More Profound When You Consider That Doctors Without Borders Rarely Makes Political Statements.

It's Phee Genoa hours again.

I was rewatching the first scene in "Pabu" and have some thoughts, sparked Hunter's knife whizzing by Phee's head to kill the kouhun and her not even flinching. I always think about how she must have absolute nerves of steel to have literally no response to that happening. So anyway, I got to thinking, as one does, and had some other thoughts. Disjointed breakdown below.

tl;dr Phee is brilliant because she is brilliant.

Phee goes into this negotiation with Crowder with every single possibility covered and considered:

Phee is familiar enough with Crowder to know that he might try to sell her a knock-off.

She also knew to check the drink for poison (likely not exclusive to Crowder — probably pretty common in her line of work.).

Killing her with a kouhun didn't work, so they tried to take the artifact back ("you should've brought more muscle"), but she had back-up.

THAT didn't work, and it turned into a shootout.

"Not until I know it's not one of your two-bit knock-offs" and "I thought you worked alone" strengthens the argument that these two either know each other or know OF each other. I'm guessing the former. If it's the latter, Phee has a hell of a reputation for Crowder to clock that her working with someone is out of the ordinary.

Her nonchalance about the kouhun -- she likely knew he'd try something like that. She had some intel maybe, or he'd tried something similar in the past. The fact that the kouhun comes from a creepy crawly trapdoor installed under his seat means this is probably the place Crowder does his business most often. Again, Phee has past experience or has the intel to know that the little bug cubby is there at all and that he would use it.

Similarly, the placement of Hunter and Wrecker has to be intentional. If Phee knew Crowder would try something, Hunter is pretty strategically placed to see it happening and be able to do something (i.e. throw a knife), while also keeping an eye on Omega (likely his first priority) but not be totally obvious about it (until he throws said knife).

My point is that Phee is a pretty brilliant strategist to be a step ahead of not one, not two, but three different attempts on her and the Batch's life in the span of less than a minute and a half. She also repeatedly proves that she is an incredibly valuable source of intel. We see this from her introduction, where she talks to Cid about the intel she'd provided regarding the war chest, in addition to her being able to track down Fennec, plus getting the location of the Imperial labor camp to find Rampart. She is paying a lot for this intel, but she both knows where to get it and that it will be correct.

She's seen it all, she's dealt with it all. She can work alone, she can work with others. She can rebuild her droid 222 times. She can use her massive contact network to find just about anything or anyone. She carries a big-ass sword and a space flintlock and wears a cool leather jacket. She cuts her ship's engines and falls through the atmosphere and calls it a "stealth approach" and has three super soldiers hanging on for dear life (Crosshair is literally crumpled up on the floor at one point.). She'll flirt with a total stranger after insulting each of his siblings. She can outcrazy the Batch but also likes to go hang out on a beach planet and be Auntie Phee for a while and maintain an archive of cultural artifacts on said beach planet.

She's cool and I like her very much.

The 145 films we watched this year. Can you figure out the odds one out?

(pink is Inès, green is Gabrielle, white is watched by both)

Again, thanks to @hotvintagepoll for all the great movie recs. Your blog literally made me fall back in love with Old Hollywood which then helped me get back into my passion for cinema and I'm so thankful that my cinema year was so rich (and Toshiro-full) thanks to you and your community ❤️

the cook and the grill master

based off of this post by @melonteee on twitter

I made a Redbubble, wanna make some past art into stickers there

The dynamic in Rise between the rest of the team and Leo is. so fucking funny. Because like you've got these three extremely talented individuals who all seem like perfectly reasonable people at first glance, right, but then if you squint hard enough you realize they're actually all batshit insane (affectionate) and the clown boy standing behind them is secretly their common sense.

Clown boy will occasionally put himself and the others in danger to Prove Himself or Prove Someone Wrong (see Minotaur Maze and the movie) but like otherwise... i think people forget Leo's overwhelmingly the voice of reason in most situations?

Raph, Mikey, and Donnie are all incredibly powerful boys with very specific skill sets. They are also, as a direct result of this, the WORST decision-makers on god's green earth lmao. When presented with a problem, Raph will smash, Donnie will blow shit up, and Mikey will razzmatazz. They will all run straight toward death with the same oblivious enthusiasm of a dog about to run straight into a screen door. None of them realize this and all of them think they are Extremely Good At Problem-Solving.

And the guy cursed with the common sense to realize this is literally the LAST person anyone would expect.

When you look closely, the entirety of Rise is actually a chronicle of Leo trying to find new and creative ways to keep this team of superpowered fools alive while simultaneously white-knuckling his Cool Fun Guy persona so the others don't realize he's secretly the Boring Responsible One. Haha, you know what would be Cool and Fun, guys? Not going after the Spine Breaking Bandit lol. Getting home before the sun goes up lol. Evacuating that civilian lol. Not telling the guy dangling me off a roof "you won't, no balls" lol.

The sacred struggle of every iteration of Leonardo is thanklessly wrangling the most trigger-happy siblings in the world, and Rise Leo has not escaped it. He just does an occasional shenanigan to avoid detection and his brothers fall for it every time.

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

“There’s no platonic explanation for tha-“