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jajanvm-imbi · 6 months ago

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Babe wake up the Helluva Boss hiatus is finally over

Okay I have some thoughts. Was it perfect? No. Was it better than the last 3 episodes? Absolutely 100%

And before anyone comes at me, I like the Blitz and Fizz plotline, I really do. Blitz and Fizz might be my fave dynamic in the whole series, so seeing them interact was fun! But the fact that we got the worst episode in the entire series (Happy Campers) followed by 2 more episodes that were almost completely irrelevant to the main 2 plotlines (Oops and Mid-season Special) A N D the hiatus BEFORE literally anything about 2 sets of alluded reoccurring villains is baffling to me.

Anyway, my main issue with the latest episode is the split focus.

This episode featured both the return of alluded reoccurring villains The Cherubs and D.H.O.R.K.S, and Stolas finally freeing Blitz of their transactional relationship. Both developments are really good, the return of the Cherubs and the agents was long overdue, but I'm glad to see them back. HOWEVER, both of these super important developments had to share an episode, which I think is the problem.

Both of these events were waaaaaaaaaaay too important to share the focus of a single 20 minute episode, and because they had to share, it minimizes the impact of both developments.

Or in the HB fandom's case, everyone is gonna focus on the Stolitz shippy stuff and all but completely ignore the other half of the episode.

Both the first return of these alluded villains and the Stolitz stuff should have gotten their own solo episode to really highlight the importance of each event.

What makes this even more frustrating is that, like I said before, we just came back from a hiatus and the three episodes before that were almost completely irrelevant to the 2 main plot lines. The only actually important thing that happened was Stolas getting Blitz the crystal, and that was the B-plot to S2 ep6 and not the main plot??? Almost nothing important happened in the last 3 episodes before the hiatus and then when the 2 most important plot lines finally get the spotlight again they have to share an episode.

"Look My Way" wasn't even in an episode????? It was a separate music video????? Which is completely bizarre?????

I have nothing but respect for the Hellverse creative teams, truly. I admire their persistence and their individuality. I respect how they are so unapologetically themselves, making the content they like and nothing else. I adore the artistic identity of Helluva Boss (not so much Hazbin but that's in my review of the first 4 eps of the series if you're interested in reading my thoughts about that). The art style and the animation style are incredible, looking x100 better than most animated shows done by bigger studios recently. Their success is something to be admired for sure, leading the pack for indie studios everywhere to find their own success. But one thing I cannot wrap my head around are the writing decisions for this show.

If they really have such limited time and resources, why are they wasting time on irrelevant bullshit????? Or at least, why are they so adamant on doing everything all at once??? Why does the D.H.O.R.K.S + the Cherubs plotline need to happen at the same time as the Stolitz plotline as the same time as the Striker + Crimson plotline at the same time as the "Blitz estranged relationships" plotline as the same time as "Stolas' family drama" plotline????? It's the same exact issue with Hazbin Hotel except worse because Helluva has more episodes than Hazbin. Vivziepop and her crew didn't know if they were getting a second season of Hazbin until halfway through production of S1, which can excuse a good portion of writing sins (no pun intended) committed in Hazbin. HELLUVA BOSS HAS 4 PLANNED SEASONS. They have the time to pace these plotlines better. There is literally NO REASON why they had to cram every single plotline into every single season. By dividing the attention between all the different plotlines, none of the plotlines get enough meaningful attention. There are so many episodes between each plotline development and so much time between each episode, that everything gets muddled and nothing is impactful in the slightest. And on top of everything, some of these episode slots are wasted on completely irrelevant nonsense. Happy Campers was such a waste of time, and Barbie Wire's introduction was completely wasted on it. It was promoted as the "Millie episode" but it was actually another Moxxie episode caused by random Millie angst. The Mid-season Special wasn't even about the main cast or Stolas????? Blitz was only there to justify the episode existing because without him the episode would have no real reason to exist???? Most of s2 has been completely irrelevant with no real plot progression.

So much time was wasted on stuff the ultimately doesn't mean anything, or won't mean anything for a long time and as a result, two of the more important plotlines get shoved in an episode together. So the stuff that doesn't matter get full episodes and the stuff that does matter have to share episodes.

Or in the case of "Look My Way", IT DOESN'T EVEN GET AN EPISODE AND IT HAS TO BE A MUSIC VIDEO OUTSIDE OF THE ACTUAL SERIES?????????

Each of these plotlines should have gotten their own season, or at least the similar ones can share.

S1 should have just been about the main cast (IMP) and maybe Stolas. Maybe introducing some of the main villains like the Cherubs and D.H.O.R.K.S (kind of like how they actually did it but without eps 2, 5, 7 and especially 8. So really only like half the season lmfao)

Then S2 could have been about Blitz's past relationships, Moxxie and Millie's relationship and Stolas' family drama.

S3 could have been about Stolitz and Blitz repairing his other relationships

and S4 could have been the epic return of The Cherubs and D.H.O.R.K.S, with some foreshadowing sprinkled throughout the rest of the series

......or something

Idk but the point is that by trying to do everything all at once, none of the attempted plotlines are impactful and the series as a whole suffers for it.

I still find HB entertaining, but damn is it frustrating to watch.

Anyway that's all I had to say

#helluva boss #helluva boss full moon #helluva boss spoilers #stolitz #helluvaverse #vivziepop #spindlehorse

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penny-anna · 2 years ago

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Just thought I’d let you know that your onslaught of Back to the Future content inspired me to rewatch the movies this weekend, which was such a delight :)

Do you have any fic recs, by any chance?

ah glad to hear it!

*rubs hands together*ohoho let's see what i got here

Like Water Flowing Underground by Kleenexwoman

Marty struggles to fit in with his new reality, but is any other world a better fit?

i read this one back in 2015 and come back to it every so often. just beautifully done.

Becoming Marty by butchcassidy

Scenes and glimpses from Marty's childhood and how he came to be Marty.

obligatory trans marty rec!!

Time is a Wave and a Particle by Kleenexwoman

Another one of those "Marty has trouble dealing with living in an alternate universe" fics.

heavy content warning for mental illness & specifically psychosis on this one!!

beautifully written, absolutely gutwrenching, this one is gonna haunt me ):

Alternates by Wildgoosery

Marty's life isn't at all like how he left it.

i eat up post-canon 'marty deals w being in a new timeline' fics like candy nom nom nom

wish someone would tell me who to be (ready to try anything) by Adanska

(“Fashion cycle,” Doc had explained, looking more ‘50s than anything else. “The Eighties just came back around in a big way for kids your age, you shouldn’t stick out too much—people will just think you’re hipsters.” “What, like the pants?” “No, a nostalgia-obsessed movement—ah, nevermind.”)

lesbian marty & jennifer visiting Actual 2015 its great give this one a read!!

we can't live in the present forever by ideal_girl (trainwreckdress)

Marty wonders if Doc has the same problem; histories overlapping, memories colliding in the space of a single, shared moment. He hopes not.

a 'marty deals with having 2 contradictory sets of memories' story

Inevitable by nbfutureboy

It's a bizarre twist of fate. When they’d found out they’d been expecting twin boys, Jennifer had suggested, sensible and sweet, that they pick out two new names. No comparisons to the kids of the first 2015 - they could be their own people, without having to compete with a future memory.

very sweet fic about trans marlene mcfly!!

The Man in the Box by makesureyouwashyourhands

People said the strangest things about the McFlys. They said that Marty McFly went to bed one night and woke up a different person. Or, the two Martys: how they differ, and how they're the same.

*throws another post-canon new timeline fic at you*

The Human Body Is Incredibly Faulty by ThePhenomenalStingray

Written for the ask, "For that headcannon prompt, Doc is a complete mother hen mess when Marty’s hurt".

cute!! <3<3<3<3

First Impressions by Kristen Sheley

To say that he had been surprised when the kid had showed up that evening at his doorstep was an understatement. He hadn’t ever imagined anything so fantastic, and his was a mind that had visualized a lot of unrealistic and fantastic things! But a seventeen-year-old time traveler from the future was never one of them. Equally surprising to him was that this kid was apparently a friend of his. What a sixty-five-year-old was doing hanging out with someone so young, Emmett could only wonder. Maybe Marty was a student of his, from the University.

an oldie but a goodie!! absolutely banging bit of missing scene work from the first film w doc & marty adjusting to each other in 1955

The Longest Odds by leaper182

Marty McFly just had two more years to go before he could start thinking about the future.

But then the odds shifted, and the only future he has to think about now is whether he'll make it home alive.

wip not updated since 2016. not a whole lot of this one as it looks like it didn't really get off the ground but the central concept (tribute marty + former victor mentor doc brown) is just gutwrenching and im going to be rotating it in my brain forever!! ETA: totally failed to clock the ship tag on this one oops!! its tagged doc/marty but i don't remember anything shippy happening in the chapters posted. read at your own risk ig.

that's all for now!! i got more stuff in my to-read so stay tuned hopefully!!!

#fic recs #bttf fic recs

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darkined-assassin · 6 years ago

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Blood Moon AU Info

My Blood Moon version of Kayn and Rhaast are, as expected, bound together by blood and fate as a Host and Blood Demon, respectably. However, that’s where the similarities between them and their “normal” counterparts end.

(Reference image by miirup)

Kayn was at first merely a shy initiate of the Blood Moon Order, until he met Rhaast, who was originally just a mid-ranking Blood Demon summoned by Blood Moon Jhin to aide him during a fight. Rhaast was injured during the fight, and his form began to destabilize. Calling out to his summoner for assistance, he would receive no more aid than a bullet in his attacker’s skull. Kayn on the other hand saw that Rhaast had been gravely injured, and despite the risk, tried to stabilize his form by giving the demon his own blood. While this action wound up saving Rhaast and giving him enough strength to fight again, it also created a contract between Rhaast and Kayn--something Jhin did not like, as it meant he couldn’t directly command Rhaast anymore. Despite this, Jhin agreed to let the transgression slide, so long as Kayn would agree to have Rhaast sealed inside his own body. Kayn, having no ability to reject this proposal due to his low rank, was forced to agree.

Kayn and Rhaast were forcibly merged together using one of the Cult’s Mysterious rituals...though Rhaast did not completely overtake Kayn. Instead, the two now shared a body. When questioned about this, Rhaast replied through Kayn’s Lips: Since Kayn was technically his master, he couldn’t betray him by completely destroying him, and as Kayn had saved his life, it was only fair for Rhaast to save his. Jhin relented and sulked off, angry to have lost control over one of his Blood Moon Demons permanently.

Kayn and Rhaast slowly grew used to having a shared body, and quickly learned there were some massive benefits of having two minds inside one head. For instance, if one of them went to sleep, the other could take over. Rhaast’s presence increased Kayn’s confidence, and Kayn softened Rhaast’s temper. Eventually, the two reached a point where they could react to threats the other wasn’t focusing on in combat, causing each fight they engaged in to be that much harder for their enemies. All of these benefits quickly added to their notoriety within the cult, and they climbed the ranks quicker than anyone else had.

There was still one glaring issue between the two: Both felt strange twinges of an emotion towards one another, an emotion that Kayn had suppressed many times, and one that was completely foreign to Rhaast: Love. The two tried to ignore it, coming to a silent mutual agreement that it would only hopelessly complicate matters between them, and should be ignored at all cost...

Peace was not to last, however. The Blood Moon Cult’s Temple was attacked by a rival cult, and though the Blood Moon Champions fought valiantly, the enemy had employed demon-banishing spellcasters, who were quick to whittle down the Blood Moon’s forces. Kayn and Rhaast nevertheless leaped into action, cutting down swathes of enemies. Just as the Blood Moon seemed to be getting the upper hand, a wave of energy washed over the battlefield that had once been the temple courtyard...the lesser demons were banished instantly, others destabilized and were forced to retreat. Rhaast felt his connection to Kayn starting to slip away...though it wasn’t a fear of his own probable death that was so frightening to him, it was that Kayn may die without him. Rhaast semi-forcibly took over his and Kayn’s shared body, heading to where the wave had emanated from.

Rhaast found the source of the disruption, a powerful Lich who had long been a thorn in the Blood Moon’s side. Figuring the vile thing was in charge of the assault, Rhaast charged in, snatching the Scythe from the Lich’s hands. Both Kayn and Rhaast knew that the Lich had to have a contingency plan for if he was destroyed, but Rhaast didn’t care. He had to at least save Kayn. Slamming the scythe down into the undead spellcaster’s head like a giant Pickaxe, the resulting explosion of anti-demon energy nearly caused Rhaast’s Demonic Soul to vaporize instantly, giving him only a tiny amount of time to mind-whisper his confession of love to Kayn, seeing as he would get no other chance. The lich was destroyed, his army of undead cultists crumbling to dust.

Kayn was devastated. He was truly alone in his own mind for the first time in years. He called Rhaast’s name mentally...then aloud....with no reply. His tears fell fast and freely as he was taken into the medical area to be treated for his otherwise minor injuries, the scythe still clutched in a death grip.

Kayn had been confined to the infirmary for over a week, despite his physical injuries being fairly minor. He felt broken, lost, and most of all, completely alone. Shortly after moonrise on a full moon, however, he saw the moon grow completely red...and a slight tinge of a familiar presence re-emerge... Kayn initially didn’t believe it, thinking it to be a trick--until Rhaast explained.

Rhaast, much to his surprise, reawoke in a black void of red stars--the plane of the chosen warriors of the Blood Moon. Not entirely sure of what happened, he called out Kayn’s name, only to be met with a reply from the Blood Moon itself. He had been chosen for his valiant actions in defending the Blood Moon’s followers to get a second chance at life. He could choose to be reborn in a new, stronger body, or go back and continue being bound to Kayn, allowing the full might of the Blood Moon to be channeled into their body. While a younger, untempered, not-hopelessly-in-love Rhaast would have chosen the former in a heartbeat, the more mature Rhaast had chosen the second with even less hesitation. The only catch was that if Kayn or Rhaast chose to channel the power, the one who chose to be the focus for the channeling would be the primary controller of their more empowered form until the next full moon.

Though the two are still not entirely sure of how to handle a proper relationship, they quickly resolved to live their shared lives to the fullest together, romantically.

-( ☾ )-

#League of Legends RP #Blood Moon AU #AU Info #Kayn x Rhaast #Rhaast x Kayn #Oops it's incredibly shippy #What even is Canon anyways?

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evalieena · 4 years ago

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35 Questions for Fanfiction Writers

well since dearest @bachint asked, here goes nothing!

1. From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)

well if no downplaying’s allowed i guess i’d give it a 3/5? some mistakes since i’m not a native plus i”m still working on getting my english style better! i like what i come up with all the same, i’ve improved a lot these past two years, and my grammar isn’t that bad i guess?

2. Why do you write fanfiction?

to do what developers didn’t do in the first place to make good use of my imagination, to cope with the fact that some characters don’t exist and i will never follow another one of their adventures, to forget about a boring real life...

3. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

my writing doesn’t stand out lmaooo but i guess i’m always trying to focus on the character’s psychology, struggles and all that, so if someone likes my work, it’s ‘original’ bc it’s usually quite different from the usual stories where there are a lot of dialogues and interactions.

4. Are there any writers that inspire you?

i’ve been inspired a lot by @welcometogressenheller (i wish i could do as well as she does.....), @aceklaviergavin (kudos to you even if you never see that post and you probably don’t know who i am), and some others whose name i forgot (sorry!)

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

i didn’t write much but i guess that my latest fics are really nice (There’s No Light In You Anymore, and the whole Faith series on AO3). also my big project “Now That You’re Gone”, i’m glad i’ve been able to write that much for it and i intend on continuing as soon as i find the motivation!

6. What element of writing do you find comes easily?

pain, struggles and all that comes with it as long as it’s in the character’s mind, because beware here you step in a dark space

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most?

ordinary scenes of life? i always find my writing lacking as soon as i step out of my comfort zone, i’m all for rambling and never-ending pain

8. Which character(s) do you find easiest to write?

desmond/descole surely

9. Which character(s) do you find most difficult to write?

all the good guys (and dimitri allen because i’d love writing about him but i’m? just unable to?)

10. What’s your favorite genre to write for?

that may come as a surprise! angst!

11. Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

a mix of question 8 and 10 and you’ve got your answer

12. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.

professor layton and the shattering secrets!!! i’m so happy of what this AU will look like when i’ll be done writing the following chapters, at first it probably looks annoying but heck i wanna promise anyone who’s reading it that the plot twists are gonna be worth it even though the overall background isn’t that original because i’ve mixed up different elements from other games (aaaand we’re back in our oh-so-amazing comfort zone that covers up a massive lack of imagination)

13. First fandom you ever wrote for?

ummm? the vampire diaries maybe? back when i was 10 or 11 lol

14. What’s your favorite fandom to write for?

hands up... pROFESsoR LayTON

15. What’s the weirdest fandom you’ve ever written for?

i didn’t write for many fandoms but back in my younger days i used to do self-insert fics with the vampire diaries cast and it was so odd and i wish i hadn’t just confessed that on my tumblr blog

16. Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?

nothing that comes to mind

17. A trope you’ll never, ever write for.

dunno either

18. Wildest fic you’ve ever written?

PL and the shattering secrets! huge canon divergence and one heck of an AU (also its original version is much worse, my mind was going crazy when i was 15)

19. Do you prefer canon-compliant, AUs, or something in-between?

i love reading AUs, writing some requires solid imagination which i have not, but honestly i don’t really mind

20. Gen fic or shippy stuff?

gen

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

desmond sycamore x his wife / randall ascot x hershel layton (be it romantic or platonic) / randall ascot x basically anyone from the MM i guess though i didn’t write anything about that yet (it’s about to change guys)

22. Do you listen to anything while you write?

yea i can’t write without listening to music - any playlist does the trick as long as i like what i’m listening to but usually i listen to sad soundtracks, or i’m inspired by some random lyrics

23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?

i’d go with challenges bc my horrible ass has very few ideas but i usually come up with independent ideas

24. One-shots or multi-chaptered works?

one shots!

25. Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them!

i don’t remember ;_;

26. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

i’ve got one OS in mind with randall/layton but i don’t want to be the talk of the town because it’s probably going to be awful? also any other fic including the PL3 crew

27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received?

@welcometogressenheller telling me she believed i was a native!!! i struggle so much trying to improve my writing style in english and i have a lot of insecurities so it was so heartwarming and incredible to read...

also basically any other comment where people tell me they like what i write. i love that writers feel the need to take some time reviewing my works bc i need constant validation

28. How well do you handle criticism when it comes to your writing?

well i’ve never really received ‘harsh’ criticism or anything, save for some very rare remarks on my grammar so i guess i don’t know? at first it’s always sad to see that what i’ve done isn’t perfect but i guess it’s impossible to be perfect so i’m really happy that people take some time to underline what looks wrong to them

29. Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out?

currently trying to with shattering secrets and it’s actually a great way to improve!

30. Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

MERCILESS ANGST

31. Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them!

i wish i could but it would perhaps be a huge spoiler so i don’t wanna say much about them...

i have 1) annabell sycamore, des’s wife, whose personality fits very much mine. she’s a playwright, spends lot of her time writing and acting in front of des AND WITH des. also she’s a very realistic person and some people usually tell her that she’s being too pessimistic

2) aurelia from the shattering secrets and on her i really cannot say much... if anyone’s read this far it would be so nice if you could give SS a shot by the way!!

32. Summarize a random fic of yours in 10 words or less.

desmond sometimes finds happiness but it’s always taken from him

(isn’t that a summary for everything i’ve ever written?)

33. Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process?

i don’t translate my works from my original language to english, i write straight in english. i spend a lot of time making sure i haven’t done any grammatical mistakes, checking the definition and the use of some words i’m not sure about, and sometimes it’s quite a pain and it can be also very discouraging bc i end up believing what i write comes from a random internet dictionary while deep down i know it’s not true but hey what can i say. huge insecurities laid bare here.

(if any reader of mine’s reading this, i apologize)

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

(beware: spoilers for the whole prequel trilogy!!!)

“Hershel Layton was puzzled. A funny emotion to feel for someone who loved puzzles that much, but nothing could ever describe better the way he’d felt for hours now, hours that seemed like ages.So much did happen in the span of a few hours.

First he’d learned his parents could be targeted by Targent, then Aurora had made it clear that she didn’t want to live anymore, all so she could protect them. Then Desmond—no, Descole—had taken the key from her hands, and revealed himself as the dangerous scientist Layton knew him to be.

Then they’d fought. Despair was filling the air, though Hershel didn’t understand what Descole meant when he cried that the Azran legacy was all he had to live for.

And as if there hadn’t been enough betrayals as it was, Emmy was soon to follow. Luke had been abducted. He’d had no other choice than siding with Descole to prevent Bronev from unleashing doom on Earth. Misery didn’t seem to end.

Just when he’d thought he’d finally be able to change things, Descole had been ready to sacrifice himself to save Luke. And then…

Then everything just collapsed.

He held his agonizing brother in his arms; the one who’d wanted so hard to take him down only a few hours back was now confessing, fearing death was on the way.“

[...]

from ‘Six Times Hershel Layton Remembered, Plus The One Time He Didn’t’

35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

oops i haven’t got anything more to say but thank you for reading? perhaps?

#asks #asks for fanfiction writers #eve rambles #professor layton fandom #how does umblr work #also sorry my english may be lacking #you know the meme sorry for my bad english don't you #well i'm that meme

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earlgreytea68 · 5 years ago

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A Review of the Fall Out Boy Biography Inevitably Colored by Shippiness Oops But Really Mainly By My Love for Pete Wentz

I don’t even know who the audience is for this monstrosity of a review, nor do I know the audience for this biography, though, so, like, it’s fitting lololol:

I am a new Fall Out Boy fan. I say that because, if anybody was in need of a Fall Out Boy biography, you would think it would be a new fan. AND YET. I’m not entirely sure who the market for this book is, because it isn’t really Fall Out Boy fans of any duration, because not only can everything in the book be easily located with the simplest of Google searches but also there’s so much he leaves out. And what he leaves out is just…so incredibly telling. It’s like, the facts he chooses to highlight are often pointless and random (although thanks for telling me that Pete Wentz’s jeans were so tight he had to perform without underwear, I’m going to think about that a lot now), whereas the facts he leaves out are the ones that lend both complexity and context. Like, this whole book could be Exhibit A in how malleable facts can be. Given the same set of facts, this man and I would tell two very different stories.

At least partly this is because he’s a music critic (I glean from the book) and I’m a creative writer. I believe he is a music critic because he takes care to dedicate a paragraph of musical analysis to every song on their earliest CDs (he loses interest in them over the hiatus, and more on that later). I appreciated this, because I know nothing about music, and I learned a lot about how talented Patrick Stump really is, like, not as a vocalist, because I knew that, or as a musician, because I also knew that, but as a smart, clever songwriter. I don’t know how to critique music, and I was happy this guy was full of praise for what Patrick does. He also pointed out musical hallmarks of theirs – like their tendency to drop the music suddenly for Patrick to sing an a cappella line – and that was the first time I’d ever really thought about them.

He was full of much less praise for Pete’s lyrics, though, and I think that’s because he’s a music person, not a word person. Not that he thought Pete’s lyrics were ever bad but he tended to stay very conventional about them: emo, confessional, dramatic, and ingeniously juxtaposed with Patrick’s clear-as-a-bell voice. He’s kind of obsessed with the contrast between Patrick’s voice and the lyrics he’s singing, whereas I’m much more obsessed with the contrast between Patrick himself in sweater-paws and glasses snarling, “I am your worst nightmare,” like, sweetheart, I doubt it. AND YET HE PULLS IT OFF. Like, that’s so interesting to me, how much Patrick can make himself embody Pete, that act of alchemy where he sings on his behalf, but this book talks less about that than I think it might, mostly because I don’t think this guy really wants to think too hard about how incredibly good Pete’s lyrics actually are. The thing about Pete’s lyrics – he does this, and it’s so clever, it’s killer clever – is you can read them so easily on one very obvious and expected layer, and then there’s always one or two additional meanings tucked underneath them, and you might never stop to think about them, especially if you’ve already written him off, but his lyrics reward careful study and a lot of thought, he specializes in triple entendres, a turn of phrase that spins out into so many meanings, that’s so hard to do and he makes it look so easy that it’s such a simple mistake to dismiss it, to not even see how dense his poetry is. The conventional story on Pete Wentz is he’s good at marketing – marketing the band, marketing himself – and so he spun in circles to keep the spotlight on him and away from Patrick, and that’s definitely one take, and another take would be to point out that the same whirligig sex-symbol tabloid-fodder act also had the side effect of undercutting any tendency to take Pete seriously from a literary point of view, like, so much easier to just say that, in keeping with his goth guyliner, he wept into his inkwell and scrawled messily over parchment. So anyway: criticism #1 of this book is that they should have complemented the music-critic-ness with an English major.

Criticism #2 is that I feel like people always get wrong what appeals to girls, to speak in the massive generalizations of this topic. Like, someone somewhere was like, “Hey, girls like this Fall Out Boy band, it must be because Pete Wentz is hot.” And they’re not wrong about that, exactly, but they always seem to miss how many entangled layers often come with attraction. Like, yeah, sometimes it’s just he’s got nice abs but often there’s a million other things happening there, and one thing I cannot forgive this guy for is not just his failure to engage with Pete’s lyrics on any real level, but how little he also truly examines Pete Wentz’s genuine marketing genius. He’s a music guy: His interest is clearly in Patrick, and also in Joe and Andy, because they’re musicians, and he can wax poetic about them. Pete gets his standard paragraphs: Oh, he chose the right management, the right record label, the right deal. He can pick out a good band, like Panic! or Gym Class Heroes. All of that is true, but none of it really grasps exactly how smart Pete really is. Like, the book hardly mentions at all how much Pete realized immediately the value of internet fandom. When I first fell for Pete Wentz – that first weekend I spent Googling him – what really was the death knell for me was stumbling upon the old FOB Q&As he used to run in the earliest days. And it wasn’t actually his constant leaning into the Peterick shipping with such dead-on unerring understanding of fandom that did it for me (although that was pretty charming, ngl). It was how often teenagers messaged Pete Wentz with their problems, and how patiently he took the time to respond. My boyfriend broke up with me. My grandma just died. I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Again and again and again, Pete Wentz took these messages and wrote out detailed, laborious responses. And I know he was a guy angling hard to be famous but not all guys angling hard to be famous realized how important something like this is, this very personal connection, like, above and beyond the bantering and the smirks, and even if you’re doing it entirely for ulterior motives, that’s a ton of emotional labor he was performing. I finished reading those Q&As and thought, God, Pete Wentz must have been exhausted.

And I’m not sure that’s something the bio ever really wrestled with, because it never really talked about that aspect of him. I don’t actually think the bio read anything Pete Wentz has ever posted online, like, not even those basic Q&As that are the easiest thing in the universe to Google, never mind the secret blogs he still has scattered all over the internet with nuggets of lyricism buried in there for Patrick to mine. It’s just so easy to buy into the Peter-Pan, devil-may-care Pete Wentz picture, and for all I know that’s the truest of the pictures, but it’s also undeniable fact that the other side to that was either really cunning and savvy or just a nice guy, and either way it’s another layer to Pete Wentz that gets short shrift in the bio. Which isn’t surprising because although the author clearly appreciates Fall Out Boy the band, the author clearly isn’t fannish at all, whereas it’s pretty abundantly clear Pete Wentz is fannish. He’s unapologetically fannish. He speaks fan language with a fluency that is hard to fake. And he’s astonishingly well-versed in tropes. He’s instinctively good at creating a good story, not just in his lyrics (although he, like Taylor Swift, is adept at tropey lyrics, so it’s no surprise they have a mutual admiration society), but in his life. In addition to the Q&As, that first weekend was full of me being like, …How is this the tropiest thing I’ve ever read??? It’s unsurprising that the bio doesn’t point out all the tropes in the Pete Wentz / Patrick Stump / Fall Out Boy story, because the author isn’t versed in tropes, but Pete Wentz definitely is. He knows how to use words, well. And you wouldn’t necessarily know it to listen to him – he babbles and uses tons of filler phrases and never, ever ask him what his lyrics are about, it’s like trying to have a conversation in Wonderland – but that’s all part of the aw-shucks-sometimes-I-scribble-some-stuff-down-Patrick’s-the-real-genius brand.

Now I am not qualified to write a Fall Out Boy biography and also I don’t know these people and also everything I do know comes from Google but that said, I feel like I do know for a fact some primary source materials that the writer just chose to leave out that really does display how malleable stories can be depending on what you highlight or not. Like, if he didn’t want to draw psychological conclusions based on the facts that’s fair enough. But he also pared back the narrative so drastically that it left off the true meat of it, like, if you read this book you would not necessarily think there was much interesting about these people, whereas if you really dig into everything they’ve got out there, well, you could start to think they’re super-interesting people. But I am a creative writer and this biographer was a music critic. He settles happily into the song analysis but I’m busy connecting dots into a narrative, and life is complicated, it is not a simple narrative, but that impulse underlies most biography, the idea that we can assemble the facts into something that has something to say about a human life. But that act really exists in how you assemble the facts.

~~~~~~~~TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE DISCUSSION~~~~~~~~~~~

A really good example of this is the way the biography deals with the Best Buy incident. Here are the bare facts: Pete Wentz, in a Best Buy parking lot listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” took too many Ativan. In a phone call, his manager noticed he was slurring, called his parents, they rushed him to the hospital, he lived. These are the facts that the book gives you, and these are true facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these bare facts, Pete has given many, many interviews about this incident because he is very open about mental health issues and his bipolar disorder and depressive episodes and anxiety. Pete has said that he’s not sure he was trying to kill himself so much as just make his head quiet for a little while. Pete has said he felt like he was too busy being Pete Wentz for everyone else and he just wanted to rest. These are also facts, although ones I don’t think the biographer truly believes. He does dutifully quote them but he also clearly has his own belief about how much Pete’s telling the truth. Because this is inevitable in any telling of the facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these facts, you could point out that Pete’s lyrics reflect how noisy his head is (“when this city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent”), which might color how you understand him when he says he just wanted some peace and quiet. You might also point out that, as the bio has already said, Pete was the driving force behind the band’s strategy and it was about to culminate. You might remind the reader that Pete walked away from other possibly very successful careers to do this band (there is much made in the book of the theoretical ease with which Pete could have achieved a soccer career, which made me raise my eyebrows a bit but, you know, Patrick does say Pete’s really, really good at soccer). You might recall that Pete has these kids relying on him whose parents he literally had to persuade to trust him. You might say that so far everything had gone exactly as he planned and he just needed to stick the landing. You might mention the fact that they kept rewriting songs and rewriting songs and rewriting songs; that Pete was in such utter meltdown mode that he was sliding lyrics under Patrick’s door and then retreating, so that the rest of the band never even saw him; that they had scrapped half the album and were furiously writing new music right up until the deadline – all of which are facts not even mentioned. You might say all of those things, because they are indeed all true facts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is appropriate at this point to note that many of these things were simply not germane to the story this biographer was telling, which was a music-critic-focused story. But these things are all incredibly germane to the story *I* would tell, about these four people who found each other, lost each other, and found each other again, and the two people at the center whose creative alchemy was by turns either too dazzling or too explosive and in both incarnations needed to find a way to balance to keep the band afloat. This is the story I would tell, but, to be totally honest, Pete and Patrick’s creative partnership doesn’t really seem to interest the writer of this book. He mentions it vaguely, in passing, once or twice, fairly standard surface proclamations about Pete handling lyrics and Patrick handling music, and Pete drawing the spotlight away from Patrick who didn’t want it. Or he’ll say that the true secret to the band’s success is Patrick’s voice and Pete’s lyrics, like Patrick could be any pretty-enough voice, which I think just isn’t true, there’s so much more to the way they clicked together. I read this great New Yorker article once about how, through history, genius exists in pairs, that often two people need to find each other to push each other to be better than they would ever be apart.

It’s fine to not want to get into that too intensely, it’s just that that means that half the story of Folie goes away, if you’re not focused on how the band was creating. Like, there’s so much about the lead-up to Folie to talk about: Patrick’s control over the music to the exclusion of everyone else, Pete’s worsening prescription pill thing, and the way that their creative partnership seemed to disintegrate while simultaneously leaving no room for Joe or Andy in the band. The book mentions really none of this – nothing about the fact that at one point they had descended into physical altercations over chord progressions; nothing about the story the producer tells that Patrick would get so frustrated after phone calls with Pete that he’d throw things around the studio; nothing about the story that Patrick once told Pete, “I don’t care, I’m going to write a song and call it ‘I Don’t Care,’” such a telling little tale when later Patrick comes to hate the song “I Don’t Care” – so the hiatus feels like it descends out of nowhere, with a paragraph about the fans not liking the album. Which, again, is a true fact, but without the other true facts of the way the entire creative process was crumbling around them, around all of them, it sounds less compelling. The bio does get into Joe wanting to flex his creative muscles more but doesn’t connect it back to the Folie era of being shut-out. The hiatus becomes entirely about Patrick not liking being booed.

Even worse to me is the book devotes a lot of time to each of their music videos, which is awesome, because their videos are important and great, but it devotes exactly zero time to the video for “What a Catch, Donnie.” And I’m so bewildered by that, you can have a field day with the symbolism in that video, even if you want to just make a true factual statement about its plot: Patrick collects all of the detritus of Fall Out Boy and all of their friends come and party with him, while Pete goes down with a sinking ship all alone, to a medley of the words he’s leaving behind. Like. That is literally what happens in this video. And then the hiatus starts. To me this is one of the most ridiculously angsty things ever, that they would go out to their own triumphs echoing back at them and the literal death of captain!Pete Wentz. To the story I would tell, this is the most germane. It merits not a single mention in the bio (other than praising the song itself for being one of the strongest on the album, and talking about the Elvis Costello cameo).

Because he’s much more interested in them musically than as people or relationships, he seems to lose interest in them post-hiatus. He details each of their hiatus-era projects with his typical attention to the music criticism side. And then he spends, like, eight pages talking about the guy who wrote the article that triggered Patrick’s “We Liked You Better When You Were Fat” blog post. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s an entire chapter dedicated to the article and the guy who wrote it. Patrick’s response is described and quoted and even praised, but not in nearly as much as detail as the original article, and Pete’s reaction to Patrick’s blog post gets literally zero attention. Which is fascinating since, in some tellings of the story, that’s the entire reason the hiatus ended. Pete has said on multiple occasions that he read the blog post and was upset Patrick was so upset and called him up and asked him to try writing with him again. But if you’re not actually interested in that creative relationship as a relationship, then you don’t see a reason to explain the motivation behind trying again.

You also don’t really see a reason to tackle why they initially struggled to get back into it. Like, truly grappling with the Pete/Patrick relationship leads to more depth than the surface “Patrick doesn’t like the spotlight, so Pete takes it for him.” That’s too simplistic a formulation, as Pete himself has said. It also discounts Patrick’s obvious dedication to Pete, his complete willingness to step in and publicly defend him on many occasions, like, Patrick’s no shy, retiring wallflower when it comes to Pete, Patrick can let loose viciously on behalf of Pete. Their protectiveness is mutual, although the public narrative often glosses over that. (In one of those “why leave that out” details, the biographer notes that Hemingway was Pete and Ashlee’s ring bearer but not that Patrick was Pete’s best man, Idk.) At any rate, I point that out because the struggle they had to find their groove writing together after the hiatus mirrored their initial struggles, to find their way into trusting each other’s strengths, but the book is just kind of like, “The first session wasn’t successful but the next session was. They were out of practice.” They weren’t out of practice with songwriting, not really, especially not Patrick – they were out of practice with each other. And that wasn’t just a hiatus-era souvenir, that went back to Folie, but we didn’t get that part of Folie.

The biographer also, annoyingly in my view, loses all interest in them at this point. He devotes almost no time to the post-hiatus era, which is fascinating to me, since their ability to launch a comeback as successfully and relevantly as they did is striking, and to do it not by relying on nostalgia but by generating genuinely new hits with a genuinely new audience, and he’s not interested in that at all. Even worse than not being interested in this is the fact that he fails to close the Folie loop, like, he devotes lots of time to Patrick coming to hate Folie because of how much the fans hated it. Then he makes a little note, like, “Maybe someday Patrick will come to love Folie again,” or something, and the thing is, I know the book was written a few years ago now, but there was definitely stuff available about how much Folie had become a fan favorite in the hiatus years. Patrick gave an interview somewhere where he talked about the reunion show and how he read fan reviews of it and the fans were like, “They should have played more songs from Folie!” I always think at that point And then Patrick looked into the camera like he’s on The Office. But, at any rate, Patrick got to see Folie become beloved and that loop could have been closed better and he just leaves it dangling. (I’m almost like, Did he really write most of this book while they were on hiatus and then when they came back he was like, …Goddamn it?)

He doesn’t at all get into the shock of the immediate level of success of their comeback, like, that’s another thing that’s documented, that they were unsure anyone would care and they were so startled by the response that they had to actually add larger venues onto their tour because they’d thought no one would want to come to their shows. He could have talked about how people waited hours outside in the Chicago cold to get into the comeback show, how they started the show with “Thriller” and Patrick says the response was electric and it must have been amazing and he’s just not really interested in it, you can tell that he’s bored. He doesn’t talk about how Patrick hadn’t really thought about having to perform the new songs live because he didn’t think anyone would really care about the new album, so they had to really think about how they were going to make it work, and how he almost permanently damaged his voice having to sing “Alone Together” live and that’s what finally finally drove him to pursue actual voice lessons, like, he mentions none of this, he’s just like, “They wrote Save Rock & Roll, and then they wrote American Beauty / American Pyscho.” He’s just clearly, at that point, bored. Whereas in the story I would tell, that is the most satisfying part, the happy ending beyond their wildest dreams.

Okay, omg, this is SO LONG, but here are some other random thoughts:

· He never – not once – goes back to source Pete’s lyrics to their original blog entries, which can be very interesting. This is because he’s not interested in the lyrics really, but it’s very frustrating to me because, like, SOMEBODY TAKE THESE LYRICS SERIOUSLY, PLEASE, THEY’RE SO GOOD. It also means that he misses things like “Miss Missing You” and the way it echoes Pete’s poem with the line “I miss you missing me,” like, that’s just a fact ::shrug:: He also says “Hum Hallelujah” is about teenage romance, and that is the most straightforward, surface-level reading, like, “Oh, it says ‘teenage vow in a parking lot,’ that’s what it’s about.” This pains me only because “Hum Hallelujah” might be the most perfect lyrically constructed song Fall Out Boy has, every line is golden and stuffed with meaning and emotion, and he’s just like, “teenage romance,” so dismissively, and I wince, like, “I could write it better than you ever felt it” is a line that deserves more than that. Not to mention “I love you in the same way there’s a chapel in a hospital,” god, or “One day we’ll get nostalgic for disaster,” ugh, do not read this book for lyrical analysis. He also terms the best lyrical line on Cork Tree as “To the ‘love’ I left my conscience pressed / Between the pages of the Bible in the drawer” and, while there’s nothing wrong with that line, I don’t even think that’s the best line in XO (I mean, leaving off the follow-up of “What did it ever do for me? I say” undercuts those lines immediately, imo). (He does at least point out that “Keep quiet, nothing comes as easy as you / Can I lay in your bed all day?” is a devastatingly sexy couplet.)

· Can I just say, the entire debacle with Hey Chris gets precious little time in this book, which in a way is fine but in a way is like, just by Googling I got way more information on what went down and the weird, weird words that were being flung back and forth (at one point the term “heterolifemates” is used which makes zero sense at all in this context), but this book does spend a lot of time with Chris and Pete pre-Patrick (fascinating, right???) and there’s this weird part where Chris says he hated Pete before he met him and is like, “He should wear pants that fit,” which is just…such an interesting reason to hate Pete Wentz, like, Idk, Chris, coupled with your heterolifemates thing and weird thing about “whose name do you say every night???” which is also weirdly sexual phrasing and also being like “no one knows how to break a heart like he does,” like, everything about this entire situation has so much queer subtext but the book doesn’t touch any of that, ever, in any circumstance, with a ten-foot pole.

· EVERYONE, THE BORDERS WHERE JOE AND PATRICK MEET IS LOCATED IN EDEN PLAZA AND I AM SO UPSET I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WHEN I WROTE THE DEVIL FIC.

· I did not know that the producer wanted them to change the “We’re falling apart to halftime” line in Dance, Dance because he thought it was too incomprehensible and I’m just like, That’s the lyric where you thought you were going to lose people??

· From the bio, describing the Live in Phoenix performance: a strange moment where Wentz inexplicably gets changed onstage. A strange moment? Inexplicably? Okay, like, germane to my telling of the story is how much those dick pics affected Pete Wentz’s public persona, how much he knew exactly what he was there to sell and he sold it with gusto, and how much of a spiral that ultimately sent him on. Instead, this biographer finds it inexplicable that Pete Wentz would take his shirt off onstage, and his analysis of the music video for “This Ain’t a Scene” gives the dick pic storyline only an offhand reference, calling it “making light” of the scandal, instead of really digging into the obvious pain there, like, that’s not a joyful lark there. (Later, much later, years later, Brendon Urie will manage to actually make light of the dick pic saga, both in the Drunk History and also in the joke of the dick pic being the photo that comes up when Pete calls him, as seen in the promos for the tour they did together, and that feels much more genuine. But that bit in “Arms Race” is kind of heartbreaking.)

· Pete says of their failed attempt to get the Guinness record of the first band to perform on all seven continents that it was the worst feeling he’d ever felt in Fall Out Boy, and the biographer is like, “Really, Pete? Really?” and I kind of want to shake him because Pete Wentz is obviously a dramatic person and he feels disappointments keenly and he made that statement literally just as they were finding out they wouldn’t be able to do it, like, of course it’s just hyperbole! The biographer is weird through that whole section of the book because he never once mentions that, as a consolation to Pete, Patrick stayed up all night with him so they could get the record of most interviews by a duo in a twenty-four-hour period, like, that’s what I would have said about that story instead of trying to get way more out of Pete’s off-the-cuff self-pity (which is just so Pete Wentz, it’s like this writer hasn’t just spend a hundred pages writing about him…).

· Whenever I read about how many songs Patrick shows up with when it’s time to record an album, I always feel this little twinge of solidarity with him, like, sometimes that’s just how it is in your chosen creative medium, you’re just always endlessly writing.

· I had never thought before about the fact that Pete says all the time that he was too selfish pre-hiatus, all the time, a lot, that’s how he describes his problem – and the fact that there’s an entire song on Truant Wave called ��Love, Selfish Love” with the line “God bless the sad and selfish” and I’m just going to…sit here and think about who in Patrick’s life could be described as sad and selfish.

· From the bio re: Soul Punk: It’s disarming to hear this garrulous boy-next-door sing so candidly about sex. Yeah, I don’t think you were paying attention to the way Patrick smirks at the camera in the music videos, buddy.

· Detail I knew but had never really thought about before: that Pete got Patrick to really click into songwriting with him again by giving him a puzzle. Patrick says that sometimes Pete gives him homework assignments, “I want a song that sounds like x, y, and z,” and Patrick will be like, “That’s impossible,” but also so intrigued that he ends up sitting and writing the thing. The fact that Pete knew, after a few mediocre songs neither of them liked, like, “You know how I snag him? This way,” is adorable. Also, the fact that it was Pete who adored the song to come out of it, “Where Did the Party Go?,” and that it was his excitement over the song that made Patrick think, Okay, maybe we can do this, like, it was Pete’s joy that drove Patrick’s optimism, they’re so creatively linked, these two.

· He does include the detail that Pete was worried he’d fallen behind during the hiatus because he didn’t spend much time playing music and so he committed himself to practicing and improving with metronome work, like, Pete Wentz ugh <3. In a very recent interview that I cannot blame the bio for not including, Pete said that Patrick helps him with the bass because he’s so musically talented and everything about that offhand statement just kills me.

· I did not know that one of the leaks of their reunion was on a blog that wrote “You can stop refreshing for a journal update,” and I’m in love with that, sorry.

· Ugh, can I just say, the fact that Patrick sang all of his vocals for Pax AM Days live with the band is just so unbelievable, he kills me.

· From the bio: “We were fireworks that went off too soon / And I miss you in the June gloom, too,” Stump sings here, and you can’t help but wonder if the words refer to his public but brief marriage. …I have indeed helped the wondering of that because I have never once thought that about this song lolololol

#long post #peterick #pete wentz #fall out boy #fob #bandom

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katierosefun · 4 years ago

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HI this is just out of curiosity; don’t feel obligated to answer, but do you ship obi-wan/anakin? some of your works seem to edge on that while still remaining gloriously platonic, so I’m just curious!! I’m indifferent either way btw; I was just wondering :)

hi anon!!! i appreciate the ask, and i don’t mind answering at all!! (although oops i kinda went on a mini essay here i’m really sorry)

so slight confession: i did kind of lowkey ship obi-wan and anakin as a 14/15 year old and onwards, mostly because i started out watching tcw and reading a lot of star wars books. so that said, i really do love them both platonically and otherwise because either way, i think their relationship is incredibly special. (and i think i do have a fic or two in which i note that ‘yeah idk this could be seen as platonic or romantic, because i love them both ways/don’t mind them either way’.)

that said, i wasn’t really aware of the opposite side of the obi-wan/anakin discourse until,,,really recently, and so that made me kinda balk a few times and feel really disconnected with the ship and also wonder ‘wait a minute,,,am i a terrible human being wait a second i didn’t even figure out that point until just now though oh no’. so that really kinda made me feel guilty and genuinely wonder oh my god wait a second if i’m shipping a person with his former teacher, then,,,oh my g od what yeah that’s kinda messed up isn’t it??? (why yes, you heard it here first folks! caroline acknowledges that uh maybe some aspects of this ship is,,,not something you want to replicate in real life???)

but also. also. i think i’ve hit a place--and i’ve kind of alluded this in some other asks about unpopular opinions/opinions about fandom in general, where i’m deciding to recognize that ships can really be something as simple as “i just think these two have an interesting dynamic” to “maybe i just project really, really, really hard onto character a and character b just happens to be my type”.

i’ll *also* say that i have friends whose parents are in loving relationships, and they started out as like,,,a professor and a student, although they didn’t date/get into a romantic relationship until years later. and one of my favorite teachers also wound up marrying his own student years and years later, which...i remember being a little confused by as a high school junior, but idk, they seem happy, and they have a son who they both adore, so ?? who am i to judge??

and i think those experiences/interactions i’ve had have made me a little less squicked out by things like age gaps and the whole ‘former teacher and former student’ dynamic. that being said, i’m not a fan of stuff about,,,padawan anakin and obi-wan because i think that’s when i get a little worried about power dynamics and stuff, but again, i started kinda shipping the two when i watched tcw without that much context about their actual past--i just kinda went ‘oh these two seem close’ and that was that. i think at the end of the day, simply put, anakin skywalker and obi-wan kenobi do love each other and do have a deep, deep bond, and that’s that.

as for my own writing, why awww, i super appreciate the term “gloriously platonic” because i guess i really do love deeply, deeply platonic relationships, and i 10000% am here for platonic love. i guess i do sometimes walk that fine line between “okay this is either deeply platonic or just lowkey shippy” and tbh, i blame this on the fact that i just really like writing platonic things + also a part of me lives in perpetual fear of being labeled a Bad, Disgusting Person for shipping obi-wan/anakin and yikes.

idk my own feelings about this ship is super complicated because on the one hand, i truly do love this potential pairing that has actual canon lines like “they knew each other better than lovers” and “two halves of a whole” and “despite it all, obi-wan still loved him” and “he would die for you, you know” and “working without anakin was like working half-blind” and “it’s okay, it’s okay, we’re okay, we’re okay” and “you never give up, do you? / “on you? never” and ahsoka actually referring obi-wan and anakin as her adopted parents and also the iconic “ah yes this looks like anakin’s butt”--and i really love this concept of just two people who have known each other for 10+ years and just kinda gotten to the point of memorizing each other’s voices and movements and gestures to the point that they literally can’t imagine life without the other, and i love all the platonic goodness that comes with that, but i’d be lying if i said i didn’t see some romantic appeal in that, too.

uhhhhh sorry for making this so long, anon, but i hope that clears things up!! (also am 100000% ready to discuss more of this over private chat because ya girl always can talk about this)

#anon #answered #whOO boy i didnt expect to write this much but here i am #uhhhhh pls dont put me on blast for this i am......trying my best to articulate my feelings!!!#and my own experiences!!!!!#that doesn't mean i hate one side or the other!!!!!!#im just vibing and trying to be respectful i promise

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dotthings · 5 years ago

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So on to Sam and Eileen, which connects to some bigger overall themes and plot points.

I had been pretty sure that Sam resurrecting Eileen would be a defiance of Chuck’s endgame plans. Taking people they love away fuels the drama Chuck loves, Sam getting Eileen back would be a defiance of that. But it turns out Chuck inveigled events. Made sure Sam found the spell, or even planted it himself. Nudged a little. Okay. But here’s the thing -- the ep definitely makes clear he was playing on feelings that were already there. Using them. Putting them through his rat maze, but not making them feel, he didn’t decide their actions or how’d they react to what he planted in their path. Chuck tells Sam he knew Sam would want to resurrect Eileen because he’s good. Chuck no doubt has noticed how Sam feels about Eileen. He played that to the hilt. He used Eileen to hurt Sam, using direct manipulation this time, knowing how it would hurt her to be forced to do that, knowing how it would hurt Sam.

Sam telling her it’s okay it’s okay over and over broke me. This is a fairly classic romantic trope--put the couple in danger, force one of them to harm the other, by the villain, and they don’t want to. Eileen’s anguish and Sam trying to comfort her over being forced to hurt him that’s a lot. This was a lot on my fledgling shippy feelings about this ship, where I don’t really ship anything real deeply on SPN except Destiel, and Saileen decided that was just too easy for me and here, have some more ship feelings, while spn laughs maniacally at my suffering.

That thematic point I’d projected about Dean doubting the very nature of his bond with Cas due to the existential nature of Chuck’s manipulations that didn’t actually materialize (textually at least, despite loud telegraphing), in fact manifested in Sam and Eileen. Where after the torture and Chuck’s reveals, Eileen is confused, and who can blame her, about what was real and what isn’t. How much was Chuck, how much was her and Sam’s feelings.

Saileen in fact takes textual something that I thought would play out with Dean and Cas. Given that Eileen is to Sam as Cas is to Dean is a note repeatedly his this season including in this ep itself...that’s interesting isn’t it.

In the earth 1 future scenario Chuck shows Sam, Dean and Cas, Sam and Eileen, are paired around the bunker table, and it’s going to be movie night. The whole thing screams double date. It’s one of those tacit Destiel nods because jfc people it’s right there, these are sister ships. See what they did there. But that’s not even the main point, the main point is we’re being shown this found family unit, of Sam and his love, and Dean and his whatever-you-want-to-define-Cas-as-love. Look pretty good, right? Oh but wait this isn’t a good path, because with Chuck gone the monsters are too powerful and this domestic bliss can’t last and things get dark and then they get darker.

Sam loses Eileen. Dean loses Cas. It’s spelled out right there in the canon, “ever since”--so y’know anyone left who has any doubts about these two relationships. Losing Eileen, losing Cas, most definitely a really bad thing that sends the Winchesters on their downward path to loss of all hope. It’s spelled out overtly by Dean in this scenario, they have lost everyone they ever loved and it’s their downfall. All hope is lost. Guess what, Sam and Dean need more than just each other.

In this earth 1 future where Chuck isn’t there to hold back monsters, Sam and Dean eventually become vampires and they fight their friends and kill their friends and are killed by friends.

Hooray, Sam and Dean, immortal serial killers together! Even vampire Dean is still protective of vampire Sam. Are you not entertained? Is this not the brothers together, eternally? All hope lost and it’s really horrible but hey, SamnDean 5 ever!

Then there’s the info drop that turns out after all those visions of Sam weren’t Chuck’s planned endings but AU’s. Which a lot of us thought they were, and now we know for sure. In those AU’s, Sam and Dean play out horrific ending scenarios on earths 2, 3, 4 etc where specifically, in earth 1, Cas was there to avert. Interesting, isn’t it.

In the earth 1 future, they lose Eileen, they lose Cas.

And look what happens.

I don’t trust Chuck one little bit, btw, and this could be more manipulations. Chuck’s speech to Sam about how he cares about Sam and Dean, oh shut up Chuck you’re full of crap.

But do we trust Sam’s instincts, and Dean’s? Sam couldn’t bring himself to smash the ball to imprison Chuck. Chuck showed Sam that horrific scenario where the monsters overran the planet and Sam and Dean lost because Chuck is the thing holding them back so that Sam wouldn’t smash the ball. What if Sam was right though. Dean is on board. He gets it. There are costs too high. They have to find another way.

For now I suppose we take at face value that despite being a villain, Chuck is necessary to keeping earth 1 from imploding due to monster overpopulation. I’m curious how this will play out.

The main point being that the undesirable outcomes on each world is Sam and Dean dead, one kills the other, or they turn into monsters. There are infinite possibilities of horrific outcomes on these AU’s. Try not to think about it too hard. The common theme: they lose those they love and lose all hope. To avert that, they need the people they love not just each other.

What if this experiment and creations of Chuck’s, these worlds, has gone wrong out of his control? What if the monsters have gone haywire on every world, and now he’s standing there with his finger in the dyke holding back the flood. But he’s too damn arrogant to just ask for help, of Amara or of Team Free Will. No, he’s gotta manipulate and be cruel, getting off on the suffering of his faves. He wanted entertainment. Are you not entertained, Chuck? Oops look like your terrariums got overrun by monsters and it’s out of control without you, now what do you do.

Which brings me to Jack and Billie and “it’s time” and now here’s an idea, if Chuck is the cruel God holding back the monsters, and that’s just not sustainable, he has to go, but how. How to remove him without letting the monsters take over. Maybe...a friendly nephilim? With godlike powers? Can step in and clean up the mess of Chuck’s worlds, keep the monsters from overrunning the entire planet if Chuck isn’t there?

Back to Sam and Eileen, so while Chuck was inveigling the plot for her resurrection, the feelings are all them and I loved that kiss so so much. Eileen doubting what feelings are real or not and Sam is just determined to show her how real he is, how real they are. This is real. Hm, seems to be someone else said that to someone else earlier this season...the pairing that doesn’t have the overt signal of a kissing scene but we know what Dean and Cas are to each other anyway.

Also...Eileen gets to walk away from this. Not unscathed. She needs some time to process. She doesn’t get killed or snapped. She’s still on the board, she’s out there...and there’s hope she can come back to Sam.

Wait before I go another Destiel parallel...Cas had to leave for a time too. Different motivations but...hey if canon would stop so obviously paralleling these two ships I would’t have to keep talking about that in meta posts would I? Neither of these ships exist as a parallel for the other, but they are nonetheless being placed side by side in canon so we keep looking at them side by side. That’s not fandom. That’s what canon’s doing.

Ep 9 showed me again this theme that Sam and Dean don’t just need each other and losing those they love is a really incredibly bad thing. Can’t just be them against the world. It isn’t sustainable for them. SPN can’t get any more obvious about that point. I’m not sure what’s going to happen but that is the message S15 has been giving me again an again.

#Sam Winchester #Eileen Leahy #Saileen #spn #supernatural #Chuck Shurley #Destiel #meta #the destiel parallels are inescapable that's how canon's framing things #but this is mostly about Saileen and Chuck and the overall themes of the season #supernatural spoilers #saileen meta

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bookworm555 · 5 years ago

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Sketchdump time! This time for @ironbiohazard03‘s fic ‘A Menagerie of Imagination’ (posted both on FFN and Ao3 under that username).

The four characters on the left are her OCs. (Fun fact: each of the four has a dessert-themed name.) Rocky is my fave, XD

Mike and Violet are an established couple in the fic, so I drew a shippy doodle (not very good, though; I find it incredibly difficult to draw shippy stuff, whoops). In the fic, they, and the OCs, are in college. (Unfortunately, Rocky turned out looking more like an older version of Mike than the actual Mike doodle? Oops X’D)

After all those drawings, I realized I still had space on the canvas, so I quickly doodled the two movie incarnations of both Mike and Violet.

Note on designs: The fic basically mashes up the character traits from both the 1971 and 2005 movies, but uses the 1971 designs, in terms of hair and eye colors. (It’s also set in 2007, which means that Mike, Violet, and co. went on the factory tour in 1998) By the time the story starts, the two of them look relatively normal due to medical treatments and such, but they still have some side effects from what happened to them. (Which is why Violet isn’t blue here, and why Mike isn’t paper thin/super tall.)

#bookworm555 #charlie and the chocolate factory #willy wonka and the chocolate factory #violet beauregarde #mike x violet #do they have a ship name? if so idk what it is whoops #my art #friend's ocs #hopefully you like this ironbiohazard03 #i had so much fun drawing your OCs! :D #mike teavee

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margretmarrymo · 5 years ago

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Day 3: Hot Chocolate

For @mlrarepairmonth

Pairing: Sabrina and Kagami, also some Chloe and Adrien

I don't think I've seen anything with Sabrina and Kagami together or being friends. This one is more of friend fic, because I have lots of feelings about both of them and they both deserve more friends. I actually really like them together as friends or otherwise so I might write something shippy about them later!

---

"Aren't I just amazing, Adrikins!" Chloe squealed as she twirled in her skates towards him. Sabrina watched from across the rink as her best friend, unable to stop, came crashing into the blond boy with the unfortunate nickname. Sabrina shook her head with a chuckle and continued to skate peacefully.

"Uh, yeah Chloe, you're doing great," Adrien responded, pushing her away slightly. She smiled up at him expectantly "Maybe you should take it a little slower though, Like Kagami."

Chloe scowled as she watched the girl glide past them elegantly, her eyes closed and mouth in a delicate smile. Why did she have to come? Chloe wondered, of course she knew why. It was the only way he could convince Adrien to skip fencing to begin with.

"You're right, Adrikins! Let's skate together, slowly," She responded, dragging him away.

Kagami frowned at the two of them, she barely knew Chloe as it was and wasn't too keen to change that. But she didn't know Sabrina at all, she seemed nice enough but it was hard making friends without the help of Adrien, who was a little busy at the moment.

"You thought going skating would mean you'd be spending time with Adrien, didn't you?" Sabrina said, skating up behind Kagami who was still lost in thought staring at Adrien and Chloe.

"What? No. I enjoy skating well enough on my own," Kagami said, she was used to skating on her own. Considering her mother rented out the finest rink for her lessons growing up. Sabrina placed a hand on Kagami's shoulder gently, causing Kagami to tense at the unfamiliar feeling.

"Its okay, I didn't mean it in a rude way. I've gotten used to Chloe, it's always like this when she's around Adrien," She sighed looking over at her best friend who was currently holding Adriens arm as they skated. "She isn't always like this, when it's just her and I we do have fun together but I know it's hard for her to get free time with Adrien because of his father. So I'm just happy to be invited along."

Kagami nodded and turned the redheaded girl.

"You seem to be very understanding, that's a good quality in a friend," She said. Sabrina smiled and grabbed her by the hand dragging her into the middle of the skating rink before spinning with her in a circle, laughing.

"Thanks, I love Chloe, but it's hard to make friends with everyone else in school because they don't really like her," Kagami smiled, she knew the feeling of being lonely all too well.

"I don't have many opportunities to, similarly to Adrien, because of my mother. But, I'd be honoured if you consider me your friend," Sabrina smiled and pulled Kagami into a tight hug. Her breath hitched, she wasn't used to physical contact.

"You know, Chloe will probably keep Adrien so busy that they wouldn't even realized if we left," Sabrina said with a sneaky smile. Kagami matched her expression with a curious one.

"What did you have in mind?" She asked, Sabrina lead them towards the exit, then turned to Kagami.

"Well, there's this incredible Cafe nearby, it doesn't serve Chloe's favourite tea so she never lets us go there. But they have the best hot chocolate!" Kagami's eyes lit up, she stepped out onto the rinks walkway and sat down on a nearby bench to remove her skates.

"Let's go!" She said once they were removed.

The two walked down the road, only a short distance to the cafe. It was a cold January day and once they arrived they were grateful for the warmth inside the building.

"And what can I get for the two of you today?" A young woman asked at the till. Sabrina looked up at the menu behind her.

"Well have two hot chocolates with extra whipped cream, and two banana chips muffins. If that's okay with you Kagami," She said turning to the girl next to her. Sabrina was so used to ordering for Chloe and herself while Chloe sat down that she forgot she was still standing next to her.

"That sounds good," Kagami said with a smile. The woman nodded and typed in there order.

While they waited Kagami looked around at the room. It was filled with art and photography, and on one side there was a small rack of natural fine clothing for sale. The cafe was fairly packed but not loud. Most were typing away on laptops, University students getting their homework done. Others were engaging in quite conversation. A vaguely familiar song played quietly.

"This place seems nice," Kagami said, " Thank you, for taking me here,"

"Thanks for coming! I love it here but I don't come often. They frequently change out the art too, featuring different local artist and it's all for sale." Just then they were given their drinks and food, so they headed towards an open table. "It always inspires me to see all the different art."

"Do you paint?" Kagami asked breaking off a piece of her Muffin and popping it in her mouth, it was delicious. Sabrina shook her head.

"No, I do like photography though, I just take photos with my phone, nothing special, but I'd like to get a good camera some day," Just then she took a sip of her hot chocolate, sticking her nose right in the whipped cream without noticing. "Have you tried the hot chocolate yet? It's incredible."

Kagami giggled, something she didn't often do and Sabrina looked at her curiously. Then she touched her upper lip and noticed the whipped cream, letting out a chuckle.

Kagami quickly took a sip of hers, getting her own cream mustache. The two giggled gleefully, until they realized the glares some of the other were giving them for causing a commotion.

"Oops," Sabrina said still laughing quietly. She grabbed a napkin and wiped off the cream, Kagami did the same, smug but slightly embarrassed.

#Sabrina and Kagami #sabrina raincomprix #kagami tsuguri #Sabrina x Kagami #Chloe and Adrien #Sabrina & Kagami #Chloe & Adrien #Chloe x Adrien #not really tho #Kabrina #???#idk if they have a ship name #miraculous ladybug #rarepairmonth2020 #miraculous ladybug and chatnoir

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rapha-reads · 5 years ago

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Wasn't tagged but @postmodernmulticoloredcloak opened up the tag game to every Tumblr citizen and I am hella bored so here I am.

Rules : tag 9 people you’d like to get to know better

Top 3 ships : I'm not in a shippy mood lately, more in a found family one (hello Batfam), but as usual the Merthur feels are here, I'm back on my Stormpilot (FinnPoe), or General Husbands as I call them now, BS, and I am in love with Geralt x Yennefer's love story.

Last movie : my first memory was of Birds of Prey, but then I remembered that Netflix is getting all of Ghibli movies, so the last movie I watched is Tales from Earthsea, and I really need to get Urusula K Le Guin’s books, because I love this story. And yes, icydnk, Tales from Earthsea is loosely adapted from a series of books by none other than Madam Le Guin, The Earthsea Cycle.

Reading : ha. The million euros question. I read all of The Witcher back in January. Right now I’m reading Gaël Faye’s first novel Petit Pays (Small Country) and I really recommend reading it and listening to all of Gaël Faye’s songs, he’s incredibly awesome and (for me) relatable. I also have something like ... thirty novels started ... but left aside ... Oops. My attention span is not what it used to be.

What food are you craving right now : PIZZA but obviously can’t get it right now ...

Tagging : everyone who wants to play, and in particular @annie-thyme @ruby-red-inky-blue @havocinthebluebox @dollopheadsandclotpoles @tinyrubywolf and @schweetheart.

#please don't hesitate to tag me in games i am getting very bored and antsy and i need mindless occupations #tag game #tumblr tag game #rapha talks #know the blogger

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dangermousie · 5 years ago

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Fair warning - I am gonna restart Siege in Fog and prepare for binge posts.

People who have been asking me for angsty, shippy, dysfunctional period recs - this one is for you!

Adapted from a novel written by the same author who wrote the novel on which Too Late To Say I Love You (which also centers around a dysfunctional romance with a member of a warlord clan in the 1930s - lady knows her niche), was based, our heroine is a sweet, naive daughter of an upper class family who loves a seemingly equally sweet young man. Oops! Her daddy marries her off into a warlord family for political connections. Oops, her new husband is obsessed with her but refuses to show it due to pride! A more modern woman would decide that if one’s lawfully ordained bed partner looks like Elvis Han, it’s a sin against providence not to take advantage of the fact and have a societally sanctioned bangathon, feelings be damned, but unfortunately, our heroine is a more old-fashioned and sensitive woman than yours truly. Angst and dysfunction ensue.

Like, TLTSILY, it features a hero incredibly obsessed with the heroine, burning hot men, stylish outfits, violence, heroine’s slow realization that her initial first love is inferior to her current prospect, dysfunction, angst, and sex in the weirdest places (guess you can’t be too picky in the middle of a civil war.) If you want a happy ending, you should probably stick with TLTSILY (which changed the novel’s ending in the way I approve of.)

The novelist seems to specialize in dysfunctional relationships - she also wrote Goodbye My Princess, which I started and like so far but promises to be a rocks fall everyone dies situation.

She has also wrote the appalling Sealed With a Kiss, which I loathed (though if you are a fan of old-school lakorns like Defendant of Love, it may be for you) so I think her brand of love stories just work better in a period setting.

SiF is fully subbed on viki, btw.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this:

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If you do not think losing your maidenhood to your husband after two years of marriage in a bedraggled hut while on the run from the military shooting to kill and with your hands still covered in his blood is a splendid narrative occurrence that gives glee and joy by its very existence, I am not sure we can be friends.

#siege in fog #cdrama

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dontcallmecarrie · 6 years ago

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By Myself But Not Alone

Another day, another test, another fic-idea-that-won’t-leave-me-alone. Specifically: time-travel fixits are really fun to see, but there’s a few takes on it that’ve stuck with me throughout the years, across fandoms. Even more specifically: ones where it’s not just one person waking up in the past, but several, and not always in the same place. Add in my weird mood where anything I touch turns to not-crack, plus glimpsing some Infinity Wars spoilers despite not being caught up, and ta-da! [Aka oops, I did it again.]

Heads up for quite a bit of angst, possible shippiness [depends on the version], and unapologetic canon-dropped-the-ball-on-Tony stance. Title from Metallica’s ‘Wherever I May Roam’.

So, AU where, for whatever reason, people in the MCU after a certain point wake up in the past.

Kicker being, it’s pretty damn scattershot from there; Steve’s memories kick in when he first sees Times Square after waking up from the ice, Natasha’s mid-mission somewhere in Bangladesh when she realizes some of her fellow operatives are probably. HYDRA and she can’t do a thing about it, Thor’s just seen his brother fall from the Bifrost and he’s alarming his parents because he’s acting even stranger than usual in his grief. Bucky wakes up after falling from the train, sees where he is, and goes “oh hells no” and promptly fucking off to Wakanda because even if they’re mistrustful of outsiders and will be for decades, between what he’s managed to pick up on the language, and his skills, there’s probably something he can do to help out, right? [Between long naps, anyway...or maybe he just goes full-on ninja instead, idk] Fury’s mid-conversation with Maria Hill in HQ when they both go “oh fuck what year is it” and the list just goes on.

At first, everyone’s assuming they’re the only ones who traveled back, and they set out to fix things even as they’re reeling because hello, old friend who I haven’t seen in years since your painful death, how are you?

The more time goes on, though, the more everyone realizes they’re not the only ones running around, and the fact that people’re arriving at different points in time means it is a headache. Was AIM running around this early, last time? When the fuck was the Winter Soldier a mercenary and not the fist of HYDRA? What do you mean he’s infamous for his bodyguarding contracts and not assassinations?! Wait, you mean Howard Stark’s still alive?

On the plus side, after a while they realize the time travel thing’s not a one-off. The more time passes, the more people start to remember. [They’ve got a support group going by the time Steve remembers.]

Cue tearful reunions, feat. “oh god I didn’t think I was going to see you again” and “oh thank fuck I’m not the only one”. Everyone who remembers starts to put their heads together, sorting out their timeline to fix things without tripping over each other, to figure out what they can and can’t fix.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though; Bucky punched Steve after the ‘yeah, I didn’t tell Tony about who actually killed his parents thing’ after it comes up, and he’s not the only one judging him hard afterwards and he resolves to fix it because he really is sorry. But hey, this is a whole new world, one where SHIELD never got corrupted, where the Winter Soldier is just a handle Bucky uses instead of decades’ worth of HYDRA conditioning. In many ways, it’s almost a vacation; seeing and reconnecting with loved ones, especially given the clusterfuck that happened in their original timeline.

...however. This is a whole new world, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Like, sure, there’s quite a few things that’re better here, but.

Thanos is still coming, and due to the butterfly effect, there’s a whole slew of new guys that hadn’t come up in their timeline, like MODOK, like Crimson Widow, grad students they should keep an eye on because this Richards kid was going places and so was his friend, Victor von-something. Stark Industries is still selling weapons by the bucketload, since Howard Stark’s an unapologetic war hawk, has been since the Manhattan Project. But the biggest problem?

It’s 2008, and Tony Stark has yet to make an appearance. Not in a way that matters, at least, to the people who remember him from another life.

———————

okay, from here I can see this going several ways:

[under the cut because this got long and RIP mobile users otherwise]

the super-angsty break-it-even-more version:

Warning: this one’s got suicidal thoughts leading to Major Character Death. Also, vaguely shippy, with possible Stephen/Tony.

Tony’s last coherent memories are of the bomb with his name on it, when it hits. Suddenly, it’s not just his past flashing before his eyes, but his future as well—years’ worth of memories, of trauma after trauma with next to no support whatsoever because the world did its best to break him—and...in that instant, he’s tired.

He’s so, so tired, and he sees the road ahead and the idea of having to do that all over again is just. Too much. He knows the agony that follows, and knows that he was lucky to have survived a bomb to the chest last [this?] time, and...even if he’s terrified at the prospect of Thanos coming, he just. Can’t.

He can’t, anymore, he’d barely managed to pull through last time, asking him to do it all over again was too much—and, seeing the bomb with his literal name on it, Tony sees an out.

The world’s better off without him in it, anyway.

—

Everyone is shocked and dismayed, when the reports come in. Tony Stark never came back from Afghanistan, and there is a lot of grief to go around, in the time that follows. The world mourns a prodigy; the people that remember Iron Man, remember Tony, mourn a good man who they never really had the chance to meet.

Fury in particular’s very, very quiet, after hearing the reports come in; he’s lost good people before, but...he’d seen Tony grow up, what with him being the kid of one of the founders of SHIELD and all. He’d seen the potential, seen it realized, seen just what kind of force for good he was—so when he hears the reports come in, he feels every single one of his years weigh down on him in a way they hadn’t before. It takes slightly longer than normal, pull himself together, to focus on how this latest development’d affect things now that they were minus a heavy hitter [in more ways than one].

Steve, meanwhile, is inconsolable. He’d had his regrets, had been working on fixing them, and one the biggest ones had been with Tony. He’d never had the chance to set the record straight, never had the chance to apologize—and now, he never will.

Tony’s loss ia a huge blow, to those who remember Iron Man.

Especially the more time goes on, and the impact of what could have done are felt: it’s in the scandal that erupts, when the VP of Stark Industries is caught double-dealing, it’s in the incredibly tense sociopolitical climate that follows because even if they’ve done their best to fix things, nobody’s around to privatize world peace. It’s in the recklessness the new Spider-Man’s actions, after Peter remembers—pushing himself so, so hard, trying to save everyone the same way his mentor once had him.

...it’s also in the questions everyone has, after Thanos rocks up and apart from the Avengers, there’s a goddamn robot army flying out to wage war because apparently Tony’s AI were a bit more Skynet than anyone had expected. Or, actually, no—more sentient than expected, and wasn’t that a kick in pants, that JARVIS remembered not only his but Vision’s experiences as well, after hearing about Tony’s death?

wait, no. Too angsty, here, have a fixit.

Dr. Stephen Strange wakes up right after his first fight with the followers of Dormammu, and the Ancient One and Mordo are more than slightly worried when he looks like he’s about to cry when he sees them afterwards. Even more worried, once they check for magic, and the following conversation gives them all a migraine because they’re still not quite sure what sent him back in time, and that the Eye of Agamotto seems to have taken a liking to him only complicates things even further.

When he hears of Tony’s death, well...he doesn’t take it well. Specifically, after finding out he’s not the only one who remembers Tony from a different world, there’s a bit of yelling, and him storming out afterwards in grief.

To sum up: his emotional state after getting wind of it’s more volatile than anything else, which, as it turns out, makes for some interesting results when you’re the Time Stone’s favorite person.

Specifically, Stephen opened a portal intending to go the Sanctum to mourn in privacy, how the fuck he ended up in the middle of a desert, he doesn’t know. How the fuck he ended up right by the same outcropping as Tony did the moment the bomb landed not ten feet from them, he doesn’t know but isn’t about to question. He just sees Tony’s face—fear shifting to shock shifting to remembering shifting to despair—realizes what’s about to happen, and grabs Tony as he immediately makes a portal back to the Sanctum.

Cue even more headaches. The Ancient One, Mordo, and Wong are not amused by how fast and loose they’ve been messing with the timestream, and that the Eye is showing blatant favoritism doesn’t help. At all.

On the plus side, they’re also able to table that in favor of helping the shell-shocked guy who’s like a breeze from having a nervous breakdown. Cue therapy. Lots of therapy. Also, the ‘oops we accidentally faked your death’ reveal, what with the time travel thing, which then leads to some reunions because Tony could go a lifetime without seeing Steve again but he hasn’t heard JARVIS in years.

...is this a shatterpoint of a fic idea? Can’t tell anymore.

The more-bittersweet-than-anything-else version:

also slightly shippy, only it’s Steve/Tony here instead.

Everyone remembers. Everyone, but Tony.

They keep as close an eye on him as they can, given that JARVIS’ pretty paranoid about hacking and they’d have to go through Pepper to actually see. him. But they manage, even if it’s pretty tricky before Afghanistan.

Fury’s the most straightforward; he’s shameless about using his connections to get an excuse to see how Tony’s doing, and Tony remembers seeing him around the mansion with Howard as a kid often enough to let it slide. [Especially since SHIELD’s also buying quite a few guns for their personnel, there’s that, too.]

After Afghanistan, the rest of them start to trickle in, similar to canon.

Here, however, the dynamics are a lot kinder, a lot less terse. No thinly-veiled threats, no blackmail; when Tony returns after his ‘I Am Iron Man’ press conference, it’s because JARVIS remembers and Fury managed to convince him that he’s genuinely trying to do better this tine. Howard’s notes and old stuff get shipped over as soon as Phil Coulson can come with an excuse for it, because palladium poisoning is just...no.

...you get the idea. Canon ensues, and Tony’s doing his thing, kicking ass, taking names, and trying to make the world a better place. Except here, everyone who remembers is seeing him in a way they hadn’t really, before, and treating him differently because of it.

Tony picks up on it pretty fast—kinda hard not to, considering everything. There’s an element of regret he sees some people, sometimes, but he doesn’t know why and it is baffling. Not only that, but...it’s almost like they know him? Almost like they can see pasts his masks? Weird.

Meanwhile everyone else’s low-key expecting Tony to remember any day no, but no dice. Kind of a bummer. Oh, sure, Pepper and Rhodey’ll give him all the hugs regardless, but still. Also, Steve wants to get some things off his. chest, and this Tony’s both so similar and so different to his, it’s almost painful.

Time goes on, canon ensues, only this time, a lot of missed opportunities are taken.

Bruce sees the way Tony tentatively reaches out and listens, Steve calls him when he gives him his number, Thor returns earlier, and the list just goes on. [...aka all the self-indulgence. All of it.] There’s a lot of impromptu hugs that Tony’s still very confused by, and strange looks, but...these people care, for some reason. It’s weird, but...he likes it.

More and more people show up, and it’s the same thing: he clicks with Strange almost as fast as he did with Bruce, although Peter’s hero-worship is still something that takes a while to get used to.

Even if he sometimes feels like they’re seeing someone else when they look at him, but that can’t be right, can it? Well, fortunately that feeling goes away after a while, but still. It was weird while it lasted.

Tony doesn't remember because of Reasons. Maybe he repressed said memories because of the trauma, maybe that part of him was just too tired to make the trip, idk, you decide.

#3 am musings #behind the scenes #fic ideas #fic idea #My fic #By Myself But Not Alone #my brain did a thing #gdi brain #naught rambles

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howlingmoonrise · 6 years ago

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Dear Yuletide Author

thank you for signing up for yuletide, i hope you have fun!

i’ve put all my letters in one place so you don’t have to juggle links around, feel free to send me an anon (is that allowed?) if you’re in doubt as to whether i’d like a certain trope or not! (and so sorry about all the ranting oops)

things i like in general:

pining. TONS of pining. ALL the pining! i have a lot more fun reading about idiots in love that aren’t together yet than if they’re already in an established relationship

i’m good with either gen or romance if you’re not comfortable with shippy stuff! what really works for me is the relationship itself, platonic or not, the development of it, and the interactions/feelings regarding the other. when it comes to the characters i’ve picked, for me it makes sense for them to develop trust and fondness/affection for the other before they get into any sort of relationship so gen is all good!

i’m veeeeeery fond of enemies/rivals-to-friends-to-lovers, and bickering pairs overall (as you can see by all my choices in characters lmfao) since they’re so much fun and provide such an opportunity for character and relationship development :D

continuing from above, nothing kills me as much as characters that bicker all the time but in the end they rely on the other and go to each other before they go to anyone else

conceptual AUs are fine! by this i mean stuff like soulmate AUs, AUs where they met differently from canon, i’m-your-next-door-neighbour-and-i-had-to-break-into-your-flat-to-get-my-cat-back AUs, canon divergence, that kind of thing - AUs like that are super fun!

fun tropes (sorry, these are a bit romance-heavy): fake dating, “accidentally got roped into x thing and shenanigans are happening”, What Do You Mean We’re Not Dating?, “oh no there’s only one bed”, misunderstood confessions, trope subversion in general is also GREAT

i REALLY like the canon and characters for all the fandoms i picked, so sticking at least to their characterisations and the overall “tone” of canon are a huge plus!! “missing scenes” and “what if” canon-divergent situations are excellent but like i said, i also like conceptual AUs so don’t be afraid to mix up the scenario a bit if you enjoy it, because i do too!

things i don’t like a lot in general:

kidfics. unless it’s petshop of horrors - where Chris and the pets are an exception - next gen and stuff are a pass for me

far into the future fics in general, actually - what really does it for me is the development, so if we skip ahead to much later on i feel like we end up missing it all

i usually don’t like most angst stuff since it feels a bit gratuitous to me when it comes to most fandoms and characters. the one exception for this is psoh (see below if you’re picking this fandom) or when it’s introspection fic. as a result of this, i’d pass on most content with major character death, sexual abuse, self-harm, the like, though of course there are always exceptions to the rule and you’re free to write as you wish!

hard AUs are a bit ehhh to me - by this i mean world-heavy stuff like harry potter AUs, where the focus ends up more on the setting than the characters more often than not. i’d also pass on high school AUs (gsnk being the obvious exception) and ABO.

i heavily dislike things involving cheating/infidelity, and genderbending is a bit ehhhh for me

script-based or roleplay fic is not really my preferred format, i really enjoy prose instead of nearly all dialogue!

if you’re going for nsfw:

kinks: moderate sadism/masochism, bondage, choking/breathplay, xenophilia and tentacles (which only make sense here for like... 1.5 fandoms lmfao), moderate degradation, edging

squicks: scat, vomit, praise kink, daddy or baby kink, vore, forced feminization, pet play, gore

PETSHOP OF HORRORS

i’m usually not partial to angst AT ALL but psoh is the one fandom where i don’t mind it if you wanna go ahead - psoh is RIPE for angst. we got two people with abandonment and inadequacy issues: leon who decided to leave his whole life behind to chase someone who gave him life and left him after thinking that he didn’t care for him at all, and d who is supremely fucked up by his upbringing and had to push leon off the ark to continue his family’s mission and let drop one (1) single tear that he was not supposed to cry over a human.

THAT BEING SAID, i also!!!! love slice of life shit for them!!!!!!!! GODS i love how much they bicker but then they turn around and the other is the person they rely on the most and who they trust above all others and how they keep roping each other into ridiculous shenanigans. neither of them are particularly communicative with a few rare exceptions, so there’s also a lot of room for introspection there on both sides, which i LOVE. my son leon in particular is also super underestimated when it comes to his intelligence and tolerance for gay shit both in canon and fandom, and he performs ridiculous leaps of logic and instinct that somehow turn out to be right but that are super ???? for everyone else involved, and that’s always fun to see. hell, just another missing scene where leon brings d some cake and they banter fondly over tea is A++++ to me!!

nsfw???? bring it!!! this is the fandom amongst these three where you’re free to go super dark and kinky if you wanna, or if you wanna write tender loving reunion sex where d cries a little while leon cherishes every bit of him that’s also excellent!

psoh is the most excellent genre triangle where i’d be super happy to receive anything on the slice-of-life/angst/smut corners! (also, slash is 3249823% acceptable if you couldn’t tell by my ranting)

GEKKAN SHOUJO NOZAKI-KUN

yuzuki seo is my absolute favourite character on the series and i love her and how ridiculous she is! waka is also gr9, and i really love that little sadist streak he has going like when he kept teasing seo with his “confessions”, that was probably one of my favourite chapters!

for gnsk either canon-verse or a conceptual AU would be excellent - if you’re going AU, i’m very fond of those where seo is a siren/mermaid and possibly man-eating (because those are the best kind amirite??) canon-wise i LOVE their interactions and how waka keeps accidentally getting taken on lowkey dates while resolutely defending they’re not even friends and even more accidentally retributing those with thoughtful gifts and the like haha

another thing i love is when waka is capable of looking past appearances to see seo, like in the chapter where they gave her the “lorelei” makeover and no one recognized her but him. i also love how stupidly happy seo is whenever she sees waka, it’s so cute!!

HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE

the thing i like the most in hmc are the characters’ flaws! i love the ghibli movie, don’t get me wrong, but they took away the bits i liked the most - sophie’s stubbornness and nosiness and temper and howl’s cowardice and vanity and his silver-tongue whenever he tries to slither around sophie, and all their banter and arguing.

there’s nothing quite like their stupid arguments where sophie pretends she didn’t mess around with things she shouldn’t and howl is torn between being amused and exasperated at her expense - even better if he’s trying to do something good sneakily behind her back so he won’t be accused of being a good person before he finds another excuse to justify it.

for this fandom i’d really prefer it if it were from anywhere from the beginning of the first book to before their marriage (i haven’t read the sequels and prefer non-established relationship anyway), but a conceptual AU would also be pretty nice! hmc in particular is very good for trope subverting, which i’m extremely fond of! for example, take a soulmate AU with the first words written on the skin thing: we could mess it up a bit since calcifer was in possession of howl’s heart and as such his first words would be on sophie instead of howl’s - cue shenanigans while sophie wonders how someone can have a soulmate bond with a sentient fire with no words of his own, howl panics internally about sophie not returning his mark, and so on!

another thing i love about the book is the writing style and that incredible sense of humour in the writing, so something lighthearted and in the spirit of canon would be great!

#howl rambles a lot #yuletide #yuletide 2018 #dear yuletide author

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domesticfluffsimulator · 7 years ago

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Whoops! Didn’t see @dragongem777 had sent me the request ask on my main blog~ there is the proper post!

Pairing: Gladio/Ignis Wordcount: 979 Rating: Gen Warnings: this is more angsty than shippy, oops? But it’s hinting at it so…

the starters post can be found here (requests are still accepted but might arrive slowly)

This one was for 130 - “Run!”

Gladio didn’t wait for Ignis to actually react and locked his hand around his biceps, dragging him behind as he broke into a sprint. The dead weight of his friend threatened to make them both fall down at first, but Ignis quickly caught up the pace and freed himself of Gladio’s grip, rectifying their balance in the meantime. Their camp was close - Gladio almost pushed Ignis inside the sanctuary when the blue light of the fire appeared in his sight.

Ignis fell on the rocks, out of breath.

The giant snake behind them hissed.

“What were you doing!” Gladio exploded. “You can’t just stop in the middle of a fight! This thing was going to eat you alive!”

Ignis raised his head up to meet Gladio’s eyes but didn’t say anything. His mouth was hanging open, his breath short. He wasn’t seeing him either, kept glancing all around with the sort of expression Gladio had seen on him a few times already - distracted, lost in his own thoughts spiralling out of control.

This was precisely to solve this problem that he was accompanying Ignis on this trip outside the wall - this part of the region of Cavaugh was free of Niflheim’s troops and should have been a good training spot if Ignis had not found himself suddenly fascinated by the forest and decided to explore further, only to get stuck at the worst moment.

“Ignis,” Gladio called, swallowing his own frustration and kneeling in front of the other. “Stop doing this. We’re safe now. We’re at the camp. You hear me? Come back to the mortal realm now.”

Ignis blinked a few times and Gladio could see his face twist as he tried to stop the current of his thoughts. It felt almost painful, to see him mentally slap himself out of his panic, and Gladio slowly took his hand to put it on his wrist, where he could feel his heartbeat; give Ignis some grounding.

Slowly, the young man leaned and breathed deeply into Gladio’s neck.

“Feeling better?” Gladio asked when his breathing sounded calmer.

“I had it…” Ignis sat back up, frowning at Gladio as if he was responsible for every wrong in the universe. “I know what specie it is. There’s a weak spot behind the poison glands… I could have… with just more time…”

“You didn’t have more time, Iggy - we talked about this. In the wilderness, or anywhere, you can’t just expect the world to stop turning while you think of a strategy.”

“I didnt—”

“You did. You almost got killed because you were trying to imagine some incredible plan or whatever.”

Ignis bit his lips, still frowning.

“Yes. Alright. I’m sorry. I need to think faster.”

“No! That’s not what I mean!”

Gladio couldn’t help the exasperated scream. He was here for three days with this infuriating caricature of a human being, more machine than human, and the remaining feeling of his impending death made it unbearable. Inside the four walls of the citadel, the coldness of the gaze Ignis Scientia put on everything had seemed beautiful - sort of attractive even. Ignis navigated inside his environment like he owned it. But in the forest, Gladio had seen him freeze in place too often, desperately trying to make sense of signals he could not understand and taking any danger as a personal offense that needed to be challenged.

“You don’t need to think at all,” he growled to a confused Ignis. “You need to stop thinking so much. If there’s no obvious solution, you just get out as fast as you can. You don’t try to guess.”

Ignis looked at him like he was suddenly mad. He even went as far as escaping a surprised laugh.

“I can’t stop thinking, Gladiolus.”

“I’m not asking you to completely stop thinking, but you know what I mean–”

“No— I got it. But I still can’t. It’s not something I just turn off - it’s always there whether you, or I, like it or not. If I really need to be faster in battle then I need to learn more about the field and the enemy and the tactical aspects so I can conjure information and imagine strategies faster, and that is why we should be focusing on instead of…”

“You’re doing it again.”

“I am telling you, Gladiolus, I can’t stop!”

Gladiolus quickly stood back up before he was tempted to hit him. Fucking brainiac.

“You see a fucking library around there? No? It’s a battlefield, you can’t expect to know everything beforehand!”

“I should!”

“You shouldn’t! No one should! It’s not a question of how insanely smart you are, it’s just how it is! You get it?”

“I do, but I know I can be better—”

“No one is asking you to! It’s not a test!”

He thought he finally got the last word when Ignis closed his mouth shut until it drew a thin line on his face. But then, he got up and shook his head.

“Of course it’s a test,” he said, voice calmer. “What else would they send me here for?”

Gladio threw his arms in the air with a frustrated groan and landed them on Ignis’ shoulders. Clearly they had sent him here to punish Gladio for something, but even now he was aware that saying this out loud would be more damaging than it would be relieving.

“Just… learn to fucking stay alive, alright?”

And they looked at each other and suddenly, the intense gaze Gladio was used to was piercing directly through his brain and reading his thoughts, revealing them bare, and he realized with a subtle shiver that, yes; maybe Ignis of all people could read into the mess of a battlefield and come up with a new strategy every second, but Gladio couldn’t risk losing him anyway.

“Alright,” Ignis said. “I get it now.”

#gladnis #gladiolus amicitia #ignis scientia #gladiolus x ignis #ffxv fanfiction #mine: fanfic

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kylosrehn · 7 years ago

Note

001: MCU (excluding AOS) 002: fraida, assuming no one's asked it yet 003: ummmm Jemma

001 | Send me a fandom and I will tell you my:

Favorite character: Tony Stark, hands down. Iron Man is kind of what got me into the MCU in the first place so it’s always going to be special to me.

Least Favorite character: Going with heroes-only, I never really cared much for Bruce Banner or Sam Wilson.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): OH BOY.

Pepper/TonyNatasha/ClintStephen/ChristineNatasha/SteveNatasha/Ward (this is cheating kind of but)

Character I find most attractive: Tony Stark tbh. And Peter Parker. Out of the ladies probably Pepper?

Character I would marry: Again either Tony or Peter.

Character I would be best friends with: Oh man. Thor seems like he’d be a chill friend tbh. Also Peter.

A random thought: Ant-Man is one of my least favorite films in the MCU.

An unpopular opinion: I really didn’t like/get GOTG. It just didn’t feel…I don’t know, serious enough? And the idea of like a CGI raccoon and the Avengers interacting in Infinity War I mean, idk.

My canon OTP: Pepper/Tony

Non-canon OTP: I guess Clintasha (they’re canon in my mind okay.)

Most badass character: They’re all pretty cool but I always go with Tony because he doesn’t have superhuman abilities or agent training, he’s special because he’s incredibly smart, makes amazing tech and worked hard to get to where he is.

Pairing I am not a fan of: I don’t get Bucky/Steve, like at all. Also that Clint/Phil ship that was around for a bit after the Avengers came out.

Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): I still don’t get what the Nat/Bruce thing came from. Like why.

Favourite friendship: Tony and Peter, definitely. I love how he’s mentoring him, how he wants Peter to be “better” than him.

002 | send me a ship and I will tell you:

when or if I started shipping it: I officially stopped watching AOS after the S2 finale, didn’t watch any of S3 or early S4, just lived in blissful ignorance. Then a friend of mine said that they’re doing this Framework arc thing and that Ward is back and there’s Skyeward and okay I (ship)pped Skyeward so I was like okay let’s watch this. I was confused as all hell, didn’t have a clue who Aida/Ophelia was supposed to be but from that kiss in 4x16 I was hooked. Literally, ‘I have no idea what’s going on or who you are but this? I like this.’

my thoughts: It gets too much hate. I’ve definitely seen weirder/more questionable ships around. Just let the shippers have their fun. It’s not like there’s an army of us so, no need to feel threatened.

What makes me happy about them: Man, Iain and Mallory just have such great chemistry. I was immediately on board with the ship. Their entire Framework relationship is just so damn hot. It was great to have like a darker kind of love story on the show.

What makes me sad about them: So much wasted potential, both for the character of Ophelia and the ship as a whole. They definitely could’ve kept her around for longer, with Fitz teaching her how to be human and her slowly becoming a part of the team. Also it would’ve been more realistic if he’d still had lingering feelings for her after the FW. I mean, he has a lifetime of memories where he loves her, I don’t think that would just go away so easily. And even so, I don’t believe he wouldn’t want them to at least try and help her. In any case she should’ve gotten a better send-off/ambiguous ending. It was all very hasty and lazy and anti-climactic.

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: Literally nothing because fic is written by like three of us, so I’ll take anything. And honestly most of it is really damn good, so I can’t complain.

Things I look for in fanfic: People writing for this ship is a miracle in itself so again, can’t really complain, I’ll pretty much take anything and everything.

My kinks: I’m such a sucker for pregnancy/baby fic. This is a known weakness of mine. Also FW Fitz being kinky and possessive, wanting to touch her all the time, let people know she’s his, spontaneously touching her in public, etc.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: I kind of like the idea of Ophelia/Ward, although mostly in a friendly and not shippy way. I guess she loves Fitz too much to be with anyone else. I like the idea of Ophelia just going away and discovering herself when/if Fitz rejects her though. So Ophelia/happiness I guess? As for Fitz, well, she’s kind of his first/only love interest outside of Jemma. Fitz/happiness too tbh. Give this boy a break. I kind of shipped FitzSkye way back in S1 (and there’s like tiny hints of it in the FW eps) but that probably wouldn’t happen. So like, someone else entirely maybe. Someone who’s not involved in the whole SHIELD mess.

My happily ever after for them: Just. Let her live. Please. But seriously, I wish they’d just stayed in the Framework together. Alternatively Fitz mentoring her in a Team AU sort of setting, helping her learn about herself, adjust to being human, while also realizing he’s still got feelings for her and them slowly learning to love each other again.

003 | Give me a character & I will tell you

How I feel about this character: I’m pretty meh about Jemma. Sometimes I like her more, sometimes less, but she’s never been a favorite of mine.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: Everyone but Fitz basically, lmao.

Ward (S1)Trip Skye/DaisyBobbiWillHell, even Aida/Ophelia could work, if you squint.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: I like Fitzsimmons as a friendship only, so I guess them. Also Jemma and Lincoln were kind of a cute friendship and the whole thing about them both being doctors. It could work.

My unpopular opinion about this character: Not sure if this counts as an unpopular opinion but I hc that Jemma’s bi.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: She and Fitz take a break from each other. Like please can this happen. I think they went through too much (Fitz esp) to be forced together for the sake of fan service right now. It would just be healthier for both characters to go their separate ways (or at least not be in a romantic relationship with each other) for now and just be…themselves. Most of Fitz’s/Jemma’s plots have been like, “oh I have to save him/her” to the point where Jemma “can’t think without [him].” Let them be their own person.

My OTP: I don’t think I have one? I’ve def read a good bit of Biospecialist fic back in the day though. Oops.

My OT3: Jemma/Fitz/Ophelia. Hands down. Guilty pleasure ship af.

thank you sm for asking! ♥♥♥

#replies #ask meme #about me #agents of shield #MCU #seriously thank you for asking #i really appreciate it ! :)#ilosttrackofthings

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