Anyone Who Sees Mew/cheum As Morally Superior Or Less "in The Wrong" Than Boston Or Ray Are Basically

What if Ray is the one who finds Mew's change problematic after he gets over Mew that is. right now he's too blind to see what's happening. ray didn't fall for this new, he fell for his mew, the one who saved him. This one looks like someone who will leave him to die after using him. Maybe this is what gives Ray an epiphany and he finally sees sand. but at that point sand is done with him , so ray goes after him but sand doesn't want to anything with him ( understandable) and then we get the line from the trailer. i am not going to let you go after you have come into my life.

maybe in the middle of this comes the boeing plot , ( that chekhovs gun has to fire sometime ) and ray getting jealous, and ray going berserk on sand, claiming ownership. and sand is like I can choose aka do you think I don't have any dignity ?

what if mew goes back to top and ray finds out, but he's not that mad as he taught he will be , hes mad but he's more mad when he sees sand with boring. hes mad, sad, confused and on top of that he's drunk and high, maybe this scenario could be what gives clarity to ray on who he actually likes. except this is going to happen towards the ned of the show and sand has moved on and we don't get a raysand ending, then what I am I going to do.

( i would be happy if ray goes to rehab instead and sand stays away but the heart wants what it wants)

Mew trying to become Ray let alone date him was not on my bingo card for this week but I'm no professional bingo card designer, let's talk about this anyway

We all went into this show knowing it was going to be messy, asking for it to be messy, we're all weak for SandRay so RayMew is upsetting because we want Ray with Sand, sure, but setting all of that aside, the thing that is really concerning to me about the fact that Mew is choosing to rebound with Ray is the fact that he is very creepily BECOMING RAY while doing it. He's putting on a persona to handle his life right now and it's really unhealthy and boy needs to cut it out and get some therapy. (they all need therapy.)

At the beginning of the episode, before the confrontation with Boston, Mew is dressed more or less as himself. He and Ray do dress similarly on a base level- they both wear a lot of patterned, unbuttoned shirts over a second shirt, but Mew normally wears stripes over tshirts, and mostly light colours with a lot of blues and greens. Ray wears a lot of darker colours and patterns with shapes and designs, with a lot of reds, tans, and oranges.

After blasting Boston into the pool and delivering one of the most satisfying kicks on television, before going for his confrontation with Nick, we get the creepy tub shot of Mew sinking into his misery and his upcoming revenge era-

To put on his Ray cosplay, he's gotta sink down into the deep. This isn't a rebirth or an emergence of a new, stronger version of himself; this is him descending, covering himself and his hurt with someone else's aura and attitude so that he can cope with the path he's decided he needs to go on to burn his enemies and get his revenge.

He tries it out when he goes to see Nick and it works for him-

This is his soft launch, where he's up against someone else who has, or feels he has, been done wrong by Boston and Top (and done wrong, obviously) but that Mew knows is vulnerable. Mew pushes on Nick to help getting his revenge on Boston, and Nick crumbles. Using this persona, this attitude, is working for him.

He uses it to hunt down Gap next, another trial run, that goes flawlessly for him as well.

He's got the black tank, the necklace, and a black, white, and grey shirt this time, another test of borrowed confidence. And he's successful: he pulls Gap with almost no effort, he gets the file, he's ready to go now. He's used the Ray based persona twice with people he doesn't know, his confidence is up, which means he's ready to use it on someone he does know.

So when he gets ready to confront Boston, we get a whole sequence of him preparing for the battle, and checking all the details. There's a lot of very close up shots of his face and eyes here that I left out of the gifs because this scene was already long, and a lot of focus on each detail.

The necklace like Ray wears, a tanktop like Ray wears (but black! because this is Mew in his angsty villain era!), a patterned button up shirt like Ray wears, check the hair and go. Armored with this other persona, he's ready to handle Boston, and he does. Much, much better than Ray himself, mind you, compared to when Ray went and confronted Boston in the last episode.

The next big outfit switch we get for Mew in this episode (I'm not counting the whole big Top punching Mew confrontation since Mew and Ray are both just wearing their school clothes there) is Top's daydream about dancing with Mew. This whole sequence is so soft focus and Top looks so sad and there's no one else there which implies to me he's imagining this and it's not an actual memory, but either way we're back to Mew in stripes, with Top in stripes as well.

What's different about Mew and Top matching versus Mew matching himself to Ray? Mew and Top don't really MATCH so much as coordinate. They're often in different colours, different styles, different material shirts, etc. Like here, Mew is wearing an unbuttoned dress shirt with vertical stripes over a tshirt, while Top is wearing a collared polo shirt with horizontal stripes, AND they're wearing different colours. They work together without fully matching, and they're distinct to the characters as well. Even when their styles get a little closer, like Top wearing some solid colour button up shirts in episode 6 instead of polo shirts, he styles them differently than Mew does and I at least can't really picture them switching clothes and having the outfits really look right.

Meanwhile, the last scene of the episode, with Mew dancing with Ray, we get this-

Mew is dressed as Ray again, even shifting into Ray's common colour schemes with the flowers on this one. His first outfit when he went to see Nick was a trial and the pattern still had a lot of blues in it, but he's been shifting into darker colours with the tans and oranges we see Ray in pretty often with this.

(Ray, meanwhile, is wearing a shirt that looks like something Sand would have chosen for him, of course.)

Ray is reckless, Ray is fearless, Ray is bold, Ray is confident, Ray is wild and sometimes unpredictable, or he at least seems to be to the much more conservative Mew, so slipping into Ray's clothes and taking on what he thinks is Ray's persona is a way for Mew to push himself in ways he hasn't before. There's no way Mew could have handled his whole spy mission to get the video file from Gap as himself the way he has been; that's not in his wheelhouse.

From the preview for next week it looks like Mew is sliding into more of Ray's persona with the partying behaviors, and I don't think it's going to end well for him. But being with Top has taught him that trying to get someone to change is useless because they're still the same mess on the inside, so his decision to slide down the same path as Ray and let go of his inhibitions instead of trying to fix Ray is as unsurprising as it is self-destructive.

Seeing Mew take some kind of power over his life should have been satisfying, and in some ways it definitely was, like watching him burn the notebook page and try to put his foot down with Top, but then seeing him do it while spiraling mentally and slowly covering himself with Ray's outward persona at the same time was incredibly unnerving. Adding in him deciding to get involved with Ray romantically and it just speed ratchets up the unhealthy factor by a million miles a minute.

It also shows how well Mew actually knows Ray now compared to how well he thinks he knows Ray and who and what he thinks Ray is, that he could send himself down this path without seeing the writing on the wall about who Ray is trying to be and what Ray is trying to deal with behind Ray's substance abuse problems and everything else, but I imagine that will be part of the inevitable explosion that THIS impending disaster will also turn into, potentially very soon.

You can't fix your problems by pretending to be someone that you're not, especially if who you're trying to be is someone you know who is incredibly problematic and unhealthy themselves. It's a whole toxic situation even BEFORE you start trying to DATE THEM AT THE SAME TIME.

We wanted a mess and boy are we getting it.

really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

I asked for messy not for pain.

Firstkhao is just wow I have no words. Damn stupid talented gorgeous people making me cry so much. I hate you.

he waited for this moment his whole fucking life. nobody get it… He’s literally on cloud nine, he is SO geeked he is SO in heaven right now that he’s malfunctioning.

All I am seeing is Boston in my dash and of course I am going to contribute. Character readings can be different for each viewer so this is just my reading of Boston.

Boston's journey ended the exact way he wanted it to. He was going to move to the states and leave his life Thailand behind. It's why he was sleeping around without forming deeper romantic attachments. Why would be tie himself to one person when he was going to leave anyway.

And that is the point of conflict in his relationships. People formed emotional attachments to him but he couldn't care less about them. And yes he was honest about his actions. But him being honest is not going to control the other people's feelings. Or suddenly make them immune to not having feelings about him. And he's not responsible for Nick developing feelings or atom getting or drake getting obsessed. But that's what happens when physical satisfaction is tied to their emotional states in the characters that we have seen.

Boston just doesn't equate sex with feelings and it's not bad. But what he doesn't realise is that what's true or makes sense for him won't necessarily be understood by the people around him.

Boston can't empathise. He sees what he did was wrong ( sleeping with top ) but he doesn't understand why everyone made a big deal out of it. To him it was just sex , just physical not something deeper like emotions or love or feelings.

Nick is important in Boston's development because he bought a counterpoint into his way of doing things. They had a connection, I don't call it love , maybe an obsession, heck every relationship in this show is more obsession then love.

Nick was emotionally attached to Boston. An attraction that Boston encouraged by being very affectionate and sweet. Boston liked the physical part of it, and he really liked having someone to have regular sex with. He thought that was all there is to it. He thought that he has found an equal, someone who seems to like him, worship him even and can match his energy in bed.

But Nick caught him off guard. He's felt betrayed , he missed him. He experienced emotions he never felt with anyone else. Something that was purely physical for him ended In him having an emotional attachment, maybe for the first time.

So he jumped right in , giving declarations that can easily be taken as indicated of an exclusive monogamous relationship , " you're the exception ", " from now on I would only take photos of you ".

But that's not what he intended with that. He likes nick, he not only has a physical attachment to him he also has an emotional attachment to him. In his mind both are seperate not tied together. Which is why he went after Boeing.

But Nick wanted exclusivity and rightfully put a stop to their relationship. Nick knows that they want different things from the relationship but Boston was not equipped to deal with it.

Now Boston is surprised. Because he thought he got it figured out , he promised his emotional loyalty to him , isn't that enough ? But it's not. And Boston is realising that his views about sex and relationships are fundamentally different from everyone else's.

People want exclusivity with the emotional and physical side of a relationship, that's one of the truth's that he realised. It doesn't' make his views wrong,its just different. But after his relationship with nick Boston has got a valuable lesson on how people have their own perspectives , and just because what you are doing is right in your eyes, doesn't mean it's the right thing in someone else's book . ( there's was a whole lot of meta about who decides what's right or wrong in this series )

And because of that it's a good thing that he is leaving. Because now he can find someone with views that aligns with him. And he would know how to communicate that and he could choose for himself friends that understand his views.

It's a good opportunity for him. So for me his story ended in a positive note.

Give this boy his threesome

MY ''RAY PROPOSES THREESOME ONLY TO BE REJECTED YET AGAIN" PATIENCE IS RUNNING THIN @ P'JOJO

What's funny is that it's coming from the same group of people that were hell bent on making mew the manipulator but they can't deal with him actually being toxic.

are there people actually blaming ray for mew doing drugs like are you people serious

I depend emotionally on too many homosexual pairings and that's both the most beautiful and destructive trait of my personality.

This too.

All the complaining about TSATS just shows, in my opinion, how the older audiences of Rick Riordan expect his books to age WITH them. In reality, Nico is a bit over a year older than the last time we read from his point of view. And in that year his life has changed drastically. A character showing growth and change doesn’t mean they are being written “wrong”. Nicos character, if anything, is such great representation for so many depressed teens a children. Personally, seeing his character finally heal and gain real stability for the first time in YEARS was so emotional for me.

Also, Nico literally called himself The Ghost King when he was like 13/14 and y’all are expecting him to NOT be cringe??? PLEASE 😭

AND WHEN HE SAID PERCY WAS NOT HIS TYPE. Y’all he’s been “cringe” he’s literally a teenager!!!!

All in all, if you thought this book was out of character or cringey, maybe you are just growing out of the genre :) (Like actually, I’m not trying to be mean saying this lmao) If I read this book expecting it to be like a “cutesy” gay YA romance, I would think it was cringe as well. But this book is so unapologetically Rick, and it was enhanced by Mark so well with how Nico and Will interacted.

There are so many important conversations in the book, I could literally write and essay on it. I won’t, but I could.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this book is absolute perfection… but Nico’s character has been so “fandomized” that I also think his true identity has been so watered down and idealized. To me, this book read as the Nico that Nico should be. Making him any different would be a disservice to who he represents!

Also I want more friends on Good Reads so like add me pls

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/98271429

Sooo this happened on tiktok

And the comments are gold

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