#a new character. i may follow w/out waiting to see writing b/c i already know what to expect and i enjoy your stuff and work well with you.

[soothfog]

i often rarely follow back accounts that have no in character writing yet.

i wait and check in several days or a week later to see if you've posted anything in character. this is not to see if you stay active (as someone who is very very sporadic with my replies (sometimes i reply literal years later) i promise you will never come across an rp partner more laidback about speediness). it is so i can get familiar with your writing style and formatting and portrayal and world and etc to gauge whether all of these elements blends well with mine. then i follow, if they do.

if you follow me and all of my accounts and then unfollow all of them after several days b/c i haven't followed you back, that's your call and i'm not stopping you from leaving, obviously, you're your own person. but just know the not-following-back on my part, if you are a new blog, is not because i'm uninterested. it's because i'm waiting to see some writing! that's all! if you are/were ever self conscious on the matter, i hope this clears things up.

[icasttourniquet]

Common Misconceptions: Raising the Dead (CPR)

Let's start with the bad news: basically all the CPR you've seen in movies and TV shows is performed terribly.

Here's the good news: most CPR is performed on dead patients, which means even bad CPR is better than nothing.

What is CPR?

CPR stands for (googles hurriedly) Cardio-Pumonary Resuscitation. It has two parts: 1) chest compressions and 2) rescue breaths. Here's a video in case you're still confused, but most people have seen CPR performed a ton of times during the climaxes of medical shows. It comes right before either a) the nurse yells "Clear!" and the patient comes back to life or b) the EMT says "I'm not losing you" and injects the patient with adrenaline right to the heart, and then they come back to life.

Raising the Dead

CPR is generally performed on dead patients. That is, patients without a pulse. In the first responder business, the situation doesn't really get worse than dead, so it provides a unique opportunity for authors because you can't really get it wrong.

Here are some questions I've heard people ask while learning CPR:

Should I perform CPR on pulse-less patients who have chest wounds?

Can I continue performing CPR if I break a rib?

Should I perform CPR on pregnant people?

What if I can't give rescue breaths? Should I still give CPR?

My patient has a lot of broken limbs. Should I fix those before performing CPR?

My patient was electrocuted. Should I give CPR?

Here's the trick to answering all your CPR questions. Is my character dead (no pulse)? Does performing CPR put a) the first responder, b) another patient, or c) a bystander in danger?

If you can answer (yes) (no, no, no), congratulations! Your first responder can perform CPR, even really crappy CPR, even CPR that is ineffective, for as long as the plot requires (ModN's WFR instructor tells the story of a 6-hour CPR session on a dead patient during a journey to care that included a toboggan ride).

(NOTE: there's actually one solid contraindication: if the patient is severely hypothermic, their heart rate may be so slow and weak as to be undetectable. In this case (and pretty much only this case) chest compressions may actually do more harm than good. Other than that, obvious signs of death like decapitation or rigor mortis indicate you don't need to start resuscitation, but there are still plenty of compelling interpersonal reasons to do it – at that point you're doing CPR for the responder and survivors rather than the patient.)

Otherwise, your character should go for it!

The bad news about CPR

Time for the bad news (other than you having a dead character on your hands). In general,* CPR is not enough to bring someone back. Its role is to continue circulating oxygenated blood while you wait for a defibrillator like an AED to arrive. The AED or manual defibrillator is what actually convinces the heart to stop fluttering/beating erratically, and allows it to resume something like a normal rhythm. That means that in the wilderness, CPR is almost never going to work. That said, ModN's WFR instructors had a couple tales of AEDs falling from the sky (via helicopter, not under their own power), so it's worth trying regardless.

* The exception: lightning-struck patients can at times restart regular rhythms with just chest compressions. This leads to interesting triage considerations when dealing with the aftermath of lightning, but that's a subject for another post.

How to perform non-crappy CPR

There are a million videos on YouTube that can talk you through every sort of CPR. Keeping in mind, of course, that some CPR is better than nothing on a pulseless patient, here are some quick tips that could indicate your character has some training:

Your character distinguishes between adult and pediatric CPR. Because children don't tend to get heart attacks, pulse-less children almost always have a trauma or respiratory cause. This means responders give children more rescue breaths.

Your character keeps their elbows locked. Here's a playlist of some examples of bad CPR (and some are really quite bad). Actors generally can't lock their elbows because they'd risk injuring or even killing their scene partner (so, okay, fine, that's a decent excuse), but people with real training will know better.

They do not always give rescue breaths. Any CPR is better than no CPR. Rescue breaths can put the first responder at risk because they can involve lip-to-lip contact, assuming no PPE is available. I once had a paramedic say bluntly that he really only gives breaths to children—it's just not worth the risk to him for anyone else. If this sounds callous, remember, CPR is (almost) only performed on dead patients, and the number one priority in any disaster is yourself.

(ModN edit: in a professional setting your character will always have some sort of PPE for rescue breaths: a face shield at the minimum, or in the front country a full-blown bag valve mask (BVM) that allows them to use their hands to get air into the patient.)

Your character does a blood sweep before staring CPR in a trauma injury. You may have heard the rule no pulse = chest compressions immediately. This is almost always true, especially in the frontcountry, when most pulse-less patients you encounter will have had a heart attack. However, in the wilderness, we can run into a bad situation: chest compressions that pump all my patient's blood out the gushing wound in their side.

Maybe you're thinking, hey! I thought you said my character could always do CPR on a dead patient and they'd be fine! And yes, I did say that—thank you for listening. If your character performs CPR on a patient with no pulse and arterial wound, they have not killed their patient. This is because the patient was already dead. They have not "sped up" the bleeding out process because this patient has basically already bled out. So, I'm not blaming your character for anything.

That said, the pro-est of pros will do a blood sweep after finding no pulse and stuff/apply direct pressure/tourniquet as necessary. As an added note, your character with no pulse and the arterial bleed? Probably not going to survive.

This leads me to...

Writing more realistic necromancy

If your character's CPR is successful, your character has just raised the dead. Thinking about it this way can help you write more realistic resuscitation scenes. Here's the number one thing that will make all your CPR more realistic:

Your dead patient does not go from dead to walking and talking in a few seconds.

When the body has no pulse for a while, it gets unhappy. This is because all its internal organs are dying and also because it is dead. CPR replicates the pumping of a heart, but not particularly well. Most people whose organs are all dying don't get that shot of adrenaline to the heart (this is not part of any WFR or EMT protocol but whatever) and then go back to swashbuckling adventure after a quick sip of water.

In fact, in real life, checking the pulse of your patient is an important part of performing CPR because sometimes they come back to life and you don't notice.

So how might you accurately describe someone who's just come back from the dead via CPR (possibly plus defibrillation)? May I recommend some of the following words (no need to cite me—just plop 'em in your writing):

Unconscious

Unmoving

Pale

Clammy

Weak pulse

Non-responsive to pain

Not dead!!!

An added point: absolutely no one whose heart stopped is now "okay" because their heart restarted. They are "not dead" because their heart restarted. Admitedly, not dead is pretty good in the first response business, but they need to see a doctor. As soon as possible. This is because something caused the heart to stop and CPR did not treat that underlying cause. Many people who come back from the dead die again soon after, and could come back and die multiple times before picking a state more permanantly.

Wilderness-Specific CPR

In the wilderness, we have get one (1) special CPR-related ability and that is the ability to stop.

In the US, there's a thing called patient abandonment that can get folks in trouble. Basically, if you start treating a patient, you need to keep treating them until 1) they are dead, 2) they are conscious enough to refuse further treatment and do so, or 3) someone else with an equivalent or higher level of training is treating them (ModN: as a W-EMT this is tricky – it's hard to find people more qualified in the wilderness to hand a patient off to!).

Because WFRs and EMTs cannot declare patients dead, and a dead or unconscious patient cannot refuse treatment, that means you are treating them until someone else is treating them. (As a side note, my first first-aid instructor told the story of performing CPR for 30 minutes in an ambulance on a patient missing part of his brain [this is bad] because the police officer at the scene didn't want to declare him dead on the highway, which would mean shutting down the road for a few hours).

CPR is unique, however, because it's performed on dead patients. The law doesn't want a poor WFR to be stuck in an endless CPR loop because they can't abandon their patient, so in the wilderness only, your character can stop CPR:

After 30 minutes of sustained pulselessness.

If another patient needs more help.

If continuing is dangerous to self or others.

Otherwise, backcountry and frontcountry CPR are pretty similar.

Summary

CPR is generally performed on dead people.

It is difficult to get worse than dead.

Garbage CPR is better than no CPR.

Recovering from being dead takes time and always warrants more care.

WFRs have a superpower and it is called stopping CPR.

Good luck raising your characters from the dead!

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

[sapphireglyphs]

[ bangtan short fic series ] jjk (feat. myg)

» Yᴏᴜʀ Vᴏɪᴄᴇ | ᴊᴊᴋ  sᴏʟᴏ ᴍᴜsɪᴄɪᴀɴ!ᴀᴜ (ғᴇᴀᴛ. ᴍʏɢ)   

Gᴇɴʀᴇ/Tᴀɢs: sʟɪᴄᴇ-ᴏғ-ʟɪғᴇ, ᴛɪɴʏ ʙɪᴛ ᴏғ ᴀɴɢsᴛ, ᴍɪɴ ʏᴏᴏɴɢɪ ɪs ᴀ ʀᴀᴅɪᴏ ʜᴏsᴛ, ɴᴏ ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢs, ɪɴᴠᴏʟᴠᴇs ᴀ ʀᴀᴛʜᴇʀ sɪᴄᴋ/ɪʟʟ ʏ/ɴ sᴏ ɪғ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪs ᴛʀɪɢɢᴇʀɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ... ᴍᴀʏʙᴇ sᴋɪᴘ ᴛʜɪs ᴏɴᴇ?, ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴛʜᴀɴ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴛʜɪs ᴏɴᴇ ɪs ᴘʀᴇᴛᴛʏ ʜᴀʀᴍʟᴇss, ʏᴏᴏɴᴋᴏᴏᴋ ғʀɪᴇɴᴅsʜɪᴘ ғᴛᴡ

Rᴀᴛɪɴɢ: ᴘɢ

Wᴏʀᴅ Cᴏᴜɴᴛ: ~1.5K

Sᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ: Jᴜɴɢᴋᴏᴏᴋ ɢᴇ���s ɪɴᴠɪᴛᴇᴅ ʙʏ ʜɪs ʟᴏɴɢ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ғʀɪᴇɴᴅ Mɪɴ Yᴏᴏɴɢɪ ᴛᴏ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴏᴛᴇ ʜɪs ɴᴇᴡ ᴀʟʙᴜᴍ ᴏɴ ʜɪs ᴡɪᴅᴇʟʏ ᴘᴏᴘᴜʟᴀʀ ʀᴀᴅɪᴏ sʜᴏᴡ ᴀɴᴅ ɢᴇᴛs ᴀ ᴠᴇʀʏ ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴇsᴛɪɴɢ ᴄᴀʟʟ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴀ ғᴀɴ.

Aᴜᴛʜᴏʀ's Nᴏᴛᴇ: ᴏʜᴍʏɢᴏsʜ, ᴏᴋᴀʏ, sᴏ ᴛʜɪs ɪs ᴍʏ ғɪʀsᴛ ғᴏʀᴀʏ ɪɴᴛᴏ Bᴀɴɢᴛᴀɴ ғᴀɴғɪᴄ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ sᴏ ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴇ. Iᴛ ʜᴏɴᴇsᴛʟʏ ᴡᴀs sᴜᴘᴘᴏsᴇ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴛʜɪs ᴛɪɴʏ 500 ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ sᴘɪʀᴀʟᴇᴅ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏғ ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴏʟ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪs ɪɴ ғʀᴏɴᴛ ᴏғ ʏᴏᴜ ɴᴏᴡ. Tʜɪs ɪs sᴛɪʟʟ ᴜɴᴇᴅɪᴛᴇᴅ; I'ᴍ ʜᴏᴘɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴡʜᴇɴ I ɢᴇᴛ ʜᴏᴍᴇ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴛᴏᴍᴏʀʀᴏᴡ. Iғ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀɪᴏᴜs ᴀs ᴛᴏ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴠᴇʀsɪᴏɴ ᴏғ "Sᴛɪʟʟ Wɪᴛʜ Yᴏᴜ" I ᴛᴏᴏᴋ ɪɴsᴘɪʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ғʀᴏᴍ, ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ ғᴏʟʟᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇ ʟɪɴᴋ ʜᴇʀᴇ! Pʟᴇᴀsᴇ ʟᴇᴛ ᴍᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪғ ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜɪs ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ғɪᴄʟᴇᴛ ᴏғ ᴍɪɴᴇ... I'ᴍ ᴀʟᴡᴀʏs ʟᴏᴏᴋɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ɪᴍᴘʀᴏᴠᴇ ᴍʏ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ sᴏ ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ sʜᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴛʜᴏᴜɢʜᴛs ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴍᴇ! Eɴᴊᴏʏ 💜 

“We’re back on in 2 minutes.” 

Jungkook shifted in his seat with a toothy grin. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a ‘producer’...” the singer-songwriter trailed off bashfully. 

“But that’s what this album was: self-produced. Your first, in fact.” Yoongi countered.

The young artist didn’t deny the fact, knowing that his old friend had already slipped back into his radio host persona, even before the one minute standby was called. It seemed that, at least for the time being, Yoongi didn’t press the issue but simply followed up with, “What’s something you’ve been working on that’s been giving you trouble lately?”

Jungkook tilted his head slightly as he thought. His overgrown bangs fringed across his bottom eyelashes, giving him a rebellious devil-may-care aura, which would have made Yoongi roll his eyes if the younger man was actually anything like that in person. The radio host knew that under that edgy haircut and emo hipster attire, Jungkook was still that soft, shy kid from Busan with big round eyes and an even bigger heart. 

He was glad to see his friend was still the same guy in all the ways that mattered. 

“There is this one particular track that I have a vague concept and melody for but-” Jungkook’s response was cut off by one of the producers calling the 30 second standby.

Yoongi, still relaxed as ever, pressed for him to continue, “But-?” 

“Oh, uhm, but the lyrics are still eluding me.” Jungkook finally murmured, fidgeting with his bracelet absentmindedly. 

The host nodded sympathetically as he pushed a few buttons on the console in front of him before turning his head slightly to the window where the staff members were monitoring the phone lines and the clock as the show returned from its commercial break. “Welcome back to the show, everybody. I’m your host, DJ Suga with the sweet voice from Honey FM 06.13. My guest is the one and only Jeon Jungkook here to promote his brand new, self produced EP “Mixtape 1”. His single “My Time” was released earlier today and it seems as though the response is already overwhelmingly positive. Producer Jungkook?” Yoongi pauses for dramatic effect before quickly continuing, “Would you like to take some calls from your fans? I can see the switchboard lighting up like fireworks. What do you say, huh? Shall we take some calls?” 

Jungkook simply chuckled at Yoongi’s subtle ‘producer’ jab, ducking his head in embarrassment. "Yeah, let's get it." 

“We have Minnie on the line. Hi, Minnie, you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jeon Jungkook.” Yoongi said.

“Oh my gosh! Hi DJ Suga! Hi Jungkook!” a cheerful voice filtered in through the headsets, “I’m in love with “My Time”. The lyrics seem so sad even if the song sounds so upbeat. What inspired you to write a song like this?”

Jungkook replied, “Thank you so much for liking the song. It’s a very personal piece to me and it means a lot to hear that fans are reacting so positively to the track.” He took a deep breath before continuing, “When I had set out to create this song, I had wanted to be as honest and authentic as possible with the lyrics while still staying true to my original vision for the song which was basically a bittersweet look at the last few years of my life and what it means to me as a young musician. I believe instead of seeing the lyrics as something sad, I see it as simply living life. Life has ups and downs, there are sacrifices but even greater rewards. A give and take, if you will.”

“Poignant.” Yoongi responded, “Thank you for calling in Minnie. Next caller we have is Ken. Ken you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jungkook.”

“Hi guys. I just wanted to say that I really love both of your albums, Jungkook. “Euphoria” is on repeat daily for me.” a warm, tenor voice insisted on the other end. “When will we be able to hear you live in concert again?”

Jungkook gave a grateful smile and bowed unconsciously, almost hitting his head on the microphone in front of him. “Thank you so much for your support. I’m hoping to go on tour very soon, so please look out for tour dates on the official website. Until then, please enjoy ‘Mixtape 1’.” 

Yoongi efficiently thanked Ken for calling in and pulled up the next call in the queue, “Hi Y/N, you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jungkook.”

There was silence on the other end. 

Unfazed, Yoongi tried again, “Y/N? You’re on the air.”

The unnerving silence permeated the air and just as Yoongi was going to move on to the next caller, a soft voice pierced through the quiet, “Hello? I-is it really you, Jungkook?”

Jungkook scooted forward into his chair. “Yes, hello.”

“I wanted to let you know that I truly love listening to you sing. Your voice is so beautiful and full of emotion. You truly have a gift...” There was a pregnant pause before the fragile voice rasped, “But I’m not sure how much longer I can stay to listen to you.”

Both host and guest were taken aback by the peculiar response but Jungkook recovered quickly and said, “Why do you say that? It isn't that late. Are you getting tired already?”

“I’m always tired nowadays.” The silence was heavy. When the voice returned, it seemed strained, as though simply speaking was becoming too difficult a task to bear. “Your songs used to be a source of such strength for me… but I’ve come to accept that it isn't going to be enough anymore. You see… I'm not doing too well.”

As the weight of the words sat palpable in the studio, Yoongi could see the panic in Jungkook’s eyes as he began to piece together what the caller was implying. Before he could jump in to save his friend though, the young musician simply asked, “How can I help?”

The voice returned this time with a quiet strength that masked the slight quiver of desperation, “Would it be too much if I could hear you sing for me… one last time?”  

Jungkook looked up at Yoongi, his mind racing with a million thoughts. His eyes flickered to the radio host’s black guitar that hung on the wall behind his booth. Standing to his feet with resolve, Jungkook strode over to the guitar and carefully pulled it down from it’s hooks. He turned to Yoongi. “Hyung? Would you mind?” 

Yoongi didn’t even blink. “Go for it, Jungkookie.”

Nodding his thanks, Jungkook made his way back to his seat and spoke softly into the microphone, “Y/N, please forgive me if this song is a bit on the rougher side as it’s still a work in progress.”

“I understand.” 

Upon hearing a reply from the other end of the line, Jungkook closed his eyes in relief. He didn’t realize he had waited for that response with bated breath. 

He began strumming a few cords before tweaking the guitar just a bit. “Now here’s the deal: I’ll be happy to sing this for you but you got to promise me that you’ll listen well to the very end, okay?” 

“I will.” 

Jungkook closed his eyes. Giving himself over to the music, his calloused fingers found its rhythm and began to strum a simple cord before taking a deep breath and allowing the song to take shape...

That faint voice of yours that grazed me Please call my name one more time I’m standing still under the frozen light, but I will walk towards you, step by step Still with you

Yoongi sat back, too stunned to actually respond to anything that had actually transpired over the course of the next few minutes as Jungkook began to croon over the gentle strum of his guitar, an acoustic ballad of longing and loneliness. Despite the lyrics holding such sadness in its tone, the song ends hopeful of a day where the vocalist could meet again with the person they had longed for. Yoongi imagines the final studio version of the song would sound nice with a piano in the mix, brushed drums for a percussion piece and maybe even some tinkling synths for character. Either way, he’s pretty sure he had just witnessed the creation of another major hit for the younger musician.    

The moon looks lonely Like it's crying in the bright night sky Even though I always know the morning will come I want to stay in your sky like a star

As the song wound down, the studio erupted into cheers, from the staff and Yoongi alike. Jungkook bowed politely before he spoke into the microphone, “So, Y/N, what did you think?”

There was no reply from the other end of the line. Yoongi looked towards the booth where the producers sat behind the glass window and took their nods as a sign that the line was still open. 

“Y/N?” Jungkook repeated. “Don’t leave me hanging now. We had a deal. Are you still there?” 

There was a beat of agonizing silence before a sniffle could be heard from the other end of the line. “Yes, Jungkook... I’m still here.”

[wingsporkhalo]

He’s Mine: A BakuDeku Fic Spork- Chapter 3

Eyyy it’s time for chapter 3! Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Last time, Katsuki attempted to confess his “love,” Izuku was forced to dress as a girl, Shoto kidnapped Izuku, I ranted about people uke-fying my favorite characters, and Kirishima offered some terrible advice! In today’s installment, Shoto makes terrible jokes and lies to Izuku’s mother, Izuku and Shoto go on a date, and our helpless damsel protagonist gets attacked by a villain!! Also, I provide several of my own takes on the pairing! Special thanks as always to @kittykatz009​, @the-wizard-l​, @satsuneade​, and Phos! Thanks especially for the art, Satsu! LOL

Me: Thanks for the summary, Izuku, but wouldn't your time be better spent experiencing new events?

"OH WELL AS LONG AS THEY SAID SORRY, MY SUFFERING IS RENDERED MEANINGLESS! EVERYTHING'S GOOD!!"

Wiz: OH JOY Me:

My mum shouted me

That's right. She just... threw her head back and screamed MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE as loud as she could One of our neighbors thumped on the wall. "MAKE HER STOP DOING THAT!" I heard a muffled voice roar on the other side. "I'm sorry!" I shouted back. "I don't know why it keeps happening!!" Wiz: JTRHSDGF

Satsu: Oh god Phos: Jeez Me: Wow, okay, sure, just declare yourself someone's boyfriend without asking them first. Wh... Where's Inko going? cOME BACK! WE NEED AN ADULT PRESENT Satsu: Okay but why isn't Inko questioning Deku about this!??? Me: FOR REAL THOUGH "Also, I found some girls' clothing in your bag... Honey, you know you can tell me anything. Is... everything all right? You know I love you no matter what, right?" "mOM STOP YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME" Satsu: HER ONLY SON HAVING A BOYFRIEND FOR THW FIRST TIME SHOULD BE AN IMPORTANT MATTER Ndvdkfbfkfbksbd Phos: "Truth is I got dressed up in it against my will." "Did they apologize?" "Yes" "Then that’s all right!" Me: I'd love to say it's completely out of character for Shoto to respond to a question with a shitty pun he's no doubt spent hours coming up with... but I could definitely see him doing that, actually but not THIS shitty pun Not THIS one this one... is uNBEARABLE SAVE ME lskjfslkdj pHOS I like how there's a lone quotation mark there, like that line was so fucking bad that even the punctuation is trying to separate itself from it Satsu: SKBFKWBGKDBSKDJIDBFJD 😂 😂 Me: AFTER THE PARK?? WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THERE? WAS THAT JUST NOT IMPORTANT??? AREN'T YOU WRITING ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELATIONSHIP?? WHAT THE FUCK Wiz: tjdafgfdhgfhg Me: THIS PERSON'S WRITING!!! IS SO FUCKING BORING!!! PLEASE, GIVE ME SOMETHING!! THE CLOSEST WE EVER GOT TO DESCRIPTION WAS THE LOST CAT THING AND EVEN THAT WAS COMPLETELY INANE Oh boyyyyy the next part

Satsu: They just got there and went back lol Me: I wish this author could be stoped Satsu: Omg she had FANS XDDD Phos: She has tiny electrical fans in her mouth. They’re completely shorted out by now, but that’s what you get. Me: "I'm glad I'm here with you, Tod--I mean, Shoto-kun." "Me too, Izuku." [silence. A crow flies overhead. Crickets chirp.] "Well, this was nice, Izuku, but I should be getting home." "Wh...what? But we just g... uh. O-Okay...??" Satsu: KDBDKFBFJX Me: [throws some rabbits in the air] Two high-up buns I mean, you ain't wrong, Toga DOES have lots of fans, but how could you tell that from looking in her mouth?? A Japanese girls uniform? Uh... is... is there a uniform that all Japanese girls must wear? That sounds like some kind of dystopian hellscape??? Wiz: Not wearing your japanese girl uniform? sirens start up Me:

(Guessed who it is ;))

Yeah, as with everything in your writing, it didn't take a genius to figure it out. It may take a psychologist, however. Satsu: Poor Deku, can't really defend himself even though he has One for all's power and has defeated so many villains already :( Me: I KNOW LIKE WHAT THE FUCK 😂

"Your cute come with me!"

Okay like... if you're going to bother putting an actual yandere into the story, let alone one who is canonically in love with Izuku/wants to murder him, don't you think her dialogue should be a little more characteristic?? Like, uhhh, "I've been waiting to see you again, Izuku-kun! Did you miss me?? I missed you. But it's okay. You'll never go anywhere without me again~" Y'KNOW SOMETHING SCARY AND UNSETTLING Satsu: "hey cutie ;)" Phos: That’s really good dialogue on short notice, Mom Me: WHAT THE FUCK IS AN ALIWAY [someone points to a girl named Ali] "about 140 pounds" aww, thanks Phos!! <3 Why would Izuku follow her though?? He KNOWS what Himiko Toga looks like!! He has fought her before!! Good lord!!

When I saw it my body trembled and I backed up to the wall

Bitch!! This kiddo faced down the League of Villains, The Hero Killer Stain, a humongous freakshow four times his size with prehensile muscles, a performance-enhanced metalbender, several morons in plague masks, and a terrifying maniac who had rearranged his body into a titanic monstrosity with four arms, and didn't back down!!! What the fuck show are you watching???

She cut my cheek

And Izuku just... stood there, I guess, with a bit of drool escaping his semi-open mouth as he stared at nothing vacantly. Wiz: :’)))))) Me: And then he just passes out for no reason?? I?? I don't get it! Was it because of the explosion? Did he get cut a bunch more times (but we never knew because the author was incapable of describing it to us) and pass out from blood loss? Or is he just so frightened of this admittedly-terrifying girl that he just swooned onto the ground???

Sure. Because visiting Deku is something he does all the time I guess. This is so pointless, so bad, so unbelievably boring, oh my god author I've met trees with more personality than your writing. Literally I read a book where a tree was the main character and it was one of the most interesting books I've ever read Wiz: y e p Me: also, there's the "my deku" again [rolling eyes] Satsu: oh god

Satsu: Did Kacchan seriously stalk him for more than two hours Me:

I ran to wards

I hope it was to a psych ward; that's where I'm headed after reading this. Satsu: was it really two hours because nothing happened there apparently Me:

And hit her in the face with my quirk. When I was done beating her up

Oh my god you idiot. You fool. You are like a little baby. Himiko Toga is not so easy to defeat. She's a notorious killer who's wanted for dozens of murders, and she's also a master of deception, extraordinarily quick-witted, and really good at knowing when it's time to skedaddle. >:C Satsu: Two things: He didn't recognize her even though she's from the league of villains Also, he just... Left her there..... Jaz: I'm so offended that they butchered Toga's characterization like this Me:

"Deku?" I asked while shaking him a bit. But he didn't respond

Oh god, he's finally succumbed to shaken baby syndrome from all these people infantilizing him Wiz: fdghjDSFGHJ Me:

I checked his puls

His what now? Wiz: his puls Me: gOD STOP SHAKING HIM OH MY GOD Bridle style. I can only assume this means he wrapped Izuku around the muzzle of a horse Wiz: oh my god Me: Oh, so suddenly Inko is back at the house again?? "A crazy girl tried to kill him with a knife" "IS HE OKAY??" "...I mean, obviously not. Did you not hear what I just said" Satsu: The puls 😂 😂 

Jaz: Bakugou. What. The. Fuck. Me: I went up stairs. Just... some random stairs. I went up them. Yo but for real though... WHY DID IZUKU PASS OUT I don't think more intense stalking is the answer, Katsuki So like... how do you say "had of" but then later use the correct "would've"??? I? Maybe don't rub your finger in his fresh wound, Kacchan?? Wiz: o w Me: "Deku... who did this to you?!" "Oh that? Don't worry about that. I was chasing a stray cat and it, uh, got a little temperamental" "...were you shirtless during this?" "Yeah!" "........why??" "I had just gotten out of the shower." "................look, never mind. My fault for asking." I like how Katsuki's like "I'll make her pay for hurting Deku" but for the past decade it has in fact been him who has been hurting Deku Wiz: OH RIP Satsu: OH LORD Me: I don't get it; why is he just rubbing all these scratches? I can understand if he like, gently traced them with his finger? but you keep saying RUBBING and I'm like, what kind of strange fetish is that??? Wiz: That sounds ow fjcmv Me: So he just intently stares at his childhood "friend" until he himself loses consciousness. Sure. Makes sense. Inko pokes her head in later like "Boys, I made you some sna--oh. They're asleep. Uhh, I guess I should call Mitsuki and let her know Katsuki's staying over... that's nice. He hasn't spent the night since they were four" Satsu: Aww that's actually cute, but very impossible in canon 😂 Jaz: Lol it really is Me: that reminds me of a tiny something I wrote thanks to one of these badfics that I should share with y'all

Jaz: Hey look, it me Me: When u stan two characters becoming friends instead of becoming boyfriends Satsu: Omg 😭 😭 😭 😭 Jaz: FRIENDSHIP Me: YEP I friend-ship them so hard (': Satsu: SLOW-BURN FRIENDSHIP Me: SLOW BURN FRIENDSHIP ALSKDAJ;FKLD I LOVE IT Jaz: Hey, that is AMAZING Me: Katsuki: Fuck that. [holds up his hands, which are sparking] I burn everything fast Kirishima just puts a hand on his shoulder like "whoa, slow down there, ya little pyro"

OKAY, WHAT THE HELL! TOGA INTRODUCES HERSELF TO IZUKU WHEN THEY FIRST MEET, AND LATER WHEN THEY MEET AGAIN HE REMEMBERS HER BY NAME (and Toga looks... uhhh, a little too happy about that). HE KNOWS WHO SHE IS Satsu: Kzbdkfbjejdbd I'm crying at the had placed his head on his chest Me: I'm crying at the fact that apparently Bakugou is able to wrap his hand entirely around Izuku, because I guess he suddenly has Kendou from class 1-B's Quirk now And also "I tured my head" like oh really? Did you need a ture guide? Was it like, an Inside Out thing?? The idea of Izuku sleeping with his head on Katsuki's chest is cute, but I don't think they would willingly arrange themselves like that. It's more of a "we happened to pass out like this after being smashed out of the sky by a villain" pose, and when one of them wakes up they'd be like "aAAAH OH CHRIST OH FUCK [scrambles away like they just woke up cuddling a giant spider]" "he moanded" oh my god save me 😂 Wiz: moanded Satsu: Oh nooooooooo

Wiz: wh Me: "as soon as he [let go of me] I got away from him" Hey look, the first in-character thing that's happened THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME I like how Inko only exists when the author needs her to

"Coming!" I shouted back

Already? He only moanded once WHY WAS THAT ALL YOU HEARD FROM YOUR MOM? IS SHE LIKE, FADING OUT OF EXISTENCE AGAIN? MAYBE ASK HER WHAT SHE MEANS BEFORE SHE BECOMES MIST? "HEY MOM, DO YOU MEAN HE HAS YOUR BLESSING TO CONTINUE TO ABUSE AND TORMENT ME LIKE HE'S BEEN DOING FOR THE PAST 11 YEARS OR SO??" Wiz: :'))) Me: plus, is she forgetting that a DIFFERENT attractive teenager claimed to be Izuku's boyfriend yesterday?? Jaz: my head hurts from this

Wiz: There is so much happening but also nothing, I'm just. what. Me: Izuku is so fucking dumb in this story that he, to use a phrase I saw in a post today, "wouldn't know how to pour water out of a boot if there were instructions on the heel" Wiz: I freaking love that phrase Jaz: "but Kacchan was already finished.... I guess we have that in common" WHAT THE FUCK Me: And again, he only moanded once. Pitiful Jaz: get these bois to a doctor Satsu: And that's why they have to marry Because they have so much in common Me: Also, why is Izuku clutching his chest? Did he sprout boobs because the author has feminized him so fucking much?

He scoffed his breakfast down.

Okay. "You call yourself a waffle? Pathetic. Eggo, you say? More like, Egad, this waffle sucks." Jaz: WING OMG

Me: Without the umbrella? I suppose it's just as well. Even if it was raining, the author would never tell us Jaz: THEY SPELLED “DAMNED” RIGHT OH MY GOD Me:

while walking

oh my god, for real? couldn't you at least tack that onto some dialogue? Like, I asked while walking??? Jaz: too much work. they had to put all the effort into spelling damned right Me: PFFFFFFFFF The last line there is so depressing because it means the author IS aware of how Katsuki acts in canon... and has chosen to write him this way regardless

"I'm... mm [struggles to speak]" "Kacchan?? Are you okay??" "Yes, it's just that whenever I try to say something in-character my mouth snaps shut and I MMM-MM [flails around desperately]" "[panicking] oH NO! WHOSE QUIRK IS CAUSING THIS" Satsu: Ldbdkdbdkf Me: I like how the author makes Katsuki delay telling him The Big Important Thing until after school... which adds like a whole 6 sentences to the story instead of being a "haha, you'll have to wait for it, readers!" thing And I like how Izuku is self-aware enough to tell people where he's going and who he's hanging out with, but not self-aware enough to realize that he's in a love triangle apparently. Satsu: Of course this is the thing I decided to do to finish my art block lmao

Me: lKJF;LGKSEJRG;AWLKJGD;LKJE;GIJW;EGJS;LKJS;GLSKGJF Wiz: oh my god beauty Me: IM GONAN FUCEKN CRY OMGGGGGG Satsu: THEBIMAGE WAS STUCK IN MY HEAD, I AH TO DO IT LOLLL Me: I LAUGHED SO HARD THAT I CHOKED ON MY OWN SPIT AND COUGHED A LOT [WHEEZES] Phos: Oh my GOLLY THAT’S SO GREAT Satsu: I'M SO SORRY MOM DLVDKDVDKD Me: "Close your eyes!" "Uhhh, Kacchan? Last time you held something behind your back and told me to close my eyes, you threw an angry squirrel at me and then recorded me running around trying to get it off me" "Psh, that was a long time ago, nerd. I'm different now." "That was last week, Kacchan"

"Is it--" "It's not a fucking squirrel, all right! Just do it!!" "o-okay!" Jaz: that picture is so beautiful omg Kacchan isn't going to be happy you dropped those roses Me: Mkay so if Bakugou suddenly kissed him, I think Izuku would leap back and be like "WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU PRETENDING TO BE KACCHAN" "No, it's--listen, it's really me, okay?" "LIAR! WHERE IS THE REAL KACCHAN?!" "I'm right here, you moron! [puts both hands on his chest] I'm Katsuki Bakugou! Cross my heart!" "AHA! YOU'VE SLIPPED UP! KACCHAN DOESN'T HAVE A HEART TO CROSS!!" "Wow, that was kind of fucking uncalled for, but I guess I can see why you'd say that" Jaz: lmao oh my god Wiz: DPESN'T HAVE A HEART TO CROSS Satsu: Kdbsjdhdbd I love that when you write them it's like they go back to normal, oh my babies ;-; Maybe the're just actors on a very bad romance series Me: And then yeah he would absolutely yell at him for dropping the flowers and Izuku would be like "[squints suspiciously] .......Kacchan?" "YES, for the three trillionth time. Jesus, I knew you were an idiot, but I didn't know you were THIS dumb. Now pick up those fucking flowers before I blast a hole through you" "[clutching his own head] wHAT IS HAPPENINGGGGG" Jaz: now THAT'S the Kacchan he knows! Me: What a beautiful greeting for a heartfelt love letter

Wiz: they spelled damn right :oooo Me: I know; it's almost as amazing as their utter disregard for canon Jaz: oh jesus Me: Izuku would stare at that letter for ages and find a hidden message in it Izuku, reading the note: "Hey, damn nerd... Even though I didn't get to tell you yesterday, I was trying to say that I'm in Love with you. I want to go out with you. Let me know what you think. PS- Tell anyone else and you're dead." [long pause] "...............oh my god... the first letter of each line... HE'S IN TROUBLE!! I HAVE TO SAVE HIM" Jaz: Afudshgoudshuigdsh

==========================================================

Next time: The last installment, in which Katsuki and Shoto fight over our damsel!

[spaedia]

PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ.

alrighty dudes, dudettes, and everything in between. this is the last post i intend to ever make on tumblr, so listen up. in regards to the bullshit “callout” posted the other day:

CALLOUT, I GUESS, FOR DEVIL AND CO, BUT MOSTLY DEVIL BC LET’S FACE IT, WITHOUT THE SCREENSHOTS YOU PROVIDED, YOUR ARGUMENT FOR WHY WART IS A BAD PERSON IS “HE DAMAGED MY EGO OWO”. YOU SAID THIS WASN’T YOUR PROBLEM? WELL I’M MAKING IT YOUR PROBLEM, ASSHAT.

so let’s start w/ the screenshots in question. i haven’t read the callout, so idk what was used, but considering i had upwards of 5 people come to me and ask me if i was okay, i can take a guess. let the record show that all of the messages i sent to dev and norgie regarding wart was in the midst of our breakup, which was messy enough as is. when wart and i first broke up, i had dev and co blocked bc of personal reasons. devil then decided to HUNT DOWN ONE OF MY BLOGS and follow me (after i assume staking it out, bc he’s known for stalking people). i confronted him, and he gave me some shtick about how he’ll “always care about me” and i’m “still his little sister”, blah blah blah other manipulative bullcrap. against my better judgement, i let him back in.

wart was my first boyfriend. i adored him with everything i had, so naturally, this breakup left me in a bad emotional state. devil and norgie took COMPLETE ADVANTAGE OF THIS, and when i told them what happened between wart and i, immediately began twisting it to make wart out to be the bad guy. it was norgie who originally suggested that i had been emotionally abused, and in my vulnerable state, i began to see things that way. 

not that it’s anyone’s business, but if you wanna know how the breakup went, it was something like this: wart’s mental state was deteriorating, i suggested maybe we take a break, immediately went back on that statement, wart broke things off the next morning. there was no emotional abuse, no threatening of suicide, no physical violence - it was a breakup. things didn’t work out. it happens. but of course, this didn’t fit dev and co’s narrative, so they needed to get me to admit things were much worse than they were. when i later came to my senses and realized this was all bullshit, devil and norgie then decided to GUILT TRIP ME by pointing out how they spent “two hours” on call with me while i cried. after i had just had my heart broken. no shit i was upset. newsflash: wart spent a lot longer with me on call while i was breaking down. hell, he broke up with me and still let me cry on his shoulder. and unlike dev and norgie, he never once acted like i owed him, because that’s what friends do. but hey, go on and talk about how wart’s the abusive one.

devil has spent years abusing my trust. every time i tell him i don’t want so speak with him, he comes back awhile later with some new apology and reasoning for his behavior. and like most toxic relationships, it was hard to let him ago, especially after losing the person i cared most about. he blatantly took advantage of my situation to fuel his vendetta. the only reason i told him anything was because he promised me he wouldn’t make a post unless wart “stepped out of line” (which, looking back, is a huge red flag: what gives him the right to police other people?). and had i not begun to confront him about all the bullshit he made me say, he probably would have held off. in fact, he told me that one of the “main reasons” he felt this “needed to come out” was because i was starting to defend wart. when i realized that dev was serious about making this callout, i told him i wanted no part of it. he asked me for screenshots of some of my and wart’s conversations, to which i gave him a hard no. did that stop him from using our personal messages in his sorry excuse for a callout? of course not. these are the type of people who don’t care about anyone except themselves, dev has made that perfectly clear. MY PRIVACY AND AN INNOCENT MAN’S WELL BEING MEANT NOTHING TO HIM. all he and his friends cared about was spurring along their vendetta. and honestly, if i was wart, i would have sued y’all for harassment and defamation of character ages ago.

with the matter of those messages out of the way, let’s move on to dev’s actual claims. this is where the defamation gets real, because he had the nerve to call wart a predator. seriously? what, because he dated someone a few years younger than him?

dev loves to throw the word pedo.phile around, despite the fact that he obviously doesn’t know what it means. pedo.philia “is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children”. i started puberty when i was twelve, and wart and i didn’t even meet until i was fifteen. so immediately, he doesn’t fit the bill for a pedo.phile. #sorrynotsorry.

but let’s work around that. let’s say, that because he was romantically attracted to me, that automatically makes him a pedo.phile. i’m going to remind everyone of something devil would love to leave buried: the fact that, when i was thirteen, and again at fourteen, devil tried to coerce me into writing smut with him, along with a sixteen year old girl. he used my trust of him to assure me that it would be fine. his excuse? “my (ex)girlfriend made me do it.” cause that’s a solid argument alright. so fine, label wart a pedo.phile. i sure hope dev’s planning on giving himself the same label, because what he did is a lot worse lmao.

i don’t have screenshots from dev and my conversations, i think he deleted that account, but here’s him w/ the other girl.

so yeah long story short: dev knew this girl was underage, still tried to smut with her. take my word that he tried with me, i guess. i don’t think he’s ever denied it.

now, admittedly, i didn’t need to bring this up, but according to devil it’s important that predators get called out, so...he brought this on himself.

now i’m going to tell y’all the story of how wart and i started dating, because it really puts a hole in this “predator” story. see, for wart to be a predator, he would have had to target me in some way (come to think of it, much like devil did to me). when wart and i got together, dev and i weren’t talking, and i never got around to telling him how this happened, only that it did. (if i did tell him, i forgot about it, and that makes it even worse bc he knows this already lmao.) 

it was may sixth. i was fifteen, wart was nineteen. we had been talking for awhile, and sometime in the past week or so, i had talked to my mom about liking this guy who was older than me. she told me about her own relationships with older guys when she was my age, and that so long as he didn’t try anything, she was fine with it. so on that spring day, i confessed my feelings to wart. and y’know the first thing he said to me? “wait a few years.” a logical statement, one i probably should have taken to heart, but i was a fool in love, so i didn’t. i spent the next hour or so convincing wart to go out with me, and he eventually pitied me enough (he’d admit to something along those lines not long after) to agree. neither of us expected this to become an actual relationship, but hey, a year and a half’s not a bad run.

to make a long story short: i asked wart out, not the other way around. i begged him to date me, not the other way around. and this wasn’t some secret relationship. my parents knew from the beginning, and gave it the okay.

i think i addressed everything in that lameass “callout”, but because dev’s The Worst, i know he’s going to pull at threads to try and get his “predator” accusations to stick. i’m going to post this, and devil will immediately reply “but wait!! he is a predator: you said you two slept together!!” and then post the message where i said exactly that, added some details to make it realistic, whatever, but then fail to post the message a few days later where i told him IT WAS A HALF-BAKED STORY.

see, after wart and i broke up, i heard rumors that he and i had been sleeping together when he was up here. i’m gonna shoot those rumors down right now. a) i’m asexual and sex repulsed. i wouldn’t sleep with someone if they paid me. devil and norgie know this, but they chose to ignore it in favor of a juicy story. b) the story i gave them was incredibly inconsistent. to the point where even devil pointed out my inconsistencies, but then conveniently forgot that ever happened, then, when i told him it was bullshit, TRIED TO INSIST IT WAS TRUE. as if he knows better than i do what happened lmao. c) wart and i were never alone for more than a few minutes. my bedroom walls aren’t exactly soundproof. my bed frame is metal, it squeaks whenever i sit on it. so yeah, obviously we got away with having sex. dumbass.

now, when i heard these rumors, i decided to roll with them. what did i have to lose, right? so yeah, i spiced it up, gave devil and norgie some random details to make it realistic, and told them not to tell anyone (which as far as i know, they haven’t, so thanks for not spreading rumors i guess). when devil brought it up to me during his rant about how this callout “needed to happen”, i pretty much laughed in his face and told him it never happened. and then he tried insisting it did and i rolled my eyes so hard i think i gave myself a headache. 

tl;dr: someone started rumors that wart and i slept together, i confirmed them for shits and giggles, but no, it never happened, for all the reasons stated above.

oh, and as for dev’s reason for this vendetta? he’s told wart that it was because he (wart) wrote a character that dev wanted to write. i’m still convinced it’s over a fragile ego. either way, Real Mature, dude.

NOW i think i covered anything. phew, that’s a doozy. as i said, this is the last post i intend to ever make on this hellsite, but i encourage everyone who sees this to reblog it so that we can clear a (mostly) innocent man’s name. did wart hurt me? yes. was it enough to warrant this abuse?? not in the slightest.

my discord is still on my blog if anyone wants it (unless you’re friends with devil, norgie, kirby, or anyone else involved in this. if that’s the case, i’ll see you in hell). as for my legacy on this hellsite, let it be known that i tried to fight the good fight. i hope it’s good enough.

el psy kongroo.

[kkaebsongtypo]

A Change of Plans // Mark Lee pt. 1

(A/N: I was reading fake texts and i was just hit in the heart like ‘damn. I love Mark so much.’ then i started cooking and i just randomly thought of High School musical, and now here i am. Writing a High School musical inspired Mark Lee scenario. The musical i used in this in here was Dear Evan Hansen because i’m absolute trash for that musical. Also, it’s like hella basic because you’re casted as Zoe who is like the female lead, and Mark is casted as Evan Hansen, the male lead. T O T A L L Y  B A S I C. but it’s cute nonetheless :) I hope you  enjoy :D)

pairing: mark x fem theater nerd!reader

genre: (in later parts) fluff, because when have i ever written anything else

warnings/notes: cussing, but that’s about it. The musical may be triggering? I don’t like spoil it or anything, but if you want to know what it’s actually about then you can google it :)

word count: 27280

Side Note: I would highly recommend listening to the soundtrack if you haven’t :)

“You have got to be kidding me.” Mark stood staring at the sheet pinned to the bulletin board. Donghyuck chuckled from where he stood, leaning against the wall.

“I wasn’t lying.” he spoke, looking at Mark and shrugging.

“How am I casted as the Evan Hansen?? How am I the lead? H O W Hyuck?!” Mark turned to Donghyuck with a look of utter confusion and panic.

“This is not how this was supposed to play out.”

-2 weeks earlier-

"Come on dude!"

"It'll be fun!" Mark rolled his eyes as Donghyuck and Jeno continued badgering him.

“Alright! Alright! If I do this, will you guys finally shut up?!” the two other boys nodded eagerly and that was that. Giving in to their peer pressure, Mark scribbled his name on the audition sign up sheet. There was no going back now.

-Day of the Auditions-

“MARK. HURRY UP. WE HAVE TWENTY MINUTES.” Jeno and Donghyuck shoved Marks bag into his locker before dragging him to the theater. Twenty minutes until Donghyucks audition; Jeno was right after; and then it was Marks.

The past week was filled with Donghyucks tutoring; memorizing the audition lines and the audition song: Waving Through a Window. Mark wouldn’t admit it, but he kind of fell in love with the song. He often found himself humming it while doing homework, or walking home. Although he likes the song, that does not mean he was looking forward to this audition.

Of course, it didn’t take long for the three boys to reach the theater. Jeno checked his phone and took a deep breath. Hyuck did the same thing, and smiled.

“Fifteen minutes. You’ll do great dude.” Jeno spoke up and patted Hyucks shoulder. He looked back at Jeno with a look of almost excitement.

“Oh yeah, of course. This is nothing new. We’ve been doing this for years, Jeno. I’m just really pumped.” Jeno chuckled at Hyucks response. He was right though, he and Jeno have been doing this for years. They’ve always been apart of theater together. Mark looked at the two and smiled. Their heads turned to the theater door as it opened. Revealing Ms. Lee, one of the two choir teachers.

“Oh Donghyuck, Jeno, you’re already here.” She smiled at the boys before glancing at the clock.

“Donghyuck, would you like to maybe start early? You could come in now.” Hyuck nodded and followed Ms. Lee into the theater after looking between Jeno and Mark, who smiled at him reassuringly. Jeno looked over to Mark as the door shut.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” Mark turned to Jeno, and sighed with a slight chuckle.

“Ah, well. I’m alright. I’m pretty nervous if I’m being honest.” He leaned his head against the wall, looking up. Jeno nodded and spoke softly.

“Yeah, I remember my first audition, grade 7. I totally bombed it. Well, that’s what I thought at least. I ended up getting casted as the supporting character, who happened to be the main character's best friend. Hyuck was that main character, and that’s when we really got close. We kind of developed our love for theater together. At this point, we’ve auditioned for every musical together, and we’ve always been casted. It just takes practice.” Mark watched as Jeno spoke.

“You’ve been practicing with Hyuck right?” Mark nodded. Jeno smiled and rested his hand on Mark’s shoulder briefly.

“You’ll do great. You were basically being tutored by one of the most dedicated theater nerds in this school. Trust me, Hyuck wouldn’t let you go into this without being ready. I know you might not feel ready, but you are.” Mark smiled at Jeno’s words. Within a short few minutes, the door opened and Hyuck walked out, Ms. Lee following close behind.

“Jeno, come on in.” Hyuck sat next to Mark on the floor as Jeno made his way into the theater after giving a thumbs up to his two friends.

“How was it?” Mark asked Hyuck once the door clicked shut. Hyuck glanced at Mark before letting out a breathy laugh, as he noticed the slight worry in Mark’s voice.

“It was good. Pretty simple and straight up. They’ll ask you what part you practiced and then they’ll ask you to go through the script with them from memory; just like I did with you. After that they’ll ask you to sing for them, and you’ll sing Waving Through a Window. They’ll most likely give you a bit of feedback and then that’s all really.” He gave Mark a reassuring smile.

“Don’t worry too much dude. I know you’ll do great. You know your lines, you know the song. Don’t worry about your voice either. You have a great voice, a great tone, trust me. You got this.” Mark looked at Donghyuck and nodded with a deep sigh.

“Do you want to go over your lines, practice a little?” Hyuck turned his body to face Mark as he did the same.

“Please...” Mark smiled nervously before Hyuck started to recite script. Minutes later, Jeno came out and smiled at Mark. Mark’s eyes shot to Ms. Lee, as she looked at her clipboard and read out his name.

“Mark Lee? Come on in.” She smiled softly as Jeno and Hyuck gave him some last minute reassurance. Mark took another deep breath and walked into the theater. He stopped on the stage in front of the staff.

“Alright. Hello Mark. I’m Ms. Lee, this is Mr. Oh, and Ms. Kim. How are you doing?” Ms. Lee started basic conversation, which Mark was very grateful for. Almost as if it was an ice breaker.

“Okay, which script did you prepare with for today?” Ms. Lee asked. Mark smiled softly.

“Uh, the one scene between Evan and Zoe.” Ms. Lee nodded and started to recite Zoe’s lines. Mark continued with the familiar lines as the scene went on.

“Okay, now, moving on to the singing portion. Which song did you pick? Mark smiled and rocked forward on his toes slightly.

"Waving Through a Window." Ms. Lee smiled and nodded.

Would you like the instrumental or do you want to sing it acapella?”

“Oh, uh, instrumental please..” Mark took a deep breath as Mr. Oh pressed play and the music started up. He closed his eyes as he began singing.

“I’ve learned to slam on the break, Before I even turn the key, Before I make the mistake, Before I lead with the worst of me.. Give them no reason to stare, No slippin up if you slip away, So I’ve got nothing to share, No I’ve got nothing to say.”

He began slightly shaky, but as the song continued, he grew more confident.

“Step out, Step out of the sun if you keep gettin burned. Step out, Step out of the sun because you’ve learned, Because you’ve learned..”

He could feel a smile making it’s way onto his face as he reached the chorus. At this moment, he felt no nerves. He felt… free.

“On the outside always lookin in will I Ever be more than i’ve always been, Cause’ I’m tap, tap, tappin on the glass I’m waving through a window oh I Try to speak but nobody can hear so I Wait around for an answer to appear While I'm watch, watch, watching people pass, I’m waving through a window oh, Can anybody see, Is anybody waving back at me.?”

Mark glaned at the teachers in front of him, to see them smiling. Mr. Oh stopped the music and Ms. Lee spoke up.

“Thank you Mark, that was great. Just a few notes; You’re stage presents grew the longer you were up here, you clearly got more comfortable. Quickly, you seemed to enjoy your time on stage, is this your first audition for a school musical?” Mark nodded and Ms. Lee smiled, continuing with the notes.

“It was amazing for a first audition. You seemed to enjoy your time on stage. You had very good expression; while going through the script and while singing. Uhm, yes. Over all, that was a great audition. The casting will be posted on the bulletin board right out in the hall next Friday. Thank you again.” Mark smiled and bowed to the staff, thanking them before heading towards the door.

“Hey! How was it?” Donghyuck and Jeno hurried to Mark as he stepped out of the theater.

“Oh, uh it was-” Mark began, only to be slightly interrupted by Ms. Lee calling the next name.

“Y/N, ah good, come on in dear.” Ms. Lee called.

“Hey, good luck!” Donghyuck called out to the girl as she entered the theater. Jeno shot her a smile and a thumbs up, she returned the two gestures before letting the door shut.

“Uh, anyways, it was pretty good. They said that it was pretty good for my first time auditioning for something..” Mark trailed off as the trio made their way to exit the school.

“See! We knew you’d do great! We gotta celebrate!” Jeno smiled proudly and started walking towards the bubble tea store near their school.

-Present day-

"You guys said it was just for fun!" Mark exclaimed in a panic.

"Come on dude. This is great! We're finally going to be on stage all together! We even have a performance with just the three of us! Sincerely, Me! That's so exciting Mark!" Jeno pushed the positives to drown out Marks panic and delirious state.

Mark read over the casting list once more, just to be sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.

Evan Hansen - Mark Lee Heidi Hansen - Jung EunBi Connor Murphy - Lee DongHyuck Zoe Murphy - Y/N Y/l/N Cynthia Murphy - Choi YuNa Larry Murphy - Jung YoonOh Jered Kleinman - Lee JeNo Alana Beck - Myoui Mina ... ... ...

Reality finally sank in. Mark was the lead of the musical. He thought back to his audition and what Ms. Lee said. ‘You seemed to enjoy your time on stage.’ he knew she was right. He loved being on stage.

‘Rehearsals start Monday, February 5th.’

Mark sighed in slight panic once again. He had this weekend to do some research on this musical so he’d be ready for Monday. He looked to his two friends who were chatting happily about choir, or something like that.

“Alright guys. Do you think you two could come over this weekend and teach me everything I need to know about this musical?” Hyuck and Jeno lit up with excitement and agreed right away.

“We can start now!” and with that, Hyuck was leading the other two toward Mark's house.

As the threee boys got comfortable in Mark's room, Donghyuck pulled his laptop out of his bag and pulled up the soundtrack.

“Okay. You already know the basics, so we’ll start with performances. The first performance is ‘Anybody Have a Map’ and it’s performed by...”Mark listened to Donghyuck as he explained the performance, taking mental notes of who sang what, when, and with who. This was going to be a long night.

-Monday @ rehersals-

“Alright everyone! Welcome to the first meeting for our musical this year, Dear Evan Hanson!” Mr. Oh welcomed enthusiastically. The room was full of students. Some were cast, some were makeup artists, some were there for tech crew, other’s were in charge props. Mark didn’t realize how many people would be there for this meeting.

After Mr. Oh and Ms. Lee dismissed all but the actors, they handed out the scripts.

"Evan Hansen."Mr. Oh called. Mark walked up and got his script and returned to his chair between Hyuck and Jeno. He opened up the booklet and was immediately greeted with the acts. The songs were listed along with who sang where. As he read though, he thought back to everything Jeno and Donghyuck told him about the performances; what the songs were about, what emotions they held, whether they were upbeat or not, etc.

Act 1

"Anybody Have a Map?" - Heidi, Cynthia

"Waving Through a Window" - Evan

"For Forever" - Evan

"Sincerely, Me" - Connor, Evan, Jared

"Requiem" - Zoe, Cynthia, Larry

"If I Could Tell Her" - Evan, Zoe

"Disappear" - Connor, Evan, Alana, Jared, Larry, Cynthia, Zoe

"You Will Be Found" - Company

Act 2

"Sincerely, Me" (Reprise)** - Connor, Jared

"To Break in a Glove" - Larry, Evan

"Only Us" - Zoe, Evan

"Good for You" - Heidi, Alana, Jared, Evan

"For Forever" (Reprise)** - Connor

"You Will Be Found" (Reprise)** - Company

"Words Fail" - Evan

"So Big/So Small" - Heidi

"Finale" - Company

Mark took note of where he sang and who he sang with. He mentally face palmed because he didn’t realize how many songs he sang alone; forgetting that he was the main character. He flipped through the script as the teachers spoke, observing all of his lines. Before he knew it, they were being dismissed.

“Don’t forget, we’ll be meeting every Wednesday and Friday. From 3:30 to 6:00.” Ms. Lee called out before everyone filed out of the room.

-Wednesday @ 1st official rehearsal-

Mark, Hyuck, and Jeno made their way to the theater for rehearsals. When they walked inside, they were greeted by Mr. Oh and Ms. Lee, along with the rest of the cast buzzing around. As the last few members came in, everyone took a seat in the first few rows of the theater. Mr. Oh and Ms. Lee made their way onto the stage and began to speak.

“Hello everyone! Today we are going to just listen to the songs in the order they’ll be performed in. So, just be sure to have your scripts on hand and follow along with they lyrics in the last few pages. After each song, we’ll talk about the singers and how they will potentially perform. Alright, let’s get to it.” Mr. Oh finished and pressed play on his laptop.

The first song was ‘Anybody Have a Map’ which would be sang by Heidi Hansen and Cynthia Murphy, Evan and Conner’s mothers.

“Alright. So that song, will be performed by EunBi and YuNa...” Ms. Lee spoke more directly to the two girls, who listened more intently than most other’s. Then, they continued on.

“Waving Through a Window. All of you are familiar with this one. This will be performed by Mark, who is our Evan Hansen. Mark, you did great with this song in your audition so the actually performance will be similar to how you did there...”

...

“Sincerely, Me. Mark, DongHyuck, and Jeno. You boy’s are close right? So this song, as heard, is fun and a little more loose. There will be some 'choreography', but nothing too crazy. This performance should come to you three almost naturally, it’s basically like three close friends fooling around and having fun...”

“Requiem. Y/N, our Zoe, will start off. A little later on into the song, we have YuNa and YoonOh come in. This song is a lot slower than the previous. Of course, this song is beautiful. Y/N, you sang it amazingly in your audition, so it should be easy for you three to mend your voices...”

“If I Could Tell Her is a little bit of a different kind of song. Mark, you will be the one singing most of it, but there is also some dialogue between you and Y/N. So this performance will be a little more like a conversation, similar to Sincerly, Me...”

...

...

...

...

After going through all of the songs, there was about half an hour left. Mr. Oh and Ms. Lee decided to dismiss the class. Jeno, Hyuck, and Mark made their way out after the everyone else. By the time they exited the school, Mark realized that he left his script back in the theater. He mumbled a quiet ‘shoot’ before telling the other two and hurrying back to the theater.

He pushed open the door and quickly scanned the room before his eyes landed on a someone sitting on the edge of the stage. He quietly walked in, and made his way towards the unknown figure. Once he got close enough, he recognized them to be one of the actresses.

“Uhm, hey” She jumped slightly at the sound of his voice. She looked up and pulled out her earbuds. Mark gave her a small smile. Hm.. that was kind of adorable.. She smiled back, and put her phone down after pausing her music.

"Hi, um, I'm Y/N."

HOOOKAY. So this is going to be my first serise. I love Dear Evan Hansen, and I thought it would be a cute base thing in a scenario. I'm hoping to have the next part uploaded in a few weeks. I have quite a bit going on in school, and I haven't written any more parts. I am working on some individual scenarios though, so look forward to those! I hope you enjoyed this is little part 1/prologue thing! The next one will be up as soon as I can get it done! ~ Jae☾

[sapphireglyphss]

» Yᴏᴜʀ Vᴏɪᴄᴇ | ᴊᴊᴋ  sᴏʟᴏ ᴍᴜsɪᴄɪᴀɴ!ᴀᴜ (ғᴇᴀᴛ. ᴍʏɢ)   

Gᴇɴʀᴇ/Tᴀɢs: sʟɪᴄᴇ-ᴏғ-ʟɪғᴇ, ᴛɪɴʏ ʙɪᴛ ᴏғ ᴀɴɢsᴛ, ᴍɪɴ ʏᴏᴏɴɢɪ ɪs ᴀ ʀᴀᴅɪᴏ ʜᴏsᴛ, ɴᴏ ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢs, ɪɴᴠᴏʟᴠᴇs ᴀ ʀᴀᴛʜᴇʀ sɪᴄᴋ/ɪʟʟ ʏ/ɴ sᴏ ɪғ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪs ᴛʀɪɢɢᴇʀɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ... ᴍᴀʏʙᴇ sᴋɪᴘ ᴛʜɪs ᴏɴᴇ?, ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴛʜᴀɴ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴛʜɪs ᴏɴᴇ ɪs ᴘʀᴇᴛᴛʏ ʜᴀʀᴍʟᴇss, ʏᴏᴏɴᴋᴏᴏᴋ ғʀɪᴇɴᴅsʜɪᴘ ғᴛᴡ

Rᴀᴛɪɴɢ: ᴘɢ

Wᴏʀᴅ Cᴏᴜɴᴛ: ~1.5K

Aᴜᴛʜᴏʀ's Nᴏᴛᴇ: ᴏʜᴍʏɢᴏsʜ, ᴏᴋᴀʏ, sᴏ ᴛʜɪs ɪs ᴍʏ ғɪʀsᴛ ғᴏʀᴀʏ ɪɴᴛᴏ Bᴀɴɢᴛᴀɴ ғᴀɴғɪᴄ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ sᴏ ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴇ. Iᴛ ʜᴏɴᴇsᴛʟʏ ᴡᴀs sᴜᴘᴘᴏsᴇ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴛʜɪs ᴛɪɴʏ 500 ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ sᴘɪʀᴀʟᴇᴅ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏғ ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴏʟ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪs ɪɴ ғʀᴏɴᴛ ᴏғ ʏᴏᴜ ɴᴏᴡ. Tʜɪs ɪs sᴛɪʟʟ ᴜɴᴇᴅɪᴛᴇᴅ; I'ᴍ ʜᴏᴘɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴡʜᴇɴ I ɢᴇᴛ ʜᴏᴍᴇ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴛᴏᴍᴏʀʀᴏᴡ. Iғ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀɪᴏᴜs ᴀs ᴛᴏ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴠᴇʀsɪᴏɴ ᴏғ "Sᴛɪʟʟ Wɪᴛʜ Yᴏᴜ" I ᴛᴏᴏᴋ ɪɴsᴘɪʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ғʀᴏᴍ, ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ ғᴏʟʟᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇ ʟɪɴᴋ ʜᴇʀᴇ! Pʟᴇᴀsᴇ ʟᴇᴛ ᴍᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪғ ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜɪs ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ғɪᴄʟᴇᴛ ᴏғ ᴍɪɴᴇ... I'ᴍ ᴀʟᴡᴀʏs ʟᴏᴏᴋɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ɪᴍᴘʀᴏᴠᴇ ᴍʏ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ sᴏ ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ sʜᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴛʜᴏᴜɢʜᴛs ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴍᴇ! Eɴᴊᴏʏ 💜 

“We’re back on in 2 minutes.” 

Jungkook shifted in his seat with a toothy grin. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a ‘producer’...” the singer-songwriter trailed off bashfully. 

“But that’s what this album was: self-produced. Your first, in fact.” Yoongi countered.

The young artist didn’t deny the fact, knowing that his old friend had already slipped back into his radio host persona, even before the one minute standby was called. It seemed that, at least for the time being, Yoongi didn’t press the issue but simply followed up with, “What’s something you’ve been working on that’s been giving you trouble lately?”

Jungkook tilted his head slightly as he thought. His overgrown bangs fringed across his bottom eyelashes, giving him a rebellious devil-may-care aura, which would have made Yoongi roll his eyes if the younger man was actually anything like that in person. The radio host knew that under that edgy haircut and emo hipster attire, Jungkook was still that soft, shy kid from Busan with big round eyes and an even bigger heart. 

He was glad to see his friend was still the same guy in all the ways that mattered. 

“There is this one particular track that I have a vague concept and melody for but-” Jungkook’s response was cut off by one of the producers calling the 30 second standby.

Yoongi, still relaxed as ever, pressed for him to continue, “But-?” 

“Oh, uhm, but the lyrics are still eluding me.” Jungkook finally murmured, fidgeting with his bracelet absentmindedly. 

The host nodded sympathetically as he pushed a few buttons on the console in front of him before turning his head slightly to the window where the staff members were monitoring the phone lines and the clock as the show returned from its commercial break. “Welcome back to the show, everybody. I’m your host, DJ Suga with the sweet voice from Honey FM 06.13. My guest is the one and only Jeon Jungkook here to promote his brand new, self produced EP “Mixtape 1”. His single “My Time” was released earlier today and it seems as though the response is already overwhelmingly positive. Producer Jungkook?” Yoongi pauses for dramatic effect before quickly continuing, “Would you like to take some calls from your fans? I can see the switchboard lighting up like fireworks. What do you say, huh? Shall we take some calls?” 

Jungkook simply chuckled at Yoongi’s subtle ‘producer’ jab, ducking his head in embarrassment, before quietly agreeing. 

“We have Minnie on the line. Hi, Minnie, you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jeon Jungkook.” Yoongi said.

“Oh my gosh! Hi DJ Suga! Hi Jungkook!” a cheerful voice filtered in through the headsets, “I’m in love wiht “My Time”. The lyrics seem so sad even if the song sounds so upbeat. What inspired you to write a song like this?”

Jungkook replied, “Thank you so much for liking the song. It’s a very personal piece to me and it means a lot to hear that fans are reacting so positively to the track.” He took a deep breath before continuing, “When I had set out to create this song, I had wanted to be as honest and authentic as possible with the lyrics while still staying true to my original vision for the song which was basically a bittersweet look at the last few years of my life and what it means to me as a young musician. I believe instead of seeing the lyrics as something sad, I see it as it simply living life. Life has ups and downs, there are sacrifices but even greater rewards. A give and take, if you will.”

“Poignant.” Yoongi responded, “Thank you for calling in Minnie. Next caller we have is Ken. Ken you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jungkook.”

“Hi guys. I just wanted to say that I really love both of your albums. “Euphoria” is on repeat daily for me.” a warm, tenor voice insisted on the other end. “When will we be able to hear you live in concert again?”

Jungkook gave a grateful smile and bowed unconsciously, almost hitting his head on the microphone in front of him. “Thank you so much for your support. I’m hoping to go on tour very soon, so please look out for tour dates on the official website. Until then, please enjoy ‘Mixtape 1’.” 

Yoongi efficiently thanked Ken for calling in and pulled up the next call in the queue, “Hi Y/N, you’re on the air with DJ Suga and Jungkook.”

There was silence on the other end. 

Unfazed, Yoongi tried again, “Y/N? You’re on the air.”

The unnerving silence permeated the air and just as Yoongi was going to move on to the next caller, a soft voice pierced through the quiet, “Hello? Is this Jungkook?”

Jungkook scooted forward into his chair. “Yes, hello.”

“I wanted to let you know that I truly love listening to you sing. Your voice is so beautiful and full of emotion. You truly have a gift...” There was a pregnant pause before the fragile voice rasped, “But I’m not sure how much longer I can stay to listen to you.”

Both host and guest were taken aback by the peculiar response but Jungkook recovered quickly and said, “Why do you say that? It isn't that late. Are you getting tired already?”

“I’m always tired nowadays.” The silence was heavy. When the voice returned, it seemed strained, as though simply speaking was becoming too difficult a task to bear. “Your songs used to be a source of such strength for me… but I’ve come to accept that it isn't going to be enough anymore.”

As the weight of the words sat palpable in the studio, Yoongi could see the panic in Jungkook’s eyes as he began to piece together what the caller was implying. Before he could jump in to save his friend though, the young musician simply asked, “How can I help?”

The voice returned this time with a quiet strength that masked the slight quiver of desperation, “Would it be too much if I could hear you sing for me… one last time?”  

Jungkook looked up at Yoongi, his mind racing with a million thoughts. His eyes flickered to the radio host’s black guitar that hung on the wall behind his booth. Standing to his feet with resolve, Jungkook strode over to the guitar and carefully pulled it down from it’s hooks. He turned to Yoongi. “Hyung? Would you mind?” 

Yoongi didn’t even blink. “Go for it, Jungkookie.”

Nodding his thanks, Jungkook made his way back to his seat and spoke softly into the microphone, “Y/N, please forgive me if this song is a bit on the rougher side as it’s still a work in progress.”

“I understand.” 

Upon hearing a reply from the other end of the line, Jungkook closed his eyes in relief. He didn’t realize he had waited for that response with bated breath. 

He began strumming a few cords before tweaking the guitar just a bit. “Now here’s the deal: I’ll be happy to sing this for you but you got to promise me that you’ll listen well to the very end, okay?” 

“I will.” 

Jungkook closed his eyes. Giving himself over to the music, his calloused fingers found its rythum and began to strum a simple cord before taking a deep breath and allowing the song to take shape...

That faint voice of yours that grazed me Please call my name one more time I’m standing still under the frozen light, but I will walk towards you, step by step Still with you

Yoongi sat back, too stunned to actually respond to anything that had actually transpired over the course of the next few minutes as Jungkook began to croon over the gentle strum of his guitar, an acoustic ballad of longing and loneliness. Despite the lyrics holding such sadness in its tone, the song ends hopeful of a day where the vocalist could meet again with the person they had longed for. Yoongi imagines the final studio version of the song would sound nice with a piano in the mix, brushed drums for a percussion piece and maybe even some tinkling synths for character. Either way, he’s pretty sure he had just witnessed the creation of another major hit for the younger musician.    

As the song wound down, the studio erupted into cheers, from the staff and Yoongi alike. Jungkook bowed politely before he spoke into the microphone, “So, Y/N, what did you think?”

There was no reply from the other end of the line. Yoongi looked towards the booth where the producers sat behind the glass window and took their nods as a sign that the line was still open. 

“Y/N?” Jungkook repeated. “Don’t leave me hanging now. We had a deal. Are you still there?” 

There was a beat of agonizing silence before a sniffle could be heard from the other end of the line. “Yes, Jungkook... I’m still here.”

[kittyrredden]

How it ends...

Hey guys, sorry it took so long to get this to you. I’ve had zero creative drive lately. But yesterday and today, it just flowed. Originally, LAR was going to go on for years with a wedding and kiddos and junk. But after the breakup with my ex, this is how I rewrote it. It’s mostly just an overview, with some more specific scenes in there that I’d already written. Anyway, this is the rewrite I did…

TL;DR- The end.

 The act five side story was going to be a shortened version of act zero. Originally, it was planned to be a whole act following Jaska from leaving Nix Velox (his village), through to the beginning of act one when they were thrown onto the boat. It would cover his journey south, meeting Catlin, his transformation, and the torture he was put through while waiting for the ship that would take them to Paello Isle. Instead, I shortened it down to a 7 page side story.

  Here is the overview:

 Child Jaska

Chases hawk

Uses powers

Sees through the hawk’s eyes

A little older

Watches father skin an animal

Asks why they kill animals

Teen Jaska

Thanking recent kill for its sacrifice so that his people may live

Journey to Vinea

Joking with companions

Teasing his little brother

Saving Yannick from the bear

The change

Jaska wakes from his dream

  Over the course of the next few acts, Jaska would run into Torin more frequently, even to the point of meeting her wife. When he is out with Tonya and they meet up, Tonya gets easily angry and jealous of how flustered both Torin and Jaska are around each other.

  Torin on the Bridge

Cast: T=Torin; W=Wife

T- -waiting on a footbridge in the park, staring down at water; thinks about Jaska; flashes back to dreams; grips her hair- Get over it, Tor! It was just a stupid dream! W- What about? T- Oh, nothing. Just a nightmare. Been bugging me all day. W- Wanna talk about it? T- No, I’m fine. W- -frowns-

  One day, when out with Presley and Summer, Jaska runs into Torin and Summer invites her to their next dinner party.

At the party, it is obvious that Torin’s wife is not well. She seems extremely tired and Torin takes her home early, but she is pleasant to be around.

 Jaska gets on well with Lana and Brandon at his new job. Brandon (being in a wheelchair) mans the monitors while Jaska and Lana do rounds. With absolutely NOTHING happening on the night shift, the pair get up to mischief. Here are a few examples:

L=Lana J=Jaska B=Brandon

  The Race

L- -standing in doorway of security office- Bran, tell us who passes the door first. B- K… -Jaska and Lana take off running- -speedwalk thru science lab as not to break anything- -Jaska runs thru basement; Lana noes the fuck out- J- Hey! That’s cheating!! L- -on stairs; jumps banister, cuts J off- Twelve years of gymnastics, bitch! -both run past security office door; walk back panting- L- So, who one? B- Unlike you two, I was working. -J and L stare at monitors for a moment- L- There is literally NOTHING happening! You couldn’t have looked away for two seconds? B- Nope L- -throws hands in the air; walks away-

  The Basement

B- -into radio- Hey, need one of you to check the basement. Something fell over. L- -thru radio- Not it! J- -thru radio- Okay, I’ll do it. J- -enters basement, looks around, comes to a set of doors chained and locked; shines light on doors, illuminating the words painted on them in red- Don’t dead… Open inside… That makes no sense. -over radio- Hey, what’s up with the writing on the doors? L- Oh… that’s… don’t worry about that. That’s just the furnace room. Charlie, the last night guard, he did that. Big zombie movie fan. J- -thought bubble- The fuck’s a zombie? B- Keep going, over by the old computer stuff. J- -stares at door for another moment, then continues on. Finds downed item. Nothing else is out of place, no one else in basement-

  Brandon warns Lana about flirting too much (in her own way) with Jaska. She denies it, then admits that she is flirting, but it’s just harmless fun and that she doesn’t like him like that.

 Catlin goes through a string of jobs, not making it past the training period.

 Both Tonya and Arthur express jealousy and suspicion regularly about Catlin and Jaska living together. Neither are pleased that Jaska is supporting her. Arthur never offers to help.

 Between Jaska’s protective nature around Catlin and how flustered he gets around Torin, she ends things with Jaska.

 One evening, Jaska and Catlin are hanging out on the fire escape and Jaska kisses Catlin. Unbeknownst to them, Arthur is on the street below and sees them. Arthur gives her multiple openings to tell him what happened, but she acts oblivious.

 Arthur gets a job offer back in his hometown. He invites her out to dinner, but keeps hesitating all night. The following morning, he finally tells her about the job, then invites her to go with him, then he offers a ring.

 Catlin is stunned. She doesn’t know what to think and at 19, she definitely isn’t ready. She doesn’t want to leave her friends. Arthur accuses her of being in love with Jaska, of seeing her on the balcony with him. Finally, he tells her to get her stuff and get out and he storms out of the apartment.

 Catlin gathers her things, leaves her key with the doorman and goes home.

 Jaska returns home from work to find a note from Catlin saying that she needs time to figure things out. Her room is empty, but for the furniture. [/end act]

 The next side story opens with Catlin waking up in bed with Gypsy. What was supposed to be a few nights on the couch that turned into a one-night rebound turns into a full-blown relationship. Catlin falls for Gypsy hard and Gypsy adores her.

When a job opening comes up at the coffee shop, Gypsy recommends Catlin to her boss, but like all the jobs before, it doesn’t go well.

 One day, Jake (rabbit) asks Summer how Catlin is doing and she says “Last I heard, she hooked up with a girl at the coffee shop.” He furiously blushes at the idea.

Catlin chances to run into Jake in the market. Coffee becomes a regular thing between the two.

 Being single and still very possessive of Catlin, the more Jaska thinks about her out there being happy with another girl, the darker his thoughts get.

 Summer comments that they haven’t seen Torin in a while (with a joke in there about how she can never remember Torin’s wife’s name – hint: she is never given a name).

 At Gypsy’s urging, and an invitation from Summer, Catlin and Gypsy attend a dinner party. The evening goes well, everyone enjoys Gypsy and Catlin is encouraged to spend more time around her friends again.

 Exposed to this new version of Catlin, Jaska doesn’t like who she is becoming. He confronts her about her behaviour.

 A season goes by.

  The Breakup

Cast: G=Gypsy, C=Catlin

G- I love you and I know you love me but I think there’s someone else. C- What? No! Of course not! G- Sweetie, it’s the same person it’s been since day one. You just need to see that. C- So… you’re breaking up with me? G- Yes. I love you so much, but I’m not the one. I’m just your rebound. Now you need to figure out for yourself who it is and go get them.

Catlin goes to Summer and Presley with all her stuff.

  Winnie tells Catlin of an opening at the library. Catlin imagines that scene that takes place in every movie with a library where the bookshelves domino, but she’s trained to reshelve books and run the front desk. It’s not enough to afford her own place, but it’s enough to live off of. She moves back in with Winnie.

 Two more seasons pass. Shows Jaska and Catlin in everyday life.

  Jaska and Torin

Cast: J=Jaska, T=Torin Jaska has a prophetic dream, wakes up confused, looking at the empty space beside him. Gets up, throws on clothes, runs out into the rain. Finds Torin standing on the other side of a bridge railing. J- Torin! T- Just go away! J- No! What the hell are you doing? T- I can’t do this. She’s gone. I can’t… J- What? T- She’s dead! J- Torin, don’t do this! What about everyone else? Everyone you’ll leave behind? Don’t you know how much that will hurt them? T- I don’t care. None of that matters. J- What about me? T- -looks at him- J- If you do this, do you have any idea what that would do to me? I know it hurts. It will never stop hurting. You’ll always miss her, and you don’t feel like it now, but you will learn how to live without her. You’ll get stronger everyday so it will hurt a little less. Torin, please. You are so important to me. T- -lets go of the railing to cover her face and cry- J- -grabs her and lifts her over the railing to safety-   Jaska sits with Torin through the night until she falls asleep, carries her to Catlin’s old room

T- -wakes, goes to Jaska’s room- J- -wakes at the sound of the door- T- Sorry, I’m gonna… J- -pulls back the covers- Come on. T- -sniffs, hurries to the bed and climbs in, falls asleep cuddled up with him-

J- -wakes to find Torin watching him- Hey… T- Hey. You must think I’m crazy. J- No, I think you’re hurting. When my mother died, I was lost. My father didn’t know how to help. He had my little brother and a new baby to see to. He didn’t know how to help me. Mom was the only one who understood me and life without her was impossible, but I got wrapped up in helping my dad and learning my trade and one day I realized… it didn’t hurt like it used to.

T- -strokes his cheek, kisses him- J- Torin… I don’t think… T- -climbs on top of him- You’re important to me too.

  Things begin to wind down at this point between characters.

  The End

Cast: C=Catlin, J=Jake Cy=Cyrus (SOL), R=Romy (SOL)

Catlin walking through the market. Sees Jaska with Torin out shopping. Sighs. Bumps shoulders with Cyrus. Cy- Oh, sorry. C- -watches him go- R- Hey, are we going to the Valkyrie tonight? Cy- Still hoping to figure out what that was in the shark head?

Catlin continues to the cafe. C- -mumbles- He’ll be in a pink shirt… pink shirt… -sees Jake in a pink shirt- J- -spots her, straightens- C- Jake, you’re not… -blush- J- -sigh- Damn Summer and her meddling. C- -sits- Yea, but this time, I don’t mind so much. J- Yea… yea. Maybe she got it right this time. -turns to waitress to order-

   The End

[twistedtinseltown]

Episode 2: Operations

STORY SUMMARY: They say it takes a village to raise a child, and Hollywood University just obtained Atlas Seville – an incredibly bright but naive boy with a good future ahead of him if he can just survive the next four years of college. But knowing this town, that's obviously easier said than done.

CHAPTER SUMMARY: Atlas and Max get knee deep in Hollywood waters with a new friend; Thomas gets word of the fight in On the Grind.

WORD COUNT: 3,083 TOTAL # OF WORDS: 5,429

DISCLAIMER: The only character that I personally own is Atlas Seville. Everyone else is owned by either Pixelberry Studios or Bagdasarian Productions.

Enjoy!

It had been less than twenty-four hours since the incident at On the Grind, and Atlas had never been so scared in his life.

The poor little guy couldn’t sleep that night after the whole fiasco with Bianca and her friends, staying up all night and arranging his desk so it was immaculate for when classes started. He knew that he wasn’t in trouble, but it was the fact that Max was in trouble for defending him that troubled him so much.

Now it was eight in the morning, and after turning on the small television in their room to watch it, Atlas popped a coffee cup in the brewer and watched the drink cascade over the ice. He grabbed some milk and sugar, putting them into his coffee as he heard a stir coming from Max’s bed a few yards away.

Max groaned sleepily. “Morning…”

Atlas smiled slightly back at him. “G-G’morning.”

“What are you doing up?”

“C-Couldn’t sleep…”

Max sat up and rubbed his eyes before getting up from bed, concerned. “You haven’t slept all night? Aren’t you tired…?”

“Y-Yeah, but I-I’m worried about you, Max…” He sighed. “W-We just got started and you got in trouble… I’m the reason th-that you got in trouble because you were defending me…” He sniffled.

“I couldn’t let her continue to hurt you like that, Atlas. I’ll take flack from other people if it means you won’t be hurt.” Max wiped Atlas’s eyes. “I’m your friend, and I’ll always protect you from mean girls like Bianca.”

Atlas nodded and hugged Max with all of his might, feeling the blond’s arms wrap around him as well.

The two stayed in this embrace for a moment until a voice on the television interrupted their quiet moment.

“Social media is going nuts over a video of a fight that broke out in a coffee shop yesterday,” an older woman spoke, the anchor of an entertainment news program.

Both boys glanced over with wide eyes.

“This video, taken by celebrity debutante Jenni Whitman, shows a university student in an unprovoked attack with another student right in the middle of the coffee shop floor,” the woman continued, video of the incident the boys were involved in yesterday playing on screen next to the reporter.

Max’s face fell. “Shit…”

Atlas audibly gulped.

“Seven students are involved in this altercation, including the student that captured this video, and all seven are under academic probation until a thorough investigation of this incident can be done.”

The blond groaned, hanging his head. “God damn it…”

Atlas hugged his roommate again tightly and closed his eyes, still trying to process what exactly just happened. “M-Max, I’m so sorry…”

Max patted his head and sighed. “It’s okay, Atlas.”

The two heard an abrupt knock at their door.

“I-I got it.” Atlas stood up and walked over to the door to open it.

Standing in front of him was an older guy in an immaculate blue striped Armani suit, a binder under his arm. “Are you Atlas?”

Atlas nodded nervously. “Y-Yes, sir… May I-I help you?”

The man chuckled. “I’m actually here to help you, my friend. Diego might have mentioned me in passing yesterday?”

“O-Oh! Not b-by name, but yeah. He s-said you could help me avoid trouble.”

“I certainly can!” He held out his hand for Atlas to shake. “I’m Ethan, and I’m actually an agent.”

Atlas shook Ethan’s hand. “L-Like a talent agent?”

Ethan nodded. “Yeah, but I’m going to law school too to be and even better agent. I can help you and your friend over there.”

Max looked up at the two in surprise. “So you're gonna help us get out of this mess?”

Once Atlas let Ethan in, the latter spoke. “I can't get you out of this since it's out in the open on video, but I can minimize the damage it deals to your career. That's if you make it through the probation hearings.”

Sighing, Max ran a hand through his hair. “We're so screwed.”

“Not if I can help it, you're not.” Ethan smoothed out his suit jacket and sat down. “I have a famous friend you guys might want to meet. We’re having lunch at On the Grind if you both want to join. It would be good for both of your careers to have his say at this hearing.”

It took Atlas a minute for all of the information to finally click in his head, and his lip wobbled. “I-I'm in trouble too…?”

Ethan sighed deeply. “I'm sure you'll get cleared right away once they show the University Board Committee the entire video. May Gordon only got part of it – probably because Jenni herself had turned it in to her.” He checked his watch. “If you guys want to come to this power lunch with me, you've got a few hours to get ready.”

Atlas nodded. “O-Okay, Ethan!”

Max nodded. “Count us in.”

Thomas was in such a stupor that he didn't know what to do with himself.

Naturally, this was a hungover stupor that he was in; he had three glasses of scotch the night before, and he had passed out on the couch in his second-floor apartment with the television on.

…Again.

His nights typically went like this after particularly bad days at work – he considered almost every day a bad day by now, but he only drank after the worst of the worst of days when being at Hollywood University put him through the shredder.

Opening his eyes as they readjusted to the darkness of the room, Thomas turned over and had to shield his eyes from the bright gleam of the television while it played morning talk shows.

A set of knocks sounded, but Thomas hadn’t properly registered them and thought they were coming from down the hall.

“Thomas,” a stern voice spoke from the other end of the door.

Closing his eyes, he didn’t move from the couch.

His visitor grew irritated. “Thomas!”

The professor immediately sat up at the sheer volume of the voice waiting for him. “Okay, okay!” He pulled on a sweater to go with the sweatpants he was wearing and opened the door for his impatient guest.

“You look like hell,” the man in front of him spoke.

Rolling his eyes but managing an amused smile all the same, Thomas opened the door more for him. “Nice to see you as well, Enrique.”

“I wasn’t joking when I told you that, Thomas.” Enrique Vasquez, another of Thomas’s coworkers, walked into the apartment and sat in the leather recliner. “I was merely being observant.”

Thomas sighed. “Well, you’re not wrong, I suppose.” He went to close the door. “Can I get you anything?”

“Don’t close the door!” a younger man rushed down the hallway toward the apartment with coffees in his hand.

Pausing, Thomas chuckled, his head hurting a bit from the bright lights of the hallway. “Ah, James. Always a pleasure to see you.”

James grinned. “Likewise, Professor.”

“I told you, James: you can call me Thomas now. You work for Professor Vasquez, not me.”

“Alright, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Thomas turned his attention back to said professor. “Now… to what do I owe the pleasure of you two visiting me this morning?”

Enrique sighed. “I’m afraid that the reason is not for pleasure, Thomas.”

“Oh…” Thomas slumped onto his loveseat, sipping the coffee James had given him. “What’s going on?”

“We have a University Board Committee hearing tomorrow after our lectures.”

Thomas swallowed his coffee before groaning. “Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would screw up before their first day?”

James sighed. “These kids got into a fight in the coffee shop on campus. There’s video evidence that premiered on May Gordon’s show.”

“Well, that must be why I haven’t heard about it. I don’t watch her garbage can of a show.”

Enrique shook his head. “Neither do I, but Priya told me about it this morning.”

Thomas sighed and leaned back in the loveseat, closing his eyes. “Alright… If you’re not going into the campus today, can you two stay here? I’m not in any condition to go into work, despite appearances.”

“I have to go in, but James can stay with you.”

“That’s fine. You’re always a busy man with your writing, Enrique.”

Enrique smiled slightly. “Tenure as well.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Thomas chuckled. “Go on now. I’ll see you at lunch tomorrow.

“Of course.” Enrique eyed James with an undecipherable look. “Make sure Thomas doesn’t do anything that’s too reckless.”

James nodded. “Of course.”

Satisfied, Enrique nodded and headed out the door.

Ethan walked with Atlas and Max over to On the Grind a few hours later.

Zig was leaning against the outside wall when they approached. “Hey there, you two. Let’s make today better than yesterday, okay?”

Atlas smiled. “W-We’ll definitely try!”

Ethan grinned at the tall barista. “There’s the Zigster!”

“What’s up, Ethan?”

“Not a whole hell of a lot! Just picked up these two as clients!”

Zig chuckled. “Good move getting the little guy so fast.” He went over to Atlas and patted his head. “Ethan is my agent too, little guy. He’s good.” He turned back to Ethan. “I got you guys a booth in the way back after what happened in here yesterday. Bianca Stone and her cronies are nowhere to be seen, and your special guest is already here waiting for you guys.” He smiled. “I’ll take your order. It’s on me.”

Ethan nodded. “Thanks, Zig, you’re the best.”

Atlas and Max followed Ethan and Zig inside the café, grabbing food and drinks before heading to the booth that the agent’s famous friend had invited to lunch.

Once the mystery man turned around, Ethan smiled. “Hey, Chris.”

Chris smiled. “Ethan! Good to see you again!”

Atlas and Max were instantly starstruck, and the older boy was the first to speak. “You’re Chris Winters!”

The actor smiled softly as Ethan sat next to him, coming off very approachable to the two kids. “Yeah, I am.”

“You just starred in Fireman: Inferno, right?”

“Sure did! I had the premiere afterparty last night.” Chris blushed awkwardly. “I hate bragging about my work, but boasting sells.”

Ethan patted Chris’s shoulder and laughed. “Gotta ham it up for the press, am I right?”

Chris nodded and smiled in response. “Yeah, but the schtick can get old.”

Atlas, too starstruck to speak before, gathered up some courage to say something after finally sitting down next to Max. “Y-You were in Modern Wonders too, r-right? That b-baseball movie?”

Pleasantly surprised by the question, Chris grinned. “Yeah! Wow, that’s one of my favorite movies I was in as a teenager!”

“I-I used to watch it with my dad when I was in elementary school! M-My dad actually worked on the movie too!”

Chris was intrigued now. “Oh really? What’s his name?”

“His n-name is Dave! D-Dave Seville!”

“What did he do for the movie?”

Ethan and Max shared amused looks as the two brunets continued their conversation.

Atlas took a minute to think. “He w-was a composer for it, I think!”

Chris smiled. “That’s really cool! I don’t think I ever met him during filming, but I’d love to meet him one day.”

“Y-You would?” Atlas blushed with a toothy grin on his face.

“I don’t always get to meet everyone I work on a film with, but I try to! I like to get personal with everyone in a production!”

Max grinned. “Well with your personality, it’s hard for people not to want to know you better.”

Chris blushed and waved the compliment off. “Oh, I don’t know if it’s my personality…”

Ethan gave a charming smile. “Maybe it’s your giving nature then?”

“You guys are driving me nuts over here!”

Atlas giggled at the sight of the three of them talking, feeling embarrassed at first that he was making an idiot of himself in front of an actual movie star.

That is, until Chris cooed at him.

“Your laugh is one of the cutest things I’ve heard in a while!” The sincere look on Chris’s face was genuine and endearing. “What’s your name, buddy?”

Atlas smiled brighter at the actor. “I-I’m Atlas!”

Chris held out his hand for Atlas to shake. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

If Atlas thought he was dreaming now, this moment only made that notion more believable. “I-It’s nice to meet you too!” He felt his phone vibrate, picking it up when he saw the contact was the one person he wanted to hear from most right now. “Hi, Daddy!” He blushed in embarrassment, but realized it was actually okay when the other three men smiled at him regardless, despite Max’s very confused look at first.

Dave chuckled on the other end of the line, and Atlas could just feel his father’s positive energy radiate from him. “Hi, Atlas! Do you mind if I switch this to a video call?”

“N-Not at all!” He waited patiently for the call to transfer to video, and he beamed with delight. “Oh, y-you’re in your office again!”

Chuckling, Dave propped the camera so it was angled just right to show his face. “I finally managed to clean it after your little brother tripped and the music sheets went everywhere in the room.”

“I said I was sorry!” an oddly… squeaky voice replied with an amount of sass only one of his younger brothers could muster.

Dave gave a stern look to the origin of the voice. “Yes, but I still had to clean up the mess.”

Atlas blushed, hoping his little brothers wouldn’t make a guest appearance yet. “S-So, Dad, I’m with some people you wanna meet!”

Putting on a smile, Dave got comfortable in his office chair. “I’d love to meet them!”

“Th-This is Max, m-my roommate!” Atlas tilted the phone camera toward the blond boy.

Max waved. “Hi, Mr. Seville.”

Dave smiled warmly. “Hi there, Max. What are you studying there?”

“I’m undeclared right now, but I’ll be putting my feelers into a little bit of everything.”

”Nothing wrong with that! You watch over Atlas, okay?”

“I sure will, sir. With everything in me.”

Atlas smiled as he swapped the orientation the camera was in. “Th-This is Ethan! He’s m-my agent!”

Ethan gave a charming smile. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Seville.”

“Nice to meet you too, Ethan,” Dave replied. “It’s good that he found you, but don’t go fishing for projects without his say-so, alright?”

Atlas blushed. “D-Dad…”

Ethan laughed heartily. “Trust me, Mr. Seville. I don’t do anything without client permission.”

Dave smiled. “Well alright then. Thank you for being upfront.”

“I-I have one last surprise for you, Dad…” Atlas finally turned the camera to Chris. “M-Meet Chris Winters!”

The older man gave a surprised facial expression. “Oh wow! Mr. Winters, it’s a pleasure to meet you!”

Chris laughed. “Likewise! Atlas told me you composed on Modern Wonders!”

“I sure did!”

“That’s great! I love meeting as many people as I can from the movies I worked on that don’t usually get to see me in person! It helps me not seem like a surreal figure, you know?”

Dave nodded. “That’s very admirable of you, Mr. Winters.”

Chris gave out a chuckle. “You can just call me Chris if you want, Dave. I hope I get to work with your son someday. His future’s already looking so bright.”

“Is that the Chris Winters you’re talking to, Dave?!” the squeaky voice sounded off again.

Atlas blushed again and closed his eyes. “Oh no…”

Max frowned. “Oh no what?”

Dave sighed in frustration. “Not now, Alvin…”

“But I want to meet Chris Winters!” the squeaky voice responded.

“M-Me too!” added a second high-pitched voice that was partially reminiscent of Atlas’s in Max’s opinion.

“Oh for God's sake, you two!” chimed in a slightly less squeaky third voice.

Dave sighed. “Really, fellas?”

Atlas groaned slightly in embarrassment.

One by one, three chipmunks – yes, chipmunks – graced the screen with Dave. “Hi, Atlas!!”

Max blinked. “Holy moly.”

The oldest Seville son waved. “Hi, guys.”

“Did you have to get nosy at the mention of Chris Winters?” the chipmunk in blue with glasses scathed at the one dressed in red with a baseball cap.

“Hey, it's not every day you get to meet someone famous!” the red-clad rodent retorted.

“We're famous people, Alvin.”

“Riiight…”

The chipmunk in green looked up at Atlas with big brown eyes and a concerned face. “Did we embarrass you, big brother…?”

Biting his tongue to not make his brother upset, Atlas shook his head. “N-No, just wasn't expecting you guys, th-that's all.”

“Are you sure?”

Nodding, Atlas smiled genuinely. “I-I'm sure, Theo.”

Theo smiled and looked at the other three boys at the table. “Hi, I'm Theodore!”

Chris immediately felt his heart swell. “Aw, hi, buddy!”

Dave smiled. “These are my youngest sons – Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.”

Alvin, the one in red, grinned. “I'm the awesome one!”

Simon, the one in blue, rolled his eyes.

The three boys at Atlas’s table chuckled.

Atlas smiled. “I-I know you wanted to talk, Dad, b-but you can always text me too if they ever become too much of a handful!” He giggled.

“Yeah, but what's the fun in that?!” Alvin asked.

“Please, Alvin, I'm begging you not to embarrass Atlas. He's making friends at school. He'll be fine.” Dave looked back to Atlas. “Talk to you soon?”

Atlas nodded. “Y-You bet! I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, kiddo. Have fun at school, okay?”

“O-Okay, Dad! B-Bye, guys!”

“Bye, Atlas!!” the chipmunks cheered before the call disconnected.

Atlas hung up as well before blushing in embarrassment he hid from Theodore. “I-I was hoping you guys wouldn't know about them until you really got to know me but… those are my little brothers.”

Max looked concerned. “Why did you want to hide them from us?”

“B-Because I want people to get to know me as a person of my own rights and thoughts, a-and not just lumped in as related to my famous brothers, you know?”

“We getcha. But we already know you as your own person.”

“And you're pretty great,” Chris added.

The youngest boy blushed. “Oh stop…”

Ethan smiled. “Don't worry, Atlas; I can help you tastefully develop your own signature brand that's different from your brothers and still maintain a good relationship with them. I'm sure they'll understand!”

Atlas nodded gratefully. “Th-Thank you!”

“Of course! Now, let's finally eat! We got distracted.”

“S-Sounds good!”