Ok, now you have heard the news
Saphron’s actual fucking horror when Ruby says Atlas is under siege though.
Remember how she wanted Jaune to stay in Argus? Yeah.
THIS WAS THE MOST SATISFYING FIGHT IN THE ENTIRE SHOW LMAO
80yo blind badass lady being the first one to basically actually hit Neo is the best. Best Huntress of her generation still got it.
Maria’s line, “Don’t you think Penny has had enough people telling her what to do?”, is so good. She just gets it, she knows this isn’t good or fair for Penny, but she’s still gentle with Pietro - I think she understands where his overprotectiveness comes from. I can’t help but remember that Maria was trained by her father… Maybe a little part of her sees herself in Penny.
I don’t care about the big picture. I care about my daughter! I lost you before, and you’re asking me to go through that again? No, no. I want the chance to watch you live your life! But dad, I’m trying to.
The fact that Blake is the one who filmed Ruby’s big speech - and if not, she was at least involved - makes me so happy! I’m sure Blake understands a thing or two about political messages and delivering them to a wide audience. Now I’m imagining Blake helping Ruby writing it, and coaching her, reassuring her, supporting her through the whole process…
And then Ruby’s head on Blake’s shoulder as they all watch the broadcast! Ruby looks a little bit in shock, but Blake looks so proud of her! I love getting more of their friendship this volume <3
Real talk though, can we talk about Taiyang’s reaction? This is the first time he’s seeing Ruby in months. This is the first time he’s even hearing from her since that letter she sent to him back during the v4 finale within the first couple hours of making it to Mistral, and who knows if that letter even made it home! It’s been months since then, with Taiyang not having heard from either of his daughters since Yang left. And now he finally gets to hear from one of them and it’s on a television screen on a channel that’s not supposed to be working and hasn’t worked since Beacon fell a year ago, as she tells the world about a super important secret that he’s one of the few people on the planet who knew about it beforehand! He was on STRQ, he knows how dangerous Salem is, and now here’s Ruby, revealing to the whole world that she’s now a part of this war. He’s probably feeling proud, excited, scared, terrified, helpless. Ruby just said Atlas was under attack and then the feed goes out! I can’t even imagine all of the feelings Taiyang must be feeling as he watches the screen go blank and his baby girl fade off the tv monitor.
This is how we leave Taiyang Xiao Long. In a dark room with nothing but a couple lamps and the tv for light, of which the tv is the brightest light in the room, holding his head in his hands while his dog tries to comfort him. All of this after begging to see his youngest daughter for just a second longer.
I feel so bad for this man.
god it really is just an exoskeleton she’s wearing because her actual skeleton is still fucked god what the fuck Atlas—
Ilia: Watching the Broadcast
Ghira not even waiting for the Broadcast to finish:
louisthesixteenth-deactivated20
its a national holiday
cflat-major
Celebrating someone’s death seems like a really macabre thing to do. Like I get that people don’t like him because of how his administration dealt with the AIDS epidemic, but promoting someone’s death as a good thing doesn’t sit well with me.
marginalised
during his administration, we had a problem with abuse of patients in mental healthcare facilities (asylums, but don’t call them that), and his response to it was just to shut down the entire system. he closed all public mental healthcare facilities because a few of them were mistreating patients, and all those mentally ill people suddenly found themselves homeless without the skills necessary to survive in the general populous. he’s the reason why our healthcare system is so terrible, and he’s to blame for the homelessness epidemic (i’ll get into the next reason why he’s responsible for our high homeless population in a sec). millions of people lost everything because of reagan. thousands died.
he also completely restructured our economy. from 1776 until he became president, we had an economic system like no other (look up the American School), but he removed most of the rules and regulations we had to keep the system in place because our system at the time limited accumulation of wealth. we had a built-in buffer that kept most people middle class. when he restructured our economy so he and his friends could get richer, reagan removed the safeguards that kept us out of poverty (most of the time), so now the lower echelons of society were in freefall towards homelessness. people lost their homes and businesses because the rich could do basically whatever they wanted now. superstores like wal-mart rose to prominence and pushed out small businesses because of this. our government also greatly reduced its expenditure on infrastructure. ronald reagan’s greed is why we don’t have enough trains and all our roads are falling apart.
he also expanded our already bloated military while in power. one of his slogans was “peace in strength.” his goal for our country was to get an iron grip around the rest of the world and impose our own agendas on other countries at gunpoint.
One of the first things reagan did when he came to power was to ignore the supreme court’s earlier ruling, ignore the constitution, and try to enforce a mandatory daily christian prayer time in all schools. when government workers went on strike against him and his policies, he fired 11,345 people. he put 11,345 people out of a job because they didn’t like him.
he lowered taxes for the rich, but increased taxes on the poor, contributing to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure and homelessness crisis. he also began privatising the government, which put thousands of jobs at risk and made wealthy capitalists the men who run our country. reagan is responsible for trickle down economics.
after the great depression, our government put in social programs to help people stay afloat, like universal healthcare for the elderly and disabled, basic income (the government paid people to dig ditches if they couldn’t find any other jobs. the ditches didn’t serve any purpose, but those people needed money and the government was willing to give money to anyone who worked), and food stamps. ronald reagan slashed all these programs and more, like the EPA, which made sure we were a “green” country.
as a result of these slashes, people who had been secure on government assistance programs were now having to take out loans and get into debt, which jeopardised our economy. we had a stock market crash because people were becoming too poor to buy stocks, and our national debt increased by 3 times. we went from $997 billion in debt to $2.85 trillion in 1987.
he also pushed us further into the cold war. previously, our relations with russia were cooling down a bit, but during reagan’s second term, he began actively threatening russia again. ronald reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war that would have killed all humans on earth.
Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the most hated prime minister in UK history, were close friends. he was also personal friends with Donald Trump.
Under reagan, we resumed a history of violent military imperialism in foreign countries, most notably lebanon, afghanistan, and pakistan. In lebanon, we tried to stop a revolution against an oppressive regime, and in afghanistan and pakistan, reagan ordered the CIA to train civilians and create a military force to fight russia for us. Reagan created the taliban, a militant group that even today publicly dismembers people for playing games in public. they cut off children’s hands. He also began dealing weapons with China, betraying our longstanding ally, Taiwan, destabilising politics in the pacific. Under his orders, we secretly aided african and south american military dictatorships in crushing their opposition. He assisted Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran who started the 1979 revolution, in purging political opposition from the government. in 1988 our military shot down an iranian commercial flight, killing 290 civilians.
Reagan was a Nazi sympathiser and referred to slain SS officers as “victims” of the war. just to make sure you read that right: Ronald Reagan supported the Nazis.
He declared the war on drugs, a movement that has greatly increased the disproportionate incarceration rates of african american and latino men in this country.
During Reagan’s second term, 115,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 died of it. Reagan did nothing to curb the spread, despite knowing that the AIDS epidemic almost exclusively affected black people and the LGBT community. when he learned how many people were dying and who they were, he laughed. he laughed at our suffering while we were dropping dead.
In short, Ronald Reagan was a wealthy, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, imperialist, racist, ableist, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic, warmongering, backstabbing murderer. Ronald Reagan was a monster.