#I just have such big feelings about a character who gets treated the shittiest and then dies

[justalittlechocolatemilkshake]

Just read an article about the plans for Outer Banks and the Pates said they ALWAYS planned on JJ dying. You mean he was actually, very truly, doomed by the narrative?

[agendabymooner]

matilda ! max v. x ofc (hearth sister!ofc)

“you showed me a power that is strong enough to bring sun to the darkest days.”

summary: sylvie ford wasn’t fond of the older men who stuck around in her life and those who didn’t even try to be there for her, but she couldn’t speak for him. one thing was clear, though: there’s a silent agreement that they’d take a different route from those who brought nothing but pain into their lives. (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)

content warning: angst angst hurt/comfort, use of explicit language, mentions of emotional traumas, brief description of paternal relationship issues (character’s father and max’s dad), emotional breakdown/crying (max) and support (ofc), “you talk of the pain like it’s no big deal”, christian horner is funny- ofc just hates him but he's cool

note: posting this because i want a lil context for the post after this lmfaoooo. i am sharing my view on max’s relationship with jos based on what i experienced btw— i have problems with paternal figures so 🫡 cheers enjoy xx

masterlist

She never once liked any older men to exist in her life. All but one, but it was mainly because Toto Wolff truly cared for Tilly. Otherwise, older men were the shittiest people to exist and they can choke for all she cares. 

The distasteful feeling that she got from knowing Christian Horner had subsided as she continued to work with him and the team. She was outspoken and passionate about what she believed in for that moment. She told him upfront about how she respected him but preferred to keep her personal life separate from her work. She never shared anything about her family. Everyone around them only got the gist of her life, but never did she share to everyone who she was. And with her dislike for her employer, she preferred to keep it that way. 

Toto merely earned her respect as he treated their relationship as if there's no man’s land. At least that was what had happened at the beginning, when he and her sister became official.

The end of the term exam ended and coincided with the summer break of the 2015 season. She wondered who he was as a person and had asked her chauffeur to take her to the Mercedes factory. Toto had surprisingly picked her up from the lobby when the receptionist called him about a “college student who would like to get an interview with him” named Sylvie, asking her if she actually needed some help with her research. 

To which she replied, “It’s nice to know you’re a considerate man. No, I don’t. I don’t have any paper to write. My term just ended, in fact.” 

She then spent her days in the factory with him being stuck on his desk. Oftentimes, she followed him like a duckling and asked him questions left and right about how communications between drivers and the public worked. 

It started there and she continued to visit the factory, now gaining a special access ID just in case she wished to barge in to pester the Mercedes staff with questions. Well, not to harass them but rather ask questions or observe here and there should they allow her to sit in.

Now the frown that she etched in her face while she worked became a permanent part of her routine. Christian once joked that she was Toto’s clone, to which her frown deepened in annoyance before she continued to work on whatever task she had in hand. 

She wouldn’t admit to Christian that she found it hilarious few hours after because her pride was bigger than her fondness of him.

But she was proud of herself for reaching that phase of mentorship. Toto was the only older man she tolerated. Having to grow up with no father and with only sisters — while both your stepmother and mother coparented — would give you that feeling. 

There was just something about father figures that made her feel so little and stupid. Perhaps it was her father’s expectations to make her a prodigal F1 driver — to put the Hearth name back to the motorsports community after being absent from the tracks for thirty years.

Julius wasn’t subtle when he’d put Sylvie in a private schooling program just as she started karting at the age of 5. He’d long given up on Tilly and Stevie, but Sylvie was his star driver. How her mother never got full custody of them, she didn’t know, but she disliked the fact that she had to attend driving classes with her father during his week and somehow still had to take the classes despite not living with him. 

She could remember having her piles of books being stored away once after she ended up on the 7th place of their tournament. He said that she didn’t need all of that kind of intelligence and that her education was an easy thing to pursue— it wasn’t a big deal to him. Everything that she wanted, he’d refuse. He wanted her to focus on racing, because the next time she ended up in such a position he’d burn the books. She began to race and fight against other competitors to get a good shot at winning trophies. She became somebody that she didn’t want to be. 

Maybe it was his arrogance and greediness that made her think that all fathers were the same. That… or maybe because she’d seen how Max’s father acted towards him after landing on 5th in Monaco. She felt her heart breaking at the sight of a defeated Max. She had seen it all before, but to hear it up close this time— it was even worse. She could feel his heart pounding, his need to clear his head and possibly cry it out— she could feel it. Because she was in that position before, and it takes a traumatized child to know one. 

Sure, Sylvie had grown a backbone to tell her father about leaving the academy without his knowledge and had somehow loosened her grip on her own ambitious thoughts, but she didn’t think that she’d witness a version of herself in the form of her best friend. This was what she didn’t see after abandoning her friendship with him. But it wasn’t as if she did it just to spite him. 

She merely needed the courage. At some point, Max Verstappen managed to win against his own father — but there was something about the father figures they’ve had in life that were too determined to keep their children on a tight leash. 

She pretended as if she didn’t eavesdrop on Jos’ berating and merely gave him a curt nod and a stink eye before she approached Max’s drivers room. She could hear him throwing his bag in rage… then silence.

He was seething in disappointment. He wasn’t disappointed in anyone but himself. And the anger that he had told Sylvie that he needed to sit down for a moment. By himself. 

There was just something about their fathers that drove them mad. They’re always too greedy and arrogant, and they both damaged their bloodlines at a young age because of their vile desires and lack of empathy towards others and their own children.

Thankfully, his father had flown back to the Netherlands right after the race. Max, from what Christian had told her (with a sympathetic smile), had retired early to his room instead of partying. Good, she told herself, because he needs someone and some ice cream right now. 

Marinara was going to sleep in Stevie’s room tonight. Sylvie was very good at begging until others cave in to her pleading face, and it obviously worked on her older sister too. So after dropping her dog off, her fluffy sandal-cladded feet made their way into another floor and directly to his room. 

She patiently waited for him to open the door after knocking, her plaid pajamas hanging on her hips while she wore a blue jumper over her white cropped shirt. She could hear the faint footsteps gradually moving their way to the door. She was met with Max’s reddening eyes just as he swung the door open. 

Her hands held a tub of ice cream as she shuddered at the cold water the dripped down her hand, “It’s melting. And there’s less calories on it so you’re not gonna fully ruin your diet.” 

He stared at it for a moment, then looked back at her as he stepped aside to let her in.

The night they spent together consisted of watching Miss Congeniality and Easy A (again). While Sylvie laughed along at some jokes, she could hear how he took deep breaths before regaining his composure. It happened every other minute. 

She decided to put the ice cream on the table and turned to look at him. He, acting as if he wasn’t grounding himself ten seconds ago, asked her with a croak, “W-what?” 

She didn’t answer, observing all of him. His facial features. His surprisingly messy bed hair. His bloodshot eyes. His lips were more plump than usual. His cheeks were tinted pink. She could just tell that he wanted to let it out. But he grew up being told that, “his feelings wouldn’t be a big deal when he’s competing.” 

Sylvie pushed her sleeves back and wiped the tear away from his eyes, smiling faintly at him and breathing evenly. She was more grounded than he was, and her simple gestures helped him get back. Somehow. 

Then his deep breathing method didn’t work out, now quietly sobbing as Sylvie hugged him on his side, her hand circling his back gently. Sandra Bullock’s voice tampered his sound of defeat, but it wasn’t as if it mattered. He could cry for as long and as loud as he wanted. 

She hadn’t even realized how late it was until he fell asleep in her arms, head resting on her chest while she ran her fingers through his hair. She could barely see the digital clock and couldn’t figure out if it said eleven or one, having to squint and adjust a little to look closely. 

These days, she has been able to sleep before midnight. After that intimate moment she shared with her best friend, she had been able to close her eyes peacefully. He’ll have to figure out what helps him sleep better. It’ll be easier if he sought help from professionals— that’s what the team was for. He’ll give them success and in exchange, they make things easier for him. Nobody really knew what eased Max off, because he seemed more calmed and relaxed for the past few races. But that was because he knew that she was only a few footsteps away from him.

It was as if they had their little sanctuary that nobody could find. They couldn’t find themselves in the arms of other people, already used to each other’s affection and the solace that came with it. As if it was normal for friends to be this… considerate. 

Everyone who knew the two as a pairing would simply laugh when you tell them about the peculiarity of their “friendship.” You would think that they’d have intervened by now, but their relatives and friends merely shrugged it off. They returned to their old routine, except they’ve grown. It was normal for their families to see the two together, much to Max’s father’s dismay, knowing that whatever they may have planned was already thought of and agreed on. 

Their closest friends laughed at the thought of their relationship being platonic. What a fucking dream it would be if best friends can just casually buy a house together, or decide to adopt a puppy together (which happens more frequently than not). It would be a wild experience for anyone if their best friends would just platonically steal glances from their other half. 

And friends don’t create their own little family like that. Just the two of them, and their dog. They don’t play mum and dad while they’re just “friends.” No friends would silently agree with raising their kids the way their fathers hadn’t treated them before, just to avoid that pain all over again.

So no, if you were to ask anyone who knew them well — they’d say that Mustang and Cadillac being friends would be a load of rubbish. Even the two knew that the thought was ridiculous. 

Peering down at the Dutchman, she sighed softly while snores escaped his mouth quietly. His weight on top of her was comforting, immediately lulling her to a dreamless sleep. 

They really need to work on not bottling their feelings up.

[the-desolated-quill]

WandaVision: ‘Subverting’ Good Television - Quill’s Scribbles

(Spoilers for the first five episodes)

Hey everyone! Well... it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The last time I wrote a proper review or Scribble, people still thought the COVID crisis would be over within a month. The poor saps. But I thought that as a special way to mark this year’s Valentines Day, we could take a closer look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s shittiest power couple in their new Disney+ show WandaVision.

The first of many MCU spin-off shows that nobody asked for, broadcast exclusively on Disney’s totally unnecessary streaming platform, WandaVision is about everybody’s favourite whitewashed Nazi experiment and her red sexbot boyfriend as they try to fit into a suburban sitcom neighbourhood without arousing suspicion.

Yes, you read that correctly. The MCU has a sitcom now. My life is now complete.

Sarcasm aside, I was legitimately curious about WandaVision because of its unusual setting. And considering one of my most common criticisms of the MCU is its total lack of creativity, anything that’s even a little bit subversive is bound to attract my attention. Of course ‘subversive’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good.’ I could hand you a canvas smeared with my own shit and call it subversive. That doesn’t necessarily make it good art. And that’s exactly what WandaVision is. A canvas smeared with shit.

So lets split this critical analysis/review/angry bitter rant into two distinct chapters. The first focusing on the plot and setting, and the second focusing on the characters. Okay? Okay.

Chapter 1: Bewitched

Critics seem to be utterly enamoured with the whole sitcom gimmick, and it is a gimmick. As far as I can tell from the episodes I’ve seen, the sitcom setting serves no real purpose whatsoever other than to make the show ‘quirky.’ Which I wouldn’t mind, believe it or not, if the show was actually funny. There’s just one problem. It’s not.

Now in some ways describing why a sitcom doesn’t work is often futile because comedy is largely subjective. What I find funny, you won’t necessarily find funny and vice versa. With WandaVision, however, I won’t have that problem. I can demonstrate to you precisely why WandaVision, objectively, isn’t funny. And it all comes down to one simple thing. The stakes. Or rather the complete and total absence of stakes.

The show makes it very clear from the beginning that none of what we’re seeing is real. The cheesy theme song, the era appropriate special effects (mostly. It’s actually very inconsistent), the joke commercials, and, in the case of the first two episodes, which are in black and white, the appearance of red lights and objects in Scarlet Witch’s general vicinity. (Gee, what a mystery this is).

Basically Wanda has brought Vision back from the dead and created this sitcom world for them to inhabit. I’ll explain the stupidity of this in Chapter 2. The point is none of this is real, and that has a negative effect on the comedy because the very nature of comedy is suffering. Take the plot of the first episode. Wanda and Vision have to prepare a dinner to impress Vision’s boss. If they fail, Vision could lose his job and the couple could be exposed as superheroes. If this were a normal sitcom, it would work. The stakes are clear and it would be satisfying to see the two struggle and overcome the odds. But here, we know it’s not real. If it’s not real, it means there’s no stakes. If there’s no stakes, it means there’s no suffering. If there’s no suffering, there’s no comedy.

It would be one thing if the unfunny sitcom stuff lasted for like the first ten minutes or so before making way for the actual plot, but it doesn’t. Oh no. It doesn’t even last for the first episode. Out of the five episodes I’ve watched, four of them are almost entirely about these unfunny, objectively flawed sitcom homages, each set in a different time period. The fifties, the sixties, and so on. And what’s worse is that nothing that happens in them is plot-relevant. That gets relegated to the last five minutes of an episode. So you’re forced to sit through twenty five minutes of boring slapstick and puns in order to catch even a whiff of actual story. Which begs the question... who is this for exactly? It can’t be entertaining to Marvel fans, who have to slog through all this pointless shit so they can figure out what the fuck is going on. Comedy fans may get a kick out of the sitcom pastiche at first, but after four episodes, surely the joke would wear thin. So why is it in here? Clearly someone in the writer’s room absolutely fell in love with the idea of doing a Marvel sitcom, but nobody put in any time or effort to figure out how it would work in context.

I cannot stress enough how bad the plotting of this series is. As I said, the vast majority of a thirty minute episode is about shitty sitcom plots that aren’t funny and don’t have any impact on the story, only to then tease you with a crumb of actual plot in order to keep you coming back for the next instalment. Admittedly it’s an effective strategy. I was more than ready to quit after Episode 2 until that beekeeper showed up out of the sewer (don’t ask. It’s not important). WandaVision essentially follows the Steven Moffat school of bad writing. String your audience along with the promise that things might get more interesting later on and that all the bullshit that came before will retroactively make sense by the end. Except, as demonstrated with BBC’s Sherlock, that doesn’t work. And even if it did, it wouldn’t justify wasting the audience’s fucking time. And that’s what the majority of WandaVision is. A waste of time.

The only episode that doesn’t follow the sitcom format is the fourth episode. Instead it basically exists to explain all the shit that happened before. The shit that the audience, frankly, are smart enough to figure out for themselves. Wanda created the sitcom world as a way of coping with the loss of Vision, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we got it. Thanks. It doesn’t advance the plot or anything. It’s just a massive info-dump. But by far the lowest point was when Darcy (by far the most annoying character in the first Thor film and is just as obnoxious here) was sat in front of the TV, watching the sitcom and asking the same questions we were. Not even attempting to look for answers. Just reiterating what the audience is thinking. Like this is an episode of fucking Gogglebox.

In the end it becomes apparent why the series is structured the way that it is. It’s to hoodwink people into subscribing to Disney’s stupid streaming service. If you think about it, there was no reason for WandaVision to be a TV series other than to lure gullible fans in with a piece-meal story buried in a mountain of crap. This isn’t a TV show. It’s what is cynically known in the world of big business executives as ‘content.’ They’re not interested in entertaining the audience. Instead they crave ‘engagement’, which isn’t the same thing. Watching WandaVision is like staring into the void, waiting for something to happen, while Disney charge you for the privilege.

Chapter 2: I Love Lucy

So the plot sucks balls. What about the characters? Surely if Wanda and Vision are likeable at least, it’ll give us something to cling onto.

Well as I was watching the first episode, it suddenly hit me that I couldn’t remember anything that happened to them in previous films. I knew Vision died, but other than that, I couldn’t tell you significant plot details or their personalities or anything. Not a great start.

See, up until now, Vision and Scarlet Witch have been little more than background characters. So already there’s an uphill struggle to get us invested in their relationship, especially considering we haven’t actually seen that relationship develop. In Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Scarlet Witch is killing people because she’s pissed off about Tony Stark killing people (you work that one out) until all of a sudden she stops and joins the good guys because the script said so. Vision meanwhile is introduced as a convenient deus ex machina to beat Ultron and gets no real personality other than he’s a robot. Captain America: Civil War comes the closest to giving Wanda a story and personality of her own as it’s her actions that cause the Sokovia Accords to come into effect, but she never gets any real growth or payoff as the film is heavily focused on Cap and Iron Man’s penis measuring contest. And as for Vision, all he does in the film is accidentally cripple War Machine. No real character or arc there as such. And then we have Avengers: Infinity War, where Wanda and Vision are now sporadically in love and on the run until that pesky Josh Brolin, looking like a CGI cross between Joss Whedon and a grumpy grape, comes along and rips out Vision’s Infinity Stone to power up his golden glove of doom, and the film treats this like a tragic moment, except... it isn’t. Because we haven’t really had the time to properly get to know these characters and see their romance blossom. So instead it just comes off as hollow and forced.

WandaVision has the exact same problem. Apparently Wanda was so distraught about Vision’s death that she broke into a SWORD base, stole his corpse, brought it back from the dead... somehow, and then enslaved an entire town of people to create an idyllic lifestyle for her and her hubby while broadcasting it as a sitcom to the outside world... for some reason. Putting aside the dubious morality of it all, it’s impossible to really sympathise with Wanda or her supposed grief because we’ve barely spent any time with her. Had the Marvel movies taken the time to properly explore the characters and show us their relationship grow and develop, this might have had more emotional resonance. But no, it just happens. In one film they barely speak to each other and in the next they’re a couple. No effort to explore how they feel about each other or any of the problems that may arise trying to date a robot. It just happens and we’re just supposed to care. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t care. You’re going to have to try a little bit harder than that I’m afraid. What’s worse is that, thanks to the whole fake sitcom thing, it’s impossible to really become invested in Wanda and her plight because the show has to constantly keep us at arms length at all times in order to keep up the pretence that this bullshit is somehow mysterious.

Looking through the WandaVision tag, it amuses me how many people say that she’s acting out of character. And yeah, her actions are a bit of a head scratcher. Why would an Eastern European’s ideal life be an American sitcom? Why a sitcom? Why kidnap an entire town? Why keep changing the decade? None of it makes sense, but you’re wrong for thinking that Wanda is behaving out of character for the simple reason that Wanda has never actually had a character. In fact, ironically, Wanda mind controlling an entire town and forcing them to do her bidding is probably the one consistent thing about her as she did this in Age Of Ultron. In interviews, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany described how they used actors like Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick Van Dyke as influences, which is really funny because they’re straight up admitting they don’t have characters and even now they’re still not playing the characters, instead emulating the work of far better actors.

As I was watching the show, it became abundantly clear that not only do Marvel not have the faintest idea what they wanted to do with these characters, but they also straight up don’t give a shit about these characters. Wanda in particular has had a rough time under the tyrannical regime of the House of Mouse. First they cast Elizabeth Olsen, a white woman, to play a Romani character, then systematically erasing her Jewish roots, even going so far as to put a cross in her bedroom in Civil War, and now the character is being butchered even more by forcing her into an American sitcom housewife role that she apparently willingly chose for herself, which is laughable. I mean say what you like about Magneto in the X-Men films, at least they actually depicted his Jewish culture. At least they recognised his Jewish background was important (though not important enough to cast a Jewish actor apparently). Wanda’s steady cultural erasure over the years is incredibly insidious and judging by Olsen’s comments in interviews, where she called Wanda’s comic book outfit a quote ‘gypsy thing’ unquote, it seems nobody has an ounce of fucking respect for the character or the culture she’s supposed to be representing. (and to all those kissing her arse saying it was a slip of the tongue, she has been repeatedly called out for using the slur in the past, so at this point I’d describe her behaviour as wilful ignorance)

If you want further proof of how much Marvel doesn’t seem to care about Wanda, look no further than her brother Pietro, aka Quicksilver. At the end of Episode 5, Wanda brings Pietro back from the dead, except it’s not Pietro. It’s Peter Maximoff, the Quicksilver from the X-Men films played by Peter Evans, who coincidentally is not Jewish or Romani either. So Quicksilver has the dubious honour of not only being whitewashed three times, but also twice within the same franchise. But should we really be surprised at this point? It’s Marvel after all. The same company that whitewashed the Ancient One in Doctor Yellowface and claimed it wasn’t racist because Tilda Swinton is ‘Celtic’. But now I’m going off topic. My point is that this isn’t a simple case of recasting an actor like Mark Ruffalo replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk. WandaVision actually acknowledges the recast in-universe, which makes no sense. Why would Wanda bring back her brother, only to make him look like a different person? We the audience may be familiar with this version of Quicksilver, but she isn’t. That would be like me bringing my Grandad back to life and making him look like Ian McKellen. He’d be perfectly charming, I’m sure, but he wouldn’t be my Grandad. 

If Marvel really cared about the characters or narrative consistency, they would have brought Aaron Taylor Johnson back. Instead, now they have absorbed 20th Century Fox into the hellish Disney abyss, they use X-Men’s Quicksilver as a means to keep viewers from switching off and so that people will write stupid articles and think pieces about whether the rest of the X-Men will show up in the MCU. It’s like dangling your keys in front of a toddler’s face to distract them from the rotting corpse of a raccoon lying face down in the corner of the room.

And it’s here where I decided to stop watching the show because fuck Disney.

Epilogue: One Foot In The Grave

You know, I am sick and tired of the so called ‘professional’ critics bending over backwards to praise these god awful films and shows when it’s so clear to anyone with a functioning brain cell how bad they truly are. WandaVision is without a doubt one of the most cynically produced and poorly structured TV shows I’ve ever seen. Its riffs on classic sitcoms are pointless and self-indulgent, the writing is terrible, the characters are unlikable and unsympathetic, and it’s entirely emblematic of what the entire MCU has become of late. And it’s only going to get worse as Disney drowns us with more ‘content’ to keep the plebs ‘engaged’. In short; pathetic.

[fancyfade]

barbara gordon, bruce wayne, stephanie brown

tysm for asks ^_^

Barbara

How I feel about this character

I really love babs. It is not her only attribute, but her being a disabled superhero who acknowledges she does more as a disabled woman than she did as an able bodied woman and her life is different but maybe even better now is so important to me

I like that she genuinely learns from her mistakes and works to make things right and also like it's not easy -- when she wrongs huntress, it takes like an entire fukcing plotline or two for huntress to consider working with her again, and babs had to be like "yeah that was unequivocably wrong on my part"

I like when we see her anger or protectiveness poking through, like when she gives huntress permission to use lethal force (she says something like "do whatever is necessary") to protect tim in jokers last laugh

i love her confidence and sureness in her skills

also her kicking ass and don't forget that even in a WC she kicks ass

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Dick atm but I could see getting into Dinah as well, I just haven't put a ton of thought into the latter

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Barbara and Cass or Barbara and Dinah

My unpopular opinion about this character

not unpopular with the right people but unfortunately still too unpopular with many people but: Magicuring babs was the shittiest decision dc ever made (Okay one of them -- they have a lot of competition for shitty decisions) and they handled her way more sexist and treated her more as a victim of her joker when she was AB than they ever did when she was disabled

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

unmagicure her

Bruce

lmao poor bruce. I'm gonna try to think of something positive to say about you

How I feel about this character

Okay when Bruce is being well written he is a compelling character. When he is not continuously reliving the same three plotlines over and over again and he is allowed to try to be a dad to his kids (even if he messes up) it is way more compelling than whatever the fuck is going on right now

I feel like when he is a very principled but still flawed and human dude who wants to save people from ever experiencing what he did before and prevent the kids he adopts from being alone to deal with their grief that is good.

However in canon he is often not well written, he’s just a black hole that sucks down other characters and a power fantasy for boring dudes

All the people I ship romantically with this character

no one. i'm sorry bruce you need to get your shit in order before you inflict yourself on a woman

(I don’t retcon out his romantic relationships, but they’re not like “My favorite ship” thing. They’re just there. I think most about hsi and Talia’s interactions because of my focus on Damian/ the al ghul side of things. I write him and Talia as having a romantic relationship in the past but I think by time the present rolls around Bruce would be too resentful of Talia for how she raised Damian and I think Talia would have like... “outgrown” bruce? Like he represented freedom and everything outside the league and a good genuinely nice person at the time but she’s not a young adult who hasn’t had much experience outside a cult of assassins anymore)

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Bruce should just live with his family in a big house so i'm gonna say everyone.

My unpopular opinion about this character

okay so canon wise: Bruce's love interest plots are boring, all of bruce's GFs are better than he is in every single way and don't deserve to be dragged down by him, and the idea that he needs a female love interest to be happy is so heteronormative and goes against the entire appeal of the batfam

fanon: I understand why people want a purely "bruce is a good dad" characterization of him, but you would have to re-write so many other character reactions that I can't get behind it. Bruce wants to be a good dad, but he is often a shitty dad. When I write him I keep most of his mistakes canon (the ones that involve just being bad at interactions, prioritizing the mission or something else more, or being thoughtless, not the ones that involve him being cruel or downright abusive)

Specifically: any time any of his kids gets reasonably stressed or alienated from him and makes decisions based on that, if you retcon him to always having been the perfect dad it just makes them look kind of irrational and is always tearing them down to prop him up

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

don't forget to let the batfam be competent around him? They should not be nerfed so he can save the day. yes i am thinking of that shitty detective comics comic i read recently where everyone was like... taken out instantly by hush's goons

also, since there is no retcon for what's going on with damian: the other characters calling out Bruce on how he failed damian in nearly every way and his dumb plan got alfred killed and left Damian with that guilt and also calling him out for every time he ever hit his kids.

Stephanie

   How I feel about this character

I like her a decent amount. She’s not on my faves list but she’s definitely a character I appreciate reading. I especially liked when we got to see her anger and complicated feelings towards her dad (she was glad he was dead, ran away from home because her mom kept trying to comfort her) and I like her stubborness. I like how she just decided “my dad is doing bad shit and i’m the only one who can help stop him” and then went to try to stop him.

I also like how she is the first Batfam member who tries to treat Damian like a kid

(Dick didn’t do it before Steph did but I don’t think that’s a failure on his part, I’m pretty sure if he tried to treat Damian like a kid at that point he would scare Damian off)

   All the people I ship romantically with this character

I’m not sure TBH I haven’t thought of it much. I found her interactions with Tim cute when I read them sometimes

   My non-romantic OTP for this character

Steph + cass kicking ass.

   My unpopular opinion about this character

I don’t like it when people try to simplify her to just preppy, and I really don’t get people who praise the pregnancy plotline considering how it just demonized all the other female characters who weren’t steph to prop up the author’s agenda

   One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

I think there never should have been a retcon where Bruce said that he knew she was not dead all along. This is just boring “Bruce can never be wrong” shit and like okay so? you let Cass (who had very few friends even close to being peers) and Tim (who was losing friends and family right and left at this point) believe that she was dead for however long so you could what? Say “I told you so”?

in my headcanon that was purely him trying to cover his own ass

[whentherewerebicycles]

i am doing SO much interesting reading this morning and it’s making me feel so invigorated and alive!! one hazy thing i am thinking about today is how much of social media culture (but maybe especially twitter) encourages people (maybe esp young people) to focus on & amplify the negative aspects of their lives, characters, relationships, personal experiences, etc., while sort of tacitly discouraging (by not rewarding as strongly) the sharing of strengths, talents, dreams, aspirations, or the fulfilling aspects of our lives/relationships/work.

these hazy thoughts are attached to some even hazier thoughts i’ve been working through over the past year or so, about how social media rhetoric around “destigmatizing mental illness” may help to reduce shame around depression, anxiety, etc. (i’m not entirely convinced on that point), but in many ways seems to more deeply entrench people in a depressive mindset. the way social media encourages people to talk about & share experiences of mental illness tends to strongly reward divulging painful or negative aspects of our lived experience, while dismissing or not directly rewarding (with attention, engagement, etc.) efforts to share practical tools for refiguring the habits of mind and features of one’s environment that can entrench depressive symptoms. social media culture elicits and strongly rewards expressions of suffering, and it also seems to encourage people (especially young people) to see mental illness (or the distress that mental illnesses cause) as a core aspect of their identity, ie, an essential and immutable part of who they are. it’s almost like, under the guise of “accepting ourselves as we are,” we are encouraged to see our depression, anxiety, bipolar symptoms, etc as part of our “authentic selves,” which i think can subconsciously dissuade us from pursuing treatment or lifestyle changes that could significantly alleviate the suffering those conditions cause us.

i also feel very strongly (and this is anecdotal experience drawn from almost 10 years of working closely with college students) that over the past decade social media culture has normalized depression and anxiety in ways that i find extremely disturbing. many of my students now act as if it is completely normal and unremarkable for a person to live with (and to regularly express) lowgrade feelings of “i hate myself,” or “i’m trash,” or “i want to die / it would be better if i were dead.” it also seems to be much less common for students to talk openly about pursuing happiness, well-being, a sense of personal fulfillment in one’s work and relationships, etc. of course, there are absolutely students who still prioritize those things (i see it in their work & in the way they pursue and talk about that work). but they seem to do so in increasingly quiet, inwardly-directed ways, as if there is something slightly taboo about openly expressing a desire to be fulfilled by one’s work, or about openly prioritizing emotional well-being.

i am getting way too far into the territory of drawing Big Conclusions from anecdotal observations so i will back off for now!! BUT I do want to note that i tend to work with students who self-identify as very leftist (somewhere on the progressive to radical spectrum) and who have an avowed concern with a wide range of social and environmental justice issues. now THIS is the haziest thought of all, but i feel like there is a link between what i am describing in social media culture & the extremely-online left’s obsessive focus on what indigenous scholar & researcher Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered narratives.” Tuck defines damage-centered narratives as accounts of the world, or of one’s self and community, that center experiences of exploitation, trauma, damage, pain, loss, and oppression.

Tuck argues that progressive and radical movements tend to rely on a flawed “theory of change,” namely that obsessively and endlessly documenting the damage caused by oppression will somehow move the dominant group to redress historical & ongoing injustices—when actually, historically, the dominant or oppressive group is almost never moved or shamed into changing course. damage-centered narratives not only fail to produce the desired change, but also tend to leave people with a distorted understanding of themselves and their communities as fundamentally damaged, flawed, incomplete, too traumatized or oppressed to heal, etc. in essence, damage-centered rhetoric teaches both marginalized people and members of the dominant group to see damage as both a normal and essential part of the marginalized group’s identity. Tuck’s argument is not that we should pretend like the damage doesn’t exist, or stop documenting the suffering it causes. but she does argue that we need to think about what we center in the stories we tell about ourselves and our communities, and about what happens to our sense of agency and wholeness when we repeatedly choose to center trauma and suffering in ways that crowd out stories of individual & community power, resilience, agency, and healing.

i feel like there’s some link here—like, some way in which social media culture’s rhetoric around “destigmatizing mental illness” has gotten entangled in these leftist damage-centered theories of change. or maybe it’s less of a direct connection and more like, Tuck’s analysis offers a useful framework for describing what i observe in these social media cultures. idk! still working through the tangled threads of this thought (and it’s possible that the connection to political views isn’t the most compelling part of this observation, just a personal pet idea of mine that i am always trying to fit into this narrative).

anyway i think i just want to end by saying that it is in fact NOT normal for lots of young people (or older people!) to be living everyday with a lowgrade feeling of wanting to die, and that we should be really concerned first and foremost with the political and economic conditions that are producing those feelings, but also with a social media culture that presents those feelings as “normal” and tacitly rewards them. but even that articulation does not feel very precise! because i am not saying at ALL that the solution is to stop talking about the lived conditions of our lives, or the fact that many of us DO live in a state of distress. it’s not the sharing of feelings that concerns me at all (all i do all day is share my feelings on the internet!!! sharing and reflecting on feelings is Good, actually!!). rather, it’s the way in which the sharing itself (of feelings of despair, depression, worry, social isolation, hopelessness, suicidal ideation, etc.) becomes an end point & a “good” in and of itself. the sharing becomes disconnected from, idk, a deep culture-wide examination of the conditions that produce those feelings, or from a culture-wide mobilization to materially address those conditions.

AND ALSO, to circle back to my very first point: when the sharing of negative emotions & experiences is rewarded and treated as an end in and of itself (ie it does not spark further individual or collective action/response), it tends to crowd out (and perhaps even render taboo) the sharing of strengths, hopes, dreams and aspirations, our efforts to build more fulfilling lives and relationships, and so on. sharing and focusing on the positive aspects of our lives does not automatically solve the negative stuff, and obviously we are often going to find ourselves in situations where we don’t have a lot of agency or the power to change our material circumstances. the negative stuff is real, and the way it makes us feel deserves to be closely and compassionately attended to. but i just worry about a particular kind of dysfunctional coping mechanism that encourages us to treat the shittiest, most distressing aspects of our lived experience as somehow central or essential to our identities, while persistently downplaying or discouraging us from cultivating the traits and habits of mind that make life worth living & our personal and collective well-being worth striving for. 

[skye-huntress]

RWBY V8 Episode 13 “Worthy” Reactions

There is so much going on in this episode and naturally because it’s the penultimate episode, so much conflict still in progress. I may miss or forget things and this will take me a while to get out because I have so much nervous energy it took me half an hour just to start typing. So keep that in mind as you read on

People were saying the plan went so smoothly but as I pointed out in my last reaction, local comms going down was and has thrown the evacuation into disarray, we can see it. So already we have Jaune and Nora splitting off from their team to spread the message, leaving less people to secure the gathering point in Vacuo

Second complication, a sandstorm that cuts off local comms and makes it impossible to know where Vacuo is. And a growing number of terrified refugees just out in the open with less than a handful of fighters to protect them. No way back to relative shelter or to even warn the rest either because true to his nature Ambrosius built exactly what they ask for.

Third complication, I wondered why Cinder seemed to be prepared for their plan. I thought Watts somehow also intercepted comms between Winter and Weiss but it seemed a stretch. Using the last question is going to bite her in the arse later, but I suppose she is in a damned anyway if she can’t give Neo Ruby before Salem respawns

And now we can also confirm she knows of Emerald’s “betrayal” but unless she leaves or gets knocked through the Vacuo portal, we may not get a confrontation this volume. Hard to say what she makes of this, she’s only shown to treat Emerald as someone she can use, much like how Cinder herself was and is being used.

Also Jinn definitely looked remorseful, but just like Ambrosius and the other spirits, she has rules to follow. BTW, I thought of a possible loophole for Jinn’s question limit. She can only be asked three questions every 100 years but I find it curious one question was already used. So my question is would it be possible to ask Jinn the same question twice. Technically it would not be a fourth question, but is that technicality enough to at least allow Jinn to repeat information for new ears.

Watts has access to the Command Centre. Jimmy’s need to control everything has once again backfired and given the enemy everything they could possibly want to do as much damage as they desire

All those people that Cinder blasted off the edge just to get RWBY’s attention, this has always been who she was, which is why there will not be any form of redemption for her. Even if she turns against Salem, it will be for her own selfish reasons and it is why she’ll never truly be able to escape from her fate

Our first RWBY vs Cinder fight (and probably not the last). Not many places worse for them to fight (if at all), with little ground (not a problem for a flying enemy), no cover, civilians in the line of literal fire (and glass). Got knocked off, game over. Speaking of which...

And Neo. Fucking Neo. And of course, protective big sister to the rescue. And she is the first to fall.

I did find it interesting that she seemed to vanish at a certain point on the way down. I interpret as proof, it’s not some endless void, there is something down there. And of course, there has to be a way back. We’re talking the Y of RWBY here, not to mention half the show’s most prominent LGBT+ couple. Contrary to what some individuals claim, RT do not do “Bury Your Gays” or “Queerbaiting”, at least not intentionally. As I said for Penny when she got hacked, Yang is going to be just fine, eventually. She’s not fine right now, obviously, but this isn’t the end for her. RWBY isn’t that type of show.

Ruby seems to be just surviving, no time to think or process what happen unless she wants to end up dead-dead by her sister’s supposed murderer. In this case, it is somewhat fortunate that Ruby’s coping mechanism is through actions, but when she stops it’s going to catch up with her

As for Blake, who got over repressing all her emotions several volumes ago, is not only the one to lose it the most but has gone absolutely feral. Still, she is not so far gone that she isn’t completely unaware that Penny and Weiss are unless in danger. Dilemma, exact vengeance on Neo, or lose another person you love?

While I’m on this point though, this is an excellent example of the destructive nature of the cycle of vengeance. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. In her pursuit of vengeance, Neo has naturally made herself the target of the same type of vengeance. Precisely why killing often not actually a final solution, it also has consequences as well.

I fear for Penny but I’m still confident she’ll survive this somehow. She is something new and unique, a whole new chapter of her life has just started and it would be anti-climatic and a huge waste for the show not to explore that. Besides, if Cinder has learned anything than she knows the relics must take priority over her power lust. All the power of Maidens won’t save her from Salem if she doesn’t return with both of them.

Weiss seems to be the one in most trouble right now, and in most danger of falling next. Still, I’m curious to see if her Nevermore summon will come into play again. A finale seems like the best time for it, and could potentially be a tide turner, perhaps more so than the Queen Lancer summon in Volume 5. She could use more wins.

Back to the Loser Ops. Hoping Marrow is okay. But of course, Harriet is still set on delivering that bomb. Much like her boss, she seems incapable of admitting she is wrong or has lost. I don’t think most people expected Vine to be the next one to concede that Jimmy was not the one to follow, but it makes sense. At that point, blowing up a city for man who has already lost is the furthest thing from logical. It’s just spite at that point, and just a way to make sure everyone loses.

So the bomb is back in play, thanks to Harriet. And while everyone is focused on her, no one will notice Watts pulling the strings from behind the curtain. But what is his target? He wouldn’t waste such a thing on mere civilians. It could simply be to occupy and/or eliminate several powerful combatants, given the villains are currently outnumbered. Still, he’s in his element and the last person we want to underestimate now. If this is truly the end of Atlas, this may probably be his last great act of villainy before he truly falls into irrelevancy and expendability

Lastly, Jimmy F@#$ing Ironwood. Forcefield prisons are such a bad idea. And of course, we can’t forget Chekhov’s gun-gun-gun. We had to see it in action and what it can do to a person. He recovered extraordinarily quickly, but then his body is more machine than man at this point. Also, as I predicted, shattering his aura did not snap him out of it. Atlas the city, the idea, is everything to him. He stopped seeing the people in it a while ago. He’ll kill them all if it will keep the city afloat.

I have complicated feelings about Jacques Schnee. I don’t need to tell anyone how much of a terrible person he is but I can’t ignore the truth that not everything he touched turned to shit. Weiss is perhaps my favourite character in the show, and she would not only not exist if it weren’t for Jacques, she wouldn’t be the person she is that I love now if Jacques was any different as a father. Same goes for Whitley and Winter. It’s a reminder that some good can come from even the shittiest of people acting in the shittiest of ways. He was also right about Ironwood all along, can’t forget that.

That all said, Jacques did not deserve to be murdered like that, whatever his crimes. The man had nothing left, no threat to anyone anymore. He should have lived for the rest of his pathetic existence knowing what he lost.

So now Winter is facing Ironwood again, this time she is alone and he is armed. Neither are in the best shape. I only see this ending with one or both of them dying.

One final note, Yang may be gone but... what if instead of the others also falling... those still standing take a leap of faith to jump after her and whoever else falls

[streets-in-paradise]

Fictional Sibling relationships i live for

I had been thinking about this topic lately and decided i would like to make a post about it because it is a very fun and interesting one for me. I had mentioned a few times here that in terms of fandom involvement i am more invested in family and frienships than in shippings, particulary i have a fixation with strong sibling bonds or sibling like friendships. I think it must be because i have a strong bond with my younger sister, i identify with that and that’s why i tend to get more involved and interested in this sort of character interactions. 

I will keep this just in movies, movie adaptations of books and tv shows because i don’t want it to be super long but still want to talk. In movie adaptations i will try to stay in movie’s territory as much as i can, if i add commentary on the book versions this would never end but i may slip a bit towards it because i can’t help it. 

As always, i make the disclaimer over the images i will use here, they belong to the sites where i found them.  

Sorry for my pathetic language skills in english. 

Note: this got so long that i will probably make a second part for more characters i coulnd’t include 

Boromir and Faramir in lotr 

Lotr is full of great material for people who, like me, obsess over families. Frodo and Bilbo, Merry and Pippin, Elrond and Arwen, Theoden ,Eowyn and Eomer are other great examples of family relationships i’m interested on from here ( i pretty much love to overthink stuff about almost all the lotr family relationships). I choose to talk about this bros because they have a particular place in my heart. How many times we had seen the common trope of a royal or noble family where the father is a dick who gives all his love and attention to the older brother, neglects the little one causing him to grow up resentfull and ending up as a villian while dad’s favourite is the hero of the tale? Not this time, and it is so refreshing. 

Boromir and Faramir choose each other over their father’s bullshit, you can see it in the lovely deleted scene the gif up here comes from. When Denethor shows up they are both annoyed, when he is mean to Faramir Boromir calls him out and tries so hard to make him show some appreciation for his youngest son. it is clear that, in this version, Boromir is more family to Faramir than his father ever was. I love how much they care for each other, how they pass beyond the differences. Boromir is a super amazing big bro, i love how he protects Faramir and is there for him instead of letting his father’s praise get in between. I could talk for hours about this two because i love them so much. I’m doing a hard effort in stopping myself from throwing a whole set of headcanons i have for them so i will stop now before i get too excited. 

Fili and Kili in The Hobbit

Staying in Middle Earth for one more mention i had to talk about this two. Being fully honest, the movies broke my heart because they took the exact opposite way i would had wished for. When they were introduced In An Unexpected Journey this two adorable brothers were one of my favourite aspects of it because i loved their Merry and Pippin like dumb chaotic energy. One of my biggest complains with the Hobbit adaptation is to have shifted the narrative of the strongly family focused story arc of the Line of Durin. Kili’s romance with Tauriel shifted the focus and, in my particular perspective, i hated that because i was already super involved in the family story. Besides from the “I belong with my brother”  iconic line we don’t see much more of Fili and Kili’s bond after the introduction of Tauriel. In fact, Fili loses a lot of his initial screentime in Desolation of Smaug and Battle of the Five Armies.

 I love this two, the relationship with their uncle as it was introduced in the first film and i would had loved to see more of their family dinamic explored. One of my biggest complains, besides from the change of focus on their supposed ending, is that i’m convinced that they should had entered the mountain with the rest of the company. It is such an important moment they would probably waited for since they were children, is the legacy of their family. In short terms, i love them and i would had loved to keep seeing future developments of the Line of Durin story they had in AUJ. 

Hector and Paris in Troy 

This two represent the opposite case. The relationship they have in this movie is very different from the source material but i love the great development it has here. It is outstanding to see the importance the sibling bond has in a movie that is supposed to be about a war caused by a romantic passion. 

The sons of King Priam are absolute opposites. Hector is the embodiment of a true hero, a Steve Rogers of ancient times. His strong caring nature and will to protect everyone reminds me of Boromir as well. Unlike Faramir,Paris is a freaking mess. He is the careless, adventurous and reckless little brother Hector ends up protecting every single time he gets into trouble. I had stated before that i think Paris is a selfish prick but i think that is a slight confussion of mine with the original. This Paris is more a reckless dumbass and, unlike Iliad Paris, his arc in the movie it’s a bit more simpathetic. In this version Helen is trapped in a loveless marriage to an old prick who treats her like trash (in the director’s cut Menelaus jokes about how he only cares for his wife for breeding purposes on a conversation with Hector). I can understand at some point that, if he trully fell in love with her, he felt horrible for letting her stay there as a prisoner of her husband. Going back to the my focus for this talk, i like that the movie had decided to make this two close brothers who actually care for each other despite being absolute opposites instead of two guys who barely know each other, are barely aware of being brothers and share only hatefull interactions. 

Hector’s protectiveness over Paris warms my heart. He had threated him a few times ( director’s cut has the “ i will rip off your pretty face from your pretty skull” excharge. I love that scene), he gets furious at him for his foolishness, they argue but when the time comes he always chooses to protect him. Honestly, that’s such a big bro thing, i can’t help to feel identified. The weight that this relationship has in the development of the story is a surprising thing and it makes everything more tragic. Paris being the killer of Achilles has a more significant meaning because, now it’s not just the irony of the weakest character killing the strongest. Paris is aware that he owns the memory of his fallen brother so much, he wants revenge. Hector was there for him all his life, the least he can do for him is to kill his killer and avenge his death. Briseis begs him to stop but he can’t let himself do that, he owns it to Hector and that debt is bigger than anything. 

I will not delay this any longer, the family relationships on this movie are my favourite aspect of it and i have a soft spot for the bond between the trojan princes. Don’t get surprised if i one of this days i end up making an entire separate post talking about the family dinamics displayed in the film (same goes for lotr but that would take me ages and i would have to make an entire series of posts if i wanted to discuss every lotr family relationship i would want to talk about). 

Sam and Dean Winchester in Supernatural 

If you reached this point you may had noticed that i have a big thing with family tragedies involving siblings. Supernatural is my favourite show because it combines lots of elements i love. To mention just a few: horror, mythology,classic rock and a strong family approach in its pretty tragic but outstanding plot. 

Sam and Dean are one of my favourite duo of bros of all time. I don’t think i have a lot to say about them because their relationship has been analized lots of times by the very big fanbase of the show. My main difference with the common interpretation is that i don’t see the Winchester family in a similar way to the movie versions of the Steward of Gondor and his sons, which means i don’t think John has been the shittiest father ever despite his many mistakes. Unlike movie Denethor he tried hard and in the interactions we saw of him with his boys he actually cares for both of them. 

This bros were the ones that made me realize in an actual concient way of my tendency to get too attached to families, story arcs regarding them and sibling love. I’m super attached to this story, i don’t know what the hell i’m going to do with my life once it ends. 

I will end this post here. It is more than sure that there would be a part two because i have tons of more brothers,sisters and other family relationships to talk about. 

Thanks to everyone who has read my very long ramble 

[a9saga]

I wanna make one thing clear. Nobody killed Jenny Schecter. Nobody. Not even herself.

The L Word was the most sloppily written, most lazily dramatic show, and it never cleaned up any of its undeveloped sub plots that they began once and then suddenly dropped entirely and pretended never happened. I swear to God the writers must have never revised a damn script. And this wasn't the type of thing that you only noticed if you're really hypercritical of shows you watch. Very little in the show happens subtextually. It's not a subtle show. Its on fricking Showtime.

Jenny herself over the course of seasons is an example of how the show would just create drama without reason. In season one she and her boyfriend just moved into west Hollywood next door to a couple of lesbians and through one experience with Marina at a party hosted by some of the neighborhood lesbians, she begins to understand she is really intensely drawn to this woman and her boyfriend is at this point still seemingly necessary to her new life, but he doesn't hold up to her interest in this woman no matter how guilty she feels. This makes sense as a plot point. This is how you begin a show about a bunch of lesbians in proximity to one another. The new girl in the neighborhood wants to ditch her fiance for a woman she just met. And after all this Marina stuff subsides eventually, Jenny is a decently developed character. She has flaws and good traits alike. She's messy but she's passionate. She's a drama queen but she cares about people. For instance, Max? Jenny is the main support system for Max in his transition at first, she's really like the only one enthusiastic for him about the whole thing besides that Scottish guy who does drugs in Kit's restaurant and has a couple of otherwise completely unacknowledged sex scenes with Max that dont develop into anything else and don't matter in the future to the show at all. Again. It's a Showtime show. You get the quality you should expect.

And Max is another great example of a sub plot the writers lose interest in! He's a priority to the show for basically just that one season. Honestly they treat Max like shit and lose all interest in him until they get him pregnant in the last season and even then he's only in like every other episode for a few minutes. That was mean. And so was Jenny. Jenny has like, anti-character development throughout the show which is not normal for writers to do to a protagonist. She goes from Jenny Schecter, aspiring writer and newly out lesbian in a new neighborhood to Jenny Schecter, two faced bitch with princess syndrome. They just start writing her in being obviously mean and wrong. And when Max gets pregnant suddenly she's misgendering him on purpose left and right and to my memory maybe the shittiest person to him about his pregnancy? Except of course for Tom, Jodi's interpreter and the guy who got him pregnant who was all on board for parenting the baby until for no reason he gets up in the middle of the night and leaves Max's room and never comes back. Oh and immediately changes his phone numbers apparently, and I guess cuts off contact with everyone on the show or something. That was also just a sudden, uselessly dramatic thing the show threw in that you didn't want it to, that was not justified other than to fuck over a character in a vulnerable situation, and which isn't even in character of the guy who did the thing.

But anyway. This is all to say that no member of the main cast killed Jenny Schecter. You know why? Because the writers are too fucking lazy and careless to make you want to point the finger at anyone, again, including Jenny herself. They don't give you one particularly good reason why anybody might've done it or how they were possibly tied to it. They don't give you reason to think anybody is more likely to have killed her than someone else. They give you nothing to work with in your mind's eye besides your ability to understand who in the main cast hated Jenny the most already. Jenny up and died for no reason because you aren't properly made to raise an eyebrow at her death. Jenny's death is another undeveloped subplot that the show isn't interested in seriously developing, except it is meant as the dramatic series finale to leave you at the edge of your seat so they want you to think it's *mysterious* except that's actually just a recurring fault of the show. Half assed undeveloped melodramatic subplots that get dropped and written out well before your mind forgets them. Don't let them trick you into thinking this was clever of the writers. It's not. It's so consistent with the headache inducing and lazy writing of the show it's absurd. Nobody killed Jenny Schecter. Mark never recorded Shane and Jenny in their own home. Papi was never falling in love with Kit. Etc etc. Ultimately none of this shit happened because they were unfinished and dropped entirely, and the whole murder mystery of Jenny's death ended up being less important than everyone being interrogated by police and explaining their personal history in the show like it's fascinating when weighed against this sudden death. Alice sighing and explaining "the only person I ever loved as much as Tasha... was Dana 😔" is just the investigation being a substitute for therapy. The murder mystery is an afterthought to the cast's final reflection on their relationships to each other just to stick in your mind after the show ends the way the writers want them to. And then they're like. Oh no but who killed Jenny? Nobody. God killed Jenny. Big Bird killed Jenny. The old rescue dog Jenny adopted to put down and then seduce the vet she took him to came back to life and killed Jenny. I killed Jenny. Your mom killed Jenny. The Joker killed Jenny. No one in the main cast killed Jenny. The writers just want you to think they did enough to make you think one of them did. They didn't.

Now that we've established the absurdity of the l word, why did I watch the entire show? Because I was a senior in high and a newly realized lesbian of course. That was more than 4 years ago now. I finished just before Showtime announced they would be bringing it back. I haven't watched generation q so I can't tell you anything about that. But my confliction for the original show as well as my really weird and intense love for Shane are both documented on this blog. I can't believe watching the l word in senior year and falling way too deeply and all-encompassingly in love with Shane is not a universal or even common experience. What were you guys doing senior year? Haven't you watched the l word?

[sweet-savvy-slytherins]

Hi, everyone!

Developing characters is something I really enjoy, so I had a lot of fun putting together a twin set of MCs! This is the first of the two, Evangeline! I’d love if people would give her a read, and let me know what you think of her!

For clarification, I used the Classified Text Generator in a few spots. That way, I didn’t have to leave any information out, and those who had reached that part of the game would recognize what I was talking about regardless, but those who hadn’t wouldn’t be spoiled.

Name: 

Hypatia Nadine Linwood, originally

Evangeline Nadine Desrosiers, currently

Usually goes by Vany

Initials spell “END,” which she finds hilariously ominous

Gender: Cisgender female

Age: 16 years old

Birth Date: October 20th

Species: Human (despite her mother’s insistence that they’re part Veela)

Blood Status: Pureblood

Sexuality: Openly homoromantic and homosexual

Alignment: Chaotic good

Ethnicity: Afro-European

Residence: A condo in Bristol

Myer Briggs Personality Type: ESTP-A, the Entrepreneur

1st Wand: When she was eleven, Evangeline was matched with a dogwood wand that was nine inches in length, with a dragon heartstring core.

2nd Wand: In her fifth year, after she unwisely challenged Madam Rakepick and had her wand broken as a result, Evangeline found herself paired with a spruce wood wand, this one nine and two thirds inches in length with a phoenix tail feather core. While she resents Rakepick for breaking her first, Evangeline does admit to feeling like her second wand suited her better.

Animagus: Evangeline never becomes an animagus.

Miscellaneous Magical Abilities: Unlike Jacob and Enola, Evangeline is not a born legilimens. However, just like her mother, she is a Seer. (Because that is just like her mother, isn’t it? To pass on the world’s shittiest super power?) Most of the time, this ability manifests in the form of a vague sense or a murky dream. To this day, she’s only had one proper vision, and it was when she was very small.

Boggart Form: Her mother showering her with praise, and saying she was proud of the witch she’d grown to be. This tends to confuse her peers, since it seems so positive—but Evangeline knows her mother. The narcissist that she is, Mireille would never have praised her like that unless she molded Evangeline into her double. That is Evangeline’s worst fear: becoming her mother.

Riddikulus Form: Mireille more or less being turned into a cymbal-banging monkey, with a kazoo in her mouth, cymbals in her hands, and a silly hat.

Amortentia: When Evangeline smells amortentia, the scent is a combination of broom handle polish, leather, and buttered toast. If someone’s amortentia were to smell like her, it would smell like cherry lip gloss, orange pekoe tea, and, again, broom handle polish.

Patronus: A crow. Although they’re best known for supposedly being an omen of death, they’re also believed to symbolize destiny, flexibility, and mischievousness.

Patronus Memory: About a month before Evangeline turned nine, there was a night where her entire family—Aunt Felicienne, Jacob, Enola, and Casper—all let her paint their nails. They all talked and laughed the entire night, drinking cocoa and admiring their nails, and it was the first time they felt like a proper family.

Mirror of Erised: Her family not only together again, but being treated with the respect they deserve. Her brother’s bad reputation erased, the whispers about her aunt for being a squib silenced, and the ghost of their parents’ actions exorcised.

Specialized/Favorite Spells: Evangeline has an affinity for fun spells, like Colovaria and Orchideous. They may not be the most practical, but is that such a crime? Not every spell can serve a greater purpose.

Physique: 

Athletic build, due to her involvement in Quidditch

Strong limbs and a toned figure

5′8 in heigh

Eye Color: 

Dark grey in color

Always decorated with pristine eyeliner and a light brush of mascara

Hair Color: 

Deep brown

Occasionally experiment with different hair colors using Colovaria

Naturally curly, but is often straightened

Hip length (when straightened)

Skin Tone:

Light brown

Warm undertones

Body Modifications: 

One piercing in each ear

Scarring: 

Extensive burn scars on both forearms — gained at 7 years old

Thin scar directly across the bridge of her nose — gained at 25 years old

Inventory: 

Her favorite cherry lip gloss

A bag of butterscotch candies

A hair clip or two

Her treasured leather journal.

Fashion: Though Evangeline consciously tries not to be vain, knowing it was one of her mother’s vices, she does take pride in her appearance, and enjoys looking good. When not outfitted in her school robes, she usually tries to aim for a classy, feminine sort of style. More often than not her outfits consist of trendy sweaters or turtlenecks (never t-shirts), tea length skirts, and oxford pumps. As for accessories, Evangeline is quite fond of dainty earrings and delicate silver rings, as well as pretty hair clips. The one exception to her style tastes is Erika’s sweaters: they’re over-sized, a little more traditionally masculine, and more worn out than Evangeline likes to let her clothes get. Still, she absolutely covets them.

Hogwarts House: Slytherin, house of the cunning and ambitious. It’s garnered such a reputation for being the “mean house” that people always seem to be surprised to learn that Evangeline was placed there. But, as she’s always quick to remind them, “mean” is not a requisite for being in Slytherin. It’s just an unfortunate trend.

Ilvermorny House: Thunderbird, house of the soul, home to the adventurer.

Affiliations/Organizations: Obviously, as first a student and then an alum, Evangeline is affiliated with Hogwarts. She also joins ███ ██████ ██ ██████ out of support for Enola, and, later on, is a member of the Order of the Phoenix.

Professions: After working as a spy for the Order during the second wizarding war, Evangeline builds a career as a grief counselor for magical children.

Class Proficiencies:

Astronomy: A

Charms: E

DADA: O

Flying: O

Herbology: P

History of Magic: A

Potions: A

Transfiguration: E

Electives: 

Divination

Muggle Studies

Both are total goof off classes, considering she’s a Seer who was raised in a muggle community

Quidditch: 

Seeker on the Slytherin team from third year onward

Played one season as a beater in her fourth year

Extra Curricular: 

Art Club

Frog Choir

Favorite Professors: 

Professor Hooch — fellow Quidditch lover

Professor Trelawney — endearingly kooky

Least Favorite Professors: 

Professor Snape — killjoy

Professor Sinistra — uptight

Brother: The eldest of the Desrosiers children is Theron, who renamed himself Jacob after his parents’ death. Of his three younger siblings, he’s arguably closest to Evangeline, since she shares his charisma and occasional haughtiness. Evangeline understood, better than any of the others, how badly he wanted to restore both the Kastellanos and Desrosiers family names to their former glory. No, actually, not their former glory—a new glory, built on talent and respect, rather than on the subjugation of those considered “beneath” them. 

Other Siblings: Older than Evangeline by six minutes, Enola is the second oldest Desrosiers sibling, and easily the one Evangeline is closest to. People can dismiss the notion of twin ESP all they want, but Evangeline believes it. Different as they may be, her and Enola have always been finely attuned to each other. They can read each other easily, and always know exactly what the other needs. There isn’t a chance they could ever be as close with someone else as they are with each other. 

Evangeline also has a younger brother. Helios Kastellanos, renamed Casper by their Aunt Felicienne, is five years younger than the twins, and truth be told, Evangeline’s never had too strong of a relationship with him. It’s not like they argue, or they hate each other. They’ve just...never connected. He’s always clung to Enola, so Evangeline figures that it’s a trade off she had to make. She gets to be close with Jacob, at the cost of being close with Casper. Enola gets to be close with Casper, at the cost of being close with Jacob. It evens out.

Father: Truth be told, Evangeline remembers very little of her father, Proteus. Beyond not spending a lot of time at home, Proteus was more concerned with his male heirs than either of his daughters. Everything Evangeline knows about him, she’s learned secondhand, and even then, it’s very little. Felicienne and Jacob always waved off her questions, telling her she didn’t want to know about him, Enola remembered as little as she did, and Casper was only three when he died. Evangeline knows that he was a Death Eater, and that’s more or less it.

Mother: Now, her mother, Mireille, on the other hand...Evangeline remembers her quite vividly. Mireille was a woman who prided herself on beauty more than anything, and wanted to raise her daughters to be just the same—as long as they were never more beautiful than she was. Though she came from a family of blood purists, Mireille was the first Desrosiers to become a Death Eater, and Evangeline suspects that she got in over her head. It’s her theory that the stress drove Mireille crazy, and that was why she was so prone to paranoia and explosive bursts of anger. One of Evangeline’s most vivid memories of Mireille attempting to throw a pot of boiling water in her face when she was seven years old; Evangeline threw up her arms to defend herself, and she still bears the scars from the attack all these years later.

Love Interest: Evangeline has a big, fat, gay crush on Erika Rath, and she’s not ashamed to admit it. She’d already been attracted to her on an entirely physical level, and then Evangeline had to seek out her tutelage when the Slytherin team was short a Beater. Discovering the awkward, uncertain girl that existed beneath the gruff exterior completely sealed the deal. They bonded over their love for Quidditch, continuing to train together even when Evangeline switched back to playing Seeker, and with time, came to find that they really enjoyed each other’s company. Evangeline could make Erika laugh like no one else, and Erika felt like one of the only people Evangeline could be entirely herself with, even if that meant exposing the ugly pieces of herself as well as the polished ones. Finally, Evangeline asked Erika to the Celestial Ball, and the rest was history. It’s rather funny to see them side by side, with Erika, perpetually dressed in her jersey and scowling, towering over Evangeline, with her pressed skirts and sunny smiles.

Best Friends: One of Evangeline’s dearest friends at Hogwarts is local contraband dealer, Jae Kim. Truth be told, he was initially quite intimidated by her. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but despite Evangeline’s bubbly disposition, something about her always struck him as distinctly...eldritch. Like she was something unusual, and not entirely human. Maybe it was just the way she could flip her emotions on a dime, entirely of her own volition. Watching her be seething mad and then slap on a bright, sunny grin as she turned away, easy as flipping a switch, was unnerving. Regardless, the two bonded throughout their time spent in detention, and Enola is quite proud to boast that she’s one of the few people that can almost wrangle Jae into following the rules.

She’s also quite close with Penny Haywood and Diego Caplan, two Hufflepuffs who share Evangeline’s popularity and social skill. Evangeline likes to joke that she’s “Penny, but with edge.” Penny gets a kick out of it. Diego, on the other hand, did initially have slightly selfish reasons for befriending Evangeline—namely, his hope that she could help him get closer to Enola, who he had a crush on—but ended up genuinely bonding with her somewhere along the way. She’s his favorite dueling and dancing partner, and they trust each other more than anyone seems to realize.

Rivals: Some people might not understand how two people on the same team can be rivals, but Evangeline and Skye Parkin make it work. It’s not a mean rivalry by any means, but it’s an intense one, with both of them aiming to be the star player on the Slytherin Quidditch team. Evangeline also considers herself rivals with Emily Tyler, who reminds her uncomfortably of her mother, and Merula, who competes with her in, well, everything.

Enemies: Logically, Evangeline knows that there’s really nothing wrong with Talbott Winger. He’s an entirely decent guy, who minds his own business and keeps his head down. She has no reason to dislike him the way she does. But she just can’t help it. Maybe it’s his aloofness that rubs her the wrong way—Evangeline’s always liked to be liked, not to mention the nosy streak she possesses and she finds people that reserved and guarded frustrating. Maybe it’s the fact that she thinks he has eyes for her sister, when Enola could definitely do better. (Of course, this is only Evangeline’s perception. If she really wanted to know who had eyes for Enola, she’d have better luck looking at her best friend, Jae.) Either way, Evangeline isn’t a fan.

Dormmates: Evangeline shares a dorm with Rowan Khanna, Liz Tuttle, Skye Parkin, and her twin sister, Enola.

Pets: On the record, Evangeline has only one pet, and it’s a very old, exceptionally grumpy, melanistic Sphynx cat named Toodles. Despite being more or less a crotchety old man in cat form, Toodles is absolutely the light of Evangeline’s life, and she dotes on him like he is her actual child. The amount of money she’s dropped on Toodles is honestly kind of staggering, but Enola insists that it’s entirely necessary. Sphynx cats require a lot of careful care, and if Evangeline has her way, Toodles is only going to get the best of the best.

However, off the record, Evangeline has also grown unusually close to one Thestral in particular. She’s been sneaking into the Forbidden Forest to study them since she was in her 2nd year, and during one such excursion, she witnessed a Thestral foal being birthed. Since it provided a prime opportunity to study the life cycle of a Thestral, Evangeline focused most of her observations on that foal, which she named Melinoe, after the Greek goddess of ghosts and spirits. It took some time to build trust, but eventually, Melinoe and Evangeline were thick as thieves, and Melinoe greeted her like an excited puppy whenever she came to visit the forest. Leaving Melinoe behind is perhaps what Evangeline’s dreading most about her graduation from Hogwarts.

Closest Canon Friends: Jae Kim, Penny Haywood, Diego Caplan, Nymphadora Tonks, and Tulip Karasu.

Closest MC Friends: Outside of Enola, none yet, but looking!

Pre-Hogwarts: Hypatia was born the third child of Proteus and Mireille Kastellanos. She spent the first eight years of her life in Greece, living on her father’s family estate, roaming the grounds with her siblings, enjoying the abundance of wealth at her fingertips. It should’ve been a charmed life...but it wasn’t. See, Proteus and Mireille were both Death Eaters, and neither were much suited for parenthood. It was a household strife with unease and contempt, and if the ruthless mental (and occasionally physical) abuse Hypatia experienced wasn’t enough, her childhood was also plagued by terrible visions. In this visions, an explosion burst in her family parlor, leaving both her parents dead on the floor.

Then, when she was eight years old, the premonition came true. Aurors raided the manor, and in the ensuing fight, both Proteus and Mireille were killed, with their two young daughters bearing witness. The children were whisked away from the home, and eventually sent to live with their maternal aunt, Felicienne Desrosiers. A squib who had fled her Pureblood-supremist family to live in England, Felicienne was hardly equipped to take on four young, magical, traumatized children, but still, she stepped up to the plate, determined not to fail them the way that their parents had.

The first thing she did? She sat them down, and helped them choose out new names. While her family name wasn’t exactly sparkly clean, it carried less of a stigma than their father’s. And thus, Hypatia Kastellanos died with her parents, and Evangeline Desrosiers was born.

From that point on, Evangeline grew up to be a rather well-adjusted girl. Or, as well-adjusted as a girl with her experiences could be. The only real point of concern was the fixation she began to develop with death; she played funeral director far more often than she ever played princess, and was prone to checking out books on embalming methods from the local library. However, she wasn’t hurting anyone or thing and showed no desire to, so Felicenne decided it wasn’t anything to worry too much about. It was simply Evangeline’s way of coping. Throughout the years, Evangeline found happiness with her new family, and despite Jacob’s disappearance, despite Felicenne’s failing health, Evangeline is determined to protect that happiness.

2nd Wizarding War: As the war starts picking up steam, Evangeline establishes her allegiance to The Order of the Phoenix, and starts working as a spy, able to rely on her charisma and family heritage to gain the trust of dark wizards. She’s not accepted into the inner circle, not nearly, but she’s silver-tongued enough to get information from those that are. During this time, she secretly elopes with her long-term girlfriend, Erika Rath. She fights in the battle of Hogwarts, and in doing so, gains a scar directly across the bridge of her nose.

Post-War: Following the war, Evangeline finds that her ambitions have changed. Despite having wanted for years to be a mortician, she finds that the idea now lacks the appeal it did when she was young. Perhaps she’s just seen enough death. Still, she’s determined to put all of her years of research to use. She ends up finding her calling providing grief counseling to children, and, specifically, to magical children. She makes the unconventional choice to train Thestrals as a sort of therapy animal for children who have witnessed death. Her and Erika, now going public with their marriage, also adopt a set of siblings—an eight year old named Winifred, and a six year old named Josephine, the daughters of a friend of Erika’s who was, unfortunately, killed in the war. It’s difficult, considering both girls are old enough to remember and miss their parents, but Evangeline’s grief training comes in handy in helping them cope with the loss. It may take time, but eventually, they do truly feel like a family.

There's a lot more to Evangeline than there appears to be at a glance. Upon first meeting, she seems...well, vivacious. She loves to laugh and lights up a room with her smile alone, and is playful and a little mischievous by nature. She's also quite the hopeless romantic, and ultimately wants to end up happy with someone she loves. Some may say that this makes her pathetic, but she doesn't view it that way at all. What's so wrong with wanting to be happy?

Though Evangeline may not hand out her trust too quickly or freely, she is always willing to provide a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. Her loyalty to those who find a place in her heart is admirable, especially when it comes to her family, and she would willingly fight to the death to protect those she loves. She always finds some way to show her affection, whether it's through a warm hug when one is needed or a good laugh provided when sadness seems to be taking over. She’s charismatic and enigmatic and attractive, and most everyone she meets consider her to be a delightful young woman. 

And then her smile sharpens just slightly, glinting like light on the blade of a dagger, and all of a sudden, it’s abundantly clear why she was sorted into the house of the cunning.

Now, the image Evangeline puts forth isn’t a lie. She is genuinely friendly and outgoing, and the majority of the time, everything she says and does is sincere. However, certain traits are exaggerated because she wants to present a specific image of herself—or rather, she wants certain parts of her to go unnoticed, so she emphasizes the ones she wants people to see and lets the other ones slip out of the edges of their perception. 

Beneath the girlish laughter and perfect grins is a master manipulator, always poised for battle, whether they be fought with words or fists. The sweetness, the flattery, the pretty little smiles, they coax information out conversations faster than threats ever did. A true Slytherin at her core, Evangeline has long since learned how to use her beauty and natural charisma to get what she needs out of people and accomplish her goals, which are, fortunately, mostly altruistic. Who knows what sort chaos she could wrought, if she put her mind to it?

Total theater kid. She attended muggle primary schools prior to Hogwarts, and you can bet your bippy she jumped on every opportunity to get on stage that she was offered. Notable roles include Belle in Beauty and the Beast, the Wicked Witch of the West (ironically enough) in The Wizard of Oz, Wendy in Peter Pan, and Queen Zixi in Queen Zixi of Ix.

It’s no secret that Evangeline’s one premonition was of the raid that her parents died in. Her siblings all know, and none of them blame her. She was just a child; she didn’t understand what she was seeing. The secret is that, even if she had understood, Evangeline doesn’t think she would’ve warned anyone.

[ponett]

As I said in my thoughts on The Color of Magic, I’d been told many times that the Discworld series started out rough as Pratchett found his voice over the course of the first few books. Going into the second book, which is a direct continuation of the first, I was braced for more of the same: an enjoyable but very uneven genre parody starring Rincewind the funny wizard and Twoflower the fantasy tourist. An amusing but unambitious bit of pulp fantasy writing, with lots of fun moments that don’t quite come together to form a cohesive whole

So I was very surprised to find that, while we still haven’t quite reached the proper Discworld style I’ve heard so much about, The Light Fantastic was a huge improvement over its predecessor, and a book I had a great time reading

The Light Fantastic is essentially The Color of Magic: Part Two, picking up exactly where the first book left off. Rincewind and Twoflower had fallen off the edge of the world, their fates uncertain. This book begins with reality itself literally being rewritten to place our heroes back on the disc, safe and sound

There’s a reason for this: as established in the first book, Rincewind's head contains the eighth and final spell from a legendary tome known as the Octavo, which is said to have existed since the dawn of the universe. The Octavo had been kept in the wizarding university Rincewind previously attended, you see, and he once read it on a dare, at which point the eighth spell decided to quite literally live in his head rent free

Spells in the Discworld universe are sort of alive and have their own free will, and this one has been both a blessing and a curse for Rincewind. On the one hand, the Spell has been secretly manipulating reality to keep him alive all this time, giving an in-universe explanation for how the shittiest wizard ever has managed to get out of so many near death experiences. On the other hand, this one huge spell has left no room in his brain for any others. He’s tried for years to memorize other, more useful spells, but these lesser spells are “too scared” to stay in the same mind as one from the Octavo. While a little of this was established in the first book, it didn’t really go anywhere, so it’s nice to see it expanded upon here (and to learn what the Spell actually does in the thrilling climax)

The Spell is at the center of something The Light Fantastic has over its predecessor: a plot! Whereas The Color of Magic felt like four short stories stapled together and called a novel, book two has an honest to goodness narrative. The world turtle that carries the Discworld is headed towards an ominous red star, and the wizarding community believes that reading all eight of the Octavo’s spells is the key to their salvation. The fact that one of the spells has lodged itself in Rincewind’s brain is the central source of conflict that ties the events of the book together into a cohesive package

As part of this newfound main plot, book two also features a central antagonist in the form of a rival wizard named Trymon (played by Tim Curry in the TV adaptation). Trymon is a cold, calculating wizard who values organization over the chaos of traditional magic, and who wants to use any means necessary to put himself in a position of power in the wizard community. The book regularly checks in on him and the other wizards back in Ankh-Morpork as Rincewind is off having more misadventures with Twoflower, and he also sends multiple groups of mercenaries out to retrieve Rincewind. While book two still features a lot of standalone setpiece moments along the way, having this threat looming in the background from page one gives everything a sense of urgency and importance that was sorely lacking the first time around

The biggest and most consistent change, however, is the prose. I don’t know what happened in the three years between the first two books, but Pratchett’s writing has gotten so much snappier and funnier. While I almost dozed off a few times reading The Color of Magic in spite of its fun ideas, it feels like nearly every paragraph of the second book has at least one fantastic line, and the dialogue is a treat

Perhaps the best example of this newfound creative confidence is a new main character introduced partway through the book. The Color of Magic featured Hrun, a buff and not extremely bright hero who was quite blatantly modeled after Conan the Barbarian. He was present for about half the story, existed to poke a bit of fun at the archetype, and then got unceremoniously dropped from the story before its final act. This time around, he’s been replaced by a character named Cohen the Barbarian. The name’s a dead giveaway, but yes, this guy’s still a Conan parody. However, instead of just being a straight expy of Conan to poke fun at, Cohen is something more interesting: he’s a version of that archetype who never stopped adventuring, even past his prime, and is now still fighting evil at the ripe old age of 87

Cohen is a lot of fun to read and a much more well-rounded character than Hrun ever was, and it’s not surprising for me to learn that he kept popping up in future books. Of course, for as much as I liked reading about him, Cohen also comes with some baggage that proves I’m still not quite out of the weeds. While Pratchett was definitely starting to move towards more empathetic writing, the Discworld universe is still a pretty cynical place in many respects, and the characters often exist more to be the subjects of mockery

Cohen caught me off guard when he suddenly announced to Rincewind that he had plans to marry Bethan, the fourth member of this makeshift adventuring party, who’s introduced as a sacrificial maiden who the protagonists rescue against her will. (She briefly complains about how a life spent among druids has now been flushed down the drain if they aren’t going to sacrifice her after all, and how she could’ve spent all those years doing anything else.) The problem here is that Cohen is 87, and Bethan is 17

Rincewind does immediately point out that this is extremely weird, of course, and the wiki tells me that the two apparently got divorced off-screen shortly after the events of this book. I know it’s not Pratchett advocating for 70-year age gaps or anything. It’s supposed to be absurd. It’s poking fun at how this Conan-style hero is still only interested in young maidens even in his 80s. And Pratchett thankfully steered clear of the Master Roshi style “pervy old man” trope, instead focusing on how Cohen likes that Bethan knows how to straighten his aging spine and things like that. But still. Before this, a heartwarming little moment where Cohen realized that Twoflower still saw him as this awesome, legendary hero had me thinking that the tone of the series was shifting more rapidly than I expected. But I guess we’re not there yet

Similarly, a bit about how Rincewind and most other wizards had a misogynistic bias against the types of magic women tended to perform and didn’t allow them to study as wizards made me think a little less of him. Again, while the characters are growing, there are still more instances where we’re supposed to laugh at the characters instead of with them. In many respects, they kind of intentionally suck as people

To put it in terms of modern sitcoms: tonally, we’re not at something like The Good Place yet. It’s closer to Always Sunny with wizards. But for now, that’s not such a bad thing for it to be

Some stumbling blocks aside, I found The Light Fantastic to be an extremely enjoyable read, and a clear improvement over its predecessor. While first book was a series of random events that just sort of stopped at an arbitrary point, this one offered a complete adventure that allowed the characters to grow a bit and left me satisfied. I’d list more funny moments that gave me a chuckle, but there are too many to list and this post is already long enough

I was also very intrigued to see Pratchett lay the groundwork for the next two books. As mentioned, the gender divide between witches and wizards was briefly established, and will be explored more in the next book, Equal Rites. (We also met a male relative of Granny Weatherwax at Unseen University, although poor Galder is quickly killed by the Luggage.) And Death has already moved past his shtick of trying to take Rincewind’s life. In a scene at his home, we got a tease of his personal life, and the fact that he has an adopted human daughter was revealed. Big things are on the horizon in this series, and after how good this second book was, I’m now even more pumped to get to these new stories

[mossiestpiglet]

JAMACK

HOOOOOO BOY THIS IS IT

How I feel about this character

Stunning, excellent, 10/10 sad bastard crime frog. Traded all his brain cells for ambition and it DID NOT work out. He’s just so incredibly repressed by his culture, he’s always been an outcast, he’s incredibly insecure about everything. Doesn’t think anyone would ever like him but hides it by being an absolute self-absorbed turnip. Deserves the world and a good kick in the shin.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Only romantic relationships and not counting my degenerate frog thirst ideas, Lio, Harris, and Scarlemagne are the big ones! He and Harris have always been around each other and have a fraught past with trying to form a relationship. Liomack because Lio will help him love himself and be more confident and Jamack will help Lio to accept that sometimes you try your best and still lose.

AND SCARLEMACK GOD im so weak for all iterations of scarlemack. Where they’re both evil, where they’re both reformed, where scarl is evil and jamack comes to his senses, it’s all so good. I’m a sucker for a happy ending though so reformed villains scarlemack is my favorite!

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I will gush about Jamack and Kwat forever. I will also just gush about Kwat forever. but like seriously they have also been partnered up since they were froglets, and kwat is so much more confident and secure than jamack is and he is so envious because he wants that so much. And Kwat knows how much Jamack cares about promotions and stuff so she cares about that for him, but not actually for herself, and she likes Jamack because he treats her like a person and not just like a big body to be thrown at problems.

That’s not even getting into my “Jamack adopts a red eyed tree froglet” thing where I’m ALSO obsessed with him as a dad and how it would make him face the shittiest parts of mod frog culture

My unpopular opinion about this character

He’s not perfect! He comes from a pretty terrible culture which has affected him horribly and he is certainly not at the end of his journey! He’s also fully not yet in a position where he is going to take care of anyone else as evidenced by the fact that he specifically chose to go with Kipo and co. in season 2. He saw kids who needed help and who could have really used his knowledge and skills and he decided to send them off into danger without him. He’s got a lot of ways to go before he’s actually dadmack material.

Also this is and has always been a Puck hate blog, fuck puck and his theater ilk, Jamack and Puck is not and never will be a thing because Jamack is only there for the dough

(im a theater kid im allowed to hate other theater kids)

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

Obviously he better show up in S3 but if he is there and doesn’t mourn Harris and Kwat i’m gonna cry.

thank you for letting me shout about the dramatic frog man!

[queen-of-bel]

i think someone already asked for paz and kaz?? if not then them, in case someone asked for them, kandori and maki for the hc meme!

MY TWO FAVE DUOS EVER. i’ll do them all bc i could fill out a hundred prompts about them

Persona 1, Persona 2EP, general Metal Gear spoilers incoming

Putting under a read more because it is loooong (sorry in advance)

Kandori

realistic: Oh, Kandori was absolutely the one who alerted Nanjo to his existence in p2ep. I’ve written multiple posts on Kandori’s motivations, but bottom line, Kandori wanted to work against Nyarlathotep’s plans as much as he believed his fate would allow him to. Kandori had infinite strength and should have been the impenetrable stronghold that kept Tatsuzou safe. He is the only boss in the entire game to not have a low health stance, and he resists everything. He’s able to catch Tatsuya’s sword with one hand, as Tatsuya says:

“Kandori tilts his face out of the way, and when my blade grazes his ear, he grabs it with his left hand. All I have to do is pull back, and it’ll cost him his fingers. He gives me a broad, natural smile. However, even when I yank it with all my strength, my sword doesn’t move a centimeter. It’s like it’s caught in a vise.”

Kandori’s revival should not have been found out by anyone (especially since everyone watched him die the first time). But somehow, the word leaked back to Nanjo. It’s not impossible to think that it was Togashi who leaked the information, but there’s a line of Kandori’s that really makes me think Kandori himself was the source.

Once Maya et. al + Tatsuya arrive on the Nichinmaru, Kandori says that “all the players are in place”, implying that he’s the one who brought them all together like this. This was a very meticulously crafted plan, and it only could’ve worked if Nanjo heard of Kandori’s revival, which leads me to believe that it was Kandori, not Togashi, who spread the rumors of his own revival.

while it may not be realistic, it is hilarious: Due to the high levels of contempt he feels for Tatsuzou, I’d love to think that Kandori just fucks with Tatsuzou constantly. He’ll move all the furniture in Tatsuzou’s office just a few inches to the left, or he’ll swap the position of some of the books on his shelf. It’s infuriating to Tatsuzou bc Kandori’s antics are just enough that he knows something is off, but he can never pinpoint exactly what it is. Kandori, meanwhile, insists that nothing is wrong, and convinces Tatsuzou that it’s just his old age getting to him.

heart-crushing and awful: I bet Kandori kept tabs on the P1 crew during his time under Tatsuzou. While he’s said to have an obsession with Tatsuya, there’s no reason to believe that the care he showed for Maki in P1 went away, and he’s grateful to the P1 cast for saving her. I like to think that Kandori found out that Reiji’s going to have a child, and stashed away a large amount of money (bonus points if he embezzled from Tatsuzou) to send to him, especially since Reiji’s girlfriend’s house collapsed. Kandori doesn’t sign his name on it or anything, so the money arrives to Reiji in an unmarked envelope, with only Reiji’s name written on it.

Reiji first thinks that it might have been Nanjo who sent the money (because that envelope is packed, and Nanjo is the only person he knows rich enough to send that much). Nanjo denies this, and after a while, the two of them come to the conclusion that the only other possible person could have been Kandori. Reiji thankfully accepts the money, and this whole incident reinforces in his mind that “Takashi” was the right name to choose for his son.

unrealistic: In order to cope with the boredom and emptiness he felt as SEBEC’s Mikage-Cho branch president, Kandori set up a secret room in SEBEC filled with video game consoles. During the height of his depression, Kandori would just be so engrossed in his games that he would forget he has actual meetings to go to. Cue Takeda apologizing profusely to clients, saying that Kandori’s running a bit late, and Takeda has to practically drag Kandori by the collar out of the little gamer den that he’s created for himself.

Maki

realistic: After her training under Eriko, she realizes that she misses painting and wants to pick it up again. She eventually incorporates that into her profession, becoming an art therapist.

while it may not be realistic, it is hilarious: Maki really wants to be good at baking, but she’s terrible at it. You know, like this:

She knows that she’s created a monstrosity but at least it’s still edible, right? So she brings these to P1 cast reunions. Nanjo is just appalled, and has to excuse himself because he knows he’s just going to be too blunt (prompting Mark to call him a “dickweed” again). Yuka, having no filter, just straight up says how horrible they look, but then she offers to teach Maki how to bake, since she’s pretty damn good at it herself.

heart-crushing and awful: Maki definitely regrets not accompanying Maya to the Nichinmaru. She doesn’t blame Nanjo/Eriko for not being able to save Kandori, but ever since she heard that Kandori was alive again, she’s wanted nothing more than to talk to him again.

She thinks that if she were there at the undersea ruins, maybe she could have convinced him to come along with her. This regret is just going to add to the massive amounts of guilt she feels over the Mikage-Cho incident.

unrealistic: It took ideal Maki a while to perfect her “cringe” negotiation. When she first tried it, she would burst out laughing too much, absolutely ruining it, and angering a lot of demons along the way.

Paz

realistic: Kaz has constantly asked her to come feed treats to Nuke with him. She’s always agreed, because that’s the role she’s supposed to play, but she really hates it at first. Eventually, as she comes to like Kaz more, it becomes the highlight of her day, and she begins to really look forward to it. She finds herself prolonging Nuke’s feeding sessions, just so she can spend more time with Nuke and Kaz.

while it may not be realistic, it is hilarious: So you know how Paz couldn’t stand Kaz at first? She wasn’t exactly subtle about it, so everyone at MSF knew that Paz thought Kaz was an enormous idiot. Cecile was so happy to find someone else who felt that way about Kaz (and she’s always wanted a reason to get closer to Paz), so she goes to Paz to air her grievances about what a pest Monsieur Miller is being. Paz, meanwhile, does not give a single shit. She still thinks Cecile is just a ditz, and now she’s irritated that she has to deal with both Kaz and Cecile’s annoying antics.

heart-crushing and awful: I’ve thought about this for a long time. I really have. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can be any more awful than what we got in canon. I have a lot of characters that fall under the “deserved better” category, but Paz takes the top of that list.

Paz is a unique character in Metal Gear in that she was not supposed to have anything to do with war. Other characters’ lives in the series were intertwined with war, whether by choice or by fate. Even characters like Chico or Sunny were born into it, given their parents and upbringing. 

It’s never clear how Zero was able to come in contact with Paz, but I think it was intentional to never specify it. It’s not important to know how Zero found Paz, because fundamentally, Paz is not an important person. She’s nobody special. She was literally just some random orphan living in the US, and Zero went out of his way to drag her into his plans.

To me, Paz’s character parallels the child soldiers in Zanzibar Land. They’re both representative of how ruthless Zero and Big Boss were in their quests to fulfill their interpretations of the Boss’ will. Zero and Big Boss were both willing to employ any tactic possible to reach this end goal, and they didn’t care about the pain and destruction they left in their path.

But I digress...

That being said, I think Paz felt sick when she saw MSF soldiers playing with the mini remote-controlled ZEKE that Huey had built. For her, it was just a reminder of the duty that she had to carry out. She wasn’t allowed to be happy at MSF, and she eventually would have to fight to the death with Snake.

unrealistic: Writing Love Deterrence with Kaz and Zadornov made her want to learn how to play the guitar. In my totally self-indulgent “Zero and Skull Face both get brain aneurysms and drop dead 4 days before Peace Day” AU, Paz approaches Kaz and asks him to give her guitar lessons.

Kaz

realistic: The morning after the monthly birthday party at MSF (you know, where Kaz invited everyone to see the real Kazuhira Miller?), he’s embarrassed as hell. He been so protective of Paz the entire night, and it turned out he was the crudest person at the party. He goes to apologize to Paz, and can barely look her in the eyes as he’s doing so. Paz, meanwhile, can’t stop laughing. Her opinion of Kaz had been softening ever since he visited her when she was sick, but interacting with him during the party had really made her like him. Kaz still feels a bit of shame, but upon seeing Paz genuinely laugh for the first time, he can’t help but feel so publicly embarrassing himself was all worth it.

while it may not be realistic, it is hilarious: MORE 90S FOXHOUND PETTINESS

The first year that both Big Boss and Kaz are at FOXHOUND, Kaz bakes a cake for BB’s birthday. As BB accepts the cake, he wonders if Kaz has forgiven him, but then he looks down at it and sees

And these are the cheapest, shittiest cigarettes that Kaz could make, because you know his petty ass rolled them himself. BB picks up a cigarette and it’s so sloppily rolled that it immediately falls apart and the tobacco spills all over the cake and the floor and BB looks up to Kaz and Kaz is just smiling back like

heart-crushing and awful: Ohoho, I have many thoughts as to Master Miller’s life post-Zanzibar Land and his final moments. Now that Big Boss is finally dead, Kaz’s life loses all meaning. Skull Face, Huey, Big Boss, they’re all dead, and suddenly, the decades of anger he carried with him has nowhere to channel itself to. I think he becomes an empty shell of a man, just sort of running on autopilot.

So when Ocelot breaks into Kaz’s house to kill him, you absolutely know that Ocelot wasn’t discrete about it. There’s no way that Ocelot’s overdramatic cowboy ass didn’t gloat about it, to show that he was able to get the upper hand in the end.

Kaz just doesn’t care.

Kaz’s life is plagued with regrets. While none of it was intentional, his impulsivity and short-sightedness has really screwed over a lot of people and absolutely destroyed so many people’s lives. I think when Ocelot came to kill Kaz (and I’m going to toss in a bit of torture, just because Ocelot’s petty ass remembers Kaz complaining about Ocelot’s getting “too many kicks from his ‘art of interrogation’”), Kaz just resigned and doesn’t even attempt to fight back. He knows that this is a sad and undignified way to die, but he believes that this is karma and he deserves it.

unrealistic: Okay I’ve talked about this a little, but I want to add to it.

Kaz absolutely kept a Burn Book like in Mean Girls.

After MGSV, Big Boss and Ocelot make their way in the book as well. Underneath Ocelot’s picture, Kaz writes “Too gay to function. Also, cowboys are stupid.” BB has got 5 whole pages dedicated to him, but the line that Kaz is most proud of is “Didn't shower for a month... during SUMMER, and to this day still hasn't washed his hair.”

Thank you for asking!

send me a character and i’ll give you some headcanons

[doctordisaster]

Okay, so about the space movie: it is not good. I haven’t come out of a star war feeling this disappointed since the prequels. It’s worse than revenge of the sith. I think it must be better than phantom menace, but I’m not sure. That’s how bad it is: I’d need to rewatch the worst installment in the series to confidently rank the newest.

I’ve seen some people say they enjoyed it in the theater but liked it less the more they thought about it — which was more or less my experience with Solo. That was not my experience this time. I was numbed, bored, or annoyed for most of the movie’s runtime. There are a few good moments, but it is by and large just not fun to watch.

It also appears to have been plotted by an angry mob of reddit incels. Bad fan theories, unwanted redemption arcs, and pointless throwbacks rule the day. Assholes drove Kelly Marie Tran off of Twitter; JJ Abrams drove Kelly Marie Tran out of Star Wars. Every moment of character development from the previous film was actively and loudly reversed. As a matter of fact, every status quo change in this very film was reversed, usually within seconds of screen time. At every point at which the movie ought to have turned right, it turned left.

Below the cut I’m going to list things I liked and things I didn’t. Don’t read it if you want to be surprised by the movie's disappointments live in the theater.

Good things in space movie no. 9:

The little goblin who works on droids is cute

Lando’s scenes are all very nice

Chewie trying to hide in a crowd was funny

Wedge! I love Wedge!

I loved the design of Kylo Ren’s space office

The moment where literally every spaceship that has ever been in a star war shows up. Also the moment where literally every person who has ever played a Jedi speaks a line. These are each a nice gimmick, although I am not sure both should have been used, and certainly not that close together.

I like the moment where Poe and The Female Person Poe Put His Definitely Heterosexual Penis Into At Some Point In The Past have a whole conversation just with their facial expressions. It’s especially impressive because The Female Person Poe Put His Definitely Heterosexual Penis Into At Some Point In The Past is wearing a metal helmet that entirely conceals her face.

The scene where Finn and The Female Person Finn Is Going To Put His Definitely Heterosexual Penis Into At Some Point In The Future bond over the shared elements of their history was very nice.

The scene where force ghost Luke explains that he was wrong to isolate himself from the universe is nowhere near as good as any of Luke and Rey’s scenes in TLJ, but it’s definitely necessary considering how confused some fans seemed to be on this point.

Some of the banter between the main three is quite fun

The scene of young Leia and Luke doing Jedi stuff is lovely and I wanted more of it.

Bad things in movie 9 from outer space:

Everything about Palpatine. Bringing him back is stupid. His plan is stupid. His inexplicable motivations are stupid. The fact that he has apparently just been sitting on his ass for 40 years is really stupid. Not explaining how he survived being thrown down a bottomless pit, exploding, and then the station he was on also exploding is extremely stupid.

Speaking of stupid, Rey Palpatine is the single worst idea that has ever been in any of these films. One of the most obnoxious things about JJ Abrams “mystery boxes” is that the mystery he deems the holy grail of box mysteries and buries deep deep down at the bottom of the mystery box is consistently something obvious and bad and not even slightly clever. There were literally two dumb fan theories for Rey’s parentage — Kenobi and Palpatine — and Palpatine was the one that was dumber.

It’s worse than midiclorians, because now Palpy fucks. Palpy canonically fucks.

Gross.

The only potentially good thing about bringing back Palpy is getting to enjoy Ian McDiarmid’s gloriously campy performance again, but for some goddamn reason they trap him on an empty soundstage lit only by strobes, then color grade everything to pure gray so you can’t fucking see what’s going on.

I get that it’s supposed to be the heart of evil and darkness, but good production design can evoke that without making it impossible to see the actors and unpleasant to look at the frame

Speaking of which, how is this movie so ugly??? There are maybe three visually nice locations and everything else is just hideous. This is a complaint I’d never even consider leveling at a previous star war. Even the shittiest ones were beautiful to look at.

Every Star Destroyer has an onboard death star superlaser now. I started by booing, saw that the superlasers are just a metal cock and balls, and then laughed my ass off through the rest of the supposedly serious scene where it blows up a planet.

The way you kill a star destroyer now is you shoot it in its dick

The only people who will be pleased by this movie are Reylo shippers and that is a horrible thing to be true

The macguffin chase that constitutes the first two thirds of this movie is pointless and boring. I especially loved the multiple times when someone lost a macguffin only to go “oh I forgot I have a spare in the glovebox”

Can we even list all the times something supposedly momentous happened only to be reversed moments later?

chewie dies! wait it was somehow the wrong ship even though they were in the middle of a literal fucking desert and there was no other ship around

The Female Person Poe Put His Definitely Heterosexual Penis Into At Some Point In The Past just got obliterated along with her entire planet by a different penis, this one attached to a star destroyer! oh wait she didn’t. no explanation she just didn’t die.

also the droid gremlin is with her

hux turned spy for the resist— oh wait he’s dead

Rey killed Kylo! But she feels bad so she heals him back

Palpatine just killed Kylo! Oh wait he didn’t. No explanation he just didn’t die, because JJ needed him to immediately reverse another supposedly momentous death.

Kylo smashed the macguffin! we’re doomed oh wait glovebox

Palpatine just electrocuted the entire rebel fleet to death! oh they got better

There’s absolutely no way to get across these waves! Oh wait Rey just... went across them

Well maybe it’s because she has the force and was able to oh wait Finn just went across them too

Well maybe that’s because The Female Person Finn Is Going To Put His Definitely Heterosexual Penis Into At Some Point In The Future is such an expert at navigating the oh wait Kylo is there as well

If only this movie took place in a universe with vehicles that do not touch the ground, we could have skipped this entire stupid subplot

3po makes a massive sacrifice by allowing his memory to be wiped! oh wait he had a backup

I also hate that 3po’s memory wipe is treated, before it happens, with pathos and gravitas, and then the moment he actually loses everything about his life and all his friends, it’s IMMEDIATELY treated as a joke

I love the way Rey is briefly dead but then Kylo goes “oh no!” and uses the last of his life force to bring her back. I wanted her to go “oh no!” and then use the last of her life force to bring him back. And then he’d go “oh no!” and use the last of his life force to

When the emperor dies, they show a montage of star destroyers blowing up elsewhere in the galaxy. Including one over endor? Why did they have a star destroyer over endor. How did the ewoks blow it up? Did they tie a log to one of the other moons and another log to another other moon and then cut the vines and the logs went smoosh

At the start of the movie Palpy promises Kylo his throne and limitless power in exchange for the one thing he wants most desperately in the world, which is for Rey to be dead. Then Rey shows up and Palpy goes “ah good you are here, I need you to kill me so my spirit can transfer to you” as though these demands aren’t utterly contradictory on every level. Then when she refuses he’s like “oh well, I suppose I can suck your and Kylo’s life forces out and rejuvenate myself to rule anew” as though that isn’t vastly preferable to plans A and B from his perspective

why is he in this movie

Having the knights of ren in this movie really justifies Rian Johnson’s choice not to have them in TLJ.

Every time the knights of ren appear, the timpanist bangs out the music cue for the sand people, so I think John Williams just decided that they ARE sand people in different hats.

Remember the eerie moment in TLJ where Rey and Kylo were connected across a vast distance through the force and Rey was in a monsoon and when the connection closed Kylo found some raindrops on his glove? Remember when Luke used a similar ability, without any physical transference, and the strain was so great that it ended his life? Now do you remember when TROS turned that into a totally mundane effortless 3d fax machine so they could pass necklaces and macguffins and lightsabers back and forth constantly, and even have whole physically real saber duels even though the script was too lazy to put them in the same place? Hey that fucking sucked

Remember Rose Tico? JJ doesn’t

The scene of Poe “micro-jumping” the Falcon is awful on so many levels. First of all, it’s just a one-off joke from Guardians of the Galaxy, but played straight for some reason. Second, changing the setting of the chase every few seconds makes the action just as numbing and impossible to follow as Michael Bay’s worst. Third, it makes no sense that the TIEs are following them through the microjumps, and the fact that they can do so makes the microjumps completely pointless. Why are you even microjumping if they can just follow you? Then the characters spend several scenes going on and on about what a big deal microjumps are, only for no one to ever do it or refer to it again.

Rey asks “what was snoke’s deal,” as though reading off a card with questions from our most obnoxious audience members, and Palpy goes “Snoke was my creation” which makes sense, like he trained the guy and equipped him and pulled his strings from the shadows and no, wait, the camera is panning over to a literal Jar O’ Snokes that Palpy just has handy in his empty strobelit soundstage.

I wish the camera had kept panning to show a Jar O’ Phasmas and a Jar O’ Huxes and maybe a Jar O’ Unkar Plutts so that all the characters from TFA could have an Offically Explained Back Story

If he put all the jars in another jar he could have a Jar Jar and the circle would be complete

I liked the part where they were having a lightsaber duel on a pier and the swings got slower and slower and finally they stopped and just kind of stared at each other like “wtf is even the point of this” because that was exactly how I felt at that moment.

tbh that was exactly how I felt for most of the movie

[boywivlove]

| When Lightning strikes |

Pairing: Briefly mentioned Kim Taehyung x Reader

Genre: Apocalypse AU | Angst

Summary : Kim Taehyung is broken, after a successful supply run turns sour, a loss that no one could have seen coming hits him hard. As he is forced to take shelter from the storm and the dead in an abandoned shack, his thoughts are of the rest of his group waiting for them to come back. Taehyung reflects on the people he’s lost and the last time he saw you, letting thoughts of you overwhelm him. Determined, he will brave the storm and take down anything in his way for a chance to hold you and his family in his arms again. Even just for a minute.

Song inspiration | the Lightning Strike | Snow Patrol.

Warnings : Mentions of major character deaths | mentions of murder and violence | Descriptions of gore | swearing | Strong language

Word count : 3k words.

Author’s note : I finally did it. I finally wrote something somewhat worth posting on here, this idea came from a song fic summary game with @ddaenysus​ and @jhspetitegf​ last night and I thought I may as well make something of my ideas. Be aware this is ANGTSTYYYY.

It can be hard to see clearly in a storm, especially at night. Vision was limited enough but adding harsh winds and harsher rainfall? That just makes things utterly inconvenient. The flashes of lightning were his only saving grace at this moment in time, lighting his surroundings for the faintest of moments that Taehyung dare not close his eyes for even a second, his life depended on it. He was alone, injured and depending on lightning of all fucking things. The rain mixing with the blood that has stained his clothes and skin, giving the air that familiar metallic aroma. 

Running through the underbrush he could hear them, the now familiar snarls and groans he had been forced to become accustomed and aware of since the world went to shit. His hearing was his saving grace at this moment, his vision not accustomed to the harsh rainfall of the particularly harsh storm. Those guttural growls and faint shuffling of dragging feet telling him where not to run and the lightning momentarily letting him see the swallowed lifeless faces getting closer to him as he ran. However long he seemed to have been running for though, luck seemed to have thrown him a lifeline here. A cabin. A small, rundown looking shack that looked like it could have been a small little rest stop for people camping or hunting in the wooded area. Taehyung got to the side of the shack, trying out the door with no luck, but seeing a window he took his chance and used the battered looking pipe he had to break through to his possible piece of salvation. He quickly made work to making sure there wasn’t any of those things lurking about in the tiny space. Luck was on his side in that moment. Using the strength he could manage with his bruised and bloody body, he managed to move a long empty shelving unit to block the now broken window, sealing the only entry those dead heads could use to get to him. He sat in silence for what seemed like the longest of times, in the dark of the hut just listening. All he could hear was the patter of the heavy rainfall and the occasional rumbles of thunder. The lightning setting the room alight for seconds at a time.                          

Only when he was sure he was safe for that moment, Taehyung set to work on setting up his resting place for the night. He lit the spare candles he had in his travel pack, he had to admit Jin had good `this will come in handy later` moments. He set them up on one of the wooden tables and used one of the others to place upon the door. He didn’t trust a locked door not to break should a group of hungry rotters come knocking. Once his little nest was set up he went through the green backpack, the once vibrant grass green was now covered in rips, tears, grime and now, fresh blood. He retrieved the small red pouch, took out the tiny travel sewing kit and a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. He then set to work on the rather nasty slash running across his abdomen, not deep enough that he would bleed out then and there, but not shallow enough to warrant just winging it and leaving it unattended either. He threaded the needle and set the needle over the flame. This wasn’t gonna be the best medical care in the world but when needs must.

With each stinging stitch he was only just becoming aware of how numb he was, he ran his cold fingers over his stomach, nothing. Yes, he had been in the freezing cold of the shittiest storm he had seen since the world went top side, his skin beaten with freezing winds and his clothes were drenched. But this numbness was different. It was a numbness of different circumstances. The numbness you get when you get bad news, like the death of someone you know. The numbness that you don’t realise until your brain finally processes it. With each stitch he wished he could feel something. But feeling the slightest bit of anything would only open the floodgates to everything he felt in the past 24 hours. Thinking back now on how things were looking like things were settling into something hopeful. How could he have been so stupid.

 24 Hours earlier

The night air was cool and crisp, mixing with the wisps of smoke from the small campfire the group had made for their meals. The menu tonight consisted of cans of mixed vegetables. The water they had left was rationed between the group as they silently savoured their mouthfuls. Hopefully the scavenging run to the gas station they passed on the road would be kind to them, their supplies getting thinner by the day. The team was set, Taehyung, Jimin and Jungkook would go on the run, while the rest would stay back and keep the camp safe. How they had avoided the dead so far was a mystery but they weren’t going to question the good luck they’ve had so far. But at the same time they couldn’t get too comfy, they always kept moving, never staying in the same place for too long. They had seen what happens when you do that, the people who thought they could just hunker down and not take precautions, and they weren’t going to bring bad vibes onto the group by thinking about the what ifs. Taehyung sat going over the supplies they would need to look out for during the scavenge, Jin piping up every so often about canned crab, making the group smile and sigh in unison. Taehyung then looks to the person across from him, she was sipping her water as if it was the sweetest nectar, catching his eye, her lips upturned in the faintest of smiles, her cheeks warming slightly as she focused back on Namjoon and the map they were overlooking. He held his gaze for the slightest moment, thinking back to the night before, the feeling of your hair in his fingers, your hands caressing his cheeks, and his lips between yours.

Post supply run

The three were walking the path they came, their backpacks were full with the spoils of a successful scavenge. The gas station had been pretty much cleared out of most stuff, but in some wondrous miracle, whoever came before left canned goods, those usually gross fruit granola bars that sit by the till that no one usually touches were now highly coveted and worth more than gold. They even found an overturned vending machine and with a little elbow grease, it opened to reveal bottles of water, and to the boys delight, candy bars galore. The high they were feeling knowing how the group will be able to fill their bellies with the glorious taste of sugar gave them the energy they needed to make the 4 hour track home.

They decided on the walk as it would be better to not draw attention, and while it was Jimin who complained about the possible walk of shame back, coming home empty handed, watching him savour the sweet treat with a spring in his step made Taehyung feel like he could walk on water. He thought about the supplies they had gathered. Water, canned veggies, canned fruit and granola and candy bars. The gas station also had a little apothecary like pharmacy section which they managed to salvage some bottles of pain meds, bandages, the little things that make a big difference to your survival. One thing Taehyung couldn’t wait to showcase to the group, that Jin would more than likely so anything to have a share in, canned crab. The boys had already started screaming all the ways they could make the hungry man their personal servant. 

The small group had stopped to rest for a moment, taking the time to take some well deserved sips of water. Jimin and Taehyung set to the task of evening out the load of the packs for each member, equally sharing the load until they got home. Jungkook took watch, better to be safe than sorry, they came so far and accomplished so much in this one day then they had in weeks, things were looking up, but you can never be too careful, never. 

it all happened in a split second, one second that changed the game entirely. Looking over to the two finishing the supply sharing, Jungkook was looking to the treeline, and the small group of deadheads that had come across them. It was only when the one closest to him let out the ever familiar growling they had always been so watchful of, that he quickly turned around. A matter of seconds is all it took. Jungkook wasn’t quick enough to notice, and it was only when he felt teeth tearing into his upper shoulder did he react. The scream of pain and surprise ripped through the area like a gunshot, alerting the other two men. Taehyung and Jimin could only look on in horror as Jungkook ripped himself from the grasps of the corpse, his right side now stained crimson and his eyes wide with fear and disbelieving. In his shock he couldn’t bring himself to raise his baseball bat, giving Taehyung cause to react, bringing his rusted pipe down on the monsters head, making short work of it. Seeing more of them, the group made for a hasty retreat, grabbing their packs, Jimin grabbing Jungkooks and Taehyung grabbing Jungkook himself, they made a b-line for the trees and to anywhere but there. 

It had all happened so fast, how could their luck have changed so quickly. 

After they got a safe distance away from the deadheads, they set their injured friend down at the base of a tree, his face had lost its colour, his skin clammy and stained with his blood, which was still spilling down his side with no signs of stopping without proper medical care, the bitch had got him deep. Taehyungs body was tingling and cold. He was shakily rummaging through his pack for the medical supplies they had found when he heard the wheezing words of his friend, 

`I,, I wasn’t, pa-aying attention,,,Im sorry`

The look in Jungkooks eyes was that of a child that had crossed the road seconds before a car comes speeding past. The look when scolded by parents. His lips quivered as he silently contemplated his actions. Jimins eyes shone with unshed tears as his friend scolded himself. 

 Present day

The stitches were not in anyway a medical marvel, but in times of desperation, they were a step to stability. Taehyung set the needle down and wiped his newly stitched skin with rubbing alcohol, the sting was barely recognised in his head. Taking a can of soup out of his pack, pulling the top to open it and stills his hand. He looks at the dried red liquid smeared onto his skin, his knuckles had split open, mixing his own blood with the blood on his hand, he then looks at the second pack on the floor. The blood on the pack that also stained his hands. The blood of his friend.

5 hours earlier     

The two are silent, walking with a heavy weight upon them both. They had left him. They had left their friends body under the tree they set him down to rest. Jungkook succumbed to the blood loss in the end, his wound already turning black and the blood starting to dry and crack around the teeth marks. Jimin and Teahyung were adamant in not abandoning him, that they were gonna get him back to camp, they weren’t stupid, they saw what happened when you got bit. Jungkook wasn’t stupid either, he could already feel the fever setting hin his bones. He shakily handed his pack to them, telling them he will rest for a little, and join them later at the campfire, his way of saying goodbye they guessed. But what could they do? taking him back wouldn’t be practical, he wouldn’t be able to stand on his own, and when he did eventually pass from the infection, it would only be a matter of time before he came back, and turned his cold dead eyes on them. Jungkook had made his mind up, he tossed jimin the backpack, and gave the two a smile, his eyes spilling tears, his breath staggered and his lips quivering. The last thing he sees his the teary faces of his friends as he closes his eyes and rests.his limbs becoming heavy and his breathing slowing.

They didn’t say a word when they walked. what could they say. there was nothing they could say that would bring their friend back, Jimin turning every so often out of habit, as if expecting to see him, catching up like he promised. 

it was hours later when words were uttered. a question was raised that brought the pain of it all to the surface. 

`what do we, how do we tell the others…`

It seemed like they forgot for a moment the others back home, Jungkook was the youngest of the group, the others had all taken to him like a younger brother, Namjoon especially, had been close to Jungkook, watching out for him when he could, an extra sweater when it was cold, sneaking him his own water and food when he wasn’t looking. As they contemplated how to break the news of their youngest friends death, Taehyung thought back to you again, a memory of you he now cherished every detail of, you were so motherly to Jungkook. Wrapping your red scarf around him and zipping his jacket up to his chin, scolding him about the complications of getting colds when living outdoors, Jungkook getting bashfully grumpy at being victim of your mother hen act. A fleeting memory that Taehyung would now hold in his heart with all the other small memories of mundane things. 

The sun was getting low as the skies darkened, the clouds bringing a fitting miserable darkness to the pair as they made their way home. At this point they just wanted to get back and be with their family, sharing in the grief and loss they now had welcomed. The quiet was interrupted by a booming roar of thunder. But the choking sound that followed was what brought Taehyung out of his thought, turning to his remaining friend, he felt all feelings leave him. What he thought was thunder, now identified as a gunshot.

 present day 

He looked at his hands, his cold, bloody hands. The blood that belonged to not only him, but two of his best friends. in the space of a day, he had lost two precious people to him, akin to brothers. His family. 

The gunshot came from the treeline, Jimins neck spurting blood and choking him as he fell to the ground, Taehyung was cold. He falls to his knees and grasps at his friends neck, trying to stem the bleeding with no avail. Why the fuck was this happening. He thought of nothing that could jinx the luck they had, why was everything falling apart in front of him. first Jungkook, and now, now Jimin. His friend died quicker than Jungkook did, Grasping Taehyungs hand as he did, the bullet wound filling his mouth and lungs with blood that suffocated him quickly. his blonde hair now dip dyed crimson. Tae just sat with him, an utter loss at what he could do, he wasn’t a doctor, he had no idea beyond basic common sense to stop bleeding. He just sat, the only thing he felt in the minutes he sat there was the cold barrel of a gun pointed into his neck as the owner demanded any supplies he had. He was numb.

His tears dropped into his hands, making the blood of him and his friends mix with the other guys blood, Taehyung couldn’t really remember how it had happened, he remembers the gun, he remembers standing up. He remembers the knife that slashed into his abdomen, the cold sting of the newly open wound. But beating him with his bare hands, he couldn’t remember, it was only when rain started to fall onto him did he snap back to reality, seeing the two dead bodies on the mossy ground at his feet. 

He sat in the dimly lit shack for what seemed like hours, his mind just replaying the moments before his friends deaths, his friends bright smiles before they were taken from this world so cruelly. His knuckled stung with the reminder of his blind rage, of which he was unforgiving. He felt nothing at this point. His mind just recalling memories of before the new uncaring world took people he loved dearly from him. He thinks to the rest of the group, he thinks about you. That night at the campfire. The setting sun behind you gave you the look of a golden halo, a burning effigy burned into his mind and making tears he thought he ran out of run down his face. He thinks to you and the others, worried about the three of them, and leaving to find them and meeting your deaths in manners just as cruel as Jimin and Jungkook. And it’s when he thinks of your deaths, he feels something, a pang in his heart. He wants nothing more to be with you all, he wants you to hold him, to comfort him and tell him everything is going to be alright. Wanting to hold you in his arms and feel your lips on his again, even if just for a minute before you or he are both ripped away from the world like everyone else.

The smell of rain on grass is fresh and clean, a scent that has been long since forgotten as the smell of sweat, mud and occasionally, but more recently, blood, has replaced the smell of cleanliness. the rain is still heavy, but the light is a saving grace, everything clearer now morning light has come. Taehyung emerges from the confines of the shack as the light of the sun rising hurts his eyes for a moment as he adjusts. 24 hours in a cabin with nothing but himself and his thoughts. It changes you. You reach places in your psyche that you never would contemplate going. He thinks to his friends, living and departed. He thinks of you, and he commits himself to the task of getting home. He will get back to you all. He isn’t alone, he realised this in the late hours of the night as he thought of his friends. He would prefer the bright smiles of his friends to be beside him, but the silent vow he made to himself set him in his newfound purpose. He will do anything to keep you all safe, and the memory of his friends alive. A vow he made to himself along with the vow of getting back to you.

Before the storm ends.

➶➶➶ fin➶➶➶

[migleefulmoments]

"And whether he plays queer or not (we don’t know), the show has strong themes of homosexuality and closeting during the “golden age” of Hwood." lol we DO know but abby is demented. she thinks he's a pathological liar but he's not going to lie about this subject. seriously, she's so obsessed with him playing gay that she doesn't care about the backlash he'd get for taking another role. as an actual fan of his, I wouldn't wish that on him. nor do I think he lies about everything.

Her entire statement just hit me the wrong way.  IDK if it is her continued use of the word “queer”, her believing the anon who knows the entertainment industry, that she claimed we don’t know if his character is “queer” (we do) of if it was her use of ‘homosexuality” like it was a slur or her “How ‘Raymond’” comment. I posted hate entire post below simply because I needed to read that “how Raymond” quote again.  

“Obviously how problematic will depend on just “how raymond” his character is, but I cannot see how his character does not have some connection to closeting”. WTF does “How Raymond” mean?  She goes on to say she cannot see how his character does not have some connection to closeting? Why? What would make you think that based on what we know about Darren’s own comments about not playing gay characters and all the summaries we have seen about the show itself. This is purely wishful thinking and probably what she is hinting at what she “thinks” might be happening.  

She is also claiming that his team was able to get all the media outlets to talk about the statement.  They would be pretty damn powerful if they could actually make all the independent, for-profit media organizations and legit news organizations talk about their story. That isn’t how the media works. Yes there are sleazy rags that take stories for money but not any that I read.    

Anonymous asked:

Part 1: dividing this up in case this is too long. I work in the entertainment industry and I have a theory about the no more queer roles. The fact that this was brought up again tells me neither of his 2 upcoming roles are queer roles. That being said I have first hand knowledge that the one thing gay actors can’t stand other than a straight man getting a queer role is a closeted man getting queer roles.  

Part 2: what might have happened is after D’s rise playing gay parts someone (in or out) of the gay communities threatened to leak some information. D is well known especially in the Broadway/gay community and access to information about him is easily obtained. That explains why he seems more free in non acting roles to be himself (lip synch, halloween parties, gay benefits). Remember that it’s not just other gay actors that feel threatened by D. (wtf? if it’s easily obtained information then Darren must be prepared for it to come out. What could someone blackmail him over? He’s gay? I thought the theory is that Darren wants to come out, had tried to come out but he can’t conractuly? Are you claiming he’s too scared to come out? Because if that is the claim, then he is a spineless twit who has egregiously lied to his fans for 10 years and even married a woman he must not love to hide his truth).  

Part 3: it’s their managers that feel threatened by D. It’s not inconceivable that someone was threatening someone. None of D’s current actions make sense. No actor that I no of would make that statement on their own. Not one. In fact no legit manager would let their client make that statement. They would just not accept anymore gay roles without announcing it to the public. (Soooo you are in the industry but your only insider info is your first-hand knowledge that gay men don’t like closed men taking gay roles? Any woke, knowledge and compassionate actor would make a statement like that and if their manager wouldn’t let them make that statement, they need to let them go).

Part 4: I just finished Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow. There is a whole other world where young gay men are taken advantage of in Hwood. Fact. I fear that all of this bizarre things we are witnessing with D’s. careers we are all questioning is only going to lead to some very dark things. (oh ...so your insider information is from Ronan’s book?)

********************************************************************************

Hi nonnie! I would agree that is is very well known in Hwood and on Bway the D is queer and M is a beard and I also agree that out actors often resent closeted ones for taking queer roles but not being honest about themselves. However, out actors also very well know the struggle that closeted actors face in Hwood and many know how closeted actors are treated pretty deplorably.   (So she agrees because she knows? I guess it’s all that insider information she has but can’t share with her followers, right? HI love how Abby is so aware of gay men’s feelings but she has never spoke to one.  Also she agrees that gay men don’t like closeted actors taking gay roles but she also know how deplorably they are treated and gay actors are well aware of the struggle.  She what is her point? Oh, right it isn’t Darren’s fault). 

My issue, like you, isn’t D not playing queer anymore, the issue was how such a production was made over the statement and frankly the timing of the statement. (Liar liar liar). I contend this is not something D circulated .  He absolutely mentioned in an interview earlier in 2018 that he did not think he should play queer anymore, i cannot deny that. But it was a podcast delivered to a very tiny audience and it was not done in such a big, slamming the door kind of way nor was it offensive.  Months after that podcast, his team (December) decided to turn this into a huge media story and had it published and subsequently talked abut by various media outlets so it pretty much spread all over the industry and to the GA forcing D’s hand and pretty much making it impossible for him to accept a queer role from then until he comes out of the closet.  

And in my opinion, it was a harmful statement, that was incredibly offensive. and his team led the charge to make sure it was circulated. (No, it wasn’t offensive in the least. In fact, it was the opposite)  

Several factors, D had just won an emmy for ACS and was nominated for 3 more.  Seems to me like a slap in the face to the very community that he built his career on and it could have (clearly did not) jeopardized his chances of winning if people had resented him for making the statement. (No it wasn’t offensive to actual gay people Abby, just you) 

It precludes him from considering roles with queer characters from now until he is out of the closet. Seems to be to eliminate a ton of opportunities without evaluating each one on its merits. (Yep, it absolutely does... because that is what representation means. It means he is also eliminated from all black roles, all female roles, all child roles...you see how this works?) 

And another huge factor, we now know D made a deal with RM prior to the no more queer roles article. And whether he plays queer or not (we don’t know), the show has strong themes of homosexuality and closeting during the “golden age” of Hwood.  This seems very problematic. And it seems like his team trying to sabotage his ability to be in this show.  (I still don’t get this argument- does she really legit think we will believe this is a valid argument? Being on a show with gay roles is no where near the same as playing a gay character. It isn’t a thing no matter how much Abby plays confused about it- in fact if he refused to be on a show with gay characters THAT would be offensive AF and would be worthy of the gay community hating him) Obviously how problematic will depend on just “how raymond” his character is, but I cannot see how his character does not have some connection to closeting.  But that is speculation and we will know more as time goes on.

Personally, I think his team did it to hurt him and to hurt the new show (SO Ricky -the world’s shittiest manager is going up against Ryan Murphy? That seems like a fair fight) .  They do not have his best interests at heart,(But you do abby don’t you?)  they know he is miserable and does not want to be closeted and frankly I think that makes the down right giddy and joyful. And they use the closeting, and M, to control him because they know how much he loves to act and that he does not want to jeopardize his career. And you can bet there is blackmail and threats going on behind the scenes, the essentially forced him to marry the most toxic person in his life (I cannot emphasize this enough, they are not friends).  

And you are correct, a team that actually cared, would never allow such a harmful statement to be made. Never.  But then again a useful team wouldn’t force him to pretend to own a misogynist bar either, and well, his does that as well. Nor would they force him to pretend to love a person that is vile, unambitious and the opposite of a role model not to mention a complete detriment to his well being. (blah blah blah blah the record is the skipping) 

So it is clear his team doesn’t give a fuck about D, just about themselves.

[ghostbustermelanieking]

praescitum chapter nine

chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight

casefile, season 10, season 11. part of my series that i write as i rewatch the x files.

Summary: As Mulder and Scully adjust to their reassignment to the X-Files and working together in the wake of their separation, they find themselves investigating a small town and a ghost that apparently warns people of bad things to come.

note: happy halloween! i actually started posting this story when i did to post this chapter on halloween, since it’s probably the most festive. but since i didn’t get as far in the story as i wanted to by this point, i’m going to kind of slow down my posting a little bit by waiting until i finish a later chapter to post the next one. i’m hoping to still be able to post at least one chapter a week, but idk if i’ll be able to keep up with that lol. those are the hopes!

warning for discussion of death in a (false!) historical context. i included fake historical people/historical battles in a real historical war.

---

nine.

october, 2016

If there's anything that Mulder and Scully are not used to, it's having a third presence on their stake outs. Back in the day, if they were staking out with someone else, said someone probably wasn't very happy about being stuck on a stakeout with them. (They've both heard plenty of “third wheel” gossip over the years, right along with the gossip about them being together long before they actually were.) Luckily, Scully notes, this time, they have what seems like a perfectly nice woman as their company. As much as she relishes the chance to have time alone with Mulder and inexplicably get paid for that time, it's better to share the time with someone who doesn't hate them. And Joy Seers seems like halfway decent company.

She gets takeout for everyone, fighting streets abuzz with Halloween traffic, cars and costumed pedestrians alike. She stops at a gas station and grabs a couple bags of M&M's as an added bonus for Mulder—in honor of the holiday, and because she's guessing they'll be here a while without much paranormal activity to entertain them. (She's still convinced that Ryan Caruthers, and maybe a few friends, are behind the whole thing. It makes much more sense than a diabolical ghost tormenting the entire town.)

Scully picks her way back to the school through streets crowded with pint-sized monsters, ghouls, and pop culture characters. Houses festooned in cobwebs and streamers and plastic skeletons. Kids in costumes holding onto their parent’s hands. At a stoplight near the school, she notices a kid on a bus bench. A familiar-looking kid with an Orioles cap pulled over his face.

She finds Mulder and Joy Seers in the classroom: Mulder setting desks and chairs upright, Joy propping a video camera up on the righted bookshelf. The room has been swept, most of the debris cleared; it looks like an empty skeleton of a room, bare walls and bare floors. “I brought food,” Scully says, sitting the plastic bags of containers on a desk.

“Thanks, Scully.” Mulder grins at her briefly overtop of a graffitied desk. She can tell he's enjoying this. He's probably been waiting for a case like this to fall on Halloween for a while. (“How do we always end up staking out haunted places on holidays, Scully?” he joked earlier, and she rolled her eyes, pointed out that this particular place is not haunted, absolutely not. Not the inn, not the school, not the town. She knows he's remembering their conversation last night, and she's hoping he won't bring it up. She feels silly just thinking about it.)

“Were the roads too bad?” Joy asks politely, squinting as she adjusts the angle of the camera. “I know they can be a little crazy on Halloween, especially in the fancier neighborhoods.”

“Not too bad,” says Scully, sitting at the desk. “Anything happen while I was gone?”

“Nothing yet,” Mulder says, sitting down at the desk beside Scully and smirking a little at her. She smirks right back.

“I was relying on our security system to prove whether or not there's any paranormal involvement, but it shorted out today,” says Joy with a touch of irony in her voice, climbing down from the chair and smoothing messy curls absently. “Convenient, huh? Principal thinks someone messed with it to cover up the crime, but we couldn't prove it; it just seems like a system malfunction. And he couldn't get anyone in here to fix it. So I'm setting up a camera in here since this has been the primary location of the activity. I'm hoping to catch some proof as to what this is, if anything happens.”

“That seems smart,” Scully offers. “Although it's strange that the security cameras would mess directly after a break-in.”

“It is,” Joy says, crossing her arms, “but the fact is that it was still working last night. Since my window lock was fixed, anyone who broke in would've had to use the halls. And the cameras showed nothing.”

“Someone could've been planning another break-in for tonight,” Scully comments.

“That's true.” Joy shrugs. “But everyone I talk to says it's just an issue with the computer system. We have the shittiest system, I swear. Anyways, we have this camera to catch anything strange that happens, paranormal or B&E's alike.”

Scully looks at Mulder, who shrugs. It does seem convenient to her—too convenient, especially considering Ryan's technical reputation—but she decides to let it go. She says, “Do we have any sort of plan past the camera?”

Mulder shrugs again. “Not really. I think we're just planning to… sit here.” He smirks at her a little, teasing her as he unwrapping the plastic silverware. “You are familiar with the method of a stakeout, aren't you, Scully?”

“Very much so,” she says dryly, resisting the urge to stick out her tongue.

Joy joins them in the clusters of desks, taking her food gratefully and thanking Scully. “I'm hoping that we'll be able to get something out of tonight,” she says, screwing the cap off of a water bottle. “I really am. Ryan's a good kid, and I hate that everyone's been putting the blame on him.”

“You really don't think there’s any possibility Ryan is behind this?” Scully asks, picking at her salad.

Joy shakes her head. “I never have. Aside from the fact that it seems improbable that a kid—albeit a pretty smart kid, but still—could pull this off, Ryan's always seemed like a good kid to me. I'm not close to Annie Caruthers, but she's always spoken highly of him whenever we see each other… And besides that, he's a model student. Aside from a bad attitude, I haven't seen any signs of delinquency from him. I almost can't believe he really set that fire.”

Scully bites her lower lip in consideration. “I think I saw Ryan outside on my way in,” she says carefully. “The intersection a block over.”

“Really?” Mulder asks, his eyebrows shooting up.

Scully nods. “I think,” she says, somewhat uncertainly. “He wears the Orioles cap, right?”

Joy taps her fingers on the desktop absently. “Probably just a coincidence,” she offers.

“It's a small town,” says Mulder helpfully. Scully pokes at a leaf of lettuce silently.

Mulder clears his throat awkwardly. “Have you ever considered that this… activity might be the result of possession of some sort? Some mixture of Ryan Caruthers and the ghost?”

Scully swallows back the urge to scoff.

“You think Ryan's possessed?” Joy asks, almost incredulously. “By the Specter?”

He shrugs. “Possession can sometimes give humans a power they wouldn't normally have. I've seen it before. That would explain how Ryan was able to get in and out of the school without being detected, how he would be able to move those heavy desks.”

Joy Seers looks uncertain, skeptical. “I suppose that could be the case, but I doubt it,” she says. “I've never heard of any possessions in the history of the legend. And I still just don't think Ryan's involved. Besides his prior history with the ghost, of course.”

Scully hmms in response quietly, sticking the fork in her mouth. She hasn't known what to make of this case since they got it a year ago, and she certainly doesn't know what to make of it now. Mulder shrugs, surprisingly nonplussed, as if he doesn't know what to make of this either.

“I guess we just wait now,” Joy says, and it's almost a question, a clarification. “Wait to see what happens next.”

They nod, nearly in unison.

Their forks scrape at the Styrofoam containers in the new quiet. The setting doesn't seem to align with the stunning silence all around them, the echoey hallways and dim classroom. As a child, Scully used to get scared in big empty buildings, especially in the huge church they used to attend in San Diego, all the looming, empty halls and the almost eerie paintings of Christ. She's gotten past that now, of course, but the oddness of being in an empty school has nearly brought it back. Right now, in all this empty and quiet space, with the small sounds in the hall as the sun sinks below the horizon, she can almost understand why people might think this school—even this town—is haunted.

---

It's getting dark now, the familiar October chill in the air. Ryan clenches his chattering teeth, beginning to regret not wearing the skeleton costume from last year. It's dorky as hell, but it's warm, he sweated buckets at last year's party. And it helps with appearances. He's just wearing a hoodie and jeans right now, no costume of any kind.

He got some candy earlier, even with the disapproving looks (either because he's too old to trick-or-treat, or because he set a fire), and so he unwraps a mini Snickers bar now and takes a bite. He's thinking about turning around and going to the party he told Annie he was going to. He should probably go to the damn party. He still has friends somehow, despite everything, and this is not the right way to spend Halloween. It might be spooky, but honestly, Ryan got tired of the horror movie bullshit at about six or seven. (He hates scary movies, scary stories, any of that stuff that makes him think about the empty eyes of the parents he'll never know and ghostly light on his bedroom walls.) He's nearly convinced, gets his bag up off of the bench and is about to walk away when his fingers brush over an envelope sticking out of the top. The letter from his Uncle Jared.

He swallows, sits down so hard his legs hurt. Shakes his head hard until he's good and resigned. He has to do this. He doesn't have a choice.

He rummages in his bag until he finds the stick-on tattoos and the bottle of water. Follows the directions as he applies them to the back of his hands.

---

Scully will admit, once again, that she's really, really not used to sharing stakeouts with other people; some of her favorite memories of working with Mulder are when they were alone on a stakeout. But they've been sitting in the school for several hours, and she has to say, it's a lot better than she expected. Aside from their opinions on ghosts, it turns out that she and Joy Seers have a lot in common. They discuss their college degrees—biology and pre-med are vastly different, but they took similar grueling science classes and can exchange stories about hellish professors—and Joy asks about the cross around Scully's neck, the one similar to her own. “Oh,” says Scully in surprise, reaching down to touch the cross, and the ring that hangs beside it. (Thank God she didn't ask about that; that'd be a fairly awkward conversation for all of them. Mulder doesn't wear his ring that she knows of, which she has no idea how to take, but at least it fields the Oh, are you two married? questions. A little.) “Oh, my mother gave my sister and myself these necklaces the Christmas I was fifteen. I've worn it ever since.”

She leaves out the occasions where she'd given it to her daughter and it was the only part of her They left behind, and when Mulder had worn it through both of their abductions. (She put the ring on the chain beside her cross when she stopped wearing it because it felt stunningly appropriate, that it lie beside something that had meant so much to both of them over the years. Sometimes she felt like she could feel Mulder in her cross as much as she could in the ring.)

Joy smiles a genuine smile. “Oh, that's wonderful,” she says. “Mine was a family heirloom. It was my grandmother's.”

Scully smiles back, a little easier than she might've a few months ago. It's getting easier to remember her mother, and concentrating on the happier memories does help. “It's beautiful,” she offers.

“Thank you—so is yours.”

Mulder stays politely quiet through most of these interactions, but he speaks up sometime in the fourth hour of their vigil. “Ms. Seers—” he starts.

“Call me Joy, please,” Joy says immediately.

“Joy,” Mulder says. “I remember when we met yesterday, you said something about there being more than one way to interpret the Willoughby Specter story.”

“Oh, right.” Joy throws out an absent grin. “That famous touchy spot. Especially around here.”

“I sense that people don't agree with you?” Scully asks, thinking of Robbie O'Connell's and the sheriff's claims that the ghost is angelic. Ryan Caruthers's claims that the ghost is anything but. The disdain she's seen in response to that skepticism. Personally, she can't really tell why the demeanor of the ghost matters, one way or another.

“I don't know if they do or don't. I haven't made any particular claims about the skepticism.” The other woman shrugs. “My husband is a historian, though,” she adds. “He's done some research into the subject, and we've discussed it before. The origins of this ghost aren't quite as black and white as everyone would like to believe.”

Mulder's interest is piqued—more than piqued, Scully can tell. “Would you mind sharing?” he asks.

Joy shakes her head. “The fame of the ghost just so happens to be intertwined with the origin of this town,” she says. “The name Willoughby comes from a Revolutionary War leader, General Samuel Willoughby. He's hailed as a hero, especially around here, considering he led his soldiers to victory in a battle right around this area. The legend got started when Willoughby published a book of his journals and letters during the war. In the journal entry dated the night before the battle, he speaks of seeing a 'specter’ who brought about feelings of foreboding and dread. This convinced him that he was doomed to die on the battlefield the next day, and his soldiers doomed to lose. So he changed his plans.”

“He survived the battle,” Scully says knowingly—she knows how these legends always go. “And he led his men to victory, and people attributed that victory to the Specter. Which is where the legend originates."

Joy nods. “But what most people don't acknowledge is how costly that victory was,” she says. “Over half of Willoughby's soldiers lost their lives, including his brother. As well as several civilians who unfortunately lived in the area and got caught up in the battle. And that's not to mention the British casualties. Personally, that's not my definition of angelic, especially considering the death of his brother.”

Mulder chuckles briefly, rubbing thoughtfully at his mouth. “It's not exactly mine, either.”

“People see what they want to see,” says Joy. “Someone comes to warn them of something bad coming, people want to think they have good intentions. That there's some way to be prepared.”

Scully hardens her face until it is stony, trying not to show her cards. Spreads her fingers out flat on the table and tries to think of anything but that night before her mother died. Mulder is nodding in agreement, and she's glad that he's distracted by this story, that he won't notice and start asking questions again. “So you don't think the ghost has… good intentions?” he asks Joy.

“Does a ghost have intentions?” Joy laughs. (Along the same line Scully has thought on in this case.) “But no, I don't. Personally, my husband and I have discussed it before, and we think that the ghost is demonic.”

“Demonic?” asks Mulder.

“Yeah. My husband has studied a lot of local history, and he found a court record corresponding to a diary entry from the judge in the early settlement that more or less became Willoughby. It speaks of a man who was convicted of the murder of his wife. He was scheduled to hang, but he disappeared from his prison cell the night before, despite two guards being posted outside. The man had been fairly wealthy and prosperous, and he had a fair amount of money stored away in his house, where they'd also found many signs of what they considered witchcraft and devil worship. All the more reason to execute him, they'd said. But after he disappeared, so did the money.” Joy takes a sip of her water bottle. “They found him two months later, dead in the mountains with no clear cause. All of his money on him. A lantern burning beside his body despite the snowstorm raging around him.”

Scully raises her eyebrows in a halfway interested response—it’s an interesting story, even if it sounds false. Mulder says, “And you think that's the Specter?”

“A ghost has to come from somewhere, right? It makes sense to me, especially that lantern detail. The details about his escape and discovery, as well as the trial records, lead me to believe this man had made a deal with the devil, for lack of a better term. And this is more or less his due he has to pay: bringing bad luck to the inhabitants of Willoughby.”

Mulder hmms under his breath. “That's a great theory,” he says. “And it makes a lot of sense, at least in my mind. It would be consistent with Ryan Caruthers's claims.”

“There’s discussion of 'the local devil worshipper’ in local folklore, but it's not as widespread. And since it took place a full century before, no one in the town ever connected the story with the Specter. But I've always thought it made a lot of sense,” says Joy. “And with everything that's happened here at this school, I've got to say, it makes even more sense to me now.”

“What do you think, Scully?” Mulder asks, and his hand is suddenly on her arm. He's noticed how silent she's been.

Scully grits her teeth and shakes off the thoughts of her mother and her cross and that fucking hallucination or dream or whatever she had before her mother passed away. Forces a smile. “I suppose it could be plausible…” she says, “... if ghosts were real.”

Mulder scoffs jokingly. “I can understand your skepticism, Agent Scully,” Joy says kindly. “Even i—”

They're cut off by the sound of distant crashes, somewhere in the building.

Scully's eyes dart to Mulder. “Did you…”

“Yeah,” he says, already standing. “Joy, do you have any idea…”

“I'm really not sure,” she says. “Maybe the cafeteria?”

More crashes, louder this time. “Split up, clear the halls?” Mulder asks, and Scully nods.

“Joy, you stay here, okay?” she says, standing and reaching for her gun, just in case. “Keep an eye out, call us if you need help.”

Thankfully, Joy doesn't argue; she just nods. “Do you really think you need that?” she asks, gesturing to the gun with her chin.

“Hopefully, no,” Scully says. “But it's a good precaution. In case whoever—or whatever—is destroying your classroom is dangerous.”

---

Mulder and Scully split up outside of Joy Seers's classroom; she goes through the west wing, and he goes through the east. The school is stunningly dark, the halls admittedly eerie, and Mulder is inadvertently reminded of the case years ago that he can barely remember the details of outside of the fact that a satanist PTA tried to kill him and Scully in a high school gym shower. He shudders involuntarily; that doesn't seem like a good line of thought after discussing a ghostly devil worshipper.

He's most of the way down the hall when he hears it: the creaking of a door hinge behind him. He whirls around to see the door of an English classroom hanging open in the circle of his flashlight.

Immediately, he sweeps his flashlight up and down the hallway, but it's completely empty.

Mulder swallows roughly, ignoring the chill spreading over him. He starts to turn back around when the door slams closed hard. He jumps, his hand flying to his holster automatically. Still nothing there; no signs of life, or things notably not alive.

“Hello?” he calls out, sweeping his flashlight up and down the hallway, feeling equal parts silly and determined. He's about to make some plea for the ghost to show itself when he hears another slamming sound, almost smaller than the last one. And then another, and another. The lockers lining the hallways are opening and closing, their slams cacophonous and engulfing. Mulder scans the hallway in frantic confusion, looking for any signs of the Specter, not sure if he really wants to see it or not, considering its legacy. But he still finds nothing, invisible hands moving the lockers as they slam, the cabinets shaking and rattling in place as if affected by an earthquake. Fascinated, Mulder stares, not wanting to look away, wanting to call Scully to get in here and see this. But before he can do anything, his flashlight flickers once, twice, and dies in his palm.

The lockers’ motion fades out as Mulder's breathing grows more erratic, maybe even fearful. The hallway seems darker without the flashlight, pitch black. He smacks the flashlight against his palm in an effort to get it working again, to no avail. “Shit,” he mutters, dropping the flashlight to his side and rubbing at his temples with his free hand.

And then from behind, he hears the scritching sound of a lit match. Golden firelight, small but unquestionably the brightest thing in the room, comes to life behind him, reflected on the metal lockers.

His heart in his stomach, Mulder whirls. He sees it almost immediately, it's unmistakable. He can't make out a face, but he doesn’t have to. It matches every description he's ever heard.

The Specter stands at the end of the hall, lantern held up like some kind of lamplighter.

Mulder's breathing is shallow, erratic; where the hell is Scully when stuff like this happens? He's dying to take a picture, but he knows that will likely only cause problems.

Instead, he draws closer, flashlight dead and useless in his hand, heart thudding against his ribs. The Specter doesn't move. He seems to be surveying Mulder, sizing him up, but somehow, Mulder can't allow himself to worry about that. He goes closer and closer, carefully, as if trying to calm a stray dog. “I know what you are,” he calls. “I know what it is you do.”

The Specter seems unaffected by this. He stands still, his face shadowed, his lantern flickering.

“Do you speak?” Mulder asks, thinking of the ghosts in that haunted house that one Christmas Eve. (If that was real; he and Scully have disagreed about it forever.) “What do you want?”

The ghost remains silent. Mulder's shoes creak on the tile floor as he steps closer, his palms sweaty around the flashlight. The Specter seems to be regarding him, considering.

When Mulder is about three feet away, the ghost's mouth contorts, dipping into a frown. Disapproval. A sudden fear plunges through Mulder's chest, nervousness—what does disapproval mean?—as he remembers Joy Seers's theory that the ghost is demonic. He is about to ask, again, what the Specter wants, when the lantern flickers out.

In a completely impulsive move, Mulder stumbles forward, absurdly swiping at the space where the Specter is. He feels nothing, and he doesn't know if it has disappeared or is still there. Breathing hard, he stands awkwardly in place, his hand curled around the useless flashlight.

And then he hears a pained yelp, down the hall the way he came from.

---

Scully is in the ninth grade wing when she hears it again: the crashing sounds down the hall to the right of her. She follows the sound, flashlight held out in front of her and gun held down by her side. There's a sound almost like banging, a clattery sound like something being dragged over the floor. Scully comes face to face with the double cafeteria doors, where the sound is louder, and pushes it open with a loud clang.

There's a startled shout, and then the smack of a body hitting the floor. Rounding the table blocking the body from view, Scully shouts, “Freeze, FBI!” completely on instinct.

“Shit!” The kid—Ryan Caruthers, Scully notes with an emotion somewhere between satisfaction and disappointed—scrambles to his feet, his ankle caught in a cafeteria chair. His face turns up towards Scully, full of regret and panic as he curses quietly under his breath: “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Scully puts away her gun with a sigh—somehow, she doubts she needs it. “Ryan?” she says, somewhat sternly. “Ryan Caruthers?”

“I had no idea you'd be here,” Ryan says miserably, untangling himself from the chair.

“So you wouldn't have come if you'd known?” Scully asks. He doesn't answer, just rubs at his face with the heel of his hand. “No one's ever been here when you've done this before, right?” she prods.

“I haven't done this before,” Ryan snaps, glaring at her. “I know what you think of me—believe me, I know what everyone thinks of me—but I swear to shit, this is the first time.”

“How did you get in?” Scully asks, still firm. “The window in Mrs. Seers's room is fixed.” She remembers in a split second, as Ryan answers, that the window was fixed before the destruction of the classroom the night before, and mentally curses.

“I jimmied open another window,” Ryan says, sounding disgusted. “The windows in here are shit, the locks are awful… And I'm telling you, I've never done this before.”

“Then why did you come here tonight, Ryan?” Scully fixes the kid with the sternest look she can muster up. “Knowing that people believed you had broken in before?”

Ryan's face turns red, and he ducks his head. His hand shoots through the air as he reaches down to untangle himself from the chair, and Scully sees the same cross tattoo on the back that she remembers from last year. “I… was worried about what was going to happen,” he nearly mumbles. “Because of the ghost. I thought something bad might happen to someone, and I wanted to come here and try to stop it.”

Scully's stern demeanor falls, just a little. She doesn't know why, but it does. She asks gently (not too gently, of course—only a bit more gently), “How did you think you could stop it, Ryan? What did you think was going to happen?”

“Does it matter?” Ryan snaps venomously. “Aren't you going to arrest me now? Agent Sully, or whatever your name is?”

“It's Scully,” she says automatically, and is ready to say more, when she hears a distinctly female shout from somewhere in the building. Joy, she thinks immediately, and mentally curses herself and Mulder for leaving a civilian alone in a potential crime scene. Even if she doesn't believe in the ghost.

Ryan jumps at the sound, startled. “What was that?”

Hoping briefly that Mulder will get there sooner, that Mulder is okay, Scully says, “You know what, Ryan? I should take you in, but this is all very juvenile, and Mrs. Seers has vouched for you multiple times. So I'm going to look the other way.”

The kid looks stunned. Beyond stunned. He says, “Are you serious? Why are you doing this?”

She doesn't know why, she really doesn't. Outside of the face that is stuck at the back of her brain, along with pain and death and visions of the end of the world. Her son out there, somewhere, and she shouldn't let it affect her work, but�� She says, “Look, I need to go. If you're still back here when I come back, I'm taking you in. If I ever catch you doing something like this again, my first call will be to Sheriff O'Connell. Do you understand?”

His face white, Ryan nods. Unwilling to wait any longer—unwilling to linger or analyze why the hell she did that, she really can't believe it—Scully turns and heads the other way, back to Joy Seers's classroom.

Inside, she finds all the fluorescent lights flipped on, Joy sitting in a chair heaving air like she is going to run out and Mulder crouched on the floor. Scully runs straight to her side. “Are you okay?” she asks, kneeling to examine the prominent red line on Joy's neck. “I'm a doctor, I can help you.”

Joy waves her off absently. “I'm okay, I'm okay,” she says, her voice only a little rough. “My necklace… it was being tugged, by I don't know what. It was choking me, and then it just broke.”

Mulder stands, the broken silver chain in the palm of his hand. “I saw it,” he says, and his voice is filled with some panicked emotion that Scully can't quite place. “It was being pulled by an invisible force, Scully, she was choking and it was just held up in the air. By nothing. And then it just snapped.”

Joy takes the necklace, muttering, “Damn,” under her breath. She rubs at her forehead, her eyes, in a tired sort of way. “I'm okay,” she reassures Scully again. “Scared me more than anything. I guess I have my proof now that the Specter is hostile.”

She laughs briefly, but Mulder doesn't, and Scully doesn't know how to ask why. She stands up a little reluctantly—she’d have preferred to check Joy a little more, but she really does seem fine, she's waving  her off insistently—and dusts her palms off on her pant legs. “Deep breaths,” she says gently. “Try to stay calm.”

Joy clears her throat a few times, rubbing her neck with her empty hand. “So did you find anything, Agent Scully?” she asks raspily. “I heard more sounds in the cafeteria.”

Mulder looks at her curiously, but Scully doesn't know how to tell them what she saw, much less explain what could've convinced her to let Ryan go. She lies, “I think some furniture may have fallen over. I didn't see anything.”

---

They leave the school after that. There doesn't seem to be much point in staying. They have the video in the classroom, and therefore proof. Joy seems spooked by the whole encounter, seems to have lost interest in all of it—she thanks them profusely in the parking lot, but says that she doesn't see any need for them to stay if they don't want to. “I guess I can call you if anything else happens,” she says, “but I don't know if there's anything else you can do. And I'm sure you have more important work to get back to.”

Mulder doesn't bother telling her that they probably don't—he’s almost sure that Scully shares Joy's opinion, that the lack of an actual crime here doesn't justify their position. They shake Joy's hand and get in their car to head back to the hotel.

They're both quiet on the drive. Mulder can't get past what happened in the hallway, his encounter with the Specter. At the time, he'd mostly been fascinated, caught up in the excitement of seeing an actual ghost, but now, all he can think of is the other part of the legend. The part that promises that something bad will happen if you see the Specter. He drives back to the hotel with a precise carefulness that Scully doesn't seem to notice—she seems as lost in her own thoughts as him, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. He keeps sneaking glances at her, as if something is going to steal her away, because by his count, the only two people besides him who could be affected by the Willoughby Specter and his bad omens are Scully and William. He doesn't relax until they get back to the hotel, and even then, it is a cautious relaxation. He's extraordinarily glad that they are sharing a room.

He waits until they get up to the room to say it. He nearly blurts it out—he says, “Scully, I saw it,” and it feels like an exhale.

Scully, in the act of peeling her coat off, freezes. He can see the muscles of her back, can tell how tense she has suddenly gotten. “What?” she says.

“The Specter,” he says. “I saw the Specter, Scully, in the halls. It disappeared just before something pulled at Joy's necklace.”

Scully isn't looking at him. She drapes her coat over the back of the chair, her knuckles nearly white as she clutches it. “It's not that I… don't trust what you saw, Mulder,” she says carefully, her nails scuffing the side of the jacket. “But… are you sure that's what you saw? That it couldn't have been some kind of… projection?”

Twenty-odd years ago, this skepticism would've driven him mad. Now, he pretty much expects it. But it feels like there's something different here, some unusual emotion. The familiar stubbornness, and then something else layered under it. Almost fear. He wonders if it is because of the legend, the implication that something bad will happen to him. He swallows, reaches out and brushes a slow hand over the small of her back as if trying to offer comfort. “I really think it was,” he says. “It couldn't have been a projection, it was too… It couldn't have been.” She's still not looking at him. He flattens his palm against her back, rubs a circle with his thumb. “I don't know what that means, Scully,” he says softly. “Whether or not it's…”

“It probably means nothing, Mulder,” Scully says immediately. She finally turns towards him, and her expression is guarded, but she reaches out and squeezes his arm. “It'll be fine,” she says softly, firmly. Leans forward and kisses his cheek. “I'm going to take a shower, okay?” When she draws back, she won't meet his eyes. He watches her go into the bathroom, until the door closes behind her.

He showers next, tries to shed the thought of more misfortune, but he can’t quite shake the thought of it. After everything they've been through, he can't imagine going through more, even if it is a bit inevitable at this point. He doesn't know if he could bear it. Especially if whatever misfortune the Specter brings involves losing his wife or son. (He is praying it's something trivial, like a flat tire, or someone breaking into his house.)

When he exits the bedroom, Scully is lying in bed on her side, facing the wall. He climbs in behind her, touches her shoulder gently and briefly before settling in. He's ready to fall asleep and try and forget the whole thing, give Scully her space, but she rolls over first, rolls towards him until they're facing each other. “Ryan was in the school,” she says. “In the cafeteria. All that crashing around was probably just from him breaking in.”

His eyebrows raise in surprise. “Seriously? What happened, did he get away?”

“No.” She bites her lower lip, looking away from him. “Sort of. I… I decided to give him a warning.”

His expression shifts to confusion. “A warning?”

“Yes.” She is almost squirming, avoiding his eyes. “I… I don't know why. It just all seems so silly, the whole thing. And he insisted that this was the first time he had broken in. But I told him if I ever caught him doing that again, I'd call the police without hesitation.” She rubs at her forehead with embarrassment, her voice full of shame. “The security system was out, though. We hopefully don't have to worry about it ever getting back to Skinner.”

“Do you believe him?” Mulder asks, astonished and trying like hell not to show it. He's more surprised than angry, it doesn't really matter to him, but he can tell how foolish Scully feels and he hardly wants to make that worse. “That it was his first time?”

Scully rubs her forehead again, presses her palm over her eyes. “I honestly don't know, Mulder. I really do think that he's involved in this… it makes the most sense. I don't know how or why, but I hope he gets his act together. I… I hope that I've made this better instead of worse.”

“I definitely think Ryan has something to do with this,” says Mulder quietly, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder, “but I don't think it's the same way that you think so. I think he's a… catalyst of sorts. I think he has a connection to this ghost, and I can't put my finger on it. But I think Joy Seers was right. I think there's more to the legend than people take at face value. And I don't think that Ryan was responsible for what was happening in that school.”

Scully yawns, burrowing down into the covers. “Whether there is or there isn't, it doesn't really matter, does it?” she mumbles, sounding like she wants to drop the subject. “We're going home in the morning. I just hope that no one finds out what happened.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, quietly, and reaches over to turn out the light. They settle in next to each other in the dark, their arms pressed together, hands side by side. Mulder swallows, bumping his finger against hers absently. The adrenaline of the night hasn't completely left him, the implications of his encounter in the hall, and he's grateful that she is close by. As if that can prevent everything bad from happening.

“Do you think I made the wrong decision?” Scully asks softly, and that shame is still in her voice. “To let Ryan go instead of taking him in?”

“No, I don't,” he tells her honestly, covering her hand gently with his. “I think that isn't nearly the worst thing we've gotten away with on the job.” She chuckles at that, and he grins. “I don't see why anyone ever has to know about it,” he adds. “The cameras are out, and I'm not planning to tell anyone. And I'm sure Ryan will keep it to himself. You may have given that kid another chance that he'll take.”

“Mmm,” Scully says, and he can tell by her voice that she is tired. “It feels so convenient, the cameras. Especially considering how much I asked about them earlier. Mulder, I bet Ryan either knew about the system being down or took it down himself, if this really was the first time he'd broken in.”

“Hmm,” he says softly. “Maybe.”

“I guess I just didn't think he was dangerous,” she whispers. “I feel so foolish. I feel like I haven't done my duty as an FBI agent. I don't know what I was thinking.”

“You don't have to know,” he says, and he intertwines his fingers with hers. “You don't.”

She makes a small sound that indicated she disagrees with him, but she doesn't argue. Their elbows bump together companionably. Her palm is cool under his. They fall into quiet again, hands clasped together under the sheets.

Mulder matches his breathing to hers, calm, and he is nearly asleep when he hears a low whistling sound, akin to a moan. The shutters of the windows rattle.

A sudden panic shoots through him at the noise. “Scully, did you hear that?” he whispers.

“It's the wind,” she says, her voice sleepy but hard. “Just the wind, Mulder.”

The wind howls against the glass again and Mulder shivers, crawling closer to Scully. “You sure?” he asks, and she nods, almost growly in her delivery. Scully does not fuck around when she is tired, and he senses she's already in a bad mood from the Ryan Caruthers thing.

But the sound is too human, too eerie, and Mulder can't ignore it. He never thought he'd be this much in regret because of a supernatural encounter, but this is the kind of thing that is too hard to let go. He's as embarrassed as Scully about tonight—embarrassed about how badly he wanted to see the ghost, and embarrassed (and fearful) of the repercussions it will bring.

He drops a light, impulsive kiss on Scully's hair before curling up closer to her than before. He doesn't particularly want to leave Scully anytime soon, not if he can help it. Not with the wind howling like that and with the eerie figure of the Specter hovering at the back of his mind. It's silly, but considering how their last run-in with ghosts went, he doesn't think he's overreacting. He holds her hand tight and lays close to her, and she doesn't protest, and he thinks that is what gives him the courage to say what he says.

He says, nose against her hair, hand on her waist: “Scully, do you want to come back to the house with me tomorrow?”

She says nothing; the only sign of surprise is the slight lilt in her breathing. He adds quickly, “Just… to look over that tip I got last week. The one about the river creature?”

“Oh?” Scully asks, and her voice is very nearly coy. “It doesn't have anything to do with what happened tonight?”

He rubs his nose into her hair; he is moving entirely on impulse now. “If it did,” he says softly, “would it change your answer?”

She's quiet. He can hear every breath. It goes on for so long that he begins to consider pulling away, but she hasn't let go of his hand yet.

Finally, she says, “I hope you're ready. I've been thinking of lots of rebuttals for your river creature theories.”

He laughs, a little nervously, a little relievedly. She squeezes his hand once before letting go. She shifts a little in bed, turning over on her side, but she doesn't move away. His chest is against her back, his arm against her hip, and she doesn't move away.

The wind wails and the shutters rattle, and he thinks that the heat must be broken because he's freezing, but they're together, and she's warm. She is so warm, and she's here, and he loves her. He presses his cheek briefly to the back of her head before settling in to go to sleep.

---

Joy leaves the broken necklace on her desk. It's so dark out, she'd probably just lose it, and she couldn't do anything with it tonight, anyway. She feels nearly naked without it around her neck, but she feels equally relieved at the absence. Her breaths are still ragged, her neck still stinging, her heart still pounding. She can't quiet leave the fright of the moment, sweat slicking her palms, a shivery feeling up her spine. She just wants to get home and fall asleep for a few hours before she'll have to wake up and go back into school. She realizes that tonight hasn't exactly made any progress in the way of getting this ghost out of her classroom, and her temples throb. Tonight seemed like an ending, but she doesn't see why it would be. The ghost is likely still there.

She rubs at her eyes with exhaustion, texts her husband to let him know she'll be home soon and starts her car.

The streets are dark, orange and black streamers hanging limply from street lamps and candy wrappers littering the streets. Joy yawns, making a left turn. Driving in the dark has always given her the creeps. She likes to think it's the product of moving to the country after growing up in the city: no lights, no noises, just endless black and silence. She turns on her brights, just because no one else is on the road, and hums absently to herself, drumming her fingers on the dashboard.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the radio springs to life. It's playing Monster Mash, and Joy never thought a goofy song like that would bring as much terror as this one does, because her hands were nowhere near the dial.

Spooked, frantic, Joy tries to reach out with her right hand and turn it off, but she can't move. Her hands are frozen, her wrists achey and her fingers spasming around the wheel in her attempts to move, but it's to no avail. She can't reach over and turn off the radio.

Her eyes yank from side to side frantically, the only part of her body she seems to be able to move. And then her foot moves without her meaning to. She presses down harder on the gas, increasing her speed far past the limit.

Joy tries to thrash, tries to break her hands free from the wheel or her foot from the gas, but she still finds herself frozen, helpless. She can't decrease the pressure. The bouncy sound of Monster Mash continues, too loud, echoing in her eardrums. She whimpers, just a little, as she shoots past 70 in a 35 zone. At least there are no other cars in front of her.

Her eyes jerk again, almost painfully, and land on the rearview mirror. There's no one on the road behind her, but there is a shape in the back seat. A hulking, humanoid shape that seems to be watching her.

Joy's breath catches in her throat, unable to take her eyes away, unable to look away. She is helpless. She can't make out the face of whoever, or whatever, is in the backseat, but she thinks it may be smiling. Smiling maliciously.

The next thing she knows, the shape seems to be lunging at her. Her hand suddenly moves, not of their own accord, swerving the wheel hard to the right.

The next thing she knows, everything is going black.

---

November 1, 2016

Willoughby Daily Press; Willoughby, Virginia

SEVERE CAR CRASH ON PINE TREE ROAD LAST NIGHT

Last night, a car swerved off Pine Tree Road and flipped in the adjacent field. The accident was estimated to take place a few minutes before midnight.

The car belongs to a Mrs. Joy Seers, who was reportedly driving the car when it crashed. Mrs. Seers reportedly obtained major injuries, and was transported to Willoughby General Hospital from the scene. No one else was harmed in the wreck.

Seers's husband was contacted, but declined to comment on his wife's condition. According to a source who requested to stay anonymous, Mrs. Seers is in a coma at Willoughby General, and it is unknown when she is expected to wake up.

The Willoughby Police Department declined to comment on the accident. It is assumed that no foul play was involved, although this is unconfirmed.