#AND it's one of those extremely For Me gifsets and would have made more sense as a fic maybe lol

[gothprentiss]

old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth (x)

[gen-is-gone]

Gah see the one thing I can't do with the EDAs, and it drives me up the wall nuts, no matter how much I do agree that they are meant to be books and that's the point of them, that they only metatextually and even thematically work as books, and obscure forgotten books at that - the one thing is, I can't make vids. Gifsets either. God, you have no idea how much I wish I could vid this series.

So many things, so many astonishing visuals and cinematic parallels, so much I want to string together in a coherent form and I can't, I just can't. Like, the actual factual thing that caused me to fucking Mandela-effect myself into misremembering the series as a 90s tv show in the first place was imagining a fanvid about Fitz's fashion sense set to Macklemore's Thriftshop, of all fucking things, BUT. While yes, obviously that would be a work of unrivaled genius, it's not just that. Over the years it's become this endless want, this constantly seeing gifsets and screencaps and vids, vids, above all else, vids, of all the different moments there are.

There is (of-fucking-course) a blog (at least one, but maybe many more) dedicated exclusively to making gifsets of every time destiel touch each other in all contexts. Of fucking course there is. I scream with envy over this because like. That could be us, if only the EDAs had any footage at all, but it's a goddamn (brilliant, daft, exceedingly stupid) BOOK SERIES instead. Every time Eight/Fitz touch? Fitz is in fifty books and they are both extremely touchy; you could absolutely dedicate an entire fucking tumblr blog to making a gifset of each of those moments; you'd be making gifs for fucking years.

I want to bestow upon them the highest honor I could give: a fanvid about their insane nutso relationship set to Vienna Teng's Never Look Away. I want a Sam vid set to Marina's Oh No! I want an Eight vid to the Indigo Girls' Galileo. I can see all these so so clearly and I want to share them with the world. I want a gifset of thematic uses of the color red in Sam's early books episodes books. I want to hear Sail on Sailor and know how the fuck the diagetically composed Dr Who theme would actually sound on violin or acoustic guitar, with its unspeakably tender lyrics. I want someone's painstakingly color-corrected, digitally restored, hi-res slo-mo shot of Fitz in his princess fairy tale wedding dress flying around on a jetpack.

Like they are books and they're supposed to be books and it's significant to what the silly things are trying to say, and also quite frankly there is no way in hell any doctor who ever, even now, could pull off even half the shit they got away with via the infinite budget of the page, and they certainly could not have made say, YIT in the 90s and have it look anything but silly and cheap when it needed to look real, BUT. I wish I could see it. I wish I could make the vids I see playing in my head when I reread these silly, edgy, annoyingly smug, painfully earnest, wildly creative and visually stunning FUCKING books.

[boysbeloving]

Happy 1st Anniversary of KinnPorsche the Series!! 🎉 🎊 🥳 🥂

allow me to be emotional a bit (i say this as if i'm not emotional over the series and the actors every other day lol)

kinn and porsche are SO precious to me...as individuals and as a couple...i relate to kinn a lot: his struggles with a parent, his crushing sense of duty, trying to fit into the world he's forced to be a part of, him not always knowing how to communicate feelings...i had talked about it a bit here about how soft he is despite everything around him and ya...kinn is extremely close to my heart because of these things...i see myself in him (barring the killings and sadly barring the butt sex too)

porsche is just....SO MUCH lol!!!! if i spend time with him i would need 3 to 5 business days to get my energy levels back! but i understand his love for his brother and relate to how he's fiercely protective of him (i'm the same with my sister...but she's older than me)

and ofc mile and apo

man i related a little too much with apo's early life struggles lol...him being told to always 'correct' himself, him feeling disconnected with who he is made to be, being subjected to casual homophobia at workplace (he talked about these things in the On That Day interview and that press con that had happened with the entire cast)...the fact that he felt so unhappy coming back home from the US...it broke my heart and it hit a little too close actually...i had talked about this a bit here (i feel apo is queer coded) coz it reminded me of things that had happened in my life quite recently at that time and the fact that both apo and i were still going strong gave me a sense of kinship with him (hahha 'kinn'ship haahhhaha)...i ofc don't have a mile who has been a positive and happy addition to apo's life since he came back but i am making efforts to have those positive and happy additions in my life

and one of these positive and happy additions happens to be the kpts fandom....y'all....it is SO AMAZING TO BE PART OF THE FANDOM.....y'all are SO TALENTED! the art, the gifs, the meta, the fics, the vids, the polls, the thoughts on the characters, the crackposts, the textposts, the fandom archivers! i'm so thankful to all of you...each and every single one of you

and lbr we've had our fair share of trials and tribulations but because i'm only on tumblr and not on any other social media sites, it has been generally a brilliant experience...i have made such great friends, have talked to a bunch of you, received amazing mile thirst traps in my inbox, have been entirely inappropriate in writing my shameless tags in posts, have openly admitted to my armpit and armpit hair fetish (i made armpit appreciation gifsets ffs), have again very openly talked about my other kinks as well (i think y'all know 🙈) (the armpit fetish admission has led to a beautiful friendship that i cherish <3 and my thirsty tags have led me to meet my feral twin <3)

personally as well i felt like investing myself more into the fandom and the series and the characters and the actors....it made me do things that i had not done before! i talked to fellow fans actively, i made gifs (low quality and using free software lol but i'm actually happy with them), i wrote stuff, like i legit made an ao3 and wrote some stuff lol! i have not done that before and again it is primarily for me and i'm proud of myself for doing these things y'know

last but not the least, kinnporsche the series gave me my thai husband: mile phakphum romsaithong .... and for this alone, it is the best thing out there in the world 🙈🤣

the anniversary of my foray into the series will be next month (it was mile's asscrack that convinced me to finally watch the series that kept trending on tumblr from time to time) but let me be emotional today too

thanks y'all and happy 1st anniversary!

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[samuelroukin]

screenshotting the ask so i can have a readmore break cause this got kinda long, sorry

okay i wanna head this off by saying i'm not good at Interpretations and like. reading people or stuff and this is just my onion (do ppl still say that..)

but i truly do think izzy knows about his feelings for men but specifically for blackbeard. with his line about how he's honored to work for the legend you could def argue that it is just that but for all his interactions with ed, the way he feels only he is allowed to call him by his name, the way he's so so mad at stede for the hold he has on ed and the way it's changing him. the "your my captain" when they're being judged (don't forget he also signed away ten years in exchange for service to the crown, to keep ed safe)

i think he's devoted to the extreme but it's not to ed it's to the blackbeard persona. and i think what people interpret as homophobia is more to do with his feeling of wanting that claim. like with lucius when lucius says "see, we don't own each other" i don't think izzy is mad so much about the fact that they're all gay (or at least open/fine with lucius being gay) but the fact that they get to be so free with it when allll he wants is to Belong to ed like he feels ed does to him, in a way. here he is, willing to take scraps of scraps of edward's attention and lucius is kind of holding a mirror up showing him it's not like this for everyone.

also i made that gifset of their touches and note that almost all the violent ones are directed at him and not coming from him (i mean. those are deserved but still, it’s interesting to me especially in this context)

in essence i think what people read as repressed/homophobic gay man is just his completely unrequited love for a man that doesn't see him and in reality doesn't exist (anymore) and i may be wrong about that but with david jenkins saying izzy feels like a jilted (ex)spouse i don't think i'm far off

i'm not saying he doesn't have some internalized homophobia since he's very concerned with both his own and others' tough guy image but i don't think that's like. the major reason he is the way he is (and i would give my left arm for Actual Backstory)

anyway i have more thoughts but i don’t think they make more sense/are related enough to the topic so this will have to do dkjfhkjfhgs

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

I am curious: what are your favorite scenes from your main ships (date, dair, derena...)?

scenes involving milo don't count, sorry!

for me, it's really not just scenes, but body language & just in general, how they are with each other, you know? dan and serena grin at each other and hug SO much, you can tell that being around each other in s1 made them both so happy, and even after that glow fades the way they look for comfort in each other... top level stuff. the way blair looks at dan... we never see her as radiant at any other point. she was not looking at anyone else like this. and gosh, dan and nate. they're both so comfortable around each other that there's absolutely nothing weird about like. discussing that one ex girlfriend whom they both share AND both were in love with. there is literally no other duo who trusts/enjoys each other's company so much that they're comfortable in a love triangle. (probably because they're more in love with each other than with the girl, but that is not the point. or is it?)

anyway, more specific answers. under the cut. this is one of the longest answers i've ever written on this blog possibly but you KNEW that would happen when you sent this ask, didn't you? (affectionate)

derena: i tagged one of my ds reblogs as 'the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one' and like. look at them! this hug from 1x10 kills me in the best way. they are both the literal embodiment of :D when they see each other! i love 1x10 as a whole moment, their entire thing at cotillion is so sweet and they're both so happy. the fact that he is talking about his chemistry teacher during this kiss in 1x07. that bit at the end of 1x05 when they talk about their siblings (being there for their sibling because of fallible parents being a derena parallel makes me simultaneously really sad and really soft, tbh). 1x05 gives me SO MUCH SECONDHAND EMBARRASSMENT but the way they walk off together arms around each other does something to me - these are two people who are still getting to know each other but who really like what they see, and who trust each other and. are just having a good time together! back when derena was my OTP, the 1x11 "your story's about me?" was absolutely a fave, too, and i still adore it, albeit in a different, more nostalgic way. i like a dan who writes cute stories about serena. no empty shell sabrina van skoneker bullshit. she is so much like you, daniel! you'd be shattered if she did this to you. don't do this to her. tbh, most derena moments from s1 are just A+ romance. the bit in 2x02 in the jitney is so funny, they're SO bad at being exes. the bit in... 3x03 i think?? i don't remember... on the contrary. when they're talking about dan's fling w/ georgina and serena's relationship with carter, the ease with which they talk and how happy/supportive they are of each other's new relationships... yeah. love to see it.

i also really like any instance of them having honest/open conversations. 1x13, talking about how serena is concerned about blair. 1x08, serena talking to dan about feeling jealous of vanessa. this bit from the touch of eva or whatever that episode is. 4x04 i think. this is the conversation everyone is trying to get dan to have and he's avoiding EVERYONE else. derena interactions in 3x21 (can't find a gif right now) - the fact that dan is with serena when her dad abandons them, the fact that he goes all the way there with her. 2x07, "i'm really glad you're nate's friend. he really needs someone like you right now" (though i'm cheating, that's technically a d/n moment too klhdflkgf). there's a bit in s4 where he's advising her against having an affair w/ colin, i don't remember the ep number, but the way he takes her side so easily and naturally and puts due blame/responsibility solely on her professor... yeah. 4x10 i think this ep is?? idk. but like my tags say, im sentimental about this moment because while what dan was doing was irresponsible, sneaking her out of the ostroff, he was the only person in this episode who was actually talking to her and listening to her and taking her seriously. nobody else was doing that!!

i probably have more moments i'm not remembering, but we're only 1/3 into this answer and LOOK AT THE WORDS, good lord, i'm sorry.

dair: my favourite dair episode is hands down despicable b (5x21) which i have heard is an uncommon answer. i just love the conflict resolution of it all, okay!!! 1x04 & 2x08 are like. standard answers any dair shipper will give, and i'm no different. i love dan being able to give blair advice and blair actually taking his advice even though they're not friends yet!!! be right back, yelling at the intimacy of it all!! 5x16, with their getting together (this little kiss and dan being so startled by it), blair admitting a flaw she genuinely does have and dan saying it's not awful because it's her, which is just. romance at its finest. those vows, good lord. 5x18.... they're having fun! blair showing up at the loft in lingerie for dan... the delight on her face.... (i know this moment blows up in their face but when she's there she looks so happy and proud of herself and this was like THE moment when i was like. oh. dair is really the heart of this garbage show huh).

i think for me, the thing that really sells dan & blair together is the serena of it all. both of them love serena more fiercely than anyone else, and that is what brings them together. (fwiw i definitely think nate loved serena this much and this deeply, too; the writers just wanted to pop the serenate balloon, which even i think was extremely unnecessary and ooc.) but (& i have so much meta about this) their relationship grows beyond serena. their entire s4 arc is SO good. i love how comfortable around each other they are, in such an adult way, in the sense of like. they both bring so much stability to each other? morgan tagged this edit "the marrieds" and like. yeah. b offers to help him shave. they're having breakfast & reading the paper together.

all the love declarations we got that weren't a simple 'i love you.' be your charming wonderful self (how could she not love you/ tell me what would make you happy, dan) i told chuck he doesn't have my heart anymore (you spent your life earning the keys to set you free when you were free all along!!!!) dan's pep talk to blair in 5x21 (already linked a gifset earlier, here's another one if you want i guess). there's definitely more... but honestly, the way the dair arc was executed was so good - while i do have my complaints, i also think keeping those aside, it was SO close to perfect. i love dan & blair's banter and gradually becoming closer and closer and closer. it felt very organic and real and GOSH. the way penn & leighton looked at each other while playing dan and blair...... it's just SO MUCH.

date: this is the hardest, because it's. *screams*. maybe you saw me losing my mind over those 2 seconds of nate handing dan a waffle? i love almost every scene with these two, even the hellish s6 breakup scene. my favourite episode for d/n (& also favourite gg episode in general) is 2x06 - i love the homoerotic subtext of it all. nate pretending to be dan because dan's name is the first name that came to his head. dan flirting w/ nate while tied to that thing, in his underwear. them becoming friends. and 2x07 as a follow-up to that! dan getting nate to live in the loft with the humphreys for a while. i am so soft.

4x09 is a terrible episode in general, especially for serena my beloved, but the d/n moments in that one? off the CHARTS. this weird overly macho flirting, in some ways THE most iconic d/n line. this entire finish each other's sentences nonsense. someone (i think it was ana but im not sure?) compared the energy of those scenes i just linked to the book blairenate love triangle resolution, blairena choosing each other over nate in the books, date choosing each other over serena in the show (if only! RIP.) after the saints & sinners ball, this cute little moment of 'youre the only one who understands me. please tell me they went home together. i mean. how could they not have.

3x07, them watching vampire porn together. a tag i used on ao3 (& also on here, once) is 'nate brings out the himbo in dan'. here is a prime example. 'is she levitating?' i don't fucking know, dan, what do you think?? (i was telling my partner that that's what i love abt dair vs date. around blair dan is an intellectual, a librarian, an art historian, a museum curator. around nate it's like dan is competing to be #1 himbo on the show. can my girlfriend actually fly? i don't know, dan. i can't believe you're seriously asking such a question.)

3x12 pep talk. (sorry about the shitty quality!) essentially nate telling dan that he (dan) is hot and that he shouldn't talk himself down so much.

dan making nate gay in his book. you know. his book from which blair found out he was in love with her. nads (who i will not tag in this billion word long gushy meta, because i value her sanity) once called inside "wish fulfilment' and. i mean. yeah

nate checking dan out at the derena wedding continues to be hilarious. hilarious in the same way as dan sexually fantasising about nate. canon really went 'let's give ivy some special easter eggs' and i appreciate them a lot!

i love the way they are around each other - so quietly attuned to each other. i showed my sister my date!husbands gifset, and she was like. yeah they're so married. and it's just stuff like how dan looks for nate over his shoulder, it's not even an active action, it's as easy and natural and intuitive as breathing, checking to see if nate is still there.

oh, that wasn't as hard as it could've been! okay. cool. im SURE there's more things i could scream about, because it's DN, the fact that they're non-canon makes me THAT much fiercer about them than dair/derena, to be honest. so many dots to connect!! anyway.

[softcannoli]

you are the person who got me to watch the untamed and now I am BEGGING you to tell me what guardian is and where I can watch it.. is there time travel because sometimes I see two gifsets that do not seem like they're from the same show

ooohhhhhhhhohohohohohohohoohohhooo ohhhhhhh boy where do i even start

so uhhhhh Guardian is an on-fire trashcan of a show and also the only thing I've been able to think about for like a month. It's based on the novel of the same name by Priest, which I have not yet read but have heard is very good.

I say "based on" bc I have been given to understand that it is a VERY loose adaptation, bc the novel is pretty much entirely about That Gay Shit™, the undead, reincarnation, and literal gods, all of which IIRC are big no-nos under censorship laws. So the show had to get a little creative, and so now it's about aliens? and time travel? sort of? It's weird, but that's okay, because the show is far more interested in the homoerotic subtext, of which there is OODLES.

So basically our two main characters are:

Zhao Yunlan, who is a regular human dude who is in charge of Special Investigations Department, or SID, which is essentially the department of Supernatural Monster Cops, who are responsible for making sure superpowered underground alien people don't come up to the surface and run roughshod over regular humans, and

Shen Wei, a mild-mannered university professor who is Actually Ten Thousand Years Old, and is also secretly a superpowered underground alien person. He knew a dude 10,000 years ago who looks exactly like Zhao Yunlan for unknown (timey-wimey) reasons, and was very obviously in love with him, so when he meets Zhao Yunlan he is IMMEDIATELY lost in the yearning.

There's also a bunch of other people who work under Zhao Yunlan in the SID, and they are all absolutely delightful and have a whole found-family sort of dynamic going on.

Is this a good show? I think if I'm being totally honest I would have to say no? But is terrible in a bunch of truly delightful ways. The CGI is literally shit-tier. Some of the props could not more obviously be made out of craft foam and paper-mache. The quality of the dubbing work is really uneven, and by the last 15 episodes or so they seem to completely give up and some of the lines are dubbed over by someone who is CLEARLY not the same voice are the person speaking. A lot of the writing choices make NO sense, and the plot starts to go completely off the rails somewhere just past the halfway point. (there's also some stuff that is bad in like, a bad way, but I'll talk about that a bit at the end of the post)

The thing about this show is that it's gay. Like GAY gay. Like The Untamed was pretty gay, but I could conceivably see someone cover their ears and shut their eyes to all the gay subtext in that show and convince themselves there's a heterosexual explanation for everything. Not so with Guardian. Like, I really, legitimately cannot fathom even the most willfully ignorant person not picking up on the vibes between Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei. I simply cannot picture it. There is, in fact, NO heterosexual explanation for them.

The show throws in the most flimsy, half-hearted nods to the idea that Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei are just Good Platonic Buddies, and then in the next scene will just drop in a 5-10 minute sequence of Shen Wei taking a sick Zhao Yunlan home, tucking him into bed, staring at his sleeping face with a face full of tenderness and longing, and then cleaning his apartment and folding his laundry for him. It's fucking unreal.

The show was very clearly trying to push the limits of subtext to see exactly how much they could get away with, and as far as I can tell the answer they got was "not that much", bc I've heard some suggestion that the show was pulled shortly after broadcast for another round of edits.

So it's on Viki, but if you don't want to pay for a streaming service and don't mind sliiiightly sketchier subs, it's also on Youtube! It might be some other places too, but those are the ones I know about.

I'm going to stop now bc this post could seriously be like 5 times longer but please watch Guardian and join me in my daily cries about Shen Wei (Zhao Yunlan can come too I guess, but it's mostly about Shen Wei, bc of the inherent eroticism of loyalty and life debts)

Lastly, bc I would be remiss not to mention it, here's some warnings about the worst things I can remember off the top of my head. I personally still think the show was well worth watching, but there's a few things I sort of wish I had known going into it, beyond the vague warning "the ending sucks". It's gonna be spoilers, so read at your own risk.

There's some talk about suicide in the first arc which isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things, but can come across as dismissive and/or insensitive. There's an arc somewhere in the mid-20s that leans on some really ableist "split-personality" tropes. I will fully admit that the only thing that kept me watching at that point was the knowledge that this would be over in an episode or two, and the fact that the youtube subtitles translated comments about other character's behavior as "cringe", which I found an extremely funny translation choice.

And lastly, the finale. The finale is bad in a number of ways, but the biggest and easiest to explain is that the show goes full Bury Your Gays and kills off both Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan. ( and then another entity takes control of Zhao Yunlan's body?? so the general public doesn't actually know he's dead?? which I found pretty uncomfortable) But like basically my view of the ending is that if something bad happened, No It Didn't. Which seems to be the general opinion, since apparently Priest went back and wrote an extra epilogue chapter to fix the drama's ending.

[number5theboy]

Hello :3 Thank u for working so hard on your gifsets, please take your time producing your quality content 🥺 I don't really have a Tua related ask to send in askskskd but I'm down to read abt Five at all times so there's that. So here goes: Your thoughts on Five and Reginald and the nature of their relationship? Thank you <3

Aaahhhh thank you, you are so sweet!! And I’m actually working on a deeper dive into the relationship between Reginald and Five, especially looking at the bar scene, because it fascinates me, but I keep getting distracted, but it’s coming, I promise.

In the meanwhile, a more general overview. The thing about Five and Reginald is that Five has a fundamentally different relationship to his father from his siblings. His siblings can all safely and squarely point at Reginald as a) being the worst thing that has ever happened to them and b) the one responsible for ruining their individual lives. For Five however a) he has the apocalypse which is just clearly worse than the academy life (I’m not trying to say that the academy life didn’t scar the other siblings for life or comparing trauma, I’m just saying that however bad the academy was, at least they had food and alive human company) and he himself qualifies the Handler as being worse than Reginald (not to speak of the fact that his childhood lies back forty-five years, those are distant, distant memories, distorted by decades of monotonous apocalypse life and some very busy working years), and b) Reginald is demonstrably not responsible for ruining Five’s life - Five is, and he knows it. It’s the ‘I told you so’-theme. I’ve seen people blame Five ending up in the apocalypse squarely on Reginald, and while there is something to be said about upbringing and how Reginald dealt with Five’s more rebellious personality, in that moment, the agency is all with Five, Reginald didn’t really do anything wrong. He told Five that he shouldn’t try to time travel and told him exactly why (impossible to foresee the effects it could have on his body and his mind), and Five disregarded that and did it anyway.

So essentially, Reginald is not the villain figure to Five that he is to all of his brothers and sisters. Five does what none of his siblings do: he underestimates Reginald, underestimates his cruelty and ruthlessness, and does so massively. It is a very nice and deliberate touch of having the sibling that spent the least time with Reginald be the one who turned out most like him, while at the same time having Five be the sibling that managed to move past Reginald the most. I’m not saying he’s unaffected by Reginald - he clearly isn’t - and he definitely suffered the same abuse as a kid, but he is the one for whom it is the least defining. It is both explicitly said in the show (S1E6 “Who cares if dad messed us up? Are we gonna let that define us?”) and metaphorically, in the fact that Five is the only Hargreeves who is not technically a Hargreeves. I know we keep tagging him as ‘Five Hargreeves’ for organisational reasons here, but that’s not actually his name. Five is ‘Number Five’, he is never referred to with Hargreeves as his last name, like his siblings are. He has made a name of his own, quite literally, by taking the number assigned to his existence as an experiment and becoming more than that, a legend in something that is completely apart from what his father intended. Five is very detached from Reginald as an actual being. It has been so long for him, so much has happened in-between, that he approaches him with a certain kind of distance, as a potentially very valuable source of information, having discarded (or maybe the memory has just faded), the things Reginald did to him, to his siblings. He underestimates Reginald, and he underestimates the severity of the effect his abuse had on his comparatively much younger siblings, which is, in the end, why they end up in a 2019 where cold, hard Reginald has rejected even the idea of their existence.

As for Reginald’s view of Five, it’s a bit more difficult to interpret because we just see less of him, and know less about his personality and even less about his true intentions. We see little of their relationship in Season 1, and I think Five did comparatively fine under Reginald from what we see. He is naturally curious and willing to push his powers to test his limits, but also the one most ready to openly talk back to Reginald, which seems to faze Reginald little, indicating that it was a regular occurrence. During the fateful breakfast, Reginald doesn’t even bother looking at Five arguing for his right to time travel, until the moment that Five runs out and openly, directly defies him, and it would be the very first and very last defiance. This tells us very little, which is why I find Reginald’s reaction to the Five we know even though he doesn’t know him in Season 2 so very, very fascinating, incidentally the same thing Reginald finds Five. There is a universe in difference between Reginald not sparing Five a glance at the breakfast table and them having a discussion on even terrain in the tiki bar. I’m not going to delve too deep into the scene because that’s for the post I’m working on, but I think, for the first time in the show, Reginald looks at Five and sees someone to take seriously. I’ve seen people suggest that Reginald was playing Five during that scene, that it was all an act, but I personally think that that interpretation makes that scene so much less interesting from a character perspective. Reginald entertains Five’s ideas, he takes him in earnest, and he seems genuinely sorry that he can’t help out. I don’t believe Reginald walked out of that bar with a bad opinion of Five. For a moment there, we see a glimpse of how Reginald acts with someone he gives at least basic human decency, and maybe even something that approaches respect, to. It doesn’t break Five’s illusion that Reginald isn’t the worst thing in the world, a sense of false security that makes the plot twist at the end of the season probably most shocking to him, because I think he never would have thought of Reginald just replacing them.

There is a very intriguing dynamic between Five and Reginald, one that lives less in extremes than it does for the other siblings. I think the point of this entire ramble is that Five and Reginald don’t dislike each other, and it makes for a very fascinating relationship where everything is open for the future, where this dynamic can develop further in narratively interesting and relevant ways. Five has enough distance from his abusive childhood (which, again, is not me saying that he has no repercussions from that, just that he has suffered different trauma and abuse on top of that and, let’s be real here, never had the opportunity to work through any of it) that he can approach Reginald different than his siblings, who are still very much and more acutely hurting, and this different approach allows him to get through to Reginald on a more personal, honest level than we have seen a sibling do before.

[love-takes-work]

The evolution of Garnet’s Questions

With the excitement surrounding Garnet asking questions again after getting reset in Steven Universe: The Movie (and the related popularity of my GIFset depicting some of the questions!), I thought I’d offer some nuanced commentary.

Some context:

You probably already know that multiple behind-the-scenes statements from creator Rebecca Sugar (and Ian Jones-Quartey, and Hilary Florido, and Kat Morris, and several others) indicate that they write Garnet as deliberately avoiding spoken questions in her dialogue.

What this covers:

Garnet does not speak questions. That includes rhetorical questions--anything with a question mark, she does not speak, unless it’s a mistake. (There have been a handful of those. Rebecca takes responsibility for “Can’t you see that my relationship is stable?” Yes, that counts as a question and shouldn’t have been phrased that way, she says.)

What this does NOT cover: 

Requesting information in non-question form (”Tell me where X is” instead of “where is X?”). Questioning herself internally. Expressing uncertainty. Admitting that she doesn’t know. Wondering and doubting herself.

Some history:

Garnet adopted this behavior because of something Rose said to her shortly after she became a Fusion.

“No more questions. Never question this. You already are the answer.”

Garnet took this extremely literally and used it as the basis of who she wanted to become. This is the first experience she’s had as a Fusion interacting with other Gems who didn’t call her disgusting, and having someone AFFIRM HER LIFE was incredible for her. She could leave confusion behind and just BE the answer. That was the confidence and pride Garnet wanted to embody.

A common theory:

After Pearl’s revelations in “A Single Pale Rose,” we learn that Rose, as Pink Diamond, had the ability to effectively gag Pearl with her orders. Because Pearl’s ability to speak of certain subjects was then forever altered, it was only natural that some folks wondered if a similar spell had been cast on Garnet. Considering the emphasis and the way it also altered her speech patterns forevermore, it was a decent theory.

However, it has been debunked by Crewniverse member Joe Johnston.

Joe answered on May 8, 2018:

offcoloured asked: hi joe! quick q, did Pink have a power over gems that binds their free will? i ask because of how Pearl obviously cannot physically speak of the past

This is more a function of how Pearls work. Since they are specially made for their owners, they are duty bound or I guess “programed” to follow the orders of their masters.

Joe answered on May 10, 2018:

Anonymous asked: Wait if the command only worked that way because Pearl is a pearl, why can't Garnet ask questions now?

If some one amazing came along and changed your world view and told you never to doubt yourself or question yourself, and it you took that encouragement and self love and imbedded it deep in your being, would you ask questions?

Joe answered on May 10, 2018:

melodicdragon97 asked: So we know that Rose is able to order Pearl around if Rose so chooses to (and that Pearl only has to obey her IF Rose orders her to). I just want to know if Pearl is the only one Rose is capable of ordering around in that way (forcing someone to do something). Is it part of her being a Diamond, or does it only apply to Pearl?

It only applies to Pearl.

BECAUSE our Pearl was made for Pink Diamond, she must follow her orders.

Rose did not have this power or control over anyone else, and its ONLY because Pearl was made for her that Pink/Rose had this power over her. Pink is a Diamond, she could order around lots of gems, but they follow because of hierarchy, not because the Diamonds are mind controlling them. Is this making sense? I’m try to clear this up for everybody, but people still seem confused.

Folks, Joe has doubled and tripled down on this. When they wrote “The Answer,” they thought we would see how Garnet used Rose’s emphatic encouragement to become confident and true to herself, but instead people made this connection and saw it as a tragedy or a trap or a spell--something Garnet was suffering from, something she no longer had the ability to do.

And now that the movie reset returned Garnet to her bundle-of-questions self from before “The Answer,” people are in my notes dozens of times talking about “Pink’s order” and “Rose’s spell” again, seeing Garnet’s wide-eyed cluelessness as adorable and representative of freedom.

Look, baby Garnet is cute as hell. It’s funny, like Pearl devoting herself to “Um Greg Universe” and Amethyst copying everything others say and do. But this isn’t “her true self” before Rose stole something from her. This is her before she learned everything about herself and her relationship, and while it’s novel and fun to see her like this for a change, this isn’t a “free” version of Garnet to contrast with a trapped one.

Garnet returned to herself at her realization of “the truth” because TRUTH is what’s brought her to her current self. When Garnet realized the lie that had been present underneath the foundation of her relationship, she fell apart and reexamined it.

And then, Ruby and Sapphire realized that when they finally did ask “The Question,” the answer was still the same.

Their love, their relationship, their history, their confidence they’ve built as Garnet, HER leadership, HER sorrow and pain and joy, all of this that belongs to her in confidence and solidity and wisdom . . . it’s something she earned. 

When she was a wide-eyed cotton candy Fusion in that garden being told not to question herself, she jumped to an easy answer, but over all this time she’s been herself, she’s been becoming someone who never existed before. SHE defined who that was, and it takes confidence and truth to do something like that when you come from a society like the Gem society. She’s probably more free as Garnet than she ever could have been as Ruby or as Sapphire because both have such strong programming, but Garnet? She’s the first of her kind and she forged her new identity bravely.

Garnet still chooses to avoid questions to this day. Like many things she thought Rose gave her back in the day, she’s made it hers.

Please don’t process this speech pattern as a tragedy, or as evidence of brainwashing, or as a failure to question when she should. This is something uniquely Garnet’s; after all, Ruby and Sapphire still both ask questions when they’re unfused. Her confidence and her love is real, and it was always hers--just like Steven had to travel a winding path to find out he was himself all along, she took a difficult road to finding her truth, but she found it: ALL ALONG she was a leader even when she thought she was a follower, and ALL ALONG she was an incredible new beginning for Gems who wanted to escape utterly into something entirely new that belonged to them.

She CHOOSES not to ask questions. It’s a positive choice and an outward expression of confidence. I love the way this is celebrated in the show, and how effective it is at making her seem so different when they take it away from her. Her restoration was in TRUTH, not just love. The truth was always there in her answer to the question. When the last lie was peeled away, Garnet survived it. She turned something that started as a falsehood into something she could live by. 

And that’s why she still does.

[akathecentimetre]

So here’s the thing.

Of course I love The Old Guard. Like, of COURSE I do. It is everything I like and everything you all have gotten used to knowing I like, from found family to unconditional love to the yummy yummy historical tidbits. It’s going to have a truly Great fandom.

But watching it was not, for me, some huge revelatory experience in media because - well, I’ve written it before. Many times, in scattered pieces, across a lot of my fic. And what made me cry last night when I finally watched it was that it’s the spitting image of an epic vampire story that I wrote, over a decade ago, with Rio (@aumerle-that-was​).

Who is now dead. Recently dead. [I wrote a post about her here.]

The Barrens will most likely never make it to publication. It’s huge, and unwieldy, and full of unnecessary crack because I was an 18-19-20-year-old virgin when we were spending the most time on it. But it’s 232,761 words of memories, of laughter, of love, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, of me learning how to write at all.

I miss her. I wish she was still here, to see The Old Guard and love it (GOD she would have loved it). I wish she was here so she could write the most beautiful, unbearable, Italianate fic of Joe & Nicky that anyone could have ever imagined. They deserve a gifset set to her Coldplay “roman cavalry choirs” singing. 

Here’s some tiny images of what we wrote, focusing on various characters (including one called Rio, of no relation; this epic started, if you can believe, as a football/soccer RPF AU). I’ve picked out some character moments rather than historical bits, but fair warning that there’s mention of some nasty/upsetting stuff.

*

It was the need to eat, and the need to live, and the need to go on, and it was, as the last sliver of sun splintered on the deep blue of Capri's sea, utterly unendurable, because he knew that he would, he would get up, he would go on, he would feed, and he would keep living. He would keep living, and the grief and anguish in his mind would keep on with him, the raw, still-bleeding edges of the severed bond breathing with him, and the new fear and hatred he had learned keeping him company with them.

He would just refuse to think, that was all. That couldn't be so hard.

It couldn't.

*

He closed his eyes, and swallowed, shutting down memories and envy and misery at once, and drew a deep, unnecessary breath before he looked out at the Mouth of Truth again. He walked over to it slowly, and put his hand in. "I don't miss you," he said. "And you needed to die." Robin whined sadly behind him. The Mouth stayed open.

*

Things were shutting down, blowing out like lamps at night, and all he could think was thank God, because he didn't want this anymore, couldn't stand it, and he thought it might be his life that was guttering out like a candle, and it was really too much effort to care, because peace.

...but as bad as dying was, it was nothing compared to waking up again.

Fingers were tapping him sharply on one cheek. "'Ey. 'Ey, come on, wake up."

He opened his eyes. And immediately shouted out in a mix of pain, terror, and absolutely overwhelming confusion, because his head hurt so badly he thought he just might have been brained with an axe, and when he struggled into a sitting position it was to the realization that his clothes were soaked with blood, and that just couldn't be good at all. His hands shot to his throat, but when he found that there was nothing there - no torn flesh, no blood, no wound, no nothing - all he could let out was a horrified sort of squeak.

There was the odd laugh again, and it didn't help at all to realize he could feel it now, as if he was tapped into the other man's amusement like some barrel of watered beer left running.

"Very good," the man's voice rumbled, making him jump again, because he didn't just hear it, it was like it was in his ear. "Now then. Follow these regles" - a piece of crumpled paper was thrust into his bloody palm - "and you shall be just fine, yes? Yes. I think you shall be fine." And then the man stood, stepped over him, and opened the door, pushing Rio's nerveless legs aside as it swung on its hinges. "I think I had better go. Too much - commotion. Bonsoir!"

"And fuck you," Rio managed to croak with some vehemence, feeling the amusement fade out and vanish, as though it had never been there at all. If it weren't for the way his head felt and the state of his hands and clothes, he'd have thought he'd dreamed it - got coshed, maybe, and dreamed it. The crumpled piece of paper was telling him otherwise. The slightly-mangled syntax was bad enough without it apparently being straight out of a child's fairy tale.

Never kill when you drink. Never go out in the sun unless you have strength enough. If it is possible, no churches. NEVER TOUCH SILVER. Run from Hunters, do not fight. Be polite when you use your mind, otherwise it will hurt.

Bonds of love are forever.

*

He had got as far as the steps when the world began to shatter, as though cacophony could be made into feeling, sending him in a kind of sideways fall against the stone balustrade, and wondering how he had never known there was this much pain in the world, because it was worse even than the night he had been left to bleed his life out on a London street, worse than silver, worse than anything he could begin to think of as comparison. It was the utter definition of agony, and all he could think was that he needed it to stop, it had to stop, before his mind fragmented and splintered along with it.

It came to him, distant and heartwrenching, that this was what Cruyff had meant by letting go, that he had to withdraw or risk going irrevocably mad, but - fuck, fuck, how could he let go of everything, Cruyff was everything, it was impossible that he should be - imposs -

He fell against the wall, toppled onto his knees, and screamed.

*

“And if you want immortality for someone, the last thing you want is to find yourself becoming a murderer. Unless you're Marco..."  he trailed off with a sigh, and shook his head. "Marco seduced a girl in Babylon --"

"Babylon --!"  Rio gaped.  Babylon didn't even exist any more, God, what sort of timescale were they talking about here?

"He went with Alexander," Gullit said patiently, "and if you want to know more about that, read a book."

*

Gullit bristled and snarled without actually saying anything, giving Rio the distinct impression that the master vampire was more of a real wolf than Robin would ever be. "Go on then," he snapped. "Tell me to my face that you will be able to wake up tomorrow night and do what you have to do. That is all the time I will allow you - and I will know if you are lying."

Rio swallowed.  He thought of silver, and the way it burned even when it wasn't a knife, thought of how it tainted everything, how the thought even of being there one more second alongside that pain was almost impossible.  He thought of how it was now his knife, how he had earned the pain and the ability both, and owned them by name and by right.

He thought, deliberately, of the scars on Ed's body, of the look in his eyes that first night at Stevie's, as though the world were a place of ash and horror and nothing good could even be imagined.

He thought of Gullit, whose sons were dead and had no-one to lay claim to him or who he could be part of but Marco, and who carried on, scarred and limping and casting his damn spells, trying to earn something Rio thought just might be the forgiveness of the twice-dead.

"Yeah," he said then, looking straight into Gullit's dark, hot eyes.  "I could."

"Could you really," Gullit said thoughtfully.  It wasn't, terrifyingly, anywhere near a question.

*

I can make no predictions, so consider this an indefinite promise: you are not going back.

Rio's mind turned into a perfect, careful blank of pure incomprehension.

Back here? he ventured, because if that was it, he really didn't understand, since how not coming back here was anything but good was absolutely and completely beyond him.  How he was supposed to feel anything but thank-you-God about even the idea of never coming back here was apparently a mental leap he was incapable of making.

There was a snort of derision, the horrid sound failing to arouse even a twitch of amusement from anyone. No, Rio, Gullit whispered. He had to live with the possibility of never - that his pain would never end. And now you’re going to live with it too. You’re going to live with the thought that you might never kill Marco... and, due to the extremes of unpredictability this world - and especially Marco - goes to, you’re going to live with the idea that you might never see, or be able to love, Edwin ever again.

He wasn't sure if he was being manipulated, or if it was real, but the sense of something that wasn't even grief – that was beyond grief, was nothing as human as grief – was shocking and immediate and all-consuming.  It was the knowledge that the last memories he might ever be able to make that were his own – even now, as his brain stuttered in a void, he knew that what he had seen here was not his for the taking – the last memories he could truly take for himself would be the look of joy in Ed's eyes, and the clean-cut Roman profile of the vampire who had been able to give and be all he had ever wanted.  The last memory he might ever be able to bring out of his mind in all the days that were his to pass from now until the end of some infinite horror was one of loss.  

It was devastation, wilderness, wasteland, the barrens.

It was exile, and eternity, and Christ! Laurent had given him no such thing as a gift of life, he had given him a curse.

Bonds of love are forever.

And without the ability to love, with only the bonds, with only shackles for his heart and soul worse than those that lay open in front of his mind's eye – with the only thing he had always known suddenly ripped from him and held up to the clear light of unforgiving truth, and shown as worthless, forever didn't seem like any kind of promise at all.

*

He had only recently started getting used to the concept of communicating with his mind, and what glimpses he had gotten of Ruud's had only convinced him that there was more in there than he could ever possibly hope to understand - so he didn't try. But he did know that London was important, and that something was going to happen, so he finished packing very carefully before moving on to Ruud's things, which were still scattered carelessly around the room (a rarity, because normally the captain was as neat as a pin). "You don't deserve this," he heard Ruud say quietly, and he shrugged without looking over his shoulder. "Well. I'm alive, sir." "No you're not," Ruud said - not unkindly.

"I'm here?"

"Yes," Ruud said. He sounded exhausted. "You are. Hooray for you."

*

"Give me one solitary fucking reason why I shouldn't throw you through this wall."

Ruud didn't have the energy to come up with something honest. "Goodwill towards your fellow man?"

He ended up flat on his back in the remains of what had been a parked cab instead, but he was pretty sure it hurt the same amount.

"Fellow man? You don't count," Rio said, sounding horrible and raspy from somewhere off to the side, as Ruud blinked away some interestingly-coloured sparkles and waited for his leg to heal up the nerve-endings enough for things to start being excruciating. "I'm not sure you count as a fucking vampire, you shit."

"No," Ruud grunted, swaying up to a seated position just in time to get punched in the face and fall back again with a broken nose, and the sparkles deciding to take up permanent residence behind his eyelids. "I don't. Tell me how he is."

Rio's skull-face didn't look any better in lamplight and through floating small pinpricks of fake stars. "Sorry, was that you asking for something?"

"Yes," he ground out, lifting a weary hand to his mouth and shoving a crooked incisor back into its place. "And you're going to tell me. I don't care if you feel like disembowelling me, though don't get any ideas - you're going to."

"I'm off disembowelling for the next century, don't worry yourself," Rio growled, and that was the nastiest way Ruud had ever got an answer in his life, and knowing he'd deserved it didn't help at all. "Fuck's sake. How do you think? You left." Right, so apparently git stood for Great Incompetent Tosser.

*

"Like you what?" the man said, getting right to the heart of Rio's inadequacy in the same death-warmed-up voice, and put a shaking hand down against the floor to try and pull his rag-covered body out of the bunk. "He said it would save me. Are you saved?"

Maybe he would just use the hook on Laurent, instead. "Um. Not - really, no." He hoped like hell the man wasn't talking about in the sight of God, because that was one can of worms Rio was never going anywhere near. "He made me, though, too. Just like he did you. So we don't die....yet." Life, Laurent had told him, and hadn't that been a terrifyingly unfunny joke? Rio didn't want to have to use the word 'vampire' among all these living corpses, but he was getting a nasty feeling that between necessary obliquity and whatever arsing terrible explanation Laurent had buggered off after giving, he was going to have to.

He straightened up without the help of Rio's hands, and for the first time Rio could put a face to the voice - he was Rio's height, and big, or should have been were it not for the thinness of his limbs, wrists and forearms Rio could have encircled with two fingers end-to-end, and a broad, now-pinched face which spoke of a starvation perhaps beyond all else Rio had seen, because he knew without even asking this man had not known, at least not consciously, to drink, and yet the strength of the vampire would have kept him from expiring even had he begged for it.

Laurent would have fed him, though. Laurent would have let him know at least what it took to keep going - wouldn't he? Perhaps not, any kind of feeding here was a death sentence to the donor, willing or not, and considering Laurent's one and only set of instructions, Rio guessed that the bastard had just been hoping for the best to work itself out - and in the meantime, what the fuck was he going to do? "Means you're my brother," he said at last, because that was what mattered, in the end, wasn't it, that was why he was here, why he'd ended up in a kind of Hell no-one had even thought of until now, not even the living dead. "An' I'm Rio." He'd first introduced himself as who and what he was so many lifetimes ago that he was amazed it still struck a chord of memory inside him, hearing his voice in the little hut as though he were back in the room in London, wondering why he'd saved a vamp who didn't even have the sense not to kill. "It's - we're gonna be all right. Honest."

[bellamygateoldblog]

THE 100 7X07 LIVEBLOG

Warning: Long. I’m sorry. I was excited.

• First thought, I'm being forced to watch without subtitles & and it might just be me but these actors are impossible to understand on the first listen.

• "The shepherd teaches us that winning the last war brings upon the final evolution of a species" so....aliens? ALIE? Ascending into a 'higher' form of existence meaning either life after death (ALIE style) or these people want to become Gods?

• They "believe in transcendence" so i must be on the right lines.

• Bardo have "different plans" for the two killers. Void!Echo might be cominggggg.

• "Death is life" / "may we meet again" / "death is not the end" — "winning the last war brings upon the final evolution of a species"???? I’ve connected the dots.

• I'm sorry but all this hyper-focus on Clarke and being "The Key to everything" is kinda embarassing me, like 😳 it's just so odd. That this alien cult from another part of the galaxy/universe is fixated on this random teenager born on a space station around Earth. I know, I know it's to do with Becca's tech, but it's still very much sounding like the "super important special protagonist" trope which I hate and until that detail about the code/tech is revealed it will continue to make me rme. LMAO.

• "Rise and shine errand boy" OK MA.

• Indra is out looking for their friends which confirms LGBT wrath squad literally told nobody they were leaving, and since Gaia was kidnapped, there's no news from them at all.

• Emori trying desperately to help Murphy stay out of hell. At first I thought she was reassuring him, but she was explaining why he needs to do these “errands,” because she believes in his ‘vision’ of hell last season.

• "besides [Murphy's] worshipped me for years."

• Memori is the inverse of Bellarke. There, I said it.

• "You don't know me very well-" / "i know you went into that tavern to save a child at great risk to yourself..." is the pretty much the exact same scene as Murphy's with Luna in s4: "you don't know me very well" / "I know you stole medicine to save [a child]..."

• Luna's spirit followed them across the galaxy/universe this season.

• I don't know anything about chess but the fear on Murphy's face when Slim Sheidy moved his Queen makes me think Emori is in danger this season for as long as he's still alive.

• Echo indirectly preaching "love is strength"

• "You don't talk about yourself much and you're a shapeshifter"

• Dude maybe Echo really is getting an arc this season.

• "Bellamy this isn't real" implies she's had to shut “this” down before, and that there's been something between them for a while. And Bellamy literally shut her up with a kiss, telling her and us that she’s being silly. Also, Echo was the one putting it off.

• Tall girlfriend short boyfriend rights!

• The shot of the ring becoming Echo's eye. Oh my GOD.

• "I know you're in pain Echo, I feel it" what a dumb fuck thing to say LMAO what gave it away?????? The way I'm crying right now in front of you??????

• "I'm the monster from Hope's bedtime stories"

• Octavia:

• WE'RE VOCALISING THE PARALLEL NOW HUH?!

• Octavia is telling EVERYONE else what we already knew. The parallel was NEVER to Finn. It was to Octavia. After Lincoln died. TELL EM.

• "I wish I hugged him instead"

• Octecho Murphamy parallel oh jesus.

• Octavia is like "no Murphy Echo! I'm not letting you go until you admit you're not useless! it's not your fault!"

• Octavia telling Echo love is the answer, love is what she needs, not death or violence. Love is strength. Here we go bitches.

• "YOU'RE MY FAMILY TOO"

• !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “YOU’RE ONE OF THE HUNDRED”

• Am i actually right with all these Echo theories i’ve had? I’m feeling so validated.

• It’s a shame none of these scenes will be edited and made into gifsets by fandom the way other Clarke/bellarke/anti-Echo-centred ones have been them with their none-existent Finn ‘parallel’ lmaooooo, because nobody cares for Echo and Octavia.

• Everyone is yelling for Echo. I feel that.

• Diyoza is checking her nails. I feel that too.

• "THAT'S DISHES YOUNG LADY" ajaksjajsjskasjsjdkskdjdj

• I'm so sad we're back in Sanctum😔😔😔

• Emori is fr pregnant.

• Are we really doing a sexism thing, here with Shiedheda and Murphy? I thought those things didn't exist anymore?🤔

• "how you respond to the loss of your Queen will tell me which you are (a leader or a follower)" — I'm going to be unhappy if Emori dies just so Murphy can become a "leader" by the end. Don’t. Especially not after this conversation about “not liking women very much.”

• Well there goes that theory of Hope favouring Murphy from the stories because she was told he was similar to her father. Sigh.

• "I like you John, you amuse me" is a pretty good way of summarising how his character has been used this season.

• "Everyone I ever loved was killed fighting in wars. Some that didn't need to be fought"

• "I LIKE OUR CHANCES" callback.

• Men who?

• "Violence and rage will only destroy your soul"

• “Revenge is a game with no winners” motherly advice vs “They loved people too. Where does it end?” / “it doesn’t end here. I don’t believe in karma” motherly advice.

• These quotes are making me nervous about void!Echo. I hope she gets brought back from the dark eventually. Or makes the dark her bitch.

• This Diyoza-Hope scene looks paralleled to the Octecho one! Thus Echo also wants to "go back to the way things were."

• "They took my mommy away" — Like ‘they’ took Octavia's and Echo's. Two other warrior women in the same group. Clarke dealt with the loss of hers. Madi with the loss of hers. There’s Gaia and Indra’s strained relationship. Emori + being cast out by her parents. The child sacrifices. Murphy + Sheidheda’s mother throwing him in the conclave meaning he doesn’t like women. Is this season about mommy issues?

• A little confused why he’s talking about Lexa as if she directly stole his legacy. Wasn’t he in power when Indra was a child?

• Octavia is laying there staring at a blank book.

• I'm dying at Octavia monologing, completely oblivious to Echo cutting her face with broken glass behind her. LMAO. She's become so accustomed to Echo's whimpering she's not even phased anymore.

• Dying again at Echo out of nowhere just going DO YOU KNOW WHY AZGEDA WARRIORS SCAR THEIR OWN FACES?

• Octavia, again:

• "We do it to symbolize that the pain is over. The wound is healed."

• That's such a good explanation. And here begins Echo's healing journey. As her wounds heal over the next few episodes so will she. And by the end her scars will symbolise that journey.

• Here Echo goes again being the smartest person in the room, always. "We're not prisoners, we're recruits."

• Tasya is making me super uncomfortable with the jittery, eery way Echo is moving around. I love it.

• The way Echo casually saunters out of the fucking room with not a single care in the world oh she knowsssss. AJDKSHFJSF

• Echo leading again!!! Making the decisions. Octavia following after her (literally) and backing her.

• "This is how my people show they're ready to go to war" — making everyone extremely uncomfortable and I love that for her. Also, "my people."

• Embracing her Azgeda-ness.

• Octavia understanding and jumping in to aid Echo's plan combined with the close-up of Echo's determined abliet slightly unhinged expression makes me believe Echo is leaning into her "spy" along with her Azgeda and going undercover, making them believe she's on their side when she's not. But there's still a part of me thinking Echo is spiraling and is going to war out of habit and because she feels she has nowhere else to go/ "no home." Aka, the detail to finish off the S7 O/E parallels: "this is who I am" / "I'm here for the war."

• Furthermore, her scarring herself could be a callback to Octavia telling Ilian to help her feel something.

• I love this season a lot.

• Back in Sanctum again😒

• How does a chess game take all fucking DAY?

• OH 🙂 That's how.

• Yeah it makes absolutely no sense Raven would ask about Octavia before Echo.

• Raven looking at Clarke when finding out Bellamy's dead as if she isn't the only one there who's his actual family, who spent 6 entire years with him + more. Raven Clarke-Prop Reyes strikes again.

• Clarke's like *sad confusion*

• The scene of Clarke finding out about Bellamy's death didn't feel so much about her as it did "well what does this mean for them now?"

• "From the ashes we will rise" becomes "from the ashes, through the bridge, the shepherd will rise" Gotta say, not as catchy.

• "please call me Bill" - No. No Bill. Only Cadogan.

• We're going back to Earth this season aren't we?

[smallblueandloud]

hi essbie!! you seem super awesome❤️❤️ if you would like to talk to me about the west wing i would love that! i’m watching for the first time now and i’m in LOVE with it- tell me all your thoughts! otps, favorite episodes, arcs, characters... anything!

oh my god, this is my FAVORITE ASK THAT I HAVE EVER RECEIVED EVER. i’m so happy to talk about the west wing because the fandom that’s still alive today seems to be TINY (although high-spirited!!). thank you for asking!! i will endeavor to talk a lot.... which isn’t hard for me, lol.

(psst, before we begin, can i recommend you check out @donnajosh, who posts gorgeous new gifsets of tww pretty regularly [and also has gifs tagged by episode so you can find the right post to reblog when you’re liveblogging, shh], @etraytin, who’s written some AMAZING multichaps that have gotten me through this very stressful week, and @cassiesinsanity, who’s just plain genuinely amazing?? okay. now that that’s out of the way.)

i tried to figure out from your blog where you are in the show, but i can’t find anything more detailed than “probably has finished in the shadow of two gunmen”, so i’m just gonna keep things anti-spoilers. there are some really, really cool plot developments in tww, and i don’t recommend you spoil yourself for things on purpose! but also like. i DEFINITELY spoil things for myself all the time. so what the hell, don’t listen to me lol.

(i tried to put this under a cut, but tumblr glitched. sorry, peeps who don’t care about the west wing. also, WATCH THE WEST WING.)

my ALL TIME, dearest headcanon is adhd josh. i just. i love my boy so much. i love my impulsive, ridiculously-sensitive-to-perceived-rejection, loud, hyperfixated boy so much. i don’t know everything about adhd, but from what i know josh is TEXTBOOK. or at least he’s a lot like me! and i’m reasonably sure i have adhd. so. i’m REALLY, REALLY into that headcanon and everything about it. (i actually wrote a fic in which i wrote him the way i see his adhd presenting, because i love him so much. hmm, i should write a fic about josh being adhd. what kind of stims would josh like??)

i love and adore josh/donna, like many many other people. i like zoey/charlie, just because i think they make each other happy and both of them deserve that. i... like cj/danny? sorta? i think they’re adorable, and they have some REALLY good moments (no spoilers but. oh my god. danny really out here chugging his respect women juice and i love him for it). but also i am EXTREMELY ATTACHED to cj/toby and more specifically cj/toby/andy.

HEAR ME OUT. cj has EXTREME wlw energy and cj and toby have A LOT of married energy but then toby and andy... love each other so much, it’s so clear, in literally everything they do, i don’t know if you’ve gotten to the end of s5 yet but i cry. so like?? obviously, because i am who i am, polyamory is the answer! basically the rundown is: andy and toby are a typical couple except that they fight a lot. cj is kinda in the middle. if gay marriage had been legal / socially acceptable in the 80s (because god knows this ot3 has been thinking about optics since they graduated college), cj and andy would’ve gotten married and toby would’ve come and gone depending on who he’d pissed off recently, and everything would’ve been perfect. instead, andy and toby got married and it didn’t work because they really just couldn’t function as a unit, especially since their getting married meant that cj isolated herself a bit more. definitely cj and toby have a couple of SCREAMING arguments about the whole relationship. idk.

but just like. imagine with me, if you will, cj and toby... not dating, while working in the white house, but being exes. friendly exes. friendly exes who are still in love with each other and know it. please imagine that and then think about “i love you desperately / i know” and “you wanna make out with me right now, don’t you? / well, when don’t i?” and “we had it good there for a while / yeah, we did” and then join me in the pit of sadness.

(sidenote i have a sense8 au for the west wing and the second story is just me being emotional about their cluster for 5k. i have another story vaguely planned that i’ll probably never write about the development of the ot3 and about their cluster and how it functions. but don’t read that story until you finish... the first half of s7? or thereabouts? actually probably you should finish the show before you read the sense8 au in general if you’re avoiding spoilers.)

(when i say “i’ll probably never write”, i mean��“until the next time i get obsessed with the west wing”. which will probably be years from now. oh, well, we can all hope the muse actually does something efficient for once.)

so yeah. those are my ships. i know a lot of people shipped josh/sam, but i don’t really see it? sam always seemed Way Too Straight for that to work lol, although i DO like the idea of sam pining tragically for josh for years just like donna does. (can you tell i read such a winter’s day a few days ago? it’s amazing. i haven’t left a review yet because i have not been a human being recently, but go read it!! it’s awesome!!)

also, i love the idea of bartlet/abbey/leo, although i can’t really visualize it lol. but there’s some amazing fic for them out there. maybe one day my stupid brain will realize the angst potential and actually let me write something for them, hopefully within the sense8 au. (sam also has a cluster! and i would love to write about them! .....but my brain doesn’t do what i tell it to. ever.)

my favorite arc.... i don’t know. i really loved the early seasons, which were a little more episodic, but ALSO i actually really liked the tone after aaron sorkin left after s4? it takes some getting used to, but it’s WAY more emotional, and i am ALL HERE FOR THAT. i definitely have a least favoite arc, or at least a least-favorite way-that-they-handled-a-storyline (spoiler alert: i hated how they handled the end of bartlet’s presidency in the white house. like. SHE’S ALL ALONE IN THERE- anyways. trying not to give detailed spoilers!)

favorite episodes: hmm. i love the thanksgiving episodes. i loved any episode with the ainsley-and-sam dynamic. noel is a phenomenal episode. 26 could make anyone weep. the flashbacks are the best. the fucking- the fucking what’s next motif.

honestly, probably i’d have to say my favorite episode is either 4x20 (evidence of things not seen, for “stupidly noble cluster” reasons and cj/toby reasons and bartlet & charlie reasons. also i feel like there’s some good josh/donna there too but i can’t remember exactly?) or 7x21 (institutional memory, because i’m pretty sure the writers reached into my id and pulled out EXACTLY what i needed from them to be okay with the show ending. jesus CHRIST i have never felt so satisfied after an episode. literally everything i ever could have wanted happened in that episode. i’m STILL reeling. it’s a perfect episode.)

my favorite characters are... literally everyone? i know that’s cheating but i love them all SO MUCH (except mandy and amy, of course). josh is my favorite, always and forever, but i love cj more than words and sometimes i can’t breathe for love of toby. leo and bartlet and charlie and sam and donna- here i was thinking i was gonna resent will forever but i LOVE will. ainsley is an amazing woman. abbey is such a good character, god, talk about a flawed woman who’s allowed to be a good person.

AND THEN THEY MADE ME ROOT FOR A REPUBLICAN. again, i doubt you’ve gotten to s7, but the republican nominee in the last election... jesus christ. i love that man so much. arguably, i’m very biased, but also how D A R E they expect me to root against him. how DARE.

(i swear this will make more sense once you meet him. i just love the actor a lot, okay?)

anyways. this got ridiculously long. i would LOVE to talk about the west wing with you, feel free to reblog this with your own thoughts or tag me in your own post or message me or something. i would love to hear your reactions!! it’s such a good show, and such a smart show, and every character is so mcfreaking good at what they do and i adore it. enjoy the ride because there’s nothing as perfect and as quality as the west wing. if you’ll please excuse me, i’m going to go cry about 7x21 again.

[laufire]

I love when I win XDD. Ok, so, let's see: Eleanor Shellstrop, Lizzie Saltzman, Rosita from WEarp, Alisson Argent (one of my best friends was an Alisson stan in rl, and I used to be sick of hearing how awesome she was), Cersei Lannister and Echo from T100

EleanorShellstrop

This is thefirst time I really stop to think of Eleanor this way and… huh. I think she’s aVimes, which is not exactly what I would’ve expected xD (I guess it makessense, because a few Eleanor/Tony parallels had already ~pinged my radar lol).

There’s asimilar tired cynicism, just walking ahead in life with this sense ofnothing-really-matters, despite clearly being dissatisfied about it on somelevel (Vimes is a lot more self-aware than Eleanor, for one). Both have a “wakeup call” later in life when it’s (almost) too late, and after that you get tosee them taking charge, indignant about the faults of the system, etc. I evensee parallels between the Eleanor-Michael and Vimes-Vetinari dynamics (thisunofficial “mentor”, and how they transform each other’s worldviews).

LizzieSaltzman

The obviousone is Caroline, duh, and ofc there’s plenty of Caroline in her lol. But Ithink I see some Lana too? It’s not as obvious, it’s not really about anything she’ssaid or done just… a vibe. Maybe it’s just the actress, idk. I haven’t put myfinger on it, I’ll tell you if/when I do :P

Also, herresentment over the Alaric-Hope situation is very, very Jason with Bruce-Dicklol.

RositaBustillos

A Jason. Nodoubt in my mind. First, she’s a nerd (science nerd and not literature nerd,but still). And ofc, how her “origins” separate her from the core clan (Batfam/TeamEarp), put her at odds with them, make her feel she’s expendable for them (and she’sright here, unlike Jason). All culminating with her crossing A Line that breaksher relationship with them.

AllisonArgent

(I feel foryour friend lol. Allison’s death literally changed the way I get invested incharacters & shows xDD)

She’sALWAYS reminded me of Lana. Always. A Lana with a rushed arc, that met thetragic ended Lana avoided (most of the Lana types I’ve met so far had tragicendings, while Lana, original Tragedy Girl, swiftly avoided it lol). “Dark” arcincluded (and I guess Gerard would be her Lionel, sorta? It’s been a long timesince I watched these shows lol). Clark/Lana and Allison/Scott have a lot incommon too, imo. That Magic & destructive power of that first, True Love.Allison’s and Lana’s fears about being “weak”, the pressure they felt to bePerfect™. My bby girls.

CerseiLannister

If therewas ever a cautionary tale for how bad things could’ve gone for Caroline… I knowthis is an extremely controversial opinion, but I don’t think people realizedhow terrible SC would’ve ended for her, if it wasn’t for Klaus appearing andtransforming how the writers felt about SE. But Caroline stuck with a guy sheused to hero-worship but that was still obsessed with his past love, who hecouldn’t have for some reason, and in turn mistreated her? INCREDIBLE LIKELY,imo (Mellie Grant is another example for this, like I’ve told you).

ETA: after a conversation in the tags, I want to say it here (so it can be read by everyone), that Rhaegar=Stefan and Robert=Matt is a perfect parallel too xDD

Butbasically, yeah. The “dreams” they had when it came to men & how they wereshattered, the mean streak present in both from early on, the ambition andhunger. How they grasped power (vampirism for Caroline) and didn’t let go.Their approach to soft vs. hard power strikes me as similar too.

Echo kom Azgeda

I do see bothCaroline and Jason in her. From Caroline, her quick thinking, the leaps oflogic they make (T100’s s6 main plot is basically Katherine-in-Elena’sbody-snatch situation lol, and Echo figured out in two seconds flat once shestumbled into the first inconsistence –which I predicted. I literally said “Echo had to be absent from this episode because she would’ve figured out in two seconds flat”, and what do you, next episode she does just that xD–, just like Caroline did. It reminded meof how Caroline figured out the DE sire-bond too). Their willingness to carryout Tough Choices, how they cling to a notion of Their People.

BTW,recently there was an Echo Appreciation Week, and while I was making thosegifsets I noticed Echo sorta reminds me of Lizzie LMFAO. Something about the actresses’ expressions, body language etc. Plus there’s this AMAZING scene whereEcho just walks up to a guy and stabs him in the stomach with a sword, saying “Hesitationis death”, and while editing it I kept remember when Lizzie just walked up andstabbed Landon without a second thought xD. As a bonus? Landon’s body died, buthe could come back because he’s a Phoenix. The dude Echo stabbed is abody-snatcher, so while that body died, his chip could be put on someone else (also,Echo used said cheap as leverage against his mother. She makes me proud

With Jasonthere’s how they were made to take someone else’s name/mantel as children, howshe made that Her Identity, how her leader let her down & banished her whenhe thought she’d gone “too far”. How she keeps reinventing herself. The arc isout of order, but the emotional beats are so there. I guess Queen Nia could beher Talia too, thankfully without the sex xDD. And the way the conflict betweenher and Raven in s5 (aka Echo wanting to kill a dude Raven was getting investedon for valid strategic reasons xD) is not dissimilar to Dick and Jason’s dynamic imo(Echo at least is not alone being the Morally Dubious One Pushing For Murder AsA Solution in her new family! Murphy reminds me a lot of Jason too. So doesEmori. LOL).

[raviposting]

the true deserving queen of Westeros, Sansa Stark

Bwahahah honestly I’m fine with her being Queen in the North I’m a big stan of it and just getting rid of monarchy in the 7 Kingdoms LMAOOO but I feel you on this considering the canon of the show 

Why I like them gosh. So much??? She’s so strong and has gone through it all while being intelligent and genuinely kind. She’s not naive anymore, but she hasn’t become cruel despite everything that has happened to her and I love that about her. 

Why I don’t So there’s nothing really that makes me not like her? There were things that got me frustrated for sure - her not defending Arya in the Arya v Joffrey conflict, her being so into Joffrey, etc., but...they’re flaws, not anything that make me not like her. She was also 13 (11 in the books). Her being like that can be frustrating, yeah, but also significantly less horrendous to me because they’re coming from a literal child. Of course she’d act this way, of course she’d get manipulated so easily - not saying that every kid would be like this (ie Arya had less of that) but still, her age needs to be taken into account, as well as the fact that a lot of times grown adults were manipulated by the same people. So I tend to cut her slack on those. She’s a kid, and she responded accordingly to a lot of these situations. 

Favorite episode (scene if movie) Oh gosh The Purple Wedding episode! It was amazing, because she only had what, two lines? And yet she got through so much emotion through just her facial expressions. It was a great testament to Sophie Turner’s acting and a great example of how to write a character who has an internal monologue and not a lot of dialogue - something that D&D forgot for Sansa, Dany, Bran, and Jon later on but you  know, still. This episode was amazing. 

Favorite season/movie Ooooh hard. Maybe season 3 or 4? Or 5??? idk man 

Favorite line “Or maybe he’ll give me yours....your grace.” 

Favorite outfit HMM she’s had so many great outfits so this is hard. Objectively I do rather like her wedding dress to Tyrion as awful as that wedding was; also her QITN outfit was *chef’s kiss* amazing 

OTP Sansa/Margaery in modern AU times (slash overall), Sansa/Theon in show canon, Sansa/Some Peace and Quiet and Happiness in book canon

Brotp So overall I’d say her and Robb, even though we barely ever get to see their dynamic. It’s one that I really love to think about and I think they were probably extremely close. For show/book canon of what’s actually spoken about more slash shown, either her and Arya or her and Jon, although a specific fandom has made it hard for me to look at gifsets for one of those combinations. But despite fandom and show canon at times, I love these two dynamics a lot. 

Head Canon I’m gonna just go ahead and assume in show canon Podrick comes to Winterfell again and he and Sansa strike up a romance and she marries him. She deserves a dude who’s sweet and kind and would treat her well, and that’s Podrick :) I also like to HC that she and Tyrion are still good friends, and that they exchange letters and visits from time to time

Unpopular opinion Sansa Stark is not weak or to blame for the events of GOT! People have softened on their opinion of her over the years but you still get people blaming her for season 1 situations like Ned’s death (because you know, Ned didn’t walk up to who he thought was a murderer and say “HEY I KNOW YOUR SECRET THAT I’M PRETTY SURE YOU KILLED TO COVER UP” ) or saying that she’s weak because she doesn’t...what, pick up a sword and physically fight? It ignores the other types of bravery and strength and just dismisses her because she doesn’t physically fight 

A wish I wish she had been with someone at the end of the series. Not romantically, necessarily, but just someone she loved. I would have loved Arya staying with her, or had Theon lived him, or maybe Brienne as a show of loyalty or Podrick with the sense of some bond forming there, IDK. Anyone I would have taken anyone haha. Because I love her and I understand Winterfell is her home and by extension everyone there are people she loves and will care for/fight for/die for but like..we as an audience didn’t see the people who we know love for/care for/would die for Sansa there with her. We can assume those people would, sure, but I would have loved to see at least one familiar face. 

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen The show did a....lot in terms of things I didn’t want to happen for Sansa. But I guess death wasn’t one of them so..that? 

5 words to best describe them Brave, strong, kind, intelligent, beautiful

My nickname for them My ASL teacher in HS would call people “honey bunny baby head” as a term of endearment, and I’ve adopted to calling Sansa that in my tags for her :) 

Send me a character! // My fandoms

[harry-leroy]

Opera 2020: The Tempest (2/99)

My Rating: (4.75/5) 

Continuing on this track with some notes on Thomas Adès’s The Tempest! I got this opera DVD in November and finally got around to watching it just before I headed back to school (because I brought my DVD player extension home with me for break and I was going to use it over break goshdangit). The performance I watched was one from 2012, starring Sir Simon Keenlyside as Prospero. 

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Okay, so I got this opera from my university’s library in November so I could possibly use it when I was working on a Tempest paper last semester. That did not happen (which is fine), but it was really interesting to be able to look at some points in Shakespeare’s text that I touched on in my paper and see how the opera addressed them. 

One of those things was Prospero’s lack of specificity in his commands towards Ariel in Shakespeare’s text. I used this to create the argument that Ariel might have had some freedom in how he enacted Prospero’s wishes, and in addition to the fact that I felt like it was unclear between Prospero and Ariel who really had more skill, I argued that it was through music that Ariel takes his form of agency. (I use “he/him” pronouns for Ariel based on the one reference to a pronoun which Ariel uses in 1.2. - “task Ariel and all his quality”). Additionally, I feel like this lack of specificity in command also creates an air of suspense in the audience. We don’t know when Ariel is going to show up again, and we certainly do not know what he is going to do once he is made “like a nymph o’th’sea”. His songs are unexpected, though necessary points of dramatic movement. 

In Adès’s opera, these commands are explicitly clear. Meredith Oakes’s libretto is not the original text, but does keep some of what I feel to be the play’s best lines (one that I remember is ‘this isle’s full of noises’ - which is a great line from a great speech in the text). So what happens in the opera is that we get a line in which Prospero says “bring Ferdinand to me”, which is a significant change from the original text in how that relationship works. Ariel does not seem to act without Prospero’s explicit commands in this opera, which could possibly make it seem that Ariel is even more constricted than he is in the original text. 

As for some other things about the changes between the opera and the original Shakespearean text, there were some pretty significant changes in the plot regarding Ferdinand and Miranda. They end up running away together at the end of the first half, Miranda defying her father’s wishes when we get “he is a Caliban” moment. And they literally (I’m not joking) run off into the sunset as the curtain closes for intermission. While I recognized it as a pretty significant change from the original, I didn’t actually mind it that much. I liked seeing Miranda (Isabel Leonard) having more agency; it certainly felt more in line with the kind of young woman she is painted to be in the text (one with a boy’s education, and one who could probably easily lift the logs that Ferdinand struggles to carry, tomboyish and more masculine than some other Shakespearean daughters). Ferdinand (Alek Shrader) was absolutely precious throughout the entire opera, and it was like the only thing I kept thinking about any time he was on stage - and as a side note, I’m definitely going to make gifsets because y’all need to see how precious he was. He certainly was no Caliban. 

Speaking of Caliban, I totally understand why Ian Bostridge played him in the original 2004 cast now. If you know anything about Ian Bostridge (or even just what he looks like), you might cast him as Ferdinand, especially in 2004 when he was a bit younger, or maybe even Antonio if he was slightly too old to play Ferdinand. Caliban might be the last thing on your mind (and it’s interesting to think about Caliban as a tenor as well, because you probably wouldn’t normally see a character like Caliban in that sort of voice role). But then again, Caliban’s role in this opera was changed to one of a dispossessed prince. His struggles and his narrative voice, while he does play Prospero’s foe, fit within a tenor’s character. It makes even more sense when you think about the kind of stuff Bostridge likes to sing, Schubert and Britten seem to be his two favorites, so an angsty prince fits quite well (especially when you think about his long dedication to Schubert’s Winterreise - which is a terribly angsty tenor song cycle). I only mention Bostridge as the role was written with him in mind as playing Caliban. The role in this performance that I saw was played by Alan Oke, in which costuming was changed to be slightly more monstrous and less human-like than Bostridge’s. However, just listening to the libretto, I could definitely imagine it. 

Another change from the text was that the side-plot/backstory involving Claribel was taken out and replaced with another backstory involving an extravagant holiday that Alonso was taking along with many other members of court (which made up the chorus). I’m not sure whether I liked this change or not, though I suppose it makes Alonso look slightly more deplorable. It doesn’t seem to match up with the rest of his character though, especially in this opera, as he spends most of it lamenting for his son. 

Other notes on this performance: I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about Ariel in this opera, and her voice range was probably one of the reasons why I was unsure. It makes sense to cast a coloraltura soprano. The agility and skill that voice-type demands is fairly in-line with Ariel’s otherworldly magical qualities as a spirit. However, it was extremely difficult for me to understand the libretto because it was so high in register, so it helped to have subtitles on. That is nothing against Audrey Luna, who has a stunningly beautiful voice and her acting was also well done. It did get easier to understand her as the opera went on, but that first duet between Ariel and Prospero was certainly a bit difficult to get through. Additionally, I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about the chorus. Shakespeare’s play isn’t something that requires one, and there’s a lot of intimacy in the play for having it take place on a deserted island. We get wonderful relationships that develop in that lonely island space, so the chorus kind of took that away for me. Finally, the second half felt a bit crunched-down, a bit rushed through (particularly Caliban’s assassination plot, Antonio and Sebastian’s assassination plot, and the masque that happens in 4.1.). I’m thinking that this was most likely because they spent so much time with Ferdinand and Miranda in the first half, but I’m not sure. 

On the whole, I really enjoyed this opera. I definitely recommend giving it a listen, and if you’re able to get your hands on a DVD of it, to do that as well! Especially if you are a fan of Shakespeare’s play. I adore The Tempest as a play, and this opera made me fall in love with the text all over again. I also recommend looking up pictures of Ian Bostridge as Caliban because it’s trippy and wild but makes so much sense once you’ve actually seen this opera. I would have loved to have the 2004 performance filmed. Next up on my list is Madama Butterfly, which I will continue watching tonight. 

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey I was very confused why there was such a heavy parallel in the latest ep bw Cas-Dean fight in s11 and Cas-Sam fight. Like literally all the moves were same. The style and everything.

http://princesscas.tumblr.com/post/183463115250 

Hiya :D This makes a lot of sense to me because it’s part of the Endless Crypt Scenes Recursion. The fact that TJW did not direct this and it was Phil instead also feels significant to me because thus far the most blatant parallels in the staging have ALL been done by the same director, even with a parallel back in his earlier work on Dark Angel with Jensen, shooting an almost identical scene to this one. The fact that this visual language is being repeated by another director is very significant to me to showing the show understands the language that TJW has been talking in and that other parts of the show can repeat it and utilise it within their own storytelling. 

My crypt scenes tag contains many very long posts explaining the recursions, listing every instance I can think of including platonic or failed subversions, and the parallel to the Swan Song set of conditions and how the two aren’t alike though a scene can look like either on the surface when being done as a less elaborate mirror and just having a quick mind control/possession thing thrown into the story. 

In this case it fits the pattern in a very interesting way - between Sam and Cas we have a very classic Swan Song reversal in 11x14, with Cas holding back Lucifer to stop him killing Sam while possessed, which was excellent, and also is very firmly brotherly love territory. And this again mirrors the staging of the classic “reverse crypt scene” we had been expecting for a while as a fandom since Dean took the Mark of Cain, but covers different emotional territory. Cas makes his plea to Dean very personally about having to watch him murder the world, then when Dean has beaten him in the fight, is emotionally defeated and begging from that same position. With Sam he is clear-headed and can list off multiple reasons he understands Sam has been controlled like this, his own experiences of similar, and then gives Sam MULTIPLE family-based reasons to stop, and like the man remembering his daughter through his cellphone earlier, saying “Jack” is what breaks through to Sam and so the connection is broken not even by Cas and his personal bond with Sam as an intense interpersonal connection, but by the whole enchilada of their connection, personal similarities, empathy, etc, and their family, their collective parenthood of Jack, everything. 

Like, if Cas had been like that in 10x22, he’d have been lying on his back wrestling with Dean instead of feebly clinging to his arm, saying, like, “Listen, Dean, we’ve all been through a lot and I remember when I was controlled by Naomi and being made to beat you up and it really sucked but I understand what it’s like to become consumed by violence, after all I too was driven crazy by all those leviathans when I was Godstiel and I know how hard it can be but please think about how much you have to live for, not just for me but also for Sam and think about how Charlie would feel you doing all this in her name, and - “

I don’t remember the scene like that :P 

It’s important when we’re getting parallels and comparisons in the story to really think about what they’re saying and how they’re set up and what their context is, because it’s not always like for like and saying oh if Dean did this to Cas then Sam doing the same means that they both had the same moment… There were so many external factors, from how lost Sam was from being himself vs how Dean was an amplified rage version of Dean still on his same operating system even if it was messed up to hell with all the darkness, so his motives and relationships remained in a Dean range, while Sam was just attacking Cas mindlessly as far as any reason SAM would have for doing it.  He doesn’t even have a narrative feud with Cas, even in quiet implications of, for example, jealousy of his connection to Jack or something. He and Cas are 100% chill at the moment and therefore there’s no REASON they’d fight and it would be personal. Whereas with Dean n Cas, Dean’s entire feeling of trust and connection in his family had been shattered and he was feeling Cas was implicated in Sam’s scheme that got Charlie killed too, even if we saw the story itself bend in knots to avoid getting a drop of blood on Cas’s hands. That wasn’t Dean’s perspective, and he was killing so many people he was building up a huge bloodlust feeding the Mark, hence his extremely violent and personal response. 

So what this new Sam n Cas parallel gives us is a hugely important emotional moment, because everything Cas says of course is valid and important, but it shows us the level to which his relationship with Sam is a broad and all-encompassing family love built of many factors and shared connections and how they do have a hugely important personal bond they’ve expressed to each other on several occasions about their own mistakes and losses and over-reaching etc. It’s like, in no way is what Sam and Cas have NOT immense and worth calling a very important family love and important connection for the both of them to have. But it also shines a light on what was different about Dean and Cas - that even in this episode their relationship was snarky and bitchy in pure fondness and adoration but you know, hidden behind a huge eye roll each. And their fight in 10x22 was entirely personal and emotional and on such a deep level that in many ways there were no words, but the words Cas did say were practically a marriage declaration which Dean then rejected, and after that Cas had nothing else to give or say because it felt clear he’d given his ALL to Dean. The intense emotion of that scene had a great deal more of the fight and it was serious, in a main plot episode, in the heart of their home, and vicious and horrible in the same way that OG Cas in 14x13 attacking Dean had been vicious and horrible and just, merciless, as a contrast to what you’d want them to be with each other… A lot of the fight was to make us wince in horror and pain at seeing Dean attack Cas like that, while watching “Justin” with his hair and his glasses and his Mr Rogers sweater tackling Cas across a cutsey milkshake bar was HILARIOUS on a visual level and only when “Justin” got hold of Cas’s blade did it even get scary rather than making us giggle like everything else that asshole did. :’) 

So… yeah. Vital data for my horrifying graph of this thing, but the parallel isn’t “meaningful” in a way of actually saying anything romantic about Sam n Cas or devaluing the romance of what Dean n Cas have. It was all good fun :D