, the majority in plane crashes, meaning that Burrell’s case would be fairly typical. Burrell was on the return leg of a trip to Brussels, where she’d been sent to talk to war-crimes investigators about a mess the C.I.A. had created by relying on an agent who turned out to have worked with the S.S. and was now in custody. In that respect, too, Burrell, who had personally handled the agent, was typical of the C.I.A. (After Burrell vouched for him, the man was released.) The subject of the C.I.A.’s postwar relations with former Nazis—some of whom, like Reinhard Gehlen, it helped to install in West Germany’s new intelligence service—and with collaborationist émigré groups is, no doubt, a morass. Holt, alas, manages to make the story even more garbled than it has to be. In the end, she basically treats the whole sordid episode as a learning experience for the Gals.
The problem is that the agency doesn’t seem to learn much. Holt credits Mary Hutchison with helping to build a network of émigré Ukrainian nationalists. Beginning in 1949, the agency parachuted some of them (including one whom Hutchison apparently distrusted) behind the Soviet border, where they were quickly captured—and repeated the same procedure for a number of years. “Despite the catastrophe, the Ukraine operation would serve as a template moving forward,” Holt writes. “The C.I.A. had more success with back-to-back operations in Iran and Guatemala, where covert action was able to deftly oust leaders considered undesirable.” It’s odd to describe these coups as deft. One of Zegart’s handy lists is of the “unintended consequences” in Iran: “religious extremism, a revolutionary overthrow, the American hostage crisis, severed ties, regional instability, and today’s rising nuclear dangers.” Guatemala is still dealing with the violent legacy of the coup that the C.I.A. visited upon it. Then there’s the question of the intended consequences, which were, respectively, to elevate a shah and a military regime. Secret wars tend not to be so secret in the country where they take place.
It was, no doubt, frustrating for Hutchison when, a few years later, her colleagues on the Bay of Pigs task force failed to make use of her Spanish-language skills. But are we supposed to think that the whole misconceived enterprise would have gone off without a hitch were it not for the C.I.A.’s misogyny? One of Holt’s minor themes is that women in the C.I.A. were seen as more natural analysts than operatives—with analysis, in turn, seen as less manly, and less valuable, to everybody’s detriment. But she is more intent on showing that these women were also daring. The main point of “Wise Gals” is that it’s cool that women were in the early C.I.A., and therefore that the C.I.A. itself was cooler than we’d realized. Holt celebrates a big promotion Page got that afforded her access to the secret of a safe containing shellfish-derived poison. You don’t have to be pale, male, and Yale to be complicit in a bungled assassination plot, or, for that matter, a program of rendition and torture.
Why do so many books about the C.I.A. have trouble getting their story straight? It can’t just be the secrecy of the work itself, at least with regard to the earlier years, about which much has been declassified. (Much remains under wraps: Moynihan complained that classification created more than six million supposed secrets in 1993; Zegart writes that the number in 2016 was fifty-five million—not all of which can possibly have been critical.) The aura of secrecy, by contrast, probably does distort the judgment of its chroniclers. And the scope of the agency’s work is a challenge: it’s hard to write expertly on places as far-ranging as the Democratic Republic of Congo (where the agency initially planned to poison President Patrice Lumumba’s toothpaste, and instead ended up handing a quarter of a million dollars to Joseph Mobutu, the country’s future dictator, who facilitated the assassination) and Afghanistan (where the C.I.A. has had forty years of illusory gains and worse losses). But the biggest problem may be the agency’s own pattern of self-deception. Holt, for example, sometimes seems to go wrong when, rummaging through the archives, she gives too much credit to contemporaneous internal assessments of an agent’s or an operation’s worth.
In truth, the C.I.A. has had a “defining failure” for every decade of its existence—sometimes more than one. For Moynihan, in the nineteen-nineties, it was the lack of foresight about the Soviet Union; in the two-thousands, it was the phantom weapons of mass destruction, followed by torture and, in still evolving ways, by the drone-based program of targeted killings, with its high toll of civilian deaths. Barack Obama’s rapport with John Brennan, the C.I.A.’s director from 2013 to 2017, seems to have brought him to accept the view that the killing of American citizens abroad was acceptable, if managed prudently. The overuse of the agency on the battlefield is due not to a military-manpower shortage but to wishful thinking about the benefits of secrecy and of a lack of accountability.
It’s difficult to know, at this point, what the C.I.A.’s next defining failure—or, if one tries to be optimistic, its stabilizing success—will be. Donald Trump has had a complicated relationship with the intelligence community—increasingly capitalized and abbreviated to I.C.—which is presently conducting a damage assessment regarding documents with classified markings that he kept at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home. He might, of course, be reëlected, and have the C.I.A.’s tools at his disposal again. If the C.I.A. isn’t the place to turn for an expedient solution to foreign-policy problems, neither is it bound to be the place to turn for a solution to our democracy’s political problems.
“If you ask intelligence officers what misperceptions bother them most, odds are they’ll mention ethics,” Zegart writes. She quotes an official who complains that “people think we’re lawbreakers, we’re human rights violators.” She insists that “officers think about ethics a lot.” She portrays the agency as being filled with hardworking moms and dads who do a great deal of “agonizing.” No doubt she’s right. But if the C.I.A. keeps falling down all the same, something must be tragically amiss in the agency’s structure or culture, or both. All the talk of coups and assassination plots, Zegart worries, distracts people from understanding the C.I.A.’s more basic intelligence mission. In fact, the party most distracted by such activities—and by the military role it has taken on—seems to be the agency itself. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the numerical designation of the Space Force unit dedicated to intelligence.
Published in the print edition of the October 10, 2022, issue.

*System Restart\*
I blinked at the text hanging in the air.
A small image of da Vinci’s vitruvian man did calisthenics underneath the words. More information scrolled upwards.
HumanOS Version: 1.0 Model: Vincent J. Carter Serial: 987-65-4329 Battery: 1560 @ 100% Memory: 640/640 Provider: None Network: None Credits: 9360 Expansion: None
The words flashed then swirled and transformed into a small translucent cog that hovered in the top right corner of my vision. Other icons floated into existence across the top of my vision, just like the info bar on a cellphone. An (8E) symbol, signal bars at 100%, and a full battery symbol. The time was currently 16:43 and it was Thursday, June 16th 1885
“What the heck?” I muttered, my voice loud in the silence of the ruined room.
I focused on the cog and a series of icons filled my vision. It took me about two seconds to understand that I could move them around using nothing more than my thoughts.
App Store, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Clock, Gear, Inventory, Map, Notes, System.
“Did… Am I somehow mentally fused with my smartphone?” I wondered aloud. The timeless chaos and the voice were fading to dreamlike memories, a nightmare event that scratched at the edge of my sanity and threatened to overwhelm me. Did that entity think that the cellphone was some part of me?
“Okay, no worries. Let’s get back home and deal with this later.” I grumbled. “Hopefully I don’t run into a protest or riot or get locked up for violating curfew or not wearing a mask.”
I mentally selected [Map]
A transparent map of the room filled my vision along with tiny labels covering everything. Ruined chair, ruined bed, ruined table, rusty knife, leather pouch, unknown book. A moment later I had mastered the controls and zoomed out to find… nothing. The map was blank.
*Local Map Updating…\*
The Local map was updating, possibly because it needed to be filled in by my own exploration? I noticed a couple of icons on the left side of my vision and focused on them. Map Type, Search. Map Type allowed me to switch between Local, Transit, and Terrain.
I flipped between them and was rewarded with better information. The Transit map was like a traditional map, just lines and points of interest with the distance and travel times. I am currently in ‘Ruins of Fort Galos” with a dirt road that leads 3 miles south to “Wendleton Road” which zooms out to run between the cities of Wendleton and Comstock. Another zoom out and I’m located in the Region of Stratford… zoom out…on the continent of North Anglia… zoom out … on the planet of Aerth.
It sort of looks like Earth, if Earth had no polar ice caps. I can recognise the major continents, although most are shaped strangely because the oceans are so high. North America is split completely in two by a huge gulf that eats up all of Louisiana, most of the southern states, and carves a deep furrow all the way up to the Great Lakes and out to the eastern seaboard. Florida is missing, as is most of the eastern seaboard. The map calls that area ‘Colonia’ and it’s marked with a somewhat familiar red, white, and blue flag with just 17 stars. I’m located somewhere near Colorado, but Colorado doesn’t exist anymore. It’s part of Wilmont county in the Region of Stratford in an area called the Midlands.
My hands started shaking. It’s some sort of joke. Some kind of insanity. Some sort of delusion. Or maybe I’m delirious with the damned virus and having a mad dream. Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. Calm down and think rationally. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, inhaling the musty and burnt scents of my new reality.
Okay, if I’m really in some alternate world then maybe things aren’t so bad? I was on the verge of being homeless and now I am homeless, so, nothing has really changed, right? And since I seem to be fused with my smartphone, maybe I can use that to my advantage? I quickly imagined a million ways I could die in a fantasy world and pushed down the panic. No sense in panicking just yet — we can do that later when I’m being burnt at the stake for witchcraft or something.
I flipped back over to Local Map and examined the room again. Leather pouch, rusty knife, and unknown book were located under the rotting carcass of the bed. I approached it and looked carefully to see if I could spot them. I smiled to myself thinking maybe I could make a living as some sort of detective or something, finding lost items with preternatural ability. Unable to see anything in the mass of mushrooms and ferns, I mentally tapped the label “Leather pouch” on the Local Map.
*Place Item in Inventory? [Y/N]\*
I selected [Y] and received a notification. Memory: [639/640]
Huh. It takes up memory.
I pulled the heavy pouch from inventory and into my hand. The leather was dried and stiff, but I managed to open it to reveal 1 golden coin, 50 tarnished silver, 68 copper, and 30 bronze coins.
The copper coins were about the size of a nickel and quite worn, but I could make out the face of some priest with a fancy hat on the face and a hammer and anvil on the reverse. The brass were the size of a quarter and similarly worn, and featured a bull on the face and a sheaf of wheat on the reverse. The silver were the size of a dime and slightly tarnished, with the image of some queen on the face and a crescent moon on the reverse. The gold coin was untouched by time and featured a stern looking king on the face, with a stylised sun on the opposite face. I popped everything back into Inventory.
Huh. It appears that everything I stick into inventory counts against the available memory of 640 that was listed earlier, but coins stack into one slot for each type so now I have 636/640 memory. Not bad, not bad. A little experimentation quickly proved that I could add the ruined chair and table too. One slot each. A seriously overpowered feature that I planned to abuse in the future — just put things in bags and boxes and my Inventory was practically unlimited! I rubbed my hands together like an evil villain. Half an hour ago I was a broke nobody with no future, and now I’m able to start completely fresh with cash and some strange abilities. Thank you strange entity!
It was terrifying and exhilarating. I wanted to dance and puke at the same time.
I placed the Unknown Book into Inventory and it popped into my hands a moment later along with a strong musty aroma. The leather cover was green with mould and swollen with moisture. Carefully flipping through the pages I stared in wonder at the illustrated script. It was like one of those old religious books you see in museums, every page a work of art. Too bad it’s written in some strange language I can’t read. Arabic maybe? Putting it back into Inventory, it took just a moment to figure out that I could get a quick overview of the item. [Unknown Book. A mouldy old book written in an unknown language.]
The rusty knife was what my father would have called a “pig sticker”, with a grubby leather sheath, bone handle, and a thick blade about ten inches long. Even though the blade was spotted with a bit of rust, it seemed to be in decent condition and could probably be salvaged with a whetstone and some oil. It was a weapon, and considering current events, a welcome addition to my new collection of personal possessions.
I kept the ruined chair and table in inventory. Never know when you might need firewood.
The Calculator was pretty cool, selecting it allowed me to mentally perform arithmetic in moments or provided a count of items in my vision. As long as it was open I could just think of a simple maths problem and the answer popped in my head along with a running tally. There was a scientific tab on it, but I didn’t foresee me using cosine functions anytime soon.
The Camera was interesting, allowing me to snap a photo of what I could see, but each picture used one memory although they only took up one Inventory slot. Delete, Delete, Delete.
Calendar was 13 months with 30 days each. The weeks were 6 days long and Monday was missing. Good. I don’t like Mondays. Especially since the days here are 26 hours long. I could also set appointments and reminders.
Clock was a basic clock with alarms and stopwatch function.
Notes was really cool though, it was like virtual paper. I could sketch things with my finger, or use thought-to-text, or even attach photos to the note and save them, which took up one Inventory slot per filename. The Export function created a thick piece of paper that appeared in my hand. Nice. Fire starting material!
It has an Import function too?
I created a new Note, then imported the mouldy book from my Inventory. It appeared as a virtual object in my vision that I could manipulate with a thought. Then I exported it. A popup appeared in my vision and I watched my Battery dip from 1560 down to 1460, then a duplicate appeared in my inventory. Sweet! I could set up shop as a magical print-wizard! Or work as a pack-mule, hauling entire warehouses of goods invisibly. I chuckled to myself imagining that.
However it took 100 battery points, so it wasn’t much of a cheat unless I could reproduce expensive texts. I wonder if it took 100 battery for everything, or if it was based on the complexity of the object?
System had some nice features included. One was Health Monitor, which gave me a general screen of any health issues. Notifications was also nice for popping up things that might be important. Nothing else of real importance, just some little tweaks to the User Interface and the ability to turn off the (8E) connection I had noticed earlier. Airplane mode, I guess.
Another hunch presented itself in the System and I opened up the language setting. English was currently selected. I scrolled through the selection and choose Arabic from the list. A slight wave of dizziness washed over me and I examined the unknown book again. Nope. Still unknown.
I sighed and flipped back to the language settings and noticed there’s an “Auto-Translate” selection. Mentally mashing the illusory button in my User Interface, another wave of dizziness washed over me. This time the unknown book had a tag on it. [Old Avestan - Translate? Y/N]
Duh, yes, translate! An old, unknown book hidden in a burned out room? That just screams Secret Book of Incredibly Over Powered Magic, doesn’t it? Annnnd… Nope. I flipped through the copy and it seems to be nothing more than some religious textbook. Beautifully illustrated, but I’m not getting any magic vibes off of it. I tossed it back in my inventory [Book. Zoroastrian religious text. Professionally Illustrated. 50SP] and continued my journey of self exploration.
When I enabled “Show Hidden Files” in System, it was absolutely terrifying. File names like “Digestion.dna”, “Endocrine.dna” and “Sensory.dna” filled my vision. I disabled that feature as soon as I realised what I was looking at. I’d hate to accidentally delete my sense of taste, or something even more important.
The Service tab under System was confusing. It seemed to be some sort of weird version of a mobile service plan that asked me to choose a Service Provider.
There were dozens of Service Providers to choose from; Industrial Charms & Enchantments, Whitehall Wizard Group, Sorcerer’s United, Atlantis Magic and Enchantment, and a slew of other providers with different tiers named after gemstones and the best offering being the Diamond Unlimited plan that offered ‘unlimited mana and roaming, some limits apply’ for an astronomical amount per month. I could see the service zones of each provider laid out across a map, along with colour coding for the quality of service ranging from 1E to 8E.
I could also choose from various Celestial or Infernal Contracts which had entire pages of TOS benefits and obligations. Another terrifying aspect of my new world.
I decided to dig into that mess later. I had no use for a service provider and picking one was a problem for future-me if I ever needed one.
The Gear icon opened up a minimalist overlay with a picture of me and the items I was wearing. Socks, shorts, underwear, tee-shirt. A mental twitch rotated the image and confirmed that my backside was just as filthy as the floor. Two buttons were visible next to my image, [Custom] and [Labourer]. I selected Labourer and the image shifted to show me wearing work boots, wool socks, denim trousers, leather belt, cotton underwear, cotton pull-over shirt, leather gloves, soft-brim hat. [Select? Y/N]
A mental push of the button and a million indigo motes surrounded me. Two seconds and 10 battery later I was wearing the new gear. And clean! All the grime on my arms and legs had vanished. Seriously, how awesome is that? I still feel like I need a shower though.
[Labourer class selected - Standard] Skills: Lifting, toting, stepping, fetching, shifting, digging, hauling, packing…
Knowledge of menial labour filled my head beyond what I was already familiar with. I somehow knew the most efficient ways to dig a ditch, safely shift a box, casually walk to the water cooler, and slack off while looking busy.
Huh. Did changing my gear change my class? That’s interesting. What happens if I put on a Wizard hat? Would I become some sort of hybrid day-labour wizard with spells for digging ditches? Oh, wait. I have five slots and can fill them with clothing and label them whatever I want.
I opened up the App Store.
Holy. Shitsnacks.
Dozens of icons filled my vision, offering a vast selection of what appeared to be careers? Professions? Classes? Skills?
Archivist, Accountant, Bartender, Book keeper, Cartwright, Con-artist, Farmhand, Herbalist, Hobo, Inn keeper, …Priest, Prostitute, Politician, …Sorcerer, Tailor, …Wizard, Zookeeper.
It was a huge and confusing array of choices.

Hello!
I hope you're all doing well!
Gonna try to keep this under 40k characters... so, the main event is going to be a bit shorter than usual, so if you have questions about that particular fight (or any, really), let me know and i can expand on thoughts and answer those questions!
Also, if you have feedback about the slightly new format, let me know!
(c) - Champ
D/DWCS - Debut/Dana Whites' Contender Series
FLS - Fight Lose Streak
FWS - Fight Win Streak
NS - No Streak
(#x) - Rank in division
x/3 - Confidence Levels
Lets go!
Prelims
Flyweight
Andre Lima (8-0-0, 8 FWS) v Mitch Raposo (D) (9-1-0, 4 FWS) - I feel for Lima here, three changes in opponent during this entire camp, that can’t be easy for the mental stress, but I do think that this last minute change gives Lima that advantage in preparation and cardio and such.
Lima is coming off quite an interesting debut result, in which his opponent straight up chomped on Lima’s arm. For the most part prior to that unique moment, Lima was doing relatively well on the feet, his boxing was crisp and whilst Severino was being pretty effective with his wrestling and pressure, you can almost see Lima settle in the longer the fight went on, and in the second round, he was finding his punches fairly easily, landing at a 66% rate in that second round. That has always been Lima’s main attribute as a boxer, his accuracy is oftentimes high when he fights, never wasting many shots as he sets his own pace and finds his timing, and it’s going to be relatively effective against Raposo who has a slight disadvantage in reach, and has a rather funky style himself, and sometimes funk is fun, but not when you have a sharp boxer opposite you.
Raposo is someone who tried to get into the UFC a while ago via Dana Whites’ Contender Series, but didn’t quite succeed due to a loss against Jake Hadley. Raposo is a fairly well rounded fighter but from the footage that I have seen, he is mostly a stand up fighter who utilises variations of a two to three punch combination, with a bit of an emphasis on his wide right that he tends to swing from a somewhat loaded up position. Now, I do want to point out in a positive light that he does come from the New England Cartel, and that gym generally produces outstanding strikers, but I just think Raposo is a few steps (or leaps) behind the stars of the gym in Kattar and Font. Now, there are positives for Raposo, he shells up relatively well and he doesn’t stay in firing range the whole time, especially when shelling up, he circles away whilst keeping his guard up. The one thing I cannot help but notice though is how exposed his body is to attacks, he isn’t that adaptable when it comes to his defences, and whilst he has a very typical high shell, I can just see Lima exposing the body with strong punches, and given that Raposo isn’t quite prepared properly for a fight against Lima, those body punches could shut him down. Now, Raposo does have a strong right hand, the one he tends to wind up and throw from the same angle at the same speed and such, but once it lands it could certainly cause trouble for Lima.
Lima has incredible potential in the UFC, his boxing is very sharp and I do think that the fact he has been preparing for a fight for quite some time now shows that he has the cardio and the durability to perhaps outlast Raposo, especially if those body shots that I predict will be there, land effectively. I almost want to make him a 2/3 confidence pick, but since he’s new to the UFC, and Raposo does have a bit of danger himself, I don’t feel comfortable putting him that high of a confidence pick. This is a fun first fight of the night.
Lima via KO R2 - (1/3)
Women’s Bantamweight
Joselyne Edwards (+210) (13-5-0, NS) v Ailin Perez (-265) (9-2-0, 2 FWS)
Edwards has had an interesting time in the UFC, she has had rather lacklustre performances against some of the more lower skilled fighters in the division. Edwards was introduced to us fans as a kickboxer from Panama, and for the most part her performances have echoed that style of kickboxing, but she walks into two metaphorical brick walls which hinder her performances. First, her cardio tends to fall apart relatively quickly, she does look fatigued after the second round, heck, even during it, and I do think considering Perez’s skillset is heavily wrestling based, that the fatigue problems will be a bit more prevalent, but that also tends to lead to a different issue that Edwards walks into, and that’s her weight. See, Edwards missed weight a few times in the UFC so far, and whilst those issues on the scales are perhaps anomalous to those two incidences, it does somewhat connect with her fatigue problems, she carries a lot of weight on fight day and that’s all a major contributor to exhaustion and fatigue. As for her record, it’s been stated many times, but she’s been gifted quite a few scorecards… She arguably lost to Pascual, Pudilova and even went to a split decision against Kim Ji-yeon. To say her record is pretty sketchy is putting it lightly. Her style is pretty standard for a boxer or kickboxer, she often strings together decent combinations with a fair bit of power given her size, but her major weakness is defending takedowns, and given that Perez is perhaps the first major wrestler that she is going to face, I suspect she’s going to be struggling to defend those takedowns, especially the longer the fight goes on, when that fatigue problem kicks in (if it kicks in).
Perez on the other hand is slightly more newer to the UFC, having had her debut at 145 against Egger before moving back down to 135 to take on Ashlee Evans-Smith and Pudilova, and it was in those two fights that we truly saw what Perez is capable of. Perez is very dependent on her takedowns, she does not strike a whole lot on her feet, she often uses some strikes to close the distance then level changes for a takedown or a judo throw, in which she then unleashes a lot of ground strikes, and it’s a bit obvious to me that she is going to utilise that exact style against the much taller and longer Edwards. Now, the longer this fight remains on the feet, the more chance Edwards has of pulling away with a win, but I only say that because I know that Edwards is going to have a striking advantage, but her kicks perhaps would be shut down by the wrestling threat of Perez.
This is very much a wrestler versus striker bout, and whilst you might argue that Edwards has shown some wrestling in her last fight against Cornolle, it’s important to know that Cornolle most definitely was not a wrestler so those takedowns would have been relatively easy, and there’s no doubt that Edwards has worked on her wrestling just so she is a more well rounded individual. I still firmly believe that Perez is going to get a win here through her wrestling, and the longer the fight goes on, the more Edwards is most likely to feel that fatigue. I am predicting a KO here, but it is going to be one of those ground and pound TKO’s. It’s also very possible this fight goes the distance so if you want to place a bet, either double chance this one or just have it go o2.5 or something.
Perez via KO R3 - (2/3)
Welterweight
Mickey Gall (+225) (7-5-0, 2 FLS) v Bassil Hafez (-290) (8-4-1, NS) - There is honestly not a lot to say about this one, Gall is severely overrated and a bit of a failed product of the Lookin’ for a fight show, and Hafez still has quite a lot to show us given he went three rounds against future contender Jack Della Maddalena.
Gall is coming off back to back losses over two years ago, so not only is he coming into this fight with a tough losing streak on his record, but those two years away are certainly muddying the waters a bit here. Anyway, Gall is mostly a submission artist, he somewhat thrives on the ground, although that would be a major gamble given the fact that Hafez is very wrestling oriented, and I mean, let's be honest, as long as a wrestler is in top control, it’s very rarely that they get submitted, and it’s not like Gall is some high level BJJ fighter with an impeccable record, he is just someone who has been given somewhat name-worthy opponents and that’s practically it. Gall's best chance to win this fight is on the ground, he needs to stick to his guns in this fight and be incredibly active on the ground or Hafez is going to shut down all of the submission attempts and just smother Gall in pressure. There is a possibility of Gall being somewhat effective on the feet, but a lot of his striking is fairly standard, often really using his grappling over anything else to get a win. One thing I don’t particularly like seeing when it comes to Gall’s striking is he is very still and perhaps too calm when he’s standing in front of someone, he doesn’t move his head a lot and his lead leg is often very out there and exposed, and whilst he does have quite a bit of power in his hands, I just don’t think he’s that capable of being a strong striker, his best skillset really is his BJJ. He is often quick to tie up his opponent or at least grab for a guillotine, and that guillotine will be there for him the more Hafez looks for takedowns, that will probably be the main threat coming from Gall for Hafez in my opinion.
Hafez has only one fight in the UFC but it was against one of the toughest opponents one can possibly debut against in Jack Della Maddalena, and whilst Hafez was simply outmatched on the feet, he persevered and still looked for those takedowns that he very much needed. It is the style of Hafez that will test Gall in this fight, because if Hafez attempted 20 takedowns against JDM who has exceptional takedown defence, I just think Hafez is going to have a bit of an easier time against Gall who is mostly a BJJ fighter who typically has terrible takedown defence, and I mean, this is something i’ve gone on and on about many times before, a good wrestler is a lot better than a good BJJ fighter, and whilst this is not exactly a case of Gall being a good BJJ fighter and Hafez being a good wrestler, that style clash is basically the same. Even if Gall does put up a good defence/offence on the ground, I do think Hafez and his grappling skillset is more than enough to deal with it. Hafez has gorgeous double leg takedowns, I mean, look at this beautiful takedown he used just seconds into his debut against JDM, he can do this over and over again, and realistically, he just needs to do this for the first two rounds, then he pretty much gets a win, but I think it’s going to be a relatively one sided wrestling attack by Hafez, and a few defensive submission attempts by Gall like guillotines or arm triangles off his back.
This is a great fight to be honest, I was rather impressed by the grit and determination of Hafez, he was getting torn up on the feet by JDM but still was willing to try and wrestle, resulting in a split decision loss, but an immeasurable amount of experience gained. I think Hafez gets a win here, but I only say that because I just don’t know how Gall is going to look coming off of a two year hiatus. We have sometimes seen insane improvements from fighters who take a few years off, so it’s possible Gall could look incredibly good, but based on what I know for “certain”, I think Hafez has this one.
Hafez via UD - (1/3)
Welterweight
Niko Price (+210) (15-7-0, 2 FLS) v Alex Morono (-260) (24-9-0, NS)
Morono is coming off a fairly competitive back and forth fight against McGee, and whilst he got the win, he didn’t look too great in there in all honesty. Morono does quite a few things with his striking that looks very funky and silly, he plods around a lot, his open elbow stance leaves him very open to being attacked, which often plays into his speed advantage in his fights as he can easily retaliate very quickly and land some thunderous punches. Morono is a very powerful boxer and he often uses a very quick left body or inside/outside leg kick with his boxing combinations just to add more sting to the sequence. However, as much as I find his striking style to be very unorthodox, what I do love about him is his grappling. Morono has ridiculously good BJJ, and whilst he doesn’t have the best takedown defence to take full control of his grappling ability, he is very, very good off his back. During his fight against Court McGee, he jumped the Guillotine, and whilst he didn’t successfully submit McGee, he was proactive in chasing an armbar off his back instead… It is the activity off the bottom that makes him a dangerous grappler and it’s always great to see. Now, Morono most likely has a fairly big power advantage here, and given that Price is coming off back to back KO losses, there is some question about whether or not his chin is durable enough to handle the right hand of Morono, and boy that right hand is a tough one to deal with.
Price is indeed coming off a KO loss against Robbie Lawler, and whilst it’s a tough loss for anyone, I do think that he still offers a great deal of threat for Morono, and whilst one might imagine the threat is going to be mostly his punching power, volume and other delicious words, I firmly believe that Price is going to chew up the legs of Morono very early and very often. Price is a fantastic leg kicker, he lands about one third of his strikes to the legs most of the time, and given that Morono is a very “plodding” stance fighter, I just cannot help but imagine that Price is going to land phenomenal leg kicks throughout this fight. However, the counter for leg kicks is, as we all should know by now, a power side attack, and if Price gets hit by that right hand, the momentum could shift very quickly. Now, if the fight ends up on the ground, I do think that Morono is going to swarm Price with overwhelming pressure and activity, given that Morono has excellent BJJ, and Price isn’t exactly that well versed on the ground.
As long as Price avoids the grappling and wrestling of Morono, he has a solid chance to win this fight, but I do think if he attacks the legs early and slows down the forward aggression of Morono, he could pull out an upset here, but that’s a bit of a big order given the threat of Morono’s quick one-two and his ability to utilise a wide range of attacks throughout all three rounds. This is very much a 50/50 fight though, I don’t feel confident at all in either fighter to win, and whilst I think Morono has more tools and more pathways to victory, Price could indeed surprise us this weekend.
Morono via UD - (1/3)
Welterweight
Phil Rowe (+135) (10-4-0, NS) v Jake Matthews (-165) (19-7-0, NS) - This is certainly a fascinating fight, but the first thing that screams at me is the size difference between Rowe and Matthews.
Rowe is coming off a back and forth, relatively slow and unimpressive fight against Magny, and whilst the fight took place in the clinch for the large majority of the fight, I did enjoy watching him use his reach by throwing that quick one-two down the pipe, and its that one-two that is going to be fairly problematic for Matthews given the fact that Rowe has an 8 inch reach advantage. I do believe that if Rowe keeps this fight clean, he has a major advantage here, but there is a glaring problem that I can see Matthews expose, and that’s the lack of defence that Rowe has. Whilst his ranged attacks are relatively effective, I do not like how hittable he is because he does not use footwork a lot, he just stands in front of his opponents target zone, kind of eating punches whilst trying to maintain his range. This is a problem for Rowe in this fight because Matthews is the type to push forward at a strong pace and let his own hands go effectively. Rowe has a phenomenal right hand, it is very accurate and thanks to the reach advantage, I don’t think he needs to show it off too much for it to be effective, he would just need to pop it out there in order to have it land. Now, Magny did make the fight gritty in the third round when they fought, and I did notice that whenever a pocket exchange is initiated, Rowe is on the receiving end of the harder shots, and that is primarily due to his lack of footwork and evasive movement in that particular bout, and whilst he did underperform during his fight against Magny, I do think he has the sharper, straighter punches that could be problematic for Matthews if Matthews is unable to close the distance and enter the pocket effectively.
Matthews is coming off a tough loss against Michael Morales, and it was in that fight that we saw Matthews get hit the most in his UFC career, receiving 84 significant strikes, although I think it’s fair to say that Matthews’ incredible defence allowed him to absorb those significant strikes without much serious damage. Matthews’ defence is actually one of the most impressive things I have seen, he shells up so effectively whilst leaving his stance open enough for aggressive retaliation. Everything Matthews throws comes with him immediately shelling up and moving off the centre line, he is impeccable with his defensive timing, and whilst he has been stumbled and rocked before, he has never really been in dire trouble. I do see Matthews using his overhand left followed by a quick duck followed by a straight right, that is his best entrance for the pocket and it is something he has used incredibly well against Morales. It is this exact style which makes his fight against Rowe a phenomenal match up because we have seen Rowe struggle when an opponent enters range, and I think Matthews is a lot more quick and explosive with forward momentum than Magny is. Plus, it helps that Matthews is such a gritty fighter, constantly moving forward and putting on strong pressure even if he gets hit, and that’s mostly due to his defence, he is just so good at absorbing and blocking damage whilst moving forward.
It honestly is a bit of a story between who can initiate their gameplan a bit better. For Rowe, he needs to be active at range, on the feet, he needs to use that quick one-two to freeze up Matthews and just eventually find the chin, because the chin is there, especially if feints are involved because Matthews does instinctively shell up a lot when something is coming his way, feint or otherwise. However, I do see Matthews making this a chaotic fight, especially since he loves to enter the range by weaving into the pocket, where Rowe is perhaps at his most uncomfortable. I got Matthews winning this one, I think his experience is going to shine here, as well as the fact that his defensive habits are going to be pivotal in mitigating a lot of the dangerous shots coming his way. I am not very confident in Matthews, I do see Rowe being dangerous at range still, but I just think Matthews ability to enter the pocket here is going to be the main story here.
Matthews via UD - (1/3)
Lightweight
Grant Dawson (#15) (-320) (20-2-1, NS) v Joe Solecki (+250) (13-4-0, NS)
Dawson is coming off a rough KO loss against Bobby Green, and that was always going to be one of the main outcomes for that fight since Green has excellent boxing, and thankfully for Dawson, that boxing or striking threat will be mostly gone here since Solecki isn’t at all a striker. Dawson is a very well rounded fighter who is incredibly effective on the ground, he is someone who is able to keep up a high pace of activity and still have enough cardio to be explosive, and I do think that the UFC is kind of making this fight a “comeback” fight for Dawson because I honestly don’t think Solecki has enough of an all round threat to make this interesting for Dawson. Dawson is going to employ the same strategy he has done in almost all of his fights, and that’s wrestle and control, he is so good at maintaining advantageous positions on the ground and the longer he is in top control, the worse it is for Solecki whose only chance to win this fight is to find a submission off his back, but since Dawson has ridiculously good wrestling and grappling himself, I think he can see any set up that Solecki attempts coming. On the feet I could say Dawson has the advantage here, but I don’t think a lot of the fight is going to take place on the feet, I think there’s going to be a lot of wrestling involved with Dawson being in the better positions.
Solecki is a sneaky fighter though, and whilst he has had some underwhelming fights, I do think the threat of his submissions are going to be fairly prevalent. I don’t think those submissions are going to land. Now, I will put a major disclaimer here saying I have struggled to find a lot of “working” tape for Solecki, and I have been unable to find what submission attempts he used against Alex Da Silva when they fought two years ago, I only bring this up because I believe Solecki is active off his back and if he is lucky he could at least make Dawson’s control time a bit more difficult, but I still don’t think Solecki has that kind of threat to catch Dawson in anything, so whilst he might be active off his back and in the guard, it’s going to be the kind of activity that results in Dawson just adjusting over and over.
I don’t really have much else to say about this one, Dawson is the better all round fighter and a much better wrestler, and I do think that whilst both fighters have outstanding BJJ, Solecki’s submission output could make it a bit gritty for Dawson, but this isn’t new for Dawson, Dawsons faced excellent grapplers before (Ismagulov, Madsen and Gordon to name his recent wins). Dawson should win this one in my opinion.
Dawson via UD - (2/3)
Middleweight
Roman Kopylov (-135) (12-3-0, NS) v Cesar Almeida (+115) (5-0-0, 5 FWS)
Kopylov is coming off a tough submission loss against Alexander Hernandez, and it was a competitive fight up until that point. One thing that I like about Kopylov is his diversity with striking, he is ridiculously quick on the feet for a Middleweight and that allows him to simply flick out anything and there’s some certainty that it’s going to land. He has a very quick and sneaky lead leg kick that he often uses to change target very quickly, usually kicking the leg then following up with a left straight, instead of what we see in typical combinations where the leg kick is the final attack in a sequence. Kopylov does get hit a lot, and he does leave his right hand a bit far from his face, which makes me think that Almeida and his fantastic left hook is going to be a major problem for Kopylov. However, Kopylov does have some grappling in his arsenal, although we have yet to see it in the UFC, but since he is a multiple time sambo champion, I can’t help but think that he is going to be using his wrestling a fair bit in this fight, especially since he is facing one hell of a dangerous kickboxer, it would only make some sense, right? Now, on the feet, there are two attacks that Kopylov is going to put a major emphasis on, that is the liver body kick (left roundhouse) and the left straight, those two attacks are going to be his most damaging and I do wonder how effective it will be in slowing down Almeida.
Almeida is coming off a strong debut win against Budka, and whilst Budka isn’t exactly a tough debut, he still managed to test Almeida a little bit on the ground. However, as I highlighted in my last write up about Almeida, his defensive grappling is very, very good, he has adapted exceptionally well to MMA. Now, Almeida is one hell of a dangerous kickboxer, he is stupendously sharp on the feet and he is tight with his combinations, and it is for that reason alone that I think Kopylov needs to wrestle in this fight, use his Sambo to mix it up and make it frustrating for Almeida. Now, Almeida is outstanding at all ranges, but I think he excels in the pocket where he can land his tight left hook, a left hook that’s eerily similar to Pereira, it’s just a clean left hook that has no read and a lot of power behind it, and I think Kopylov is going to have to be the first one to start the action in order to not let Almeida settle in to throw that hook.
This is going to be a fantastic fight though, and honestly a fascinating match up for Kopylov who, up until this moment, only faced standard MMA strikers who throw big power with not that much technique, so this is going to be fascinating. Going with the underdog here, but it will absolutely not be a high confidence pick.
Almeida via KO R2 - (1/3)
Main Card
Welterweight
Randy Brown (-155) (18-5-0, 2 FWS) v Elizeu Zaleski (+130) (24-7-1, 1D/2FWS) - This is going to be absolutely awesome.
Brown is coming off a fantastic KO over highly touted kickboxing veteran Muslim Salikhov, and despite the fact that Brown did defeat Salikhov, it did not come without a lot of damage coming his way. Brown suffers a little bit from what a lot of longer and taller fighters suffer from, and that's a lack of fundamental striking defence, his range and reach is his defence, if someone can penetrate that reach difference and enter the pocket, then Brown is a vulnerable target in that moment. However, when Brown is at range and he’s in the zone, he is incredible. His long jab is his best weapon, he uses it to both damage his opponent and to set up subsequent punches, and these shots aren’t always the same, there are so many permutations of that same set up, as soon as you see Brown throw more than one jab, you know he is setting up a clean combination. However, he has shown a bit of a weakness and that’s his legs, he is so easy to leg kick due to his height and size, his lead leg is ripe for the taking and there is little doubt in my mind that Zaleski is going to chew up those legs early, as that was the game plan for Salikhov before that one-one-two combination came his way at ridiculous speeds.
Zaleski is coming off a draw against Rinat Fakhretdinov, and very early on we saw Zaleski struggle with the pressure and power of Fakhretdinov. That pressure and power is not exactly the style of fighting that Brown utilises, Brown is a lot more patient and systematic with his approach, never pressuring his opponent but keeping a constant pace of a wide sort of attacks. Zaleski has ridiculous power in his hands though and he has the speed and explosiveness to enter the pocket and land those dangerous punches that are going to land whenever he is going to enter the pocket during this bout. However, Zaleski does not have the best defence, he often leaves his hands a bit low, and whilst that’s great for an explosive overhand or a quick burst of action that’s hard to read, I don’t think that’s a good kind of defence when you’re fighting someone who has a 5 inch reach advantage and a 4 inch height advantage. Zaleski is not a safe fighter, he is here to perform and look for highlights, he is an incredible finisher, but he is also reckless, he is also susceptible to getting hurt, and whilst he did exceptionally well against Fakhretdinov, that was mostly due to Fakhretdinov’s predictable attacks. Now, Fakhretdinov threw the same attacks over and over, and since that same attack was the one that dropped Zaleski, he kept using that same thing. In order to be effective in any combat sport, especially against a veteran, you need to have different combinations, and that’s exactly what Brown has, he has such a wide range of attacks, including his very snappy front and head kicks, so there is little doubt that Zaleski is going to be somewhat overwhelmed on the feet if Brown finds his groove early on.
This is a fantastic fight, perhaps one of the best fights on this card, I expect there to be fireworks and a lot of adjustments as the rounds go on, but I do think that Brown is going to get a win here, his reach and height advantage gives him a lot of additional set ups and effective strikes, those front kicks up the middle could be effective given the loose shell of Zaleski, and those long one-two punches that Brown uses are just beautiful to watch. This is going to be awesome. Now, before I get to the prediction… Zaleski has the right tools to make this messy enough to get a win here, so there will be an alt bet here for a Zaleski Points/KO Double Chance.
Brown via UD - (1/3)
Heavyweight
Jailton Almeida (#6) (-300) (20-3-0, NS) v Alexandr Romanov (#14) (+240) (17-2-0, NS)
Almeida is coming off a KO loss against Blaydes just a few months ago, and I mean, losing to someone like Blaydes isn’t too big of a deal since Blaydes is a genuine talent in the division, but I do wonder how Almeida has improved since that loss. Almeida is a very grapple heavy fighter who has torn through a division full of unathletic brawlers, and now he is facing fighters who have a very similar style and skill set that he has, which makes this fight all that more interesting because I have been very high on Romanov in recent years, mostly due to his style being unique in the heavyweight division. Almeida has ridiculous cardio for someone at heavyweight, and whilst you could argue that his lay and pray style does not really reflect great cardio… how often are we going to see Blaydes get taken down 9 of 13 times. 13 fucking attempts against someone who has one of the best wrestling backgrounds in the UFC at heavyweight? Almeida’s wrestling is going to be a problem for a lot of people, even as we move up the division, but it comes at a cost. Almeida is very one dimensional, he has a heavy reliance on those takedowns, and if he doesn’t get them, you get a repeat of what Blaydes did to him. On the feet I don’t see a lot happening, Almeida has shown to be a bit more free with his boxing, only to open up his opponent to takedowns, and that could very well be the gameplan for Almeida this weekend, box a little then shoot for a takedown, and it could be effective against Romanov who is a bit more one dimensional than Almeida.
Romanov has somewhat stagnated a tiny bit in his career, with a not-very-recent win over Blagoy Ivanov, and for the most part it was a strong showing of his wrestling ability and strength, however I do question the quality of opponent that Romanov has defeated in comparison to Almeida’s… It seems that Almeida has been given the more star-power names whereas Romanov has been climbing the ranks in a more natural way. Anyway, I like Romanov, but I genuinely don’t think he is going to fare well against someone like Almeida. If an old 40+ year old in Espino can out wrestle Romanov, there is no doubt that a younger and perhaps more athletic fighter in Almeida can replicate that same kind of style and just overwhelm Romanov. Romanov is a strong competitor though so I think there might be enough resistance in the wrestling department to make this fight a long, gruelling one.
A very fun clash of similar styles here, which I find pretty important since Almeida is a very impressive fighter, and I think the more we see him take on opponents with a similar style to himself, the more we get to see what he is truly capable of. I got Almeida winning this one, it should be a fun fight!
Almeida via UD - (2/3)
Middleweight
Kevin Holland (-250) (25-11-0, 2 FLS) v Michal Oleksiejczuk (+200) (19-7-0, NS) - Oh man do I love this fight.
Holland is coming off back to back losses against JDM and MVP (Jack Della Maddalena and Michael “Venom” Page”), and whilst back to back losses could easily make people dismiss Holland, I do want to bring up how competitive his fight against JDM was, and how durable and tough he was when MVP was taking his soul in what was such a brilliant display of unorthodox kickboxing. Holland has always been a game fighter, he has a chin that allows him to hang in there with the hardest hitters, and he is genuinely a very skilled fighter who has outstanding boxing and such an expert at range and luring his opponent into an angle that gives him an advantage. Holland is coming back up to 185 after a fun stint at 170, and since Oleksiejczuk has very little wrestling threat, I am excited to see if we witness Holland be himself once again, because prior to his losses against Brunson and Vettori at 185, he was a dangerous fighter. Holland has a substantial reach advantage coming into this fight which is only going to shine even more when Oleksiejczuk tries to box him in a typical boxing range. Holland is also a fairly experienced grappler, he has quite a few submissions on his record and I do think that if he wants the path of least resistance when fighting Oleksiejczuk, he is going to look for that takedown and find a submission. However, that’s not how Holland fights, he is a crowd pleaser and is most likely going to want to keep this fight standing so he can land his quick combinations at range and just put away Oleksiejczuk that way.
Oleksiejczuk is coming off a tough sub loss against Pereira, and I honestly learnt nothing else about him during that fight, he was still looking for those heavy punches, and he still had somewhat bad takedown defence. I do think that Oleksiejczuk’s best chance to win this fight is to put Holland away, but it’s just a bit of a tall order because if Holland couldn’t get knocked out by the ridiculous power of MVP, I don’t think Oleksiejczuk is going to achieve that success that MVP tried to chase. The reach disadvantage is going to be fairly prominent here too, it’s going to make Oleksiejczuk rush in a little bit with some explosive forward movement in order to cover the distance, but Holland is so good at crowding punches and being hard to hit that I just don’t think Oleksiejczuk is going to land too cleanly on Holland.
With that said, I’ve always been a fan of Holland so maybe there is a bit of bias here, but I think Holland wins this one, i’m just mostly curious to see how he looks when he returns to 185 this weekend.
Holland via KO R2 - (2/3)
Co-Main Event
Middleweight
Sean Strickland (#2) (-205) (28-6-0, NS) v Paulo Costa (#8) (+170) (14-3-0, NS)
Strickland is coming off a very competitive fight against Dricus Du Plessis, and whilst he arguably won that fight, what I was most impressed with was the little amount of damage he absorbed, even by one of the most powerful punchers in DDP, and if Strickland could absorb that little amount of damage from DDP, I can only think that he is going to be relatively fine against Costa. Strickland does struggle a little bit in turning up the pressure when pressure is needed, he does have a bit of a predictable style which has been talked about for ages, but it’s a style that works, and if he sets a high pace of steady volume and walks Costa back throughout the fight, he can easily win this fight. The only thing that Strickland needs to be careful of is the power of Costa coming back his way.
Costa is coming off a tough loss against Whittaker, and whilst he did display that power late into the first round, he struggled to keep up with the speed and footwork of Whittaker. Now, the good news for Costa is that Stricklands footwork only involves walking forward, and occasionally taking a step back, there is no tricky blitzes or anything, so the striking success rate for Costa should be at least more stable numerically in the second and third if he doesn’t succumb to the pressure and slow down in those two rounds. However, I don’t trust Costa’s gas tank that much, he may be a physical specimen but the power he throws with is unsustainable for a three round back and forth, and it’s certainly not the first time Strickland has fought a powerhouse. My main concern however is the judges scorecards, and I know its a bit weird to talk about judging, but when you have big action fighters throwing things that aren’t super effective, the visuals reflect effectiveness, regardless of the supposed damage received, will the judges this fight see Costa throw heavy, despite not landing cleanly (which is hard to do against Strickland) and give the rounds to Costa? If that is the case, then a Costa Decision certainly should be in your books, but I just think that Strickland and his 4 inch reach advantage is going to be too effective in stifling the aggression of Costa.
I ultimately have Strickland winning this fight, I never really have been big on Costa, he’s a fun fighter to watch, but when you have Strickland taking away a lot of that fun by marching down a lot of his opponents, you get a Costa that struggles to keep up a bit. This is going to be a low confidence pick due to the judging factor, I have a weird feeling about this one lol.
Strickland via UD - (1/3)
Main Event
Lightweight Championship Bout
Islam Makhachev (c) (-480) (25-1-0, 13 FWS) v Dustin Poirier (#5) (+360) (30-8-0, NS)
Makhachev is one of the most well rounded fighters in the UFC at the moment. Everything he does is with clean technique and outstanding timing, and he has the cardio to keep up a ridiculously high pace for 5 rounds. There is no doubt in my mind that he is going to be using his brilliant wrestling and grappling to slowly dismantle Poirier, because Poirier’s grappling is rudimentary at best, it does not hold a candle to Makhachevs wrestling. There is a lot of discussion about Poirier landing a guillotine on Makhachev, but it’s all hype and hope at this rate because if he could not land a guillotine on BSD, he probably isn’t going to land one against a high level wrestler in Makhachev. Makhachev is a few steps behind when it comes to boxing though, I do not see him being successful against Poirier on the feet, Poirier’s striking is sublime, it is the most brilliant close range striking that you’ll probably ever see in the LW division, those tight hooks he uses is something nasty.
Poirier is on his last legs career wise, there is quite a lot weighing on him for this one as it is his final chance to get a belt, so that’s already a lot of pressure, but I guess he thrives in this kind of environment. Poirier is going to have to contend with the almost instant wrestling pressure and pace of Makhachev, and given that Poirier is not at all a wrestler, he is going to get taken down, he got taken down quite a few times when he fought a very depleted BSD, and now he’s coming up against a very physically ready Makhachev, I just don’t see Poirier doing too well in the wrestling department against Makhachev. However, when it comes to the striking, Poirier holds all the cards here, he has incredible timing with his lead hook and if he times it right, that uppercut could be disastrous for Makhachev. It’s going to be the hook and the uppercut that catch Makhachev, but if Makhachev can survive those attacks and get his hands wrapped around Poirier, it’s not going to matter if Poirier rocks Makhachev in the process, Makhachev is insane in top position.
That’s the story here, Poirier’s boxing versus Makhachevs wrestling and grappling. I got Makhachev winning this one, but it is always a good idea to sprinkle a bit of money on a Poirier KO, especially since he’s such a big underdog here.
Makhachev via Sub R2 - (2/3)
And that's it!
Primary Parlay - Price/Morono o2.5 or GTD + Dawson/Solecki o2.5 or GTD + Almeida/Kopylov ITD + Makhachev/Poirier ITD
Secondary Parlay - Price/Morono o2.5 or GTD + Almeida/Romanov R3 Starts Yes + Strickland/Costa o2.5 + Makhachev/Poirier u3.5 or ITD
Locks: Perez (optional), Dawson, Almeida, Holland and Makhachev.
Prediction Accuracy for 2024: 64.3%
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So this goes back during the “look what you made me do” era she says the line “I’ll be the actress staring in your bad dreams. I’m seven and I have this very lucid apocalyptic dream Taylor starts Armageddon and I’m moving place to place to survive until I wake up . That dream just interested me cause how the hell did Taylor star in my bad dream just cause she said so and why did she start the damn apocalypse. Definitely isn’t that deep at face value a child she’s something and dreams about it that’s normal just recently though she’s been seen and outed as just like the rest of the stupidly rich so could this have been a premonition 🔮

The world has gone mad.
Global pandemic. Civil protests. Riots. Inept leadership. Corruption. Propaganda. World powers shifting uneasily as tensions rise. World War III feels like it’s just one wrong move away.
And I’m trapped here in my crappy little apartment because of quarantine.
Well, not trapped exactly. I could go out and participate in socially distant activities, or join the protests downtown, but I’m too damn depressed to get off the sofa. With everything shut down, I’m currently laid-off temporarily and living on the last of my savings, which consists mostly of ramen and canned veggies. My current hobbies include selling everything I own for rent money, lying on a sofa that was abused by a fraternity back in the 80s, and distracting myself with a crappy smartphone that was outdated when I bought it three years ago. I’ve sold everything else. Television, game console, tablet, computer, and all my games. Material things don’t matter when you don’t have a place to store them.
“I’m not a loser,” I whisper to myself. “I’m not stupid. I’m a hard worker. I’m just stressed and depressed as fuck.”
A century ago I could have just headed out into the wilderness and been a prospector, panning for gold and silver in the hills. I could have hired out as a cowboy, riding the open range and herding the cattle for one of the big ranches. Or been a hired gun. Or a bounty hunter. Considering how desperate I am right now, I would probably fall into a gang of outlaws robbing stage coaches and banks, vanishing across the border to drink and gamble until the money was gone.
Good thing I’m not much of a drinker, I guess.
\Ding**
A text interrupts my idle contemplation of shadows on the ceiling. Lifting my crappy smartphone off my chest, I thumb open the message app. It’s a group text from my boss at iBox Co.
“Hey guys. I know this is a horrible way to deliver the news, but I gotta close the business. Thanks for all the hard work and good luck in the future.”
I drop the phone back onto my chest and it pulses faintly with the beating of my heart.
\Ding**
I check the new text. It’s from my mobile service provider.
“Your automatic bill pay has failed. Please update your account or call the service department.”
Well, duh. No job, no money. No money, no life. Rent due at the end of the week. Supposedly they can’t evict you during quarantine, but they said nothing about the land lord disconnecting the water and power. John down in apartment 2B has been living like a caveman for the last 3 weeks, stubbornly refusing to move out. I wonder if that’s how I’ll end up? Alone in the dark, cooking ramen over a candle.
\Ding**
\Ding**
\Ding**
A quiet rage builds in my gut. Bad news, bad news, bad news. Nothing but bad news and more bad news. Estranged from my divorced parents because I refused to pick sides. Kicked out of college for poor academic performance. Scholarship gone. Girlfriend gone. Job gone. Money gone.
Frustrated at my helplessness, I clench my fist around the phone and fling it behind me.
\Smash**
“Ah shit,” I grumble aloud, instantly regretting my impulsive action and rolling over to survey the damage.
The remains of a fancy framed mirror I had bought for a few bucks at an estate sale hung on the wall, smashed into pieces with my smartphone sticking through it like a ninja star. “How the heck did that happen?” I asked myself, staring in disbelief. I liked that mirror. It was one of the first non-essential purchases I had made after I moved in and I thought it gave the otherwise bare wall some needed character. Now it was shattered into pieces just like everything else in my life.
Crawling off the ratty sofa, I walked over to examine the damage. Pieces of thick glass hung from the frame like jagged teeth, reflecting my too-skinny body in a dozen slivers of reality. My cheap smartphone was embedded in the middle of the mirror and apparently halfway into the wall behind it. Prying away a few shards of glass to survey the damage, a strange pattern was revealed on the wood panel underneath the glass. Wriggling a larger piece loose cost me a nasty slice on my finger and I sucked on it while picking away the remainder of the glass. When everything was clear, my phone was revealed to be smashed through a silvery spiderweb of lines and symbols, apparently merged with the wall like a piece of modern art.
I tried to pull it loose with my good hand, but it was wedged in there tight. Gripping with both hands I tugged and twisted until it was slick with blood from my finger. “What the actual hell?” I said, peering at point where the phone merged with the wood backing of the mirror and the wall. I ran my fingers around the edge of the phone, trying to find where it was stuck and smearing the entire area with bloody fingerprints until it looked like a crime scene.
I gripped it again with both hands and began tugging.
\Ringtone**
My phone began to buzz and vibrate in my hand while the melody of a popular AOP song played. The strange silvery pattern my phone was embedded in lit up like a Christmas tree, glowing with thousands of colours that began chasing each other in time with the music. I instinctively jerked away, but my hands were stuck to the phone.
I couldn’t let go. My fingers were welded to the device! Panicked, I flopped around like a fish on a hook as the bluish light crawled over the phone and up my arms. Some force yanked me into the wall up to my elbows and I started screaming like a little girl with a wasp in her hair.
Then it pulled me completely into the wall.
I disintegrated into a cloud of artificial confetti, falling through synthetic colours and genetically modified sounds. Nothing made sense. The world was a boiling pot of salty madness and I was a shattered jar of elbow macaroni. Eternity passed in a cloud of steam.
“Ah, poor lost thing. What are you doing here?”
A soothing voice laid a foundation for my consciousness and I grabbed at it.
plehhhellephelpeeemeehelpmme
“You are near dissolution. I’ll do my best.”
Invisible fingers pushed and tugged and squeezed and formed the clay of my existence back into me. The last few months of my life flipped by, an embarrassing montage of manga, anime, Red Dead Redemption, and masturbation. Lots of masturbation.
“I’ve done everything I could. I’ll send you through your destination, or close to it. Your kind is not meant to be here without a guardian, remember that.”
Glass shattered into a million fragments as I emerged from that dark realm and tumbled across the ground.
I sucked in a deep breath, choking on soot and the distinct aroma of bird shit.
When the world stopped whirling around me, I opened my eyes. Above me were burnt rafters covered in bird shit and the remains of a roof. Sunlight painted one soot-covered stone wall in the golden hues of a summer afternoon. After a moment, I realised that I felt pretty good. Really good. Like I could run a marathon. Climbing to my feet, I wiped my grimy hands on my shirt. The back was probably a ruin of shit and soot already, so keeping the front clean didn’t make sense.
The room was a ruin. A fire had obviously raged through here some time ago. A wood chair was collapsed in a corner near a fireplace, along with what appeared to be the remains of a table. Shattered bits of glass were scattered all around a large ornate standing mirror frame, the one that I had apparently exited from. A large mound of mushrooms and ferns grew in another corner on what was possibly a bed at one time. Behind me a fire ravaged door hung on blackened timbers.
*System Restart\*
I blinked at the text hanging in the air.

So, there is a mini-community of people who deny the existence of an og timeline. Let's consider what their arguments are.

1. If there was an og timeline, Eobard should have never appeared in 2016. Thawne is from an alternate timeline. Why and how would his origin end up tying into the new timeline that S1 Thawne created? It's also hinted that Eobard gets the idea of stealing Harrison Wells' face in Season 1 when he sees Harry Wells in Season 2. But this doesn't really make sense since the Thawne from Season 1 was from an alternate timeline therefore, he couldn't have met Harry Wells because the timeline he meets him in wouldn't have been created yet. First we have to acknowledge the fact that thawne's knowledge of the past is flawed and maybe he believes things have happened differently than they did. Why was Cisco and the timeline about to be ruptured in Episode 2x11 when Thawne was imprisoned. If this Thawne is not the same thawne from season 1, then that doesn't make any sense. It's simple, because this timeline is his true origin, and keeping him there in the pipeline would prevent the season 1 events from happening. Cause AND effect, period. Plus, if Eobard from 2x11 was a time remnant, then locking him up would NOT almost kill Cisco or erase him from the timeline as Eobard is a time REMNANT meaning he's from a timeline that no longer exists, but the fact that it affected Cisco in the show's timeline when they locked Thawne up, proves he is from THIS timeline not an "OG" timeline. They were wrong when they said Thawne was a time remnant. Harry said this, "This is how he learns about STAR labs, This is how he learns about me, how he learns about you, the harrison wells from this earth, this is his origin story." Notice that Thawne said, "this ability to travel through time revealed the truth was to become your greatest enemy" That means he existed LONG before making his time jump in 2x11 of The Flash. Note, he actually said that it was his origin story. That proves that it had always been like this, not the 2020 crap that so many people keep saying. Thawne simply confused Earth 2 Wells as Earth 1 Wells. Hence Harry saying, "this is where he learns about me."
   
2. The fact that killing Nora Allen herself didn't make "original timeline" RF vanish from existence, even when he's from a timeline where the Flash gets his powers in 2020 and his existence wasn't bound to the Nsf. If the Flash who got his powers in 2020 vanished, since he was the one who "bedazzled the crowd" and not the one who got his powers in 2016, an entirely different Flash, then the "original timeline" Reverse Flash should've vanished along with him. The only way for the Reverse Flash to still be alive is the fact that our Flash in this timeline was indeed the one that stole Thawne's glory in the future. Because as the theory proved, his existence was entirely time-bound (before someone comes and says "the NSF prevented him from fading out of existence"...
   
3. He showed to have problems with his speed throughout season 1
   
4. Rewatch Armageddon. That precious NSF didn't save him there, did it?) If Future Flash truly disappeared, then that "original timeline" Reverse Flash should've joined him in disappearing. If that timeline didn't come to exist anymore, neither would that version of RF exist anymore. Instead, the "original timeline" RF stays in 2000 and plays out the events of the show to create the Flash, not at an earlier time, JUST HOW IT WAS MEANT TO HAPPEN. If an "OG RF" sits and creates the Flash earlier, and if "OG RF" can exist in an entirely new timeline where "OG Flash" vanishes??
   
5. "In the year 2020, you and your wife, Tess Morgan, SUCCESFULLY launched a Particle Accelerator that changed the course of history. I need it to happen a bit sooner if I'm going to get back. Much sooner." Keywords: succesfully. Thawne says it was a "successful" launch which negates the possibility of an explosion.What Eobard meant by "a lot sooner" was the construction of the particle accelerator(S.T.A.R. Labs). We know from the pilot episode its true purpose is to bring advancements to science and medicine which would negate the possibility of an explosion Building and exploding the PA is the best way for him to be 100% sure Flash is created. "Maybe that's why Wells LET the particle accelerator explode, so that you could become The Flash." Keywords: let. Also in the 1x23 scene where Wellsobard talks to Barry about the particle accelerator. "The last time that happened, you caused an EXPLOSION that hurt a lot of people." "This time, the accelerator will operate EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS DESIGNED TO." Keywords: explosion, exactly the way it was designed to. So: Whatever Eobard said to E1-Wells when he killed him. It's more likely falsified information from Gideon. Not to mention he said it was a successful launch. A successful launch negates the possibility of Barry gaining his powers in the year 2020. He also never added the word "explosion" to the "particle accelerator" words. DeVoe's wife knew it blows off; Thawne made it blow off, Harry knew his blows off; that's why he tried to contain the dark matter explosion, but still failed despite being so technologically advanced. I find it stupid that E1 Wells couldn't know it blows off(he was a scientist after all) Also he would have never turned it on if he knew it spreads dark matter around Central City. After all that guy cared for humanity. I find it also stupid that he could successfully launch it without it to explode: Someone who is technologically limited in comparision to Harry. I think that's why Gideon didn't tell Barry who Thawne was in the Time Vault because the s1 outcome would have played differently.
   
6. When we see the 15 years ago scene from Harribard's pov(1x17); Barry saves himself(looks like when he is running) and leaves his family. But when we see it from Barry's perspective in 1x01 and 1x23; to him it seems that he just vanished. So, that, means Harribard knew that killing Nora won't traumatise his future self.
   
7. His speed wasn't gone like many people assumed, it was just fluctuating due to his massive fight with the flash in 2024. He managed to hide wells’ body extremely fast right before the cops arrived. Gideon mentions the fact that it is the latest time travel against The Flash that made him "lose" his speed and not that he killed Nora Allen. If Original Timeline Flash's disappearance was what caused Thawne's loss of speed, then he would have gotten it back the moment The Flash was created again. But instead Eobard still has problems with his speed. And Eobard never lost his memories either like what happened to Barry in Flashpoint.
   
8. He just said a bunch of lies to Barry in 1x23 making it seem he is from another timeline when he really wasn't. He knew that if he makes Nora's death an "accident"; Barry's gonna try to change it. The reason Eobard says "in a" instead of "the" is because to him everything has already happened, so it won't be "the future" for him anymore. Observe that he does not specify the reason behind their rivalry. If it was a time loop it would make sense, then - because Barry would know that he should not help Thawne and go back in time to save his mother. Observe how Thawne twist the actual story to make it seem that Nora's death was an actual "accident" (Yes, he never meant to kill her. But once Barry got himself out, he did what was always supposed to do - which is to kill Nora out of anger). Because we know he already said at the stadium that his mother was destined to die that night - HE JUST LIES HERE ABOUT THAT! Notice he uses the word "create" instead of "recreate" - therefore it's implied he is the one who turned Barry into The Flash with the particle accelerator. If it was real Wells and Tess with their particle accelerator, Eobard should have said "recreate" instead. Observe Eobard's gestures and how he looks at Barry's reactions – he really wants Barry to believe that he really had a life where his parents were fine.
   
9. He even talks to Barry while he was in a coma telling him "nothing is forgiven, there will be a reckoning.. you will die" almost like it foreshadows to the conversation they recently had. Eobard mentions the context of fate here. Eobard only tells that if there were things his future self did.
   
10. Eobard tells Barry that it was his mom's destiny to die that night(1х09). 9х10 - Killing your mother is fixed point. The moment Thawne realized Barry's mother's death is destiny SPEAKING OF DESTINY.
    
11. Why would the 2024 newspaper be effected the moment season 1 Barry lost his speed if Thawne is from the "Original Timeline'? (After Farooq takes Barry's speed, the future changes). Many fans believe for some reason that the newspaper is from the og timeline. If Barry didn't originally become the Flash until later, him losing his powers in season 1 should not have significantly affected the timeline. WHY would The Future" remain intact if "The FUTURE" Thawne came from was erased from existence? So: If OG Barry and Our Barry we're completely different people then the newspaper shouldn't have changed when Farooq took his speed back in season 1 let alone the future wouldn't remain "intact" if that specific future was already gone.
    
12. Eobard knows about Savitar (even though he should not if he is from a timeline where Barry's parents lived, и "loves" the work of Zoom, as he said in 9x13.
    
13. Reverse Flash knew Zoom would kill off his father anyway. Eobard knows that the confession will get to nowhere because he knows, through unknown means, that Zoom will kill Barry's dad at some point – that's why he even makes the confession after his plans fail - to make sure Barry suffers even after his absence.
    
14. If the OG timeline ever existed before the arrowerse timeline the one where Barry's mom was alive, then why when season 2 Barry went back and saved his mother he created a "new reality" like mentioned here instead of time correcting itself back to the way it was? The only reason Eobard says it will be cemented - he means that Barry will lose his powers, and neither can change it back to the way it was - not that it would not be changeable at all (The reality you and I know will just fade away). "The you I know from the future, he's not this stupid" - "You were always smart"
    
15. Future Barry knocks out Thawne and warns himself not to save Nora(why would he do that if there was an original timeline?) The original timeline flash doesn't know Thawne would kill Nora instead. He might not know the ripple effects of changing the past as he hasn't done anything of this magnitude. Even if he caught the S1 flash accidentally looking out of that room, why did he just leave after saving the kid Barry. If there is a version of Flash back in the past other than OG(who followed thawne), then doesn't it mean something else goes very bad. Coz if kid Barry is dead then there wouldn't be another flash hiding in the room and waiting. So either of his parents or both are going to die. Shouldn't the OG flash comeback to save his parents or just get them medical help so they can be rescued ?? He didn't come back and that means he knows what is going to happen and he knows he shouldn't stop what is going to happen. I do know OG flash's mom was not killed. So there is no reason for him to look at the room where his younger version of flash will be waiting or even if he caught him accidentally he would be surprised rather than not ask him to interfere because he doesn't know what happens after. Even if we think OG flash saw the younger flash waiting and realized something else went very wrong in the year 2000 and he had to travel back to this date again to correct it, why would the OG flash stop him. According to the OG flash, if his younger version is back on the same day it means either or both of his parents are dead. OG flash grew with both of his parents. The moment Henry says "Run!" - that's Future Barry's signal. He had enough time to save all - but he did not because he knew his mother was always meant to die that night. The presence of season 1 Barry nulls OG Barry being there. Because in order for season 1 Barry to exist and go back in time by Thawne’s order, OG Barry CANNOT. It makes sense for season 1 Barry to travel back in time to an event that happens on HIS timeline. It does not make sense for OG Barry to travel to a timeline event that NEVER happens for him on HIS timeline. OG Barry would have had to time travel to an alternate reality’s 2000.
    

Again, Nora’s death is a fixed event for the flash who gets his powers in 2014, not the one who gets them later on.
Final point of evidence. Everytime future flash stops season 1 flash, he KNOWS season 1 flash is there AND knows WHY he’s there. He doesn’t question him, he doesn’t ponder, he knows why he’s there. Because future flash was season 1 Barry at a point in time. Why would OG flash expect to see a younger flash there that night in 2000, let alone know why he’s there. Unless all of a sudden flash can time travel through alternate worlds too. Oh, and for those who are gonna say "S9 Barry's only job was to warn his past self not to save Nora since OG Flash was still fighting Thawne"... when OG Flash knocked Thawne out, there was still lightning heard. If OG Flash was truly there... why wasn't past Barry warned twice? One warning from "S9 Barry" and another warning from "OG Barry". Except, we never see both versions of the Flash warn his past self.

1. Just because in season 1 we saw Eobard and Barry coming out of a portal originally with a different suit proves absolute nothing that whole fight scene was cgi and it was the first season they didn't know what suit they were gonna use for the full circle moment.
   
2. Guess now we know why when season 1 Barry revealed to be her son from the future the timeline didnt change. Because she's already encountered Season 9 Barry Allen earlier.
   
3. Nora's name being Dawn originally simply indicates that the future may have changed many times, not that there was once a timeline where Barry's mom wasn't killed (or the screenwriters just decided to make a reference to the comics).
   
4. Eddie killing himself and erasing Eobard from existence even though the OG timeline Eobard shouldn't be connected to the S1 timeline Eddie.
   

Boostrap paradox before the crisis.
2014: Thawne creates The Flash from the Particle Accelerator explosion. 2015: Thawne gets "erased" from existence 2016: Thawne in 2x11 arrives from the future, and this is the important part in the timeline, because as they imprisoned Thawne here, Cisco was about to die from the timeline changes, which doesn't make sense if the thawne from season 1 is NOT the same. Season 2 Thawne = season 1 Thawne. This is the moment he learns about Harrison Wells of earth 2, and then gets confused with Earth 1 wells, which prompted thawne to kill Earth 1 Wells. He learns Cisco and the rest of Team Flash. 2024: Flash fights Reverse Flash, hence the newspaper. They have a massive fight before vanishing in a crisis, but in reality they travelled back to year 2000 to fight around Nora Allen. 2000: the year Nora Allen dies. Reverse Flash fights the Flash around Nora Allen, and then Future Flash sees his younger self from the season 1 finale.
Boostrap paradox after the crisis of 2019, not 2024.
Almost everything is the same, but now the Future Flash is Barry S9, who was placed in 2000 by a negative speedforce, and Thawne spends all day with Barry.

Alright! So my poll for my next blog post actually ended with a tie between Dimensional Tiering and Mario Cosmology, so I’m gonna just choose for myself which one I want to do first. I actually voted for Dimensional Tiering, but thinking about it again Mario cosmology is super interesting and I really want to talk about that first. Some things might have been easier to explain if I did Dimensional Tiering first, but eh whatever.
(Also this is unrelated but while finding stuff out about Sonic’s rings I found way more cool stuff so that blog is going to be “Sonic’s Rings + Extra Lives + some other stuff maybe”)
Before I get started, I’d like to shout out Vs Battle wiki and Codex wiki for having blogs about Mario cosmology. I already had a lot of what I wanted to talk about gathered but they were still invaluable assets for making this.

Part 1: The Universe

What better way to start talking about the cosmology without first talking about the main universe that Mario inhabits. We see in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that the main universe is actually much larger than first thought to be. Each world within the game is stated to be its own separate universe, as evidenced by the subtitle for World 2 in Japanese being “A New Universe” (I personally double-checked with Google Translate, ChatGPT, and DeepL and they all came back as the same thing. I know these translators aren’t that trustworthy typically, but for a short phrase like this, getting the same thing on all of them is telling). This is also consistent with the English version, where Lubba states that each of these worlds is in a different space and time. This also means that physically traveling between worlds without using the portals would be immeasurable speed since it would be traveling beyond space and time, heck Luigi seems to be traveling across the universe without mention of the portals either, since he doesn’t have a Grand Star to make the portals.
Despite being separate universes, we know for a fact that they are all still within “the universe” thanks to Bowser’s Galaxy Generator being located at “the center of the universe”. Bowser is saying this while being on Mario’s main planet (which is in the first world), meaning that they would be in the same Universe despite being in separate universe-sized space-times.
Think of it being similar to Dragon Ball’s Universe 7. Universe 7 is called its own universe, and yet contains within it multiple different space-times, which themselves are sometimes called universes as well. The separate space-times in Mario’s universe are themselves universe-sized and are contained within the larger macrocosm of The Universe. This means that Mario’s universe contains at least 7 spacetimes, but through volume scaling could potentially reach much higher, up to over 13 thousand times the size of our universe.
This is just the minimum however, as there is something else that could potentially push the universe much higher, and that would be…

Part 2: Dreams and The Dream Depot

If you’re familiar with me, and Mario scaling on this sub in general, then you may have seen this blog post where I argued for an infinite amount of dreams within the series, using paint from Paper Mario Color Splash as one of my main arguments. I still stand by that argument, however there is a much easier way to prove that infinite dream dimensions exist without extrapolating as much. Once again shoutout to this blog on Vs Battle wiki for a lot of this information.
It is stated in BS Super Mario USA that there are as many Subcons as there are dreamers in existence (here’s another translation for consistency). Mario Party 5 backs this up, saying that many new dreams arrive at the Dream Depot every day. Mario & Luigi Dream Team also shows onscreen that when a person falls asleep, a dream world is created. Everyone’s dreams are shown to be separate as well, as Luigi was normally incapable of having the same dream as Bowser without specific requirements. So it stands to reason that we can find the amount of dream worlds by finding how many beings there are.
Well, the Official Super Mario Odyssey guide (that is officially licensed by Nintendo) states that there is a secret area in the Ruined Kingdom populated with infinite Chinchos. It should be noted that this isn’t referring to them respawning, as Chinchos don’t have the natural ability to respawn after being defeated. This is specifically referring to the amount of Chinchos inhabiting this place. So we know for a fact that there are an infinite amount of Chinchos.
Chinchos are specified to be ghosts, undead Tostarenans. You could possibly be thinking that this could prevent them from sleeping and dreaming, but ghosts have been shown to sleep and dream multiple times throughout the series. In the Luigi’s Mansion series, several ghosts are shown sleeping multiple times. Boo was also invited to the Dream Depot in Mario Party 5, which it was specified the Star Guards did to those who could dream. There are several undead characters noted to sleep and dream as well, such as Yikk stating that now that his physical body is gone, all he does is slumber and dream. Mario, after being turned into a Boo, also is shown falling asleep. Additionally, Tostarenans themselves are stated to dream in a different officially licensed Super Mario Odyssey book.
There are several other pieces of evidence for an infinite amount of beings in the Mario world, but this should be enough to definitively say that there are infinite dream worlds within the Dream Depot. If you are curious about more arguments backing this up, I highly recommend this blog once again. This blog also has a pretty well made, separate argument for infinite dreams, so I would check that out as well. Additionally, falling asleep within dreams is possible and would create more dream worlds again. Regardless, it is proven that the Dream Depot houses an infinite amount of dreams, as the Dream Depot houses everyone’s dreams.
How do we know dreams are universe-sized? Well several pieces of evidence point to this. First off, Subcon is stated to be a universe multiple times. Future Dream in Mario Party 5 was also stated to be a universe by Misstar, Eldstar, and even the manual. In the Japanese version, Eldstar even refers to Future Dream as infinite in size. There could even be arguments for higher, as each Subcon also has a Subspace, a separate dimension within the same dream called a “dark mirror world”, and the Zeekeeper is shown flying into other dimensions while remaining in the same dream as well. This would mean that each Dream World is at least a Uni+, possibly Low Multi structure.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. We see the Dream Depot in the menu in Mario Party 5 and get a better look at it in the credits, and from this we can see that every dream world is physically kept there separate from each other, with plenty of room to spare. Now this is why it would’ve been at least a little bit easier to explain Dimensional Tiering first, but because Dream Worlds are infinite 3D spaces, the Dream Depot being able to contain an infinite amount of infinite 3D spaces and still having plenty of room left over would necessarily make it larger than the infinite 4D multiverse (3 dimensions of space + 1 dimension of time), making it 5D. In other words, an infinite amount of infinite 4D realms was not large enough to come close to filling the Dream Depot, making it “more infinite” than infinite 4D, thus being 5D.
Now why is this relevant to the main universe? Well, it is because the Dream Depot is stated to be located within the main universe itself, being within the night sky beyond the stars. In order to contain the Dream Depot within the main universe, the universe itself would need to at least match it in dimensionality, being 5D itself. Funnily enough, this is actually consistent with another part of Mario’s main universe, that being…

Part 3: Matter Splatter Galaxy

Matter Splatter Galaxy is a level in the first Super Mario Galaxy game featuring the mission Watch Your Step. In the Japanese version, this level is called “The Path Shown by Hyperspace”, even including the specific Kanji 超 which can be translated as “transcend”, “super-”, or “more than”. Now obviously “hyperspace” can mean several different things, with one definition being that it is an area where FTL travel is possible (typically used in a science fiction setting), and this definition is still used in Japan as well. This can make it difficult to exactly say that this “hyperspace” is truly referring to a higher dimension.
What is often done in similar situations is to look at how the word was translated into other languages, and looking at that you get a pretty consistent result almost every time). Chinese and Spanish specifically translate it as “hyperdimensional”, while German translates it as “Superspace”, which both specifically refer to higher spatial dimensions and not anything else in science fiction. It seems pretty clear that, intention-wise, the meaning of the phrase was meant to be referring to a higher spatial dimension.
As Matter Splatter Galaxy is a physical location within the universe, similar to the Dream Depot, in order for the universe to contain the entirety of it, it would need to at least match it in dimensionality, and as such is another piece of evidence for the main universe being 5D. While I could potentially still see someone not buying it because of the different definitions of hyperspace, personally I feel that the consistency with other translations, as well as the Dream Depot already providing the main universe as 5D, means that saying that Matter Splatter Galaxy is 5D makes sense.
In any case, whether you want to go with Matter Splatter or the Dream Depot, the main Mario universe should likely be 5D in scope.

Part 4: Alternate Dimensions

There are several locations within the Mario universe that are within another dimension. Note that most of these are not given an official size, so it is difficult to prove that they are entire universes. However, they are certainly within different dimensional spaces, so they should be listed regardless. They are as follows:

• The Shake Dimension from Wario Land: Shake It
• The Banana Dimension from Donkey Kong Country Returns, which is specifically noted to be a separate dimension by Cranky Kong
• Smithy from Super Mario RPG is said to be from an alternate world
• Also from Super Mario RPG, Culex is from a different world
• In Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, there is a person that is shown to be living in a different world to Mario
• The Paranormal Dimension is a dimension seen in Luigi’s Mansion Dark Moon
  • However, it is very possible that this is the same dimension as something that will be discussed later, which would actually make it much larger

These are actually the only dimensions throughout the series that give no indication on how large they are.

Part 5: Painting Worlds

The Painting Words from Super Mario 64 are stated to be separate dimensions, as they are called “another world” and are explicitly separate from “the real world”. They should likely be infinite 3D spaces, as Shifting Sand Land is stated to have infinite underworlds, and, though more debatably, Tick Tock Clock is stated to literally have no bottom. This is backed up with them being “another” world in comparison to “the real world”, which would likely imply a comparable size. They also have their own axis of time separate from the main universe and each other, as some levels are shown at being midday, while Big Boo’s Haunt is shown at nighttime, showing that they should each have their own axis of time, and would thus be Uni+ or 4D (3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time).
It is possible that they could even be higher, as an in-universe theory for what Bowser was going to do was expand the worlds until they encompass all of reality, which would necessarily require them to fill up the entire 5D space of the universe. This is admittedly more debatable, as even in-universe it was just a theory, but it is possible that the full scope of these worlds could be 5D in order to fill up the universe. At minimum though, they should be Uni+ sized realms.
As for the amount, throughout Super Mario 64 and 64 DS, there are at least 15 from the 15 main courses in the game. There could potentially be more however, as if you consider each secret world to be its own dimension (it is a little vague as to whether or not they contribute to the “Painting Worlds” as a whole), then that would add 14 more worlds. Personally, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say that the secret worlds are on the same scope as the other ones, especially since places like the Princess’s Secret Slide and the Secret Aquarium are implied to be within the castle itself, I think it’s safer to go with just 15 separate Painting Worlds.

Part 6: Parallel Dimensions

There are many examples in the Mario series of alternate dimensions described as being parallel. Being parallel dimensions, it stands to reason that they would need to be as large as the main universe, as that would be required in order to be “parallel”. Most of these parallel universes are, in some way, based on the main universe as well, meaning it would make sense that they would be comparable to the main universe in scope. They are as follows:

• Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels features Worlds A through D after beating the game a certain number of times. This is officially called a parallel world
• The dimensions seen in Super Paper Mario are all called “parallel planes” in the official guide. There are 8 separate dimensions seen in the game, being Lineland, Gloam Valley, The Bitlands, Outer Space, Land of the Cragnons, Sammer’s Kingdom (though it was destroyed, it can still be visited and gets restored at the end of the game), The Underwhere, and The Overthere. Castle Bleck is the only world that is not its own dimension, instead being located within the Void. These worlds are also referred to as endless, never-ending, and straight-up infinite, which would back them up being as large as the main universe
  • Much like the Paranormal Dimension, The Overthere is potentially the same as another dimension that will be discussed later, which would make it even larger
  • Flipside and Flopside are possibly included in this, though I find it somewhat unlikely. They are not full dimensions, instead being created in the space between dimensions, so I find it unlikely that they are included in the “parallel planes”
• Paper Mario Color Splash has three other parallel dimensions as well, directly called parallel universes. There are three seen throughout the game, accessed through warp pipes at Vortex Island, Lighthouse Island, and Fortune Island, and each one is noted to be separate from each other since Huey states the second one they come across is “another” parallel universe.

While these are the only dimensions that are explicitly called parallel, there are many more throughout the series that have several implications that they would also be comparable to the main universe in scope.

• The bonus world from the original Super Mario Bros. is a completely different world from the main world Mario is from. Given the context of the Lost Levels’s bonus world being a parallel world, it is likely that this one is too
• In a similar vein, the bonus world of Super Mario Land is called an enemy-infested underworld, likely being similar to the Lost Levels’s as well
• Super Luigi Galaxy is the bonus adventure in Super Mario Galaxy after collecting 120 Stars, and according to Rosalina is another separate world. Given the plot of the game is exactly the same as Super Mario galaxy, the world would have to be comparable to the main universe, as Mario/Luigi’s adventure took them across the entire universe
• Super Mario 3D Land’s Special World is a clear parallel world in everything but name. It is accessed via a warp pipe and nearly every level is a parallel to a level from the main world. While this wouldn’t require it to be as large as the main universe, given the clear parallels it seems to share a close relationship with the main one similar to other bonus worlds above, and thus is likely comparable to the main one
• The Darkmess Dimension from Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is a separate dimension that is entered every time Mario enters combat in this game. It is stated to be connected to the main dimension and shares many of its landmarks with it, meaning it is very likely that this dimension is comparable to the main universe

These aren’t even the end of it however, as Nolrem states that everything has a front and a back, with the context being that he is referring to Flopside, the “backside” to Flipside. In this context, it is likely that every universe or dimension has a parallel to it, which would likely double the amount of universes in the cosmology, at least those that have been discussed so far. This would also line up with what we saw with Subspace within dreams from earlier, being the “backside” to every dream world.

Part 7: Even Higher Dimensions

Yes, even after all of that there’s still more to discuss. There are several dimensions within the verse that are noted to be transcendent to the main reality, and thus would be even higher than 5D, being 6D.
To start, Cutout is a technique in Paper Mario Color Splash that lets Mario exit their dimension and view it as a flat surface. Notably, it is specifically referred to as transcending dimensions by Huey, and is said to be transcending the very boundaries of time and space by a Toad. Because of this, the dimension accessed by Cutout would not only be separate from Mario’s dimension, but completely transcendent to it, viewing the entire universe as a lower-dimensional structure, and would thus be 6D as the main universe is 5D.
In Super Mario 64, it is said that defeating Big Boo will “put him back in his extra-dimensional place”. Extradimensional, by definition, means originating outside of the dimension/outside of space-time, which makes sense considering the “extra-” prefix means outside or beyond. While this could be interpreted as simply being a separate dimension outside of Mario’s and not necessarily transcendent to it, I wanted to list it here as a potential highball. Given the status of the Paranormal Dimension as a homeworld for the ghosts, this is the possible higher-end I was referring to earlier.
Finally, also from Paper Mario Color Splash, there is a group of deceased Toads that Mario helps called the Tea Party Toads. After Mario helps them and they have their tea party, they are said to be ascending to a higher plane of existence (here is a screenshot, though unfortunately I couldn’t find a video). Ascending to a higher plane of existence is a classic trope that doesn’t always mean a literal higher plane of reality, but given we see the Toads literally ascend higher (and given what we know about the Overthere being the afterlife, it needs to be in a separate dimension) I wanted to list it here as a potential highball as well.
Admittedly of course, those latter two are pretty shaky and debatable (though given Boos themselves are undead, they can potentially back each other up since it would be consistent for the afterlife to be higher-dimensional than the main universe), but at minimum, the Cutout dimensions should be transcendent to the main universe, and thus be 6D.

Part 8: Anything Else?

Uh no actually, that’s about it. I did want to bring up one thing that I’ve seen thrown around a lot for Mario cosmology, and that’s String Theory Soup, the bane of my existence. For those who don’t know, String Theory Soup is an item in Wario: Master of Disguise that is said to contain “all the secrets of the universe” and based on the name of the item, that must mean that Mario’s universe runs on string theory right? Well no, because in the Japanese version (which would obviously hold precedent over the English translation), it is referred to as Big Bang Soup, obviously very different to String Theory.
Honestly all I really wanted to cover in this part is the String Theory Soup. It’s really as simple as “String Theory Soup doesn’t actually exist” and that’s that. I could bring up more, like it being incredibly vague and String Theory not having a definitive definition in general, with there being multiple very different versions of String Theory to begin with, but it being a mistranslation already solidifies it as not legitimate.

Conclusion

• Individual dream worlds are at least Uni+, likely Low Multi structures, with there being an infinite amount of them with the Dream Depot
• The Dream Depot is 5-D due to containing an infinite amount of dream worlds and having plenty of room left over, which would require an extra dimension in order to contain all of them
• The main universe is at least a Low Multi structure thanks to containing 7 different spacetimes, and is likely 5-D due to containing the entire Dream Depot in it, as well as the higher dimensions of Matter Splatter Galaxy
• The Painting Worlds are at least Uni+, but likely can reach 5-D thanks to being able to extend across all of reality
• There are at least 12 parallel worlds, likely more, that would also be 5-D due to being parallel to the main universe
• The Cutout Dimension is 6-D due to being transcendental to the main 5-D universe, and two other realms debatably match it as well
• There are several other dimensions that don’t have an official size

I don’t want to make this any longer than it already is by explaining scaling or anything like that, so I hope you enjoyed reading this. I had a lot of fun writing this and figuring out everything, and expect the Dimensional Tiering post some time in the future. Thanks!

Hayao Miyazaki's View of the Japanese People

Maki Watanabe: Let’s talk about Director Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke." This work was a representative blockbuster film of that year. It was not only the first Ghibli work to exceed 10 billion yen at the box office, but it even reached 19.3 billion yen!
Mamoru Oshii: That number is indeed impressive. Unlike the previous work, "Porco Rosso," which was whimsical and lacked a theme, this time he returned with a grand theme. This time the theme was "Hayao Miyazaki's view of the Japanese people."
Maki Watanabe: So the characters like the “People of the Mountains” appeared.
Mamoru Oshii: It can be said that it brings together an all-star lineup of images representing Japan in the old man's mind. From the Emishi to the people of Irontown, to the lepers, to the Forest Spirit, and so on, the theme of the “People of the Mountains” is the ethnic minorities and small groups of Japan.
Maki Watanabe: Mr. Miyazaki has done a lot of research in these areas.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man is indeed a hardworking and studious person. He reads history books very seriously and wants to leave behind the fruits of his studies. Mr. Takahata also has this side, and so do I. In other words, this is a common desire shared by all creators. In this regard, the old man's research interest fell on another kind of Japanese who are not well known, that is, the “People of the Mountains.”
Maki Watanabe: What about Ashitaka, one of the protagonists?
Mamoru Oshii: Although he is Emishi, he is also one of the People of the Mountains. He has a unique religious view and view of nature, which are consistent with the old man's orientation. The old man has absolutely no interest in agricultural peoples, and the people of the mountains are both hunters and makers of things.
Maki Watanabe: Ah, the “making things” setting that the old man likes.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right. So this is the world where he can best transfer his feelings to these people.
Maki Watanabe: So, unlike Mr. Takahata, Mr. Miyazaki is not interested in farmers?
Mamoru Oshii: Not interested. It never appeared in his (original) works, right? Mr. Takahata is good at rural themes, but the old man is not at all.
Maki Watanabe: What is Mr. Oshii's impression of "Princess Mononoke"?
Mamoru Oshii: This work is too stiff. The theme is too grand to be concluded. It's like spreading out a whole piece of wrapping cloth and then not knowing how to put it back together, and in the end, you can only make a mess of it. In the end, the flowers bloom muddleheadedly, and then the music plays as usual, and it ends without anything being resolved. Did they ever think about how to end it? Filmmakers generally like to make a grand opening, but very few can put it back together perfectly. But this is where the director's skill is shown.
Maki Watanabe: Christopher Nolan once said that when making a film, you have to think about the ending from the beginning, and once you decide on it, you don't change it. The endings of his films are indeed impressive.
Mamoru Oshii: Actually, that's the usual way to do it. I also think about the ending from the beginning. Structure is the life of a film, it's a matter of course. On the contrary, the old man, who doesn't write scripts properly, starts from scratch and doesn't want to think about the ending at all. I have said it many times, it is precisely because of this that he is not suitable to be a director.
Maki Watanabe: However, the more you say that about him, the more I find the old man cute. After all, he has always been true to himself, that's great, isn't it?
Mamoru Oshii: What's so cute about it? In a sense, he's someone who makes movies solely on his own talent. Indeed, he is a genius in a way, he doesn't consider anything before or after his death. It is Toshio Suzuki's job to assist him from the sidelines. Speaking of which, Miss Maki, do you remember the last scene of "Princess Mononoke?"
Maki Watanabe: I remember. In the end, everyone went back to where they belonged and it ended. I didn't understand why Ashitaka stayed in Irontown instead of going back to his hometown, so I complained: "Hey, go home." But I didn't quite understand it when it was released. To be honest, there are a lot of things in the story that are hard to keep up with. At that time, many magazines made special features on "Princess Mononoke," and they all sold well. It should be that everyone didn't understand the story, so they wanted to hear what was going on.
Mamoru Oshii: How many people can remember the ending of Ghibli movies, especially the old man's movies? The theme song or the main melody composed by Joe Hisaishi plays, and then it's "the end," forcibly ending. This is Suzuki's strategy.
Maki Watanabe: "Princess Mononoke" uses a song by Yoshikazu Mera at the end.
Mamoru Oshii: The song was also used repeatedly in the promotion, making people so familiar with the theme song that it lingered in their ears. So why use this song over and over again? Because the people in charge of publicity didn't understand the story either. What is the story of "Princess Mononoke" about? It should be the story of Ashitaka and San, but what happened to them in the end? Miss Maki, can you explain it clearly?
Maki Watanabe: The theme is the opposition between civilization and nature. San represents nature, Ashitaka is the middle ground, Lady Eboshi is civilization, and then the story is about the collision of these values. I just rewatched it, so I can probably explain it to this extent, but the part about Ashitaka and San feels very weak.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right, Ashitaka and San should have become like Pazu and Sheeta in "Castle in the Sky," but they didn't. Surprisingly, San is not charming in the slightest. The most surprising thing I saw at the screening was this. The old man, who has always drawn beautiful girls, could it be that he didn't put his heart into San? At least it seems so. The appreciation of the characters is significantly less than before. It's almost impossible not to ask, "What's wrong with the old man?"

The Magic of Hayao Miyazaki's Manga Films

Maki Watanabe: Indeed, although she is the heroine, her impression is very weak. She didn't even leave as deep an impression as Ashitaka.
Mamoru Oshii: That's right, it must be Ashitaka who left a deeper impression. Followed by Lady Eboshi, she is the old man's favorite type. The most interesting thing about the old man is that he doesn't just stop at simply praising nature and denying civilization. I've said it countless times, the old man himself has another side to him that loves fighter jets and mechanical civilization. He is a very contradictory person.
Maki Watanabe: Lady Eboshi is the character who speaks for the old man, right?
Mamoru Oshii: The process of civilization is an inevitability of human development. Human beings cannot survive without destroying nature. This is human beings. Lady Eboshi of Irontown is probably the representative of this kind of human being, just like Nausicaä in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind."
Maki Watanabe: Lady Eboshi loses an arm at the end, and Nausicaä also has a prosthetic arm.
Mamoru Oshii: So, that's the price. In the old man's way of thinking, they must pay a certain price, and it is easy to see from the picture that it is manifested as the loss of an arm. The old man has a unique sense of balance, and he will definitely look for that balance point. Take the villain character, Colonel Muska, in "Castle in the Sky" as an example. As he is escaping, he throws his underwear out of his open suitcase. From this scene, you can also see that the old man did not completely portray him as a bad guy. Adding a bit of cuteness to the villains is what the old man does. Lady Eboshi is a character with very clear values, and for the old man, it is necessary to make her pay the price of losing her arm. In this sense, he is a genius in terms of balance. Although having said that, the old man would not do such a thing as adding a scar to a cute girl. The same goes for children. Girls and children are the old man's sacred realm, and he never lets these characters pay any price or suffer any trauma.
Maki Watanabe: But there's nothing entangled in Lady Eboshi, is there? For example, Ashitaka reported that the women in Irontown were in danger, but she said, "Women can take care of themselves", and then devoted herself to destroying the Forest Spirit. Generally speaking, wouldn't there be some hesitation and struggle? So I don't feel the charm from her strength.
Mamoru Oshii: That's the nature of the old man. Putting viewpoints side by side, putting out all kinds of values without omission, for the old man, there is no contradiction in liking characters who are not troubled and do not hesitate. Because the old man hates indecisive characters the most. He would never affirm those who are hesitant, hesitant, and prone to distress. In short, he doesn't like entanglement.
Maki Watanabe: This value is very interesting.
Mamoru Oshii: Of course, he likes nature the most. However, if the Forest Spirit is affirmed, human beings have to be denied, so there must be an existence that speaks for the human position, and that is Lady Eboshi. The old man is not such a simple person. He has studied why human beings have embarked on the road of industrialization, and he knows very well that this is an inevitable choice. But it wouldn't ease his mind if he simply affirmed it. But if he recognizes the Forest Spirit, he can only come to the conclusion that "human beings should be destroyed", so he has to add San, a character born in nature. Ashitaka is in a position between San and Lady Eboshi.
Maki Watanabe: But Ashitaka should go back to his village, right? Everyone is waiting for him. Why stay in Irontown? If you make such a choice, you have to go through some struggle, right?
Mamoru Oshii: That's why I said, the old man just hates struggling and tangling. The story itself is difficult to justify, so it can only end in such a forceful way. There is basically no drama in this work, because there is no struggle of values at all. As a film, there are often confusions like "Which direction is this story going?" The reason why it turned out like this is because the problem has been concluded in some aspects. That is to say, civilization will never go backwards, and it is precisely because of the creation of civilization that human beings have become human beings. Those who can really live in nature don't even know that it is nature. If one had never stepped out of the Garden of Eden, one would not even know that one was human. Industrial society is a necessity for human beings, and human beings can only survive by conquering nature. But humans don't want to deny the part of themselves that resonates with nature.
Maki Watanabe: I see.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man made "Princess Mononoke" on the basis of understanding all this, but even if he understands this rationally, he cannot let it go, so he will be divided. So how do you put an end to this split in a movie? He didn't think about it carefully, so "Princess Mononoke" became a film with an incomprehensible ending. Speaking of which, because the world in the movie is not a world of good and evil, children should not understand it. The old man clearly said that he made animation for children, and said that no matter what the real world is like, at least in the work, the black and white of good and evil should be clearly distinguished. This is one of the main tasks of being a director. However, his own work lacks such consistency. Although the theme is grand, it cannot be concluded properly. Of course, it's not just the old man, there are many movies like this.
Maki Watanabe: But the picture is very powerful. This time I re-watched it and felt very emotional.
Mamoru Oshii: Like this, in short, showing you some powerful things and making you accept it in a confused way is the unique magic of the old man's manga films. Although the director and the critics can see through the flaws at a glance and will not be deceived, the animators will be amazed and exclaimed, "Amazing!" after watching it. Of course, he is really good. Whether it is the demon or the Forest Spirit, he has made very, very grand scenes. The movements of all the characters are very neat and beautiful, and the background is also very magnificent. But as for the animals, because I'm a bit of an authority when it comes to the representation of "dogs", the image of Moro doesn't look good at all. The film is full of places like this that (the old man) made with his eyes closed.
Maki Watanabe: That's how it is. I was so shocked that I didn't pay much attention.
Mamoru Oshii: This work is extremely difficult to draw, and it's also very long, isn't it? It's impossible to be perfect. Apart from Moro, there are also some problems with the setting of Irontown. The animator who was in charge of drawing Moro also participated in the production of the movie "Jin-Roh." His performance in "Jin-Roh" was obviously better. Not to mention anything else, the running posture of beasts is a difficult problem for animators, more difficult than birds and horses. For example, the posture of a dog lowering its center of gravity and speeding up will make the animator cry.
Maki Watanabe: The Forest Spirit also looks very unique!
Mamoru Oshii: That's the old man's forte. The little mushroom-like spirits are also his forte. Not only are they rich in movement, but children also especially like them.
Maki Watanabe: Very cute, and adults love it too! (laughs) Later, the scene where the Forest Spirit stepped on the ground and the flowers and plants suddenly grew made people couldn't help but exclaim "Wow," it was really beautiful.
Mamoru Oshii: That part is very sensual, as if you can smell it. It's really sensual, very enchanting. I only admire the part with the Forest Spirit, just like the scene in Totoro where the trees suddenly grow. That's the essence of the animation world. Even if it's done with CG, it can't make that kind of feeling. That is the old man's unique sense of movement, a sense of sensuality, a kind of eroticism unique to plants. The old man is really good at drawing plants. He's definitely better at plants than animals. From this point of view, there are indeed many remarkable scenes in "Princess Mononoke", maybe the character that the old man put more effort into is not San, but the Forest Spirit, which is why everyone is glued to their eyes.
Maki Watanabe: The scene of the Forest Spirit walking on the water, being hit and sinking into the water for a while, and then floating up again… That scene is very touching.
Mamoru Oshii: The old man is also very good at water, he is simply a genius. So, I'm not always picking on him, I'll praise him where it's due. I'm making a fair assessment. There will never be another animator like the old man. It's just that, although I may have said it too many times, he's really not cut out to be a director (laughs).
Maki Watanabe: I re-watched it after a long time. Although there are many problems such as the ending not being closed and the story having loopholes, I am still shocked by the picture.
Mamoru Oshii: If you look at it again after a while, those grand themes will be put aside by everyone, and many parts can be enjoyed separately. Sure enough, the unique sexy charm of this film is irresistible.
Maki Watanabe: But the places made with digital technology are really not good, or because the hand-painted parts are so good, the digital production looks not so good.
Mamoru Oshii: This film used digital technology for the first time, which caused a lot of buzz when it was released. The scene of Ashitaka riding a deer was made using texture mapping, but that doesn't suit the old man. The old man's unique sense of movement and pleasure in the flowing scenery cannot be expressed by texture mapping. I am very sure of this. In fact, this place should be the same as the sea of clouds in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" and the flowing scenery in "Castle in the Sky," all done by hand. But if we did, the work might not be completed.
Maki Watanabe: Another major feature of this film is the voice actors. This time the dubbing lineup is very luxurious.
Mamoru Oshii: Needless to say, this is Suzuki's strategy. Toshiro Mifune, Akira Emoto, Masahiko Nishimura, Yuko Tanaka, and even Mitsuko Mori were invited. Ghibli has also invited many actors to be voice actors before, but this is the first time that there have been so many. Almost all the main characters are well-known stars. Every Japanese can conjure up the faces of these stars in their minds.
Maki Watanabe: San is voiced by actress Yuriko Ishida, and Ashitaka is voiced by Yoji Matsuda. Mr. Matsuda voiced Asbel in "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind."
Mamoru Oshii: Speaking of San just now, speaking of the lack of presence of this character, she doesn't look like the beautiful girl depicted by the old man at all. One of the reasons is that her voice didn't move people's hearts. Also, why Akira Emoto? Do you have this question?
Maki Watanabe: But didn't Mr. Oshii's "Sky Crawlers" also use actress Rinko Kikuchi? And Ryo Kase.
Mamoru Oshii: But not many Japanese knew Rinko Kikuchi at the time, right? As for why Ryo Kase was used, it's a long story... But the reason why I used Rinko was because I thought no one in Japan knew her, so it didn't matter.
Maki Watanabe: How come, I know her. After all, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Babel" and has attracted a lot of attention.
Mamoru Oshii: That's because Miss Maki, you are in the film industry, but ordinary Japanese people don't know. And it was also because I liked her very much after meeting her once. Looking back on it now, she was wearing a black dress very similar to the one worn by the young Motoko at the end of "Ghost in the Shell."
Maki Watanabe: Was that intentional?
Mamoru Oshii: It's very possible. She seemed very positive and motivated at the time, which is what an actor should be. It is very important to have the momentum of "must win this role." Mélanie St-Pierre in "Garzey's Wing" is also like this, with a kappa hairstyle and a gun in the audition video.
Maki Watanabe: I didn't expect it to be so easy to capture Mr. Oshii's heart. A kappa hairstyle with a gun is all it takes (laughs).
Mamoru Oshii: What are you talking about! It's important whether it fits or not. That's the key. Let's not mention this for the time being, why don't I like this voice actor lineup very much? Because I watched the whole film at the luxurious premiere, and they stood on the stage in a row. These faces were very powerful, and the number of people was extraordinary.
Maki Watanabe: I've always had a question about letting actors be voice actors. Does letting Yuriko Ishida dub really attract audiences? It won't be the driving force to make people want to watch a movie, right?
Mamoru Oshii: Suzuki's strategy is "to do everything that can be done." Having celebrities lined up can get media attention, and Toshiro Mifune was more famous than Hayao Miyazaki back then, wasn't he? He didn't want to attract audiences with Yuriko Ishida, it was just a strategy to get media attention. Before the release, it was Suzuki's job to raise awareness of the film. First of all, "Princess Mononoke" is a very important work in every sense, and it must sell well, otherwise its investment scale will bankrupt Ghibli.
Maki Watanabe: It's a work that has put all its efforts into it.
Mamoru Oshii: Yes. The old man also made agrand structure in his mind, putting all his heart into it. Toshio Suzuki's efforts made this work a success in distribution. As I said just now, there are various sensitive issues in this work born from the old man's whims and fantasies, so Suzuki is responsible for the aftermath. You may have forgotten that there has never been a scene in a previous animation where a head or an arm is chopped off like in this work. When it was first released, every animation studio was talking about "Princess Mononoke," saying, "That old Miyazaki actually drew so many scenes of beheadings and severed limbs!" What does this mean? It can only be said that the old man has become unstoppable. What Suzuki said didn't work, it was completely out of control. In my opinion, this sign appeared in the "Porco Rosso" period. At that time, I let him do what he liked. On the other hand, Toshio Suzuki had to work harder to get the word out.
Maki Watanabe: Having said that, it has created a big-selling record in film history, which is very remarkable.
Mamoru Oshii: Judging from the results, it was a big hit at the box office, so it became more and more unstoppable.
In this way, the two consecutive films were created as they pleased, but the two works are completely different. The arbitrariness of "Porco Rosso" is a personal thing. But "Princess Mononoke" talks about Japan, nature, human beings, and even the theory of civilization. The old man put all the things he was interested in and studied into it, proposed a grand theme, and created it as an "author." That is to say, he officially debuted as an author.
Maki Watanabe: So, "Princess Mononoke" is a masterpiece of director Hayao Miyazaki, right?
Mamoru Oshii: Masterpiece? He hasn't even "mastered" it yet. Just put together interests and knowledge. No editing, no structure, just a list of content.
Maki Watanabe: Then how should it be evaluated?
Mamoru Oshii: Clearing inventory. No, it's more accurate to say picking up and shipping. Because he moved all the stock out.
____
The content is from a Japanese book 誰も語らなかったジブリを語ろう (Let's talk about Ghibli that no one has talked about).

I have been in a relationship for 13 years now. Began as a fling turned into an abusive relationship including physical abuse, mental abuse, cheating, and not to mention his years battling his porn, alcohol, pills, heroin, and fentanyl addiction. Fast forward we now have 4 boys and a little girl on the way. He has been sober for over a year now and has been doing well for himself I guess you could say. He’s never really been an “involved” father by choice I’ve always had to force it. We have an 8 year old son who is disabled and most of his life was cared for by his grandmother (who is a fkn psychopath) because most of his life his dad was on some type of addiction train. Fast forward we are I guess no longer in a “relationship” yet he still resides with me in my home. Says it’s best for his kids and that he is only worried about how his kids are raised. I am literally drowning and on the verge of just ending everything. To better break it down this man still has sex with me but has made it very clear we are not together. Let’s his mother get involved in our life and at one point did not help me at all when she was trying to take custody from me for our disabled son. Now I went to court and ended up not having to have a trial and it actually worked out in my favor because I was not unfit or unstable. But now it seems anytime she has a mental breakdown because I don’t let her take my son it interferes with us and yes we are not in a relationship but it still makes life difficult because like I said we reside together. I am so at my breaking point. Now this mom of his has turned me into any and everywhere she possibly could have saying I’m Committing fraud because I was using my son’s ssi and committing fraud and just anything she can say or do. I also have two older children of my own with whom I came into this relationship with so in total once I have this last baby that will be 7 kids for myself total. So I am a busy mother also trying to still work as a nurse when I can. I need some type of advice please don’t put me down. I know I am an idiot I know I need to leave this entire situation as soon as I can but I do not know where to start . I am afraid of separating my kids I am afraid of their dad getting 50% and then when he has them his Mother being the one who has my kids. Not to mention his mom keeps reminding me I’m being investigated and that I should be getting my charges soon cause that’s what the “district attorney told her” now I have went to family crisis but when they called me I didn’t answer because of course by that time things were “going good” between us. Well I just need some type of advice or any type of idea on if anyone has been in this situation or knows what I can do. I honestly don’t want to leave because I am terrified if I leave and get an attorney to fight for custody him and his mother will get a better attorney because they have money and will use everything I’m supposedly already facing against me! Look I’ve lost a lot of precious time with my disabled child and all I want is to have all of my children under the same roof like they have been lately. I would give anything for him To just leave me and let me live in peace with my kids alone. He has told me before he would but that he could not make any promises that his mom or sister would not leave me alone. I am stuck in a shit situation. I do not know what to do or how to go about it. My attorney told me I need to leave this man but I feel like all this is easier said then done. I am honestly feeling like death is my only way out of this. I know if he gets my kids that will be the end any way. Anytime I try to talk to this man he tells me I’m wrong and that there’s no point in talking to me. I think and truly believe he is trying to get me to that mental breaking point and I’ll admit I am getting there. I sometimes feel it’s just best I stay and keep my kids all in the same house although there’s always a fight with his mother about my disabled son I just don’t know what to do. If I leave and file for full custody and they fight me what are the chances they could win. I do not know what to do because he has started to brain wash my 7 year old and not to mention he beats my 5 year old because he pees himself. I also have a video of him slapping our 5 month old baby. I’m tired and just ready to throw in the towel please someone steer me in the right direction

My best friend is really attractive. She usually goes for attractive guys, but her current boyfriend is the opposite of that.
We like to call him Benny Blanco. For people who don’t know, Selena’s bf is Benny Blanco, who is super unattractive. She has been getting a lot of flack from the girlies because he is just no who we thought she’d be into. I mean, look at him, lol.
Same with my best friend. Look, I’m sure he’s a nice person. But I don’t know how he expects to keep her when she is everything and he’s just not.
I was with my mom and a few of our friends. We showed her a picture of my bff’s guy and she immediately started pretend vomiting. My mom is crazy and super fun. We were also drinking and bad decisions were made.
She joked she would comment on her instagram and ask why he looked like that. My best friend posted a picture of him and my mom kept joking about funny things she would comment.
But she actually hit send. She said, “his teeth messed up and he not cute.” We did say that was too far. But not gonna lie, we were also dying laughing because 1) we were drunk 2) that is an extremely out of pocket thing to say. If you were there, you would be laughing too.
But now my bff is mad at me. She blocked my mom and once she realized we were all together she blamed me and the rest of our friends too. I told her we told my mom it was fucked up to send, but she doesn't believe it.
She said we were judging her relationship. I said it was a few jokes, we are happy for her. But she’s mad at me. She’s throwing our 10+ years friendship over a man. AITA?

Cinema is down because of streaming, but movies flopping so badly is because of far more than that. It’s because Hollywood don’t want to cater to the male audiences tastes but instead want to “correct” their tastes. I’ve seen people write that Furiosa was a great action movie and should have succeeded, and that The Fall Guy was an action comedy with a star male lead and should have succeeded. But let’s take a closer look at what both these movies look like to the average dude seeing a preview of them.
Furiosa - Mad Max with no Max in it and instead some skinny chick with a shaved head and dirt on her face.
Fall Guy - romantic comedy with a loser man (Gosling) getting bossed around and owned verbally by a female authority figure (Blunt)
Now perhaps the actual content of the movies was different than the advertising, I wouldn’t know - but that’s the point, neither would most men as they took a look at the advertising and said “nope, not for me”. And both these movies have been advertised heavily in sports and sports talk shows that the male audience watches.
From here on out streaming will always effect movies, but whether streaming or movies, when it comes to male dominated audience genres like action, if you want to gain viewers and make money you have to know your audience and cater to their tastes. Hollywood is desperately trying not to do that with men so we see the results.
Edit (why is it so offensive to some people to think male audiences should be catered to and allowed movies which represent them as stars? Do they get all pissy because sex and the city stars four women? Do they get all upset at the latest romance having yet another female lead winning yet another rich dude with an estate ala some Brigegerton or Jane Austen type shit?)

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Hello again Oldheads, and welcome to the next installment of me reading every X-Man related comic released in 1997 and then rambling about them. Today we'll be going over the adventures of our favorite time traveler and his big knives, Cable! We'll also be reading an odd one shot starring Colossus. Then we'll be going on a whimsical and strangely emotional journey with The Daydreamers. To finish things out, we'll be enjoying(?) the comic stylings of the ever annoying and ever present Deadpool. Let us begin.
Cable Vol 1 -0, 41-51 Writers: Todd DeZago, Brian K. Vaughan, James Robinson, Joe Casey Artists: Steve Crespo, Randall "Randy" Green, Chap Yaep, Allen Im, (José) Landrönn, Rob Haynes
Cable starts 1997 by traveling to the bottom of the ocean with guest star Bishop. Apparently there are strange signals coming from the ruins of Graymalkin, which blew up back in the aftermath to X-Cutioner's Song in X-Force. These strange signals are being caused by Sinsear! Remember him? New Cannanite cyborg from the future and minor villain from the first arc of this ongoing? No? Well, that's unfortunate since he sacrifices himself to save the world from blowing up and hasn't shown up again. RIP Sinsear.
The next couple of issues are kind of similar filler affair. Marrow shows up in one issue, which I feel is a sentence I'm going to be typing up a lot in future review installments. Cable, and his little shoulder pouches where he keeps his knives, helps foil her and Callisto from planting a bomb at a Lila Cheney concert along with Storm. Would you believe me when I said that Storm's claustrophobia weakness gets used when she gets pushed into a mosh pit? Cause it does!
There's a flashback issue to young Cable's time fighting the New Cannanites while also trying to prevent a young mutant from brain melting some racists who had been trying to kill him. This issue is mostly notable as it's the first published Marvel work of a young Brian K. Vaughan, who is the co-writer. Nice little nerd Jeopardy question right there.
Finally we get to the first issue of the the James Robinson run, and oh boy, it's a Madelyne Pryor issue! Later retcons would establish that this isn't actually "our" Madelyne, but it's interesting in that on its own the issue treats her with some dignity and respect, which is more I can say for certain writers and editors in the period of 1986-1989. As someone who likes Maddie, I have to say good on you Mr. Robinson.
-0 is a weird issue in that not a lot happens in it. Turns out Cable's first trip back to the past was on Muir Island. He has a brief run in with Moira MacTaggart, a very young Wolfsbane, and Reverend Craig for that matter. Moira points him Charles Xavier's way and he leaves, but not before erasing Wolfsbane's memories off panel so as not to cause a continuity problem. Natch.
Next, we get into the Operation: Zero Tolerence crossovers. And uhhhhh, man I really feel for James Robinson here since he's not given a lot to work with. Bastion is invading the Xavier Mansion for two reasons, to kidnap the mutant tracking X-Force member Caliban and to steal the Xavier Protocols, which contain information on how to defeat every mutant Xavier has ever encountered. I imagine that a lot the methods contained would just be "shoot them" but I digress. Only Cable can stop him and his band of oddly Deadpool looking soldiers from doing so! There's an odd moment where Cable has Bastion in his sights and Bastion talks him out of killing him because if he does then all of OZT has orders to go after the families and friends of all the mutants! This is a very odd plot point to me for two reasons. First, isn't OZT rounding up all the mutants to either kill them or put them in death camps? If one hair is harmed on Bastion's dumb soul patch, then Cyclops' grandpa and the Greys get it! But, how is that really any worse than what's happening right now? Second, it kind of points to Robinson's hands being tied in this. The main villain of the summer crossover can't be defeated in a goddamn Cable tie-in issue. You have to come up with weird contrivances to excuse why he doesn't at least try. Oh well.
Finally we move onto the Hellfire Hunt storyline. Irene Merryweather, Issue #48 being her first appearance, is investigating Sebastian Shaw and the Hellfire Club. Turns out that the club closely monitors all drunken conversations that people who catered an event for them one time have with reporters and send the goon squad to kill Irene, the drunken caterer, and the entire staff of the sleazy tabloid she works for. Luckily for her, Cable shows up to save her in some slightly hard to follow panels. Turns out Cable is also on the club's trail because they're trying to find Apocalypse to somehow claim his power as their own. He takes Irene with him for slightly contrived reasons as they attempt to thwart the Club in their mad scheme. There's also a subplot with this guy who got sent back in time by the Askani to make sure Cable becomes the Messiah. One interesting tidbit is that this arc establishes that the one who caused Donald Pierce, the insane mutant hating cyborg, to start losing limbs was Cable after he, along with the help of Iron Man in the George Tuska rivet head armor, foiled one of Blake's fiendish plots to conquer Albania! Wow!
To be charitable, let's say that (José) Landrönn takes very heavy influence from the works of Jack Kirby. However, his ability to lay out panels and to convey motion and action aren't as polished as that of the King's. It leads to some slightly confusing sequences where you kind of have to squint your eyes and just move along to get fully what's actually happening. There's even a bit where an editorial balloon makes fun of some of the paneling choices. A mixed bag. The other artists are fine enough, if unspectacular.
So would I recommend reading this? If you're a fan of Cable and Madelyne Pryor? Sure. If you're a casual like me, I would skip Cable's 1997. Not that much interesting happens and the art is pretty spotty.
Colossus Vol 1. #1 Writer: Ben Raab Artist: Bryan Hitch
This is a very strange issue. For one, it's not really a solo issue but more of a side story to plots that are going on over in Excalibur. Colossus and Meggan, who are, let me emphasize, just friends, are in Paris to go visit Meggan's favorite theme park, Dudleyworld. Which I suppose makes her some sort of Disney Adult. Dudley Adult? They get kidnapped by Arcade, because of course they do, and Dudleyworld actually turns out to be Murderworld. Colossus has to fight a robot version of Proletariat, since of course he does, as well as wear his old Acolytes uniform because Arcade gets off to that sort of stuff. Turns out the whole caper is just an act so Arcade can fake his own death and get out of a contract with a bunch of bad guys who are also from Excalibur. Big whoop.
There's a scene where Colossus grabs Meggan and jumps out of a 5 story building, for no other reason than he can. He ends up smashing some of the pavement below. You know Colossus, someone's going to have to fix that! Kind of a dick move.
The Bryan Hitch art is pretty good and if you're Colossus fan lord knows you're starved for any and all content involving him. Read it just for that.
Daydreamers Vol 1 #1-3 Writers: J.M. DeMatteis, Todd DeZago, George Broderick, Jr., Andy Jozefowiez Artist: Martin Egeland
From the pages of Generation X, Join the Daydreamers, Artie, Leech, Franklin Richards, Tana Nile, Man-Thing, and Howard the Duck as they travel through what they think is the Nexus of All Realities, visiting worlds modeled after The Wizard of Oz, Dr. Seuss, and Duckworld. All the while, pursued by the shadow covered Dark Hunter whose identity and motives you might be surprised by.
You know for the out there premise and obscure characters involved, I thought this was really good. Like an offbeat Nemo in Slumberland or Neverending Story. I think this would make a really good children's movie with a few tweaks here and there. It's also cool to see Tana Nile, an old 60s Thor character, in any role at all.
Howard the Duck is pretty much the perfect choice to tell this story. The original Gerber stories with the character were always weird and meta and mostly a way to tell deeply personal and emotional stories that go beyond normal comic book conventions. I think all the choice this comic makes are the correct ones.
Since the big twist turns out that they're not traveling the multiverse, they're in a reality created by Franklin Richards who is unable to process the death of his parents via Onslaught the year prior. He was creating all of it to try and avoid that single truth. However he's not alone, as the First Family of Marvel might be gone but he's got these weirdos with him.
Too bad Heroes Return would ruin the whole thing and the emotional catharsis of these issues. THANKS FOR NOTHING PETER DAVID!
I would recommend reading this, since these are actually good comics. Always read good comics. Then maybe listen to this afterwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtto2yZXw0
Deadpool Vol 3 #-1, 3-12 and Daredevil/Deadpool Annual Vol 1 #1997 Writer: Joe Kelly, Stan Lee Artists: Ed McGuinness, Kevin Lau, Aaron Lopresti, Bernard Chang, Pete Woods, Shannon Denton, John Fang, John Romita Sr
I think I want to highlight the annual as it was my favorite issue out of this whole bunch of Deadpool comics. The whole issue serves as a bit of a retcon of an issue of Daredevil: The Man Without Fear released 4 years prior. In the Daredevil issue, a young Matt Murdock who had yet to don the horns, was perusing a criminal through a brothel. The prostitutes there started attacking Matt. Matt, in a fit of panic due to his inexperience in crime fighting at the time accidentally knocks one of the prostitutes out of a window, sending her to what Matt believes is her death. Wait a minute. Daredevil, prestige format origin story, gritty, violence against prostitutes? Frank Miller, you scamp! You've been the same all this time.
What this issue reveals is that the Prostitute that Matt knocked out the window was actually Mary Walker, aka Typhoid Mary. Turns out she didn't die from the fall, but the psychological trauma, on top of all that she had experienced prior, was the finally tipping point needed to turn Mary into the murderous and psychotic Typhoid. The issue then becomes a bit of a therapy session for Mary, as Deadpool attempts, and fails at, helping her move beyond this trauma. At least Daredevil knows he's not actually a murderer, which is something. The issue also features Weasel and Foggy Nelson commiserating over pizza about being perpetual second bananas. Not bad.
Anyway, I'm going to go over the cliff notes of these issues for reasons I'll get into later. Meet Deadpool and his room mate/prisoner Blind Al, in a story line that just feels uncomfortable and a bit of an artifact of the initial pitch that Joe Kelly got bored with as the run goes on. Meet T-Ray, a guy that looks like a Darkstalkers character with powers to match and really hates Deadpool. Meet Deathtrap, a guy who never appears again after the one issue he's introduced in. Meet Siryn, the X-Force leader who convinces DP not to murder Dr. Killebrew, the Weapon X scientist who gave Wade his healing factopsychological scars. Meet the Great Lakes Avengers who at the time are known as the Lightning Rods, who get involved with Deadpool for the first time in a whacky time travel adventure. Also this is the first time Flatman is implied to be gay. Meet Zoe Culloden of Landau, Luckman and Lake who, in a storyline I didn't like when I first read all this 20 years ago, tries to get Deadpool to become a true hero so he can fulfill a prophecy about a cosmic messiah.
I think this re-read puts something in perspective for me: I just don't like Deadpool. I don't like his jokes. I don't like references, metatexual or otherwise. I don't like him constantly saying duodenum. I don't like the pathos, such as it is, of being a "hero" versus a "sociopathic murderer". It all feels like we're following an emotionally disturbed 13 year old boy who is constantly quoting Jim Carrey bits from movies and has to go the OTHER class after lunch recess. As someone who was that 13 year old boy, I feel qualified to make that judgement.
I don't know if its personal growth, or that I've seen a lot of what is going on here before, but I just did not enjoy reading a lot of this. Joe Kelly's run is considered pretty seminal in the history of the character and a lot of what has made the character enduringly popular reaches maturation here, but it's just not for me anymore. Familiarly breeds contempt I suppose.
Would I recommend reading this? Yes actually. Joe Kelly is a good writer, despite my dislike for a lot of the Deadpool-isms that are present here, and the art is very good. It's also a spot where a lot of people were introduced to the character. If anything, the historical significance makes it worth looking at.
Next Time: A Bunch of Europeans, Teenagers, and Gambit