#also I still need to replace the broken links in that post WHOOPS sorry

[distantlaughter]

in an older post (Top 5 Brocedes moments) you said that back in 2008 Nico had a favourite Brit and it (probably) wasn’t Lewis and Lewis had a favourite German (Adrian Sutil) but it (probably) wasn’t Nico. This got me wondering who was the favourite Brit and why that person? Sorry for bringing this up but the question won’t leave my head.

Hi! I’m going to be honest I actually cannot for the life of me remember who I was talking about in that post but if I had to guess I think the favorite Brit (in terms of people on the grid/associated with f1) might have been Jenson? Just based on what I could tell from the research I had done (doing activities off-the-grid together, general camaraderie)… I think I said that based more on how the media would sometimes play up the friendship between Nico and Lewis and how their level of friendship during that period in time (pre-Mercedes) actually (probably) wasn’t as best-friends-since-childhood as ppl make it out to seem…

[alex-fucking-dempsey]

SPOILERS FOR 13 REASONS WHY SEASON 4 EPISODE 1: WINTER BREAK

i was high almost the whole time this is a reaction ig sjsjsjs

Clay is narratating baby boy

Who tf died?

I called it monty fucking lived I FUCKING *flips tables*

So winston shut the fuck up if alex fucking goes to jail 🔪🔪🔪

Monty is horrfying omfg also the way hes talking abt the racial system

period tell him clay

aYO WHAT THE FUCK CLAY??? Is monty alive???

Clay looks so good shut the fuck up everyone

Dylan Minette pls sir get in guts

Clay is going insane lowkey scared

I miss Ryan Shaver n Scott Reed, end post

CLAY PUT THE GLASS AWAY MF

clay is too pretty im-

i hope tyler is okay ;-;

They are dating iM IM SORRY????

i just realize wtf is sheri? Where has been😭

clay lowkey reminds of tony

Tyler :(

tyler and clays friendship>>>

"ass shoes" - jess

Shes MOVING????

"Clay-cray" "clazy" the way i wanna marry Jessica

The way im high as hell the monty illusions i hate em

Alex dad >>>>

The only cop i stan

quick break: black lives matter.

okay Tony serve the looks

Where has justin been

ZACH MY BOY I LITERALLY LOVE HIM

PLEASE SIR LET ME LOVE YOU

ohhhhh justin was OHHHH

Okay but im zach showing up eveeywhere high as hell

justin n clay >>>>

Matt >>>>

jess n justin >>>

god i love this show sm sm

WE BITCH WHO IS WE

tony = tylers mom

Zach n alex stay a million feet apart for no reason

wAIT THIS DUDE

did he replace scott where is scott fuck u

US??? BITCH YOUR NEW GO AWAY WHO IS US

cookies: stan

alex is so nervous

oMG TYLER N NEW GUY HAVE VEEN CHILLING

I love zachs vibes

AGAIN WHO TF IS WE ANI SHUT UP

oh new guys name is charlie sisjsj

oH MY

justin what ;-;

you know what you tell her honey :(

I feel you lowkey jess :(

mERRY CHIRSTMASSSSSS

oh no ;-;

iF ALEX IS BEIBG LINKED BACK TO THW MURDER BY THIS STUPID COP IMA MD RIOT

alex looks so good rn sir pls

everyone: alex dont say anything

alex: SO FUCK YOU-

why does bill looknso diifferent

winston: mourning over his bf :(

winston needs to stoo being weird

Justin n clay getting new phones so sweet

Clay looks so good in that pic ;-;

why does everyone look so goddamn goos in the season wtf

hEY QUICK MF QUESTION DOES CLAY FUCKING DIE 🔪

ani n jess would make good friends with Sheri :(

I am one of the few who does like ani ngl

Justin serves looks sir pls

i swear i lean toward women but yall 😭the men in this mf show

Clay quit being awkward

I want ani and jess to live together

she best see her mom every weekend

sHE SAID: HER CURFEW IS 5 MF 🔪

does ani not like clay????

Yall jess best not be starting a forest fire

I forgot ani and bryce were fucking

ani is thicc lowkey

Yall i have work im upset

Is that the same whisper sound from assassins creed

WTF JESS SEEING BRYCE SCARED ME JESUS

ayo what the fuck?

yes jessica you fucking tell him

wtf is metal detector gonna do bro

I hate boland anyways

wINSTON QUIT LOOKING SO MF SUS

Estella is so pretty

Who is she Jess??

What???

Im confused

Zach >>>>

zach breathes and im all "wow so hot"

is no one going to college???

wINSTON GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM TYLER 🔪🔪🔪🔪

you getting cut if you are mean to my boy

thank god for ani

Fuck winston this lil mf gives me the heebegeebes

justins going to college imnso proud

oh shit winston is fine tho

also wtf do you mean it can kill you ima mess this mf up

wHY DID JESS GO BACK WITH- ANI PLEASE SHUT UP

okay ani pls dont call clay out (she wants a knife to her face)

poor clay has to pretend hes okay for everyone else

Im tired of seeing monty beibg a creep

Ani: *whispers* clay no wait-

LEAVE ESTELLA ALONE PERIOD

fuck off yall bitches

yEAH CHARLIE YOU TELL HER

who the fuck ONG

RHATS MONTYS SISTER WTF

monty n hannah n bryce: haunts ppl

CLAY GO RUN UP ON THOSE MFS

yall mfs really wanna box HURT CLAY-

OMG CLAY IS SO HOT PUNCH THAT MF

ani n clay: know who killed bryce

Also ani: THEY DONT WANNA BELIEVE HE KILLED BRYCE

im sorry???

tell ani clay :(

wINSTON DONT FUCKING TOUCH TYLER I WILL WHOOP UR MF ASS 🔪🔪🔪🔪

zACH N ALEX ZACH N ALEX EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP

alex: worried abt alex

zach quit being mean to ur bf

zach is being so inconsiderate eat ass bro

HES GONNA TAKE ALEX OUT OKAY NVM I LOVE HIM

:( they still wont take them back annoying

justin dont-

Snitches get stitches end up in ditches qnd get no bitches bro you know the code

okay clay dont get all pissy bro

that was a weird transition

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP IM LITERALLY I HAVE TEARS IN MY EYES ITS SCOTT OH MY GOD MY BOY

i had no idea he was a senior why didnt they say that

oh ny god this explains the absence of ryan then ig but i miss scott more than anything ong

This confirms clays in love with scott i dont make the rules

LOOK AT HOW SWEET SCOTT IS BEING ONG EVERYONE I LOVE HIM FUCK

clays jeans >>>

i was expecting hannah tbh not ani

omg no clay :( u cant save everyone- it would have been more powerful coming from hannah lowkey disapointed

clay is finally getting help, proud

Clay looks so fine omg im sorry but he looks great

everyone in this seasn is looking so fine wtf

Winston is so pretty :(

he rlly liked monty my heart lowkey is broken

wHAT THE FUCK ZACH

the WAY ZAHC JUST SAVED ALEXS LIFE

WHAT THE FUCK

IM SO CONFUSED

HE JUST KISSED HIM

ZACH SHUT THE FUCK UP

no :(

Im going to sob

I have a feeling theyll kiss again and itll be on zachs volition

The anxiety i havfor alex

Also lowkey zach kissed back

the fucks i give ima write so many fics istg yall

brb ima go get high rq

they are gonna trace it all back to clay im so nervous

tyler best keep his mouth shut

Clay is so funny sjsjsjs hes so scarcastic like okay emo edge lord

season 2 is still superior i stand by that statement

[novarasalas]

Second Look Review: ‘A Little Adventure’

And here begins a review series of Voltron’s season 7, written up as i re-watch it. This is equal parts as a writing exercise and as me just wanting to share my thoughts and observations.

I’ll try to go light on meta and theories, sticking to just the facts, ma’am.

Well, that’s what I intended to happen, but this episode was very personal from the start, what with all the Shiro backstory. 

So join me for this two-part review, where I switch on the projection machine and smash the overshare button.

Part 1: Laugh So You Don’t Cry

Let’s start with the easy stuff, yeah? 

It features Coran, finally going full Thornberry:

...truly gorgeous.

We also have this amazing pair here:

And, most unexpectedly, a demonstration of yalmors linking at the ears, something we haven’t heard about since season 1:

I don’t have much else to say about this part. I would, however, like to formally request a spin off of Hunk and Romelle being so, so done with everything.

Part 2: The Meeting

So hey! It’s that back story everyone’s been screaming for, and boy, does this episode deliver. I really wish it had been solely dedicated to that story, though. I’m not a fan of the high drama/humorous aside splits they keep giving us. I know they do that to keep things interesting, cause hey, rated TV-Y7, right? But I always come out the other side of it feeling like I have emotional whiplash.

First, look at this:

Thank you.

So Shiro’s a bit of a celebrity? That’s pretty cool. I’m impressed.

Too bad Keith isn’t.

He’s even in the classic “anime protagonist seat”. Oh, Keith.

The subtitles here say: Shiro broke the record for the fastest orbital velocity, beating the old heliocentric speed by about 50 kilometers per second. 

I’m a big damn nerd, so you know I had to look this up. Here’s what I found:

In 2018 though, a new NASA mission - Solar Probe Plus - will be launched. Designed to come as close as 8.5 solar radii to the Sun (that’s about about 5.9 million kilometers or 3.7 million miles), it will hit orbital velocities as high as 200 kilometers a second (450,000 miles an hour).

To just put that incredible figure into perspective - going this fast would get you from the Earth to the Moon in about ½ an hour. It is also about 0.067% the speed of light. (source: Scientific American -”The Fastest Spacecraft Ever?”)

I have no idea if they’re counting his record against something like that, or manned flight, for which the record is 107,000 km/h. That’s uh..that’s us. On Earth. We haven’t sent people into independent solar orbit yet.

Also, one day I’ll learn how to post links without breaking the tags, cause my source article was very interesting. Please go find it.

And now we have the simulator. We get that call back to “Taking Flight”, which I found to be a nice touch.

Keith, you’re the only one who could possibly fly through this.

And then Keith steals Shiro’s car and his heart, wasting no time in attempting to push him away. And he doesn’t just keep it between the two of them; Keith’s got a lot of misguided anger to share.

Nothing will endear you to your new classmates faster than signing the whole group up for a collective punishment.

But lessons are learned and everyone calms down.

..oh. Whoops.

Yes, the good ol’ collective punishment: let the jerkass’ peers sort them out. And maybe it would have worked in this case, except for the fact that Keith respects exactly no one.

When this episode first aired, I was seeing yelling about James being a bully, but to be honest, this is more of a case of two shithead kids being shitheads to each other. Keith doesn’t care how his actions affect others, and James reacted by going for a low blow about Keith’s parents.

I suppose they sorted each other out in the end, didn’t they?

So here’s Keith, the angry, lost kid, acting out in desperation and loneliness, and Shiro, who we now see risking his own good name to help him.

Why would he do that?

Now, a lot of what I come up with in the next part is my interpretation of Shiro based on my own experiences, because that’s all I have to go on. My one big gripe about this is that we don’t see Shiro until he’s a young adult. What was he like growing up? Does he try to help Keith because he’s a sweet guy, or does he relate to him in some way?

We may never really know. For my own purposes, I’m going to assume that it’s more of the latter.

Let’s look back at this interaction:

Shiro: “That’s the Calypso, the first ship to carry astronauts to the moons of Jupiter.”

Keith: “It took them three years to get there. Longest voyage of its kind.”

Shiro: “That’s right. Reading about that mission is what made me wanna be a pilot. Those astronauts braved the unknown.”

Nerd break: 

The Juno probe made it to Jupiter in 5 years, arriving in 2015.

Right now it takes 9.5 years to get to Pluto

/nerd

Keith knows about the Calypso. You might think that the tiny, emo kid doesn’t seem the type to be into nerd stuff, right?

But I get it.

I didn’t have the best time growing up, and we know that after the death of his father, neither did Keith. I had one big obsession that got me through the badness: space. Sorry, two: space and dinosaurs. And giant mech shows. Er...three big obsessions.

But space was the biggest and realest. The 90s were an exciting time for space exploration, with the Voyager probes finishing up their grand tours, the ISS being built, and the first rovers being sent to Mars. It felt good. It felt hopeful.

And I think maybe Keith may have felt the same about space. After all, space was a big unknown. By nature, it couldn’t be good or bad, right? Not like home.

Or maybe it’s because he’s half Galra and always knew that he wasn’t fully of Earth. Or maybe it was both.

I can imagine that Shiro may have thrown himself into space for similar reasons. Because you know what really sucks having deal with growing up? Chronic Illness.

Part 3: Invisible

We come to realize, right along with Keith, that Shiro is sick.

When I’d first heard about this, I was both saddened and ecstatic. It’s not often that I get to relate in any way to a strong, capable, wonderful fictional character. ‘Cool!’, I thought to myself, ‘He’s a sicko like me.’ Immediately, my next thought was ‘Damn, he’s a sicko like me…’

Then a few things about his character began to fall into place.

I think we all noticed Shiro pushing Keith into the place of leadership via the phrase “If anything ever happens to me...”. And Shiro being chronically ill explains that. I’d been wondering for a while about what Shiro’s deal could be. Why did he think something was going to happen to him? Was is just planning for every eventuality, or was it something else?

Shiro’s a great leader, so it was probably both. But him being ill puts a new perspective on things.

When you’re chronically ill, you have to think about things a lot more than other people. You have to plan heavily for ‘what ifs’, and you had better be prepared. 

Back in July, a friend and I took a trip to a con. This had been the first trip I’ve been on in years since I’ve been so damn sick. The preparation alone was exhausting. I had to make sure I had everything with me, and backups of everything just in case something happened. I had to make sure my meds and supplies were in reach if I needed them right away, but I also had to make sure that they were cool and out of the summer sun, because if they got too hot, they’d stop working.

The con was six hours away from home, and if I had needed replacements of these things, I would have to make soooo many phone calls and likely beg for help.

I had to have a conversation with my friend about what to do in case I had “an incident”. It’s humiliating; I’m a grown ass adult that has to preemptively ask people for help. Even though she’s my best friend, and I trust her so very much, it sucks.

In the end, everything was fine, but only because of careful planning. I can’t tell you how much I miss the days of just being able to go, to do, to not have to think about everything that could go wrong and possibly kill me.

So what I’m really saying here is that Shiro most likely has a lot of experience planning for eventualities. He’s also swallowed enough of his pride to discuss these things with Keith by the time the main story begins. And note: it’s only Keith he shares these things with, not the others. I don’t share these things with people who aren’t very, very close to me either.

Well, present company excluded, of course.

And here’s the part that  I go projecting onto Shiro again, but as I said previously, until they give more backstory, it’s all I have to go on.

So, what about Shiro’s family?

That’s something that’s been talked about in the fan space for a while, too. Is he an orphan? Did they disown him? Unfortunately, the flashbacks we get don’t go back that far. All I have to go on to answer that are my own experiences, which are not good.

My heart swells every time I see someone talk about how their family supports them as they deal with their illnesses. How good it is that they have love and stability to help them through.

I don’t have that. I never did. My home life sucked before I got sick, and illness certainly didn’t help.  I can say with certainty that if I had spent years in space out of contact with them, I wouldn’t be too broken up about it. There’d have been no video messages home, is what I’m saying.

I could see Shiro at this point in the flashbacks, gifted and celebrated, throwing himself at everything he could, working hard to prove that he’s worth something, proving that you’re not a lost cause just because you’re sick. I found myself wanting to prove things, too, taking on tasks and making plans and trying to show the world that I’m still useful, that I’m not lazy. See? I didn’t cause my own illness in an attempt to get out of responsibilities.

You’ll still get rejected, though.

So you learn to hide your illness from people that don’t need to know about it.

Shiro may have been like Keith: a lost, angry kid, pushing people away before they can make the decision to leave. It’s a difficult thing to grow up and only see disappointment in the eyes of the people who are supposed to be there for you. Again and again, they let you know in so many ways that you’re difficult to deal with, that somehow you’re a burden on them.

I can’t know for sure about Shiro, but I know that this is the truth for Keith. I completely understand why Keith would end up so attached to Shiro, the only person who was actually putting in a real effort to help him. I wish I’d had my own Shiro, ya know?

I can’t be all doom and gloom about this, though. I still like that one idea that Shiro was raised by his grandparents. I like to think that it was a happier time for him, as my time spent with my own grandparents was for me.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this, and projecting way too much of my own problems onto him. For the sake of any alternate realities where Shiro is a real person, I hope that I am. 

Next up: Part 2 - relationships are hard -and- an appeal to societies greater sensibilities.