I would absolutely accept this explanation. Another thought I had was that Trespasser took out San Francisco, so a lot of social media companies and other tech could have been crippled by that strike, playing havoc on the progression of consumer devices and applications as we know them. Some combination of both would be totally acceptable IMO
Tag: pr meta
We only see bits and pieces of the laboratory in the film but do you have any headcanons for how they ended up decorating it? Does it end up feeling like home for them towards the end? There’s the line of tape down the middle but the jury is still out on how well it actually works to keep them divided because at the end it’s just the two of them and they CAN’T be divided if they want to end the war. How much has their physical space inspired/been inspired by who they are?
I’m sorry it took me so long to answer this one but I actually have like, zero visual artistic ability at all so I really have no answer for it >.< My answer is literally like, “Because the set designer… probably thought it looked cool??”
I feel like both the science boys define themselves so much by the military but in completely different ways? Like, Hermann likes having a purpose, he likes being a part of something and he likes knowing that his efforts are going towards something greater than himself. While Newton very much Others himself (he’s on the same side as the PPDC but they’re not the boss of him). It’s just funny because after the kaiju war I almost can’t see Hermann working anywhere else?? I dunno.
I think the fact it’s such an uncomplicated war helps a lot? I mean, the Kaiju are literally trying to wipe out humanity. There’s no ideology or gray area here. It’s fight or die.
Like, in general, I can’t even conceive of Newt joining a military organization unless it was this clear-cut a war of self-defense. He’ll fight fascists, but he won’t just fight to kill other humans, y’know? He’d fight in a WWII type war but not a Vietname type one, he’d go to jail instead.
And I think on some level Hermann is similar, however, he very much frames himself as a WWII scientist and draws inspiration from figures like Turing. As I’ve said before, I headcanon that he wanted to be an astronaut before the Kaiju arrived, then after he wanted to be a pilot, and then either illness or injury in his leg prevented that so he threw himself into using his other skills to the best of his ability to fight the war.
I totally agree that Hermann came to define himself as “A PPDC Scientist” in part because he strikes me as someone who is a creature of habit and once he got settled into his routine there, it was hard for him to break that habit. So long as he was contributing to something greater and allowed to pursue his work, he’s content. It was Newt who is always bouncing around and intrigued by new possibilities and opportunities. There’s a line in TOWOID where Hermann notes that with the Precursors taking Newt away he lost all impetus to look for jobs outside the PPDC, because while he was a stabilizing influence for Newt, Newt was the one who prompted Hermann to leave his comfort zone. That’s how I see it at least, the reason why Hermann is still with the PPDC 10 years later with Uprising instead of moving on.
But yeah, Newt sees himself as PPDC because how could he NOT be on the front lines for saving humanity and studying aliens? It’s like joining Star Fleet, in a much darker and more depressing way, but if it ever militarized against humanity he’d be out in a second. Hermann is more into Doing His Duty and being on the front lines because he wants to be at the nexus of the most important fight of his lifetime, his generation’s WWII, but once there indeed the sense of purpose and being part of something greater keeps him there (and perhaps allows him to stagnate a bit, without Newt there).
→ Newton Geiszler is not the easiest guy to work with.
Newton practically screams for Hermann’s attention. I mean, he put his life on the line and goes “this is all your fault.” He attempts to gain the attention of ONE PERSON in particular. I mean, if he had said “Listen up, Shatterdome!” I wouldn’t have shipped them so damn hard.
Can I just say how much I like the costume design in Pacific Rim because objectively Burn Gorman and Charlie Day are attractive men but somehow in the film you fully believe that they’ll skip showers and laundry isn’t a priority and they don’t leave their basement lab for days at a time haha.
Honestly the costume design of PR1 is INSANE for how much character building it does with such elegant, minimalist details!
Do you think the story would’ve been hugely different if Hermann had been possessed, not Newton?
I assume by “the story” we mean Uprising? Yes and no. Side note, I had a film critic friend who was actually surprised it wasn’t Hermann because he thought that would have been more of a twist, and on some level I agree with him (though in other ways I don’t). But getting to the film.
First, why, no, it wouldn’t have changed things:
– Newt and Hermann’s skill sets had gotten so mixed in with one another that, for the purpose of the film, Herman was basically a blend of both Newt and Hermann, a one-man K-Sci lab, and in the personality divorce of their 3-way Drift, all Newt got was the Precursors ;P If it had been the other way around, I think Newt would have picked up some of Hermann’s skills and the only difference would be it’s Newt being the PPDC’s somewhat eccentric tag-along nerd trope and Hermann being the corporate guy who doesn’t really want Newt touching him, I’m not sure much would have changed except we’d be wondering why Newt’s trying so hard to get this guy to like him back?
Basically, for their actual roles in the film’s plot, interchanging them wouldn’t have changed much because they were blended by their Drift. I totally believe Newt could have just as easily fulfilled the Kaiju Blood Rocket plotline, and would have picked up enough of Hermann’s skills to figure out Hermann’s version of the plan.
Yes it would have been different for a few reasons:
– Hermann is just, personality-wise, a far more stereotypical villain personality in the first film (and Burn’s bon structure lends itself to villains, Charlie is just more friend-shaped in general). He’s stern, forbidding, and seems to hate fun. Also Hollywood has a big ol’ anti-intellectualism thing going on so smart = bad. Him becoming a corporate guy working for Liwen Shao wouldn’t have seemed odd at all. A difference would be that he’s difficult for Liwen in other ways, perhaps just saying no to her a lot or being a perfectionist about the Jaegers, saying she can’t have the demonstration when she wants it. (Overall though, I think Liwen would have preferred Hermann even if it meant the destruction of her company and the world itself, because Newt is just a personality that annoys the shit out of her and she got stuck with him for ten years, lol.)
The tragedy of Hermann being possessed would be there’s even less chance of someone noticing something is up. His brief flash of happiness after they Drifted would appear to be just that: a flash before his standoffish personality resumed.
It also would have been much harder to convince the audience and everyone in the story that, “It wasn’t him!” that this was something against Hermann’s will I think, because he’s so reserved about his emotions. The only strong argument is that he’d never turn against the cause he fought for, but even Newt would have to admit that most of the time Hermann was a jerk to him and didn’t seem to like people very much. Would it be that hard to see him leap from there to destroying people?
– For “yes it would change things”, I don’t think his ploy would have been the same. I truly do believe the Precursors went into their host’s brain and said, “Ok, if YOU wanted to destroy the world, how would you do it?” and Newt’s answer was, “Duh, take over some evil weapons manufacturer and turn their weapons against humanity. I’d do it with cloned Kaiju brains because that’s my skill set.”
For Hermann, I think it would be opening breaches to let Kaiju back in sooner. Or he’d find a way to make the Jaegers go bad without Kaiju brains, just with rogue programming. Hell, it it was me with his skill set, I’d just have the Jaegers of the world turn on each other and launch World War Three by making it look like nations were turning on one another, then let a bunch of Kaiju come pouring in after the dust settles.
Basically, I’m also not convinced humanity would do as well against Hermann going evil, or even win at all. I sort of have a suspicion that like… Newt’s plan took 10 years because it was silly levels of elaborate on purpose because he was also stalling them as much as possible because he really, fundamentally doesn’t want to destroy the world. I also think his plan is like… kinda dumb and easy to defeat. His specialty as a biologist is just DUMB for destroying the world?
But Hermann… Hermann’s the robot guy. Hermann’s the math guy. Hermann’s the “learning to understand holes ripped in the fabric of time and space”. I’m not sure the good guys would have even had time to react when his plan went into motion. To quote Newt in TOWOID, “No whimper. Just a really loud bang.”
Basically, the Precursors dun fucked up by taking Newt instead of Hermann, and we’re all lucky they did.
feel free to ignore if you don’t want to talk nsfw but do you have any specific or preferred kinks or tropes that you like with the k-science boys?
Oh man, y’know for Bagginshield I had such specific headcanons for smut, but with Newt and Hermann it’s more dependent on the kind of story the author is trying to tell?
(Cut for NSFW discussion but also just general headcanon rambling)
I like reading fics where Newt’s a bottom, I like fics where Hermann strictly prefers to bottom, and I like fics where they switch! I like fics where they’re both kink monsters who have racked up considerable experience, and I like fics where one or both of them are secretly virgins. I don’t personally like fics with lingerie or cross-dressing/feminization but that’s a unique squick of mine that has nothing to do with the quality of those fics and even then I’ll dip into those tropes for good Newmann banter.
For my own fics I tend to default to, “They’ve each had a few partners before, so they’re not inexperienced, but no one who really stuck.” A big part of that for me was the letters: after age 25/26 when they began to exchange those letters, both of them had a very fixed idea of who they wanted to be with (each other) and heavily romanticized the other and secretly pined after the other as their soulmate, to the point where any relationships they had limping along finally bit the dust, and they both struggled to form meaningful relationships with anyone else after, because everyone else just felt dull in comparison or more specifically “Not Hermann/Newt”, respectively. Basically: they ruined each other for other people (and I can so easily see both of them biting that back as an insult they’d like to fling because it would reveal too much, but both harbor a simmering resentment in the lab that they just can’t quit this annoying asshole, even when everything became a disaster after the letters, and they’re both pissed that even now that they “despise” each other they still can’t pull their romantic lives together and are still hopelessly pining, which in turn feeds the heat of their sniping).
I headcanon predominantly (as in, I’ll switch it up for a fic, but I have a strong sense of a “default”) that Newt had trouble holding down long-term relationships even before the letters because he’s flighty, easily distracted, and hard to deal with it, to the point where even he was self-aware of those traits. It’s one reason he attaches to Hermann so strongly: even when he was at his absolute most heinously annoying, Hermann stuck around. Maybe not in a “relationship” sense, but he didn’t request a transfer or even a separate lab. Hermann clearly wants to be around Newt (maybe on a perverse and masochistic level, lol) in a way Newt does sincerely appreciate. Even Newt’s mother didn’t stick around, and we see no sign of him having other close friends or partners, so I do think his teasing of Hermann is to some extent a guy with chronic abandonment issues perversely needing to constantly test the boundaries, “If I do THIS will you leave me?? What about THIS??” and gaining comfort when nothing is enough, knowing it’s toxic and counter-productive behavior, but not really being able to stop because he needs to either lose people on his own terms or know they’ll never leave him no matter how he acts out. Which could very well stem from being the youngest, most immature person in the class at school too. (Oh, and on that note, I totally agree with other writers that Newt has a serious “strict professor/librarian” kink thing with figures of authority that dominated his youth which feeds into his sincere attraction to Hermann on a primal level).
I do think Newt’s dossier statement that his dating preference is, “anyone who will take him” is not narrator-voice/word-of-god speaking in the third person about Newt, but literally something Newt is self-aware about for himself. Unlike a lot of the fandom I actually headcanon Newt as truly pansexual rather than bisexual based on that quote: genitalia does not matter, only someone’s willingness to be with him does. I see him as totally game to fuck aliens regardless of anthropomorphism or genitalia, inspired by Star Trek, Mass Effect and sci-fi in general. THAT SAID, I actually don’t personally like to write Newt as the “Kaiju fucker” because I actually like to credit his statement about, “I don’t love them, I study them,” as sincere, and not deflecting a fetish. LOL, I don’t think Newt would ever deflect from talking about his fetishes if they came up, he seems very open and honest in that respect SO, if we break down that statement, it strikes me as something he’s thought about. I strongly headcanon that when Kaiju first showed up, Newt was down to fuck if they had turned out to be sentient and benevolent and able to give consent. The fact they’re trying to destroy our world and can’t be reasoned with is why he’s not a Kaiju fucker and knows he isn’t, not the idea of fucking aliens in particular, but he’d never fuck these aliens, specifically. Because either they have beast-like intelligence and can’t give consent OR they DO have intelligence and they’re malicious. He’s outraged at the implication that he’d fuck Kaiju just because he’s obsessed with studying because HE’S THOUGHT ABOUT THIS, OK, AND NO, JUST NO. (Also it adds a delicious level of tragedy that this reputation of Kaiju fucker comes back to bite him so hard in Uprising. I truly believe any vestige of positive fascination he had for the Kaiju was dead by the end of PR1, but the legacy of it made his being controlled and destroyed by them “unsurprising” in a really tragic way).
IMO, to turn to Hermann: he’s strictly gay but has a lot of baggage attached. I can totally buy Vanessa being someone he was with at some point, maybe even “married” to on paper, but I see it pretty strongly through the lens of a relationship with a like-minded woman who was probably a close friend that his family encouraged because his father was homophobic and encouraged his son to marry this woman to make him proud, in denial of his sexuality (whether or not you headcanon them as actually getting married).
I think Hermann has a lot of internalized fears around homophobia because of his father and may even resent Newt’s more progressive upbringing that Newt never had to wrestle with those demons and was always comfortable in his sexuality and free to explore and experiment openly around his family. That said, I do think Hermann switching side away from his father to support the Jaeger program instead of the Wall allowed him to shed a lot of that baggage: once he made that stand against his father, and realized his father wasn’t infallible because he had so clearly taken the wrong side in this war, it freed Hermann up to be more decisively his own person. Rebellion is exciting to Hermann, but also still very scary (as seen in PR1 and 2 when he tries to be a badass and actually does quite well!). That includes him being completely open with his sexuality by the time we see him in PR1.
Last note on sexuality and fetishes: but I think they’re into each other, totally. Physically, mentally, circumstantially. It’s gross to everyone around them how into each other they are, lol. It’s the source of a lot of their anger in their old fights that they had all this tension between them. Newt is sincerely into Hermann’s whole professorial “look” even if he teases about it, he’s deeply respectful of Hermann’s disability and it would be antithetical to his very existence to bring it up negatively. He thinks Hermann is as hot as it gets. They mock each other’s intellect but from a place of them being the only ones allowed to do so because they’re on the same level and it’s so lonely at the top that they deeply appreciate, even if not especially through the mockery, how rare this level of intellect is and they cherish it in one another.
Likewise, Newt’s entire look is based around rebellion, and Hermann I think has a secret, buried kink for display of rebellion in others because it was so forbidden to him growing up. It’s exciting. Newt’s tattoos’, his barely-professional clothes, his rockstar attitude, even the fact he’s got the pudge and doesn’t care what other’s think about it, are deeply exciting to Hermann in ways that he could never have for himself. Newt is extremely attractive to him, physically and mentally, if exasperating at times for not having better self-preservation instincts, but again, that’s part of the charm that Hermann will never admit to aloud.
Long story short, I think they’re well matched and deeply in love. They fulfill things the other needs like someone who is stable and sticks around for Newt, and someone who breaks him out of his shell for Hermann. I just love the a lot, ok?
I know Babylon 5 is also colloquially known as The Tragedy of Londo Mollari and now I’m picturing the first Kaiju War becoming known as The Tragedy of Newton Geizler.
Oh definitely! Since PR1 I’ve noted that Newt’s a bit the “shadow protagonist” of the film. I mean, structurally, he’s without question the protagonist of the B Plot of the film, and he’s pretty central to the B Plot of the second film too, at least until he’s revealed to be the antagonist (or more specifically, the unwilling host of the true villain). He’s also, at least to me, far more relatable and human than Raleigh Beckett, who is a lovely human being but doesn’t exactly “remind” me of anyone I know in real life. He’s sort of an old-style protagonist: super-human and incorruptible. Mako is to a similar extent a paragon of a human being, but not necessarily flawed and accessible, I daresay “familiar” in the way the scientists are, which is why I think for many the scientists are the more memorable and “fresh” protagonists of PR1 compared to the traditional heroes who dominate the A Plot.
As I noted in TOWOID, Newt and Hermann did everything right in PR1. They saved the world! They risked themselves selflessly at a time where there were few options and not enough time to come up with safer plans for them personally. They risked themselves as truly as any Jaeger pilots, albeit in their unique ways according to their fields. For Newt especially to get smacked down for it by the narrative and to have such horrific consequences for that act to me is best justified (I hope) less as, “The narrative is punishing Newt for taking this selfless action,” and more the Picard quote, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” The tragedy of Newt is not that he fucked up, it’s that he triumphed in a selfless act, and that triumph had consequences.
Though I will add to this sentiment, if the PR series could be viewed through the lens of the “Tragedy of Newton Geiszler” then I absolutely think that it can also be viewed as the heroism of Hermann Gottlieb, who is another shadow protagonist of the series, and at this point the only remaining member of the PPDC still fighting the good fight.
I will believe that after the breach is closed and they’ve had a minute to breathe, Hermann makes an affectionately snide comment about the tissue up Newton’s nose and Newton reminds Hermann about that time he threw up in a random toilet in Hong Kong.
This is Real and True
Newton just looks so wounded here. I mean, we’ve all discussed this before but I have to bring it up again. Hermann’s basically just shot him down by saying Newton wants to drift with the kaiju so he can justify being obsessed with these monsters. And I feel that this moment may be a deciding factor in Newton leaving Hermann the message on his audio recorder. It’s bad enough for him that Pentecost and Hansen reject his objective to drift with the kaiju brain but Hermann’s opinion means so much to him. Aside from the fact that he is sure his theory is correct, Newton has to prove Hermann wrong and himself right to earn Hermann’s approval and admiration. It looks like he is lost without Hermann’s respect.
#pacific rim #THANK YOU #never forget – charlie day is an acting MONSTER for making this face bc this is a REALLY serious moment #remember we know for fact now from that recent interview with GDT that CD had to play newt with the utmost seriousness for most of the film #that’s because this is FAR from a light moment at all nothing about newt’s storyline actually /is/ #(see- the tags i wrote the other day on the scene following this one) #newt’s fucking broken hearted here and he tries to play it off with a joke a brag about being brave but this face gives him away #i’m sorry hermann can’t read newt to save his life that he didn’t realize what was going on with newt under the surface #(newt has the same problem – he doesn’t realize hermann’s you’ll kill yourself is his way of saying ‘/please/ don’t kill yourself’) #this whole sideplot is awful its about a mentally ill man cracking under pressure and I always wondered if ppl understood the severity of it #this is the face of a man who just decided he’s OK with possibly committing suicide in the name of science #(which newt would SAY is in the name of being right & proving hermann wrong and newt’s a rock start so this is all ok but no #it’s because he doesn’t care AT ALL if the people in charge like his plan – he hates authority – he cares if HERMANN likes it #(remember an era more than a decade ago where the only human being newt ever met who was smarter than him #who newt was totally swept away by probably filled his email inbox with praise and collaboration over newt’s ideas #another german wunderkind – another person newt’s age who loves science and wants to study the kaiju and understands NEWT #that this guy was probably super supportive of newt’s stuff like newt was of his theories and work #(and newt probably fell in love hard and fast because who wouldn’t) #but everything’s just gone downhill over the years and this is where it bottoms out #FUCK THE HATERS this is why I love newt so much i love him for being a problematic mentally ill asshole who fucks things up #he’s so confusing childish and abrasive (he doesn’t even respect hermann’s work so ??? #does he not see how that’s a factor in the mutual disrespect? NO HE DOESN’T. AT ALL. SEE THAT.) #yet wow…wow…this face. the only person whose respect matters to him he can’t obtain so like if everyone’s gonna be dead soon #does it really /matter/ what he does at this rate? Might as well go out making a point trying to be right & get the last word #(And also make a few subtextual points too in that tape recording) #(that I’m sure he thought hermann would never pick up on the implications of) #(and I’m sure hermann /did/ when he had time to listen to it & then devise the plan to drift with newt as well) #(because i guess according to hermann what better way to show you loved someone all along than to follow them to the ends of the earth?) #BUT FOR NOW EVERYTHING IS PAIN AND EVERYTHING IS THIS FACE
Your tags made my day. Thank you: tacticalomission
Avelera 