He must have gotten into so many duels when younger. If it takes a plausibly-deniably numinous heart attack to kick him into apologizing in middle age, can you imagine him backing down from anything as a young hotshot?
UGH, this is so accurate. We talked about Londo placing his trust in the wrong people as part of what kept him from realizing his potential in the Centauri court, but burning his bridges with people who might otherwise have been allies could easily have been a part of that, too. (At the same time he doesn't seem like he's particularly unusual for a Centauri of the noble class in being that way. Vir is the unusual one, with his openheartedness and lack of desire for advancement.)
As you said in a different comment elsewhere, imagining young Londo as a jock is not hard.
And it explicitly doesn't have to do with his recent amends, as signaled by Delenn sitting there recalling him—and she's right, a silent, immobile Londo is a very weird sight—over the past five years. They have just known him too long not to care.
I love this point, and this was also floating around in my head as I wrote the fic I posted today. They know him, in all his best and worst qualities, and at the end, they're there for him. It's a friendship very heavily freighted by everything that has come before, but at the end of it all, they aren't going to walk away. There may be no one on Centauri Prime who cares, but B5 is a different story.
(Although even that part may not be completely true. We already know Timov may not like him, but she'll donate her own blood to save him.)
I have no idea how that kept getting past standards and practices and I'm so happy about it. Like, mostly what the viewer learns about the Narn reproductively is that they are marsupials, and unaltered Minbari don't menstruate, but about the Centauri, you even end up learning what hand gestures not to make in polite company.
I know, and I can't believe it either, but I love it.
It's also interesting to me that Centauri, the most human-looking on the outside, seem to have the most non-human sexual apparatus of the main humanlike races on the show. We can infer from evidence that Minbari are sexually compatible with humans (at least altered Minbari are) and so are Narns, based on G'Kar taking human lovers in the first season. (Though now that I think about it, he also sleeps with one of Londo's wives, so it's possible that G'Kar is simply a xenosexual weirdo by Narn standards.) A Centauri and a human could definitely have sex if they were motivated enough, but they'd have to really work on making it fun for both parties.
(I find it hard to imagine G'Kar deciding not to visit Londo at all, but I would wonder if he was still processing about it when he got kicked in the hindbrain, which I like the idea of.)
Yeah, for the fic that I wrote, I obviously went with "kick in the hindbrain" because I had to pick something for dramatic purposes, but in actual canon fact I'm completely on the fence about it; it also could easily be that he's been going in circles in his own head about it all night and that point when he finally snapped into decision focus, through fate or their binary-stars-in-orbit synchronicity or pure chance, happened to be that moment. And there's also the possibility that he literally hadn't heard - it's a compressed enough time frame, and a late enough hour, that no one thinking to go inform G'Kar makes reasonable sense - and the moment when he found out was the moment when he made a beeline for the medlab.
I like that it works if we don't know. I still want to know! And I agree that it doesn't seem likely he would never have shown up at all. He just might've had to work himself up to it.
I do find it interesting that the show itself explicitly acknowledges the possibility of a lingering connection between them in this episode, for the first time since the events of "Dust to Dust" occurred. And we do know from what happened with Sheridan and Kosh that that kind of thing is possible.
It is evocatively out of character and so indicates as much about G'Kar as about what Londo's conscience is using his face for. And I love that it is specifically
You stopped mid-sentence! I need the rest!
Because yeah, it is blatantly out of character for G'Kar, but Londo's subconscious has cast him firmly in the role of punishment and revenge - the deliverer of the pain that Londo thinks he deserves. It is really interesting that the one character in the dream who has the strongest in-universe potential for actually being there in some sense ... is also the one who acts least like himself and who is most obviously an avatar of Londo's own subconscious, the part of Londo that believes that he deserves to be whipped to death for his crimes.
(Thinking about it from that perspective, it's really interesting that he breaks at the same point G'Kar did in reality, and with the same result, albeit for a completely different reason: he lives. Londo's subconscious acknowledging that he doesn't deserve to die under those conditions any more than G'Kar did? Or just that reaching parity, so to speak, was enough to satisfy whatever part of himself wanted to torture himself that way?)
no subject
UGH, this is so accurate. We talked about Londo placing his trust in the wrong people as part of what kept him from realizing his potential in the Centauri court, but burning his bridges with people who might otherwise have been allies could easily have been a part of that, too. (At the same time he doesn't seem like he's particularly unusual for a Centauri of the noble class in being that way. Vir is the unusual one, with his openheartedness and lack of desire for advancement.)
As you said in a different comment elsewhere, imagining young Londo as a jock is not hard.
And it explicitly doesn't have to do with his recent amends, as signaled by Delenn sitting there recalling him—and she's right, a silent, immobile Londo is a very weird sight—over the past five years. They have just known him too long not to care.
I love this point, and this was also floating around in my head as I wrote the fic I posted today. They know him, in all his best and worst qualities, and at the end, they're there for him. It's a friendship very heavily freighted by everything that has come before, but at the end of it all, they aren't going to walk away. There may be no one on Centauri Prime who cares, but B5 is a different story.
(Although even that part may not be completely true. We already know Timov may not like him, but she'll donate her own blood to save him.)
I have no idea how that kept getting past standards and practices and I'm so happy about it. Like, mostly what the viewer learns about the Narn reproductively is that they are marsupials, and unaltered Minbari don't menstruate, but about the Centauri, you even end up learning what hand gestures not to make in polite company.
I know, and I can't believe it either, but I love it.
It's also interesting to me that Centauri, the most human-looking on the outside, seem to have the most non-human sexual apparatus of the main humanlike races on the show. We can infer from evidence that Minbari are sexually compatible with humans (at least altered Minbari are) and so are Narns, based on G'Kar taking human lovers in the first season. (Though now that I think about it, he also sleeps with one of Londo's wives, so it's possible that G'Kar is simply a xenosexual weirdo by Narn standards.) A Centauri and a human could definitely have sex if they were motivated enough, but they'd have to really work on making it fun for both parties.
(I find it hard to imagine G'Kar deciding not to visit Londo at all, but I would wonder if he was still processing about it when he got kicked in the hindbrain, which I like the idea of.)
Yeah, for the fic that I wrote, I obviously went with "kick in the hindbrain" because I had to pick something for dramatic purposes, but in actual canon fact I'm completely on the fence about it; it also could easily be that he's been going in circles in his own head about it all night and that point when he finally snapped into decision focus, through fate or their binary-stars-in-orbit synchronicity or pure chance, happened to be that moment. And there's also the possibility that he literally hadn't heard - it's a compressed enough time frame, and a late enough hour, that no one thinking to go inform G'Kar makes reasonable sense - and the moment when he found out was the moment when he made a beeline for the medlab.
I like that it works if we don't know. I still want to know! And I agree that it doesn't seem likely he would never have shown up at all. He just might've had to work himself up to it.
I do find it interesting that the show itself explicitly acknowledges the possibility of a lingering connection between them in this episode, for the first time since the events of "Dust to Dust" occurred. And we do know from what happened with Sheridan and Kosh that that kind of thing is possible.
It is evocatively out of character and so indicates as much about G'Kar as about what Londo's conscience is using his face for. And I love that it is specifically
You stopped mid-sentence! I need the rest!
Because yeah, it is blatantly out of character for G'Kar, but Londo's subconscious has cast him firmly in the role of punishment and revenge - the deliverer of the pain that Londo thinks he deserves. It is really interesting that the one character in the dream who has the strongest in-universe potential for actually being there in some sense ... is also the one who acts least like himself and who is most obviously an avatar of Londo's own subconscious, the part of Londo that believes that he deserves to be whipped to death for his crimes.
(Thinking about it from that perspective, it's really interesting that he breaks at the same point G'Kar did in reality, and with the same result, albeit for a completely different reason: he lives. Londo's subconscious acknowledging that he doesn't deserve to die under those conditions any more than G'Kar did? Or just that reaching parity, so to speak, was enough to satisfy whatever part of himself wanted to torture himself that way?)