Ok So I Wanna Talk Bout How Echo's Reaction To Grief Is To Run Away. Like, He Ran Away From The 501st

ok so i wanna talk bout how Echo's reaction to grief is to run away. Like, he ran away from the 501st to the bad batch once he learned that Fives died and now he's run away from the bad batch to Rex/the rebellion since Tech "died"

yes, the lords in black are very silly. but can we just take a moment to appreciate how freaking terrifying they can be?? the interaction between hannah and the wiggly doll in black friday still creeps me out, the childish intonation and unsettling laugh and jolty pauses between wiggly's words are very effective. he says that he wants to eat hannah, he plans on ripping the president open and taking out his guts, he causes hundreds of deaths through the aggression caused by his toys. tinky controls time and uses it to play with people like they're toys, all the art of his goat form is so disturbing, his obsession with the spankoffskis is a big thing. "i'm gonna have the whole set in my toy box", anyone? nibby has an insatiable hunger, uses the melted flesh of pig corpses to go around hatchetfield swallowing people (like linda). he cares about nothing but his all-consuming need to eat. pokey succeeded in starting the apocolypse, using hatchetfield like a set in which to perform a musical of his own design, possessing people and using them as his stars. he wants everyone to be dead but him, controlling a hivemind of human puppets that tear each other apart and spread his infection further. blinky sees everything, refusing to let his workers blink and knowing what anyone and everyone is doing. he's the watcher with a thousand eyes, and takes enjoyment in watching bill and alice nearly kill each other.

they're honestly so unnerving, from their lack of care for human lives and bloodlust to their playful manner and habit of getting a little too invested in people. they see the citizens of hatchetfield as toys, and aren't afraid to break them. they're sadistic, violent, powerful gods.

and that's partly why i find it so funny that they choose to dress up in bright neon looking like an unhinged version of a kids' show's cast.

YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO INFODUMP PLEASE TELL ME ABOUT WIGGLY'S SIBLINGS???? THAT HE APPARENTLY HAS????

omg ok SO

Meet the Lords in Black. Charming, aren't they?

Yes, Wiggly does indeed have four brothers who all do different things, so I'll cover them one by one, in order of introduction (since we've already met each of them in Nightmare Time at least once). BTW Nightmare Time has a fuckton of lore in it that I won't go into here, so even though I am about to spoil significant parts of it for you, I do recommend watching it, it's really good and if there's enough interest they might make a third one!

(Also you might notice they're all in doll form in this picture. This is how we knew them up until NPMD introduced us to what I call their Tumblr sexyman forms. Which are rad as hell by the way.)

So you already know Wiggly. That little green fucker, Wiggog Y'Wrath, the Capitalist Cthulu who does uwu-speak and starts a cult by invading people's minds. This will become a bit of a reoccurring theme with these guys. He's also the only one to successfully start an apocalypse, and the only one to have attempted to birth himself into our reality. (Or is he? We'll get to that...) He does seem to have some kind of dominion over the other LiB, as whenever all five of them show up there's always emphasis placed on him, like in NPMD where he does most of the talking while his siblings occasionally butt in.

Now for Bliklotep. Blinky seems to have slightly lower-scale ambitions than Wiggly, but don't let that fool you. Eyeball Boi is still incredibly dangerous. He runs an amusement park, WatcherWorld, deep within the Hatchetfield Witchwood. But it's not for the amusement of the patrons. Oh no. It's for Blinky's own amusement. Once you step inside, every insecurity, every shred of potential conflict will be ripped to the forefront, turning people against each other to the point of trying to kill each other until he's fully infected their minds. It's implied that, if not all, but a significant chunk of the workers at WatcherWorld were once patrons before having their minds taken over by Blinky. He's also implied to be the thing in Trail To Oregon that Jack Bauer sees during his venom-induced hallucination, as Blinky is referred to as "The Watcher With 1,000 Eyes", which is exactly what JB says he sees? Making Blinky the only LiB to induce a Starkid crossover. My headcanon is that the Dikrats founded Hatchetfield. But regardless.

Next up on the roster is Tinky. T'noy Karaxis, the Time Bastard. You may be wondering about that one line in NPMD where he recognised Pete as a Spankoffski, and said he "could have the whole set in his toybox". Has Tinky gone after Pete's relatives?

Well. Um. You know Ted, right? Yeah, his name is Spankoffski. He's Pete's big brother. We actually got the surname reveal before the brother reveal, lol. And that's not the only reveal we got about Ted. Our boy Teddy Bear has this whole entire tragic backstory and it turns out he gets fucked over in literally every timeline! Isn't that fun?

So, to summarise an entire episode: Tinky makes travel fuckery happen, Ted wants to go back in time to fix his life, accidentally goes back to before the time machine was created and gets stuck in the past, literally. Tinky is watching and laughing at the whole thing, then shows up to blow Ted's brain to smithereens with his weird little magic box, the Bastard's Box, where he stores all the people he toys with. Anyway Ted eventually catches up with the present by aging, except now no one knows who he is, he's... actually I won't spoil that. But once he dies he ends up eternally trapped and tortured in the Bastard's Box. Yaaay.

Fast forward to Nightmare Time 2 and we get introduced to Nibbly, in possibly the most unexpected way imaginable. He's revealed to have been behind a whole episode literally right at the end of said episode, and even though it was kind of foreshadowed, it hits you like a freight train in the best way. Remember when I said Wiggly was the only one who tried to birth himself into reality? That was kind of a lie. Nibblenephim can sort of do that anyway. Every year, he can possess a bunch of carcasses and create a living form to walk the earth for one night. He also has a cult of followers who provide him with the carcasses, as well as a sacrifice to feed on. There's a little more to it, specifically with how the sacrifice is chosen, but again, I'm trying to spoil as little as possible. Go watch Nightmare Time. Nibbly also seems to have a "pig" motif, and his theme song, The Nibbly Ditty, is a banger, easily my favourite of the three LiB theme songs we've heard so far.

And finally, we are introduced to Pokotho, in the very last episode of NMT2.

Except no. We were formally introduced to Pokey there, yes, but we've seen his apocalypse already. Long before NPMD, before Nightmare Time, even before Black Friday.

Yeah, remember me saying that Wiggly was the only one to successfully start an apocalypse? That was also a lie! Pokey already did that, and he did it without ever showing his masked face. Remember The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals? The blue spores that came down in a meteor and turned everyone into singing zombies? That was Pokey's doing! That's his blue spores! That's his apocalypse!

This also provides an explanation for why blowing up the meteor didn't work. Emma and Hidgens were right about the hivemind thing, but wrong about the location of the central brain. It wasn't the meteor - the meteor was just the vessel which carried the spores to Earth. The central brain was sitting safely up in the Black and White, laughing as Paul blew himself to smithereens. The central brain was Pokey, the Singular Voice, the most uncompromising of his brothers. The one who hates every voice that is not his own, hence the hivemind and making all of his zombies speak in HIS voice.

Anyway in NMT2 he's happily collecting musical zombies by taking on a human form and infiltrating a fighting ring of superpowered children until he has enough to kickstart another apocalypse. (Don't question it, we're almost done). He also calls himself Otho, not Pokey, making him the only LiB to have two different abbreviations of his name. Hannah is also there (remember her? Lex's little sister?) and she is like incredibly important to this whole thing, she has a super powerful mind, but that's a whole other thing.

But I did mention Hannah for a reason. Because you said "Wiggly's SIBLINGS". And while the Lords in Black are always referred to as brothers, they do have one more sibling. A sister. A Queen in White. And her name is Webby.

Yep, Hannah's imaginary friend isn't imaginary, who could have guessed? She's benevolent, always trying her best to combat her brothers' antics, but given that there's one of her and five of them, this is a bit of an uphill battle. Webby doesn't have a full name that we know of, nor does she have a doll. We don't know much about her. And she may not be all-powerful - but then again, neither are her brothers.

Infodump concluded. Hope this helps, it was very fun to write.

Fanart of « Quote Love Unquote » by @newamsterdame

i love lucy/cooper but i also think the canon romance writing on lucy/max is good? two young people, brainwashed by different cults run by old people trying to force things to be their way. both will break free and make something new together

even their different povs on sex fit with that - max is a virgin who is completely clueless *because the Brotherhood* did that to him - and Lucy thinks of sex as either simple casual fun or to "breed" - because the indoctrination of vault 33 shaped her that way

imo it's a frank and visceral show - so i am pretty sure we're going to see them have sex for the first time and when they do it will be about Making Love - it will be a first for both of them and something they've come to that doesn't fit either form of indoctrination they were subjected to

i really dig it. strong canon romance writing! both characters are well handled and their journeys mesh together well in a romantic story.

I'm a multishipper here because i want to think of lucy with EVERYONE interesting -- because each ship brings out different sides of her potentially -- lucy/steph?? dark and interesting. lucy/coop? ooh yeah bang your dark side girl! lucy/max? strong canon romance writing of the two young people who want to be, each in their own way, knights/cowboys and have to figure out what that means to them free from the brainwashing.

he’s 15 and this is deep