ncept of what he's supposed to be as a character is ever shifting if Miss Marble is taking your job then there is no point in you existing you might as well just retire but she's not taking the job because they're not gonna make that I would be so shocked if they made that young avengers film how could you justify it at this point well I'd say we've seen precedent for this after the stars falling the fuck apart they're committing to a ray movie that's one of the worst decisions you could do so who made that decision that boggles the mind of all the things that didn't stick from the sequels the protagonist man the question is how can you justify it is not the right question to ask as they will always find a way of justifying the worst decision imaginable you could say the same with the marbles how do you justify putting a musical number in this film you can't technically but they did they put it there anyway it was a terrible decision and it's still there and it still wasn't so much fun it's more so just appealing to you can't indefinitely lose money at some point you have to start making money again money is actually a finite resource I'm sorry they can't just keep burning money on these projects that keep failing which uh in terms of major releases uh hold on Aquaman we haven't even so there were two movies that we won't be talking about we could talk about which would be Aquaman 2 and Godzilla 1 because both of them will be getting episodes soon enough gentle, gentle EFAP chat and so in a way we will talk about them in the next year's catch up of overall because that's what they'll be it'll be weird but it'll be nice to mention how like our years started with Godzilla minus one not to say that we really like to move through anything but um there's at least one more movie for us to talk about yes the thing is is that really there's actually a few that could just get glossed over here's a list of films that have come out in the last couple of months that are noteworthy Napoleon, the new Hunger Games movie Wish The Boy and the Heroine, Chicken Run Oh we still need to check that out oh yeah that's great good old Rebell Moon Rebell Moon yeah The Killer came out in the last two months oh that's what a way to finish The Killer and Rebell Moon okay do you want to talk about this well I mean we can be relatively quick on the killer we adored it I'd say yeah very good awesome it's my favorite movie of the year also mine it's one of my favorite fincher films actually yeah it's pretty fucking high scored for myself I thoroughly enjoy everything that film has to say about the topics it covers it is well beyond a hitman procedural as much as I think it can be appreciated for that got a hell of a lot more going on under the surface to the point where if you dig in hard enough you'll find that it being about a hitman isn't that relevant to the point it's trying to make about human nature I love the performance isn't it I love how it takes it's time Gilda Swinton was super impressive in the like five minutes that she had yeah and Michael Fassbender every last micro expression is so important and then the cinematography and the soundtrack are just bitching and as one of the best fight scenes I've seen all year that fight scene was talk about it it's so it's so finely constructed down to like every minute detail not just from a production standpoint but from a writing standpoint it's like so deliberately paced and structured leveraging the narration of the killer and the world view and philosophy that he presents and systematically breaking it down and analyzing it and exploring like what exactly is it that he's looking to achieve here what exactly is it that he believes and what is his actual status and position in the world what does his life really look like it's a really fascinating idea for a film of this like hyper focused character study it's so impressive especially when you rewatch it and you see that structure for how important and intentional it is gradually bringing that character to where he ends up at the end of the film and I know the a lot of people felt like it was too boring or it wasn't and by the way I don't I've never had a problem with someone finding something boring or exciting when I find it the opposite it was totally chill but it would be a mistake I think to assume you're going into a Taken slash John Wick slash Equalizer type film and Drinker's made videos on this he kind of feels the same way that it got shafted at a slight bit by people expecting something that they didn't get and I think a lot of people would blame it for being called the killer but it's super relevant to the point the film is making both in character and themes I wouldn't change the name for the world I guess maybe in marketing I don't think I ever saw much of the marketing so I don't know if they tried to sell a film that it absolutely wasn't maybe that was part of the problem but we read a lot of reviews and we were like holy fuck I don't know what film I saw that was really depressing it's weird to me as well because I didn't even pick up on the whole character study thing because I'm stupid but I just really liked it as just I don't know thriller I don't know what the genre would be I'm thinking of but just as a it's just great details in how he does his things and how he waits like he shows like all the boring things that happen when you are an assassin it's like oh you gotta have to wait here for days and see if I have an opportunity to actually do a thing and I'm gonna I'm gonna be this German tourist because nobody wants to talk to Germans because that's actually kind of true from what I know as a German tourist yourself right now I barely talked to you can just grab on the surface I don't like the surface level but just the literal events that are taking places that it's very good at building it's super tight it's just pretty easy to follow the fight choreography is awesome I just love a fight where both parties get beat up to shit and just have to grasp for everything to actually win the fight in the end yeah it's just really good so I wasn't very confused when I heard that it was like boring and stuff like why is it cool I think one of the most baffling things when I watched it with bringing in another friend and we were going through it and we were just noticing stuff and we didn't know what it was playing into exactly but at first of course we were like man it's amazing how effective, efficient and planned out everything is for this man but then we'd be like that's curious remember when he was first on the plane he had his cap on his shades on and he'd be looking around everywhere but right now he hasn't even got the shades on like he's letting his face be seen a bit more man by the third time he's got an injury that's very evident on his face no shades no cap and he's asleep and we were like what the and it's just like oh oh and you uh it's just one aspect yes the statement that not to be caught on some cameras these days just try to look you know non-suspicious non-interesting by the end of the film he's staring into a camera and he's just like and then it's just as you're watching the film and he keeps repeating his mantra and then his mantra something happens it's like huh that contradicts what you just said huh that contradicts what you just said no that me and Fringy end up talking for like an hour about everything we think it means and what they did he watched it with Theo and rags because I adored this film love talking about what everyone's taking away from it right like that I'm watching it with and then I was like I'll check out Chris Stockman's review of it no hey he praised it he thought it was great there's just one quote I want to talk about in his video that it's not even a quote I'm going to paraphrase but he basically highlighted the killer himself the character is presented as hyper-competent and he has a list of like sort of rules that he repeats and that you're seeing him be very competent however there are several parts in the film where you see that he is incompetent you see him fail at doing particular things you see him not take the precautions he says he should take you see him getting involved in making decisions that he says he shouldn't I'm not sure if the filmmakers have noticed these kinds of contradictions but I did enjoy the film oh no this is your job you almost got there are you fair? several reviews I spotted are people saying it's absolutely retarded they want to convince us this guy's got his job considering all the mistakes he makes and I was like oh shit the points it's gliding I don't know what you're supposed to do in a situation like that because you're like okay wait but like that's not what you're supposed to be taking away you're not supposed to think that's a contradiction they failed to characterize him correctly he said it was really good but he thinks that those things are contradictions and problems with the film which makes me think Chris what is this movie trying to say what's the idea of this movie then what is it that you really liked about it why would you say that it's good he said that he likes it because it's David Fincher from when he asked he's also not allowed to be negative remember he can't be negative that's true and especially if it's David Fincher which I mean again I think David Fincher is a fucking excellent filmmaker but I get the impression that he would look at other Fincher films that he likes that he actually likes and he could talk about them but with the killer it's probably a film that he'll never think about or watch again that's the impression I get and like I said after seeing it if I'd seen no one's reactions to it I still would never recommend this broadly I'd be like this is gonna be a film that's enjoyed by a select amount of people totally fine I love this niche films that I hate so like I get it but it was disappointing to see how much people just do not like the killer I was like oh fuck damn our particularly favourable opinion of it is uncommon to where unfortunately it's probably not gonna get as much credit or recognition as it deserves it's gonna be remembered as one of those Fincher films it's like yeah I mean it's good in the way that Fincher films are typically good but not in the same way as you know the best films but I really it is one of my favourite films that he's made it is really really really high up there alongside stuff like Fight Club, Gongo, Social Network yeah I was about to say it's probably with actually your set of his favourite films it's probably a club that's like 5 in like it's not a small club it's a big club cause 7 is basically in there as well it might as well be he is an incredibly he is an incredibly consistent filmmaker but this film is really good it's a really well crafted film it really lends itself well to his style which is everything is incredibly deliberate and meticulous that there's an immense amount of clarity in terms of the visual language but also in terms of the general structure in there and the intention and purpose behind all of the major creative decisions and story beats that they happen like I can't I can't imagine parts of the film where I'd be like you could get rid of that I can't see that because they're so essential or ways that they could be changed around because the structure is so it's so tight you know another film that couldn't possibly have things taken from it and instead would have to have a whole other film added on top are you talking about Rebell Moon oh my goodness Rebell Moon so I suppose to close out the look back on the wonderful year other than we peaked at the end because we did Launderings alright that's just true of which more stuff is on the way for that not new stuff but I'll explain that in a bit Rebell Moon it was a complete and utter disaster but kind of expected so we've got a very strong handle on what Zack Snyder is capable of as a storyteller Rebell Moon matches it quite well we did a three hour breakdown of it you can check it out if you want you guys seem to very much thoroughly enjoy it as well as the whole world's rejoicing in just realizing that he's a very shitty storyteller well I say for some reason we talked about it and I think Fringy was right when he said that Army the Dead wasn't enough of a reveal to the world because Snyder kind of overshadowed it in terms of what people were talking about and thinking about Rebell Moon is standalone here I am everyone the stage is yours, Zack good luck this is me with complete creative freedom making a brand new science fiction world with all of the money that I could ever ask for to realize my vision a long sense removed from all the stuff going on with the DC films and it's just fucking terrible in a way that's very apparent it's not like one where it can fly over yet I don't even know what people would be pointing to as the really exciting and cool things about Rebell Moon Rebell Moon slow motion the slow motion shot of her scraping her hand across the dirt was really artistic it was a really good use of slow motion that was pretty brilliant we wouldn't want to miss that can people please stop giving him creative freedom yeah all the reverse memes that are really funny like do not release this Snyder cut I beg you don't release that's become a conversation as well as him saying you know really it's the R rated cut the director's cut they all come together you can't go on record before your movie releases oh by the way there's like an 18 hour cut that's R rated with a completely different vision and it feels like a completely different movie it's like what are we doing at this point all it's going to do is add more shit just like the Snyder cut that's not true apparently there could be titties so you get that and you extend the vision there you go I will say though you have to tolerate two hours of Zack Snyder's work oh it ain't worth it porn's free on the internet man it's probably worth thinking about waiting until you get a movie that comes out that people respond to well that they really like before you decide and ordain from up on high that this is going to be a franchise of multiple movies like comic books and anime video game the most forced you know IP shit I've ever seen and the same thing got done with army of the dead but that's just dead like I mean it's good to have that title I guess why would you even try to connect it up and I guess Zack for a moment there was like I'm going to be making so many things all the time everyone's going to love this is going to be great and I don't see a future for like these huge projects that he keeps getting you know someone's got to give the debts will come in eventually of like man we put a lot of investment into your stuff you know this would be Netflix and they'd be like what's going on the engagement's pretty low and I think you could be fooled into thinking like Rebel Moon has got relatively good engagement but like has it not disappeared already it's absolutely awesome and the really relevant part is what happens in four or five months when part two the scar giver comes out and had way way way lower viewership in all likelihood than part one it's going to be so retarded it'll be a cult classic it's going to be all of them trying to convince me they could defend their little like settlement against the mother world or whatever it's called mother something yeah it's no way I'm actually waiting for part two before I review it just because it's such an empty film the fact that the middle third is about going around picking up really important characters who then don't speak until the end of the movie there's a lion of dialogue from some of them they don't share their opinions on anything they're just there and it's also completely unnecessary because the guy who's leading them to all of these people already knows where they are and wants to capture them and portray them none of it makes sense but the staggering thing I think is just how empty it is nothing about that film is characterful or plot even is barely there you can cut the middle third entirely if it wasn't for part two needing these characters they're picking up the middle third doesn't need to exist you can just skip straight from she meets bounty hunter guy bounty hunter guy betrays her final fight end which would probably have been a better film because it would be like 45 minutes long because like I said we were watching Firefly recently and like the format for those episodes even though there's only 14 in season one and that's all they ever got you know they still did your normal like they're on the ship and then alert there's a thing happening and they're all in a room and it's like what does the doctor think what does the engineer think what does the priest think what does the fucking crazy girl that we have on the board think what does the leader think what does the first mate think what does the muscle think you get around all the thing witty dialogue bouncing off each other all great rebel mood is like what does does anyone did anyone share a fucking opinion about any of the events that even happened it's like hello let us go here remember when we were almost blown away they had like a scene for the sons of anarchy guy and her she goes to the room and he's just like you inspire me to be honorable and we were just like what where did this come from what are you even talking about the fact that he turned out to be evil is just funny like he was just like no motivation to do anything that he was doing in the whole thing but suspiciously helpful and then it's just like I'm just bad you're like oh right the scene isn't there when all the heroes are sort of trussed up and captured and he goes around effectively narrating their one thing says you are you are the woman who lost her children you are the person who lost his soldiers yeah that's the entirety of their character work you've just summed up there in that one line of dialogue that's all it takes luckily it's a good thing he reminded us because I had there's we needed that oh yeah what an awful attempt at launching your big old Star Wars knockoff which by the way I say Star Wars knockoff every person who watches this sees something he's stolen from in here but only enough a lot of firefly clearly was stolen from as well it's a it's a Firefly Star Wars Warhammer ripoff that is terrible in every way even Harry Potter these steals from Harry Potter's from how to train your buckbeam also that it's a film made by a Hufflepuff basically oh got him Zack Snyder is absolutely a Hufflepuff but he thinks he's a griffin he thinks he's a Ravenclaw but he's not he's totally captured by his own ego like I've mentioned this a few times about Zack Snyder already but like I just cannot get over the fucking lens thing like he did Army of the Dead he set it in Los Angeles and he decided to use these like sort of vintage Japanese lenses with such a narrow depth of field that it blurs out the entirety of the background and you can only see the subject of the frame and it's like why why are you even doing this why don't you want to capture the visual splendor of the setting that you're setting this story in surely you would want to take advantage of that yeah but have you considered that what if instead everything was blurry except for this woman I didn't think of that the opposite of what I'm talking through one and a half out of the two characters in a scene are in focus which is better than the half characters that are in focus in Army of the Dead so he is improving it's so crazy that he got away with Army of the Dead he made that piece of shit and nobody had just like generally like half of Dave Bautista is clear that piece of shit was walked on so much by people without having even recognized it that it's just milled it into the floor just to exist at all there it is just I'm sure they're going to keep making more of the Army of the Dead universe with that anime and the sequel that's definitely going to happen yep I'm sure that'll happen these things only exist when they exist it's something you've been saying a lot rags and it's really true it only exists when it's out it's going to be remarkable when the sequel comes out people will be like oh shit Rebel Moon oh yeah the first one did have a story I guess we can finally see how all of this tits out or something if they have a showdown with her and bad guy again and she beats him again he's so boring what else would they do the guy should be dead but they used magic bullshit to bring him back to life obviously it's so that they can fight again yay he's going to seem to win at first but then she's going to do a thing and kill him it'll what else would he do that's the thing that's my big fucking mistake because I'm trying to predict the actions of a madman a lunatic you never know what he's going to do maybe the guy will die in the first 5 minutes and it'll be a big subversion and I'll think that's super cool and then I'll be like but you fool why did you bring him back at all guys what you wanted to think this metal did indeed call it Snyder's blurry vision I did shockingly true you can only hope that the Snyder cut means many things will be cut from the movie it's going to be long it's going to be the opposite unfortunately it will be a much longer movie it's not a cut in holding each shot for as long as possible like right until the end of the take and then doing the next shot right until the end of the take and then cutting it that's like that it was crazy how long he drew out just a scene of somebody like grabbing something or you know walking up the stairs you think he'd be Dave Filoni or something they should team up and make him look 6 hours long it's well it's just all attempts to make it as long as possible to convince people that they are dramatically different films when they are only partially different films with a lot of queries than all the scenes it'll be so easy to make it a dramatically different film there's so much stuff that you do need to add with an extra 2 hours of runtime the problem is he won't add any of the stuff the film needs to see because there are so many awkward cuts away from what you know is going to be like a really long slow mo gory death of someone's head being smashed in but in this version there's a really janky cut away from that's the stuff that will pad out the extra runtime we probably might get 2 extra lines of dialogue if we're lucky but the rest of it's just going to be gratuitous R rated stuff that's what the film really needs more tits, more blood, slower deaths a mess one thing made me laugh recently about Snyder, it was pertaining to him it was actually a quote from Christopher Nolan Christopher was saying you're going to say Christopher Stockman but carry on no no no he said I really I sense through Zack Snyder's filmmaking I sense his love for the potential of cinema and that was just like to me that was just like Christopher Nolan basically saying that he missed the mark you know like he's not really making cinema here he's just like he's trying his best that's how you compliment someone when you have nothing nice to say oh well you know he has such potential and he really loves film and filmmaking and no one makes movies quite like him yeah well yeah you could have someone be like what do you think of my thing it was like you tried really hard exactly that's exactly yeah which you know kind of gives us that was the highlight the end of the year of course not at all the actual highlight which was the eight hour Lord of the Rings coverage that was the cool thing and then followed up with a wonderful chat with cinematic venom for any episode that anyone isn't aware of you should totally check out it's a great little book end to Lord of the Rings being covered on this channel don't to say that that would be it I'm sure it'll be more in future especially when Rings of Power season 2 rolls around that's right oh boy but oh yeah I guess we should passing mention of course to Valhalla we did mention it earlier I think a little bit but just really banging DLC all of me Fringy and Metal have streams of it you should go watch to see our thoughts in depth on everything that they do for what it does for Kratos and essentially giving yeah well I was gonna say it's like it's just a big old end point that adds on to Ragnarok really well yeah that's free one of the best kind of DLCs you could ask for free DLC man that's hyper mechanics focused and has incredibly meaningful story beats to add to it it was really nice to jump back in to God of War Ragnarok briefly and be like oh well and there it goes can't wait for them to bring out whatever they bring out next even if it's not God of War to be honest with you which I guess we'll have to see it's probably gonna be a while before the next one oh and I did mention Robocop excellent well I mean we also didn't mention Loki season 2 that's okay all the fall of the House of Usher oh fall of the House of Usher actually yeah that's actually that's an easy recommendation as well as Robocop Rogue City for being faithful and fun as a FPS fall of the House of Usher is I mean if you liked the other fighting shows you're gonna like Fall of the House of Usher I would imagine it did piss some people off in terms of an adaptation of pose work I don't know myself whether I know people who are very familiar with Edgar Allen pose work that don't mind it at all as an adaptation in fact they quite like it so it's kind of hard to have an opinion on that definitively that is representative especially because he's not adapting the stories per se as much as he's adapting the spirit within them and it's up to you whether or not he nails it I guess with different ones all of the House of Usher sure just put in the word it becomes funny one of the things that's most I think shocking about that show is the main character is all reshoots they lost Frank Langella for reasons I guess I won't say anything about because I don't know the validity of any of it but it seems to be some kind of controversy and then Bruce Greenwood came in to redo everything and it's fucking amazing it's kind of nuts yeah I think if it was one element that I'd like the most about all of it it was him he does a fantastic job in that season and it's unreal to know that most of the time he's not even acting across from people necessarily I mean he probably still is in a lot of the instances but he's filling in for scenes that got cut and everything and yes it has an ending that we liked so there you go it sucked to the landing that's a hard recommendation just from that alone we don't have coverage of any of the shows except Hill House maybe that'll change someday there's just so much for us to do we're still catching up on all kinds of different things well maybe just a rather awful list we covered a lot of things yeah I think we're fine there's still more on the list of things that were notable oh yeah and there's plenty of things that we didn't get to see but there's plenty of things we did see and didn't talk about people are asking is the killer gonna get some kind of coverage like probably not it's really not like a full on breakdown whatever because we just I don't know how much time we have to do any and everything right now but we've got Godzilla minus one is done and Aquaman is in theory gonna happen as well no promises Aquaman too the end of the DCEU oh my god yes so there's plenty to talk about with that and why even Arcane Season 2 teaser just don't talk about it yet it's still so far away it's like a whole year but you know we'll try and wrap up there in the sense so before we even get close to saying goodbye say thank you all for hanging out that was a big long stream Aquaman look at that everyone's still here big thank you of course to patrician tv because you know John and little patrician they know what's up they know how this goes they do long streams of their own I'm sure but this guy he's his first time here and so I really appreciate hanging out with us and bantering about different things thank you and yeah we've come to understand you're very much a long man in your own right so why don't you tell chat about where they can find you and what you get up to there's a link down in the description to my channel I primarily do I jokingly call them video novels because I have a distaste for the term video essay can't imagine why let's see what am I what am I am I 52 hours of Bethesda coverage across five videos noice peaking at the 20 hour Skyrim video that I did but I'm actually closing the door on Bethesda stuff for now well so you're saying you got very long videos covering a lot of Bethesda's historical library and the from what I've gathered they are incredibly detailed and they go into a lot of subjects that a lot of people find very fascinating I need to check them out myself I know rags have probably sell it a little bit better than I can well you haven't seen them oh I think I meant to you Jesus Christ yeah that was they are very good I would highly recommend them if you like the e-fap style of looking into things I think you'd particularly gel with these videos you do have to watch them in one single sitting those are the rules you must know they were designed that's right absolutely so just pick a free day clear out a block and just watch the videos are very good would highly recommend a very insightful a lot of passion there I love the research and I've been enjoying watching your research streams that you've been doing that they definitely have an e-fap kind of vibe to them that I appreciate I like it it's good stuff yeah on the stream side I tend to look into any articles or interviews on the subjects that I cover and for Skyrim I watched almost all of the kind of Skyrim videos that were made that were above 10,000 views took about a month to do I mean that's quite impressive I will say thank you I do recommend my starfield video though I've been told it's the best I've done so far it's only 8 hours though so we're definitely slipping wanted to do a short short man for that one that's okay no judgment here I think if you wanted to you could do like a 24 hour video on starfield I have a list that's like a thousand words long of just ideas that didn't make it into my cut because I really didn't want to work on the video about that game anymore it was soul sucking I from what I've heard from other people as well I don't blame you it does seem like the kind of game that just like I think you and I had some life different you and I I think had slightly different experiences with fallout 76 I played it when it came out and the game was so busted and broken and bizarre that that kind of like entranced me and fascinated me to keep playing because every over the next hill there were bugs and glitches and nonsense that I'd never seen in a video game before so where it and then myself in private sessions our perspective was on a more complete product that they have finished and supported over the years because there's quite a number of people who will say that fallout 76 is good now but it's actually just a different kind of bizarre it looks like because I just played it for launch and I haven't touched it since because of course fucking not so watching you play it as a more I guess complete and comprehensive sort of experience it was interesting to compare what I saw to what was there at launch and that launch experience and it looks like they've just added more crap to the pile they haven't made the pile better they fixed a lot of the bugs and that's about it I hope so yes the channel is patrician tv link in the description covers plenty of things definitely something you're going to cover is going to interest at least everyone in chat somewhat so you should really check it out I think it's Star Wars theory 7 hours you need to look at our backlog okay we used to stream 12 hours every single time we streamed 9 and a half last night we did it was great we'd be doing the long John CJG what are you up to what's going on in the world of you not much I'm boring John Graham on youtube I did our being the chief I'm working on a new show taking me a while getting something new rolling out but I'm working on shit I got nothing right now sorry but yeah that's the channel on youtube John Graham you're very well known in the house of EFAB at this point so anyone who hasn't subscribed is just a big meanie bobeanie but there is a link they can grab you no problem thank you little platoon what about you sir much the same not much going on sort of holding pattern until the echo echo is coming out soon isn't it so I'll be I've been on other writing projects but I will probably be covering that at some point la la la that's dropping all on the same day isn't it I fear it is yes oh my no that's going to be I can tell they really believe in that one the load of confidence is to get it all out of the way as quickly as possible hopefully no one will notice if Disney were like a person they'd be like here it is echo and then they walk out of the room or walk off the stage so it goes what's that going to go what's what I don't even dead pool dead pool the echo is bleeding on the stage they're just like oh that's cute put the curtains back down it's fine but yes link also in description always a pleasure mr. platoon of course metal where have you been for the past week and a half oh god I've been I'm right below you I mean you it's like true this time poopin everywhere oh my gosh I mean we've just been doing stuff getting drunk I mean you've seen us online getting drunk it's very fun I mean I'm leaving in two days ish from now and as I just figured out as a gift I'll get echo when I'm back home so that's cool uh yeah I don't know I don't have anything new lined up get the machine back up as soon as I'm back home but the next stream I'm going to do at home is going to be Robocop I'm going to be playing that so people want me to play that and I want to play it and yeah it should be fun I don't have any topic for next watch or anything but yeah as I need to get the machine back up running I'm real sorry to interrupt apparently the Emmy's happening right now hmm yeah I'm getting a few headlines I think it's also in my email I just follow up Twitter it's like oh yeah the fucking Emmy's just happening what is it something notable well I suppose what's interesting is well I don't know I'm just scrolling through that's okay collect the notable things that we could mention it before we it's not done that's the thing I don't think it's over yet I think it started so it's part way through um which means that maybe we'll find out if shows that we like got stuff well hey we can find out if succession season four wins a whole bunch of Emmy's up wait I mean just Matt all is he was he did a stream recently doing drug Simpsons hit run drug blood board you can find the blood buy playlists on live but he will be back doing all kinds of metal related things and the I will be rather fun to see what you think of it link also in description then bring in rags what do you guys would you which way to average um nothing nothing really sort of things are sort of lined up but but we'll see what happens I don't want to announce anything yet at the moment you know the deal I'm just working but I guess the only thing that would be noteworthy is that uh Loki is getting close to being like totally done finished so that they can all sort of come out really quickly uh obviously a lot of the rings in the mix kind of delayed things but yeah catching up now so uh soon should be pretty soon honestly um I probably just gonna get back to work on it after we're done here and otherwise I'm just working on stuff you know the deal yeah and then the quick update just on my end is that uh Lorda rings the new plan with it is to tear it up in a good way I'll make sure it looks as smooth as possible into particular topics and conversations I've gotten all the time stamps done now I know where and how and when to chop and I've um what I'm gonna do is try and account for copyright again upload a version and keep it just you know offline I guess for another it'll probably two weeks I will prep all of the individual smaller pieces and then they'll go out once per week and so it's technically stuff you've seen if you've watched the whole thing but you might be interested in hearing it again or maybe you'll be interested in checking these out rather than the big ones because they'll be smaller for example a video that's all about maybe Gollum and it's just us talking about how well Andy Circus did the characterization, his start, middle and finish what he means to the whole thing how he was used in the Hobbit why not the Hobbit things get their own video so you know you'll have that and then maybe next week it would be our thoughts on all of the world building that sort of stuff split into what will probably end up being 10 videos maybe 10 to 20 that's a pretty broad amount so I can't possibly be wrong I will be and then when they're all out I will try one last time to release the 8 hour of us watching the trilogy but this time chat will be edited in from the first time around this version will be unlisted and linked in the description if you want to go back to that comment section I'd rather keep that alive and well this will be the final attempt to keep it somewhat monetized because YouTube is a prick but I think at this point it's so I can't tell what's going to get hit with copyright anymore no matter how hard I try so it's something weird that happens I guess when you get 8 hour videos that's filled with visuals from films it just gets tough yeah that'll be happening and then obviously we're going to be trying to record the other bits of coverage that we're going to make episodes for we've got to do meme faps we've got to do super chat catch ups and we've got new episodes planned along the way I think the next coming year is going to be a lot of fun the next thing of course is 300 EFAP movies the beginning of the war arc that'll be out I believe Monday I think that's the plan or Wednesday I'll say Wednesday that's the we'll go with Wednesday just in case there's something that hiccups it but yes that should be next one of those the promise is one to two of those per month and it'll end on the end of the month then you'll get a new trailer for whatever the next year's arc will be like I said you got that, you got Loki hopefully Gotham Knights if we can get that going at some point they're all getting processed so to speak so yeah I mean there's just so much on the way we can't wait to show you guys it's going to be great boy oh boy other than that is there anything anyone wants to say about in any way should perform no I think we've covered enough today I would like to add one thing in regard to patricianTV because I just realized that it's his streams that me and my roommate watched when we were first watching Starfield and we both really appreciated his input on that and my roommate's a huge Bethesda Morrowind guy and he loves your videos dude so there you go I just thought I'd mention that I was like 99% sure and I'm like I gotta verify this and now I think I'm like just about 99% sure it was you that we were watching so like you make good shit dude thank you I was gonna say that I watched RV and the chief back when it came out I was much younger hey yes I was about to say this is the magically on point we had a stream where Trud Logic was talking to John for the whole thing and at the end he went are you the RV and the chief guy that's great I get that sometimes on Twitter I used to watch your shit when I was 12 okay I mean that I think I've included one of your bits in my Skyrim video actually and part where the Xbox explodes awesome when did you when was season 2 when was season 2 of RV and the chief I think that's when I first saw it I'm trying to calculate how old I was Jesus that was probably 2009 2010 so I would have been something like 16 that's pretty funny that was like really early days of YouTube that era here was a different time sure was a different time yeah yeah anything else I want to make sure everyone has a chance to say anything they want to say grungo oh nice thank you for that alright then sorry I didn't talk about the project that I'm currently working on go for it I'm currently working on a classic world of Warcraft video as my next quick retrospective like a big big old video it's going to have to be it's a big old game interesting I played World of Warcraft for about maybe 2 or 3 months it just wasn't quite my thing thank you for your service I see the appeal I think this was I played I played some thick panda priest and I remember like disliked it and I think I had a taran paladin and I think I enjoyed it but it was like okay this is fine but it's not really grabbing me so it'll be interesting from what you described you probably played in the post cataclysm era which is when it was largely started going downhill in terms of its design I maybe I guess my window into that game is really narrow Guild Wars 2 is really the only MMO that I play and I played that at launch and I still play it and I enjoyed a lot but it's the only one I've stuck with it jails with me a lot but wow I just could never get into wow but great porn though I will say absolutely thank you Blizzard for providing us once again with an excellent source of pornographic material you are doing God's work thank you I'm looking forward to your next IP in the models therein and then it was silent and then it was silent yeah there we go we completed the journey I suppose are we are we live I think so but not for long goodbye everyone we'll see you later no the water gun should have tails god damn it


So we have an update on the Simone Hallib situation, of course, has been provisionally suspended almost a year now. Back in October last year was when she first found out that she had had a band substance in her body. But we actually have some encouraging news. She's actually started her hearing for the case, and to plead her case that she is not guilty, as she's been pleading for the best part of 12 months. Now it was before Wimbledon that we actually heard that she was getting tried and getting a hearing. Finally, for this, and she's had multiple postponements of her hearing. She was supposed to get a hearing back in January, that got postponed. It was supposed to happen in April, that got postponed. So she's finally getting the chance, and they say it's going to take a couple of weeks to go through all the information and then also get a result. So hopefully in the next week or so we'll get a result. But also encouraging signs, she's actually playing on hard courts or training on hard courts as well ready for the US Open Series. Now, she does have a lot of ranking points on the line. She's gone from number six in the world where she won in Canada nearly 12 months ago. It's now number 55 in the world. So she ideally would love to defend that title and get this out of the way as quickly as possible so she can get back on court and play that tournament and at least get some points from that. She probably won't win it back to back, but you never know. I mean, she has been training a lot in the off season and she has been getting her body right. So you never know what she's going to look like when she goes back. But she has so many points there. 900 points of her 1000 point ranking is in that one tournament. So she's eventually going to drop out of the top 100 if she doesn't get to play that or if she doesn't do well there. So that's going to be a big risk. Of course, the US Open, she's on the entry list, which is really good signs. We did see her on entry list throughout the season, but of course, I couldn't play it to withdraw from those events due to the provisional suspension. Let me know down in the comments below. Do you think we're going to see Simone Halle at the US Open or do you think we're not going to see her until maybe the start of next year?  Will she be able to actually play any events because she will be unranked? Will they get her wildcards to some of the Asian swing tournaments? Or do you reckon she'll just start at the start of next year if she does get found not guilty? She is in her 30s too, so she doesn't have that much time to be able to play. That's the bad thing about having this suspension is that 12 months of her career is gone. More so if she does get found guilty. When she gets found guilty, she'll be probably gone for a couple more years. But let me know down in the comments below. When do you think we're going to see Halle back? Do you reckon it's going to be this year if she gets found not guilty? Or do you reckon it'll be more likely to start next year?


Okay, Shoshanim, in a desperate attempt to cheer you up, I'm going to discuss today orphans, orphanages, abandoned and adopted children, and foster care. This should definitely cheer you up. Two service announcements to add to your gloom. I will be releasing a video about Psycho, the famous Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece on the way to Halloween next week. And you should ask yourself, is this a Halloween treat or is this a Halloween trick? Because you never know with me. And on a more serious note, there's a new playlist, welcome playlist, there's a new playlist on my YouTube channel, it's the covert borderline playlist. I think there's about seven videos there about this new diagnosis, covert borderline, which resonates with many, many, many people. Many people identify themselves in this diagnosis and say I've been misdiagnosed with borderline, I've been misdiagnosed with last season, I've been misdiagnosed with bipolar. Now that I'm exposed to the idea of a covert borderline, that's me, that's 100% me. So with so many people, so many people's lives, so many people's psychologies, so many people experiences resonating with this diagnosis, I think I may have hit a rich seam of psychogold. Okay, let's delve right in. My name is Sanbaknin, I'm the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Canada, United Kingdom and Nigeria. I received this YouTube comment which triggered me or provoked me or incentivized me, choose your favorite victim would phrase, to make this video. And it said, the comment, I'm interested in knowing if any studies have been done on the prevalence of narcissistic or personality-disordered mothers who adopt and the utilization of adopted children is supply. The answer is no, there are no such studies. Subsequently, continues the comment, the triangulation between biological children and adopted children. Also, the prevalence of NPD in adopted persons and its effects on personality development with already established trauma from the separation from family of origin, followed up by adoption by a personality-disordered mother, father and family. Regrettably, there are no studies and therefore I cannot relate directly to the questions raised by you. However, I can discuss more generally the issue of adoption and foster care and how they affect personality lifelong. So, the comment ends with the following paragraph. Are there any studies on this? A whole ton of PTSD involved via parental units and adopted child. If anyone has had any doubt about the importance of the mother, not the father, the mother or more precisely the maternal figure, the primary caregiver, it has nothing to do with genitalia. It has to do with who is the person who played the role of a mother in early childhood development between 0 and 36 months of age.  It could be a male, but it's a mother figure.  Orphans, children who have been orphaned, there's the famous English-Romanian orphan study. There have been even studies by Winnicott on children who have survived war. Studies of adoptees, children who are adopted, studies of children in foster care, in short, studies of motherless children demonstrate the importance of the mother. Indeed, when mistreated and abused and traumatized, children often inquire, am I adopted? And this is the topic of today's video. For decades now, for decades now, there's been a raging debate about the importance of mothers and motherhood, proper motherhood, good enough motherhood. In very early development, pre-verbal and before the ego is formed. And we have studies, for example, by Vanessa Peetz, by Selma Freiber in the 80s in the footsteps of Vanessa Peetz. And they describe defenses in infants, defenses such as avoidance, freezing, fighting and inappropriate affect. These are all defenses against trauma and abuse. These are not defense mechanisms because there are no defense mechanisms without an ego. And this is all a pre-ego state, but these are defenses, defensive behaviors. Now, before I go into the issue of adopted children, what adoption does, what foster care does to the personality, mental health issues, defenses and so on. I'm going to do a deep dive into these issues. Before we go there, I want to set up the theoretical background, the scenes so that we can then explore everything being informed by what others had to say. So, Donald Winnicott, for example, the famous pediatrician turned psychoanalyst later. Winnicott suggested that abused and traumatized children don't dare to hope for love. And adoption, adoption, being orphaned, definitely going through the foster care system is a form of abuse and trauma. It's a definitely series of traumatizing events. So he said, these kind of children don't dare to hope for love. And to protect themselves against disappointment, these children hate others ostentatiously, conspicuously, in your face. They desire to be hated in return. This is these children's way of testing the waters. Can my foster mother, can my adopting mother, can institutions, can they hate me without resorting to maltreatment and rejection? If I push the envelope, if I test them, if I misbehave egregiously, can they still not hate me? Or, at least if they do hate me, can they still not abuse me and not mistreat me? Much later, about 20 years later, Fairburn, Gantry, Seinfeld came up with the concept of the empty schizoid core, which is a major reaction to being orphaned, being adopted, going through the foster care system. I'll discuss it a bit later. Then there is Albert Ellis, the founder of REBT, the precursor of CBT. He says that experience causes no specific emotional reaction. The individual's belief system produces the reaction. So it's not what's happening to us. It's what we believe that is happening to us. And what we believe about how we should react to what's happening to us. In short, this is socially determined. And indeed, Harris-Tex-Allivan said, people are products of their environment. The most dominant voice in this field is Boris Cyrilnik. Boris Cyrilnik, C-Y-R-U-L-N-I-K. Cyrilnik said that trauma consists of the injury and the representation of the injury. Not the injury alone, but also how the injury is represented, how it is perceived by others and how it is perceived by the victim. Adult interpretations of events are the most damaging post-traumatic experience for children. This was very controversial because what Cyrilnik says, for example, is that the act of insist itself is not the main cause of the trauma. It's how adults in the environment react to the act of insist that causes the trauma to the child. This is extremely controversial. He says that labels can be more damaging and damning than the experience itself. Hedl, long before all these guys, Hedl said, consciousness of self depends on the presence of the other. Jean-Paul Sartre said that the perception of the world, including of other people, changes when another person enters the picture, another person appears. We absorb their concept of the other into our own. Jacques Lacan took it a bit further and said that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. The unconscious is the hive mind, the collectivity of all the voices of others. Charles Horton Cooley came up with the concept of looking-glass-self. He said that the way we view ourselves is based on how we imagine that other people view us. Heinz Koh would say that the child's needs should be met and when the child's needs, especially psychological needs, are not met, a fragmented self emerges, consisting of the narcissistic self and the grandiose self. Eric Byrne suggested that we all harbor within ourselves a lifelong child, adult and parental ego states. Fritz Perls, who was the co-founder of Gestalt Therapy together with his wife, said that a sense of reality is created through perception, the ways we view our experiences, not the events themselves. All this is very, very important when we try to understand adoption because the reactivity, the reactions to adoption, short-term and long-term, psychological and somatic, all these reactions are actually heavily conditioned on societal expectations, mores, signals, broadcasts, edicts and strictures. Society determines the trauma involved in being adopted or being orphaned or going through the foster care system. Of course, I'm not implying that there are no cases of real abuse and real trauma. They are more rare than we are led to believe, but they do exist. I'm talking about the amazing fact that many, many, one would even say the majority of people, adopted, actually end up with severe attachment problems and with post-traumatic conditions, the kind of CPTSD. Why is that? I think that it's because of the way society perceives adoption. And to understand why I think this way, I encourage you to watch the video. It's in the literature, the link is in the literature, in the description. The video titled, Why Childhood Abuse Victims Hate and Are Hated. Okay, now what are we talking about? Over the decades, in multiple studies, including the one I've mentioned of Romanian orphans who've been adopted in the United Kingdom, this study was a longitudinal study over 20 years. So over the years, over the decades, we have learned that adopted children develop a pattern of behaviors which are highly specific to them. It has even been suggested that it's a syndrome, the adopted children or adopted child syndrome, but this has been rejected by the DSM committee, for example. Still, there's something going on there. We know, for example, that adopted children are more prone to violent temper tantrums, sensory self-stimulation when they are stressed or even just excited in a state of excitation, oppositional behaviors, contrarian, defiant, consummations, hatred of authority, which is a bit psychopathic, aggression usually externalized, depression and anxiety. All these are much more common among adopted children than in the general population or even in clinical populations. Now, part of the problem is that many adoptions are cross-cultural. The child is born and sometimes grows up to a certain point in one culture and then exported or transported into another culture. And the cultural differences do account for some of the variants in narcissistic, psychopathic behaviors, but still it's an insufficient explanation because we find the same phenomena, the same clinical features in children who have been adopted at birth and they have time to be exposed to the culture of origin. All adopted children or vast majority of adopted children have a difficult time understanding emotions in others. They miss social cues, which is very reminiscent of autistic spectrum disorders. They develop learned behaviors. These learned behaviors are adaptive when you're alone, for example, when you have to fend off for yourself, when you're in an orphanage or in foster care, actually, but these behaviors are maladaptive, post-adoption when you're embedded in a loving, caring, nurturing family.  And such children actually are indistinguishable from children with autistic spectrum disorder. So, low functioning autistic spectrum disorder. This is a very interesting kind of similarity. So, we have psychopathic elements, we have autistic elements and they persist throughout life into adulthood. That is the big discovery of the era study, the English-Romanian orphans study. Many children suffer from trauma as a result of experiences before the abandonment or experiences from the orphanage or foster care. Trauma could be the outcome of real abuse, including sexual abuse in many cases, or it could be the outcome of dislocation, disorientation, being abandoned and detached, separation in security, object inconsistency. And if this reminds you of the origins, the psychodynamic origins of narcissism, the etiology of narcissism, you're right. That's how narcissism starts. It starts with a problem with a mother. A child cannot attach to the mother because she's not a secure base. She's not safe, she's not stable, she's not there. She's a dead mother, to use Andrei Green's phrase. And so, children who are adopted actually have all the preconditions of prerequisites to develop narcissistic personality disorder or pathological narcissism because they are not given the opportunity to attach securely to a mother figure.  Many of them have disordered attachment, insecure attachment styles, poor attachment styles, and so on. And this difficulties in attachment makes it almost impossible for them to form long-term, healthy, stable, safe, productive, constructive adult relationships. But insecure attachment of this magnitude also impacts self-regulation. So many of them are dysregulated. They lack impulse control. They are reactant. I mentioned that they are defined in consumations. They defy authority. That's called reactants. They are reactant. And there, as I said, as I mentioned, are able to understand emotions and respond to emotions appropriately. In general, identity formation is disrupted. So these people have identity diffusion on a constant basis. They are stuck in an early adolescent phase in this sense. In extreme cases, they have identity disturbance. So if you put together emotional dysregulation and identity disturbance, it's a great, great encapsulation of borderline personality disorder. The feelings of abandonment related to adoption, to having been adopted, and all of them find out sooner or later that they've been adopted. These feelings of abandonment lead to a total disturbance in multiple areas of psychological functioning. And it becomes very reminiscent to cluster B, but nowadays we know that CPTSD masquerades as cluster B personality disorders. It's very difficult to tell apart someone who has complex trauma from someone who has borderline personality disorder, for example. So these children having grown up and become adults, they actually suffer from lifelong CPTSD. They never develop the feeling that they belong. They never fit in, not only with the adoptive families, but by extension with any group or collective or environment. They just don't fit in. They're the outcasts. They're the freaks. They're the weirdos. They keep wondering, what would my life have been like had I not been adopted? Now everything I'm saying is a generalization. Of course I'm going to get a torrent of comments by adopted people who would tell me that that's not true. They have secure attachment. They don't have any mental health issues. They don't feel that they don't fit in. They fit in perfectly. They have a great social life and so on. Yeah, of course. Everything I'm saying is on average, population average, a cohort, a cohort average. It doesn't apply to each and every individual who has ever been adopted, but we're talking about statistics and this phenomenon that I'm describing is very, very common, common enough to generalize, so to speak. Many adoptees who were raised in closed adoptions develop a wish, an overwhelming wish to find the birth family, the mother, at the very least the mother, most commonly the mother. If adoption is such a great thing and they fit in and they feel great, why would they want to look for the birth mother? There's something is missing. There is some deficiency there. There's some lack, some lacuna. And many adoptees have negative views of adoption. They regard the very process of adoption as traumatic and some of them even advocate against adoption. They ask to ban, they demand to ban adoption as a practice. Adoption is about loss. It's early childhood loss. It's an inability to form an identity because of critical, a critical lack of very crucial and basic information. Who am I? Where do I come from? Who is my mother? What is her background? Even genetic if nothing else. So this in itself creates trauma. And there's a struggle with psychological disorders, behavioral challenges. This sense of not belonging has a pernicious poisonous effect on almost everything imaginable, every dimension of psychological functioning imaginable. And cultures and societies throughout the world, they don't help. They're not helpful because there are various myths associated with adoption. For example, you should be grateful that you've been adopted. You have been saved from a fate worse than death. You were taken out of the impersonal foster care system and into loving, caring, warm, embracing, holding and containing family. So all is well that ends well. On the other hand, there's the opposite myth that adoptive parents, parents who adopt cannot love the adopted children as much as they love their real children or would have loved their real children had they had them. But that's not true, of course. The bonding between adoptive parents and adoptees is often very strong and as strong as it is with real children. Actually, in such blended families, some children adopted, some children biological and real, there's often competition, triangulation and a lot of envy and jealousy. The real children complain that the adoptive children are consuming an unfair share of parental resources. It's usually the other way around, totally. But all these cultural and societal nonsense myths, they weigh heavily on the adopted child's mind.  I should be grateful, so why am I grieving? Something's wrong with me. I'm a bad person. I'm not grateful. Why am I mourning? What it is that I'm mourning? And this is what gave rise to the idea of an adopted child syndrome, which is very controversial and probably doesn't exist. But it's kind of an amalgamation of issues of bonding and issues of attachment coupled with problematic behaviors like the aforementioned defiance or violence and so on and so forth. Adoption is subject to stigma, subject to mythology, subject to misunderstandings, subject to a lot of hurt feelings on both sides, subject to an introduction to an environment that existed there before you, the adoptive family, and trying to fit in when by definition you can't fit in. So it's constant struggle, lifelong struggle, struggle to conform, to be accepted, to be loved unconditionally, not to be saved. And there is the kind of grief that is denied by society. Usually when someone is traumatized, there's a lot of sympathy, if not empathy. There's a lot of support and succor, at least from close family and friends. But when you're adopted, your grief is denied. Your mourning is criticized or ridiculed. You're not allowed to grieve and to mourn what could have been your original mother, your family, the abandonment, the dislocation. So many traumatic experiences. Adoptive families are real. And the vast majority of adoptive families love the adopted child, care for the adopted child, nurture the adopted child, embrace and raise the adopted child as best they can in total equality with the real children. Foster care is a different story because money is involved and the motivation is usually pecuniary or economic rather than emotional. So foster care is more like a hotel than a family. But adoptive families really want to adopt. Sometimes adoptive parents can't have children or don't have other children. Adopted children are chosen. They're usually selected even, like there are many options. The parents zoom in or hone in on to a specific child. And yet this is not how it's perceived. It's perceived as if the adopted child is a burden or not fully loved or requires an inordinate investment of effort on the part of the parents to be loved and accepted. Many adoptive parents are supportive and nurturing. There's a small minority who adopt children for narcissistic reasons, of course, but that applies to biological families as well. There are narcissistic parents everywhere, adoptive and non-adoptive. They bring children to the world or they adopt children because they use the children as sources of narcissistic supply as extensions of themselves. That's designed to do with adoption, has to do with psychopathology of specific individuals who unfortunately become parents because parenting is not licensed and is not supervised and anyone and everyone can become a parent. But still, adoptees always feel somehow misplaced, abandoned, sometimes guilty even.  Money is all good, you're all bad.  You must have done something wrong. You deserved it.  You're unworthy. And this is compounded and complicated with post-adoption trauma or trauma in foster care, which is much more common than post-adoption trauma. So how you react to adoption as an adopted child depends on numerous factors. The parents' behavior, their personality, the child's makeup, including genetic makeup, personal history, personality traits of both parties, the environment, culture, society, messages of mass media and social media, the reactions of peers. When the fact of adoption is discovered, contact with biological mother later, conflicts which may arise between the biological mother, the adopting parents. It's not two cases alike. Sometimes children are adopted out of foster care. They go through foster care and one of the foster care families falls for them, loves them and wants to adopt them. Others remain in foster care for years until they are of age and just leave the system. Theodora Blanchfield has written an article titled What are the mental health effects of being adopted? And while I disagree with quite a few things that she says, she makes a few very cogent points. Again, it's in the literature in the description. She says that adoption is often forgotten when speaking about trauma leading to a form of disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is not typically acknowledged or validated by society. Adoptes are statistically known to be more at risk for mental health problems, she says, both due to the initial trauma and genetics. A meta-analysis, a review of studies about adoptees' mental health found higher levels of depression and anxiety than in non-adoptees with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, the two disorders most associated with adoption. Additionally, adoptees are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide, which is very reminiscent of borderline personality disorder. Research shows that children who have been adopted face higher levels of attachment insecurity than non-adoptees, and adoptees who enter their parents' lives later than at one year old have deeper attachment issues than those adopted at birth or soon after. Additionally, she's quoting someone, Johnson says, that some of the issues come from the messaging that adoptees receive, both societally and at home.  So love is about abandonment, love is about loss. And Johnson says, it's not a great way for adoptive parents to explain it to kids. Literature shows that several mental health disorders are exponentially higher among adoptees than in the general population. They include depression, anxiety, bipolar, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD more precisely, and oppositional defined disorder. Now, this can be an accident because this characterizes even adopted children in happy families. It seems that the very act of adoption has a disruptive, destabilizing effect and genders dysfunction later in life. It is a recreation of the dead mother effect in the formation of narcissism.  Disenfranchised grief is very, very important. When adoptees are allowed to grieve, when they're mourning and sadness, their sadness, their dysphoria, their depression, when they're legitimized, when they're accepted, when they're encouraged to verbalize what they feel, when everyone around them is comfortable with their grieving, the outcomes are much better. Johnson says that, and I'm quoting, this type of grief is common among adoptees because of the societal messaging suggesting you should be grateful or you were adopted into a good family. Because of this, adoptees often will downplay their loss and the loss of the birth mother or a parent is a major loss, even if it is for a good reason. Another aspect of adoptees psychology and you're beginning to see the similarities with lots of cluster B features, yes, most notably antisocial and narcissistic and borderline. So another feature is hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is an outcome of CPTSD. It's a feeling of being constantly on guard, some undefined danger. It's a close kin of anxiety. It's a problem of trust. These kind of children would find it very difficult to trust people in relationships and love. It's their first experience of love was having been discarded by the mother who should have loved them. Johnson says they wonder, who can I trust? Their major experiences with love have included loss. So they wonder who is going to stick around and who is going to disappear. And all this makes it extremely difficult to form a core identity or a sense of self. We all figure out, we all figure out at some stage who we are, our place in the world. We develop a theory, a working model of the world, ourselves, others, theory of mind regarding others. So adoptees find this extremely difficult to do because they don't know who they are. They lack critical information and they don't know who they belong to. There's an issue of belonging, serial belonging. Serial belonging and an ex nihilo effect, like the adoptee just materialized out of nothing and nowhere. Untethered, floating, adrift, unconnected. There's no mother there. If you don't even know anything about the people responsible for your genetics, says Blanchard, it can be hard to know who you are. Adoptees, particularly in transracial adoptions, they feel stuck between two worlds. They feel like they don't quite belong in the family, raising them, nor do they belong in their family of origin. Johnson says that younger kids between ages three and five have a very literal understanding of adoption. They perceive adoption as someone gave me a way, someone gave me a way to this family. As these kids grow older, they're beginning to feel bad about this. They're beginning to question the narrative, they begin to associate or socialize with peers and they witness the families of these peers.  And so they begin to make comparisons and they want to revisit their past. They want to find this connectivity. They don't become tearful or sad. They're not adults. They act out. They misbehave. They become delinquent. It's their way of signaling distress and attracting attention and this escalates all the time.  As I said, at a rate that is four times higher than the general population and the figure is even higher among teens. So it's not only the early trauma, the attachment issues, the history of institutional care, such an orphanage or foster care, but it's also this ongoing quest, ongoing frustrated quest to find yourself, the inability to look back. And so they don't know anything about themselves. For example, do they come from a family with susceptibility to mental illness, cancer, substance abuse, suicide, they don't know anything. They can't answer these questions. Now, there's been a study by Fahy and Anthony and others titled Early Adversity predicts adoptees and during emotional and behavioural problems in childhood. It's published in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Journal. And again, you can find all the links to the literature in the description. And I would like to read to you extensive excerpts from this excellent study. They say, children adopted from the public care system are likely to experience a cluster of interrelated risk factors that may place them on a trajectory of mental health problems that persist across the life course. However, the specific effects of putative risk factors on children's mental health post-placement are not well understood. So they conducted this study, they correlated it with what we call adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, and they say, contrary to expectations, more pre-placement moves in time in care predicted fewer problems over time. Because probably there's habituation. That's my interpretation. The children get used to being handed over from one institution to another from one foster care family to another, from one adoptive family to another. Habituation numbs the emotional reaction, takes the edge of the feelings of dislocation and disorientation and identity problems and so on. That's my interpretation, but that's a fact. The more pre-placement moves in time in care, predicted fewer problems over time. But exploratory analysis continued the authors. Exploratory analysis of interactive effects revealed this was only the case in rare circumstances. We identify pre- and post-removal factors that may incur benefits or have a deleterious impact on adoptee's outcomes in post-adoptive family life. Our findings provide knowledge, etc. I would like to continue to read to you from this again excellent study. An accumulation of early risk factors heralds numerous negative developmental outcomes including emotional, internalizing, anxious, withdrawn, depressed and behavioral, externalizing, disinhibition and aggression problems. For adopted children, early risk factors may include birth family history, birth mother, birth father, medical, psychological problems, parental risk factors, for example maternal drug and alcohol misuse, stress, poor parental prenatal care and birth complications, postnatal adversity, abuse, neglect and instability which may occur at crucial stages in development and place the adoptee's at higher risk for enduring developmental problems we don't know in the majority of cases. That's the black hole of information that makes it extremely difficult to even treat, to even provide therapy for adoptees. There's a lot of critical information is missing. Studies investigating the mental health of primarily US adoptees demonstrate that adopted children are at a greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems than non-adopted children and that there is an overrepresentation of adoptees in mental health settings. Most adopted children in the UK are taken into care due to maltreatment within the birth family and they are likely to have experienced adverse childhood experiences, ACEs such as abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. They are more likely to experience this than the general population. Recent work continued the authors of this study. Recent work revealed that over two-fifth, 40% of children adopted in a one-year period experienced four or more ACEs with such exposure linked to an increase in vulnerability for health risks across the life course such as delinquency in adolescents and poor psychological health, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide attempts in adulthood. In the UK, most children spend time in temporary kinship care or with foster carriers prior to adoption. Although this arrangement seizes the immediate risk of harm to the child during this transition all adopted children experienced a loss of their birth parents and potentially extended family, friends, possessions owned in community. Early adversity and loss may be also compounded by placement instability following the child's removal. Repeated separations at unstable and unpredictable living arrangements also impact a child's well-being. Evidence suggests placement instability influences a child's behavioral problems irrespective of their pre-existing attributes or problems following their removal. Adopted children's pre-placement adversity is often estimated using age at adoption as a proxy for pre-placement risk. Children who are older at the time of adoption are more likely to experience psychological and behavioral problems with children placed in their adoptive homes over the age of four being the most trouble. Older children placed for adoption are likely to have entered care at an older age to have accumulated more pre-placement risk factors including ACEs and are at greater risk for their adoptive placement breaking down termed a disruption. Although aged placement has been used to predict children's outcomes in recent work age at adoption is a sole indicator of pre-adoptive adversity is more problematic. Not only are associations with children's outcomes inconsistent but implicit in the use of age at adoption is the assumption of a linear relationship between time before placement and the magnitude of pre-placement adversity. As such, the influence of age at adoptive placement on children's psychological and behavioral outcomes must be examined in combination with other pre-placement risk factors. Children adopted from care are more likely to experience enduring mental health problems that persist in the years following their adoptive placement. Determining the risk factors for adoptees enduring mental health problems is vital to inform early interventionists to improve children's outcomes and for the prevention of adoptive family crisis and breakdown. Let me translate all this to spoken English. In the UK, because the study focuses on the UK although it does include an overview of studies in the United States I'm not quite sure there should be major differences. I'm not quite sure. Although the care system in the UK is different to the Child Protection Services in the US are very different and the procedures and methodologies are very different still I think the psychology should be the same but that is speculation. There's no data on this. Now, the study says that adopted children in the UK do experience enduring life-long mental health and behavioral problems and there is no improvement in mental health four years after they've been adopted. The adoptive parents' love and care and nurturance and holding doesn't help. It's insufficient. The mental health problems persist and actually get aggravated regardless of how good and wonderful and amazing the adoptive parents are. This is the impact of the family of origin and at an early age, prior to age 4 it's the mother. It's the mother. It's the mother, period. That's not only me. The greatest names in psychology keep insisting on this. Kept insisting on this. Now, the children's emotional and behavioral problems did increase. These problems have been correlated with a number of adverse childhood experiences they've had. Abuse, neglect, unstable living arrangements and so on. There's about 10, a list of 10 and if you have four or more you're prone to develop mental illness or some kind of mental health problem. So, the researchers in the study looked at the children's experiences before they were adopted. They wanted to find out if the children were maltreated. The numbers of number of times the children were moved from one home to another. How long they spent in each home, in care. And then they looked at the data on the children's psychological health after the adoption. And what they found is that adoption itself was not linked to an improvement in mental health. Was not. Adoptive parents and social workers must obtain biographical information about the child's life before the adoption. This is the critical phase. After age 4 or 6, it's too late. No amount of love can compensate. The destruction is there for life. That's what I keep saying when I describe the formation of Nazis.  Not the father. U.S. studies found that adopted children are at a greater risk of experiencing emotional and behavioural problems than non-adopted children. Started there. This realization, this insight.  Maltreated children. Traumatized children. Of course, these kind of children are more likely to have experienced adversity at an early stage of life. So what I'm trying to say is that the UK care system is a kind of filter. The children who end up in care in the United Kingdom are to start with children who have been exposed to abuse and trauma and therefore much more likely to develop mental health issues. So maybe the mental health issues have nothing to do with the adoption. They have to do with everything that has happened up to the adoption and prior to the adoption. But we don't know. There's a black hole, a lacuna. There's no information. The adoptee itself doesn't know.  Children over 4 are more troubled than children under 4. Under age 4. So the first few years are critical. There are multiple risk factors involved in the first few years that they all converge in the mother figure. She is in charge of traumatising the child or raising a healthy happy child in a way what she does determines her children's lives later. And so the only mitigating factor in all this was actually constant change when children were handed from one home to another. Children who had more home moves and time in care before adoption had fewer behavioural problems and I suggested that it has to do with habituation getting used to this, but this is not mental health it's a numbing response it's reduced effect display these children simply don't externalise what's happening inside them they act in not out that's all internally they're in tumult, they're in chaos they're falling apart they develop anxiety and depression and worse so you could compare it to the distinction between shy or quiet borderline and classical borderline where the shy and quiet borderline, she's not a diagnosis it's just a pattern of behaviour, but the shy and quiet borderline in most of the cases would not act out she would act in, she would have internal disruptive processes same with adoptees we need to know more if we are to help adopted children with troubles and problems in adulthood we need to find out the history of these children and so this should inform public policy every adoptee should have full access to all the information that preceded the adoption it's crucial to the mental health of the adoptee and to any therapist's ability to help the adoptee and all the systems the legal system, the care system they should realign they should transform themselves and put emphasis on full disclosure even I would say full disclosure at an early age earlier than age of majority this is the picture with adopted children it's not a nice one adoptionist is the list of two wrongs it's a bad solution but it's not as bad as remaining in foster care for the rest of your life or for the rest of your childhood or adolescence it's not as bad as being abandoned on the streets and engaging in prostitution drug abuse children whose family of origin is disruptive, dysfunctional broken apart whose mothers are absent or dead in the metaphorical sense or really dead these kind of children their options are limited they have a menu of traumas they can choose one trauma another but it's going to be traumatic it's going to be painful it's going to destroy the ability to attach and to love to function later in adulthood not for everyone there are always exceptions and with a lot of love and care and investment even in some cases adoptive parents can somehow maintain the mental health of the adoptee but unfortunately that's not the average case we need to reform and to revolutionize the idea of adoption to render it an alliance between the adoptive parents and the original parents an alliance a collaboration for the child's own sake today when a child is adopted he or she is cut off from the past from biological parents from his own personal history this is wrong this is what caused the trauma in adoptees throughout history we need to stop this we need to engage in open adoption with parents biological parents of origin hand over the child to another couple with that couple for the benefit and well-being of the child