#I went through like... six face iterations? even with reference and fucking tracing at one point

[foldingfittedsheets]

So our DnD characters are going to a gala, and I’ve been working (very slowly) on our fancy outfits. I’ve been trying to get them into a good paper doll set up too, so I can sub out armor and different outfits without redoing all the base stuff.

Here’s Kahriq the half elf fighter cleric in her gorgeous gala gown.

[roguestarsailor]

impressions of six of crows

***spoiler ishh, not plot spoilers but just character interactions throughout the book***

note: I have not read shadow and bone and this is the first book i’m reading in this series so i have no prior knowledge of who these people are or what happened prior to this!!

I adore all these characters in the book! I love how seamlessly everything flowed and its glorious to read. The names were all confusing to me so I had to constantly refer back to the map and the Ice court layout to fully understand everything. I think there were points where I didn’t fully understand the impact because I didn’t read the other books. Talk of the Second army was confusing for me, but I just pushed through. I just love the dynamic of this group and I really really hope they are ok. Please don’t die. Will this author do this to my sensitive heart?? idkk?? 

the heist was so fun and honestly, i dont think the ice court was that well protected haha. it felt like they had so much time to do so many things but it just might be how the story is told. i love stories of trickery and heist and this one did a really good job. I love the backstories getting interwoven together and the plot twists were lovely. I was stressed for kaz though and i was nervous he will “run out of tricks” but it ended up fine. its strange because he is sooo young and hes battling these seasoned professionals and hes gotta navigate this fucked up world. they all have to navigate this fucked up world and i can’t imagine the stress of always looking behind you but also looking at the next 10 steps and then plotting additional scenarios to live. wow. anyways this i was great 10/10!!

Notable scenes include:

“Jesper!”

I’m going to kill that little idiot. “What do you want?” he shouted down.

“Close your eyes!”

“You can’t kiss me from down there, Wylan.”

I LOVE THEM ALREADY! JESPER AND WYLAN IS SO CUTE

“Pull your shirt up over your mouth,” [Jesper] told Wylan.

“What?”

“Stop being dense. You’re cuter when you’re smart.”

Wylan’s cheeks went pink. He scowled and pulled his collar up.

“Discipline. Routine. Does it mean nothing to you? Djel, I can’t wait to have a bed to myself again.”

“Right,” said Nina. “I can feel just how much you hate sleeping next to me. I feel it every morning.”

Matthais flushed bright scarlet. “Why do you have to say things like that?”

“Because I like it when you turn red.”

“It’s disgusting. You don’t need to make everything lewd.”

...

“Despite her fatigue, she trotted ahead of him. “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want to like a Grisha. You’re scared that if you laugh at my jokes or answer my questions, you might start thinking I’m human. Would that be so terrible?”

“I do like you.”

“What was that?”

“I do like you,” he said angrily.

She’d beamed, feeling a well of pleasure erupt through her, “Now, really, was that so bad?”

“Yes!” he roared.

“Why?”

“Because you’re horrible. You’re loud and lewd and...treacherous.  Brum warned us that Grisha could be charming.”

“Oh, I see. I’m the wicked Grisha seductress. I have beguiled you with my Grisha wiles!”

She poked him in the chest.

YOU KNOW DAMN WELL I FUCKEN LOVE THESE BICKERING IDIOTS. but also nina means so much to me. its so fucken refreshing to see a character who is overweight and can carry herself with so much sass and confidence (because thats what 17 year old me would have wished to be able to channel)!! i love that shes so flirty and especially to someone as stoic as matthais is cute af!! even the author wrote about how much she loves nina: “I probably identify most with Nina. She’s spent her whole life being told she’s too big, too loud, too much--and that’s basically me. I just wish I had Nina’ confidence at seventeen.” she has the kind of sass and big dick energy that comes w having to prove yourself and being shamed and i think thats why she has a special place in my heart!! maybe i’ll go in on my love for nina in another post but ugh i love her

“When we get back to Ketterdam, I’m taking my share, and I’m leaving the Dregs.”

He looked away. “You should. You were always too good for the Barrel.”

It was time to go. “Saints’ speed, Kaz.”

Kaz snagged her wrist. “Inej.” His gloved thumb moved over her pulse, tracing the top of the feather tattoo. “If we don’t make it out, I want you to know...”

She waited.

...

She reached up and touched his cheek...this was the first time she had touched him skin to skin, without the barrier of gloves or coat or shirtsleeves. She let her hand cup his cheek. His skin was cool and damp from the rain. He stayed still but she saw a tremor pass through him as if he were waging a war with himself.

“If we don’t survive this night, I will die unafraid, Kaz. Can you say the same?”

His eyes were nearly black, the pupils dilated. She could see it took every last bit of his terrible will for him to remain still beneath her touch. And yet, he did not pull away. She knew it was the best he could offer. It was not enough.”

NO I LOVE THEM TOO! KAZ1!!! DO SOMETHING!!! BUT ALSO FUCKEN GOOD FOR YOU INEJ YOU FUCKEN KNOW WHAT YOU DESERVE AND IF HE AINT GIVING 100 U DONT WANT IT I LOVE HER TOO

Inej turned to go. Kaz seized her hand, keeping it on the railing. He didn’t look at her. “Stay,” he said, his voice rough stone. “Stay in Ketterdam. Stay with me.”

She looked down at his gloved hand clutching hers. Everything in her wanted to say yes, but she would not settle for so little, not after all she’d been through. “What would be the point?”

He took a breath. “I want you to stay. I want you to...I want you.”

“You want me.” She turned the words over. Gently, she squeezed his hand. “And how will you have me, Kaz?”

He looked at her then, eyes fierce, mouth set. It was the face he wore when he was fighting.

“How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?”

He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea.

Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”

Speak, she begged silently. Give me a reason to stay. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too.

ITERATE AGAIN, INEJ DONT WANT 90 PERCENT OR 99 PERCENT SHE WANTS 100 OR NOTHING WOW. i mean my shipping heart says NOOO buT shes right. kaz gotta figure out his shit and then share that vulnerability w her and maybe they can be truly together. UGH BUT THIS SCENE my god

Van Eck taunting Wylan and shitting on him for not being able to read was disgusting and i will fight him. I WILL PROTECT WYLAN WITH MY HEART! HES TRYING HIS BEST AND WORKING WITH WHAT HES GOT AND HE SAVED THEM ALL SO MANY TIMES. GET THIS PEDO OUT OF HERE FUCK THIS GUY

“That’s why you disappeared during the journey,” said Jesper. “You weren’t helping Matthais care for Nina. You were hiding.”

“I didn’t hide.”

“You...how many times was it you standing beside me on the deck at night when I thought it was Kuwei?”

“Every time.”

pekka rolllins. wow. what a man. i expect great things to happen between kaz and him. i truly did think kaz killed him back in the ice court lol but im glad he saw the grand plan and waited it out. hes a man of patience. i can respect that.

[allofthefeelings]

Hi. I forgot that sad endings exist, and now, I'm scared stupid after your last BW movie post. She's dead already! I want something close to happy! (Oh god, I hope the fanfics come through 😭😭😭)

(Before I begin, I would also like you to know that, while this is over 4000 words long, I did cut a several-paragraphs-long digression comparing the BW movie to Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. You’re welcome.)

I know I’m once again outing myself as an optimist here, and I’m sure I’ll also end up getting smug asks in four months when much of my speculation is wrong, but what the hell. If I was on this tumblr to be right I would have made a LOT of different decisions.

So.

I really, truly don’t think we’re going to get a sad ending.

But the question is, how does it achieve a not-sad ending? Or, to completely re-frame and re-structure: for a character like Natasha, what exactly is a happy ending?

Buckle in, because this gets long.

I think we can all agree that, by definition, we’re starting the movie from a point of melancholy at best, just because we know that in 2023 Natasha will be dead. She doesn’t get to ride into the sunset in any way, shape, or form. Every other solo movie- even the ones with tragic endings, like Thor Ragnarok’s destruction of Asgard and a large portion of its people- have given characters a path forward and the odds that even if this won’t give them a happy ending, it gives them a way towards one. It ends with hope. There isn’t room for that here, for obvious reasons. But what there is room for- and this is, ironically, achievable because of one of the major flaws of IW- is the idea that she did achieve growth, and then had six years to live the life she wanted.

Or, not the life she WANTED, which probably would not have been one part on the run/five parts half of society obliterated by Thanos. Let’s say she had the chance to live a terrible life self-actualized.

IW’s complete and utter lack of meaningful characterization for 90% of the cast means that we don’t really have a sense of where Natasha was in that movie. That gives a lot of room to play with, to put Natasha at the end of the BW movie in a place that she wants to be in. In other words, they can retroactively argue that the reason Natasha isn’t given room to grow in IW is that she had achieved her growth in between CW and IW.

Which, look. Doylistically this is beyond bullshit. Doylistically this is actually offensive, and if they’re looking to retroactively placate us about how Natasha’s arc went, it really doesn’t work. I’m not talking about what was intended, or what was achieved; I don’t think this is either of those. I’m talking about what we can choose to read into it.

And, frankly, as a Natasha fan, that’s pretty much all we do anyway. I can argue (and clearly have argued) her arc for ages, but that’s all the work I’ve done, and you (collective, Natasha fans) have done- not the work the text has done.

None of this is remotely answering the question. But I think it’s necessary groundwork to begin to answer the question.

Because what the BW movie can give us is that growth arc that takes place in the negative spaces of canon.

Well, first of all, the BW movie gives us the fact that things happen at all in the negative spaces of canon. I know I’ve discussed this already, but it’s worth mentioning again: the way audiences are supposed to read texts is that everything pertinent happens on screen. Even supplemental texts that are considered canonical (cut scenes, novelizations, official tie-in comics, movie scripts) are deemed inherently less valuable because they aren’t on the screen. This movie affirms that important events are happening off-screen, to everyone- or at least everyone who isn’t front and center.

This is, again, infuriating, and I feel like when I say this I’m inadveretently contributing to justification. That is not my intention. Natasha’s growth should have been on screen and should have been seen as important. I hate that it’s reduced to a single movie after ten years and the character’s death. I don’t think this justifies it. AT THE SAME TIME, I think this opens space for us to look at lots of characters who haven’t gotten the screen time they deserved.

(Like, they may never give Rhodey the movie he deserves, but at least no one can tell us that if he did something worth seeing it would have been on screen. This movie’s existence is a rebuttal of that. This is a digression but one I’m gonna keep making until everyone starts casually referring to awesome shit Rhodey did off-screen because WHY THE FUCK NOT, YOU CAN’T PROVE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, “IT DIDN’T HAPPEN ON SCREEN” IS NO LONGER PROOF OF ANYTHING EXCEPT THEY HAVEN’T DONE THE SET-IN-THE-PAST MOVIE YET. Y E T.)

But we also get the possibility of growth, and to analyze what growth means for Natasha’s character.

So here is an issue: I can tell you, with a frankly absurd amount of confidence, what I read Natasha’s arc as. I can lay it out from film to film, I can point to key growth moments, I can read a lot into every scrap that made it into the final cut and I can tell you exactly why, and I feel like if you dig into my history you’re going to find a lot of me citing specific scenes to make my point so I’m not going to go too in-depth on an already-long post that is getting exponentially longer. I think that Natasha’s key arc is in figuring out who she is and what she needs, and how to be a person rather than a reflection of what is asked of her. I think that the mirror imagery in the trailer and in the SDCC/D23 BW footage lends credence to this being a key theme of the movie.

But I have absolutely no idea if I’m right, because the MCU has never considered Natasha to be important enough to be the focus, and as a result I read her arc mostly through the ways she mirrors other characters’ stories, usually to show their strengths by comparison. I do my best to make arguments that are textually supported, but at the same time, it’s like describing the sun entirely from the way that its light reflects off the moon.

So I can say that for the BW movie to be satisfying, it needs to offer completion to her arc, which is then capped in IW/Endgame but would have reached its climax in the BW movie. But since I cannot confidently tell you what her arc has been so far, I can’t figure out exactly how that arc could be satisfactorily completed. Which means, after SEEING the movie, I will have to retroactively figure out how they saw her arc, and then figure out if this was a satisfactory way to end it.

But an argument done in hindsight is colored by what I’ve already seen, and that’s a cheat. So let’s start over.

Here is what we know:

Natasha was taken from her family very young (Endgame: didn’t know her father’s name). As a child, she was abused and manipulated by the Red Room (Agent Carter; Age of Ultron). She was trained to be a Black Widow, did terrible shit for them for a while, defected, became a mercenary, did terrible shit for the highest bidder (Avengers). Clint was sent to kill her but made a different call and brought her in to SHIELD (Avengers). Natasha quickly rose in the ranks and became one half of a STRIKE team watched over by Fury’s right-hand man, Coulson (Avengers). Natasha also became very close with Nick Fury, the head of SHIELD (IM2, Cap2). At some point in there she was shot by the Winter Soldier (Cap2). She was one of the people behind putting together the Avengers Initiative, identifying Tony Stark as not qualified (IM2), and recruited into the team herself (Avengers). She did not leave the Avengers teams for the next 11 years; she was on the first iteration (lasting through Age of Ultron), the second (Age of Ultron through Civil War), and then the Secret Avengers (which we can now assume starts post-BW through Infinity War) and Avengers 3.0 (five-year gap team), as well as the Quantum Realm Team-Up Team right up til she got yeeted off Vormir.

We’ll set Secret Avengers and Team 3.0 aside for the moment, as they’re things that will exist post-BW movie canon.

Natasha’s narrative role has often been to be so amazing that when she’s bested, we know the other person is really good. The best way for me to pull this together into a coherent throughline is that Natasha tends to be bested by people with passion and emotional stakes. When Natasha is just doing her job, but Pepper cares about Tony or the Dora Milaje care about T’Challa, she is outmatched. In Cap2, when Natasha cares deeply about SHIELD and who she’s loyal to, she is able to outmatch everyone she faces, but since she’s a secondary character and her act isn’t as highly visible on screen, her heroism isn’t as spotlighted.

(That said, make no mistake, WE WILL BE COMING BACK TO HER HEROIC MOVE IN THIS MOVIE.)

Her role has also been, as I mentioned earlier, to be a mirror to the white male heroes. She mirrors Tony in IM2, Clint in Avengers, Steve in Cap2, and Bruce in Ultron. I can make a strong argument, that I feel is supported by each text, that each of these mirrors is about moderation, and both the white man of choice and Natasha finding that the ideal is somewhere between both points: the space between how and why Tony and Natasha handle secrecy; between how Clint and Natasha handle guilt; between how Steve and Natasha handle trust; between how Bruce and Natasha handle self-hatred. That the writers and directors often disagree with my read of this does not, in any way, dissuade me from believing it, but it does mean that this may not be the arc we’re looking at in the movie.

By the arcs that I’ve traced, though, they have a fair amount of leeway to give a satisfying conclusion no matter what the plot is. By having other characters mirroring Natasha, she is centered in a way she never had been, and simply being the protagonist of her own story is part of Natasha’s journey we haven’t seen. We know that this is going to in some way revisit the Red Room, and that means that we’ll get to see a story where Natasha is passionate about and personally connected to what she’s fighting. We also know that whatever the story is, it will not be Natasha mediating someone else’s approach to the world, but Natasha’s approach to the world with someone else (I’m guessing Yelena?) mediating her worldview, in a way that gives Natasha growth but does not undercut her as someone who had so much to learn from the REAL hero.

All plot to the side, simply because Natasha is the protagonist, there is an element of satisfaction inherent, both textually and metatextually, because Natasha’s role of being sidelined is both within the text and within the media landscape a struggle she’s finally able to overcome. There is also a metatextual satisfaction just in cleaning up the bits and pieces of canon that we’ve gotten that were left hanging. For example, in her heroic climax in Winter Soldier, Natasha- who was so focused on being able to transform into whatever was necessary- released a fuck-ton of national security information on the internet, including her own history, that made her both immutable and knowable. (Do you ever think about how this means that people living within the MCU know more about Natasha’s background than we, the audience, does? Because I do, c o n s t a n t l y.) Natasha went from working undercover and in the shadows to being an Avenger and releasing not just her own and not just SHIELD’s but also the Red Room’s dirty laundry in public, and that has never had narrative consequences; this is a great opportunity to use that, closing a loop that most people probably forgot even existed.

Speaking of closure.

I think this movie HAD to be designed with that specifically in mind. I don’t think they necessarily expected the backlash they got from Natasha’s death (I’m going to be honest here; I didn’t expect it from anyone but Natasha fans), but at least they had to know that people who had been promised Natasha would get her due in canon would be frustrated and want some sign that the complexity of the character that had been talked up for a decade was actually part of the story they put on film. Marvel wants to placate fans, yes, but they wouldn’t waste millions upon millions of dollars on a movie to get us to shut up; their job is to bring in money, and it’s not like they haven’t gotten ten years’ worth from us. They’re also savvy enough to know that for a character who’s no longer alive in canon, they need to do things that make their story relevant even without them having future appearances- and I think we’ll see that in Yelena and Taskmaster- but also to make this story have stakes.

Yeah, we never spend a Marvel movie saying “Oh geez, what if the hero dies?” (well, aside from Civil War, because comics oontext), but right now we’re going in knowing (or, bare minimum, thinking we know) exactly what happens to Natasha. Where she’ll end up just under two years from when the story starts is set in stone (NO PUN INTENDED). So we need another way to give the story stakes. Natasha’s life and her future aren’t up in the air. Her past is, I guess, but they’ve been clear this movie isn’t about her past. And where that leaves us is the emotional journey. I outlined above what I think that is, but it doesn’t have to be that to be satisfying- it just has to be some way to leave Natasha changed in a way that surprises us as audience.

And, sure, that could be loss- that could be betrayal from everyone in this movie, leaving her alone and with no one to turn to but the Avengers- but I don’t think that is. I think that’s looking at Natasha’s story like she’s still a secondary character, rather than the protagonist. The basic structure of a superhero movie (and specifically a Marvel movie) is that the protagonist suffers defeat but ultimately triumphs, internally if not externally, having learned something that takes them farther on their emotional journey. Since (as far as we )know this is the only movie Nat’s getting- she’s not getting a trilogy or a Dis+ show- this needs to take her farther than most single-protagonist movies have.

In terms of another kind of closure: If the movie doesn’t offer at least a hint of a way Nat could come back (and I’m still hoping for that no matter how unlikely it is, and if it doesn’t happen I’m hoping for it in the Dr Strange sequel, and after that I’m sure I’ll find another path), I think there’s an excellent chance the post-credits scene will be a funeral for her. Given that they have SebStan and Mackie and Emily Van Camp shooting together right now, it would be very easy to at the VERY least get us a scene of them mourning her. It’s not the same as Tony’s giant lakehouse memorial, but it’s about half the characters who were close to her when she was alive (the others being Clint, Maria, and Fury, and I’m pretty sure they could have put an hour of time on the FFH set to the latter two having five seconds of looking solemn). I think that, given the backlash to Endgame, they need something like this: we need to see, on screen, conclusive proof that Natasha’s life mattered, not just for the audience, but for the world she lived in.

My dream would be for the entire movie to use a frame story OF her funeral- people talking about her, different memories and different understandings, that combine in different ways to collectively show a whole. Fucking Rashomon that shit. But we all know they’re not going to do that.

I recognize I am still talking satisfying and not happy.

But what exactly is happy? What exactly is the happy ending Natasha might want?

She’s not a character who wants to retire or settle down somewhere. As much as we in the audience talk about wanting her to get a break, we’ve never seen that from her, and we also don’t see a world that could really offer that to her; especially post-Cap2, Natasha does not have the luxury of escaping her past even if she did want to.

We don’t know her goals. We don’t know what she wanted outside of making amends for her past. We’ve gotten that from almost every other character- say what you want about Steve’s Endgame ending (god knows I have), or about Bruce being a public figure that kids love, but at least there was groundwork laid for it.

i think the best argument we have for what makes Natasha happy is in Civil War, when it’s taken away. Natasha is willing to give up things that are important to her (her autonomy) in favor of not losing her team; being together is the priority for her. By the end of Civil War, she’s lost even that; she’s seen to have betrayed her entire team and has no one. By IW we know that she re-finds her group, that she and Steve and Sam and Wanda are a tightly-knit unit, but we have to piece it together ourselves, and we have no way to know that it’s by choice rather than necessity. (The BW trailer is really the first time we get evidence that Natasha has more resources than just the Avengers or SHIELD; even fic has tended to just posit she has empty safehouses, not living people she can go to.) The BW movie could give her that team, and retroactively make her appearance in IW a reward for her- having found the team she wanted- rather than just the natural place for her to end up.

But I can’t see how that would even work without at least some of Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, and Elizabeth Olsen appearing in this movie and showing on screen that Natasha has her people. We haven’t seen evidence they aren’t, but at least I haven’t heard any rumors they are, the way we’ve heard rumors about RDJ.

And there’s something awful, to me, in Natasha constantly being supporting in other people’s movies, which exist to seem self-contained even if they’re not, but then in her movie her emotional fulfillment relying on things that happen elsewhere- the implication that her emotional arc can’t even support a single movie.

In terms of what we’ve seen achieved, Natasha seems happiest when she’s solving a problem, when she’s fighting and winning and being the hero she doesn’t quite believe she is. But that’s not something that can be an end to an arc, of a decade or even of two hours. No matter how great that is, it’s a momentary thing, and it’s fleeting. That’s happiness but not narratively satisfying

This remains not an answer to the original questions.

I think part of the issue is, it’s not necessarily that we need Natasha to be happy, for her to have a happy ending. It’s that we, the audience, wants to be happy- and frankly, I don’t think that’s unreasonable; we’re not going to blockbusters to have our hearts torn out (and I think that after Endgame especially, Natasha fans are not ready or willing to do that again). And so we’re looking less at how Natasha can be happy, but how we can be happy. Selfishly, I’d even add: how we can be happy without doing the work. How we can be happy without conspiracy-theorizing our way to a satisfying narrative, but rather, a narrative that’s already on the screen, that we can just roll around in and enjoy.

I realize how bizarre this is to say after 3000+ words, but: I want the opportunity to be a lazy viewer. I want the chance to take things in without having to take responsibility for making them into something I want to see. I don’t want to have to reverse-engineer her story; I want to dig into the minutiae that is maybe actually intended.

On some level, that’s going to be the happy ending for me. Just having a whole text to dive into is a gift. (I am probably monkey-pawing myself just by saying this, which is the same kind of bullshit I argued for Age of Ultron- but then, I still can rewatch Ultron and find a lot that I like.) And Natasha getting a narrative win- which, as protagonist, she kind of has to- will be a happy ending for me.

But I’m a Natasha fan. This is expected.

What I think is the real question under all of this- what I’ve been struggling to tease out from my own feelings, and maybe now I’m finally getting to it- is a different question entirely: how can Marvel craft a story that sticks with their formula of giving a protagonist a win and something like a happy ending, while telling a story about a character who has been sidelined for ten years until they killed her off? Setting aside those of us who are overly invested in Natasha’s arc, what is the path to telling a story that the majority of the audience- most of whom haven’t traced her history, many of whom are casual fans, some of whom probably didn’t even see Endgame- finds fulfilling and happy?

The hero has to win, obviously. The hero has to triumph. Natasha has to come away having saved the world (stopping a villain from destruction), her world (protecting those close to her), and her internal world (some kind of emotional progress/catharsis). There will be moments intended for the audience to cheer. That’s a formula that you can find in nearly every superhero movie, and with good reason; I can’t think of why it wouldn’t apply here.

So looping back around, the question about the sad ending really is just for those of us who are deeply engaged. It’s not “will Natasha triumph?” because yes, she will- of course she will. We are going to get a movie where the world will be saved by Natasha (which has happened before) and the text will acknowledge that (which it really has not). The real question at hand is “will Natasha’s triumph be enough to mitigate the substantial losses she’s had in the other movies, or will it be bittersweet, her success here just underscoring the way that her biggest narrative win was to kill herself for no recognition?”

Which, of course, on some level, will vary from audience member to audience member. But I think that, with the awareness of how Endgame worked, and the knowledge of exactly when this movie is coming out, they have to at least try to give her- and us- this.

It’s now 5:15 AM and this is over 4000 words long and if you’ve read all this you deserve a medal. I’m happy to clarify or expand on anything in a few hours when I get up; I know that I circled a few points rather than clearly making them, but I’m no longer even completely sure what is common knowledge and what is me projecting. Hopefully this can at least start a conversation?

ETA: And anon, I am sure no matter what happens, fanfic will have our backs.