#(because for some reason Sue looks the BEST in white??)

[liroyalty]

Just randomly thinking about my baby in white again.

[deadbeat-motel]

ᐯᗩGGIE ᗩᑎᗪ ᑕᕼᗩᖇᒪIE ᖇEᗪEᔕIGᑎ

These two are simpler than the angel dust design I did since I didn't have a lot to go off of. Posted on Valentine's Day because yes I can.

I don't think Charlie is significantly different from her Pilot design because I genuinely think it was the best design from the cast (before the redesign).

Thoughts below, though TW for the creepy charlie image at the end:

My issues with their Original designs:

Vaggie:

The giant "X" over her eye is really distracting and even world-breaking because

1. Why had no one put 2 and 2 together that the only character in Hell who has a visible 'X' mark on her face might be related to the angels who also sport that X mark on their faces.

2. Why is it shaped like an X? Her eye was taken out via a single slash.

3. If the hair's purpose was to cover it, why would it show through it? What's the point of the hair then?

The hair that was supposed to cover that wounded eye looked so ugly and confused as to what it should be doing. I mean every shot that showed that thing in a sideview shot of Vaggie felt like the animators had to make their own guesses as to how that was supposed to look like. It was distracting for me personally and I hated it so much.

It's been said over and over again, but her clothes look like she works at McDonalds. I get needing to change her outfit so that she looks like she works at the hotel, but it's just been poorly designed.

Why change her clothes' colors from white to red? the white helped her stand out from Hell and the Hotel's majority red background. (In the finale, she at least has a non-red attire)

She's also one of the very few women in HH and she falls under the skinny stick side of it despite being an angel exterminator.

Her hair is kind of hard to visualize looking at in any way other than what it is when it's static. However, when it changed into a ponytail or a bob, it's actually really nice to look at.

Unsure of what that bow's purpose is for the design.

Charlie:

Charlie is a simple but very confused design. The pilot design was a lot more coherent than the current show design

It's disappointing to see the bouncy Pilot hair go and be replaced by that boring bubble braid of all things.

Her undershirt peaks out of her tuxedo.... why???? to separate the top jacket and the pants? You wouldn't need to do that if her pants were a different color like the pilot design.

Thought about it and was confused, as a demon with an angelic father, why didn't she have wings as well? She didn't need the 6 wings like Lucifer but maybe a pair of one would appear?

Out of all the characters for the show's redesign, Her's was by far the MOST infuriating to me. Her pilot design wasn't perfect but it was good, they had to downgrade her for some reason.

I didn't have much to say about Charlie. it basically sums up to "the Pilot design was better".

On to the thought process for these two:

Valerie the fallen:

Yes, she got a rename. Sue me.

I had to remove the moth aspect of her design because it doesn't seem like it makes sense for a heaven-born to follow the sinner's rule of "gaining features based on the life you lived" since she basically never lived right?

In this redesign (and eventual rewrite), Valerie is not ashamed of her exterminator background. In fact, she was known as the most recent "fallen" in hell. her short stature doesn't make her less of a threat to the demons.

She's also visually thick with muscle because why not let one of the show's women have a body type that isn't stick-thin?

She's using the wings that were torn off of her as both an interesting article of clothing and as a way to remind others and her that she is (or more accurately 'was') an angel who could kill them if she wanted to.

Her clothes are pure black underneath the pale feathers to show that while she is an "angel", deep down, she is far from a good person.

She's also getting an actual skin color because from what I gathered myself from the show's heaven. Most of the souls there still retain a human appearance (Adam, Lute, St. Peter, and the other random human angels up there still look human..... but just don't mind the fact that most of them are white.)

Her hair is that ponytail she had in the finale because as much as I didn't like that episode, some designs looked actually decent.

Also, her hair actually covers the eye scar properly.

I wanted to keep her ribbon as a splash of brightness on her design but the OG ribbon looks a little out of place on a warrior so It became that (Plus it pays homage to her OG moth influence with its shape looking like the fluffy antennas of the moth)

Gave the spearhead a little bit of detail on it plus a chipped side so that it has a bit of charm as an old weapon she still decides to keep around.

A note about Valerie's design is that I haven't tackled the armor of angels yet so I was unsure of what pieces of the undesigned armor to give Valerie as of now.

Charlie:

I honestly actually enjoyed her Pilot hair, so I tried to put it back and also simplify it a bit so there are not a lot of strands for me to keep track of. Plus it was a genuinely cute design for her. (There's a reason that version was used in the Verbalase video.) <- I'M JOKING

Replaced her button nose with a goat's because a friend has commented how it looked like the noses of the women in a Goofy Movie and I will never be able to unsee that.

Her hair is also a lot brighter compared to her washed-out blonde color.

She has the same design thought process as Valerie, Covering the darkness of her true nature with white fluffy fur which is stylized like feathers at its ends. She has pitch-black skin underneath and looks like a proper nightmarish demon like the image below.

I ditched the tuxedo look, since almost all the cast has a similar outfit already, and gave her a jumpersuit instead. (Idk what it's really called but that's what I think it is). It's a light grey because she's a mix of bad and good (though a bright grey because she prefers to be on the good side)

Her horns are there and visible because yeah it's cute but also helps her read as the half-angel/half-demon character she is.

Tiny goat tail because can you imagine every time Valerie holds the rare angel smile of approval, her tail is visibly wagging in glee and excitement???? My heart would die. I love these lesbians with my life.

Has wings from her father.

Anyways, those are my thoughts and redesigns... I wanted to add more details to them but I didn't really know what to add that didn't feel unnecessary.

Also bonus! Concept art of Charlie's true form:

[laundrybiscuits]

Eddie’s doing some dumb trick with a couple of wooden spoons, clever hands making them move through the air in improbable ways, and Steve’s about to bite his whisk in half. 

He’d thought for sure that Eddie would be going home the first week; Edward Munson, 29, bartender/musician from Brighton with mismatched tattoos and wild hair, seemed like exactly the kind of pretentious asshole who would flame out early with some ill-advised hipster experimentation. If Steve (28, social worker from Indiana, USA) had been a complete asshole, he’d have said that Eddie didn’t have the fundamentals. That he was all sizzle, no steak. 

It’s a good thing Steve’s not a complete asshole, because Eddie’s been blowing the technicals out of the water so consistently it’s actually pretty fucking embarrassing. His signatures and showstoppers are making a very respectable showing too, except for the time he tried to incorporate some fresh pandan extract and fucked up the liquid ratio, leaving him with a dripping mess that Mary’d declined to even try. 

Afterwards, Steve had seen him leaning against a tree and struggling to light a cigarette. Steve went over for no particular reason, flicking on his lighter and holding it out like a peace offering. Eddie looked at him warily, but bent over the offered flame. 

“Can’t believe I made it through this one,” Eddie said after a moment, white smoke curling out of his mouth.

“Yeah, I feel like that every week.” Steve leaned against the tree next to Eddie. It was a big tree, the kind that’s probably been growing in this field since before England was even England. 

“Nah, but—c’mon, you know what I mean.”

“You had some bad luck with your showstopper. Happens to the best of us, man. Your signature hand pies looked sick as hell.” Steve’s own hand pies had turned out pretty well, so he was feeling generous. It had only been the third week; plenty of time for Steve to snag Star Baker, though even by that point, Steve had been getting the creeping feeling that he was being a little too American about the whole thing. Everyone else seemed to think competitiveness was some kind of deadly sin. It was—actually kind of nice, to get the same kind of nerves he’d always gotten before high school basketball games, but know that he wasn’t really fighting against anyone except himself in the tent.

Anyway, the very next week, Eddie had done some kind of kickass gothic castle with a shiny chocolate dragon and gotten Star Baker for the second time. Steve had clapped him on the back, appropriately manly. Eddie had pulled Steve into a real hug, arms tight around Steve’s shoulders and his whole lean body pressed up close and warm. It had only lasted a moment, and then Eddie had bounded over to Mel and Sue, both of whom he’s been thoroughly charming since the get-go. 

Steve thinks that when this season—or, uh, series—airs, no matter where Eddie places, the entire country is going to be just as charmed. Eddie’s going to get whatever kind of cookbook deal or streaming show he wants. Sponsors will take one look at that handsome face and charismatic grin, and a whole world of possibilities is going to open up for Eddie. 

Steve’s not in it for any of that, of course. He’s here kind of by accident, because Robin pushed him to apply, and it’s a goddamn miracle he’s been holding his own. Hell, it’s a miracle he’s in this country at all. When Robin had started looking at the Cambridge MPhil program in linguistics, she’d said wouldn’t it be great if and he’d snorted, yeah right, like I could ever get whatever job I’d need to move to another freaking country, but then—well. Things had happened the way they’d happened, and now Robin’s almost finished with her degree and Steve is taking time off from the London charity he works at in order to be on Bake Off. 

He’s told all this to the cameras, plus the stuff about how baking started as a way for him to connect with the kids he used to babysit in Indiana, blah blah blah. He thinks it’s probably too boring for them to air, but he gets that they have to try to get a story anyway. 

Eddie Munson, on the other hand, is probably going to be featured in all the series promos. Steve is rabidly curious about what Eddie’s story is, but he hasn’t worked up the nerve to just ask. It should be the easiest thing in the world. They’ve got kind of a camaraderie going, the two of them; a bit of a bromance, as Mel’s put it more than once. 

It’s true they get along pretty well, and the cameras have been picking up on it: on the way Eddie’ll wander over to Steve’s bench like a stray cat whenever they get some downtime, how they wind up horsing around sometimes, working off leftover adrenaline from the frantic rush of caramelization or whatever. There’s the time Eddie had hopped up on a stool to deliver some kind of speech from Macbeth, of all things, and overbalanced right onto Steve, who had barely managed to keep them both from careening into a stand mixer. Sue had patted Eddie on the shoulder and said, “Well, boys, that’ll be going in the episode for sure.”

They both get along with the other contestants just fine, of course, but they’re two guys of about the same age with no wife and kids waiting at home. It’s only natural that they’re gravitating together, becoming something like friends, Steve figures. It’s pretty great that he’s getting at least one real friend out of this whole thing.

It would be even greater if Steve could stop thinking about Eddie’s hands in decidedly non-friendly ways. With all the paperwork he’s signed, he can’t even complain to Robin about how Eddie looks with his sleeves pushed up to show off the tattoos on his forearms, kneading dough and grunting a little under his breath with effort. Steve had almost forgotten to pre-heat his oven that day. 

Two benches away, Eddie fumbles the spoons he’s been juggling with a clatter, and he bursts out laughing, glancing over at Steve like Steve’s in on the joke. Steve grins back, heart twanging painfully in his chest, and thinks: well, fuck. Guess this is happening.

[gweninred]

cooking

melissa schemmenti

mention of sex

just a fic based on s2e4 where melissa invites janine in her house to learn cooking.

It came as a shock to you when Melissa invited Janine to your house after seeing her make pork rinds with peanut butter. You'd never thought your wife would invite one of her colleagues. "What time? I mean, can I come? I need you to help me with my wine pairings. Zach gets embarrassed when I ask the clerk for the second least expensive bottle." Jacob jumped up from his seat, Melissa was gathering her things to go back to class. "Well, I couldn't think of a reason why you can't quick enough, so yeah, I frickin' guess you can, buddy." The redhead slapped his shoulder, then turned around to pick up Janines peanut butter ramen to throw it away. "Get rid of that!" She walks out of the room. "Whoa!" Janine threw her hands in the air. "Here, have some of mine so you don't starve today." You offered her the other half of your grilled cheese.

Later that day, the doorbell rang at your shared house. "Will you get that, honey?" Melissa asked, grabbing a few wine glasses from the cabinet. You walked to the door, and there were standing Janine and Jacob. "Hey guys!" They stepped into the house. "Oh wow." They looked around the house. Janine went to look at the wall full of pictures. "This is, uhm... It's Melissa." Jacob chuckled. "Oh, it used to be worse. When I hadn't moved in yet, she had plastic over her couch." You told them. "But don't bring that up, though; it sits deep." Jacob held up a bottle of wine. "I brought this. I think it's called a 'blend' because they just mix all the best wines together." You led your colleagues to the kitchen, where Melissa was. "Well, hello to you too." Janine went to give your wife a hug. "Hey. Did you bring the onion?" Melissa quickly turned away to avoid giving the other teacher a hug.

"Yeah!" Janine went to look in her bag. "That's a shallot?" Melissa held up the grocery. "A what now?" The brunette asked. "A shallot. I said, get an onion." You walked to the fridge to get a bottle of wine. "Oh, Janine thought it was an onion that was adorable and small like her, and who am I to shatter that illusion?" Jacob cut in. "Wine?" You asked. "It seems more like I need vodka right now." Melissa was annoyed. "Ooh! Now I get to patronize a local vendor. Brb!" Jacob pulled on his coat to get an onion. "I swear to god, if you get a white onion!" Melissa yelled at him before he shut the door behind him.

"So, what are we making?" Janine asked, you handed her a glass of red wine. "Pesto pasta." You told her. "And I only like it when Melissa makes it." You walked up to her, placing the glass of wine on the kitchen counter in front of her. "She's my cooking princess." You smiled up at her, placing a kiss on her temple. "Yeah, Y/n isn't normally allowed in the kitchen when I'm cooking." Melissa wrapped her arm around your waist, pulling you close to her. "So, Janine, you can start by peeling this garlic." She handed her a cutting board and knife. "Just cut into very small pieces." Janine hummed. "So, what's my job tonight, babe?" You asked, squeezing Melissa's waist. "Just make sure the pasta doesn't overcook." She slipped away from your grip to continue her cooking. "Okay, boss." You hopped onto the counter next to the stove, sipping on your glass of wine.

Around 45 minutes later, the table was set. Some scented candles were burning around the house (Melissa's favorites, white musk and warm vanilla). and the onion Jacob went to get successfully made into the pesto sauce. Another bottle of wine had opened after dinner, with Melissa telling Janine she did well for her first cooked dinner.

"If you spill wine on the couch, I'll sue you." Melissa tells her coworkers, as they take a seat in the living room, you are sitting next to your wife. "So I also brought these cards to get to know each other more." Janine is excited. A sigh escaped the redhead's mouth, and you poked your elbow in her side. "Okay, Jacob!" Janine grabbed one of the cards. "If you could invent anything, what would it be?" Jacob crossed his legs, thinking. "A time machine. You know I love history, so I'd love to travel back in time." He explained. "Crab the next card, Jacob." Janine told him. "Y/n, what is your favorite thing about home?" He asked you. "Oh! Easy, Melissa, of course." You smiled at her, her hand creeped up your back, rubbing soothingly. "You're sweet." She placed a kiss on top of your head. "Ahw." You heard from Janine. "When Terique and I were together, he always told me I-" Melissa cut her off. "No one is making you tell these stories, you know?" You grabbed a card. "Right..." The other teacher sat back, sipping her wine. "Melis, what is a secret you never told anyone?" You asked. Melissa placed her wine on the coffee table, thinking. "A secret I haven't told anybody." She thought out loud. 

Melissa turned to you. "You know my boyfriend before you?" She rubbed your arm. "Gary, the vending machine guy?" She nodded. "We were in a relationship, and we never had sex." She giggled. "Ever?" Jacob asked, his mouth agape. "Never," she confirmed. You lauguhed, feeling tipsy. "How did you keep that up for so long?" You asked. "And why didn't he, you know, how could he resit you?" You were confused as to how he could ever resist Melissa, in your eyes the most beautiful woman. "Well, maybe it was kind of me. Now I know I'm more into  women."She wrapped her arms around you to keep you close.

A few hours had passed, and you were now sitting on Melissa's lap sideways, your arm wrapped around her neck as she held you around your waist. Janine and Jacob had left around 11. Melissa gave the leftover to Janine so she could eat it tomorrow at lunch. You had been making out but felt quite tired. You kissed down Melissa's neck, but your kisses were getting sloppier by the second. "Let's go to bed." You mumbled against her neck. You were now a little more than tipsy. "Alright, hon." Melissa pulled you up, holding hands as you made it up to your shared bedroom.

"I couldn't imagine never having sex with you." You slurred as you two lay in bed. Your head is lying on the redhead's chest. "I would have sex with you right now if I wasn't this tired." Melissa giggled at your words, slightly massaging your scalp. "Goodnight, honey."

[mariacallous]

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

[poppetsisters]

So, what/how do you think and feel about the FF suit that Joseph was wearing in that video message for D23?

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED BECAUSE I WAS GONNA MAKE A POST ABOUT IT!

My gut reaction was that I got a little scared. The combination of white AND black with the base colour reminded me a lot of Professor Impossible from Venture Bros, especially when leaked set pictures of Vanessa Kirby seemingly show her in a black skirt/shorts/it's hard to tell

But let me start from the top. I'm gonna recount a few points in my Valentines Day video but time has given me more thoughts.

Let's start with the Logo on the suit, which is best rendered in the Title graphic. It's such a nice, elegant logo, smooth curves with subtle accent lines. the way the line crosses into itself on the 4 makes it look like a star. It's not sharp like the teaser logo we got (and was used on MoM Reed) but friendlier, bouncier, while still keeping a strong structure.

The colour scheme itself was a surprise to me when I first saw it back in February. Instead of any traditional colour combination, we're getting white on azure, this is a combination I've only ever seen on season 1 of the 90s cartoon.

Unlike my reaction to that show, the choice of colours looked way better than I expected. The blue really pops with the white, and (as I'm sure was intentional) gives them a fun astronaut aesthetic. Honestly, it's such a relief after so many dull grey militaristic MCU costumes that we're finally getting something based on 60s NASA instead.

These suits also look very comfy. I know the actors are for sure gonna have a different opinion on that, but they look snug on the actor's body, not needing any muscle suit underneath to portray strength. I don't know what material the suits made out of, but it gives off something that allows for stretch and warmth, like a sweater. Great choice.

Now let's look at the elements itself. The Logo is clear and readable, something I was nervous about with previous suits having their logo too small. It's centred on a good part of the suit, maybe I would've raised it higher but then it'd be intersecting with the brim, so I'm not gonna be fussy about it.

The brim itself is much wider than I was expecting, and the turtleneck isn't too large, which is nice since you don't want to make the actors have a double chin.

The biggest departure from traditional suits is the white from the collar extending Spider-Man like down the arms. It seems a little odd that a detail like that doesn't connect to the gloves, leaving a blue gap between that and the entrance to the glove. It reminds me of a symmetrical version of the Jim Lee suits from 1997. I'm trying to find a precedent for this design decision in 60s NASA era space suits, but I can't find any. Aesthetically, it feel unnecessary, but maybe they want to call attention to the arms in the design for some reason. Maybe it's something to do with his fire form.

The gloves however being starkly white on the outside and black on the inside do hold a precedent. Some space suits, indeed most practical gloves, use a different material for the inside of the hand to aid in grip. I believe that's what's happening here. The gloves appear to have that same strap that Carlos Pacheco introduced in 2001.

Since we don't get a good shot of the legs, my final notes are on the belt. A friend of mine commented that Johnny has a camera on his belt, but I think the reference is to the Belt-Buckle Solenoid, the micro-beam key that unlocks the elevator to the Fantastic Four's residence. This is a really cool detail to put into the belt, and it's silver colour blends nicely with the while so it doesn't interfere with the colour or shape language.

The last point I want to make, speaking of Sue, is that according to this suit reveal and the leaked Susan Storm pictures, it appears that every member of the team gets a distinct costume, and that's probably for the best. My only real desires is that they should all still look like they're on the same team with a unified colour scheme and logo, which is probably a given but I still wanted to point out anyway.

Overall, this costume is leagues better than the 2015 costumes and even the 2005 costumes. They're bold, colourful, proud of their 60s design heritage, and most important of all, fun!

[direwolfrules]

EAH Glee AU

I do not have time right now to work on my actual writing- midterms are done so now we're just jumping right into final papers- but have an AU outline post.

Professor Pied Piper, taking inspiration from some of his best high school memories, gets Headmaster Grimm to reinstate the school glee club.

Meanwhile, Madame Baba Yaga fears the new activity will steal away talent from her prize cheer-hexing team, the Ever After High Cheerios (I can’t think of a good fairytale-ification for this, I will accept suggestions). To rectify this situation, she sends in three of her girls undercover with the goal of sabotaging the glee club.

Basically, Pied Piper is Will Schuester, Baba Yaga is Sue Sylvester, and chaos ensues.

Glee Club Members:

Apple White: She joined because 1) she's good at singing 2) she genuinely enjoys singing 3) her mom was in the Glee Club and led them to winning Nationals. I'd say she's the Rachel Berry or the Quinn Fabray, but I'm not gonna do that thing where I entirely change a character's personality to make them fit into the role of another character...for the students anyway. Look, Apple's got enough drama in her life, she doesn't need me making her crazy enough to send someone to a crack house out of jealousy.

Raven: Uh, in the books Headmaster Grimm won't let her take Muse-ic because it's not an evil class. Luckily, because of a bizarre loophole in the school guidelines for competitive teams, Headmaster Grimm can't ban her from Glee Club. Everyone say thank you Giles.

Daring: He joined because he was told it would give him extra credit for the serenading skills portion of Advanced Wooing. Also, Apple asked him to join because they didn't have enough boys in the club and Daring's been trained to never ignore a request from a damsel.

Dexter: He’s there cause Raven’s there? And also cause he is a genuinely great singer and unlike Daring needs the Advanced Wooing extra credit? Also, I just kinda want him there.

Darling: Her mom made her join. Queen Charming really said “I’m gonna take a page from Snow White’s book and live vicariously through you, offspring of mine”.

Briar: She really likes the idea of a team competition where she won’t put her teammates in danger if she falls asleep. Also, she checked the competition rulebook, as long as they don’t all leave the stage when she has a narcoleptic episode they won’t be disqualified.

Humphrey: Every Glee AU needs a white-boy-who raps and Ever After High has one already built-in in the form of Humphrey Dumpty.

Maddie: She’s there cause Raven’s there. It’s utterly hattastic!

Kitty: She’s there because she remembered her mom talking about how some of her fondest memories of high school revolves around messing with the glee club, and Kitty wants dearly to be like her mother.

Lizzie: We’re completing the Wonderland ensemble. Lizzie joins because she needs an extra curricular and the Invisible Tree Situation has gotten so out of hand they had to disband the croquet team. Great voice, ngl.

Justine: Not the strongest singer in the room, but she’s capable of choreographing numbers like nobody’s business.

Meeshell: Listen, canon’s pretending her singing in that webisode was something amazing. So like, we’re pretending now too.

Duchess: I picture her as a Sugar Motta-type character. Cannot sing, massive diva, but they gotta put up with her cause her family’s donating to the club budget.

Melody: Listen, it’s her dad’s club. She can’t just not join. She’s banking those supportive daughter points for a rainy day.

Lawrence Bonecrusher III: Listen, I just it'd be funny if Professor Piper says the ever-insane "You're all minorities, you're in the glee club" line and there's the one orc student in the school just sitting there with his eyebrow raised. He's also the Matt of this AU. For some reason never speaks when in a scene.

Faybelle: Captain of the Cheerios, totally not here as part of a scheme by Madame Yaga to DESTROY THE GLEE CLUB!!!!

Nah, but seriously, this whole AU was born of me going "What EAH character would say the iconic 'I'm a closeted lesbian and a judgemental bitch' line?" and her face popped into my mind.

[ereardon]

Golden Hour || Ch. 3 [Bob Floyd x Bradley Bradshaw x OC]

A Bob Floyd & Bradley Bradshaw AU [Hart of Dixie inspired]

Synopsis: Willow, Georgia. Barely even a town, just a speck on a map that you tried to wipe off, mistaking it for a crumb. You’re the outsider: a fancy New York doctor, fresh out of a failed engagement, with zero primary care experience. You’re also the new town doctor, taking over for a recent retiree who was beloved. His son, Bob Floyd, is the other physician at the practice, and takes an immediate dislike to you. But you were looking for a fresh start, and Willow doesn’t seem all that bad if you can get past the fact that there's only one restaurant in town. It helps that you've caught the eye of Bradley Bradshaw, the town attorney, despite the fact that you vowed to take a break from dating. How long until you start to make friends in a town where social circles have been set in stone since elementary school? And what will it take to make Bob Floyd see you’re not as bad as he wants to believe you are?

Pairing: Bob Floyd x OC; Bradley Bradshaw x OC

Tropes: Love triangle, enemies to lovers

Warnings: Cursing, alcohol

Chapter summary: Olive and Bradley flirt; Bob leaves the bar with a local, sparking an interesting conversation about his love life; Olive goes to meet Dr. Floyd Sr

WC: 3K

Masterlist here; previous chapter here; next chapter here

In New York, you had been somebody. A flashy doctor at a world renowned hospital. 

Perhaps more impressively: you had been Peter’s fiancé. That was the golden ticket to popularity in the hospital. And the hospital was your world. There wasn’t time for anything else. 

Willow was more of a shock than you had expected. In every way. 

It wasn’t just that there was only one restaurant and one supermarket that also doubled as the tailor. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk everywhere easily the way you had in the city, or that DoorDash was an unheard of phenomenon or that the closest thing you could get to Blue Bottle coffee was a canned tea at the Piggy Wiggly forty minutes away. 

It was the fact that people were friendly. Well, to each other. You were still the outsider that they were wary of. 

Everyone except Bradley Bradshaw. 

Ever since that night at the market, Bradley had been popping into the clinic, bringing a second iced tea with him or complaining of a headache. He had long been a patient of Bob’s, but he switched to you without a second thought. 

“I’m going to have to report you to the Georgia Board of Law Examiners,” you said as Bradley sat up, buttoning his shirt. You sat on a rolling stool at his feet wearing a pair of dauntingly tall heels, a black sheath dress and your white lab coat. 

“Oh yeah?” he said, smirking. “And why is that?”

“Because I’m pretty sure you’re lying about being sick to have an excuse to see me,” you countered. “And I thought that would be against your oath as an attorney.” 

“Joke is on you because we don’t take an oath.” Bradley finished buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his gray slacks. You didn’t allow yourself to look too long. He looked too good in his outfit and you had a reason for turning him down. You had to get over Peter, and despite what some of your college roommates used to say, the best way to get over someone was in fact not to get under someone else. 

You shook your head, trying to toss the image of being under Bradley out of your mind. “Well, counselor, you are, unfortunately, perfectly healthy. No risk of alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. By the way, how did you self diagnose that?” 

“The internet is more than just good porn now,” he replied. 

You looked up with amusement. “Don’t you have clients to tend to?” 

Bradley shifted forward, long legs brushing the ground. You could practically feel the heat from his leg and he was only a few inches away from where you sat on your stool. “What are they gonna do?” he asked. “Sue me? I’m the only lawyer in town.” 

You laughed, standing up and shaking your head. “Come on, Bradshaw. I have other patients to see. Should I have Molly book you for an appointment tomorrow, say three pm? Something about the bubonic plague?” 

You opened the door, sliding one hand over it, standing halfway through the doorway. Bradley grinned, stepping forward until the two of you were chest to chest in the doorway. His brown eyes locked on yours and you couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at you so intensely it felt like your skin was going to melt off. 

And then there was a cough. You both looked up. Bob stood holding a paper chart in his hand, a look of disappointment across his slender face. Bradley took another step out into the hall, running his hand over his hair. 

“Floyd,” he said. “How’s it going?” 

“Bradley,” Bob replied coldly. “Are you ill? I didn’t see you on my schedule.” 

“No, I, uh—”

“He has the plague,” you chipped in. 

Bob frowned. “He what?” 

Bradley hid a laugh and you couldn’t help but crack a grin. The crabby look on Bob’s face made it all worth it. “Ice it for ten minutes and then one pint of ice cream before bed, not a third like the package instructs.” 

Bradley raised an eyebrow in confusion. 

“For your broken heart,” you added and his eyes widened with realization and mirth. “Since, you know, you’re in love with me and all.” 

“See you later, doc.” He ambled down the hallway and out the front door. You watched him appreciatively, the way he moved was like a slow dance to no music. 

When the door shut, you turned around, Bob’s eyes hot on you. He scowled and ducked into his office. You caught Molly’s eye from the desk. She shook her head, lips pressed into a tight frown, and sat down. You sighed. “Mrs. Meyer,” you called out, looking at the name from the next chart in the hanging cabinet next to your door. “Please come on back.” 

***

At night, Breakers Cafe turned into a bar. It made sense, it was the only place in the entire town, although unlike everything else that was so central to town, including the office, Breakers was out in the woods down a dirt road. 

You sat at the bar, sipping a glass of really terrible Chardonnay. 

“Bad?” Phoenix leaned one tanned elbow on the counter. 

“Awful,” you replied. 

“You’ll drink it and you’ll like it,” she said with a smirk and you shook your head, grinning, taking another sip. It had been two weeks in Willow, and Phoenix was growing on you. You ate breakfast at the main house with her every day before she left for Breakers and you made your way to the office. 

You were even falling into place with the practice. Molly’s chill had worn off a little and you had helped a few patients in a pinch. Some trusted you from the flu epidemic where Bob had been absent. 

Bob was the only person still giving you the big freeze. 

“Vodka soda!” 

You turned automatically toward the drunk, shrill voice. Macy, the girl from your first morning in Willow. Then, you had felt on edge. An outsider with no understanding of what you were doing. Now, you had the upper hand. Macy’s blonde bangs were sticking to her forehead with sweat and her dress clung to her body tightly but in a haphazard way that you knew she was drunk. 

After a moment, she realized you were sitting next to her at the bar. “Oh my Lord, Dr. James?” 

You smiled. “Olive, please.” 

Phoenix set a fresh vodka soda down in front of her. “Bless you, Natasha!” 

You looked over. “Natasha?” 

“Don’t get me started.” 

Macy took a sip, pivoting her body to face you. “Dr. James, the big New York doctor. I didn’t think you’d last a week let alone two.” 

“How kind of you.” 

She tipped her head back in a laugh. “I’m drunk.” 

“I noticed.” 

She squinted. “What is this I hear about you and Bradley Bradshaw?” 

You frowned. “What?” 

“Oh, honey, the whole town is talking up a storm that apparently Bradley comes to your office three times a week.” 

“Well he’s a hypochondriac,” you replied, taking another sip of wine and wincing. “Besides, why does the town care?” 

Macy tossed her head back in a laugh. A huge, rolling laugh that filled the space around both of your bodies. “This is a small town, Dr. James.” Her eyes were glassy from alcohol. “Everyone is watching you. Just you wait.” 

“For what?” you asked, just as the doors whipped open. To your shock, Bob Floyd entered the room, turning almost instinctively toward where you and Macy sat at the bar. He caught your eye immediately, holding it for a few seconds as he crossed the room. 

But then Macy trapped him. She had her ass and back pressed against the wooden bar, arms spread wide on either side of her, lips twisted up in a pout. They were far enough away that you couldn’t hear what Bob said to her as he looked down, whispering. Macy reached up one hand, gripping his tie, tugging him in closer, until they were boxed in on each other, one of Bob’s hands on the bar behind Macy, his eyes staring into hers deeply. 

“What are they saying?” you whispered to Phoenix who also had her eyes glued on Bob and Macy at the end of the bar. But the music was loud enough and there were a few bodies milling around the bar that you couldn’t make out a single word they said. 

She shrugged. “Who knows?” 

The two of you watched as Macy ran her hands up Bob’s tie, his grip on the bar tightening. He spoke to her quietly, her eyes never leaving his, until he straightened himself, pushing off of the bar. Macy dropped her hand and Bob placed one hand on her mid back, steering her toward the door. He opened the door and led her out, but not before turning around and catching your eye. There was something in the way he looked at you. 

Almost like regret. 

And then he was gone, the two of them swallowed by the darkness outside Breakers. 

You grabbed your glass and drained it. “What the fuck was that?” 

“Macy has had a thing for Bob since we were kids,” Phoenix explained.”Also she drinks.” 

You laughed. “That explains it then.” 

Phoenix studied you. After a moment she added, “He’ll warm up to you.” 

“Doubtful,” you replied, pushing the glass toward her. “He likes me as much as people from Queens like the Yankees.” 

“You’re losing me, babe.” 

“He hates me,” you clarified. 

Phoenix tipped more wine into your empty glass. “Bob doesn’t hate anyone,” she said. “Besides, you work together. He’ll have to get used to you, one day.” 

You lifted the glass to your lips. “Sooner rather than later,” you huffed. “I’m tired of him stabbing me with his eyes every time I go out into the waiting room.” 

Phoenix raised an eyebrow. “Wear longer skirts and maybe he won’t feel so self-conscious that you’re going to steal his patients.” 

You laughed and Phoenix sauntered away, headed down the bar toward another customer. You turned and gazed out the door where Bob and Macy had disappeared only minutes before. There was a sourness on your tongue that you couldn’t place. 

***

You knocked a second time, shifting from foot to foot, trying to balance in your tall heels with an arm full of flowers and a pastry bag. 

Finally, the door swung open. You were surprised to see Bob Floyd standing in the doorway, but he looked more than surprised. 

“Dr. James,” he said gruffly, eyebrows raised. “Can I help you?” 

“I’m here to see Dr. Floyd,” you replied. “Wanted to thank him for hiring me. And since I’ve been here for almost a month I thought it was time I stopped by.” 

“My father is quite sick,” Bob said quietly. “Not sure if he’s up for company.” 

“Oh,” you said awkwardly. “Can I at least drop these off for him?” you asked, looking down at the flowers in your hand, and a bag of black and white cookies you had ordered from New York. 

“Bobby, don’t be rude.” A voice emerged from the shadows and you laid your eyes on Dr. Robert Floyd Sr. for the first time. He was tall, but thin, white hair swept back and a smile on his face that dimpled his cheeks. “Dr. James, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. Please, come in. Ignore my son, he’s being a bit of a putz.” 

You laughed. 

“Bobby,” Dr. Floyd said, “help the girl out, will you?” 

Bob stepped forward, accepting the flowers into his hands. His fingertips brushed your bare arm and you looked up. His blue eyes were hard, but they were locked in on you. “Thanks,” you whispered as Bob scooped the flowers out of your arms. He held out his free hand for the cookie bag and you handed it over. 

“No problem,” Bob said, turning and disappearing down the hallway. 

You stood in the entryway with a cautious smile. 

Dr. Floyd waved one wrinkled hand. “Come on, sweetheart. Bobby will grab us some iced tea. Close the door, will you?” 

You shut the front door, following Dr. Floyd down the hallway and into the back sunroom. The house was beautiful, all dark wood and lined with pictures from national parks. You spotted at least five photos of a young Bob Floyd, including one of him in his medical school graduation robes next to what you could only assume were his parents. 

“My wife Celine,” Dr. Floyd Sr. said when he caught you staring at the photo. “She died a year after that. I never remarried.” 

“I’m so sorry,” you replied. 

“We had forty seven great years together,” he said with a smile. “It wasn’t enough, but it’ll do. Here, take a seat.” 

He pointed to a sofa against the far wall and you sat down as Dr. Floyd settled into a chair opposite you. 

“How is Willow treating you so far?” 

You sighed. How to answer that question? In the kitchen, Bob was fussing with the flowers and cookies. “It’s an adjustment,” you said finally. 

He laughed. It was deep and throaty and it made you smile. You liked him immediately. 

You leaned forward. “Dr. Floyd. Can I ask you a question?” 

“Please, call me Robert.” 

You smiled. “Robert. Why did you hire me?

He looked you up and down and then his gaze tipped over to the adjacent room where Bob was still puttering on the other side of the wall. “Because I knew you’d bring something we’ve been missing all this time. This town, our practice. And him.” He smiled. “I know my son. He has many strengths. But he has flaws, too.” 

“And what do I bring to this?” you asked, curious. “Besides a lot of opinions on the right way to make a bagel.” 

Robert leaned back. “Life, Dr. James,” he said softly. “For too long there’s been a shadow hanging above us. We needed someone fresh to breathe some life into things. To bring a new perspective.” He looked at the doorway where Bob was gathering a tray with iced tea. “He needs someone to push him.” 

You frowned. “Push him?” 

“He’s heartbroken,” Robert said quietly. “And it’s affecting his work. He has to figure out what brought him to medicine in the first place or else he’ll never truly love it again. He thinks life is only going to let him down.”

You opened your mouth to ask another question but Bob entered the room and you clammed up immediately. He put the tray down on the wooden coffee table. “What did I miss?” 

“Nothing, son,” Robert said, leaning forward and Bob pressed a sweating glass of iced tea into his wrinkled palm. “Just catching up with the new doctor. She’s quite a spitfire, might give you a run for your money.” 

“She is.” It came out so quiet and immediate that you couldn’t help but turn in shock. Bob took a sip of iced tea without looking at you. “Bradshaw already switched to her as his primary care physician.” 

Robert laughed. “Now that is no surprise.” 

You watched the easy interaction between father and son. It was clear how much Bob loved his father. He was always there, preempting Robert’s movements: putting a coaster down before his glass could hit the table, angling the fan so it perfectly drifted in his father’s direction, even spotting when Robert had yawned two times before making a polite suggestion that it was getting late. 

You held out a hand at the door. 

“It was lovely to meet you, Dr. Floyd,” you said and you meant it. 

“Robert,” he replied. 

“Olive.” 

Robert smiled. “Well, Olive, I look forward to seeing what you do with my office. No funny movie posters, I hope. That Woody Allen shit.” 

“No guarantees, sir.” 

He grinned, patting Bob on the back as he drifted back into the house. It was just you and Bob standing in the doorway. The sun had drifted beyond the tree line, leaving the sky tinted pink. 

“Thank you,” you said. “For letting me in, even when you didn’t want to.” 

“I didn’t not want to, Olive,” Bob said. It was perhaps the first time he said your name unprompted. Not Dr. James, but Olive. “I just worry about him.” 

“He’s stronger than you think.” 

“He’s stubborn is what he is.”

“Well don’t you wonder where you got it from?” That elicited the smallest upturn in Bob’s lips. You grinned. “Anyways, I should get going.” 

“Do you need me to walk you to your car?” 

You laughed. “Oh wait, were you serious?” You pointed to the BMW parked twenty feet away. “That’s me.” 

“It’s good manners, Olive.” 

You shook your head. “I’ve ridden a bike through Alphabet City in the middle of the night,” you said. “I’m not scared of fifteen feet of sidewalk in Willow.” 

“Well then.” Bob placed one hand against the doorframe. “Goodnight.” 

You nodded. “Goodnight, Bob.” 

He watched as you slid into the seat of your car, turning the ignition and backing down the driveway. 

Bob watched as you slipped down the road, toward the horizon. Even long after he was out of your rearview mirror, you couldn’t shake the feeling that his eyes were still on you, waiting until you were home safe to finally go inside, lock his door, turn off the porch lamp. 

The next morning, you woke up excited to go to work, for the first time since you moved to Willow. Maybe you were finally getting somewhere with Dr. Bob Floyd. 

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[luckybyler]

From an actually good question posted on Reddit, here’s how I think the Stranger Things grandparents are:

Joyce: I think she had low-ish-income parents who were good people with good values, loved her and fulfilled her basic needs (fed, roof over her head, clothes, school), but for some reason couldn’t take care of her or guide her much. Maybe they had problems with drugs or alcohol, or maybe they were old and frail (or her grandparents because her bio parents weren’t in the picture), or had some illness. That made her driven, self-reliant, but also drove her to make some bad decisions. However, because she remembered what actual love looked like, she was able to correct course and protect her kids. Probably dead by the time Jonathan was born.

Hopper: I’d say he grew up in a non-abusive, but strict, home, with a father who valued honor and war and stuff. I imagine his mom was a little homemaker lady who baked cookies and loved him a lot, but who also instilled the fear of God in him and in dad. Basically a “men rule the world and women rule the home” type of family (which is actually a super hyper traditional mindset).

Lonnie: Could have been literally any kind of parents, because his fucked-up-ness seems entirely like a Lonnie problem. He could’ve had the worst or the best parents in the world and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Maybe he killed them for the insurance and made it look like an accident.

Karen: She was super popular in school, so her parents must have been at least middle class, the picture of a perfect 50s marriage and active in the church. Not rich tho, so they encouraged her to latch on to her older boyfriend from a good family for dear life to remain financially stable.

Ted: Likewise, except I imagine his parents were slightly more affluent than Karen’s. I imagine they were the pronto-Ted and Karen and Ted was a proto-Mike as a kid, until life and depression beat every ounce of joy and personality out of him.

Sue Sinclair: She most likely had loving, strategic parents most likely went ABOVE AND BEYOND to give her EVERY. TOOL. at their disposal so she could have the middle class life she ended up enjoying, keeping in mind that she grew up as a black girl during Jim Crow. In Lucas on the Line Lucas says his dad met his mom when she was in typing school or working as a typist. Her parents probably made sacrifices so she (and her siblings, if any) could have a higher education. They couldn’t afford to make a single wrong choice or even to let her become a homemaker and depend on a man.

Charles Sinclair: We know what his white foster parents were like: assholes. He fled out of there the second he was allowed to (or had to) and probably went immediately to the military recruiter. That crucial decision made the difference between a life of poverty and the comfortable life he ended up having.

Claudia Henderson: Most likely loving, reasonably progressive parents who encouraged her to get some sort of higher education or to work. I think she has only known healthy relationships.

Mr. Henderson: no idea, but judging by Dustin and Claudia’s personalities, he was probably a loving, caring husband and father who died (and most likely left them a pension or life insurance). Maybe that means his own parents were ok people.

Susan Hargrove: Probably very traditional parents who taught her that women should be seen and not heard, or at least that being a housewife was her only alternative for a decent life. Maybe she rebelled against her parents by choosing “love” instead of convenience, and so ended up dating and/or marrying a long line of losers and abusers. Her parents gave her zero tools at all for her own life so she depended on whatever dude entered her and Max’s lives.

Mr. Mayfield: described in Runaway Max as a smart but unmotivated and undisciplined man who commits petty crime, he probably comes from a long line of petty criminals who don’t feel any drive to better themselves, not even for those they supposedly love.

Neil Hargrove: Most likely raised in an abusive home and grew up to perpetuate the cycle of abuse.

[hevanderson]

hi. take some glestern style descriptions. also i must preface by saying this is NOT historically accurate nor is it meant to be. this is based off of vibes alone. thumbs up

quinn: early on, she wears very modest outfits. high collars and skirts that go to the ankles. flat shoes. long sleeves and/or impractical lacy gloves. light colors, particularly blue and white. long hair, either all down or partially up and partially down. cross necklace is always on. classy, expensive looking jewelry, particularly bracelets. later, she wears pants that are clearly second-hand and in relatively poor condition, stolen. big, button up work shirts that are also not in the best shape. the buttons are never fully buttoned. her hair is now short, think her season 3 hair or s2 new york hair. no more cross necklace, and minimal jewelry, if any at all. more durable shoes meant for working. a belt with a holster to carry a gun. carries more practical gloves in the pocket of her pants. darker color schemes with a lot of neutrals. most of her clothes have some visible stress on them

santana: darker colors. a decent mix of tight and loose clothing– usually, her tops are tighter and her bottoms are looser. big fan of shorts and shorter skirts. moveability is a priority for her. likes necklaces, but doesnt own many. the ones she own are from her family and tend to somewhat clash with her outfits but she wears them anyway because she loves her family. ties her hair up when working, high ponytail, no bangs. when shes working with sue's gang, she layers up as best as she can and goes for all loose clothing so its easier to move and sneak around. her hair is tied into a low ponytail to keep it out of her face. at work and in everyday, she wears boots with a mild heel, but when shes on duty for sue she wears discreet flat shoes to avoid making sounds. for the same reason, she also doesnt wear jewelry while working with sue's gang

puck: dark colors. darker blue jeans that have been worn quite a bit. rips in the jeans. black cowboy boots are always on, and are rather simple with no designs in them. shaved head. off duty, he occasionally wears a cowboy hat. he wears button ups that are, of course, never fully (or at all) buttoned. the sleeves to these shirts are often rolled up to his forearms. tattoos on his arm, hand-done of course, random doodles he thinks make him look badass. always has a gun in his belt holster, conveniently placed right in front of his crotch. gross

tina: dark colors strike again, but her outfits have accents of blue. gloves, dyed black leather with the occasional lace. high collared shirts paired with intricate silver necklaces, usually adorned with blue gems. long, ruffled skirts. her outfits between working and day to day dont change much, although she sometimes will wear subtley striped black pants when working. always in heeled boots with looping stitched details in blue thread. her hair is plain back and usually down, but, occasionally when shes working at the saloon, she'll pull it into a low ponytail or braids. wears a black leather crossbody satchel. no guns on her but just in case she does carry around a small knife with a sheath

brittany: finally a break from dark colors. brittany primarily wears whites and lighter colors, particularly blues, pinks, and oranges. a wide collection of white shirts she's customized, either intentionally or unintentionally– grass stains, paint splatters, patterns stitched into her shirts. she keeps it loose. overalls enjoyer, usually wears a blue pair that have doodles and practice stitches all over them. she generally prefers pants and shorts, and usually wears light blue denim. if she does wear a skirt, it is flowy but not long, and must have some form of pattern on it (she likes florals the most). her hair is equally spent down as it is spent up; either, it is everywhere and flowing freely (usually when shes just out and about), but when working on her farm or performing she ties it up into a high ponytail, but leaves her bangs out (think her early s2 bangs). when shes working for sue, she borrows clothes from santana. she also ties her hair into a ponytail and pins it into a large, rather impractical, hat she wears. her gang clothes are dark, both to obscure her identity and to give her more security under darkness

mercedes: glamorous and colorful. the largest parts of her outfits are usually black or dark brown, but anything else is bursting with color. when performing, she wears darker high-low skirts with ruffles in purples, pinks, and reds depending on the costume. more corset-like tops that have ruffles lining the top and spilling over onto the off-the-shoulder sleeves. feathery headbands. gloves that stop at her wrists and are complimented by bejeweled bracelets. tights with some subtle patterns in them in a darker version of what her outfit's accent color is. tall boots that are just a little impractical to walk in. when shes off duty, she still wears skirts, and they range from stopping at her mid-thigh to coming down to her ankles. flat shoes that are comfortable to walk in. she wears the same bracelets, but loses her gloves and headband. her shirts have a similar construction to her performance ones, corest-y and off the shoulder, but when shes just lounging around or creating costumes she wears more relaxed tops– button ups and things like that. no matter what, though, she likes to have a lot of color. her hair, both on and off duty, is most similar to her s1 pilot hairstyle. no weapons, she tries to be a pacifist when she can

sam: light colors, but a bit less soft than brittany's color schemes. cool colors, blues and greens with some greys. his hair is similar to late s2. king of plaid button ups, and he wears them buttoned to the very top bc he takes his job as sheriff seriously. occasionally wears a grey cowboy hat that has his name stitched into the inside of it (courtesy of mercedes). his shirt is always tucked into his blue jeans, which have very faint grass stains and places that look like theyre on the verge of tearing. brown cowboy boots always. if he wants to class his outfit up, and he does abkut 50% of the time, he'll pair his shirt with a brown leather vest and, of course, a bolo tie. he also wears a belt with a medium sized round belt buckle. he has a holster on his belt but rarely has a gun in it because he honestly hates resorting to violence despite his job

[olderthannetfic]

Moment that made me tilt my head in confusion: OC is a mix of five species, gets all of the drawbacks of all of them, gets only one benefit (incredible ability to balance/not lose his balance), spent all his time as friends with the canon character he's now going to be shipped with back in the day encouraging her to give love a chance and setting her up with people, was genuinely happy for her at her wedding, and while he doesn't cause more problems for the cast, he also doesn't really resolve any beyond "give our main lady a love interest and, unlike canon, actually stick to it instead of chickening out". (I was going to note attractiveness but he's pretty solidly a 3 out of 5.)

He still got called a Mary Sue in the comments.

I genuinely don't even know what that term means anymore. I know it's shorthand now for "I'm a Redditchan debate bro who watches YouTubers that talk about how the M-SHE-U has gone woke and gone broke and didn't hate the Little Mermaid or Snow White remakes until instructed to by my parasocial icons". I know it used to be "overpowered, hypercompetent, impossibly good looking, incredibly smart, new powers as the plot demands, never makes mistakes, and people act OOC around them if it'll make them look cool". I know it gets thrown at women a lot because misogyny is a helleva drug.

But I look at this best friend guy who's kind of a mess genetically, trying his best emotionally, and is only gradually getting closer to the lady lead and I'm just lost on how this fits even the Redditchan definition of a Mary Sue. He's just some guy. And yes, obviously the Redditchan definition of Mary Sue extends to any non-male, and thus just some girl/just some woman would get this, but he's male (and cis, which is relevant given transphobia in fandom) and is thus way out of the range who I expect to get hit with the Mary Sue label.

Is it now just a thing people will throw at canon/OC romances regardless of if it fits and regardless of gender and sex? Because that last half of the sentence is very new and strange to me.

--

People do throw it at canon/OC romances.

They also throw it at self-indulgent character creation, like wacky-colored eyes or too many species, whether or not those things convey advantages in-world.

I assume that's why in this case.

That said, you're missing like 50% of Mary Sues that many people agree count: the Tragedy Sue. It's not just that Mary Sue warps everything with her coolness and badassery: she routinely warps everything by being the most tragic, most put upon, hated the most for no reason, etc.

She still won't have real flaws. People don't hate her for real reasons. They hate her because she's Too Pure For This World. These mega cheesefests usually give you the impression the author can't bear to give their fave any real depth and/or that someone offline just told them to clean their room or be less self-absorbed, and they're stewing about it. Big "You'll be sorry when I'm dead!" energy.

--

But yes, Mary Sue is mostly just an insult people slap onto any character they dislike these days. I wouldn't look too hard for the logic.

[wmuquinnfabray]

BRING IT ON! 🏆

CHEERIO MANDATORY TRY OUTS @wmu-hub LOCATION: WMU Auditorium TIME: 8:00am

"Good morning Coach Sue. It's good to be here. I'll get right into it so I don't waist your time, I know you need to get through the rest of the team. If you'd like my reasoning for wanting to be on the Cheerios that's pretty simple. Sure the attentions nice, and I'd be lying if I said the uniform didn't look amazing on me. But at the end of the day those are only bonuses, and I could easily give those up if necessary. The real reason I want on this team is because I want to win. And not just at some local level, no I want to take this team to the National Championships. I want to dominate, to crush anyone in our way and watch our team stand miles above the competition because we're just that good."

"I was raised to be a winner Coach Sue. The Fabray's don't just do things because we feel like it, or because we think it looks fun. An exemplary work ethic was pounded into me from a young age, and the idea of being lazy isn't something I'm capable of. We understand the need to win, we have an inner ferocity and drive that comes ingrained in our competitive nature. We've got it in spades Coach Sue. I've got it in spades."

"I've been a cheerleader since my Freshman year of High School. I lead my High School team to victory four years in a row, earning State and National Championships back to back. Just last year I was on your winning team. So hearing I was cut was quite the shock, but understanding you as a Coach I know that there's a reason. You only want the best, you want a team who is eager and willing to do whatever it takes to stay on the team. That meant there was no time to get caught up in feelings. 30 second cry session not included. No I needed to strap in and get ready to prove myself. So I'm here to show you that I have what it takes."

Without a moments hesitation Quinn turned towards the wide floor of cheer matts. What would normally be blue roll mats were the schools iconic red color. As her stark white cheer shoes stepped onto the floor the upbeat music began to fill the auditorium with a heavy beat and an enthusiastic tempo. In an instant her body was moving, the motions like second nature to her as she began to perform an amalgamation of the previous years routine combined with some of her own choreography. The motions were sharp and clean, each movement seamless as she transitioned over the floor to her starting place in the corner for her tumbling pass.

She was determined to show Coach Sue her versatility and strengths when it came to all aspects of cheer. Taking a deep breathe to calm her nerves before taking off, her feet driving off the ground as she began her tumbling pass. A front handspring, step out, round of backhand spring, step out, round off front punch, back handspring, step out, punch front, layout to double full. Her movements carried her from one corner of the large competition floor to the opposite and back again. Each new addition to the pass made it harder and harder, her moment never slowing though as she used each pass to fuel the proceeding one until with a finality she landed in her starting position.

Turning her head to the side Quinn nods towards her stunt group who had been waiting for her que like the good soldiers she'd trained them to be. They moved in a tight clean across the floor before getting into position. Another blur of tumbling as she did a back handspring landing in a hand stand within the confines of her bases. From there they did a pop through to the top where she pulled a heel stretch. Leg extended high along her body, toe pointed to the sky before she was quickly popped switching legs and immediately transitioning into a Scorpion. With an added flourish of pulling the position even higher to emphasize her flexibility she gave a wink before being tossed into the air for a double down. Her bases catching her cleanly before popping her out right as the music came to an end.

Holding stock still for a beat longer she breathes steadily through her nose. Not making any move to relax until it's clear that she has finished her routine. Another beat passed and soon her bases have exited to the hallway to await their own auditions, meanwhile Quinn moved forward to approach the front of the floor to stand at attention for the Coach. She was just about ready to ask if there was anything else Coach Sue might like to see before a thought came to her. Before she could think better of it, she spoke up. "Oh and as for the Co-Head position, I'm ready to fight for that spot. So put me in the ring Coach. I'll take on anyone for that right, even my own Sister."

[your-old-sins-tournament]

12 YEAR OLD OCS; SIDE B

Flamepaw [Silvia Flowers] (he/him)

Flamepaw is a warrior cats OC, a Thunderclan cat who got abused by his mentor and died to a badger. As a Starclan cat he was revived (by Starclan) to protect this new apprentice who was going to be abused by the same mentor, her name was Bramblepaw (who I actually made earlier, but she has an okay-ish story in another time its sorta mundane). They fell in love and after some moons when theyre made warriors, they have a kit named Faithkit, which, for some reason, Starclan didn't like, because Starclan *loves* making arbitrary rules about romance, and he's banished, but not before his (dead) mom gives him and his family these crystals that let them turn into my "original species" called Drattus (theyre just dragon cats. theyre cats with dragon wings.)

And that is the end of this goobers story, he goes on to leave the clans and find a Drattus colony somewhere idk, he was my sona for awhile! He's goofy but I love him, and I hold him very near and dear to my heart. I have faith he can murder all the mary/gary sues in his path with his dragon cat abilities >:)

Description

A picture of Flamepaw, an orange cat with a lighter muzzle and paws. He has a white tailtip, amber eyes, and dark gold ears. He has a string with a purple crystal around his neck.

Lasha Felomi [Luna Wolf] (she/her)

She was just a normal girl but then her parents got murdered. Shen then gets adopted by the god of darkness and got turned into an immortal demigod with dark powers. She has a sword made out of her own frozen blood (never drew that though). She was forced to kill her best friend to take out the villain, but years later she finds out the villain actually survived. She tries to finish the job but gets killed herself instead. That's how her story originally would have gone. Also, Kirby and Hulk and Bubbles were there.

Growing up unable to stop all the tragedy around her, she has developed a deep need to be in power at all times and insists on being capable to do anything on her own and refuses to receive help or cooperate with others. She needs to be the most powerful person in the room but she is maybe upper B tier in the grand scheme of things.

I'm using her original name here, I wonder if anyone can spot where I got it from. It's pretty stupid and has nothing to do with her character.

Description

Her first design was a rollercoaster tycoon guest looking girl with an emo haircut, wearing an ugly yellow sweater, a red scarf and blue jeans. Also a picture of her hugging Kirby and one where she beats up a bad guy cat (epic) [Mod Note; Couldn't fit in the one where she beats up a bad guy cat :(]

[alarrytale]

H & L have power in this. They can refuse to release music. They have enough money to get lawyers and slip out of that contract. They are as much responsible as anyone enforcing this. And don’t tell me I can’t speak if “I don’t fully know what’s going on” because larries have been pointing the blame at whoever the fuck they want for years, y’all just have an issue when it makes larries look bad.

Hi, anon!

I will never tell anybody that they can't speak on an issue even if they don't have all the information. People form opinions and beliefs and make decisions with little or no information all the time. We might have different information or different ways of interpreting the information, and that will lead to different opinions and beliefs. You can believe whatever you want and i'm free to disagree with you. You're also allowed to disagree with me.

If you feel like H and L got options they're not exploring to end this, or there are actions that H and L can take to help this situation, but they're not doing it for some reason or other, then you're free to believe that. From what i've seen or learned about them and their situation through the years i've come to learn that they are between a rock and a hard place and they're trying to not make things worse, while resisting when they can. It's that god damn evil contract and Sony's absolute hatred of their relationship that's gotten them in this situation. They refuse to break up though, they'd both be miserable and all they've fought for over these years would be for nothing.

I can only speak for myself. I try to place the blame where it's deserved. The issue is that nobody involved here is all good and blameless, or all bad and evil. It's not black and white, so don't try to make it so. I've explained why Louis ending his career won't make any difference in regards to bg. Harry can't end his career because he's under contract with Sony. They'd sue him for all he's worth and then some if he refused to release music and Sony would win and he'd have to release it anyway. Other artists have tried that before. Sony could also retaliate by making another bg or creating a engagement narrative. If you think bg is bad, it probably could be a lot worse. They own both H and L's asses.

Also, Sony/Syco was smart when drawing up H and L's initial contracts (i've talked about all this before). It states that they have to pick their lawyers out of a goup chosen by Sony/Syco. We know all this from the leaked txf contract. So it was not a free choice. L is still with the same lawyer to this day and that leads me to believe he can't seek outside council without being in breach of contract or something. Or maybe i'm wrong and they've tried but found no way out. Best case scenario is that they've been building a case for years and it's about to blow up. I very much doubt that.

[emilieautumnarchives]

RUSSIAN BRIDE

Posted: February 21, 2006 Archived from The Official Asylum Forums Archived from BonnyTymePyrate’s Journal Archives

I emerged victorious this morning from my laryngitis-induced house arrest. Muscles near atrophy after four feverish days of bed-rest and mind a little unsure of what the present year was, I ventured forth to test the weather with the usual feeling that I'd forgotten something. I soon found that I had - my other six coats, because apparently the two that I was wearing were not sufficient. I'd also forgotten to charge the iPod, which leads to a fate worse than death - riding the train to the sounds of a man on his cell phone debating loudly the merits of various brands of frozen pizza. So I fought back in my own small way by playing Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4 over and over in my head with full orchestration, but had to surrender at last when the small boy sitting behind me whipped out a harmonica. No fucking joke.

Now I'm settled into a corner of the Urban Tea Lounge, very urban, more tea, less lounge. I've ordered a pot of the White Chocolate Mousse tea and a cinnamon scone with strawberry preserves. I wasn't supposed to write anything new because that would invariably lead to my trying to sneak it onto the record before final pressing, but I couldn't help laying down some harpsichord for it anyway at 5am this morning. It's called "Russian Bride," not that it matters because you won't hear it for ages, that's how disciplined I'm endeavoring to be. And to prove it, my phone is turned off.

The cinnamon scone is a delightful 2 pounds lighter than your average scone, which is a good thing as it's the first solid thing I've digested since the most obscene birthday cake of four days ago (I'd show you pictures of what I look like right now, but I think the film "Powder" would sue me for copyright infringement), unless of course you count the dozen antibiotic pills I swallowed (not at once) which came from Italy and which were not prescribed to me (no need to tell me how stupid that is, I'm marvelously aware of it).

God, I've really been a lazy fucktart, haven't I. Gillions of pictures, videos, and tales from the show last month, and several more adventures in between, and I just haven't been able to sit still and focus on such tasks. Sorry.

Planning travel today, to Canada and then Texas of all places, both for music festivals, but neither for playing, just making appearances, and setting cities on fire with cohorts, so if you hear anything on the nightly news, you don't know a thing.

I've been toying with the idea of finally giving in and becoming a Suicide Girl lately, not for any particular reason other than, perhaps, revenge, which is either the best or the worst reason to do anything, I'm not sure which. Scones just have a way of disappearing, don't they.

I've also decided to reward myself for finishing the album by allowing myself to learn Japanese, so if anybody out there has a Mixi account, please do consider sending me an invite and I'll do my best to correspond with you in unintentionally borderline offensive wording. Which reminds me, why does it seem that so much of what we do in our lives revolves around (is "revolves around" redundant? no, no, I don't think so either) retracing our breadcrumbs to our past and making friends with it? I'll explain what I mean by this later. Maybe.

Tea is cold, time to move on. I've been writing this entry and a sheet of lyrics on the table side by side, and I just forgot which was which and started singing along to my diary entry, fuck ambidextrousnessosityidle..ess..ness...

Buy and sell me like a russian bride Follow me and see how well I hide Worship me thus from a distance Trust me you don't want to miss this First I'll take the bluest vein I own Then I'll make a tourniquet You've shown me this remember remember I don't even mind in fact No this is not a desperate act this Time makes no saints that history can't disgrace Shame or break and then erase

blibbledyblobbildyblook...

Bloody Crumpet Joo Hee and I went with Lord Leicester to high tea last week at the Peninsula Hotel. Not only is it THE place for high tea, it is apparently also THE place for vegan high tea, though you do have to call ahead to alert the chef, which I doubly did. It seems the kitchen staff needs a good bit of time to contemplate the soy pudding with plum wine and coconut before they can actually stomach the thought of actually preparing it. We made fun of the string quartet, had more champagne than tea, and didn't return home again until 4am the next morning, half of which I can't explain, the other half of which I can't remember. Suffice it to say that the three of us very narrowly escaped becoming the pampered pets/sex slaves of a bored Brazilian lass and her doting-yet-allegedly-platonic minder. After Leicester's ankle was violently molested before the fireplace in the hotel cocktail lounge, we ran for the clubs where my ankles could be violently molested.

There, Joo Hee and I were photographed for the third time by a gentleman who oddly seems to manifest himself wherever we happen to be. Finding the pictures online later, I share them with you now, for the specific reason that now you can NEVER say I only show you the good pictures:

If we ever again decide to go to Y-Bar on a Wednesday night, I hereby authorize any one of you to intervene, because the place was packed with frat boys and their sorority counterparts complete with frosted eyeshadow, and the inappropriately raucous office party, which wasn't funny until a promoter came up to us and gave us an invitation to "the after-party" at another establishment. "After-party"?? For what? The copy guy's promotion to assistant manager? Maybe another time, thanks.

In other news, I'll be recording death-metal violin this week on the new album from dear UK friends "AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT" because they were gracious enough to ask me and I was flattered to accept. I will sacrifice another crumpet to the good fortune of the mission ahead.

Love & Bloody Crumpets, EA

[http-soukiebb]

babel by r.f. kuang book review (for fun)

babel, or the necessity of violence by r.f. kuang book review 🪙

rating: 8.5/10

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this is the first time i’ve read one of kuang’s works and for some reason i feel like this is her best one (I AM BIASED). this book kind of has a reputation for unwarranted reviews criticizing implications of self inserted “tangents” that are against white people but if you’re not utterly DUMB and look beyond that, i believe this book was able to unfold the realization of what it means to have to go against something that has treated you well because of what it stands for, and when to apply violence to achieve what you want, to put it in short. i enjoyed the perspectives of minorities in higher education (also in a white dominated society), and robin’s relationships with his cohort were also very special and made me very happy whilst being the highlights of the story (robin and ramy’s relationship is untouchable and so special, inarguable). *also the chapter ramy’s interlude is a COMPLETE masterpiece and the best chapter in the whole book, sue me. overall, as a rather fantasy repelled reader, I’m glad I read this book, that was definitely supported by magic nonetheless, and would give this an 8.5 out of 10.

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points off because i personally don’t like footnotes when i read and there was a ton lol and kuang’s writing is very advanced and as a kind of rusty reader it was a little hard to digest some of the tangents robin’s inner monologue would go into, but overall a great book and a great ending i loved.