#I apparently have to add commentary to all posts

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

I've been reading your Erikar posts and I think that they work really well with the idea that moirallegiance really doesn't work the way it's "supposed" to. It's framed in-universe as a very one-sided "stable person pacifies dangerous person" deal, but both Erifef and Gamkar, which are basically platonic ideals of that concept, failed independently because of how unstable that dynamic is -- one person is worn out doing all the emotional labor and the other is not interested in being pacified. Whereas the meowrails, despite also being framed as a "classical" moirallegiance, are much more clearly two-sided, as both parties consistently help, listen to, and advise each other, and the relationship is consequently much stabler and more enduring. I love the way you frame Erikar because it works really well with this by showing both parties taking and giving "pacification" and support in turn, instead of one shouldering all the work.

Yeah! I think this is a good way to talk about something Hussie likes to do that I'm a huge fan of, which is: unreliable narration. This unreliable narration has garnered Hussie the reputation of being a "troll" or even flat-out "wrong" about HS, and I find both of these to be very unfair because the use of unreliable narrator is both deliberate AND thematically fitting.

As part of Homestuck's post-modern stylings (and I mean post-modern in the literature sense, not vis. art, though it has shades of that too), it plays heavily on the ideas of narrator-as-character, author-as-character, metafiction, and we-all-know-it's-a-story-itis. Hussie himself, even in his external commentaries (Formspring, Tumblr, Books, etc.), is fully aware that his additions add to the metatextual texture of the work and change how it's interpreted - that, although his additions technically lie external to the "story" Homestuck is telling, they are also paradoxically part and parcel of that very story.

As a result, they deliberately play a character WRT Homestuck, both in- and out-of-universe, and this character is, by their own admission, buffoonish and oafish. It's really apparent in their book commentary, where they'll sometimes even drop the act, or "realize" they've dropped the act and hurry to put it back on (a standout moment is when he provides a very genuine, honest analysis of Vriska, before going "oh, wait, I forgot, she's literally my wife and has never done anything wrong ever in her life ever"). They also mention how their narrative voice sometimes works antagonistically to the characters, such as when it assures Vriska that she has no choice but to kill Aradia, subtly pushing Vriska towards that option.

Functionally, neither the narrator nor the author (and by that, I mean the caricaturized character of "the author" that Hussie plays) of Homestuck are entities that you can take fully at face value; they need to be challenged and interrogated as much as any other character, have their motives dissected, have their blind spots pointed out.

And why would this need to be the case? Because that's literally one of the main thrusts of Homestuck: malicious entities (in HS's case, LE, Doc Scratch, and Caliborn, who at various times struggle with Hussie for control of the story, before killing him and wresting it away entirely) will attempt to write the narrative. They'll push their version of events, their politics, their biases, their philosophies. They'll try to change the story to suit them and perpetuate their own power and ability to enforce that power. And you can't let them win.

Hussie-as-a-character/narrator himself is not particularly malicious, and, as the narrative prompt serving as Caliborn's guide, is even ultimately sympathetic, expressing that kids need to grow up and mature, achieve self-actualization, emotional catharsis, etc.

However, as a result of his oafishness, he has a tendency to play to the characters' worst instincts, to pick favorites among the cast. The most blatant example of this is his "love" of Vriska, which - contrary to popular opinion - isn't "real". Hussie is not actually in love with Vriska; the whole thing started because - due to misogyny - people accused Hussie of only giving Vriska so much plot relevance because he was literally in love with her. Why else would a female character with an unpleasant personality be allowed to be important, amirite? And Hussie clearly thought that this whole thing was so ridiculous that he 100% leaned into it as a joke. I'm not here to litigate whether or not it was appropriate to do so, just to point out that Hussie's "love" of Vriska was always an artifice - an aspect of Hussie-as-character that he played up to highlight the fact that Hussie-as-character is an unreliable buffoon, and, by extension, that Vriska is not blameless and perfect.

Since this is the Eridan blog, I'd be remiss not to talk about him. Hussie's commentary towards Eridan is especially fascinating to me, because Eridan is one of he characters Hussie-as-character is biased against, in a similar way as he's biased in Vriska's favor. Thus, his attitude towards Eridan is very dismissive, both in the book commentary AND in the comic itself. "Gamzee: Indulge emotional theatrics" and "Jade: Answer this douche bag" come to mind. He also spends the vast majority of the Act 5 Act 2 book mocking Eridan for being sad and alone, with nobody to care about him and nobody who listens to his problems.

Now, the reason I call this fascinating is twofold: the first is that his commentary in the Act 5 Act 1 book has a WILDLY different tone: while he's still biased in Eridan's disfavor, he outright calls Eridan a "good character" alongside Nepeta, and offers genuine insight into his characterization and the powers of Hope - comparing him at one point to Dave if Dave took a much darker path.

So when his attitude changes from "he's a shithead, but fairly complex, I guess" to "he's a loser idiot that nobody likes LMAOOOO", you're supposed to notice that! You're supposed to question that, to wonder why he has a change of heart, why he's suddenly so dismissive of a character he was genuinely writing whole paragraphs about before.

And the answer is multifaceted:

He's playing up his buffoonish character, to let you know that he's about to be wrong as hell. Every time Hussie starts really amping up the Hussie-as-character persona, you're about to be in for an opinion that SHOULD NOT be taken at face value.

He's reflecting a common fandom opinion, because one of his favorite things to do as an unreliable narrator is to speak on behalf of another character or entity, highlighting the biases and blind spots in play - in this case, the audience's. Again, he's about to be wrong as hell, so he's doing this specifically to indicate that the audience members who believe this are also wrong as hell.

Act 5 Act 2 is when we get the one conversation in all of Homestuck where somebody (Karkat) cares about Eridan and takes his problems seriously. During this part of the story, Hussie goes COMPLETELY silent. This is incredibly out of character, as he usually can't shut up, and the commentary is usually dense, packed with words, without pause. Compare:

In those blocks of silence are contained the conversation Eridan has with Karkat where Karkat literally tells him "I know it's hard being you" and that Nepeta's rejection of him wasn't a negative reflection of him. In other words, Karkat cares about Eridan and takes him seriously, COMPLETELY contradicting Hussie-as-character's assertions that nobody does, so utterly that Hussie-as-character has to completely shut up during that entire sequence because he has no way of reconciling his stance with the evidence presented.

Now, Hussie-as-an-actual-person is completely aware of what they're doing, or else they couldn't do stuff like this so consistently and so precisely. So I want to be very, very clear that this is not Hussie "not understanding his own story" or whatever BS the fandom likes to say in order to cast Hussie as the villain. This is masterful usage of unreliable narrator, like, I'm genuinely impressed.

By acting a clown and insisting that nobody likes or cares about Eridan, the audience is MEANT to glean from the text:

That Karkat is clearly an exception, and he quite likes and cares about Eridan,

That those who are dismissive towards Eridan and treat him purely as an object of ridicule are Wrong as Hell,

That maybe it's not a good thing for us - both audience, author, and characters - to be so quick to judge and dismiss others just because they're annoying and nasty - that doing so can have dire consequences, as we see with how Eridan's story plays out.

And I'm not kidding when I say that we have to be constantly fucking vigilant, that there's very, very little that can be purely taken at face value. Not long after this is one of Karkat's memos, where he attempts to warn his past friends about all the murders, only to dismiss past!Gamzee by saying that current!Gamzee going crazy murderclown "barely even concerns [him]." Hussie then notes in the commentary - and not for the first time - that Karkat has a Problem(TM) with not seeing past/future versions of people as contiguous with their current selves, which he does as a defense mechanism so as not to confront his own feelings of shame and self-loathing. Hussie then proceeds not to comment on the following:

CCG: YOU ARE DEAD TO ME CCG: PAST YOU, PRESENT YOU, FUTURE YOU CCG: AND ABOVE ALL, UGLY SCARFNECKED DOUCHEBAG HIPSTER YOU CCG: WAIT I FORGOT, ALL OF THE YOUS ARE THAT YOU

Hmmm... interesting. I wonder why Hussie points out one of Karkat's running character traits, just to "forget" to notice when an exception happens directly after? I'll let this one be an exercise for the class.

So to tie it all back to your ask: why is the exposition on troll romance done the way it is? What are the narrator's motives? Hussie even outright states in the commentary that Kanaya/Tavros/Vriska, which is used as an example of an auspicetism, isn't even a real auspicetism, as Kanaya feels no need to commit to it, and at most is putting out mixed signals - it's just used as an example because it's the closest thing we've seen.

Well, the answer I've arrived at, personally, is that the troll romance explanation is as flawed as it is because the narrator is taking on Karkat's point of view. A movie poster on Karkat's wall, the troll version of Serendipity, is used and namedropped as the ultimate expression of meeting your soul mate in every quadrant - as well as the assertion that "every" troll believes that there ARE destined soul mates for every quadrant, which Karkat definitely believes, but isn't a sentiment necessarily shared by everybody else. Moreover, the explanation ends with a tirade about how Karkat tried to explain quadrants to John, who didn't get it because "he's an idiot".

I'm not saying that Karkat is literally narrating here, just to be clear - I'm saying that the narrator (Hussie-as-character) is relaying factual information as processed through the lens of Karkat's biases, and, as a result, we can't take the explanation at 100% face value (though we can't discount it as entirely untrue, either). It's not so much that "real" moirail pairs work because they're doing moirallegiance "wrong," but that Karkat's view of moirallegiance is simplistic, idealized, and flawed, and we see this play out when he's bitter about his breakup with Gamzee because Gamzee stops "needing" him to keep him calm, even after Karkat has failed to be kept calm by Gamzee in return.

The more I look into Homestuck, the more that I'm genuinely impressed by the way it handles its writing. I hope this was interesting to everyone, too. I feel a little like I'm peeling back a curtain, or opening up a clock to reveal all the little cogs and wheels.

No, you can't trust Hussie as the narrator, but that's on purpose, and it's on purpose because why do we trust narrators? Why do we assume people telling a story are unbiased, benevolent, and have no ulterior motives? Why do we let idiots, assholes, predators, and monsters get away with their version of the truth, when a little scrutiny will have the whole ruse fall apart? Why do we let people tell us not to care about other people, why do we let them tell us that it's okay to be cruel to acceptible targets, why do we let them go unexamined?

And how about the stories we tell ourselves?

[lupus-lunae]

CALLING ALL WOLVES!

otherkin, therians, lycanthropes, doesnt matter what you are! if youre a wolf, please block celticmountainmists(blog) for your own sake. this is a porn blog that interacts with alterhuman blogs, seemingly only wolves, and ignores boundaries. they have followed me and liked my posts despite me being clear that i dont want porn blog interaction, reblogs from other alterhumans and wolf picture/gif/video blogs including a minor, and adds sexual commentary to posts with wolves. not furries or werewolves, actual wolves. i would suggest reporting them but i dont know if that would really do anything? but if having your alterhumanity sexualized doesnt sit right with you, please block and (obviously) dont harrass.

UPDATED SINCE THEY APPARENTLY HAVE TWO BLOGS WITH BASICALLY THE SAME URLS!

[the-broken-pen]

hi I saw your recent post I hope your moving went smoothly!

I have a loose prompt, if you wanted/had time/had WiFi to write: an interrogation room meet-cute between villain and non-field agent hero

As soon as the door clicked shut behind them the hero realized they were in the wrong room. A very wrong room.

They blinked. The villain blinked, taking them in.

“You look lost.”

“That’s rude,” they responded before they had the chance to think about it. “I work here.”

“Do you now,” the villain said, and the hero grew abruptly aware of their jacket stamped with the Agency logo, their gloves marking their designation as a touch based hero. It was a miracle they didn’t turn red with the embarrassment of it.

They tried the doorknob behind their back. It rattled, but didn’t open, and internally they started screaming. Just a little bit.

“They don’t open from the inside,” the villain said helpfully. “Security risk, or something like that.”

“I know that,” the hero snapped, and the villain raised an eyebrow. “Sorry.”

The apology blurted out before they could stop it.

“Did you just ‘apologize’ to me?” The villain looked at them incredulously.

“Uh,” they managed. “Funny question.”

“Funny—“ the villain cut themself off. “It’s not a question, I literally just heard you apologize.”

“Maybe you should get your hearing checked out,” they offered, and winced, because apparently every sane part of their brain had fled to France and left them with a singular suicidal brain cell.

The villain’s mouth was slightly open, as if they weren’t entirely sure what was happening. The hero shared the same sentiment.

The villain glanced at the camera, then back to the hero.

“You’re not a field agent,” they said, as if it was dawning on them.

“You don’t know that,” the hero said defensively.

“You’re holding a file.”

“Field agents are capable of holding files,” the hero replied. “Kind of rude of you to assume they can’t.”

The whisper of a smile tugged at the corner of the villain’s mouth.

“Sorry,” the villain said, and it was just barely mocking.

The hero rocked on their heels a bit, drumming their fingers on the file in their hands.

“They’re taking a while to get you out,” the villain observed.

“Yeah, Bob’s on duty.”

“Oh, so Bob doesn’t do his job?”

The hero jerked. “I did not say that.”

“It was kind of implied, though,” the villain said earnestly.

The hero had interacted with villains before: ending interviews for files, the odd informant. Never held a conversation though, and certainly not for this long.

This was why they didn’t do field work.

“What, no response?”

The hero smiled, sickeningly sweet. “I’m compiling commentary to add to your file.”

“So you admit to not being a field agent.”

“Continually makes assumptions, poor listening comprehension…”

“Not a very long list,” they pointed out.

The hero felt their smile sharpen. “The rest involves curse words.”

The villain barked a laugh, and the hero jerked slightly in surprise.

The villain regarded them like they were deciding something, as if they could see something within the hero that they themself couldn’t.

It had been a long time, longer than the hero would like to admit, since someone, anyone, had looked at them like that.

Like they mattered at all.

“I like you,” the villain said finally, slowly, like they weren’t entirely sure those were the words that were going to come out.

“You also like crime.”

“And you know how dedicated I am to that,” the villain said pointedly, a glint in their eye.

“How sweet,” the hero managed after a moment. “This is exactly why I became a hero. To be compared to felonies.”

The villain just smirked. They peered down at the handcuffed hands, then looked up at the hero. They weren’t sure when they had moved away from the door, closer to the villain, but somehow it had happened.

There was something warm to this; it sat in the hero’s chest, light and airy.

“I’ll text you when I get out. Say, next week?”

“You’re going to jail,” the hero reminded, mouth dry.

The villain grinned. “Right,” they drawled, amusement splashed across their face. “Jail. Which is where I am going. And where I shall stay. Absolutely.”

Something clicked, and the hero didn’t have to look under the table to know the villain had slipped their cuffs.

Despite their best efforts, their eyes flicked downwards, like they could see the now empty cuffs below the table. The villain grinned further, as if in challenge.

Are you going to tattle?

The hero swallowed.

“I’m really not supposed to be in here.”

“I’ve gathered,” the villain said. “You work the desk all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Personal choice, or…”

“I like it,” the hero said defensively. “It’s just puzzles, and I’m good at those.”

“Puzzles?”

“Putting things together,” they said vaguely. “Routes and evidence and all that.”

The villain’s brow furrowed, as if they were mulling something over. Their gaze returned to the hero, and it was searing.

“You’re the one who found me, aren’t you.”

“Oh,” the hero said, blushing. “That’s-I’m not—“

The villain leaned forward. “Am I in that file?”

The hero tucked it behind their back.

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“No,” the hero said with emphasis. The villain laughed.

“You’re bad at this,” they said, but it was fond.

“Thanks, I try,” the hero said. They were waiting for the villain to stand up, but they seemed content to just sit there and watch.

“Mhm,” the villain agreed, and for some reason, the hero flushed even further.

The villain’s gaze snapped to the door, and they tilted their head as if listening to something.

“They’ll be here in a minute,” they said. The hero blinked. “To get you out,” the villain prompted.

“Right,” the hero said. They had forgotten they couldn’t leave, but the villain didn’t need to know that. They had a feeling they knew anyways.

“I’ll call you,” the villain reminded.

“You don’t have my number,” the hero protested.

The villain gave them a look. “You’re cute. Do you like pizza? We could do pizza.”

“We could never speak again.”

“Funny, I’ve never heard of that restaurant.”

“You—”

“Oh look, they’re here!” The villain said cheerfully.

The door swung open, and someone the hero vaguely recognized stepped in.

In the next second, the hero was in the hallway.

“Oh, and love,” the villain called, and the hero cursed themself for blushing. “Don’t be jealous of the other felonies. You’ll always be my favorite crime.”

The hero ducked their face behind the file, but they couldn’t stop the pleased smile that crept from the corners of their mouth.

[fandomgirlz01]

This Can’t Be The End Pt. 4

Nick Stokes X Reader

Imagine on my fandom Instagram?: No  

Prompt or Request or Requested Prompt?: No

Style of Writing: Series 

Rating: PG-13 ~ For fluff and cuteness, but more adult commentary or even some triggering content.

Edited: Yes

Word count: 5,812

Post Date & Time: August 4th 2024 at 11: 44 PM

Ko-fi

Masterlist

Warnings here

Listen to the story be read out loud here {coming soon}.  

Summary: Based off of S5 Es24 & 25 When Nick gets kidnapped, the reader is forced to fear the worst for her husband as she and the team work the case with hopes of bringing him home safe. 

Y/n’s Pov:

My eyes shoot open and I immediately sit up. I frown when I see where I am, not fully remembering how I got here. Thinking over where I remember being last, I deduce that Warrick must have brought me in here after I fell asleep. 

“Did you hear they thought they found Nick only for it to actually be a dog?” Isadora, one of the other team members, asks as she leans into another from her team. 

“No. What kind of dog was it?” Marcela questions in an interested tone as they keep talking like they don’t know I’m here. 

“It was a Dalmatian. I hear Warrick's going over the box now,” Isadora continues on and I just listen as carefully as I can. 

“Did the dog survive?” Marcela asks and Isadora shakes her head. 

“Awe, that's sad. Poor dog. People are so cruel nowadays,” Marcela croons and Isadora nods. 

“Yeah. Apparently Warrick lost it,” Marcela comments as she takes a sip of her drink and Isadora shrugs. 

“I mean, can you blame him? That’s his team member out there,” Isadora comments back. 

“Yeah, his sexy team mate,” Marcela adds on with a bounce of her eyebrows and I roll my eyes. 

“Marcela, dear. He’s married,” Isadora tells her with a raised eyebrow and small chuckle of amusement. 

“Doesn’t mean I can’t like him from afar,” Marcela comments with a shrug and Isadora laughs. 

“I’m pretty sure it means that you can’t, but what about Warrick? He’s pretty hot too,” Isadora asks and Marcela waves her off. 

“He's married too, remember? Not to mention he’s got a temper. Guys with tempers aren’t always good to have around,” Marcela explains and I roll my eyes again. 

Finally I can’t take it anymore, not wanting to hear people gossip about how hot my husband or brother figure is when Nick’s out there somewhere, fighting to come home to me. I push myself up off the couch and hear gasps, making me turn to look at the two women before me. They each give me sorrowful yet horrified looks. 

“Oh my gosh. Y/n, we are so sorry. We didn’t know you were there,” Isadora apologizes and I shrug ‘as if that makes it better that you were just gossiping about me… and the people who matter most to me,’ I think as I hold back a roll of my eyes. 

“It’s fine, really. Uhh, I’m going to find Warrick. Do you know what lab he’s in?” I ask, starting to fidget as an uncomfortable feeling washes over me. 

“Oh, yeah. I think I heard he’s in lab 345,” Isadora answers me and I nod. 

“Thanks. I’ll, uhh, see you girls around,” I reply as I give them a small wave before turning and leaving in search of Warrick. 

For the millionth time in the last few days I find myself walking down all the many hallways again. I walk past every lab as I look for the one that Warrick supposedly is in. I pass each lab and look at each number of labs before coming to a stop in front of 345. 

When I come to a stop I see Warrick inside working on a big clear plexiglass box. With a sigh, I open the door and walk in as he continues to work. I watch him for a few minutes as he picks a few parts up and inspects them. 

After a few minutes, I walk over to him and hug him from behind. He tenses for a moment before turning around and hugging me back. 

“What’s up, mamas?” he asks and I blink back a few tears. 

“I overheard a few of the others talking about what happened while I was asleep. They told me where you were and I came to find you,” I tell him and he sighs, nodding. 

“I swear I came to tell you after it happened, but you finally looked semi-peaceful. You needed the sleep,” he explains and I nod my understanding. 

“Don’t worry, B, I get it. Really. I do,” I promise him and he lets out a puff of air. 

“Good. I thought you were going to be mad at me,” he comments and I purse my lips. 

“Now doesn’t really feel like the time for anger,” I whisper out and he chuckles. 

“Only you. Y/n. Only you. You get angry once, then never again even when you’re going through something bad,” he replies in astonishment and I shrug. 

“Mind if I keep you company while you finish this up? It’s a lot better than hearing all the gossip about my husband,” I try to playfully joke, but it comes out sounding more half-hearted than anything and he sighs. 

“You want me to go tell em’ what for?” he asks and I pause. 

“As nice as that sounds… I’d rather you be here working on trying to find Nicky,” I reply and he smiles softly as I sit down. 

“In that case, hang out here all you want, mamas,” he agrees and I give him a soft thankful smile before he turns around to get back to work. 

He picks over what seems to be the fan that would supply the air once again before taking it apart. He puts down the tube that was connected to it before picking up his flashlight and looking down the opening of the fan itself. Then he takes the tube off of where it’s connected to the box and looks through the hole that was left from removing it. 

“So I, ahh… heard you lost it out there,” I speak up as he moves around the box. 

“Uhh, yeah. You weren’t supposed to know that…” he tells me as he takes the grate off the other side of the hole. 

“It’s ok, you know? It’s ok you lost it,” I sympathize with him as he continues to look over the area of the box. 

“No. It’s not ok. It took time off from finding Nick. I should’ve kept my head level,” he plays it off and I shake my head. 

“Rick. He’s like family to you just as much as he is family to me. It’s understandable that you'd lose it. I mean, I lost it on you earlier,” I again sympathize with him and he sighs as he continues to work on the box. 

“You didn’t exactly lose it, mamas. You got a little angry, there’s a difference,” he dismisses me again and I roll my eyes. 

“I bit your head off. There really isn’t a difference,” I pointedly tell him as I cross my arms and he nods. 

“Ok. Ok. You win,” he reluctantly agrees as he now grabs a battery and starts using the wires connected to the box, trying to see how they hook up. 

Once he has it hooked up, the light turns on as well as the fan. He looks over it as the meter he has connected to it counts up higher and higher. He picks up the fan and looks at it before looking at the meter. 

“Damn it,” he mutters as he puts the fan down with a sigh. 

“What?” I ask him and he pauses. 

“I think we need to find Catherine,” he says and I jump as he walks over to the phone. 

He stands there with the phone to his ear and he waits for her to answer. When she does, he talks to her for a moment before looking over at me and moving the speaker from his mouth. 

“Catherine wants you to go to the computer lab. Says Grissom needs you,” he tells me and I sigh before standing up. 

“I’m on my way,” I tell him as I pass him and he goes back to talking to her. 

Third Person Pov:

Gil, Archie and Sarah sit in the computer lab watching Nick, who now pulls out a recorder and holds it up to mouth to talk into it. Gil, who knows how to read lips, now decides to read Nick’s as he talks. 

“My name is Nick Stokes. If anyone… finds this tape, turn it in to the Las Vegas… PD. There should be a reward…” he starts and Gil watches with sad eyes as he sits up a bit more. 

“Mom. Sisko… y/n….” Gil reads Nick’s lips and decides to start writing what Nick is saying. 

“Hey Sara, would you call Catherine and have her send y/n here?” he asks her as he keeps his eyes focused on what Nick is saying.  

“Yeah. Ok,” Sara agrees as she picks up the phone and calls Catherine. 

“…well, this is a lousy way to say goodbye, but it’s all I got,” Nick continues on and Grissom keeps his eyes trained on the screen as he writes. 

“I love you. You raised me right… and I’m going to miss you,” Nick says into the recorder, getting choked up with every word. 

“Y/n. I’m so sorry I can’t be with you, sweetheart, and our future child. I love you most and I’ll miss you the most too. P… promise me you’ll go on that trip I promised you, even if I’m not there to take it with you. Promise me you’ll find someone to look after you…” Nick goes on saying his goodbyes, only getting more choked up and stuttering every few minutes. 

As he goes on, Grissom’s eyes widen at the mention of a child, but he quickly plays it off.

“As for the rest of you guys. I know you did the best you could to find me and get me home to my beautiful wife,” he continues on as Grissom continues to read his lips. 

“Grissom…” he starts and that’s when Grissom stops writing it down, focusing on what he’s saying to him. 

“No, you never did, Nick,” Grissom sighs as he replies to Nick out loud. 

He continues to watch as Nick cries, but soon he starts to freak out. Grissom watches carefully as confusion washes over him. 

“He’s going into convolutions. He’s losing it!” Sara comments just as y/n walks in. 

Y/n walks over to Grissom, who spares her a quick look before watching alongside her as Nick seems to be thrashing around. Y/n lets out a breath as she closes her eyes, not being able to watch it anymore. 

“What’s going on?!” Sara voices her exact thoughts as they continue to watch. 

“Wha…?” Grissom goes to ask, but pauses when he sees it. 

“Wait a minute…” he says in realization as he picks up his mouse to zoom in on Nick. 

“Ants…” Grissom confirms what he zooms in on, making y/n open her eyes. 

“My God, he’s being eaten alive,” Grissom observes as they all watch the ants in the box with him. 

Together they all watch in sadness as he withers around, just trying anything to get the ants away and not succeeding. He pulls a glove out of his pocket and uses it to stuff up his nose. 

“That’s it, Nicky… stay still… they won’t bite. As much,” Grissom proudly says before looking up at y/n. 

“I have something for you,” he tells the girl and she arches an eyebrow. 

He folds up the paper and hands it to her, making more confusion wash over her. He smiles softly and reassuringly at her. 

“These ants could help us find him, but in the meantime, I think you should hear what he had to say to you,” Grissom tells her as he sets a reassuring hand on her shoulder. 

“T…Thanks,” she whispers out as she takes the paper before turning to leave and head back to Warrick. 

“Oh and y/n. Congratulations,” he replies, making her turn around and look at him. 

He gives her a small knowing smile and she can’t help but to just smile back. She gives him a small ‘thank you,’ in response with a nod before fully turning and walking back to where she’d left Warrick. 

Y/n’s Pov: 

I start back to the lab Warrick is in before making a split second decision to go into the locker room instead. I quickly look around just to make sure I’m alone and when I find that I am I sigh as I take a seat on the bench. I hold the paper Grissom gave me and I go to open it, but pause. 

I take a deep breath before trying to open it again, but again I fail. Tears of frustration make their way to my face and I sigh as I try to hold them back. With one last puff of air, I open the paper to read over it. 

“My name is Nick Stokes. If anyone… finds this tape, turn it in to the Las Vegas… PD. There should be a reward…” is the first line I read and a gasp leaves my lips.

“Mom. Sisko… y/n….” Is the next line and a tear falls as I suck in a breath. 

I quickly close the paper for a moment as more and more tears build up. I take a moment to let my tears fall before reopening the paper and continuing on with sniffles. 

“…well, this is a lousy way to say goodbye, but it’s all I got,” I read and a choked sound leaves my throat as I put my other hand over my mouth. 

“I love you. You raised me right… and I’m going to miss you,” more tears fall as my lip starts to tremble and I take another pause before starting to read again. 

“Y/n. I’m so sorry I can’t be with you, sweetheart, and our future child. I love you most and I’ll miss you the most too. P… promise me you’ll go on that trip I promised you even if I’m not there to take it with you. Promise me you’ll find someone to look after you…” by the end I’m fully sobbing as I hold the paper close to my chest. 

I sit there for a good few minutes before sobering up and wiping at my face. I sigh softly before getting up from the bench and standing in front of my locker. I pause a moment as I look at Nick’s locker that Grissom so nicely assigned right next to mine on our first day.

I quickly shake my head and bite my lip before opening my locker. I set the note lightly on the shelf and stand frozen for a moment before closing it. With a very heavy breath, I open Nick’s locker. 

It’s then I let out another very harsh breath when I see the sonogram he has tucked under his jeans:

I read the top where Nick had nicely written out: baby Stokes 9 weeks with a small smiley face. I quickly slide it back under and close the locker. With another heavy sigh, I walk over to the sink and wash my face with cold water. 

“He’ll be home. He will be,” I whisper down to my stomach before standing straight again. 

I look myself over and sigh once more before walking out of the locker room. I walk back to where I had left Warrick and find Greg, Catherine, and Hodges in the room with him. 

“This has got to be a prototype. It was probably built to test how long he could keep somebody alive inside,” Catherine observes out loud as she walks around the box with her flashlight. 

“Hi, mamas. You doing ok?” Warrick asks me when he sees me come up next to him. 

I keep quiet with my arms wrapping themselves around my stomach and I shake my head. Warrick finally catches sight of my eyes and sighs before pulling me into his side. 

“Now, what are those?” Hodges questions as he bends down and points to something underneath the box, making Greg, who’s under it, pause to look at him. 

“I don’t know,” Greg replies and Hodges seems to understand that it was a stupid question as he stands up. 

“All right,” Warrick speaks up, getting all of our attention as he straightens up a bit, keeping me in a side hug. 

“Based on this battery and what’s running off of it,” Warrick starts to explain, but pauses for a moment as if thinking over how to explain it better while glancing at me as he hesitates. 

“And the fact that we kept the damn light on for as long as we did,” he continues to explain, pausing again as he takes in a big breath. 

“I figure Nick’s got another 90 minutes left in there,” he concludes and I take in a harsh breath as reality slowly starts to set in even more. 

It goes quiet for a moment, but Warrick lifts his arm with his watch and pulls it up past my face to set it with the hand he has around my neck still. He pulls it away and I see the watch says 1:30 on it. 

“So this is it… I’m going to lose my husband…” I whisper out before sinking to the floor, but Warrick quickly grabs hold of me, slowing me down so I don’t hurt myself. 

“No, no. We’re going to find him, mamas. I promised. When do I not keep my promises?” Warrick asks, but I don’t reply as I shake my head in denial and a million thoughts fly through my head. 

“Y/n. Hey. Y/n. It’s going to be okay!” Catherine shouts a bit and it’s only then I realize I’m having a panic attack. 

“Damn, she’s having a panic attack. Greg, go get some water, Hodges, go inform Grissom,” Catherine commands before she bends down in front of me. 

Both Greg and Hodges nod, eyes wide with worry before rushing out. Warrick now sits with my back against his side as I try to breathe. 

“Ok. Y/n. Honey, breath with me,” she commands me softly as she shows me how to breathe. 

“Ok. In… and out… just like that,” she couches me and my breath starts to slow down, but still not where it should be. 

“Ok. I’m going to have you do the five senses, ok?” she asks me softly and I nod at her. 

“Ok. What do you feel?” she questions and she holds up her hand for me. 

“I… I… I feel your hand a…a..and Warrick behind m…m…me,” I stutter out and she nods with a small smile. 

“Good. Good. Now what do you see?” she asks and I look around. 

“I see that evil b…b…box,” I tell her and she nods. 

“Ok… bad place to ask that. Let’s just move on. What do you hear?” she asks and I shake my head, closing my eyes. 

“I h…hear you and Warrick,” I tell her and she nods encouragingly when I reopen my eyes. 

“Ok. Now taste,” she inquires and my eyebrows knit together. 

“Umm, nothing. I haven’t eaten anything for a while,” I tell her in confusion and she just smiles at me. 

“Panic attack averted. Here, drink this,” she comments as she holds a water out to me and it’s only then I realize Greg had come back. 

“Thank you guys,” I tell them and they all smile softly at me. 

“Anytime y-” Catherine starts, but she gets cut off when Hodges comes rushing back in. 

Nick’s Pov:

♪ It was Christmas in Las Vegas, 

when the locals take the town ♪

♪ Theresa hit a streak And laid her waitress apron down She’d been playing penny poker over at the old gold spike she’s won at Texas hold ‘em So she switched to let it ride ♪

I sing softly to myself to try and keep calm. Thinking of the lyrics rather than the situation I’m in and how much y/n must be scared. 

The singing doesn’t get my mind off of things for long and soon I find myself thinking of just getting home again. I think about just wanting to sit and watch a movie from the red box with y/n again. I’m soon pulled from my thoughts though when there’s a shifting sound. 

I grab another one of the glow sticks and pop it, making it come to life as the creaking noise gets louder. 

“Hey! I’m, in here!” I yell out as I hit the plexiglass in hopes that I’m being saved. 

“Hey!” I continue to yell, my voice cracking as I keep hitting the plexiglass. 

♪ It was Christmas in Las Vegas, 

when the locals take the town ♪

♪ Theresa hit a streak And laid her waitress apron down… ♪

I start to sing as loudly as I can again, but my breath slowly fails and my head falls back down as I realize nobody’s here. It’s only a few minutes later when a loud crack sound starts and I see the plexiglass start to crack slowly up the sides of the box. I keep the glow stick low as I breathe hard while watching it crack more and more. 

“Stop… no, no,” I whisper out as I put my hand up to the plexiglass. 

“Oh, my God,” I whisper out in fear the more it cracks with no signs of stopping. Soon dirt starts to break those and my feet are under a mountain of it.

Third Person Pov: 

Once the ant crawls farther into view Grissom hits the print button and as soon as the picture of the screen prints he’s ripping it off the printer. Gil quickly rushes to his office and looks through all the books he has. Soon he’s pulling one from the shelf and flips through it till it lands on the page he’s looking for. 

He pauses when he thinks he’s found it before picking up the screen shot to look at the ant again. 

“Solenopsis invicta,” Grissom says out loud to himself as he confirms what kind of ant it is. 

Y/n’s Pov: 

“Grissom’s got something. He wants us all in evidence meeting room 4 now,” he rushes out as he stands against the door frame, panting for air. 

“We’re on our way. Warrick, you got her?” Catherine asks as she looks behind me. 

“Yeah. Yeah. Go. We’ll meet you guys there,” he promises and she nods before reaching out for me. 

I grab her hand and she gives mine a firm squeeze. She gives a tight lipped smile before getting up and heading out of the lab. Greg bends down and puts a hand on my shoulder. 

“Hang in there, y/n. Nick’s coming home,” he tells me as he squeezes my shoulder before getting up to follow Hodges and Catherine. 

Warrick sits with me for a moment as I continue to just calm down. Once my breathing is fully back to normal, Warrick gets up. 

“Ok. Slowly. Slowly,” Warrick tells me as he helps me up alongside him. 

“Thank you, B…” I say when we’re both standing and I squeeze his forearm as I give him a light smile. 

“Anytime, mamas. You know that,” he tells me as he smiles back at me. 

I sigh and hold a hand to my head as I start to feel a little tired. Warrick chuckles lightly, making me look up at him in confusion. 

“Tired?” he asks me and I huff at his obvious jokeful tone. 

“I’m beat, but I’m not sleeping till Nick’s right next to me,” I answer his question and he smiles, shaking his head. 

“I wouldn’t have guessed or suggested anything else, mamas,” he tells me as he holds his hands up in surrender, making me finally laugh for the first time since all of this happened. 

“Oh please, you so would have,” I comment with a roll of my eyes and he chuckles. 

“Maybe I would have, maybe not. Come on. Let’s go find your husband,” he tells me and I smile up at him as he wraps an arm around my shoulder. 

Together we walk to meet up with everyone else in evidence room 4. They all rush around getting stuff ready and just Warrick and I walk in, Grissom rushes in. Warrick and I stand off to the side as he keeps his arm around me. 

“They’re fire ants, very rare in Nevada. They don’t like our soil. The only places you find them around Vegas are in plant and tree nurseries,” Grissom announces as he walks around the table to where Catherine is sitting at a computer. 

Warrick lets go of me before making me sit in the chair Catherine just abandoned. He starts to look at a stack of papers Catherine just printed and crosses off places not in the search grid. 

“There’s 11 nurseries in the greater Las Vegas area!” Catherine adds on what she found from a quick search. 

“Okay, I’ve got the webcam trace down to here,” Archie speaks next as he circles the area he narrowed it down to on the map and Warrick starts crossing things off his list. 

“And the data from the black box in Walter Gordon’s truck gave us a 23-mile travel radius,” Greg adds on as he too circles his findings on the map, making the circles overlap ever so slightly. 

“Okay, I’ve got two nurseries within the overlap area. Here! And here!” Warrick announces as he walks up to the table and draws two x’s over the spots. 

“Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Kelly Gordon, the daughter, worked with plants,” Sara explains and we all look at her.

“Hold on. Hold on,” Sara says before she rushes out of the room, making us all wait about a minute before she comes running back in with a file in her hand. 

“Hey guys, Nick is here,” she says as she points to the x on the left that Warrick had drawn. 

“Well, pack up everyone, let’s go! I’ll call the owner and talk to him on the way,” Grissom exclaims and I jump up as everyone starts rushing out of the room. 

“Hey. Maybe you should stay here,” Warrick tells me and I immediately shake my head. 

“If you think for one minute that I’m sitting back here while you all go find my husband, you're dead wrong, B,” I reply and he sighs as he pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“Mama, we don’t know what-” he starts but gets cut off. 

“Let her come, Warrick. She’s allowed to,” Grissom interrupts with a soft smile my way. 

“What! But-” Warrick starts, but stops when Grissom just nods at him. 

“Ok… fine. At least wear your vest? Just in case,” Warrick tells me and I nod at him. 

“If it’ll make you feel better for me too, I will. I’ll meet you at your car,” I promise him with a firm nod before rushing off to the locker room. 

Once in the locker room, I come to stop in front of my locker and quickly open it. I grab my vest out before slamming it shut once again. I quickly strap my vest around me before rushing back out of the locker room and down the many, many hallways. 

I rush out into the parking garage and I stop to watch as Grissom and Sara drive past me with their cars' emergency lights on. Once they pass, I run over to Warrick's car and hop into the passenger side. He quickly turns his lights on before pulling out of the parking space. 

Soon before I know it, we’re pulling up on location and I see that almost half our police fleet are here, making relief wash over me as sirens blare all around me. Grissom’s car is just in front of us and I hold on as Warrick takes the turn into the nursery drive. We follow Grissom all the way up the drive and come to a stop next to his car. 

Grissom gets out of his car and I yank my seatbelt off to follow after him. He meets up with the owner at the front of his car just as I come up beside him. 

“You said on the phone you had a fire ant mound. Where is it?” he asks as he and the owner get close to one another. 

“People usually prefer to stay away from it,” the owner comments as he turns and starts to lead us all over to it. We all stop pointing our flashlights at the mound as Grissom stops and looks at it for a moment. 

“All right, look. Fan out. Look for loose soil. Anything that might’ve been dug up recently,” Grissom commands and we all rush off. 

We all fan out like he said, officers all going in different directions. I stick by Warrick as we walk briskly while searching the ground with our lights. Everyone looks for a few minutes, but nothing seems remotely the littlest bit off. 

“Hey! I’m picking up the webcam transmitter!” We hear Catherine yell out and I look at Warrick. 

“She’s got something! Move, move!” An officer yells out and I smile. 

“We found him, B… we really found him,” I excitedly say and Warrick smiles, nodding. 

“Come on, mama. We’re close,” he agrees with a smile as we both pick up and start to jog to where Catherine is. 

Soon we come up behind her and she slows down to look around. We slow down too and help in looking around with our lights. She turns to her left and continues walking until she almost trips over something, making her turn back. 

She turns around and shines her light on what she tripped on, only to find a tube sticking out of the ground. She pauses a moment before turning and walking a little further only to find another tube. Her monitor picks up in its beeping and I look at Warrick as she bends down to the ground. 

She drops her light and the monitor before she starts to dig around frantically with her hands. She finds what seems to be a clear bag of sorts and she rips off her glove, making it fall back to the floor. 

“This is it!! I found it!!” she screams out as she scrambles to pick the bag back up and open it. 

“It’s here! I found it! This is it!” she screams out again as she looks over the remote. 

“Nick!” she shouts into the pipe as everyone else races over to us. 

“Nick… we’re here. We’re all here! Hang on! Nicky!” she shouts into the pipe as officers run over with shovels and Warrick takes one. 

They all start to shovel at the ground and Catherine wraps an arm around me as she holds her flashlight up with the other. We all watch with bated breath as they continue to pull dirt from the earth. 

Nick’s Pov: 

“Nicky!” I think I hear Catherine, but decide it’s just my mind playing tricks on me for the millionth time. 

I feel more and more of the ants biting at me and I groan as my heart starts to pound harder. I close my eyes, but open them when there’s a click sound. It’s then I see Doc Robbins and David looking down at me before he sighs and shakes his head in sorrow. 

“It’s a damn shame they didn’t get to him sooner,” Robbins says as he continues to look down at me. 

“I sure will miss him,” David comments and it’s quiet for a moment. 

“You know, David, I’ve seen fire ant bites in my time, but never anything like this,” Robbins tells David as he lifts my hand to inspect it. 

“Do you think he suffered?” David asks as he cocks his head to the side. 

“Do I think he suffered?” Doc Robbins parrots before pausing. 

“Yes. Definitely,” he finishes and I try to yell, but nothing will come out. 

I close my eyes before opening them again to the sound of laughter. I watch as they still stand over me, laughing. 

“All right, on three,” Robbins says before pausing. 

“Uno…” David starts off. “Dos…” Robbins jumps in. Tres!” They both yell out and all of a sudden Bob Newworth starts to play. 

“All right. Would you care to do the ‘y’ incision?” Robbins asks David and there's an audible shing sound. 

“Well ‘y’ not?” David asks as he takes the meat cleaver that passed over me and all I can do is watch. 

There’s a few audible crack sounds and a lot of slouchy sounds before Doc Robbins is getting out a chainsaw. He puts the chainsaw down before looking back at me. There’s another crack as he rips my ribs from my body only to toss them aside. 

“He won’t be needing this anymore,” he comments as he passes my liver to David. 

“Nice!” he says as he pulls more from my body and my eyebrows knit together in confusion. 

“A lung,” Doc Robbins says as he passes that over me to David as well. 

Then all of a sudden my father stands over me across from Doc Robbins. He clasps his hands and gives a deadpan look.  

“So Doc… how did my son die? Anaphylactic shock?” he asks Doc Robbins, who chuckles. 

“No, no, he didn’t live long enough for that. COD was asphyxiation,” Doc Robbins answers in a very cheerful tone. 

“Oh!” My dad says in almost awe and I just watch on in confusion. 

“When the blood oxygen drops to less than 16% and the CO2 builds up there’s a rapid loss of consciousness. Death within minutes. With no disfiguring physical findings,” Doc Robbins explains in a cheery tone. 

“He’ll look great at the funeral,” my father comments with no hint of sadness in his voice. “Oh. Yes,” Robbins agrees. 

“His mother will appreciate that as well as his wife,” my father comments again and Robbins gives a small “good” In response. 

Robbins then reaches into my open chest and rips my heart out. He holds it up and it sounds like it’s still beating. 

“Your son had a good heart,” Robbins says before slapping it down into my fathers hand. 

Suddenly my eyes fly open and find I’m still in the box with ants still crawling all over me. I let out the smallest puff of air as I fight the feeling of the ants biting me. I close my eyes again and try to think of something, anything more pleasant. My mind wanders and I see an image of me at a counter holding a little girl:

“I love you Daddy,” she whispers into my ear as she lays her head against my shoulder and I lay mine against hers. My eyes fly open once more and more tears fall as my lip trembles my fight to get out renewed. 

To Be Continued…

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[subwaytostardew]

▽ Subway to Stardew - Adoptable Joltik ⚡️

This would play after Emmet's 8 heart event and getting Joltik up to 8 hearts as well.

I released a separate mod specifically for adopting Joltik, so you only need to get them up to 8 hearts to adopt them! You can do it right now!

Adoptable Joltik Mod Link: https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/21002

And of course... Commentary under the read-more.

Joltik's adoption event sat in the drafts for quite a while. It took me whole a day to implement and I didn't let myself sleep until I finished everything. (It's 1 PM now...)

The event ended up wildly different because of how extra custom pets are implemented. You would think that they would be added in the same way as you get your cat/dog that you select during character creation. No. You have to buy a license. Only Marnie is authorized to sell them.

Here's the original script for Joltik's adoption event:

[Joltik Adoption Event]

Emmet: @! Joltik likes you verrrrry much. They want to stay with you. I'm letting you adopt them. Yup. I filled out all the paperwork. The Joltiks are legally documented now. 

I never gave ours a name... Galvantula wouldn't let me. She is verrrry picky about it. But that's okay. Joltik is yours. You should name them. She came along for approval. So. What name should I put on the adoption form?

[Name input box like Marnie's adoption thing...]

[Galvantula pauses for a moment to think and then offhandedly agrees.]

Emmet: Galvantula didn't shock me for that. That name is okay. Yup. I will file that with the Ferngill Republic. Don't worry about it. Make sure you take verrrry good care of our little Joltik!

[Joltik jumps and heart emotes]

◇──◆──◇──◆

The whole naming portion was a source of much more frustration than it should have been. In events, the name input box is brought up by the "catQuestion" command (which applies to dogs chosen at the start, too...

If you refuse, then Marnie also shows up no matter what you do. Farmhouse positions are also tricky and made even harder to find reference for after 1.6 added the farmhouse being moveable. Joltik kept spawning where Emmet was supposed to be so I had to use a move command just to get them to spawn one tile to the side. Galvantula was fine. I didn't get to updating her vanilla portraits yet so she's staying quiet.

The catQuestion command also only adds the pet you pick during character creation. There's no fields to target the usage. You have to buy a license. It's the only way to get another pet. I didn't want Joltik to replace a cat either since in-story you would have to earn the trust of both Emmet and Galvantula... There's no way you can do that by the first 25 days of spring. It's immersion breaking and you lose a cat.

I did find the license aspect funny though. It was oddly fitting for the mod's lore of Pokemon being pretty much banned from the region. Emmet is a threat to Stardew Valley's ecosystem. Not the best guy for the task of combating anti-Pokemon xenophobia.

Pet sizes are apparently hardcoded so I had to make a new spritesheet for Joltik as if they even need a 32 x 32 pixel area per frame. I did end up making new sprites for them while I was at it. I tried to base it off of the cat's behaviors so I have less animation fields to edit (I was tired). The cat loafs a lot. Trying to convey that in a tiny spider posed quite the challenge.

After everything was done, I figured that the whole adoption portion of the mod could easilly be taken apart to be its own mod as a demo of sorts for the expansion. So I went and made a content pack to post.

Bringing up your starter pet's friendship level takes quite some time, so it would be awkward if I let the event play with no preconditions. Because of that, I ended up including Joltik as an NPC and locking their adoption behind their heart level.

We actually only had two lines per day of the week (not including season) for daily dialogue. That shot up to six lines per day of the week for a full 0-2-4-6-8-10 in spring because I was determined to publish a mod. (I've been modding for nearly a year nonstop and I don't have anything playable... humiliating...)

Anyways! I hope you're all having fun with 1.6! It certainly brought new challenges and opportunities to the modding scene!

▷ Station Steward Thylak

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting Results: Miscellaneous Birds

So! This is the first in our six-week wind-down of Bestiaryposting, where we run through the Honorable Mentions that appear in the Aberdeen Bestiary but didn't get their own post here because the author of the Bestiary and I have different goals.

If you don't know what any of that means, you can find out at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.

To see the entry our artists are working from, click here:

To see the entry people are drawing now, so that you can potentially join in, click here:

Art is below the cut, in roughly chronological order.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) decided to do Literally All of the birds. I am fascinated by the detail here; I particularly like the pose on the Hreakgleav, and the feathers on the Klethghrom. I would direct anyone trying to figure out which is which to the linked post, which contains a key and brief descriptions of each.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has also given us a tree full of birds. The explanation in the linked post of which is which and what they were inspired by is illuminating (pun not intended), so check that out. I especially enjoy the interpretations of the Klethghrom and the Lokfotreag. (And thank you for providing alt text.)

@wendievergreen (link to post here) has drawn three of the birds in their always-charming style. For explanations, close-ups, and individual treatments of each, please see the linked post. I really like the tail on the Hreakgleav and the... frankly insane look of the Klethghrom. (Also thank you for providing alt text.)

All right, we're going to identify these rapid-fire because there are a bunch of them and I'm not going to hand you a whole-ass essay here. Readers are encouraged to add their own commentary.

Tluftasong

The manuscript identifies this one as "night owl", but I've seen other sources refer to this entry as the "night heron". I'll leave that one to people who know birds more.

Lokfotreag

This is the hoopoe. Which, as listeners to the podcast know, you can trade to demons for perpetual access to great parties. The illustration is very cool, and seems to show the young birds rejuvenating their aging parent.

Hurrashbeg

Really love the Stylized Plant, of course. One of the things that really strikes me about medieval manuscript art is how particular things that Definitely Don't Exist keep cropping up in different manuscripts, looking pretty much the same. Like, unless this is by the same artist who did the Rutland Psalter, it shows an interestingly consistent artistic tradition -- I swear that's the exact same plant, and in a couple other places in the manuscript they have the exact same wyvern.

Anyway, those are clearly magpies. I don't know why they're being shot at.

Konchilkuk

This one didn't get an illustration, but it's the woodpecker.

Wobrahfmet

Yep, that sure is a raven. They actually have a really long entry, but it's mostly about what they symbolize.

Hrongnewit

This one is the kite. Yeah, that looks pretty believable.

Klomurgrae

This is... apparently the ibis. Also, from the context of the entry, I think it's intended to be standing on a snake. Neither of those look like the things they are supposed to be.

Zagsmenrok

This is the blackbird. I have no explanation for why it's brown. The illustrator clearly has access to black ink.

Hreakgleav

Yep, that's very clearly an owl.

Wahrembeag

It tickles me that these are right next to each other, because there's a moderately-well-known Middle English poem called "the Owl and the Nightingale". This is pure coincidence; they're not together in the bestiary, there are a few birds in between.

Oh yeah, this is the Nightingale.

Sarbrufeat

This is the heron. The illustration seems broadly correct, but do herons come in white? That's an egret, surely.

Keltrumram

This is the coot -- doesn't look like one to me, but maybe the artist and I are familiar with different species of coot. Readers may recall its cameo in the Eagle entry; its own is unfortunately rather shorter.

Grozfarwat

Meet the quail. I was initially confused, but apparently the plume thing I associate with quails is not actually common to all species of quail. So... yeah, good quail.

Mortelgeng

Very definitely a crow.

Burngraega

Also very identifiable, here's the swan. Head and beak seem a bit flatter and wider than I would expect, though.

Klethghrom

This was basically the poster child for "too obvious to get its own entry". Here's the peacock.

And that's it for this week, it's late. Talk amongst yourselves, or tell me what you think about all these birds.

[demani-dusk]

I don't know anything about Translation State yet and yes I am reblogging every Imperial Radch post I can as preparation for reading it, but I'm very excited because I love Translator Zeiat a lot and a thing I might sort have picked up is that we'll be getting more to do with her whole deal.

I love Translator Zeiat less as I love as character and more as a narrative device, sorry Zeiat, although I do find her hysterical. I love how she underlines themes around identity and categorization by breaking down the way we talk about these things into absurdities.

The most obvious part of the book where she's doing this is when she's explaining about cakes and how if she separates the cakes with fruits from the cake without fruit they're different, but if she mixes them together then they're all the same again. She can add a counter and call it cake and then it's cake too! At this point, it's fairly apparent she's talking about people and how there are different kinds of humans. And in this case, that's what she means to talk about. Or rather, she is talking about how words work in general and it's very apparent this insight is most helpful when talking about categorizing people.

But like, what else has she got going on? She accepts Breq deciding that she's Zeiat and not Dlique. By the end of Ancillary Mercy we don't really know how translators work or how correct Breq may have been, but it works out because Zeiat is so very happy she's Zeiat and not Dlique. This is very Gender to me, the way arbitrarily being called something different causes Zeiat to behave differently and she's so Happy about it. She talks about how if she were to go home everyone would call her Dlique and she wouldn't like it. It's also a fun scifi way to raise the question to the reader, what does it mean to be one thing and not another? By forcing the reader to try to figure out what is going on with the translators' identities, we have to just, think about how identity works. And it's a theme for the series. Sick!

Fish sauce is a condiment, not a drink. That fish is for looking at, not for eating. Have you noticed that these fish cakes are entirely the same on the inside but the other fish have very complicated insides? All I'm saying is, what's the difference between a citizen and a noncitizen? One of them is Civilized and the other isn't.

And my favorite is Zeiat finding Breq in the infirmary and re-introducing herself and saying she'll miss the old fleet captain. This must be a new fleet captain, because the old fleet captain had two legs! All of these scenes are so so funny to me, but this is very interesting to say to Breq imo, the last ancillary of a dead troop carrier. How different is it for Zeiat to call her a new person than for people who know her history to think of her as "Breq," and not "Justice of Toren?" I guess I also love this because I similarly love the way Breq's story in Ancillary Justice plays with mathematical identity in a fun scifi way while the whole series plays with gender identity in a different kind of fun scifi way, and both of these are part of a commentary on identity and empire in the real world. It's good scifi! !!!

[antialiasis]

Chess (2018 Kennedy Center revival)

So I was just going to briefly mention all the other different versions of Chess I have consumed in the big essay post I’ve been writing on and off, but there was just too much to say about this one which made it really awkward to fit it in, so fine, here is another individual chesspost. Nearly 7500 words of rambling under the cut, oh my god.

This production represents the latest official full overhaul of Chess. It sports an all-new book written by Danny Strong, also known as the actor who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is some whiplash (Sarah Michelle Gellar is apparently a big Chess fan, too). It was later staged again as a concert with some further modifications in 2021, but I listened to an audio bootleg of the 2018 version. (There exist some videos of it online, but only scattered bits.)

The Story Changes

This version has London’s basic plot structure with the distinctive two chess tournaments (this time four years apart, which is neither the original number nor the actual number of years between world chess championships), but rearranges Act I, adds a lot more quippy dialogue and swearing, reinterprets the characters, and recenters real-world politics in the whole thing — sort of the exact inverse of what Chess på svenska did with the material. It opens with “Difficult and Dangerous Times” to set the scene in the Cold War and features the Arbiter narrating with sardonic omniscient commentary between songs/scenes throughout, which does feel a bit more consistent than the Arbiter suddenly having a narrator role for the duration of one song in Act II.

All the main characters in this version are reinterpreted with significant new background context, which is a very interesting way to rewrite it that I definitely dig in principle. For example, Florence’s first scene here involves Walter threatening her with deportation from the US unless she can make Freddie behave for the duration of the tournament. Most versions of Chess make the political scheming very symbolic and vague — exchanges of mostly unnamed political prisoners or handwaved concessions — but this version is noticeably specific, with specific nuclear arms treaty negotiations that the CIA believes would be negatively affected if Freddie keeps openly antagonizing the Soviets. She tells Walter to go fuck himself (told you it adds more swearing) and that nobody can control Freddie Trumper, but ultimately she doesn’t have much of a choice but to reluctantly play along. This addition recontextualizes her character and her interactions with Freddie in Act I a fair bit — it’s pretty significant, after all, that she is under threat and may lose her home if she doesn’t somehow control what she really can’t.

Meanwhile, Freddie himself here suffers from a full-on mental illness which he takes medication for. Walter asserts on a phone call early that they’re dealing with a “genuine paranoid schizophrenic”, but then later calls him a “bipolar bitch”; I take the blatant inconsistency combined with the obviously insulting nature of these remarks to mean probably we’re not meant to take either of them at face value, but these two lines from Walter are the only ones suggesting any specific diagnosis. (I unfortunately suspect Danny Strong didn’t have a specific condition in mind and research it so much as just slap him with a Generic Ambiguous Mental Illness for which he takes Pills.) One way or another, Freddie’s ambiguous mental illness gives him bouts of intense paranoia, driving him to do things like trashing his and Florence’s hotel room to look for listening devices at one point. Florence keeps insistently, frustratedly telling him to just take his goddamn pills even as he’s in genuine distress; it’s pretty uncomfortable, and also definitely one of those things that are at least more human when his episodes could cost her the only home she has: she’s desperate and in distress too.

(I do kind of feel as if this whole bit would make more sense if Florence and Freddie had a strictly business relationship here to start with, instead of being explicitly portrayed as a couple — when they have a committed intimate partnership going on, one would think Florence getting deported would also be pretty obviously significant for Freddie, and Florence quietly playing along with the CIA and crossing her fingers that she can indirectly coax him into behaving with seemingly no serious thought given to whether it’d be better to just tell him why he needs to stop feels stranger. The scene with Walter sounds like Walter/the CIA are not aware of their romantic relationship and Florence wants to keep it that way — they both refer to Freddie strictly by his full/last name and as “her player” — so I guess Walter would have assumed she wouldn’t tell him, but surely the calculus would at least look a bit different to Florence herself. Even if it just prompts her to realize Freddie would still be liable to react by becoming even more erratic and vocal about his paranoias, that feels like it’d be significant enough, at least for her feelings on this relationship going forward, that it never actually coming up or being suggested within the story starts to feel marginally odd. Not a major complaint, though, just a bit of overthinking.)

Freddie in general is noticeably portrayed much more sympathetically here than usual throughout. Where other versions of Chess tend to present Freddie as an attention-seeking drama queen who plays up ludicrous arbitrary demands for money and press, here things like his walkout from the first chess game are made to come from a much more genuine place: he has major sensory issues and is intolerably thrown off balance by distracting noise and lights (which really are deliberately arranged to sabotage him). “Florence Quits”, the song with the misogyny verse, usually reads as being triggered by his jealousy and inability to accept that Anatoly’s just playing better than him, but this version makes it feel more about how he feels persistently gaslit about the ways he’s being sabotaged than anything else: he accuses the Soviets of having a hypnotist in the front row to throw him off (which they do, and Freddie literally saw him and recognized him) and Florence of working for the CIA (which she has been, if not by choice) while they deny it and brush it off, and the tense opening notes of the song play under him desperately yelling “You’re lying to me! You’re all lying to me!” (Which doesn’t make the misogyny okay, obviously, but it does make it feel more like a desperate, paranoia-fueled lashout where you don’t know how much he really means all that.)

When he subsequently forfeits the match against Anatoly, he makes a speech that sounds absolutely despairing where he says chess has been taking a toll on his health since he first became champion at eleven years old, and he doesn’t feel he can trust anyone, even himself. In Act II, before “The Interview”, he even actually apologizes to Florence for how he treated her; heck, his motivation for going so hard after Anatoly in “The Interview” itself is portrayed as being that he is genuinely disgusted by Anatoly leaving his family so callously (which is a lot of fun given Freddie’s own issues about his father leaving him and his mother behind) and wants Florence to hear the truth about what a despicable man he is, which is still unpleasant to her but clearly comes from a much more sympathetic place than either simple spite or reluctantly complying with Walter’s orders.

As for Anatoly… he was taken from his parents when he was a small child to be groomed by Molokov and the KGB into becoming a chess champion, and he’s well aware from his very first scene that the state had killed the previous Soviet champion after Freddie unseated him. (Freddie excoriates the press early on for not covering why the former champion disappeared off the face of the Earth because they’re too busy bashing Freddie, which sounds like paranoia, but the narrative has actually told us Freddie is right and they really did execute him but no one but Freddie seems to notice or care — another way in which Freddie is jarringly sympathetic here. In general, Freddie is portrayed as paranoid, and the other characters treat him like he’s just paranoid, but the narrative keeps proving Freddie’s paranoia right.)

Anatoly, though, isn’t afraid of the same fate, because “The state cannot execute a man… that is already dead.” (This general sentiment could press my buttons, but it just feels super corny and melodramatic the way it’s presented and performed, especially with that dramatic pause in there.) He is deeply depressed, thinks his marriage to Svetlana is fake and his kids hate him, and says repeatedly in Act I that he hates chess and just wants to be free of it, though he also describes a particular championship match he watched as the only time he’s felt love. At the end of Act I, he defects to the UK along with Florence as usual (his defection fully blows up the treaty Walter was worrying about despite Anatoly’s victory, so Florence’s refugee visa is indeed revoked, and that’s why they end up in the UK). Theoretically he should be free of chess now, but it bothers him intensely that he only won by forfeit (here they never finished playing a single match), resulting in him returning to defend his world champion title, and win it ‘properly’, four years later in Bangkok against Viigand.

Unknown to Anatoly, by Act II, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Soviets are extra on edge and believe a planned NATO military exercise is actually the US mobilizing for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Walter tries to convince Molokov it’s just an exercise; Molokov insists unfortunately the generals are going to believe it’s an invasion and be ready to retaliate unless Viigand wins the championship (if Viigand wins they will take it as a ‘sign of goodwill’ from the US, which will change their minds on the apparent invasion because, uhh, unclear). Throughout Act II, the larger stakes in this version are set up to be that if Anatoly should win the match, the Soviets are liable to start a nuclear war.

Does Walter go to Anatoly to frankly tell him that apparently the Soviets have lost their minds and are basically threatening nuclear war over a chess match and try to convince him to throw on that basis? Does Molokov realize that if he’s telling Walter to go rig the chess match so the generals will call it off, he clearly doesn’t actually believe that the US is about to invade, so probably he should be trying to convince the generals not to go for the nuclear option himself? No, of course not; this is Chess, so we have to have the songs that are in Chess. So instead, Walter and Molokov just go through the same indirect schemes as usual to unbalance Anatoly and convince him to throw the game, with some minor twists. Molokov actually actively threatens Svetlana with being sent to a gulag to die if she doesn’t convince her husband to return — and Svetlana does straight-up tell Anatoly this, only for Anatoly to brush her off and tell her they won’t do that. Florence learns the same from Walter and initially dismisses him, and fully doesn’t believe him about her father being alive, but does ultimately sympathize with Svetlana and worry for her, which I like. But Anatoly is obsessed with winning this championship above all else and fully convinced Molokov is bluffing.

In the end, he plays the game to win, oblivious to the nuclear threat; as he checkmates, Walter makes a desperate phone call to his superiors to call off the training exercise. (Why he didn’t just do that immediately when Molokov told him the Soviets were taking it as an attack, instead of spending all this time playing along with this elaborate chess mind game, is a mystery.) Only… they don’t, and the Soviets watch with their fingers on the nuclear button, but ultimately they don’t fire. The Arbiter’s narration informs us this was the closest the world ever came to destruction, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis, and that this then served as the wake-up call that prompted negotiations about nuclear deescalation.

Anatoly, meanwhile, returns to the Soviet Union as usual, this time successfully exchanging himself for Florence’s imprisoned father, and Walter gives Florence and her father visas so that they can return to the US together.

Broad thoughts

I feel profoundly weird about the mixing of real-life history and completely fictitious alternate history here — you can’t just assert in narration that the fictional events in your musical were what taught the US and Soviet Union that maybe they should just talk to each other, while making a specific comparison to an actual thing that really happened, after spending the musical asserting that the Soviets murdered chess players for losing the world championship. I think mixing history and fiction can work fine if we can imagine that for all we know this is what really happened, or alternatively that this is what might have happened in some alternate universe similar to but distinct from ours. But here, we’re creating highly significant and publicized events that are obviously fictional, making it absurd to pretend this is what really happened, while also presenting these fictional alternate-universe events in objective hindsight narration alongside real events that happened in the real world and as a supposed cause of them. This ending narration just feels like it’s weirdly trying to have its cake and eat it too.

All in all, though, I think this is definitely one of the most interesting efforts to rewrite Chess. It definitely has something it’s going for, there are several neat ideas in it, and in particular I appreciate that it tries to give extra attention to the characters, more context to their actions, and more messy, humanized depth, inner conflict, and complicated motivators and stressors behind what they do. I genuinely enjoy what it’s doing with Freddie in Act I, in particular, even though it feels somehow both jarringly like it’s woobifying him (I genuinely think he ends up coming across as the most sympathetic of the three mains here, with so much of his erratic, childish and unpleasant behaviour being recontextualized to be more understandable and the way his hatred of the Soviets keeps being validated by the narrative) and like the narrative is weirdly harsh on him (this much more sympathetic Freddie who suffers from an actual mental illness is treated like absolute irredeemable scum by every other character including the fourth-wall-leaning narrator, even more than usual).

I also think the restructuring of Act I was pretty solid for the most part, though there’s definitely some awkwardness, like how Freddie’s expanded encounters with the press sort of clumsily repeat the same beats a bit. On the one hand, I can get what Danny Strong was going for in choosing to introduce everyone first and then go into “Merano” instead of doing several minutes of narrative meaninglessness before the main characters are even introduced; on the other hand, that kind of just half-defeats the sole original purpose of “Merano”, which is to provide a very jaunty more stereotypical musical theater song so that Freddie can be introduced via barging in and interrupting it with his very different vibe, and if I were Danny Strong I would definitely have just removed “Merano” at that point. But the “Difficult and Dangerous Times” opening works great, and it nicely avoids the “almost nothing of note happens for nearly forty minutes” and “several meaningless fluff songs in a row” problems of the London script, introducing conflict and stakes early and keeping the narrative going.

Ultimately, though, a lot of what it’s trying to do doesn’t quite come together to me, and some of it is variously misguided or just strange.

The Politics

To start with, I can definitely get wanting to emphasize the role of Cold War politics in the narrative, and I basically enjoyed the increased political focus and higher stakes in Act I — but I don’t think making Anatoly unwittingly almost start a nuclear war works here, or fits properly into this narrative at all. The Soviet generals have to be holding idiot balls; Molokov has to be holding an idiot ball; Walter has to be holding the biggest idiot ball of all; and most importantly, the ludicrously massive stakes being pasted on top of the match despite none of the main characters even knowing about it means we zoom thoroughly out of the character drama of the situation: “Endgame” just becomes grotesquely trivial with that hanging over it without Anatoly’s knowledge, rendering the actual drama of the climactic song completely irrelevant to what’s really at stake.

I also dislike, in a version that emphasizes the politics, how distinctly slanted it is. One of the things that I like in the London strain of Chess is that Walter and Molokov are both slimy, manipulative bastards in different ways, both sides’ political actors cruelly toying with the lives of the players for their own impersonal ends; the righteousness of each state as a whole doesn’t really matter to this story, only the impact that the whole conflict and the mutual scheming has on the main characters’ lives. But in this version, the Soviets and Molokov are cartoon villains who literally abduct children to force them into chess camp and then murder them if they don’t win the world championship, while Walter may be a condescending asshole who’s willing to threaten Florence but is distinctly the ‘good guy’ in his interactions with Molokov, which comprise most of his screentime, especially in Act II. Walter even gets a humanizing moment where he explains he has a nine-year-old son and has nightmares about him suffering a nuclear winter (Molokov, meanwhile, tells Walter in Act I that Anatoly is like a son to him but could not more obviously not care about Anatoly at all when he proudly presents his new champion material Viigand in Act II). I just find it really detrimental to Chess’s narrative to make it about Soviets Bad, US Good, and more so the more you focus on that — to whatever extent you highlight the politics in this story, it should be done in a way that’s about how the political machinations of the Cold War impact the character drama at the center of it, and it’s distracting when instead you make it into a loosely related B-plot about Walter’s desperate diplomatic efforts to stop the evil Soviets from destroying the world with their shortsightedness.

I think a successful more politically-focused Chess could definitely exist, but I think it’s always going to function best if Walter and Molokov feel at least narratively like just about equal scumbags. It’s not even impossible to imagine nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction coming up in the course of it — but it needs to be using that to make us enraged at all of this on behalf of Anatoly/Florence/Svetlana/Freddie, not enraged at Molokov on behalf of Walter.

The Character Work

Meanwhile, I do basically like the setup and recontextualization done for all of the main characters in Act I, but unfortunately none of them quite delivered as well as I hoped in the end.

Let’s start with Florence. I actually quite liked the deportation threat, putting Florence herself under personal pressure in a way she usually isn’t. I dig characters being put through the wringer and making decisions under stress. But the story doesn’t quite do anything with that other than using it as silent context behind her early interactions with Freddie and technically as the reason she and Anatoly move to the UK offscreen. We don’t, for instance, ever see Freddie learn that that’s why she moved or that he was unwittingly indirectly responsible for that, or otherwise address that in any way, and as far as Florence in the rest of the story is concerned, it might as well never have happened — we never see her having any kinds of feelings on it, or even confronting Walter about that nasty little part he played in her life when she meets him again (she doesn’t even comment on it when he offers her the chance to go back to the US at the end!). To an extent this is, of course, because Florence being deported was never originally part of the story of Chess, so of course it doesn’t come up in any song or have any significant specific impact on the core series of events — but if you’re going to add it in at all, you really ought to be taking that somewhere in the rest of your additions that isn’t just briefly handwaving that she gets to go back at the end.

Like Long Beach, this version brings Florence’s father back at the end — but unfortunately, it feels really unearned here. Compared to other London variants, it actually ditches the bit of “The Deal” where Florence is tangibly emotional and riled up by Walter’s offer of her father — she fully dismisses the idea of her father being alive as bullshit, and instead it’s Svetlana who moves her to have doubts when she sees her begging Anatoly to return on video and realizes Svetlana still loves him. I do really like that, by itself, and it’s probably my favorite thing about this version’s portrayal of Florence; her empathizing with Svetlana to the point of feeling genuinely guilty for having taken her husband from her, and believing maybe the right thing to do would be if he went back to Svetlana for her sake, is actually very good, serves as a great lead-in to “I Know Him So Well”, and makes Florence’s character feel far more sympathetic in a production where she’s otherwise pretty lacking in that department. But it leaves us with no emotional connection whatsoever to Florence’s father — we’ve only heard her mention him twice before Walter’s offer, very briefly, in Act I, and not really with any sense that she misses or is all that invested in him. Seeing her reunite with him means nothing for her or her arc; it just comes out of left field, and winds up being another thing slanting this version towards Good Guy Walter, Bad Guy Molokov, what with Walter offering her visas back to the US for both of them seemingly out of the goodness of his heart.

It would have been possible to actually build up to this in a way that would make it satisfying. Florence and Anatoly have several conversations; we could have used some of those to have Florence actually talk about her father and how she feels about him being gone, and that could have been part of building up her relationship with Anatoly, made it meaningful that Anatoly’s parting gift to her is to ensure her father’s return. I suppose Danny Strong’s thought process may have been that if he built up Florence’s father too much, that should become her main concern once Walter brings that into it, and he wanted her concern to be about Svetlana instead, which I guess is fair; it also means Anatoly only really has to dismiss the potential harm to one other person in his obsession with winning the game. But if you do make the decision to not build up her father, then bringing her father back is not an ending that makes any sense, and there was no need to do this — they could have easily cut out all suggestion of her father being alive entirely and it would only have made things smoother. I think the only reason she gets her father back in this one is in some hasty effort to make Florence’s ending less bleak, but because it doesn’t have any emotional resonance, it’s just not the right way to do that here.

Speaking of Florence and Anatoly, the romance here… once again has some neat, interesting things it’s going for but doesn’t quite come together as a whole. The two of them do have some actual conversations where they bond a bit, which is already a marked improvement over the default London script — but their very first conversation features Anatoly asserting out of nowhere that Florence has “a way of brightening his spirit”, despite not even knowing her, which isn’t super convincing and just comes off kind of creepy-awkward. Florence asserts a few times that he’s sweet and kind, but we don’t really see much of him actually coming across as sweet or kind — his lines tend to be either melodramatic or sardonic moping interspersed kind of jarringly with awkward jokes. He’s less charming or sweet and more like a lonely, kicked dog, which is fine if Florence is into that but doesn’t quite make her descriptions of why she likes him ring true.

This production actually goes back to the concept album a bit when it comes to Florence and Anatoly — namely, more than political manipulation and external pressures forcibly tearing them apart from the outside, there’s a more substantial internal tension between them as Anatoly genuinely simply prioritizes winning the chess match over her and dismisses her as she tries to question him about Svetlana. The two approaches can both work but do different things for the narrative; this internal approach puts more focus on the personal conflict and character drama and makes the relationship more interesting, which is definitely good, and in principle I think this is built up to in a pretty solid way here — Anatoly, raised to become a chess champion to the exclusion of all else, being maddened by the notion of not actually beating Freddie in Act I and needing to prove he deserves the championship to himself in Act II before he can feel “free from chess” works as a coherent reason for him to be so strikingly, unhealthily obsessive about it.

But I think the biggest problem is that Florence and Anatoly individually don’t hit well enough as characters to create investment in them. Florence is ultimately not developed enough and mostly just acts kind of unpleasant, especially to Freddie, all the way up until that Svetlana bit in Act II. More importantly, I just can’t like or understand or sympathize with Anatoly at all, beyond recognizing that core of what his arc is going for. Part of it is probably down to the writing of his lines, which I’m just not a fan of in general. I already named one example from his first scene. Here’s how Anatoly and Florence’s very first conversation starts:

ANATOLY: It’s not his fault. This game drives us all crazy. FLORENCE: I’m fine. Aren’t you even a little bit scared? ANATOLY: Of Trumper? FLORENCE: No, that they’ll kill you if you lose. ANATOLY: Oh. To quote the great Leo Tolstoy, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.” FLORENCE: What does that mean? ANATOLY: I don’t know exactly, but it is very Russian.

I just don’t find this dialogue very convincing. Why is he reciting a dramatic irrelevant quote if he doesn’t know what it means and just thinks it’s “very Russian”? It feels like a generic quippy exchange off a snarky TV show. Does Anatoly use humour to cope with his situation? Not really; this is pretty much the only time he says anything that might be taken as that. This feels like a joke that’s there only to get a laugh out of the audience, not because Anatoly would actually tell it — and consequently, it doesn’t tell us anything real about Anatoly. Meanwhile, Florence responds to this with “Oh, you’re funny,” as if that’s one of the reasons she falls for him when I would decidedly not name that as a character trait he has. I feel like most of his dialogue just doesn’t have a great sense of character — in stark contrast to Freddie, who oozes character. I can’t get a good sense of who he is and how he thinks. He’s just there. And this also makes it harder to see what Florence sees in him and believe in the relationship.

Moreover, this Anatoly just comes across as kind of a terrible person, not in the fun coherent intentional way Freddie is a terrible person but in a flat, confusing and kind of unintentional-seeming way. Svetlana here is actually really sympathetic, with lovely little additional bits of dialogue that make her feelings hit harder (her voice as she tells Anatoly that “You left us!” breaks my heart), and this is possibly my favorite version of Svetlana in any Chess. But Anatoly is really, really terrible to her, by which I don’t even mean the cheating on her but the bit where he keeps angrily insisting to her face that she never loved him and she brainwashed their children to hate him and of course they’re not going to kill her (hey, Anatoly, guess who’s already well aware that the Soviet government in this universe is not above executing people over chess?).

And even that could be made understandable, given his situation — he could just be in hard denial about it because the thought of them having been suffering with him gone and being punished for his actions is so horrific he just shuts it down — but there’s never any sense that that’s what’s really going on. We don’t see him privately upset about the possibility later, for instance — he just keeps insisting the same and dismissing Svetlana to Florence, too. We know it’s not that it’s true — we see Svetlana admit to Molokov that even though he ruined her life and she never wants to see him again she still loves him, and we hear her sing “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well”. Nor do we ever get any hint at exactly what Svetlana or his kids did to make him think this of them, if anything (his own kids!). Anatoly just seems to sort of bitterly, adamantly believe this for no reason at all. And that makes it impossible to empathize with. Okay, sure, Anatoly, you were taken from your family as a child, but that really doesn’t even start to explain any of this. There could have been ways of making it feel at least believable, tragic in a deeply fucked-up way, but the story here just doesn’t do the work. And once again, Anatoly being so unpleasant for no reason just makes it harder to feel at all invested in his relationship with Florence or sad when they part.

The best fix here isn’t quite obvious, and I can’t say I envy Danny Strong trying to put all his neat little ideas together and make them work. If Anatoly were to appear substantially conflicted about Svetlana and put any real stock in Molokov’s threat, that would render “Endgame”, where he doubles down anyway, kind of jarring and inexcusable as he’d be not just refusing to return to her but refusing to care if she is killed. So in order for this to properly work with “Endgame”, he probably does need to be very deep in denial about whether they’d really kill her. I think what I would do, if I were writing this plot where groomed-as-a-chess-champion Anatoly knows the Soviets killed Boris Ivanovich and they’ve threatened to kill Svetlana too, is to emphasize better how irrational Anatoly is being and try to show it more as a consequence of growing up among the constantly plotting KGB.

Let him go off on a proper paranoid rant to Florence about the reasons why he thinks Svetlana is just plotting against him, and some innocuous things he saw his kids do once that mean she brainwashed them. When Florence tries to challenge him on how batshit he sounds, he just storms out, saying she’s being taken in by their lies and just wants to sabotage him, and disappears — and she doesn’t see him again until he appears at the final game and plays this manic, desperate match while insisting to himself that Svetlana and Florence both just never understood him and hated his success. Afterwards, we can perhaps see him finally, quietly asking Molokov if they’re really going to kill her, showing that on some level he already knew the threat might be real and had just firmly blocked it out (in the actual ending as it is Molokov simply tells him unprompted that she really will be punished unless he comes back, and he just asks why with no addressing of his previous adamant insistence that that wouldn’t happen). His and Florence’s final conversation could then involve a bit more of a reckoning with that and with what his relationship with Svetlana was really like, through a more honest lens.

I’m actually pretty tickled by this scenario because that would really drive home a pretty fun parallel between Anatoly and Freddie — which in hindsight I think this version must in fact have been trying for, but didn’t quite do in a focused enough way for it to really hit. Anatoly and Freddie are both chess players with deeply abnormal childhoods and bouts of paranoia that cause them to behave in toxic ways, which ultimately drives Florence away from both of them.

This production shows the first chess game as the “Chess Game” instrumental playing under Freddie and Anatoly having alternating inner monologues about the game and their issues, deliberately drawing a comparison between the two of them; they both say they hate chess, that they don’t feel like real human beings. It’s not exactly subtle, but I liked the way this was used to build up their respective brain gremlins and was intrigued by the parallel being set up. I didn’t feel they ultimately did much with the parallel, though, because the story then didn’t really continue leaning into it much from there. By emphasizing this Anatoly’s paranoia as paranoia and not just as him legitimately thinking the marriage was never real and the KGB wouldn’t kill her, we could properly build the story around that parallel, and I would genuinely dig that.

The one place after the chess match where the actual thing does sort of try to get at the Anatoly/Freddie parallel again is in the dialogue scene that precedes “Endgame”. This scene is not sung (though it has the “Chess Game” instrumental in the background, which connects it neatly to that previous bit comparing the two of them), but it’s clearly based on “Talking Chess”: Freddie approaches Anatoly to tell him Viigand’s weakness lies in his King’s Indian Defense, and:

ANATOLY: Why are you helping me? FREDDIE: Jesus Christ! Am I the only one who cares about this game? ANATOLY: It’s more than a game now. There is so much more at stake than who wins or loses. FREDDIE: No! No, winning is everything. Fuck politics! Fuck the KGB, fuck the CIA, fuck them all! We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to chess. We are the ones who have given up everything for greatness — our childhoods, our sanity, our loves. Anatoly, we’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve sacrificed nothing. What’s the number one rule of a chess champion? ANATOLY: Play to win. FREDDIE: As long as you do that you can never lose, even if you do.

Much as I love “Talking Chess”, though, this on the surface similar scene just didn’t feel right in this context when I listened to it. In Anatoly’s last scene here, he told Florence firmly that he just wanted to win and that his marriage with Svetlana was never real and it’s all KGB mind games. Him going “It’s more than a game now, there’s so much more at stake” suddenly now comes out of nowhere — if he believes that now, it could only be if he actively reconsidered something offscreen, but he doesn’t say anything elaborating on what he’s thinking now or what he might have reconsidered or why, just that vague, generic line that contradicts everything he’s expressed up until this point. It’s another example of Anatoly’s dialogue just feeling really flat and meaningless to me — his lines here don’t say anything, just serve as vague filler to prompt Freddie onward. And because unlike London proper the setup leading up to this is all about him already being absolutely determined to win the game at all costs, this just feels redundant, unnecessary, going through the motions of something that’s in London without realizing that with the changed context it doesn’t quite make sense anymore.

I think that’s unfortunately the case with Freddie a bit here too. I enjoyed Act I’s quite different take on Freddie, and his establishing narration for Act II petulantly stating Anatoly won the championship last year “by forfeit, I might add”, and “The Interview” is recontextualized in a very fun way as I mentioned before — but after that it feels like Danny Strong doesn’t quite know what to do with Freddie anymore and just has him sort of arbitrarily go through the motions of London in a way that doesn’t necessarily hang together with everything he’s established of Freddie so far. It made sense that this Freddie, despite being decidedly hostile towards Walter and the CIA, conducted the interview to show Florence what a bastard Anatoly is — he’s not doing it for Walter, he’s got his own reasons to want to do it once Walter’s shown him the Svetlana video. But I find it a lot harder to swallow that this Freddie — whose usual problem seems to be that he’s compulsively blunt about how he really feels — would then be easily persuaded to play his part in “The Deal”, which involves exaggeratedly trying to be all buddy-buddy with Anatoly. Maybe if there was better setup around it, like with “The Interview” — but “The Deal” only has seconds of kind of half-assed leadup here, and from there it moves directly into “Pity the Child” (after a segue featuring the recording of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, because nuclear war).

Freddie’s next appearance after that, then, is this “Talking Chess”-esque dialogue where he’s realized the parallel between the two of them, how they’ve both sacrificed everything for chess and the political schemers have sacrificed nothing and that’s why he should play to win. I can appreciate how the low point of “Pity the Child” would trigger that particular realization, contemplating how much he lost and sacrificed to achieve his status in the game and perhaps afterward realizing Anatoly is the only other person here who might understand that. That feels like it basically tracks and is interesting.

But… it also means that fun very specific contempt for Anatoly in particular based on him having left his family like Freddie’s own father did is just kind of… gone, I guess, or at least Freddie doesn’t consider it relevant enough for it to stop him from going out of his way to pep Anatoly up for the game with no mention or hint of it. (At least Freddie probably isn’t aware of the threats made against Svetlana in particular, so he doesn’t know Anatoly winning would shatter his family even further.) And we’ve lost the bit in “Talking Chess” where the notion of the political scheming actually leading to Viigand winning the match just personally offends Freddie because Viigand is not even that good; instead Freddie is just putting forward “Play to win” as some kind of general inviolable chess principle, which is kind of generic and not nearly as characterful, in my opinion. I’m not saying we ought to have had the “Viigand is mediocre” bit here — I don’t think it would quite fit in for this Freddie, whose feelings about chess itself are very conflicted and who is more concerned with showing up these political hacks who have sacrificed nothing while they sacrificed everything — but as a Freddie moment I would really have wanted to end on something stronger there than this vague assertion that “The number one rule of a chess champion is to play to win.”

Like in London, this is Freddie’s last substantial scene, but he does have a part in “Endgame”, and it’s also an interesting one: he gets Sixty-four squares / they’re the reason you know you exist (but not the preceding How straightforward the game…), but also a couple of other verses usually sung by the chorus, and the lines he gets are clearly very purposefully chosen to reinforce that final resolve regarding the sacrifices they’ve made for greatness, which I really appreciate: Listen to them shout / They saw you do it / In their minds no doubt / That you’ve been through it / Suffered for your art and in the end a winner and They’re completely enchanted / But they don’t take your qualities for granted / It isn’t very often / That the critics soften / Nonetheless, you’ve won their hearts / How can we begin to / Appreciate the work that you’ve put into / Your calling through the years / The blood, the sweat, the tears / The late, late, nights, the early starts?

All in all, Freddie is still definitely my favorite part of this Chess, but while the parallel itself is neat it’s too muddled and I find the second half of Act II pretty uneven for him. What would I do if I were writing this bit?

I’m not totally sure how I’d want to tackle “The Deal”, but as for the “Talking Chess”-but-not scene: I would ditch the bit where Freddie is trying to advise Anatoly on strategy and the bit where Anatoly is apparently suddenly not determined to play to win just so Freddie can then tell him he should be again. None of that is contributing anything in what this version has been building up. Instead, they just sort of bump into each other, Anatoly fresh off his paranoid rant to Florence about Svetlana, Freddie fresh off “Pity the Child” and the strange realization Anatoly might be the only person who’d understand him a little bit. At first they just sort of stop and look at each other. Freddie starts, guarded, with some kind of oblique accusatory prod about the leaving his family thing, which he still deeply resents.

Anatoly has calmed down now, but he tells him what he told Florence: that it was always a fake marriage, a fake family, that the video was just a lie set up for him by the KGB, that Svetlana had brainwashed their children to despise him.

This incidentally plays into Freddie’s existing preconceptions pretty well. He’s probably not instantly convinced but it checks out enough he’s willing to reluctantly leave it alone for now. Probably mutters something like, “Fucking Soviets.”

Anatoly says something like, aren’t you going to try to make me a deal to get me to throw the match and go back? Freddie says no, fuck that. Says the whole bit about how we are the ones who have dedicated ourselves to chess, who have sacrificed everything, childhood, sanity, love, and they’ve sacrificed nothing. Why should we listen to those CIA and KGB assholes? Draws out that parallel. The two of them are probably standing in symmetrical positions on the stage.

Anatoly just nods slowly, agreeing. “I would have beaten you.”

Freddie scoffs and says, “Dream on,” but not quite with the spiteful arrogance he would’ve said it in Act I.

Then they part, and we move on to “Endgame”. The scene isn’t about Freddie helping Anatoly, or about Freddie convincing Anatoly to go for the win; it’s about the Freddie/Anatoly parallel, about Freddie realizing it and in his profound loneliness finding a smidge of connection with this guy he hated because he’s the only one who sort of Gets It, and about showing how Anatoly’s conviction has developed since the first chess match where part of his inner monologue went, “I can’t beat him, he’s too good.” Anatoly is so ready to prove that he really is the world’s best chess player.

Conclusion

Man, this version is so interesting. It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess with a bunch of tasty potential and a real sense that Danny Strong had some genuine thoughts on what the show was missing and how to rework it to fix that, even where his attempts were ultimately confused and don’t succeed. In some ways it’s the most me-core version of Chess and in other ways it’s deeply antithetical to me and in most all ways it’s trying to do something neat but does it in a flawed way. Special shoutout to this Freddie, who honestly deserves better than this Florence.

[areyougonnabe]

could you explain marie nelson to me... i know that he's tragic and also a misogynist and that's kind of all

well you've got the basics but let's get into the details [cracks knuckles]

edward william nelson was the shore party's biologist, counterpart of lillie who stayed on the ship. like lillie he had been educated at cambridge, however unlike lillie who barely scraped a degree in the end, nelson dropped out lol. he went to work at the plymouth marine biological association, which is where he was when he was hired by wilson (presumably via cambridge connections) for the expedition.

he wasn't as rich as cherry or oates but he came from a landed gentry background, his maternal grandfather was a major landowner in the shetlands in scotland and was, if you believe this random page on the internet, descended directly from King James V of scotland... and his dad was a big deal microscope guy.

anyway by the time nelson was on the expedition his initial nickname was "The Immaculate One" because he was (at first) always wearing a clean collar, and then at some point he became almost universally known as "Marie," short for "Marie Ducas" or "du Car" which nobody ever bothers to explain.

sometimes he was also known as "Antonio" or "Brontë" (that last being a reference to Lord Nelson) and griff often called him "Marie du Car Bronte Antonio Nelson" or another combination of multiple names.

silas wrote in his diary that he "had a taste for gin and bridge" and lots of people remarked on how he wouldn't get out of bed in a timely fashion and was always late to breakfast.

he was kind of seen as dissolute in general or a bit of a slacker. kathleen scott remarked at one point that he "spends all his time on shore being a man about town, which makes him look exceedingly tired" but really i think that was just how his face naturally looked.....

his job at Cape Evans was overseeing his Biological Hole (that's what he's doing in the pic up top) and identifying new antarctic species, taking temperatures, and measuring currents. he had a telephone wire run out to the little igloo he built on the sea ice, and often had company in the form of griff or cherry or whoever wanted to help him keep the ice open and unfrozen at the hole.

he did plenty of science, but that kind of fades into the background in the diaries because most people if they're talking about him at all are mainly giving a running commentary on how much he liked to argue.

his main axe to grind was women's rights... griff seemed to take great joy in calling him a "miserable, cynical reactionary" and goading him into arguments which sometimes descended into pitched physical battle.

from griff's diary, may 30 1911:

Marie Deb & I had a frightful cag in our boudoir about Women’s Suffrage. He is engaged & declares if his wife wanted to exercise her vote (even if she gets one) he will lock her up!

november 3 1911:

We have great cags at meals now. Simpson Deb & I are progressives & Liberals. Nelson is a thorough Reactionary Conservative especially re women & vote & education. However as he said he wished he were a woman (with £500 a year income) we guessed he was abnormal!

nelson probably did the least sledging out of anyone during the first year, not going on a single long-haul trip (even simpson went out on a short spring journey). he mostly just hung out at his igloo i guess? and got really into calculating navigation for fun. also apparently he was the best at chess in the whole hut.

he stayed on for the second year, and did go out sledging on the Search Journey:

there is some great stuff about his midnight poetry and weird moon obsession during the second winter in @worstjourney's very good post here.

i'll also add that it was pretty harsh on everyone else to have Maximum Marie Exposure with no tempering force of griff to allay it.

nelson did contribute heavily to the much-reduced and mildly pathetic Volume IV of the South Polar Times, which featured griff's offcuts from the prior year, deb's illustrations, and poems from nelson including a parody of walt whitman about billiards:

This is the song of billiards:- The tight stretched cloth of green, the serried arches, The cue - faking the cue, the protests from the players, The pyramid, the British Pluck, the Chinese fluke, The click of striking balls, the rattle in the ditch, the grin of joy.

most of the expedition scientists went home on steamers from NZ, but both nelson and lillie stayed on the terra nova as she took the long way round cape horn, in order to do more trawls and marine science.

nelson also took a job as second mate—it was definitely unusual for a scientists with zero navy/sailing experience (except the voyage down) to suddenly become an officer of the watch, but pennell trusted him, and seemingly that trust was not misplaced, as pennell wrote in his diary about how well he took to the job, and to atkinson about how he was by "far & away the most brainy person in the ship."

he got married to the woman he had been engaged to, violet thomas, after returning from the expedition. their only child, a daughter, was born in 1915, but by then he was serving in the royal naval division at gallipoli and then france. his war story is straight up wild and i recommend reading from ice floes to battlefields by anne strathie if you want aaalll the deets. but basically he saw a lot of action, served alongside rupert brooke (among other notables) and came out the other side relatively unharmed... physically.........

after the war he went back to the plymouth marine lab, and was supposed to be working on expedition results, but didn't do much of that.

in 1921 he left his family in plymouth to take a job in scotland working in a lab for the fishing industry, and in 1923 his wife successfully sued for "restitution of conjugal rights" which basically means the court ordered him to return to her....

but that did not end the way she wanted 🙃

shit was sad... he was found with poison injected directly into his leg.

i think there must have been a specific legal reason why the death was declared an accident—maybe something to do with receipt of military pension for the widow? but it obviously was very much on purpose. for whatever reason the thought of having to live with his wife again was so intolerable to him that death was preferable.

so thus ends the Ballad Of Marie Nelson.... here is what deb had to say about him and lillie in 1927, writing to JJ Kinsey:

You heard of Marie Nelson's tragic end no doubt, but I'm inclined to think it was as well. Poor old Lillie is in less happy circumstances, the last I heard of him was that he was never likely to get out of Bedlam, a rather ghastly end up to poor old "Ooze's" brilliant promise.

but much like lillie, nelson's end can't be blamed on his experience in the antarctic as it seems he was relatively content there. occam's razor dictates that A) he clearly had Problems before and B) wartime trauma made those problems worse.

the tragic sequel to this tragic story is the fact that his daughter, barbara, was 93 when she went on a cruise to antarctica to visit Cape Evans and see her father's laboratory... but she died of a fall while on the ship during a storm before they had even gotten there :(

[snaillock]

ok so there’s been a lot stuff going on today with multiple writers on here including myself finding out that our works have been reposted on wattpad without ANY of our permission. despite this specific account doing this for over a year by now, basically nobody was even aware of it until today.

there’s a bunch of things wrong about doing this but one specific thing this person said to justify it really ticked me off.

this is a really shitty excuse for taking the MULTIPLE works from writers to a whole different app where most of them aren’t even on.

the main point i wanted to make for this post is that if you want to have a place to store all the fics you like, the reblog function is such an easy way to do it. all you have do make a side blog (optional and very easy), reblog whatever you like, and add tags to make it easy to find again. it’s so simple and it benefits EVERYONE involved especially the writers.

artists and writers on this site have been saying this FOREVER, over and over again.

personally i LOVE it when people reblog my fics and add their own tags especially if it’s thoughts and commentary on what they had read. it’s highly motivating and it makes me feel like there’s actual community on here. doing this can really make a writer’s day.

this person also mentioned that going through their own likes is a basically a whiplash going from fluff to smut. the thing is… there’s already a solution for that. taggingggggg!!!! if you want fluff then reblog those fics with fluff tags. if you want smut, then reblog those fics with smut tags. etc. etc. etc. it ain’t that difficult.

for the offline reading part, that’s so fucking silly man i can’t. bro honestly i would’ve much rather preferred if this person copied and pasted my fics onto a private note or document for their own personal enjoyment. but noooo they had to copy me and other people’s entire stories PUBLICLY without even making sure that it was alright to do.

anyways to wrap this up, the account name is ohmyjung. unfortunately i don’t think there’s really a way to report them for this since it seems like wattpad really care more abt stealing from published works. so the best we can do right now is hope that this person takes everything down (even if apparently they’re blocking writers for confronting them????)

update: the evil has been rid of. round of applause for everyone’s hard work. my point still stands though. if you want to genuinely show appreciation a really good fan fiction you have read, then throw in a quick reblog. it means a lot

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

Hi 👋🏻 you generously offered to give me some fic recs once you're back home if I gave you some more details as to what I'm looking for. Basically, anything tedependent that's close to, around or after canon. Open to personal favourites that deviate from this, though. Thanks in advance. Seeing the tags made me so happy! ❤️

oughh sorry this took forever, long story short getting back home ended up being a 24 hour comically terrible disaster and then i was just. tired :( but HERE I AM NOW!!!!!!!!!YAY

okay! OKAY.

tedependent

near/around canon

i'm going to assume leaning away from nsfw since it wasn't specified

no preference towards complete/incomplete, but i tended for the former

let's start with a ⚡LIGHTNING ROUND⚡!

these are fics I think at least somewhat fit your description (not sure I'm a great judge of 'close to canon') that i don't have any extra commentary to add about (that's not a bad thing!) they're all good!

A Mighty Nice Shine by turingpatterns - oneshot (complete) (trent's daughter! cute fic!!)

For As Long As We Can by ShutUpGwen - longer fic (complete) (post-canon getting together, kinda)

All Publicity, as they say by JessJessTheBest - medium sized fic(?) (complete) (very cute and funny social media centered fic)

if music be the food of love, play on by literary_lesbian - medium sized fic (complete) (great author, mae pov deserves more love)

Take My Whole Life Too by ItsClydeBitches - oneshot (complete) (adorable valentines day fic)

it's nice to have you here by foxwatson - longer fic (incomplete) (excellent 'there's only one cottage' fic, not s3 compliant as it was written before s3)

Holding Pattern by Wildgoosery - oneshot (complete) (honestly worth it for the ending alone--not that the whole thing isnt' good)

Nothing’s as Easy as Riding a Bike When You Don’t Know How by r_n_g_are_dead - long fic (complete) (trent falls in looove)

closer to your request (i think)

richmond is for lovers by confessionofaking- series (complete)

[summary for the first fic in the two-fic series] “So you do laugh!” He heard himself shout. Trent blinked, and then he was standing. “But you don’t do it until page—,” he crossed the room and peered over Ted’s shoulder “forty-three? And it wasn’t even a big laugh! That was more of a loud nose breath,” he paused, trying to recall the proper word. “An exhale.” Ted put a halt to his nervous rambling in a matter of seconds. “Hey, Trent, look. I know folks are divided on the actual police these days, but all human beings are opposed to the laugh-police.” or, the 'laugh police' scene fix-it fic, except i made it worse.

notes: an eventual post-canon fix-it, as well as a fix-it for the "laugh police" scene. excellent fic, excellent author (HI CADE!!!! HI!!!!! ILY!!!!) i would also reccomend from him... well, any of his fics, but for a quick round-up of a few more sfw tedependent fics of his:

twist of fate

red light

i’ll catch you, darling

just can’t get enough (more nsfw in themes but very cute)

The Lasso Effect by earlybloomingparentheses - oneshot (complete; part two of a series)

Dating Ted Lasso is a wonderful thing. There are, however, certain downsides. For example, Trent no longer has control over when and where he smiles. He apparently cares about Roy Kent's opinion of him now. And he's been having the most ridiculous urge to tap dance. It's the Lasso Effect.

notes: there's several bits in this for trent's characterization that live in my brain rent free.

number four was always you by thefaceofno - long fic (complete)

Ted’s phone rings. He looks away from the window, where he was watching the tree sway in the wind, to see Beard’s face splashed over his phone screen. He thinks about not answering, but if he doesn’t answer then all he’ll have done today is run to CostCo for no reason. He doesn’t need eight pounds of almonds, but he has eight pounds of almonds. a.k.a. the post s3 fix-it where Ted does some intense mental healing.

notes: THE post-canon tedependent fix-it. excellent. please read it immediately.

constant as a northern star (constantly in the dark) by laiqualaurelote - medium sized fic (complete) (technically part of a series but this is standalone)

“I just met Ted Lasso,” Sachiko Crimm says bluntly when her ex-husband picks up. Trent is silent for a while. “And?” he says finally. Sachiko gives it five seconds, and then she bursts out laughing. “Stop it,” says Trent wearily.

notes: one of my favorite incarnations of trent's ex-wife ever. also always a sucker for pov outsider. also, excellent author, and you should absolutely read their post-apocalypse theater/shakespeare au. please.

nothing worth doing comes easy by pocky_slash - medium sized fic (incomplete)

First Ted Lasso is a joke, then Ted Lasso is a story, and then, suddenly--mortifyingly--Ted Lasso is something more. (Or: Trent doesn't want to be Ted's friend.)

notes: excellent, loving it, basically, to quote the author's note, "trent's deeply awkward gay spiral in the [s2] finale". however, word of warning: it is, tragically, unfinished.

Architecture With a Human Element by ItsClydeBitches - oneshot (complete)

“There has to be something,” Trent muttered, furiously scrolling through his feed. Each suggestion he found was debunked by the next post, with many parents swearing up and down that certain techniques made the whole thing worse. Trent stopped on a video of a mother taking scissors to her daughter’s curls and bit down on an actual sob building in the back of his throat. It was right before Trent let it fly that his mobile rang. Coach Ted Lasso (from America). Trent couldn’t say what possessed him to answer with his throat thick and his eyes prickling, but his traitorous hand had already swiped while his mouth said, “I have to shave my head.” Or: 5 times Ted got to touch Trent's hair and one time he returned the favor.

notes: losing my mind at the tenderness in this one. ough (positive)

time may change me by rockinhamburger - oneshot (complete) (part of a series)

Trent’s writing a book, so he’s in the room, generally, whilst [AFC Richmond’s magical season] fucking happens. These are the kinds of days when he curses single fatherhood. Trent debates whether he can just skip work for the day, but the West Ham match is a mere week away. Nothing else for it. “Mia, how would you like to come to work with me today?”

notes: very sweet, good series. this particular work is pre-relationship, but i love crimmlet so much, and their interactions with the team.

Independent by TheBasilRathbone - medium sized fic (complete)

Trent Crimm might only recently be an independent journalist, but he's had no one to rely on but himself for far, far longer. And most days, it feels like he's barely keeping it together. So it only seems fitting that the conclusion to the worst period of his life is for the whole thing to go up in literal flames.  Luckily for Trent, help comes from a (not so) unexpected source.

notes: one of my favorite tedependent fics, not gonna lie. just. wow

some all-time favorites!

a man arrives on thursday by clementines_and_colorful_things - medium sized fic (complete)

The capture of a friend prompts notorious outlaw Ted Lasso to take on the crooked leadership of Nelson Road, Kansas, with his motley crew of castoffs, cowboys, and criminals. When English-born historian Trent Crimm finds himself unwillingly swept into the fast-paced world of Lasso and his outlaws, he gradually begins to unravel the enigmatic Ted Lasso’s complicated ties to Nelson Road’s most prominent players. Tensions run high as Ted evades arrest and plots the downfall of those who have wronged him, and Trent worries that Ted will meet the same abrupt end that most outlaws do: with a length of rope and a rather short drop. — A Ted Lasso Wild West AU

notes: a very good cowboy au from a very good author. not close to canon by any means, being a cowboy au, but very, very good nonetheless.

read our constellations by ShowMeAHero - long fic (complete) (series)

[summary of the first fic in a four fic ongoing series]

And Trent’s not a mess! He’s not. He’s got his life entirely together. He chose to reveal his source and give up his position with The Independent. He chose to start chasing book authorship as his new branch of his career tree. He chose his flat, and his car, and his life, down to the brands of tea he buys and the sorts of people he spends time with and the sheet sets he puts on his and Beatrice’s beds. He’s an adult man, for Christ’s sake. Of course, he’s got his life together. Everything is under his control, and it’s all fine. It’s entirely, completely, fully fine. Taking one last steadying breath, Trent opens his eyes and looks over the line of seven tests on the counter: the first he took a few hours ago, and the six he just took since. Each and every last one of them says he’s pregnant. Some have plus signs, some have two lines, some simply have the word pregnant. All of them may as well come together to form a little sign reading, Congratulations, Trent! You did it! You’ve finally made a goddamn bloody mess out of everything! Just wait until you have to tell Ted! Trent’s stomach turns for more reasons than one.

notes: what is there to say??? one of my favorite fics from one of my favorite authors. it does somewhat follow along canon, with a pretty obvious deviation of their relationship and trent (a trans man) getting pregnant. but i truly cannot recommend their fics enough. another lightning round of their more sfw tedependent fics:

to seek solace (exploration of trent and past abuse that makes me wanna bawl (positive))

you'll never walk alone (HEARTWRENCHING soulmate au, happy endings all around, i adore it)

you know (i love you so)

darling, i love you

come what may

birdhouse in your soul

[fictionfolk-safehaven]

I have so many mixed feelings about my sources. Mainly because I’m sources from:

(all from hazbin hotel)

-Valentino

-Velvette

-Alastor

-Charlie

-Camilla Carmine

-Lucifer Morningstar

my strongest sources are Velvette and Valentino

i don’t regret my source actions. I wouldn’t do it again but I don’t regret it.

I feel bad about not feeling bad though

-Destiny

(input wanted)

CW's for this post: Will add based off the above sources if asked, we just don't know the source; Mentions of explosives and arson and such, exotrauma, serious talk of guilt/shame, and self-worth.

Post author: Wilbur (DSMP fictive)

Quick disclaimer- we don't know your source media very well, and only really have one example of a problematic action from any of your source characters beyond typical "we're in hell lol" stuff. But from what little we do know, I think I'm the one out of our collective who relates the most. Also apologies in advance, I get sort of serious near the end of this. Nothing bad, just like- really genuine.

Hello! So, I'll start off with the fact that I see no issue with not feeling guilt for sources. I have some commentary because I relate a bit to this, but first... Our way of looking at it is like this; Would any of us feel guilt for something we did in a past life? We believe in reincarnation, but I don't think you need to believe in that for it to be relevant. Who I am now has no control over who I was in my source. That's not just past, it's outright another life. I personally feel- while other fictives in our collective have a different relationship to their source than I do- that there's no room for guilt in this situation. I don't feel bad, because that was another me so to speak.

As for what I did in my source- I'm often considered to be the character that started the ball rolling down the hill and into hell, pretty much. Not even joking, my profile picture on discord is me blowing up the homes of a solid chunk of my sourcemates. I felt a little bit bad, because... I don't feel bad for that. My actions were, at least from my point of view, understandable. And even if they weren't- who cares? Certainly not me. I'm allowed to have been a horrible person in my source, and to still accept myself now. I think I owe that to myself, actually, and to my sourcemates. Not to get all poetic, but- what use would causing more pain do? Would turning that pain inward rather than outward help? It doesn't change what happened.

Most of my sourcemates have exotrauma that's directly or indirectly tied to/caused by me. If they expressed that they were struggling with exotrauma from our source that I'd caused, I'd do what I could to help, but ultimately guilt and shame from me won't help them. Understanding will. I don't know if you have sourcemates, and I don't know their relationship to your source or you, but ultimately my admittedly-very-not-professional opinion is that guilt and shame just make people feel bad. They don't do much else. Whether we like it or not, we share a body and a life now. We have to learn that our wellbeing as a collective includes everyone. If someone is drowning in guilt, miserable, that's not a good thing! I'm not bad for not feeling that way, that's not what any of us want. I wouldn't wish that on even our worst enemies, if they were introjected. Once you're in here, you're in it for the long haul and you deserve happiness just as much as everyone else. Regardless of source actions.

At least, that's our take on it. I hope some of this made sense- I didn't know I had such strong feelings on this honestly. Kaeya made this blog mostly for himself and here I am ready to shake people by the shoulders into loving themselves apparently. /lh /silly

I wish you and your system/collective well. You all deserve it.

-Keeper Wilbur (yes I'm still signing off even though it says at the top of the post. I think the Haven Keepers thing is cool as fuck and Charlie liked signing off so we're doing that too.)

[noddytheornithopod]

PnF Season 5 Title Speculation

Okay first thing's first, found out through this (click on "relationships"), which I found out through the PnF Wiki twitter.

As for the episode titles themselves, I will list what's been confirmed here.

501: Summer Block Buster/Cloudy with a Chance of Mom

502: Appetite for Adventure/License to Bust

503: Dry Another Day/Deconstructing Doof

504: Tropey McTropeface/Biblio-Blast!

505: A Chip to the Vet/More Than an Intern

506: The Aurora Perry-Alis/Lord of the Firesides

507: Agent T (for Teen)/The Haberdasher

508: [Title TBD]/Out of Character

Alright, now that's out of the way, time to get crazy and speculate nonsense based on titles alone

Summer Block Buster: I don't really have much to say besides the fact the title is very fitting. Yeah Summer Block Busters are a thing, but I won't be surprised if this episode is just one big grand re-entrance for everyone. I expect it to be very meta about it too, some of the dialogue Dan recorded for Doof even suggests this.

License to Bust: IDK what to say here but the whole pun on "licence to kill" (which is also the title of a Bond movie). I don't think puns are emblematic of much, but it's most explicit confirmation Candace is still trying to bust her brothers, which people understandable debated after Candace Against the Universe. Wonder if the licence thing is going to be relevant.

Dry Another Day: Second Bond title pun, lol.

Deconstructing Doof: Not sure what's being gotten at here, but it's an intriguing title to say the least. Very uh interesting. I could make a joke about how it's about how they don't know what to do with him post Summer but I'm not here for snarky commentary.

Tropey McTropeface: Uh... very interesting. Named after Boaty McBoatface, apparently. IDK what tropey nonsense they're getting up to though.

Biblio-Blast: I feel like SOMETHING is being said here but I don't know what. Was pointed out to me it could be something about weaponised books but IDK what that even looks like.

A Chip to the Vet: Okay this is very interesting. Firstly, it's probably Perry going to the vet. Secondly... one thing done for pets at vets is to get chipped. Whether it's just something the vet does or it's a deliberate request so they can get an idea of where Perry wanders off to... it's gonna be a big problem for Perry. Hopefully OWCA has a way to get around that lol.

More than an Intern: Carl episode. Nuff said. More trying to prove himself to Monogram probably even as Monogram treats him like shit, lmao.

The Aurora Perry-Alis: Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of- yeah we all know Steamed Hams probably. No idea what this will add up to honestly, maybe some kind of astronomical phenomenon that looks like a platypus, or the gang make one? If there's anything I have to say though, there's a chance it might run parallel to the next episode in a Bubble Boys or Bee Day type fashion, because...

Lord of the Firesides: Yeah you know I'm gonna be talking about what is obviously a Fireside Girls episode as that guy with the Isabella brainrot. So if it works like Temple of Sap or Bee Story, it COULD run parallel to the last episode, but that's not guaranteed. Either way... some friction between the Fireside Girls is going to come up. The title obviously references Lord of the Flies, aka the story where kids turn brutal and try to dominate each other or whatever. Maybe there's a split Isabella is caught in the middle of. Or perhaps... Isabella is removed as troop leader. She could make some serious blunder (could even be unrelated to Phineas even if that bias does affect her activities a lot), but maybe the other girls just end up being sick of Isabella's Phineas nonsense after something went too far. :P If Isabella is kicked out, I feel like she'd really struggle with that, because being a Fireside Girl is really important to her. Also, IDK who would replace Isabella as leader (honestly this ep would be good to just flesh out the other girls more in general), but I did see a hilarious suggestion that maybe it could be Candace. Would be similar to We Call it Maize (a very underrated episode IMO) but with more serious consequences. Not something I'm riding on, but it's a fun idea, especially if she proves she's more egotistical or just outright doesn't know what she's doing. Also saw a hilarious yet touching idea that somehow PHINEAS helps Isabella regain her leadership, he'd reassure her of why she's a good Fireside Girl and all that (cuz he believes in her to the ends of the Universe guys, shit my Phinabella is showing), or just somehow help her prove herself again. Also, the solution coming from what the girls thought was the problem would just be ironic and funny in a very PnF way. Either way... amazing at what a mere title can make me wonder.

Agent T (for Teen): Perry the teenage girl??? Okay so I've already seen this catch on from many people, but if there's one thing everyone in the Phineas and Ferb fandom wants, it's more Stacy and Perry interaction. Sure, maybe it could be someone else (Monty's a teenager, where's he been? maybe something leading to or following up Vanessa's internship based on when the revival takes place, or even some weird Candace shenanigans)... but come on. Even if it isn't, we all are gonna see this and hope it's Stacy related as she gets roped back into Perry's world again.

The Haberdasher: So something to do with selling men's clothing? Definitely a scheme PnF could enact. Also there's the meaning of stuff for things like sewing but that's supposedly British and the men's clothing thing is American soooo we know what's more likely. I wonder who's gonna get the glow up though? Baljeet? Jeremy? Maybe the guys just wanna slay? Shit, Phinabella brainrot is back, what happens when she sees whatever Phineas puts on? :v Of course, this could somehow tie to the B-plot too, maybe Doof needs to dress nicely for something.

TBD: Truly a profound title. So much is said with mere letters... okay yeah I can't do this lol

Out of Character: So much is said with so little. The first thing that came to mind was once someone asked Dan and Swampy at I believe SDCC if they'd ever do a personality swap episode, and their response was to look at each other and be like "maybe we will now" (it was likely too late before the show ended then but yeah). Point is... maybe we're finally seeing this idea. It can be very easy to have characters act out of character through whatever means ie an inator or invention, but if you're going to name an episode that, I think you're going to have something that really commits to that premise. There is ENDLESS potential of weird dynamic shifts you could do with this, it could be truly hilarious. Maybe it's also body swap shenanigans, but well I think I made my case for personality swap. Just imagine Perry trying to take over the Tri-State Area, or Baljeet bullying Buford, or Ferb talking while Phineas is silent, or *could go on for hours*.

Soooo yeah that's way more speculation than I expected, let's see if any of this leads to anything lol

[theriu]

River Reads Midnight Sun

Well met, traveler! This is the starting post for my experiment, wherein I, who have never read the Twilight books or seen the movies, read Midnight Sun (basically Twilight from Edward's perspective) and commentate for (hopefully) your entertainment! I decided it would be easiest to do this a chapter at a time, and my commentary will essentially be a summary of each chapter so people equally unfamiliar with the story can follow along. You can follow or block this experiment with the tag #river reads midnight sun.

I think that should do it! Let's get started with:

Chapter 1: First Sight

In which Edward finds high schoolers very Boring and Inane, and also nearly goes bonkers over a potential snack.

First things first: Can we talk about how gross pomegranates look? Is the cover art SUPPOSED to resemble an optical illusion between a halved pomegranate and a bleeding heart? Either way, EW.

Right, on to business!

Edward is bored, you guys. He is SO BORED. High school is so boring. Purgatory is mentioned, as well as “tedium” and “monotonous.” He really wants us to know how bored he is, even though the word “boredom” is not used until the sixth paragraph. But trust me, he’s very bored. One begins to wonder why the immortal 100+-year-old vampire is choosing to hang out daily in such a boring place, but I’m sure it will be explained.

Now we learn about his mindreading powers! This is also very boring because most of the minds he has to read are petty high school minds. By the way, the inane sheeple chatter in the school mindscape today is all about the new girl! I wonder who she could be! Ed sure doesn’t care! He can see every angle of her face via peoples’ thoughts, and he is NOT impressed. Half the “sheep-like males” are crushing on her. Edward’s disdain for them is palpable, almost as if it's not totally normal and fine for human teenagers to find new things like a new student exciting. We may be witnessing a smidge of superiority complex, which is shocking, no doubt.

Mind-reading as a way to introduce other relevant characters is handy, I will grant the author that! Of course, Ed tries not to mindread his fellow vampires out of courtesy, but he KNOWS what they are probably thinking, and boy is he ready to tell us!

Rosalie: Is either actually super hot or super thinks she is, and apparently this debate encompasses her every waking moment. She only compares herself to VAMPIRES, of course, because humans could never be comparably hot. Related to a stagnant pool. Wow, Ed.

Emmett: Hyper competitive guy who has no new thoughts because he says EVERYTHING he thinks. Compared to a glass-clear lake. I suppose that means Ed maybe thinks he has depth? Maybe? We'll err on the side of optimism.

Jasper: Suffering. That’s literally the entire description.

Alice (who can see the future) introduces herself by beaming thoughts at Ed asking how Jasper is doing. Jasper is not doing well. Apparently he is so ready to eat people that he has forgotten how to Human and is sitting in a corpse-like rigor, because it seems when you become a vampire you lose quirks like restless leg syndrome and blinking? This feels full of potential hilarity to me, but I fear such hilarity will not be realized in this Very Serious Book.

Anyway, back to Jasper, who is SUFFERING. Alice asks if there is any danger. Edward signals no. Half a page later, his exposition about Jasper's problem adds, “Jasper was very dangerous right now." Okay, so which is it?! PICK A LANE, ED

(On a genuine note, I already like Alice; she counters Jasper’s fantasies about eating a girl by telling him her name and a few personal facts in a way that shows Alice makes an effort to know her classmates as more than just The Humans. Yay empathy!)

Btw, Ed’s internal monologue indicates they’re hanging out at this school to build their strength and endurance by being around humans and not eating them, and to that I say REALLY??? You chose high school for that?! The one where you’re SUPER BORED?? GO HANG OUT AT A COFFEE SHOP OR SOMETHING

Ope, plot progression! Bella has entered the chat lunchroom. Literally everyone is thinking about Bella, including Jessica, no doubt the requisite catty high school rival who crushed on Edward previously. She has many disgruntled thoughts about Bella, Bella noticing the Cullens, everyone noticing Bella, etc. Ed, who has been doing a great job keeping us up to date on the general thought processes of the student body, takes this moment to assure us once again how much he finds all of this chatter inane AND petty AND trivial, and he’s definitely going to try harder to block them out (again).

Wait, oh my word, was that a line of HUMOROUS BANTER between the Cullens just now?! I have renewed hope for this Very Serious Book!

So Edward is the vampires' mental scout who checks for people suspecting he and his family are inhumanly weird (as opposed to acceptably weird), and naturally he does a brain scan on Bella. Oooo but he’s not hearing anything! And now they have locked eyes! Her eyes are very odd, because of the DEPTH of them! Already, Bella is very Frail and immune to mindreading and somehow has “deeper” eyes than I guess any other human Edward has met in his 100+ years? Ed, I think you need to make eye contact more.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled torrent of inane high schooler thoughts! Amazingly, they are all still focused on Bella and being attracted to or jealous of her, because of course real high schoolers are all Inane and Tedious. (The one exception is Angela, who is busy thinking about homework. I like her, she seems normal.) Jessica is being catty again, and what’s this?! Ed suddenly has this STRANGE URGE to SHIELD Bella from this nasty girl! How very odd and unusual! Especially from a guy who very clearly finds all human teenagers Inane/Petty/Trivial! Bella must be special, except she is also “very unexceptional." Also, Ed is highly frustrated that he can’t read this girl’s mind, despite him constantly reading her like a book and her having “deceptively communicative” eyes.

Rosalie breaks Ed out of his frustration-driven contradictory spiral, and they all go to class, Ed casually mentioning his two medical degrees in an internal dig at his biology teacher (again, why are you hanging out at high school???) Naturally, Bella shows up and the only seat available is the one next to Edward, because Plot everyone is subliminally terrified of him. Ed has a moment of panic wondering if not hearing one girl’s thoughts means he has a vampire disease and is gonna lose all his mindreading, and then he has another moment of empathy for Bella having to sit next to the Scary Vampire.

Then she walks in front of an air duct, and Edward is suddenly overcome with INTENSE BLOODLUST THE LIKES OF WHICH HE HAS NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE!!! He wants to eat her SO BAD, you guys! He spends roughly EIGHT PAGES brooding on how badly he wants to eat her, noticing how delicious she smells, crushing the underside of a desk with his intense self-control grip (but having the presence of mind to “destroy the evidence” by rounding out the finger-shaped hole he just made), analyzing the logistics of eliminating a roomful of witnesses and whether to do so before or after eating her, seeing his monstrous reflection in her eyeballs, angsting over how bad he will feel when he murders a bunch of people, plotting ways of murdering her that WON’T result in collateral damage, questioning Bella’s sanity for daring to SHAKE HER HAIR IN HIS VICINITY, angsting about how disappointed his wonderful adoptive dad Carlisle will be (aww, that’s actually sweet), stubbornly deciding “she can’t make me,” hating Bella with the fury of a thousand suns for daring to smell so delicious, and shutting off his breathing so he has at least some self-control, which does sound uncomfortable but I applaud the effort.

Then class finally ends (for him and for us), and he goes and hides in his car. Which, honestly, relatable.

The car timeout helps restore his sanity, and he determines he does in fact not need to kill her and that hating her guts for smelling like an eight-course dinner probably isn’t fair! He just needs to avoid her as much as possible. Bless your heart for your optimism, Male Lead of a Paranormal Romance Novel.

The solution he comes up with is to charm the poor secretary (who keeps having to remind herself mentally that he’s too young for her, which, augh) into switching him to a different sixth-period course. Bella chooses this opportune moment to walk in, which he doesn’t notice until her DELICIOUS SMELL is blown over him (I question why someone with such advanced senses can only notice powerful smells when he is downwind of them). Edward’s Amazing Vampire Vision kicks in, allowing him to once again see his Monstrous Face in the reflection of her eyes, despite her being over against the wall. He briefly contemplates double homicide, then . . . uh . . . gives up on changing classes so he can walk away. This doesn’t feel like a long-term solution, Ed, but Kudos for the self-control.

The chapter wraps up with him jumping into his car (it’s the end of the day, so the others are waiting for him) and breaking the speed limit out of the parking lot. Alice uses Future Sight (it’s super effective!) to see that Ed is either going to book it out of Forks (the town) or go and murder Bella in her house. I once again have reason to like Alice, who orders him not to do it, adding that it would metaphorically kill Bella’s dad. He drops them off and races away again, not yet sure if he’s going to tell Dad Carlisle that he’s leaving or going to go eat the delicious new girl. And Scene!

Well, that wasn’t as painful as I feared, so huzzah! I kind of appreciate the internal look at his thoughts and how his mindreading lets us see other characters even when they can’t talk. Got a bit long at times, especially with how Inane and Petty and Trivial high schoolers are to Edward! LOTS OF DETAIL about how badly he wanted to eat Bella and possibly murder all bystanders, which I guess does go to show how bad the bloodlust is, because dang! (But why do none of the others have this reaction to her yet? Maybe they just don’t have classes with her. You must be this close to the Bella to ride the maniac vampire train!)

And with that, I have earned a much-deserved break before delving into CHAPTER TWO: OPEN BOOK! I’m sure Edward will totally succeed in his plan to skedaddle out of Forks and never see Bella again! Stay positive, Ed! =Dd

Chapter 2->

[godlygivenanxiety]

Okay, listen. Just gimme a second here on the whys of William Schenk's introduced persona(enormous case building for a headcanon incoming, be warned!).

We could go on and on about the reason of why William decided to present himself as a married man; in the context of evoking a sense of companionship, there's something to be said about the social pressures and the status of being married. Zeke's quick to talk about what being married means to a cop after all— although it's also curious that he presents himself as happily married, a dedicated father while Zeke himself's going through custody fights and a divorce.

It does make me think of what William wants Zeke to understand about him, ready for serious commitment and sharing responsabilities, he's willing to put in the work so to speak. There's a softer, loving and protective side of him — one he hasn't shared with many ever since his father's death, I bet — that he'll gladly show Zeke(and we only see him talk about his fake family with him).

But that's not enough of a motive, so let's go for the angle of what marriage represents.

Marriage's not just a symbolic, romantic act but the union of two citizens, both Zeke and William giving the impression during Spiral that they do perceive it as something that's supposed to be a conscious choice you make that has value, it's worth it; William could've presented himself as married then not just to show that he's 100% for loyalty and commitment but also that he's not that kid Zeke backstabbed Dunleavy for anymore.

He's not William Emmerson and he doesn't need Zeke to protect him or confuse the child he was to the man he is now(which adds another layer to his relishing of Zeke's anger and acceptance of each blow, the rawness of the moment leaves nothing to interpretation, they are in EQUAL standing—); he's evolved since their last time together. Zeke, none the wiser, eases his worries slightly when dismissing William's comment:

"Hey, man, I get it. I wouldn't want to be stuck with a kid either."

[Zeke stops to really look at him.]

"You don't want to be my partner."

Which he says after probably hearing Zeke's commentary(they weren't really trying to be quiet in there) on showing the ropes to a rookie, saying he doesn't want to be a 'nanny'. A subtle poke to Zeke's apparent expectations of him— testing the waters as if to see how much of a problem this will be. It's not about age though, or really about William in itself(as I've theorized in another post) and William proves himself valuable in the little time they have, as evidenced by Zeke's own words.

"Hey, William. Good work today."

There's the 'easiest assumption' that William really just used it as a disguise for the tattoo of his father's name but there's no logical need for a loving wife there. Or a son for that matter— he could've tattooed the name of a sibling Zeke would vaguely hear about or a nephew; it would still hold the weight of someone that William supposedly goes back to when leaving the job, give Zeke a burden to carry in terms of thinking of a young detective with a family that he couldn't save.

So. It makes me think, that perhaps William just holds in himself so much hope for what they can be. So much faith in their connection, there's no one else for him but Zeke and he has known this for years. William's cunning and confident, he doesn't lie to himself about what he knows to be true but there lies an issue— well, isn't it him insisting Zeke's unfortunate predicament isn't an universal truth of life?

[Chuckles] "Just because you’re getting a divorce, it doesn’t mean that everyone else’s marriages have to end, too."

Which roughly matches their earlier talk, when he interjects Zeke's bitter perspective on it:

"'While it lasts'?"

"Nothing happier than the wife of a new detective, nothing more angry than that same bitch ten years later."

"Maybe it’s ’cause you call them bitches."

The same way William's invested in taking Zeke by his shoulders and shoving him out of his defeated attitude towards the corruption in the system and guiding him to action, he's also prodding at Zeke's waning faith in partnership. It's not because his marriage didn't last that Zeke's never going to find the one person capable of staying loyal to him to the end... that he won't realize what he needs is right in front of him.

William's hopeful, obsessively devoted and has specifically planned his killing spree with luring Zeke, having him by his side, in mind… so, if he presents himself as a married man? If his and Zeke's hands rest close together on the table in whatever place they'd stopped for lunch or at Zeke's desk, when they squeeze next to each other to watch the spiral killer's tape, and their golden bands look just about similar enough to be a pair… it's just bound to be.

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting Results: Tatchgob

This is a weird one, I think, because there are a couple aspects of this entry that fully make sense in the context of what this animal actually is, and others that just make you think, "wait, the medievals thought what about [redacted]?" Not a lot else to add here, and I'm already running unusually late with this tonight, so here's the entry in question:

And below the cut is the art people have produced, in rough chronological order:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has decided this is an insect, for entirely sensible reasons. The entry says that it flies, but not that it's a bird. It also says that the female reproduces without copulation with the male, and Silverhart helpfully observes that parthenogenesis is a much more common phenomenon in insects than in birds. Specifically, it's a bee, because the Tatchgob is said to be large and slow-flying, and as we all know, a bee's wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.* This one is specifically inspired by vulture bees -- bees that do in fact eat carrion as the Tatchgob is implied to do (the entry doesn't actually say it eats the corpses, only that perceives them).** Silverhart further notes that they ended up spending a few hours going down a rabbit hole about vulture bees, a warning from which I failed to learn, as I spent the last half-hour reading arguments about whether "meat honey" is a real thing. Anyway, enough commentary from me, look at the very good drawing of a bee and then read what Silverhart says about it in the linked post.

*Bee Movie reference mine; please don't blame Silverhart for my internet-poisoned sense of humor.

** The Aberdeen Bestiary does actually specify this, but it was buried in the long religious-allegory section after the main description so I missed it when setting this up and didn't include it in the post. Now I wish I had, because it hilariously notes that the [Tatchgob] "is often overtaken by death when it descends to the dead animal from a great height." The drawings we could have had of animals crashing full-force into the ground... actually I'm torn on whether that would be a plus or a minus.

@strangelyflesh (link to post here) has made the reasonable call that a large flying animal may as well be a dragon-thing, so here's a bird-like dragon for you. Delightful facial expression on this one. Honestly everything about that head is very charming, actually. The linked post mentions that they "reproduce like those fucked up little geckos" and I am struggling against the temptation to fall down another rabbit hole, so I'm just going to move on.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) drew a bird, but decided to focus in on the fact that it's too large to fly quickly. It's broadly based on a bustard, which is apparently the world's heaviest flying bird (learn something new every day) but is shaped and posed specifically to evoke the silhouette of an aircraft, specifically the infamous Spruce Goose. (Cover the head with your hand, you'll see it.) Extremely clever, in my opinion. For more details on the design decisions, see the linked post. One more thing before we move on, though... check out that thing on the far right of the image, down in the sea. I think that's one of these critters:

Okay, now we're moving to the next one.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) continues to outdo herself with the stylized medieval drawings. This one is definitely a creative choice -- Capybara notes that they would have been inclined to draw a dragon for this one, except we already had the dragon entry a while back. So she decided this was a komodo dragon that can glide on skin flaps like a flying squirrel. Excellent, love it, very interesting coloration also.

Capybara also raises the interesting question of whether the bestiary writer ever considered what male Tatchgobs might be for, if they aren't involved in the reproductive process. I suppose evolution is a fickle mistress, especially when the person describing your animals doesn't know what evolution even is. They don't seem to have an allegorical purpose either (there's like half a page railing against hypothetical people who fully accept that a [Tatchgob] can give virgin birth but deny that Mary could, which I guess is the point of that detail, but the male Tatchgob goes unmentioned). Anyway, the monk would probably just say they exist because God wanted them to or something... actually I'm not sure how aware they were of the possibility of species that didn't come in two sexes. Anyway, moving on.

@pomrania (link to post here) also thought large flying thing -> dragon, but decided to make theirs more fishlike. See, fish engage in external fertilization, and what are the odds of a pre-modern observer just missing the fact that the male is involved? Assuming they're not on board the "spontaneous generation" wagon. I really like this design, also; gliding on these fin-like structures is especially cool. And yes, according to the linked post, the fact that it shares a color palette with the ace flag is fully intentional. Ace icon Tatchgob.

@strixcattus (link to post here) has drawn a good bird -- serrated beak a solid choice -- but as with many of their posts, the real gold is in the text. See, Strixcattus gave us another carrion-eating bird some months ago, and they've decided this one is a related species. That's right, meet Wutugald tatchgob, the Brown or Lesser Wutugald. Which also explains why this one has that yellow thing above its beak there. Love the connection being drawn to previous entries. (Strixcattus's original Wutugald post can be found here.) As usual, you are strongly, strongly encouraged to go read the descriptions Strixcattus includes with their animals. You should then go check their brief follow-up to the Tatchgob here.

Now, to the Aberdeen Bestiary.

That's right, it's the eagle again! I wasn't expecting a repeat, but you have to admit it's clearly the same bird. The illustration for "eagle", in case you don't remember, looks like this:

Virtually identical except for the coloration of the wing feathers.

Okay, yeah, there are no duplicate entries, I just had to point out the fact that they look exactly the same. This one is the vulture, which apparently also doesn't reach far enough north for our illustrator to be familiar with it.

(A quick check through Wikipedia indicates to me that the various vulture species whose ranges include Europe tend to stick to the southern parts. None of them seem to reach the British Isles, which is where this manuscript originates.)

Anyway, something I find interesting about this is that vultures are another animal that modern people often think of as sinister, creepy, or just gross, but the bestiary is actually really positive about them. There's even one part where they get to be a Christ symbol, which honestly I have to share. It starts with that "dying by descending from a great height" bit I quoted earlier:

The fact is, if a vulture, in flight, sees a corpse, it sets itself down to feed on it, and is often overtaken by death when it descends to the dead animal from a great height. It is right, therefore, that Christ, who was God's mediator and our redeemer, should be signified by the name 'vulture'. While remaining in the heights of his divinity, like the vulture flying on high, he saw the corpse of our mortality below and descended from heaven to the earth beneath; he deigned, indeed, to become man for our sake; and when he sought man, the living thing that had no life, he who in himself had eternal life, met his death at our hands.

That's right, the whole Jesus thing was the allegorical equivalent of diving towards a corpse and accidentally smashing into the ground. Really puts the New Testament in a different light.

There's also a part where vultures foretell death. But not foretell for our benefit, mind: the example given is that vultures have learned to recognize what an army is and follow it because they know there will be food. So they're foretelling for their own purposes, and if we happen to notice and draw any conclusions, that's just a side effect.

One more quote from the Aberdeen Bestiary, and then we're done.

For who looks at the eyes of the vulture, that is, at what lies behind men's thoughts?

... that's a reference people get, right? anyway, it's late, good night.