krad

I was talking to my partner @lovelanguageisolate in the gym yesterday about Rei. Rei has always been the most confusing character to me. Shinji and Asuka represent such striking, familiar psychological archetypes, and it feels like Rei should be a character of the same class.

Shinji and Asuka… wait, I just need to concatenate a bunch of things LLI said in a chat last year, it’s so good:

Shinji is always acting out the drama of being victimized.

That’s kind of how he’s coped. No one has ever adequately acknowledged his abuse, so he has kind of started playing this Nietzschean slave morality game of obeying adults and forcing them into the position of acting coercively so they cannot launder their mistreatment of him through more noble concerns.

He is very, very good at this game of making the adults in his life look at the monsters they are. And it’s like the off-brand version of love—not so much from the adults as from the Big Other/cosmos/audience.

He is obeisant, cloyingly needy, open-hearted to those he knows, and naturally good at his job. And he clearly also acts out a maladaptive need to be loved. He radically threatens Asuka’s theories about how the world works. He is attractive to her because he is a complete, integrated specimen in those important ways she isn’t. He is also nauseating and pathetic, which are some of the lowest things a person can be in her mental theater.

Asuka cannot be happy because, as you’ve observed, she pours herself monomanaically into performing genius, competence, and independence. She simultaneously mistrusts others so deeply that she refuses to attach to them in any kind of deliberate or open way but needs their approval and attention.

And she is doomed to suffer because of the Freudian narcissist’s dilemma: inasmuch as she can impress others with her performance, she thinks less of them by virtue of having fooled them. Inasmuch as she actually receives the trappings of love for performing in all these ways, her conviction that the performance is structurally necessary deepens, but also, the more the actual feelings of being loved feel out of reach.

She is a person I struggle mightily to empathize with because of her fractal nastiness, but her need to be loved is so palpable and endearing, and it makes her suffering so heartrending to me.

But what is Rei, whose existence is so abnormal, so hard to fit into an adolescent psychodramatic archetype? I really want to place her into the pilot trifecta. The show wants me to! But I have to extrapolate what she is from her foils, and from what I think she might become.

And I notice that I have to do this because everything in the show conspires against my getting to know her, both textually and metatextually.

She is continually being taken away.

this is me nerding over the nuts and bolts of making comic pacing work more than hellsing specifically but i do think hirano-san’s action-drawing skill (and the layering of storytelling) is

o b s c e n e l y underrated. 

especially since it’s seen only as gorn porn (which it is, don’t get me wrong) and not that and a delicate understanding of clarity, beats, how to rip at your heart while alucard’s still guninng down mooks like no tomorrow, the fuckkin detail in general, the clarity again.  like - take it from someone who does the same medium -  action scenes are fucking nightmarish to draw. 

(-gestures @ self with a ‘kill me now’ expression lmao-) (analysis doesn’t count as procrastination right)

take these pages from the brazil fight: this whole thing is a start-to-finish slaughter when the paramilitary force finds alucard.  from a ‘how do i execute this visually’ standpoint, it’s a man vs nature fight, you are required to dial up the intensity a bit.  there’s some lovely set-up with alucard emerging from already being gunned down once, so the stakes are pretty high - first blood has been dealt and you know this monster’s just itching to be let loose.

and so he does.

most of the paneling is literally just three or four rectangular pages a pages, no fancy dynamics, no interruptions - it’s literally like screenshots from a movie right in a row.  partially because with the amount of blood/dynamicism, things can get complicated as shit visually, and hirano’s strength is bold ball-bustin’ delight in horror, so the framing is simple to let it shine.

note too how he plays on negative shapes in the first two panels - inversing alucard’s face goes a hell of a long way towards a not-quite jump-scare but close. 

before i mention the exquisite way how the blood trails lead the eye to the next panels, also note that the first entire page is just alucard chompin’ down on a neck; manga tends to be slower in pacing than western comics (not unheard of western comics to have 10-12 panels in a page) - which works in favor of scenes like this. more drawing, yeah, but reading it is hella easier.

second page is a classic (action > (close up for shock effect) > wide pan of a reaction set of beats) - the whole spread deliberately moves from uncomfortably close up shots > wide pan, like the chaos is spreading outwards.  classic movie cinematography.

third page is another beautiful 3-beat-setup like mentioned right up above.  again, hirano knows his cinematography what with alucard’s face being placed in the same screen real estate for a delicious ‘oh-shit-i’m fucked-eyes-meet-eyes’ moment.

fourth page seems a little unnecessary at first glance (there’s nothing he’s doing there that he’s not doing in other panels) but it’s telling if you line up these pages and delete that page, something feels off about the pacing; it doesn’t quite feel like alucard’s gone through the whole group before facing down the last soldier (below).  again, spreading the chaos outwards.  

you know what I love about these pages too? one of the only times alucard’s not using his guns in the whole brazil episode.  it’s a beautiful visual underline towards that ‘man vs nature’ skewed power balance; he’s a terrifying monster that is perfectly willing and able to shred apart trained military men with guns, and that fact doesn’t matter to the point it’s laughable.

- drags fingers down face - ART!!!!!!!!!!

now this moment could be really complex to draw from a series of ‘how thefuck do we hint that alucard’s used his weird ass telepathic powers to lock the dude in without showing door mechanisms or loosing the pace of this whole thing’

fear.

raw primal scrabbling-at-the-door-terror at being locked in with that. i’m honestly in awe at how hirano shows that clarity of expressions even in those butt-uggo ski-masks (though actually the eye-holes tend to make the eyes more circular in fear more, so +1 for deviously brilliant character designs)

i have a theory in general that good comics are made up of nothing but action>reaction pair setups - which is slightly beside the point, but you see it here how there’s one explicit action per panel, it’s very clear - the head drops, swat guy reacts in fear, alucard steps forward, has a second sub-action by locking the door in anticipation of swat guy pissing in his pants and running for it - which he then does. 

(note the panel sizing too; biggest one is the looming malice of alucard with fucking blood and gore dripping from his hands how metal is this.)

i’m gonna say my one critique out of this whole set of pages is hirano goofed by making the hand silhouette on the door not easy to read (personally i’d remove the ‘wha’ speech bubble so it’s clear his whole arm is reaching towards it), so hey, nobody’s perfect.  what i do like on that page is the stark negative (white) space as the swat guy turns slowly in fear again, which pairs -

- really damn well with this inky black dark horror walking forward.

and bam, nothing like a good full-pager to go from ‘teeny tiny corner panel’ to ‘oh FUCK’ in terms of contrast (mike of hellboy fame does the same thing in his comics which tells me it’s a reliable trick).  and i also just noticed how vaguely unsettling it is that alucard’s hinted to be leaning on a wall with the outstretched arm like he just slid in there and the weight of the dead guy pressing down.  brrrr.

i lov lov lov that last page too - another gorgeous if terrifying action/reaction blitz.  boot step action to ratchet up the tension (you know the guy is deader than dead) > paired successive actions as swat guy reloads and falls back against the door, cowering - you can practically feel the pistol shaking in his hand > alucard’s response.

(it’s unorthodox to split the last panes like that but tbh i think it works with the necessary pause as alucard gives the greatest line of all time back.  brilliant multi-level work of symbolism there; note that the ‘i get that a lot’ has his face carefully obscured; it’s like a barb against his back, something he fights off through the whole series, naturally (and naturally for the series that sides with the monsters) he -as the dark mirror to humanity -  turns it around and asks the quintessential existential question in return - what are you?

so i’ve been rereading/skimming through repcomm today because i am the type to have .pdf versions on the laptop (shhh) in addition to the 2 hard copies (shhhhhhhh) not to mention the version that’s all of vau’s scenes pasted together in a doc and

i haz thoughts

(mostly belated ‘what tipsy-and-utterly-non-filtered!krad generally thinks of each character’ thoughts because large distinct casts are rad ?? and unsolicited opinions on each are even radder??)

• kal: still a entertaining character to read - i forgot how much he waves around his knife at people and/or straight up throws it at them in a grown man hissy fit lol.  corporate!AU with kal as the ‘WE. ARE. FAMILY!!’ bellowing salesman-y sleezy CEO definitely seems like something that would be lolworthy and incredibly in character because god Now I Have Seen Several Real World Versions and they are both incredibly fun in parties and incredibly un-fun one-on-one.
• distinctly Uninterested in the ’~how Bad of a Bad person is kal~’ discourse ((a) all of the cast being pointedly shades of grey was already p obvious imo…?) (b) that is like literally the least interesting thing about him, tell me about how fucked up his PTSD is from being a literal war orphan and loosing goddamn everything and how clearly that carries over into everything else including his massive class insecurity??? and © especially how it implicitly places vau’s choices as the more morally-correct by default which
  • hahahahhahahahahaha
  • haaaaaaaa
  • h e l l   n o 
• given traviss being British, kal is the most spot on ‘american individualism’ character i’ve seen from a foreigner? which is both the coolest thing and the most damning thing depending on your take (or both).
  

• etain: it took a very long time for me to warm up to her over the years as i am personally the type to hiss at the classic normie-special stand in that a lot of EU stories start with - but honestly?  aside from her being unnecessarily shafted at the end for the manpain, i kinda like how she was thrown way in over her head in a different kind of war; repcomm at its heart was about the tension between black ops asymmetric guerrilla shit (what traviss was clearly more familiar with) and ‘classical’ warfare (what the jedi and the movies showed) - the EU was at its best when authors brought their own specific interests to the table and shook the box up, and it happened to be hella timely what with the iraq war starting at the time (and all the questions about imperialism, how the fuck do you solve for military-industrial-complex problems when you were literally born to be a tool in the system, etc).
• anyway
• etain! 
• the parts i really like about her tie directly to the parts when she rebels against jedi stereotypes - she’s non-judge-y and gets shit done in a very shocking way for a lady jedi protag (shit, she finished vau’s torture-interrogation in the second book without a peep, something i think jusik would’ve balked at - and fascinating considering ladies always get hit with the empathy ‘wah wah i don’t want to hurt peoplez, u manly men deal with it’ card).  her ability to read people’s internal moods(?) was super neat and a refreshing take on that empathy.
• romance with dar was …. e h ?  i skip through those parts every time lol
• (i definitely don’t dig her near total opposite thematic synergy with vau for bias reasons what do you mEAN)
• i could write a whole essay on those parts cough actually fuck i did already
  

• boss: is a really easy character to overlook! (as sadly, niner and omega fill in a very similar archetypal role of ‘the leader’ and ‘the squad of soldiers’ respectively and here in the books we got introduced to omega first, not delta)  but imo repcomm is very anime in the way it plays deliberately with archetypes after it sets them up (kind of like how every anime has something pretentious to say about the pretteh white haired red eyed creepy cutie set to start armegeddon)
• i mean i’m not saying boss is a bishie but-
• (shredded bishie and wow why have i not done pin ups of the entire cast they are all p smokin down to the last one)
• ANYWAY
• wookieepedia quotes temura morrison as saying boss is the closest clone to jango - which i think is a hilarious statement that also perfectly shows that archetypal play - jango is a very dry sort of character once stripped of his twisty past with mandalorians and his need to make boba - so you get a very bare-bones jango whose paternal instincts are slightly warped/redirected to delta as a whole, plus the most blunt period to the whole existentialist question of ‘clones’ - it isn’t tangled up in romance like dar, it isn’t tangled up in unexpected trauma like fi / scorch / atin / sev, it isn’t tangled up in mixed loyalties like niner - he does his duty, end of story.  i think there’s a lot of vau that shows up in the empty spaces of that (what with needing to be used as a tool), which tells you a lot about their dynamic.
• deceptively interesting character, 8/10 would be tempted to write a standalone essay on the above

• atin: i……….. surprisingly, took a while to “get” him?  i read hard contact first after picking up the books on a whim, so he didn’t stand out as having a Rough Past With A Reason until i went back and read them properly, and even then it was a while before he amassed to something beyond ‘oh yeah, screwed over by vau too many times’
• part of me sometimes leans into ‘man KT really needed to give the man more of a personality other than ‘oh yeah screwed over by vau’ and it feels like his arc with Laseema was an attempt at fixing that plus shooing him off-stage to let the wimminz!! and their magic empathy!! solve all manpain!!! (/s)
  • (contrary to the tone of that sentence i actually dig atin/laseema more than etain/dar but more due to him being super chill with her whole story and having real chemistry there - both of them could have on point things to say about being abused by authority figures but i’m not sure if i trust KT to relay that right lmao )
• [ pinches nose ] brutally honest here, it is always slightly awk talking about atin with me being the resident chatterbox vau ‘stan’ as while i do my best to dissect the fuckery that vau unleashed on him, i … am only human and i have a limited amount of time to frankly c a r e about how to dance around that, so….., yeah………
• overall: slightly burnt sinnamon roll that strikes me as someone who has hidden depths that laseema / etain / jusik could pull out, would read fic of that and squee.

• Scorch: i don’t see a lot said about scorch which is UNFORTUNATE because he had a pretty nifty arc what with that missle attac attack that was maybe a little anvilicious but again, brought an interplay of war-on-terror themes mixed with star wars that was impossible not to find … relevant, if not interesting?  I personally liked repcomm’s focus on the different takes on psychological trauma and all the ways folks can shake out -  healthy, unhealthy, oh god-how-are-you-alive, etc - an how it was A Big Deal but not … Too Serious?  like as tasteless as it sounds, it was still entertaining.
• and Scorch other than Sev strikes me as the Entertaining One in Delta - the junkrat that has A Thing for explosives, the unintentional snark, the one they needed to feed all the witty lines to in the game, so he strikes me as a slightly caricaturized fellow that needed more deliberate shaping in the books, and what better way to do that than T R A U M A
• (ahahahah who are we kidding that goes for all of them)
• morbid jokes aside, i think there’s something fun to explore in how quick he was to be defensive when asked about his feelings after that - I think all the troopers would be to an extent, but there’s meat in how quickly he wanted to bounce back and be the ~ heart and soul of the group again ~

• vau: you know, funny thing i think kal was my favorite character for the first 2 full rereads of the series, then somewhere between #3 and #21 (and an affair with Uthan), this bitch started growing me and didn’t stop.   
• t h i s  b i t c h
• that’s a really good summary of him actually
• the pithy way to describe it in <100 words is that he dealt with fucked up shit by lining up Any And Every Care against a cinderblock wall and execution-style shot them in the temple and kept shooting like that for ~50 years until there was no weakness (and demanded no weakness at knife-point from actual traumatized kids) because there was nothing else to keep him from doing the same to himself out of fucking relief
  • and uh, teen!krad falling over at the fact that f i n a l l y there was somebody!!! that reacted to things in the exact same way!!! holy shit this is relatable!!! i have never felt like this about a character!  was maybe ……. a sign…… to think long and hard about skeletons in the closet etc etc
• i have written essays organized in a table of contents on him i do not need to give him moar words (even though his dynamic with literally every character is interesting by default given he’s the perfect charismatic existentialist foil so there’s a lot to say regardless cough)
• mird is cute and problematic like a schrodingers cat with more drool the end
  

• Corr: probably my personal favorite out of the clones - i thought him him being the token wounded/disabled vet was shockingly??? tasteful???? by most standards and actually remarkably embodied the personalities i’ve seen in the same boat - very quick to lol / joke / squick out other folks at their rad titanium limbs as a way of pre-emptively disarming any potential awkward moments becauseohgodthosearetheworst and still has that dual charming but deeply morbid sort of humor that basically serves the same purpose. (hi) (yes yes other than vau he’s probably The Most Relatable #spoiler alert )
• the ‘token thing’ doesn’t bother me as much considering literally every character had Trauma Baggage and he actually had a number of scenes not specifically centric to that, surprise surprise.
  • (his characterization being squashed in 501st was a crime against humanity given how that book shat on everyone but that’s neither here or there)
  • also lol @ the beetle racing that was such a random but … weirdly relatable scene considering how bored kids can get, and digging up insects to compare and coo over is apparently a universal Thing.

[ see this post for explanation & the masterlist of this meta series ]  

Vau was now a statue of self-control. Etain said he always seemed utterly calm in the Force, even when he was shoving a vibroblade down someone’s gullet. Zey looked none the wiser. - True Colors

Control is a word that I’ve used a lot in these posts. 

There’s a reason why.

the words’ serene’ ‘detached’ 'cold’ ‘calm’ (and similar descriptive words in that quadrant) appear so often in the books that i’m frankly surprised it’s not a running fandom joke that that Vau has All The Chill™‚  (’defrosting’ tho) (ty izzy :P)   Thankfully - unlike some series - we have a handy no-shit way to see the character’s exact mental landscape, fairly untainted by biases: through the Jedi and what they sense in each of the characters. 

[ see this post for explanation & the masterlist of this meta series ]  

[Sergeant] Vau had never been a chatty man at the best of times; maybe this was the private Vau, the one his squads rarely saw.

- Order 66

One of the biggest sources of tension between Vau and his commandos - including Delta - is the misaligned idea between parent and mentor, and what his role is with them.  They desperately want him to be their father like Kal is for Omega - loving, accepting, and all-guiding.

He has not, and will never view the clones as his children*.

( … in many ways, that’s a good thing.)

[ see this post for explanation & the masterlist of this meta series ] 

“Now do you see? Do you?” Vau hissed the sibilant like escaping steam.

Mird cowered on the floor, whining softly.

“I’m sick to death of your sentimental twaddle about Jango betraying us by letting Kamino use his genes. He did it to stop the Jedi. He did it to create an army strong enough to bring them down. You drone on about the injustice of unelected elites, my little working-class hero - well, now they’re gone. Yes, it cost our boys’ lives, but the Jedi are gone, gone, gone. And they won’t be killing Mandalorians again, not for a long time. Maybe never.”

- Republic Commando: Order 66

Vau’s entire character makes a lot more sense when you factor in the massacre at Galidraan.  

For an EU recap:

At Galidraan - Jango and the core faction of the True Mandalorians walked into a trap that the Death Watch seized on: playing off the good jedi’s morality (and naivety) by sending a false distress message that the mercenaries were slaughtering unarmed civilians.  Their plan worked far better than anticipated as the Jedi confronted Jango - who was unwilling to back down - and sat by as the massacre unfolded, with Jango as the resulting sole survivor on the Mandalorian side.

Overnight, what was a splinter faction had demolished the backbone of the Mandalorian forces - no mean feat.  Experiencing a freak accident of being at the right (wrong) place at the right time, Vau and the handful of other surviving True Mandalorianes on other planets could do nothing as their entire command chain (and found family) fell in shambles.

And were left with one hell of a survivor’s-guilt punch.

(To get it out of the way - Vau himself clearly identifies with the True Mandalorian faction.  Off the top of my head: there’s the “Death Watch are my only enemy” quote in O66, his close-knit dynamic with Jango (which far exceeds Vau and Kal’s own barely working relationship which still nonetheless has material to span three books), what we know of his initiation in the Mandalorians, etc. 

They were his surrogate family, as much as he could admit such a thing.)

Keep in mind, also - that there was probably a long section of time where Vau had no idea Jango survived.  Jango went straight to Jedi captivity and slavery iirc, and if the remaining True Mandalorians had an idea of where he was, I gamble that there would’ve been at very least, a rescue attempt.  (Cynically - for a figurehead that could be useful in rallying the remaining clans to the cause.)

Jango sure reads like a personal quasi-mentor for Vau, if you ask me.  For someone who has extremely deep trust issues, loosing that on top of his entire support network would … not do any favors.

>> on survivor’s guilt

Touching on an earlier point, I am by no means a medical expert, but a lot of his actions can also be read as a pretty textbook case. This quote, right after the one shown above -

Vau didn’t meet Skirata’s eyes for a moment, but he glanced at Jusik. “I could have been at Galidraan, but I wasn’t, and I never forgot that. Not my fight. Should have been my fight.”
“And you could have been dead, now, too. Bard'ika, if you don’t know-”
“Oh, I know what happened at Galidraan,” Jusik said. “I know Jedi wiped out Jango’s entire army.” He paused. “And I know Jango killed Jedi with his bare hands, too, because I once talked to a Jedi who was there.”

-O66

- says it all.

For more physical symptoms -

• mood swings / outbursts of anger (obvious. holy hell)
• hyper-vigilance (something this entire cast has in spades)
• anxiety (this seems like a contradiction to the whole ’~super chill ice king~’ shtick he has going, but bear with me.  think about overcompensating and the human nature of avoidance for now - I’m circling back to this in a different post.)

And what do we know, we see all three in the books.  

(Not seen directly in the books - but reactions that that I would bet a sizable amount of money on: •  exaggerated startle response, •  difficulty in falling or staying asleep, •  persistent remembering, or “reliving” the stressor by intrusive flashbacks / recurring dreams, to name a few.)

(Additionally - think about why he’s so (overly) attached to Mird, and then come back.)

>> On Jedi and Vau

This could use a whole post on itself, but Galidraan was also a focus for all the lingering resentments that he had before and afterwards - marking the Jedi as a convenient bogeyman to lay the blame down at their feet.  The sword of unmet justice, if you will.

( There’s a reason he wears black armor. )

Yes, the Death Watch were the ones who started it, but with the centuries-long bitter history between the Mandalorians and the Jedi, there’s more than enough room for a hatred that only gets stoked as time passes.    

It’s to the point that Jusik and Etain really …

… should be much more wary of him.  I would.  Just because malice isn’t overt and imminent doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and there’s a monstrous and nurtured sense of contempt behind the effortlessly composed mask of ice.  You can see it if you look hard enough.

The hatred’s mixed with - strangely - fear as well.  (First time I read TripZero, I found it so bloody fascinating that here was a killer who would up-front admit to Kal that his greatest fear was Jedi.  No bones about it.  Vau has very little to fear.  He’s someone that could - and does - survive quite happily on the fringes of society, knows more ways to track and kill a man than he should, has a variety of income at his hands - general fears about survival and other beings aren’t a concern. )

(But when you factor in that Jedi can strip away every line of defense in a mind, could (and do) canonically violate every boundary of mental control - especially to unpalatable enemies - and when you consider Vau is someone who holds the idea of control and mental boundaries with a vicious and fanatical jealousy above everything else … then it makes more sense. )

Pair that fear with contempt, and with a desire for justice - all in an extremely intelligent man with black ops skills honed from decades worth of experience - and you have

a very,

very frightening enemy.  

He’s studied Jedi with the intent to kill. 

(Sev mentions it after the conversation with Zey.)  

He’s probably gone after a few, too.  (Pro bono or not, I couldn’t say.  Personally leaning towards not - a man has to have some standards.  Not something Etain would want to explore as a topic, I daresay.)

(Sidenote: I also believe Jusik knows this.)

To put it crudely, he theoretically sees Jedi as loose canons to be put down - as things that should, at the kindest, be kept under lock and key and a watchful eye that could minimize their damage.   At worst … all we have to do is look at his reaction above.  

(last sidenote: however. like all humans, his abstract ideal stars fuzzing when he meets Jedi individually - I’ll go into how he sees Jusik and Etain individually in their own sections.  They still do have bloody good reason to fear him, but their dedication to Mandalorian ideals and protecting the clones goes a long, long way with him. )

He wants so very badly to be the executioners axe.  Desires it as a singular purpose.  Why else would he react shockingly so, after hearing that the clones committed to O66 in the quote above?  Why else, other than suddenly finding out his near-lifelong fantasy had been god damn done - but beat by someone else’s hand?

It’s a shockingly bittersweet realization, is what it is.

eastern promises is one of those movies where the symbolism was goddamn perfection - i could go on and on abt:

• usage of red as the main thematic driving point - of the direction where true power was and will trickle towards.  red in the blood when the baby was born (red stained on the dead mother’s clothes and her diary, passed from hand to hand) hinting at the eventual justice they had, red awash at the party in the monster’s den - and lastly, red on nikolai’s tie for the power that he inherits. (and for the blood and deeds that stains his hands.)
• blue and yellow also play into it, less obviously - blue mostly as a safe haven, yellow as the utter opposite.  Blue at the hospital where safety and kindness was, where anna was (consistent during the whole movie); blue on nikolai’s shirt so we still connect with him as the protagonist despite what he does.  you could even say blue as the sweetness of death where the vor’s long arm could not reach you. [kiril’s dead friend in the icebox - remember how blue that scene was?]
• amusingly, the two scenes with hairblowers (nikolai warming up the corpse / anna using the hairblower as it was fucking intended to, aka drying hair ) was ‘supposedly’ an accident of symbolism/parallels - yea sure.
• if this movie was abt anything else other than power, i will eat a fucking cactus.   #this movie was all about power plays [#between the son/father/interloper] #earned power [nikolai] versus given [semeyon] versus born with [kiril] #and how that power can and will rot you from the inside out
  • this movie in no uncertain terms said power will turn you into a monster.  as much as nikolai was the protagonist - he was a monster by the end of the movie, too tainted by the others to truly be apart of them. 
  • and you know who stood firm in all of the horror and resisted this? 
  • anna.  it was her deeds that started and fucking finished the justice for the dead, not nikolai.  he was her tool, if anything.
  •  (whups that was a tangent)
• this entire fucking scene