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The Jailhouse Job (S03E01) LEVERAGE (2008—2012)

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Leverage textposts part 24/?

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i think maggie would be the only person in the leverage universe who DOES notice the leverage team members occasionally becoming famous. like she’d tune into the world news and then have to call the team to check if sophie really died in a small european country during a turbulent election. "no but wasn’t my funeral so poignant? they put my face on the $20 note!" okay great glad to know you’re not dead. she watches a game of baseball on TV and just sighs deeply when the camera pans to eliot. next time she sees the team, she compliments his baseball skills. for some reason he mutters something about a sandwich while looking wistfully into the distance.

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one of the most fun things about leverage is how many of the episodes read like fanfiction AUs of the show itself, particularly when the team get way too into their grift personas lol. like okay this week we’re doing a College AU. now we’re gonna have a "The Office" AU. theres fake dating galore. there’s multiple eliot-as-a-sports-star episodes. we get famous violinist!hardison, we get country music star!eliot, we get to see them be everything from Men In Black to fashion designers to school teachers. and there’s even a couple episodes where the main cast play completely different characters in a historical setting, simply because it’s fun and you get beautiful stories out of it. honestly even half of the series finale is essentially about nate making up an Everybody Dies/Nobody Lives AU (with a suspiscious amount of OT3 shipping in there) and telling it all to sterling. the writers just love to put these characters in every Situation™️ possible and it’s a 10/10 every single time!!

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The Coldplay thing really feels like something from a Leverage episode to me. Like that CEO and HR manager walked out of the concert at the end of the night stressed out about their futures and saw the team lined up outside.

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The Coldplay thing really feels like something from a Leverage episode to me. Like that CEO and HR manager walked out of the concert at the end of the night stressed out about their futures and saw the team lined up outside.

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“the storm,” katherine mansfield (poems, 1924)

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Ten year anniversary of And What Happened After!

Ten years ago I finished my first Tolkien fic, featuring hobbits in the Blessed Realm meeting figures from the First Age. And that precipitated me into reading as well as writing Tolkien fic, and opened up the kaleidoscopic world of fan creativity. What a joy that was, what a thing to be part of!

The number of things that have changed both internally and externally in those intervening ten years require, frankly, another novel to cope with, and maybe one day I will write it! But I am glad that After is still there, and every now and again receiving a comment from a reader or a re-reader, still a thread in the tapestry.

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“God poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese” sounds like a post you’d find on tumblr dot com, but it is in fact Job 10:10

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First Chapters That Don’t Suck...

✧ You do not have to start with action. You have to start with interest. I will read two whole pages about someone making soup if they’re muttering about killing a god while doing it.

✧Your first sentence doesn’t have to be deep, mysterious, or poetic. It can just be “The corpse wouldn't shut up,” or “The milk was cursed again.” Get (PLEASE) weird.

✧ Starting with a dream sequence is legal only if someone wakes up and says, “That’s the third time I’ve died in my sleep this week.”

✧ The point of Chapter One is not to explain the entire world. It’s to hook the reader and emotionally blackmail them into turning the page.

✧ Introduce ONE conflict. Not five. One delicious little problem to gnaw on. “Oh no, they’re late for their job at the magical DMV.” I’m in.

✧ You don’t have to name every person your character walks past. Save the lore dump for later. If you give me eight capitalized names and two empires in the first paragraph, I will cry.

✧ Dialogue is a great opener if it makes me ask a question. If someone says “Did you hide the body?” in the first line, I’m staying.

✧ First impressions matter. So if your MC’s first action is whining about something boring, I will throw them. Gently. Out a window.

✧ It’s okay to rewrite your first chapter after you finish the book. In fact, please do. Future-you will understand what the story actually needed.

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Ahh this is so truee

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your post made me think. the thing that always got to me about vader's "redemption arc" (especially when the sequels were still new and Kylo Redemption Discourse was still a big thing) is that vader's arc in those movies is really just About his relationship with his son, and luke's arc is About his relationship with his father. so when people talk about whether vader 's "redemption arc" "worked" and whether it "worked" better or worse than kylo's "redemption arc" to me it's kinda like. those movies aren't about trying to get vader to atone for anything or mitigate the harm he's done to the galaxy at large, or really "redeem" him to anyone other than...himself and luke. those movies are about how luke can't bring himself to kill his own father and risks everything to try and save him instead. when luke takes off vader's helmet at the end, i don't think it's to tell the audience "see, he's Good now 😃👍" so much as it's to say that in the end, in spite of everything, luke managed to save his father just long enough to really meet him before he died. those two have this specific relationship and that "redemption arc" really is just about the closure on that relationship, between Just These Two People. at least to me.

so to me trying to say his redemption works or doesn't work versus, say, kylo's (which is an argument that seemed like it got rehashed over and over) is like. well what do you actually MEAN by "redeemed" here. i think the reasons why kylo's arc fell flat for many people were kinda broadly misidentified (namely that so much of the "redemptive" effort is being done by rey, a woman who has no substantial relationship with kylo and no real reason to be invested in his choices on a personal level).

and i guess what im frantically stabbing at is that i don't even find the construct of a "redemption arc" very helpful because it's so caught up in people's preoccupations with ascribing ontological goodness or badness (or states of badness that can be cleansed through selfless suffering and thereby become goodness) and a lot of the stories that get stuck with that label aren't actually About ontological goodness or badness. none of this is the question you asked it just got me thinking.

yes!!!!!! i agree with this. i always think about that ms marvel quote, "good isn't a thing you are. it's a thing you do." i don't want to see someone becoming good, i want to see them doing good. and thinking about the bad things they've done in the past and figuring out how to Not Do That anymore.

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You know I’ve written quite a few Ekkreth stories at this point but despite several attempts I still have never reached the incredible smoothness of the blended dialogue between the POV events and Ekkreth story which @fialleril did in Ekkreth Steals the Moon. Like truly that fic is just so beautifully tightly crafted it’s amazing. No matter how much imitation I get up to or how Star Wars changes in my eyes, I will never ever not be in awe of Double Agent Vader

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vergil(and by extension V and urizen)’s decision-making skills in dmc5 track with someone who has had zero opportunities for internal growth since they were 19 tbh

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Sherlock Holmes is the funniest case of “doomed by the narrative” ever. Doomed by the narrative and destined to die young bc the creator hated him, and then the fans literally bullied him into un-dooming the narrative, writing about him for another thirty years, and giving the character a canonical happy ending where he retires to the countryside and keeps bees. Funniest shit ever.

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