#Coup by Clam

[hetchdrive]

*sensually eats a bowl of jello to save my not-really-friends from fatal food poisoning*

[whoopseydaisy]

a name you swallow vs. a name that feels like you have a mouth full of peanut butter FIGHT!

[basingstokemercury]

Me: If you were designing a stereotypical femme fatale look but for a male character, how would you do it? My mum: Doctor Bashir. Me: ...that's not very helpful. (muses) Of course I could always just put a man in a slinky dress and earrings, but I'd like to try and get creative- My mum: Ben Browder! Me: *sigh*

[united-under-skyfall]

leverage is so fucking funny. man manages to find the most mentally ill and neurodivergent group of thieves on the market + an even more mentally ill guy whose literal job description was trying to chase all of them, and forces them into a found family speed-run by trying to blow them all up. they lowkey stage a full fucking country wide coup and are like eh 🤷 just another wednesday. this might be a fun place to vacation tho i guess. sophie shows up to her own funeral twice. they're so good at convincing people of their shit that they make a guy's body start reacting to an illness he doesn't have because it isn't real. go completely out on a limb and basically hand this one guy a new password for his computer so they can get into it and he goes with it. parker and hardison have straight up just "fake it 'till you make it"d into the fbi without even attempting to cover their tracks beyond just These Two Guys. half their clients never asked to be their clients and don't know they're their clients, and the other half are random people who find them who fuckin knows how, meanwhile no government agency can track them down without selling their soul to sterling. they make a point to have a dramatic scene w a Big Bad Shadowy Government Guy who doesn't actually get caught or brought to justice or anything telling them he's going to hunt them all down, and in any other show this would probably earn at least a minor arc later on but he literally never shows up again. an entire season finale hinged on a cake and a bunch of clams. they accidentally made eliot a celebrity not once, not twice, but three times. parker blew up her foster parents' house when she was like. nine. and it's hardly a footnote. hardison is just casually an artistic prodigy but it's only ever brought up for the most background of background gags. eliot's biggest beef with parker and hardison for like two and a half seasons is that they won't stop making weird food with lasers and refuse to realize they can't make a decent beer to save their lives. sophie's immediate response to being shot is to call her shooter a wanker. there's a character who has literally killed a man with a mop and they had the audacity to only put her in one episode.

[sophsun1]

FARSCAPE

4.10 Coup By Clam

[plethomacademia]

Had a lunch fit due to this picture of Enver pouring wine on himself. Maevetash, M rating for blood and a sideways reference to sex, 681 words, Gort provokes Maeve by pouring wine on his chest when she is in Blood Weirdo mode

Maeve puts her fingers to Enver Gortash’s chest, just above his heart, and begins to trace. She cannot say whether or not her movement is accurate, whether she is faithfully following the flow of the blood being pumped out from his heart, heavy with oxygen fresh from his lungs. Once her fingertips touch his open collar, she goes back to try again.

She hears the slurp of him taking another drink, and then the wet sounds of his mouth as the liquid is sent down his esophagus. She looks to the middle of his chest, imagining the red wine going underneath the path of his red blood.

“You are distracted,” he says and she feels his words in her hands.

“Distracted from what?” she says, looking up to see him watching her. “We aren’t doing anything.”

It is half true. They are at rest after a hearty meal and a hearty debate over whether a historical coup had been a success or a failure. Maeve had argued the former (the coup had in fact succeeded), Enver had argued the latter (the government formed in its aftermath had quickly collapsed). They have settled on the couch of his study and she has allowed him to put his arm around her. Finally, she has relaxed into it and now they they are in the in-between space: the time period after the excuse for their coming together and before the battle to convince her to stay for just a little while longer.

“You would like to though, I think,” he says.

“You like to think that you that know what I would like, I think,” she replies.

He moves his glass back to his lips. “Mm,” he hums as he takes a sip.

Maeve looks back to her hand, paused above his right pectoral and the lovely layer of fat that his fine life has put over it. She moves it back to his heart.

Suddenly, her vision is filled with red.

She feels herself freeze and she anticipates copper, she anticipates iron, she anticipates a thick trail of sticky clinging red that drips fast and then slow as it grabs onto itself, trying to stop itself from pouring, the kind that could coat a tongue, maybe a throat if you are greedy.

Instead, there is a splash, followed by the smell of oak and grapes, a red burst that dissipates into a thin film in between the hair on his chest and belly. She looks to his face again and finds him smiling, his wine glass held nearly horizontally, just high enough to keep him from spilling even more of the drink onto himself.

“What are you doing?!” she says and she hates how it sounds coming out.

“Testing a theory,” he says. He smiles at her and she knows he heard it, the surprise and worse, the betrayal when the red liquid was not the one that she wanted.

“Perhaps I will test my own theories, Lord Gortash.” She pushes herself to sitting, then slings a leg over his lap. This lets her put both hands on his chest and she digs in her thumbs, presses them both into his sternum. She does not let up until his skin is white from the pressure, then hooks each finger, as if she might decide at any time to open his chest like a clam.

“Oh come now, you have long decided that I am best kept alive. But,” he says, making sure that she is listening before he continues, “if you desire to carve me up, I am always amenable to seeing you exercise your lovely control, Slayer.”

She feels him already hardening underneath her bottom and she pushes down hard, enough to earn her a wince. “You are a reckless fool, Enver Gortash.” She lets herself extend a single nail, a piece of her father’s power, just enough to fill the white divot underneath of her thumbs with red, proper red, thick and pooling. She breathes in the scent of him. “One day, I won’t bother to bring you back from it.”

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

I know the Farscape fandom has pretty much decided that Jeremiah Crichton is the worst episode of the series, but even though I’m not a huge fan of that episode, I think Vitas Mortis is by far the worst episode of the series. There are actually a bunch of episodes that I like less than Jeremiah Crichton. These are just personal taste because I know for a fact that some of these episodes are objectively a lot better than Jeremiah Crichton.

I would watch Jeremiah Crichton over any of these episodes:

Vitas Mortis

I, E.T.

That Old Black Magic

Crackers Don’t Matter

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Incubator

Dream a Little Dream

Lava’s a Many Splendored thing

Coup by Clam

Mental As Anything

Constellation of Doubt

[dangermousie]

Farscape Rewatch - 2x07 and 2x08

Not my fave eps (in fact, 2x08 Dream a Little Dream is my least fave ep in the season and in my bottom three eps of the show) so not too much to say.

Home on the Remains 2x07

The start of D’Argo x Chiana, a glorious secondary ship.

I love the visuals of the pollen floating through the ship. I love that you can never feel entirely comfortable with Zhaan because underneath her calm, even good demeanor, there is madness waiting to peep out and the show never lets you forget it. Here it really manifests when she is in starvation mode and it’s scary and surreal and oddly beautiful. For Zhaan, like for many other of the characters, being good, doing good is not the default - it’s a conscious, hard-won choice and I love that.  Second comment is that we get some glimpse into what Chiana’s life was before Moya, and why she was all spikes when she came on board. Her loyalty is manifest here as is her lack of self-worth: she is OK with whoring herself to get Zhaan a meal(!!!!!) (and I love how both John and D’Argo would much rather kill the guy). And so is her darkness: she kills the guy in a pretty gruesome way and doesn’t dwell on it for a second. I really do think she is the one who killed the Nebari keeper in the ep she first appeared. And also here is the start of Chi and D’Argo. I squealed at the kiss when I first saw it and get !!! on every rewatch. I loved how complicated this OTP was and how invested I was and how their flaws and strengths both intertwined into it.

And some of my fave quotes are here. I love Aeryn’s snide ‘I get to babysit the blooming blue bush and you get to play with your favorite little tralk’ and Crichton’s ‘you can eat anything if it’s fried’ is sort of a catchphrase in the Mousie household. I also love the scene with Rygel on the sled and Rygel biting John and John biting back. Yeah. This show was gloriously unhinged. 

Not a favorite ep but enjoyable enough, which is more than I can say, with few exceptions for the ep that follows.

Dream a Little Dream 2x08

This is my most fast-forwarded S2 ep ever. Honest. Blah. 

But even a truly bad ep has some glorious exchanges.

Anyway, this ep is largely a flashback by Zhaan about what happened to her, China and Rygel between end of s1 and start of s2. Zhaan goes crazy while being framed on planet of evil lawyers. Rygel and Chiana save her. Blah. End of flashback.

I’ve read someone say that the problem with this episode is that since it’s a flashback we have no tension. We know everyone will be OK. But I don’t think that is the case. After all, do we really expect Crichton et al to be bumped off at a random ep? No, but we still get excited about the eps (of course, DALD takes it further as we know everything will return to status quo we know now but still…) And we just a few eps ago had The Way We Weren’t which was largely set three years prior to the premiere episode and it’s one of the best eps of the season. For me, the flashback is not the problem. I think this is the ep that reiterated for me that while I find Zhaan and Rygel interesting in small dozes, an ep centered around them is not really my thing. And I love Chiana, but probably ditto unless she is interacting with someone other than them. Basically, my character order of preference goes: John, Aeryn, D’Argo, Chi etc etc. And an ep where my top 3 characters are absent (minus a very very cool hallucination) drags. The plot is also not scintillating. In fact, to call it simplistic with truly boring characters except for the regulars is to compliment it. Oh well, they can’t all be winners and Farscape had way less losers than most (after this ep, I adore every single ep until S4′s Coup by Clam - every single ep and that’s insane.) I do love Chiana and Rygel as trial lawyers, utterly hopped up and themselves in wiggle room exploitation. And the courtroom design is very neat. But that is about it.

Also, this is a small framing scene but I do love how, once again, John is the one who believes that talking it out helps. He gets more and more hardened but he still believes in talking it out, even if it’s now limited solely to those he loves (that is why in part the end of 2x22 DMD hits so hard - John lying there, agreeing to a procedure that will render him mute, because, as he says, there is nobody he want to talk to anyway and nothing to say. One of the worst times he’s been broken thoroughly; though he always manages to reassemble himself somehow.)

I do love Zhaan and John’s bond. I will always love Farscape for many reasons but one of them is creating all these powerful, complex women and not having them be love interests for the male lead. Crichton’s relationships with important female characters are varied - with Zhaan here she’s the older sister in so many ways - but except for Aeryn, they are never romantic, and very very rarely sexual (and if we remove Grayza where the sexual element is not by his choice, the rarity becomes even more pronounced) and I love that.

[soulsxng]

"What were you thinking?!"

"Zae, please, darling...I was only trying to provide for you--"

Mattias' hand only just brushes Zahine's arm when a resounding slap echoed through the room. The halfling glaring daggers at his husband as he stopped pacing and smacked the offending hand away from himself.

"Provide? Provide what, Mattias? We're doing well enough as it is-- and that aside, Elyki doesn't exist to make a profit! We exist to help the people that aren't able to speak or act for themselves against the powers above them! How does inciting a riot out of nowhere accomplish that?"

"Ahnia has been unstable for nigh on twenty years now! If the people there didn't want change, there wouldn't be a growing coup there in the first place. It's obvious that they want Tahariel on the throne-- as they should! He's done more for Ahnia than Lierik and Kalliah for it. More than any of their spawn have done for it!"

Zahine falls quiet, and the already chilly air in the room goes absolutely frigid. For a while, it's all that he can do to stare at Mattias, but when he does finally speak again, his voice is low. Low, and unnervingly smooth.

"...What did he give you?"

It's Mattias' turn to clam up, now. Though he tries at first to stammer out a halfhearted response, he eventually gives up. Reaching out with both hands in an attempt to take Zahine's, who steps back and out of his reach.

"Don't touch me. I asked you a question, Mattias. What did Tahariel Elohim give you, for taking the deal that I said we were turning down? Because I really, truly hope that it was worth the price of putting every single person here in danger!"

He gestures toward the other members of Elyki, who were seated about the room, silent and still as the dead. Watching the argument between their leaders as it unfolded before them.

"I hope that it was worth allowing Blackwood and Duva'li to be imprisoned. That it was worth my baby being imprisoned!" Mattias continues trying to approach as Zahine's voice climbs to a shout again, his expression darkening when Zahine pushed him away.

Always, with those two fucking brats. It hadn't escaped Mattias' notice that Melchior wasn't present for this meeting. And 'his baby'? Mattias had to admit, he did prefer Eluvias-- the younger of the manticore brothers that Zahine had taken in all those years ago-- over Melchior...but hey. He knew that there was a risk of capture when he went on the job. (not that he'd had the choice) Maybe he should have been faster with his escape.

Golden gaze flicked about the room, taking in each face that surrounded he and his husband, before reaching out to snatch Zahine by the arm. His beloved struggled against him as he was dragged from the room, but the Ahniri was quick to grab up a fistful of grey hair and give it a firm (but not yet painful-- it was still a warning) tug backward.

Though Zahine was compliant after that; following Mattias to their bedroom to continue their conversation more privately, Mattias could tell that he was furious.

...But that was alright. Be it happiness or anguish, determination or fury, his Zae always had, and always would be the most perfect thing to him.

Even negative attention from a being so flawlessly ethereal was attention, after all...and Mattias was more than happy to lap up whatever Zahine was willing to give.

[x-authorship-x]

For the ask game: 🗣️ I love reading your thought process, so that should be fun! (What would be the chances of the WIP being about Shisui...🤔🤔🤔/jk) Hope you have a good weekend! xoxo

Hey Nalyvia ~~~

Just for that, I'll pick an unconventional one! 🤭

*insert fifteen minutes of digging through docs* FOUND ONE

Okay so this is gonna be minimally edited (because it is so riddled with typos it's barely even coherent lmao) but this is a Naruto/BnHA fic where Obito and Shisui are brothers! I actually keep within Shisui's Canon age range by having him at 14 lmao, Obito is 19-20

ADVERSITY

Obito spontaneously remembers he has a heart and grabs shisui before Danzo can steal his eye. Shisui loses his shit, thinks Obito is trying to stop him from saving the Uchiha, and goes all mangekyou, dropping their asses in BNHA. They have a major freak out and run around like headless chickens through tokyo as they beat each other's asses and the truth comes out in bits and pieces; shisui with the coup and Tobi being his older brother Obito who was saved by crazy ass Madara, before their fight is interrupted by a villain-hero fight, which they drop kick and then disappear in the aftermath.

They track down a library, rob a bunch of people, and do some research before having another huge argument about winding up here - obito is furious at shisui for dumping them when theres no way to get back whilst shisui is still raging that obito fucked off for five years - and decide on a truce to survive. Shisui points out that if they use their chakra in public theyre gonna get arrested and experimented on real fast, if not locked in prison, so they should look into get licenses; obito is like fuck no. so they decide to cut the labour between them; Shisui is old enough to blitz through middle school graduation before applying to high school (novelty, delight and frustration all at once) whilst obito is gonna go digging about what villains do around here and see if theres any chakra or way back etc. they manage to forge papers with liberal sharingan usage and thievery and get an apartment. Obito makes a comment about shisui going back to the academy; Shisui dodges the argumentative tone and seriously asks why Obito let him think he was dead but obito clams right up.

Shisui enrolls in online classes at a local school and dreams about what nightmare he’s abandoned his family to; obito seems to sense his mood but refuses to talk about it. This gets tricky when he starts going out at night and making a name for himself; Shisui tells him to aim for vgiliante, so that if he does get arrested then the heroes wont immediately chuck him in prison, but grey-scale enough that he can talk to villains. Obito says hes not gonna get arrested and shows off his kamui skill; shisui wonders what theyre gonna do about their shared ‘quirks’ being recognised. Obito whips out the orange mask and says he’ll stick to intangibility and pretend his daylight persona - not that he plans to be out and about - just has the energy manipulation required for Shunshin etc since they can both do it; shisui’s quirk will be energy augmentation, which allows him to shunshin etc; theyre keeping their sharingan hidden as nothing but a latent family mutation in the pupil. Obito starts making a name for himself, although he regretfully fails to kill-shot anyone as thats a very serious crime to get caught committing; he meets  heroes and starts playing cat and mouse with them.

shisui, meanwhile, is having a breakdown over the internet and history here, an existential crisis about propaganda, locked in their shitty apartment with a stolen computer to use for class and research. He starts wandering the city in the afternoons, feeling like his whole life has been upended; when he speaks to obito about it, his brother starts mocking him about getting a reality check from being a brainwashed little tool; shisui screams at him about being loyal and looking after those he loves at least and runs out into the night; obito goes after him and tracks him down to the beach where he sighs and begrudgingly apologises. Shisui asks why obito never came back for him, why he let Shisui think his brother was dead; obito tells him that when Rin died, when Kakashi was the one to do it… he felt like he’d gone insane and he didnt want to go back to a village, one he’d been desperately holding onto despite the fact he’d been left to die in that landslide begging for death but somehow holding on for hours of agony, and it felt like nothing had been what he’d thought. Thered been an old man and a strange creature who’d cursed him back to health, whispering strange things in his ear whenever he regained consciousness, and obito hadnt wanted to be Obito after that; he was better off having died in that cave… so he became someone else. Shisui tells him about losing obito and then his entre genin team in the same month, about gaining his mangekyou and the way the elders had suddenly seemed to crawl all over him in interest; about itachi’s vacant, tragic eyes and sasuke’s reluctant attention and the weight of fugaku’s disappointed stare; about no one wanting to look at him, even speak to him, until after he’d forced himself into the spotlight at the chuunin exams when he killed everyone he came across, so skilled and talented and look at me look at me - about joining anbu and finally feeling seen even when he was in the shadow corps. About the coup and danzo and walking the wire for months, trying to save everyone even as they dug their graves deeper and deeper. Shisui bawls his eyes out, suddenly so terribly young, and obito, for the first time since he ‘died’, holds him.

Its three months later when obito meets endeavour. It goes about as well as expected when endeavour almost exploded an entire block trying to burn obito alive only for obito to flee without so much as a singe-mark….all the civilians are found dumped, unconscious, in an alleyway a safe distance away(he grabbed them and knocked them out with kamui). Obito is launched into the public eye after that. Shisui starts looking into quirk history and politics and current rankings; obito is both uninterested and intrigued when shisui points out certain heroes and he goes around trying to meet them (edgeshot is cool but definitely not a ninja… he looks too much like kakashi and obito flees that thought). As the entrance exam for UA approaches, obito finally meets eraserhead, scares the shit out of the man when his quirk doesnt make obito drop from the side of the building he’s crouched on, and we get a detective cut scene about ****Obito's vigiliante name***’s quirk. 

Entrance exam day; Shisui really hasnt been getting out much and he’s shocked by a lot of things, especially when the guy next to him tells people off (which is valid because dont these people understand respecting authority and shit, but also really he shouldn't be putting himself out there like tht...). He ends up in the physical exam with tokoyami and is impressed and regretful for the loss of his crow summons; he compliments tokoyami afterwards and gets to meet dark shadow, who clicks and whistles at him to tokyami’s bewilderment. Shisui legs it out of there; no surprise, he passes first in the exam. Obito, meanwhile, is approached in a bar by dabi who introduces him to kurogiri as they both presumably have ‘warping’ quirks. Obito has hit something big; dabi is both pissed and impressed by the idiot annoying his old man.

First day of UA: shisui is in 1-A and meets tenya again, slinking to his seat away from the attention; denki complains that between Shisui and shouto theyre not gonna get any girls to themselves; dark shadow and tokoyami greet shisui and momo interjects with interest when tokoyami compliments him again on his amazing showing in the exams; Shisui is put off by the open discussion of quirks, since its handing out their own weaknesses, but shrugs off the attention as having a simple speed-quirk. Aizawa finally calls out to the class and they go outside for their tests; shisui’s genin test was to find his old sensei in the middle of the village without being seen by civilians. This test is just fitness. He gets a lot of looks in the changing room and shisui is annoyed he didnt think to cover the scars; he foolishly though hero hopefuls would be more trained than this; he just says that hes been caught up in a few villain fights since he lives in a rough neoughbourhood and unwittingly makes everyone wonder if he’s a bit of a gang-type despite his politeness lmao

Aizawa calls Shisui up to do first ball throw, revealing that shisui came first in both parts of the exam (shisui is a jounin AND he used a sharingan for the test, c'mon people) and Midoriya steps up to do his tests , making aizawa use his quirk to stop him hurting himself. Shisui abruptly realises he’s going to have to fake being influenced by aizawa’s quirk and pay attention in the future so that no one can mae a connection between him and obito’s vigilante persona. Mineta is expelled, classes begin, and absolutely no one predicted that Shisui would be sitting with Bakugou of all people. Why? Everyone else is waaaaay too open, Bakugou is short tempered and angry but hes also so much more feral to succeed than most of them. There's a difference between trying hard in school and being absolutely devoted, Bakugou has been living and breathing his training since childhood (Todoroki is the same but shisui can smell the trauma and also this in endeavors kid, he doesn't want to risk Obito's cover) and shisui respects that even if he's increasingly annoyed with his temper and lashing out.

Obito joins the League to dig deeper into the underworld. Bakugou warms up to shisui when he realises that shisui isn't interested in petty childish egos and is professionally fixated on getting his license, which also helps Bakugou stop focusing on how others are doing. Shisui flunks the sports festival, because revealing his fighting style and 'quirk' on tv is a hard NO and Bakugou almost loses it when he see that shisui is 'whimping out' and they have a bad argument. Shisui avoids endeavor, Obito catches the Hero Killer for the clout, Bakugou is kidnapped by the league and broken out by shisui, realising that Shisuis 'rough neighbourhood' backstory might be even more gang-related than even Kaminari was gossiping about...

Shisui/Bakugou, Obito/Dabi

And that's all I had! I just copy pasted it 😅 maybe this reveals a bit about how I plan a fic?

This was fun, thanks for playing! Have a great weekend too ✨✨

[boypussydilf]

coup by clam is certainly. an episode of farscape. but damn if john crichton didnt look great in drag

[leolaroot]

the Scorpius scenes in coup by clam. also

[sophiecatstiredofmodernism]

The "coup by clam" episode of Farscape.

i'm founding a new school of media criticism which i've decided to call Bitism. the Bitist school of literary analysis asks a simple question: is this work committed to the bit?

you see, any work of fiction is either committed to the bit or it's not. the worst thing a piece of media can be is ashamed of its own premise, of the genre it in habits, of the tropes and aesthetics we expect from it. to be committed to the bit does not inherently make it good, but it makes it more worthy of respect than those which are not.

also, that's not to say that a story cannot parody or criticize the genre it inhabits or mimics. we can discuss the bit, we can deconstruct the bit, we can ask ourselves whether or not it's a good bit, but to commit to it first will strengthen these discussions, not detract from them. commitment to the bit is, after all, the first step to genuine sincerity. and sincerity will exalt and elevate parody such that it can stand on its own feet.

commitment to the bit turns melodrama into camp, elevates parody to biting commentary, and allows cringe to open up into a resonant, if unpolished, expression of true emotion.

fully expect bitism to take the literary world by storm sometime in the next few years.

[thechurn]

coup by clam has to be the horniest fucking episode so far. good lord

[baylardo]

I love that scene in farscape coup by clam when rygel goes shopping for women’s clothes because him and John are going to cross dress to get into a girls club and John like Ew yucks the purple dress rygel has chosen for him specifically because it’s the color purple and rygel is like I wear that color all the time </3