#IT'S ALL A PIPE DREAM

[joejhang]

andrew is so real for thinking neil is a hallucination cos now that we have outsider pov on him it's actually insane that he's a real person. like this is neil josten: he's the prettiest boy you've ever met. he's the runaway son of a serial killer. he has a million dollars but is afraid of spending money. he folds his clothes a specific way so he can tell when someone's gone through his stuff. he keeps a stalker's journal on the two greatest exy players of all time. he wears coloured contacts and they're brown. he paid a busboy $100 to knock him out cold. he insulted a celebrity athlete on live tv after trying to keep a low profile. he says he's trying to stay alive while running towards death like it's a race. he mouths off to the mafia. he respects your boundaries and is the first person ever to take you at face value and not consider you an out of control psychopath. he orders hits on your abusers. he has the most electric blue eyes you've ever seen. he looks great in clubbing clothes but dresses like he's homeless. he insults someone for their "intricate and endless daddy issues" while his father is a convicted mobster and serial killer. he didn't give a fuck when his teammate was killed. everyone seems to like him even though it's clear he's hiding a million secrets. he doesn't catch on to the many many hints you're giving him. he calls you out not for being a danger to others but for being a danger to yourself. he thinks you should be protected as well as trusting you to protect him (and you think, how can someone be a victim and a protector?). he doesn't give a flying fuck what literally anyone thinks about him. he comes back from being waterboarded and tortured and abused for weeks (to protect you) and is still as feisty and bitchy as before. except now he's a redhead and has many more scars. he is possibly the first person to ever make the active decision to protect you. he's willing to put himself in harm's way again and again and again so he won't lose you. he always has a cigarette but he never smokes. he says "you're not actually a sociopath are you?" and "the next time someone calls you soulless i might have to fight them". even though he's messy and a little oblivious he's sees you. he might be the only person to ever want you off your drugs. he wants to see you lose control, is aware that you're not out of control, you're actually so controlled and restrained all of the time and he wants to see you feel something, he wants you to be angry, be angry at him. he riles you up on purpose to see you show emotion, feel something. he's a runner and yet he's still possibly the bravest person you've ever met. he gets kidnapped and comes back even more bruised and battered than before and he's still a mouthy little shit who bitches at the press and cuts deals with the yakuza. he's most of the reason why the worst team in the nation ends up winning championships. he shoves a guy clean off his feet because they body checked you. he punched celebrity athlete riko moriyama in public, for you. he threatens him, for you. he's almost killed on live tv. he mouths off to the fbi. he watches the (second) best exy player in the world get shot. he also watches his father, notorious serial killer and gangster, get shot in front of him. and he laughs. he smiles. he kisses you and is never gonna run again and he's free and he wants to be with you, he wants you.

[starkingdraws]

“I’m not a hallucination.” “No, you’re a pipe dream.”

[septembersung]

In real life, the traddest men I know: change diapers; do chores; are present and playful with their kids; take good care of their wives; work 50+ hours a week to provide for their families; literally never think about the 1950s.

[atlalasassy]

Neil told Andrew ‘I’m not a pipe dream. I’m not going anywhere.’ after Baltimore because for the first time in his life, it was true. Neil Abram Josten was a real person in the system. He wasn’t running away or expecting to be dead anytime soon. He truly wasn’t going anywhere

[thesandsofelsweyr]

⚠️ cw: smut (⚤)

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asks, hating that uncertain quaver that stains his tone.

She takes a step toward him, taking his hands in her cuffed ones, then lifts them to her lips and kisses them softly. "Yes baby," she purrs.

Reflexively his hand drops to her throat and wraps around it, jerking her face up to his, her eyes to his. Words slip out before he even realizes what he's saying. "Yes what?" he growls. He trained me well.

A smile stretches across her lips. "Yes sir."

[ghost-bxrd]

I’m an okay writer but I would LOVE to help with the click Gotham game

I have so many ideas

what if you could make an era choice

like, Robin Dick, 1990, or Robin Damian, 2018 (dates are wrong but you get the general idea)

The tech would match up with the times, and so would the medical care, and the villains, and everything (walking down the street and getting hit by an automobile that looks like it belongs in a museum)

the crowning glory would be that the resolution and color scheme would also match up

black and white, cartoony animation, over bright colors and everyone looking like they were drawn from the same two bases, hyper realistic animation.

ANYWAYS I love your ideas and can’t wait to see where it goes!

Holy crap imagine that! 😨

That would be a whole new level of complexity 😩 love that idea! But we would totally get stuck on the part where we find someone willing to work on those animations 😭🥺

But pls open world mechanics would be so cool! A huge map of Gotham City! With options of DLC’s to Star City and Metropolis maybe! Buildings that are closed off to you because you lack skills/clearance and need someone else to help you! GOING TO ARKHAM TO KILL JOKER!!! Kwnebcoakwjbduxkabdhj-

[ihavesomejays]

in the name of love

amn double post today? insane considering that it's me. anyways i finished 2.2 penacony quest and ARGHGHFGJKHSKGHFSJ SUNDAY WHY WHY WHY DO YOU ALWAYS DO THE WRONG THINGS FOR THE RIGHT REASONS WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS arhgh it makes me grab my knees and scream... sunday... you poor, broken, megalomaniac, soft-hearted madman...

textless/closeups below keep reading

[thelifeofacactus]

I sincerely hope that those of you who chose not to vote are feeling the weight of your inaction and false activism now. Did you win? Do you feel good? Is your sense of self-righteousness going to protect you or the people you claim to fight for?

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[codename-adler]

not to toot my own horn, but i really do love and believe in my hc that aaron was the one behind the ‘pipe dream’ expression coming into andrew’s vocabulary

[eheavenlyy]

andrew coming out of easthaven and seeing neil still there:

fuck he’s real.

[triglycercule]

killer eating food in front of horror as a way to taunt him. duuuude do you see this delectable parfait he has in his hands right now. he just put a spoonful in his mouth. horror is scratching at his own arms right now (trying not to jump this bitchass). killer can't even taste it LMAOOO another bite ‼️ imagine not being able to eat food 🤣🤣🤣 killer can't even taste it and enjoy the food but horror can't even EAT food

then horror grabs the parfait glass out of his hands and oh killer you should probably teleport away before horror does to you what undyne did to his eye

[grasslandgirl]

perfect sav birthday daydream: all of my friends come to [redact city where I live] and my favorite tiny unknown band is playing locally and we all get together and go see them and make a bunch of the silly band-themed candy bracelets to make and wear and pass around and we sing and dance and I get to introduce all my friends to my favorite band and then we go back home or to a big hotel or smth and all crash and have a stupid kid-style sleepover with face masks and cookies and do our nails and stay up late and go for a nice late brunch the next morning and I never go to everyone hates me island ever again bc I'll have a million photos of me with my friends

[deadpoetsdarling]

when ronan lynch said “maybe i dreamt you” and andrew minyard said “you are a pipe dream”

[tinyetoile]

Decided to toss my hat into the Wapeach Redesign Ring LMAO

I do think her normal design is cute I just think she looks too much like Rosalina (though to be fair, she was likely designed first and elements of her design might've been incorporated into Rosalina's...)

Actually in retrospect I probably should've switched the direction of her bangs to differentiate them more... dangit

also yknow how Mario & Luigi are contrasting colours? Well, I noticed this about the "Princess" gang if you add Wapeach to the mix

[nevermind-i-dont-wanna-know]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single post about neil josten that hasn’t been tagged #the man that you are even if it’s just a post that barely mentions him and honestly y’all are so real for that. This feral little bastard lives rent free in my head and I fully understand andrews fascination and disbelief that he’s real