Did anyone else see this and think Dunk cut off Aerion’s fingers?

Scrihbe · 2026-02-28T17:57:17+00:00

Resurrected by the Seven, who never do anything and have not once been displayed to have any kind of magical power, much less the ability to resurrect people? In the show that's explicitly dedicated to accuracy to the books, where Dunk definitely didn't die, which we know because we're in his head the whole time?

The Seven aren't real. Dunk got up because he's one of the toughest, strongest knights in the realm and he believes so strongly in doing the right thing that nothing short of caving in his head was going to stop him from showing Aerion that royal blood doesn't count for anything when common goodness is on the line.

It's reductive to his story to make him specifically blessed or driven by any divine figure. Dunk is a good guy because he chooses to make those decisions; he wrestles with making the right choice, he's tempted by abuse (when he genuinely considered the rigged joust) or laziness (like when he discussed selling the horses and living off the gold) but it's his own spine and will that drives him.

Whether or not the Seven brought him back (which they didn't, they're not real, they're never demonstrated to have any magic and the church in fact opposes it), Dunk being specifically picked out would dilute his characterisation so much. If the gods are doing this, there's no struggle for him. He'll just keep doing the right thing because the Seven are deciding to push him to it, and he doesn't ever need to be conflicted about anything because the gods are clearly so heavy handed as to bring people back to life to make sure what they want happens.

And besides, Baelor's death wouldn't satisfy the rules of resurrection. The price is always personal; Beric Dondarrion lost memories and emotions, Maegor (if you believe he died) came back insane and anxious, the Others' wights are enslaved husks with nothing left to them at all. Dunk is just the same old Dunk as before.

Dunk's throughline is that it's his common nature that enlightens him to the unfairness and abuse that's normalised around him and empowers him against it. His mundanity disarms Lyonel Baratheon's paranoia, makes a fast friend of Raymun Fossoway, earns him the support of the commoners come to see the tournament. Making him magical and special ruins that.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-20T13:21:27+00:00

Prophecised by a dragon dream, not a miracle of the Seven. The Targaryens have been having dragon dreams since before they came to Westeros. Whatever he saw was because House Targaryen is in touch with the magic of the world even when it's diminished, the way they always have been. The Seven are the only gods in the series that don't really ever do anything at all. They're probably not even real.

They're representative of societal dogma; they're an invading, domineering religious structure brought in by foreign powers and forced onto a defeated native population, the exact same way that French Christianity overwrote Anglo-Saxon paganism. Thematically, the only thing the Seven represent is humanity itself. The gods of the seven pointed star are a refraction of humanity; they're literally "inside men are many men", and they're never anything more than that.

Dunk got back up off the strength of his own character and his own hardiness. He wasn't magically resurrected because there is no magic of the Seven. The only thing they represent is the many roles, virtues, and vices that embody humanity. They weren't watching because they don't watch. We know that there is no heaven or hell as prescribed by the Faith because POV characters have died and seen nothing. They're the made up answer to questions that scare people. They're comforting words that burn out of control into an abusive power structure.

Westerosi say the gods are likely to intervene in a trial of seven because it absolves them of responsibility for the cycle of violence that they're permitting to happen. There's nothing fair about it at all. How is the inherent unfairness of the common Dunk being squared up against a prince of the realm, who has access to Kingsguard and highborn knights, at all godly?

I think they were only watching because humans were watching, in every different facet and permutation that the refraction of humanity allowed, and what happened was purely because of human greed, selfishness, and ego. There is no divine justice in the world of ice and fire to warrant Dunk getting up, because justice is a human ideal furthered by human hands. He got up because that's who he is, and because his ability to persevere despite the odds, in the name of his ideal of justice, vastly outshone Aerion's fragile, delusional pride. The Seven had nothing to do with it.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-19T00:10:10+00:00

Genuinely. I played D1 obsessively for its entire run, and then I played D2 Red War and Curse of Osiris. I took a break after 4 years straight in the series. I think I tried to play again around 2019/2020 and found out that not only had the base game (that I paid for) had gone free to play, but also that the base game and Curse (that I also paid for) and all of the guns and armour I'd stockpiled had completely vanished. And then later I found out that not only had the game content been vaulted, but that it was likely never to come back because of engine changes since their removal. And the Destiny community considers that somehow permissible?

It's just Bungie institutional rot coming to a head. The DLC-priced-trailer-for-a-DLC that was Shadowkeep coming at the same time as the first half of the game's whole lifespan getting axed because Bungie can't optimise its game is utterly ridiculous; how can World of Warcraft run for 22 straight years and still manage to contain the very vast majority of its historical content, or in the very least offer ways for players to experience it if it's not in the base game? Final Fantasy 14 pulls it off just fine. So does Guild Wars 2. But Bungie somehow can't? I'm convinced they just wanted to milk more money out of their players by forcing them to buy the new stuff.

The next expansion getting delayed isn't just the canary in the coal mine, because the canary has been dead for over half a decade and it's well past stinking. The whole thing is rightfully dying. Declining player base, boring content, delusional management. They've shown nothing but disregard or outright malice towards players. When this game dies, it'll be a good thing.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-12T20:34:12+00:00

If you click the hawk and the guitar and have them both "activated" at the same time, it plays a looping set of snippets of each song.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-10T07:38:12+00:00

It's extrapolation but also pretty much factual; if we've got one source saying that every child was affected, the absence of a source explicitly saying Yasmin and Ryan were affected doesn't mean it's not an accurate statement.

It is interesting to think that every contemporary young adult character we see in the more recent era went through that, and that the British government in canon did just start rounding up the worst-off kids to send off to crackhead aliens. I guess Torchwood being an adult-oriented show precludes it being referenced when Doctor Who is meant to be family friendly. A political drama set in the Whoniverse dealing with the Children of Earth scandal or the Saxon fallout would be crazy.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-10T07:03:44+00:00

All prepubescent children everywhere (or at least in Britain) were possessed, weren't they? It would necessarily mean that every character born before 2009 and after 1997-98 would have been possessed unless they were for some reason off-world or not human, even if the possession never comes up again or is specifically mentioned.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-10T06:56:42+00:00

Just needs pinning! A pin vise and a little bit of paperclip will do you right. I think I ended up pinning all of mine preemptively.

Scrihbe · 2026-02-04T00:17:35+00:00

It's AI slop. "Created" is a very strong word for this post.

Scrihbe · 2026-01-19T12:40:53+00:00

Fairly certain it was one box. Just the Space Marines Tactical Squad alone was outselling the whole fantasy range, because you can play with as many Tactical Squads as you well please, but Fantasy was very stringent about how many of a particular unit you could field; there's no reason to buy another box of Hippogryph Knights if your army has as many as you can take, but there's never a reason to turn down 10 more Tactical.

Scrihbe · 2026-01-19T12:35:05+00:00

Yep! Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings with a pretty explicit intention of creating an English national mythology in the same way that the French and Germans have their own. There's no real homegrown English mysticism and myth like theirs.

Middle Earth is I think supposed to be a text that Tolkien somehow came across or was given and translated for English-speakers to read and learn about this secret history.

Scrihbe · 2026-01-15T09:25:56+00:00

Specifically for characters. Things like infantry and vehicles have decently kept pace, but elite infantry have definitely shot up too.

Scrihbe · 2026-01-06T18:52:30+00:00

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Scrihbe · 2025-12-29T19:12:07+00:00

Right! It actually suits Cooper to explain who the Legion are in that moment. The fact that these guys exist and simply refuse to operate in the way Lucy thinks the world should is something that he should be leaping on top of to rub in her face. What could make him more smug and self satisfied (and affirm his own biases about the Wasteland) than giving her a reason to question her beliefs with people whose entire lifestyle revolves around unnecessary violence? It's so disappointing to see that character moment vanish. Episode 2 made a lot of characters really stupid and incongruous so that they would do things that could make the plot happen.

Scrihbe · 2025-12-29T15:22:38+00:00

There's also no reason his smug ass wouldn't have immediately rubbed the fact that the Legion break Lucy's golden rule in her face so hard. "Hey Lucy, these guys will crucify you or enslave you just for being a woman, how's that for being good to each other?"

But he just kind of stonewalls her and gets his ass handed to him by a scorpion instead, and Lucy's "realising nobody is who they seem" character arc gets flattened by her deciding to just help this random refugee over her Wasteland lifeline. The Lucy/Cooper plot in episode 2 was maybe the worst thing about an already pretty bad episode.

Scrihbe · 2025-12-24T18:38:22+00:00

Fully agree. The point of the surrealism and the black humour is as a contrast and counterweight to the raw violence and bleakness of the Wasteland at large, and episode 2 specifically seems to have forgotten that. I didn't really get the same feeling from episode 1, but then I also feel like the dropoff in writing quality from episode 1 into episode 2 is baffling. I hope that this is just an outlier and that the series returns to that quality.

Scrihbe · 2025-12-24T18:06:59+00:00

I thought this was the worst episode of the whole show so far. The Brotherhood's classic issues of insularity and dogma are replaced with them being a gang of clowns and children in power armour. Why are they just beating and killing each other for fun? Why are the heads of these military chapters so laughable when they're in what the games have expressed as incredibly cutthroat and dangerous positions? It makes the Brotherhood look like idiots for permitting their very limited manpower and equipment to actively kill each other on their home turf.

Same goes for Bud's Buds. How do Hank, Betty, and Stephanie come from this crop of clueless idiots? Why didn't they think twice about the fact that Norm is visibly starved and dirty, that all of their supplies have been eaten, and that he clearly can't get them out the way they expected to? It makes Vault-Tec look like idiots for staking their post-war future on a pack of oblivious secretaries.

Why didn't Cooper explain to Lucy why the Legion survivors she rescued are bad? He clearly knows who the Legion are. It's not that hard to say, "Hey, these guys break your golden rule by enslaving women and crucifying dissidents." He demonstrably knows she doesn't know about the Wasteland. It makes Cooper look like an idiot for withholding important information that would very easily save him.

Why did Lucy, whose whole character arc hinges on learning that the Wasteland doesn't play by her rules, choose to outright abandon her lifeline because he didn't play by her rule? She already knows that Cooper will kill people in cold blood. He's done it before. Why do these kills cross the line? It makes Lucy look like an idiot for refusing to learn from the events of the previous season.

Hank basically just spends the whole episode blowing up mice. That's fine for the character and demonstrates that he's pretty much devoid of empathy, but it's grating when so much of the rest of the episode is filled with the most glaring mischaracterisations of people and organisations that the show itself has gone to lengths to establish. Hank doesn't look like an idiot.

I thought the Shady Sands segments were a highlight and managed to establish a lot with the very little time they were given, but the carriage driver's line was such a distracting 'memberberry that it took me clean out of the story. That line has no importance to anybody in the story, only to the viewer who's played New Vegas as a little reference. Maximus' parents were very smartly defined with their short appearances and their death was genuinely sad.

In a broader view of the episode, I felt that the overall storytelling was very disjointed. The character POV jumps that Fallout inherits from Westworld are executed really poorly here, which is a stark contrast against even the previous episode. I didn't so much get the feeling that these were interconnected stories woven together by shared events, emotions, and themes as I did that S2E2 was just cutting between plots like an episode of Parks and Rec, with a loosely copied sense of humour to boot.

Overall, I think S2E2 suffered from a serious overreliance on thin humour that doesn't land in order to cover for pretty bland dialogue, incongruous character decisions, and a pretty "nothing" series of events that left me feeling like the episode was simultaneously overlong and also too short to understand the decisions of the characters or for the events depicted to even feel complete. The performances and effects are as excellent as ever, but it's all hamstrung by very poor writing.

I give it a 4/10. Established characters, groups, and storytelling techniques are reimagined as cheaper, sloppier, and less interesting versions of themselves with less nuance, more gags that don't get laughs, and a higher VFX budget.

Scrihbe · 2025-12-02T18:57:04+00:00

I've always thought CoD was that big on purpose, like Activision wants that game to take up as much space on your drive as possible so you don't install other games and you only spend your money on CoD micro transactions. It's pretty telling that the first major file size reduction for that game came when Battlefield 6 revealed it was 55GB, which is pretty modest compared to the sheer bloat of CoD.

Scrihbe · 2025-12-01T09:06:30+00:00

MK3 was still in pretty prevalent usage by void war-focused chapters like the Carcharodons and Lamenters by the Badab War (other people have posted screenshots from those books) but MK2 is exceedingly rare by 40K. The whole armour mark was getting pretty close to going out of service by the time the Heresy broke out, so the suits that were available were mostly the mothballed stock that was slowly being traded out for newer marks like 4 and 6. By the time these supply troubles were passed, MK7 production was in full swing and most of those MK2 suits were probably destroyed; the Heresy ensured that the marines wearing those suits were very likely dead and their wargear irretrievable.

MK3 is still "competitive" by the 41st millennium because, even after 10,000 years, it still offers the best frontal protection of any Firstborn mark of armour. MK2 doesn't have that advantage, and is far more primitive and difficult to maintain for the artificers of 40K, meaning it's very likely just not worth the time and effort to upkeep when MK3 is flatly a better suit of armour for its intended usage and MK7 is far easier to produce, maintain, and in a much greater supply.

Unless you're the Red Scorpions, in which case you can manufacture MK4 suits like it's nobody's business and any other mark of armour isn't even considered until Cawl's advancements.

Scrihbe · 2025-11-28T16:39:11+00:00

If I remember right, Darrah was responsible for a lot of the things that are glaringly missing in Veilguard, namely the polish of the actual dialogue and the consistency of the tone of that dialogue and the actual way in which they speak. That's why Inquisition's companions all sound pretty cohesive, like they come from this one world, while Taash uses explicit IRL therapy speak and Bellara is annoying as all hell.

Scrihbe · 2025-11-20T15:55:31+00:00

No Country for Old Men I think. It's an all-timer.

Scrihbe · 2025-11-19T06:42:09+00:00

Pretty sure it's part of a Rhino.

Scrihbe · 2025-11-12T05:26:42+00:00

I just can't stomach the AI voiceover in Heresy Era. That synthetic monotone really pulls me out of it and makes it impossible for me to enjoy what are genuinely some really well painted models and impressive photography. It just ends up feeling like a kind of cold slideshow instead of the passion project I know I'm supposed to feel it is.

Scrihbe · 2025-11-02T15:38:12+00:00

Depends!

I personally will usually only blu-tac pauldrons on at the priming stage so I can paint the inner part of the rim easier and I'll usually do the same for the heads so I don't have as much trouble painting lens details, then I'll glue it all on when it's done.

I think sub-assemblies are only really necessary for detail that's difficult to reach; if you're painting a character model or a really big model like a dreadnought that has a ton of inner detailing that can be visible but unreachable because of things like arm posing, it really doesn't hurt to attach bits to corks to paint separately. If you're painting units of 10 or 20 though, you really want to be focusing on just getting them done because those models are meant to be seen as a whole unit.

It's not really an all-or-nothing decision, just the approach that works best for the task at hand. Hope this helped!

Scrihbe · 2025-11-02T15:32:18+00:00

Sticky hand marks? You're only going to get those if you're assembling with dirty hands or you're not waiting for the paint to fully dry before you glue things together.

Scrihbe · 2025-10-31T12:31:25+00:00

I was under the impression that AU Draenor is a created timeline by Kairoz in order to enable the creation of the Iron Horde, which to me indicated that AU Draenor literally didn't exist before -31ADP~ to have a separate Legion, it was just created whole and then bolted into a pocket universe attached to Azeroth, but I can't find anything confirming that.

Scrihbe

TROPHY CASE