cleverrebelkitten

[utilitycaster]

Do you think that Laura and Marisha are deliberately making their relationship somewhat toxic and unsustainable or do you think they see the relationship as healthy? It is just so different from all of the other relationships they have been a part of and not really in a good way. Would love to get your perspective on it if you have one

I am honestly unsure. I would like to say it's deliberate. Prior to it becoming canon, in fact, I, and a lot of other people who were less than enthused by Imogen and Laudna's romance and weren't entirely sold from the start, made the case that we expected they would be talking to each other and would put together a compelling story, not the dull fluff so common in fanon. While whether it's compelling is a subjective judgment, we know for a fact they didn't talk to each other. We know for a fact Marisha was surprised by the question of "Can I kiss you," and Laura was surprised by the answer. We know from a 4SD not long after (4SD #16, Kiss and Tell) that several episodes later they still hadn't talked. We know that Marisha perceives Laudna as holding Imogen back (and that Laudna perceives herself as doing so) from the Rose City Q&A. We know that from 4SD #20 (Episode Twenty) that Laura doesn't like conflict in narrative and Marisha does, and that Laura was thrown by Laudna's regression following Ashton's attempt to absorb the shard (4SD #19, Shard Candy).

I don't know if it's deliberate or not; I don't have any extra insight that isn't public knowledge any fan can easily access. But man, it doesn't feel like these are two actors on the same page about what's going on.

I've touched on this before but mostly in tags or whisper posts but I've always felt ill at ease with a number of for lack of a better term "fandom-approved opinions" and one of the ones that has baffled me the most is this idea that Marisha and Laura have exceptional chemistry. I watched Campaign 1 knowing the endgame ships but deliberately avoiding the fandom, and Vex and Keyleth did not even once occur to me as a thing. I watched the first year of Campaign 2 without a ton of fandom interaction because I was avoiding additional C1 spoilers and it seemed crystal clear that the obvious ship was Beau and Yasha; it felt like Beau and Jester only even had enough potential for me to multiship it as my general "whomever Jester picks" for like, 30 episodes. And yet people - people who didn't even ship either of the above ships and in some cases disliked them- would just say "oh man I can't wait until we get to a campaign where we can finally explore Marisha and Laura's incredible chemistry!" and it's like. I feel like I'm the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes on this! I understand that chemistry is to an extent a matter of taste and subjectivity, but it just increasingly feels like people looked at two campaigns of tables where Ashley was frequently absent and said "well, if I want an F/F ship that's between two of the women in the cast, I guess this is what I have to work with" and repeated to themselves that a flat pamplemousse La Croix was a Piña Colada until they started to believe it. I mean if someone wants to explain it to me in good faith I suppose be my guest and I will try to take it in, but it feels like people just treat this as incontrovertible fact and if you doubt it they're like "don't you have eyes" and it's like, well, pretend I don't. Explain like I'm eyeless and five because I have never understood this. They both have more chemistry with every single other cast member; it's not all romantic but man, I didn't even buy Laudna and Imogen as platonic best friends of two years. I have never had this problem with any other pre-existing character relationships Marisha and Laura have played, platonic or otherwise. It's literally just them. I just never feel like they're quite on the same page.

Back to the relationship between Imogen and Laudna onscreen, this was easily the best conversation since the start of the gnarlrock fight, and it is my hope it doesn't fizzle out the way that did. You can't keep kissing Laudna whenever she fears she's lost forever to Delilah, Imogen. Or you can, but that won't fix the problem. Again: are you disgusted? Do you feel betrayed? If you're not, why did you say that? If you are, how will you move past it? Do you want to be with someone who never feels like they're good enough for you? Laudna, do you want to be with someone who, no matter what they say, you feel you're holding back?

Early in the campaign, my feeling was that of our current situation, switched - Imogen felt her powers were a burden and a curse and Laudna kept referring to them and to her glowingly. It's just...ships passing in the night, no pun intended here. I hope it's on purpose and whatever comes from it is a good story - and either a tragedy or a happy story could be a good one. But I have a nagging sensation that Laudna wants out but is afraid to say no, and Imogen is afraid to let go, and I honestly don't know if the actors have realized this impasse and how the characters might resolve it, one way or another, besides the insufficient bandaid of a kiss whenever the conversation gets too uncomfortable.

[ghooostbaby]

deeeep dive into why and how wei wuxian and lan wangji love each other, complete each other, are the inverse reflection of each other’s deeply hidden internal selves mirrored through the other’s external self, lan wangji’s inner wildness that he has to conceal and protect recognizing and loving wei wuxian’s outer wildness, wei wuxian’s deep, fuddy-duddy morality and values that he conceals with an elaborate subterfuge of jokes, mischief, and bravado, seeing and loving in lan wangji the ability to say no that it was never safe for him to express directly, “between you and me there is no need for thank you and sorry”

oh and a slight diversion midway through into a manifesto on WEI WUXIAN IS NOT INSECURE the whole story is about a society where being liked is ESSENTIAL for survival and it is actually completely perilous not to be liked, and his “people pleasing” is a skill and tool for his survival especially as an orphan and proven to be a necessary one when he stops doing it and STOPS SURVIVING

after the cut discussing the very interesting dynamics of consent in general in the novel, but not going into the consensual non-consent kink stuff till the last paragraph if you need to avoid for any reason.

I've been thinking about how Lan WangJi sees in Wei WuXian the exterior, unfettered expression of the wildness Lan WangJi holds in him and protects with rigid codes of conduct, propriety and outward dignity.

I have had this sense that these two are mirrors, either one reflecting the hidden, interior (and unallowed) self of the other. but it seemed more clear from Lan WangJi's side, especially knowing about his history with his mother and the spicy side that emerges when he drinks and in the extras.

I also - just... the way this whole story shows how romantic love is truly this longing for your self, to become yourself, to become the thing you're not allowed to be, seeing in that person the expression of whatever it is you can't become and longing for it, protecting it, joining with it as closely as you can without ever being able to let it live inside your own body.

On the surface it seems a lot more difficult for Wei WuXian to find a piece of his soul in Lan Wangji. I think its a bit too simplistic to see whatever draws Wei WuXian to Lan Wangji as a reverse-psychology sort of craving of acceptance from the only one who won't give it, pushing and pushing against this impenetrable boundary that he needs to break to feel assurance that no matter what he can make anyone accept him.

And he is SO drawn - in a mind boggling way, in the teenage flashbacks Lan WangJi rudely and aggressively throws him off over and over and Wei WuXian cannot keep away! Even when he talks about how boring Lan WangJi is, he never stops trying to be around him and talk to him.

I've seen discussions of the way Wei WuXian has always relied on the goodwill of others to survive, and that his placating of others to survive is a character flaw. Although that seems only halfway true. 

As a young child he didn't have anyone's goodwill for a while and he survived, and it seems like he can always find a way to survive from whatever means and sometimes very limited resources he has at his disposal. Doing what he has to do to become powerful enough to survive losing his core and being thrown into the burial mounds slowly costs him the goodwill of everyone around him - and what happens to him as a result shows how much placation was a truly necessary for someone without the protection of biological/hereditary family bonds.

(Don’t get me started on how his loss of his golden core and his development of demonic cultivation to give himself power by ‘unnatural methods’ through the use of a musical instrument is a metaphor for disability and the way ableist society sees the use of accessibility devices and tools. Actually please DO get my started haha.)

Wei WuXian is so charismatic and seems very used to getting what he wants and needs on the strength of that. He pushes a lot of boundaries and seems pretty confident and flexibly prepared to handle the consequences, whether beatings or harsh words. But he does work so hard to make others feel good, good with him, good with themselves.

When he is in the cave with Lan WangJi, Wei WuXian is described as "like one who forgets all past pain as soon as the wound heals". He can't resist coming up beside Lan WangJi and talking to him again and again after every time Lan WangJi pushes him off, only finally staying away when Lan WangJi bites him (and he still keeps trying to talk to him after a little bit!) and then calls him an awful person (!!! Bad Wangji! :(((( ). In the end, when Lan WangJi (very minimally) discloses what happened to his sect and his father, and even cries, because of all the defences/assaults Lan WangJi has put up Wei WuXian can't do anything or say anything to help and feels miserable.

Lan WangJi just absolutely refuses to allow Wei WuXian to take care of him - and I began to wonder maybe that’s what Wei WuXian actually really likes about him? Why he is unable to resist coming up to Lan WangJi again and again? Maybe because Lan WangJi refuses to let Wei WuXian appease him. He’s not trying to crack Lan WangJi to get to this impenetrable place of approval and acceptance. In a way he can’t quite understand, Lan WangJi is a respite for Wei WuXian from the constant work to be the one who pleases.

And  how different this is to how Wei WuXian is (or has to be) with Jiang Cheng when he wakes up in Lotus Pier after the cave. Jiang Cheng gets so down and really really needs Wei WuXian to do what he does so well (and wasn’t allowed to do with Lan WangJi) - chasing Jiang Cheng down while being injured and reassuring him about all his insecurities about his father's acceptance and becoming a sect leader and Wei WuXian's own abilities excelling his - and at first Jiang Cheng is pushing him away, but he really does need Wei WuXian to do all this to feel better.

Wei WuXian is described as not wanting to be lonely, and not wanting to see other people unhappy, and he keeps trying to push and pull with whatever he has to not be lonely and lift the mood for those around him. I don't think it's a kind of codependency or insecurity. It’s not that Wei WuXian is afraid to say no, in fact I would say he doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do, but he must always do it creatively, with humour. Similarly to Nie Huaisang, he uses a persona of foolishness to give himself a covert agency.

I also think I'm writing this because I don't like seeing this discussed as a sad bean character flaw for him to always need to be liked - its a strategy, its a tool, its how he survives and excels. Doesn’t the whole story prove how essential being liked is to a human’s survival? And he is so so good at being liked, in making others happy, even when he is refusing to do what others want from him that he doesn't want to do, he does it in a way that deflects criticism, with a smiling bravado that never says what it truly means and has people writing him off as shameless or foolish or just endearing himself toward them despite themselves.

He is always at work really, with jokes and flattery or mischief and teasing, to get the resources he wants and needs. Case and point, when he makes a big coquettish show for mianmian, definitely not being "people pleasing" for her, but the group of girls around them all find it funny and cute and in the end she gives him a perfume sachet which ends up being a valuable resource for later. Or the time he outright tells Jiang Cheng that if you give the girls some lotus seeds they'll remember you and return the favour in the future. (Also notice how his interactions with girls seen as flirtatious are actually strategic resource-gathering acts.) These are the skills he has developed to meet his own needs. (THIS IS NOT A CHARACTER FLAW. I REPEAT.) He takes what he needs and steals from the Lotus Pier markets knowing it'll be paid for, he lives like he never know when his next windfall will come from so he'll take what he can when he can find it. Like Jiang Fengmian said, if there is no guarantee of a meal in the future then today's meal should still be enjoyed. It’s how Wei WuXian said to Nie Huaisang at Cloud Recesses, you have to find ways to make your own fun out of whatever you have. So he gets kicked out of class, goes fishing, gets alcohol, he pursues his own pleasure. He actually is quite insistent of his own agency and right to choose, he just can never directly say no.

And that little detail that Wei WuXian always tucks coins into his clothes just in case, that makes him able to buy food when he and Jiang Cheng are on the run... breaks my heart and reveals so much about the way Wei WuXian is constantly at work on ensuring his own survival and never takes for granted whether he is safe (he knows he never is). 

I've seen some people talking about Wei WuXian sacrificing so much for his brother and sister out of a need to be accepted out of a chronic sense of insecurity. But isn’t this just true? Doesn't he live in a world where being accepted is absolutely essential for survival? Doesn’t this whole story show the cruelty of a social system based on networks of hereditary/biological family that closes out and scapegoats any outsiders, and that without biological family connections that can enclose around you, you can never truly be safe if not constantly working to earn acceptance? (And then beautifully ends with the way a gay romantic relationship that queers marriage/family/etc disrupts all this and creates safety and inclusion for Wei WuXian without needing a normative family.) (AKA romantic love does not resolve some internal personal problem in Wei WuXian but disrupts and refuses and rebels against the problem of SOCIETY.) (*breathes heavily*)

And that’s why Lan WangJi is magnetizing to Wei WuXian. Lan WangJi is always saying no. Although what Lan WangJi sees in Wei WuXian is an exterior wildness, Wei WuXian is not really out of control so much as he is playing and caring and supplicating and showing off and pleasing people to get the resources and the acceptance he needs to live his life. He has firm values and desires that he can never outwardly state, only creatively spinning plates to distract and deflect while he refuses what goes against his values, protects who he cares for, or takes what he needs to in order to survive/thrive. Lan WangJi embodies an exterior of resoluteness and direct agency that Wei WuXian doesn't have the luxury of. And he's so drawn to him for his ability to repeatedly say no, to refuse to get along, or make others laugh, make other people happy, but just simply follow what he thinks is right.

Wei WuXian’s outward wild movement protects an inward stillness. He is an exterior of people-pleasing around an interior of refusal. He is an exterior of youthful rebellion around an interior of unflinching morality. He sees in Lan WangJi the outward expression of his stillness, his morality, his resistance that he can't express, that he's had to protect.

FYI after the cut gets more into the dynamics of consent in the story, and the last paragraph directly talks about consensual non-consent kink play in wangxian’s relationship.

When Wei WuXian is with Lan WangJi, there is no work to be done. Lan WangJi cannot be swayed by him, and so there's no point vying for resources or favors. Lan WangJi will either give him everything or refuse him everything based on who he is, it does not matter what Wei WuXian does and he can't do anything that will change Lan WangJi’s mind. Someone he literally can't win over. After the resurrection, they are often in an adorable tug of war, where Wei WuXian tries to take care of Lan WangJi, while Lan WangJi won't allow him to but demands to care of Wei WuXian right back. Actually, Lan WangJi insists that Wei WuXian take everything he wants or needs from him and is even angry when he doesn't take or when Wei WuXian tries to offer a gesture in return, even something as simple as a thank you Lan WangJi won't accept. It’s kind of adorable how frustrated Wei WuXian is in doing this thing he's learned that he needs to do, and just... so confused by Lan WangJi, and has to find a way to please this person who aggressively refuses to be pleased and is ONLY pleased by Wei WuXian being pleased.

(Not to mention the way Wei WuXian delights in finding that Lan WangJi can’t say what he wants, and they have sort of these chaotic cohesive both-being-so-pleased-by-working-hard-to-please each-other moments where Wei WuXian is letting Lan WangJi please him by finding out what pleases Lan WangJi and giving it to him.)

The wildness Lan WangJi had always hidden within himself is something he sees as just as dangerous as Wei WuXian thinks of his desire to refuse. He saw his mother be socially alienated, shunned, and eventually die because of her wildness. His ability to survive in the world, aka to be accepted by his family, is contingent on him being able to control this inner wildness. From a young age (re: Phoenix Mountain kiss) he could only understand his sexual desires for Wei WuXian as something repulsive or dangerous that had to be repressed and controlled, and that the only way he could imagine his desires as possible was as non-consensual. His secret gay desires were never available to him as anything but something monstrous.

Importantly, it’s not like everyone else other than Lan WangJi are all vampires cruelly demanding Wei WuXian’s constant sacrifice. Wei WuXian is always vibrantly, charismatically offering so much, before anyone has asked. It’s Wei WuXian who creates this kind of relationship for himself again and again. It’s Lan WangJi who simply refuses - he refuses to charmed, to be cared for. And so in the end Lan WangJi becomes the one person who Wei WuXian feels doesn't need anything from him. When he says he's eating the corpse's fruit to save Lan WangJi money and Lan WangJi says that will never be necessary. Or when Wei WuXian asks what toy he should win for Lan WangJi at the market game, and Lan WangJi says anything Wei WuXian gets will be the one he wants. (XD stahhhhp it’s too sweet !!!) He really just wants Wei WuXian to be, to exist, to spend his life discovering his own desires and allow Lan WangJi to help satisfy them, he doesn't want anything from Wei WuXian other than him living - happy and safe.

It takes someone like Lan WangJi to refuse Wei WuXian’s aggressive generosity, it’s definitely not an easy thing to say no to Wei WuXian, dazzling or annoying people so chaotically before they even realize there’s something to say no to. The sacrifice he gives to Jiang Cheng, he never even offers a choice - and perhaps it would have been too much for Jiang Cheng to accept if he had the chance.

Lan WangJi’s statement "Between us there is no need for thank you and sorry" seems like one of the most important sentences in the novel, and you can’t help but noticed the way “sorry” and “thank you” is littered meaningfully through the book. What is owed, what the characters owe to each other, the give and take, touches every part of the story (down to wangxian's erotic explorations!).

When Jiang Cheng talks to Wei WuXian at the Guanyin temple he makes a lot of contradictory statements about what Wei WuXian owes, what he was given, what he took, what he (Wei WuXian still) is owed in return. Wei WuXian, according to Jiang Cheng, took everything from the Jiang clan, and paid them back with their deaths. The Jiang clan give him his life when they took him in, and he owed Jiang Cheng service for the rest of his life as the right hand to the sect leader, that’s what Wei WuXian had promised anyway. At the same time, Wei WuXian sacrificed everything (his golden core) to Jiang Cheng, by giving everything he was taking one more thing - Jiang Cheng’s right to even be angry at him. Jiang Cheng had taken everything from Wei WuXian. Everything that happened around Wei WuXian after could be said to be because of the loss of his golden core, which Jiang Cheng might be said to be responsible for. But he never asked for it, maybe he never would have wanted it. He wishes Wei WuXian told him, but Jiang Cheng never told Wei WuXian his golden core was melted while he was sacrificing himself to save Wei WuXian. He wants Wei wuxian to say sorry, but that makes him feel pathetic. And Jiang Cheng says sorry too. It’s a mess of paradoxes, and in the end somehow it seems like the scales are balanced in the most hollow, dismal way.

What is owed, what is given, what is taken ... Wei WuXian has never been part of a family. He has always had to say thank you and sorry for everything he's taken. Wei WuXian himself admits that he used "thank you" as a way to enforce distance between himself and Lan WangJi. Lan WangJi's point i think is that they belong to each other, Wei WuXian is his, and he is Wei WuXian's, unconditionally. The way that Jiang Cheng speaks of him in the Guanyin temple (admittedly I read a fan translation and this is very nuanced, related to slight variations of grammar), even when Jiang Cheng clearly is so broken by the loss of Wei WuXian from his life, he talks about Wei WuXian as an outsider. It is what MY family gave to YOU, never what you took from our family. But at one point Wei WuXian was part of their family - but he takes too much, and becomes an ex-disciple, not a brother. Wei WuXian’s inclusion as a Jiang was always conditional. 

Even when Wen Qing and Wen Ning leave him to go take the blame for qiongqing path they tell him "thank you and sorry", drawing a line between them and him, so he doesn’t even belong to these people who he sacrificed everything for. The way Wei WuXian acted when he was younger, he was always keenly aware of this - he always knew that he didn’t belong to anyone, no one is going to protect him unconditionally. And after first escaping the Burial Mounds, he is done pretending. When Lan WangJi warns him about what a demonic cultivation path will do to his heart, Wei WuXian replies: “After all, on the topic of how my heart is, what could other people know about it? Why should other people care about it?” He is done pleasing. Nothing has changed really, he still belongs to no one and is alone, but now he is angry about it, and instead of saying thank you and sorry he is going to become too powerful to be at anyone's mercy. And then we see in the story afterward what happens to people who don't say thank you and sorry.

The whole point I think is the impossibility of choice, the impossibility of consent in this society. If he didn't forgo the behaviour his social acceptance was conditional on, he wouldn't have survived the burial mounds. But once he becomes powerful enough to survive and get revenge on the Wens, he is socially outcast. Except he was already outcast from the beginning.

And so how do Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi find a way through all that to a life together where all their desires are possible, where Wei WuXian can say no while also being pleasing (safe) to others, and Lan WangJi can indulge in his wild desires while still being good? The answer is kinky sex!

It is kind of miraculous and beautiful how Wei WuXian finds a way to say no, while simultaneously pleasing Lan WangJi, giving pleasure, while taking it, saying no, and knowing his refusal is not just tolerated, but gives Lan WangJi pleasure, knowing Lan wangji and knowing the painful belief Lan WangJi holds within that his desires are unacceptable and unspeakable, and that Wei WuXian can take care of Lan Wangji in a secret little way and please him and give everything to him by craving this wildness in Lan WangJi while at the same time he gets to say no again and again , and it won't push Lan WangJi away, he can refuse everything while at the same time be totally pleasing and thus safe, and also for Lan WangJi, Wei WuXian's pleasure at saying "no" while still being held onto, that he genuinely wants to be fucked even while begging Lan WangJi to stop (and the many ways he does give his consent for this throughout, especially their first time), allows Lan WangJi the ecstatic feeling that this idea that his sexual desires are only possible through force are not just something his lover forgives him for but something his lover is SO turned on by, and that he has consent for his fantasies of non-consent, Wei WuXian has the same fantasies from the other side, he is doing what he is supposed to while doing what he shouldn't, and actually these monstrous feelings in him allow him to take care of Wei WuXian in a way that he needs - that they both need - and all these impulses that are so wrong with Wei WuXian become very right and a way to do good. And they are just both so perfect and perfect for each other and I love them and I am so happy for them to have a long kinky life together.

[evakuality]

Matteo - Episode three

Social Media - There’s so much of it this week!  At the time, I only followed a couple of accounts and then only saw the rest when it was posted to the tag.  I think I’m grateful for that.  This is absolutely overwhelming, the sheer volume of things the characters were putting out.  But it’s also really nice that we get all this normal teenage life stuff.  It really does allow an immersive ‘this is real people doing real stuff’ feeling to everything.  Particularly people like Kiki and Sam who have little to do with the plot.  It keeps them real and alive through a season where they were a bit more sidelined (and I love that Matteo and David’s little trip later on keeps them alive in a way that doesn’t overpower Amira’s season - this is a really clever way for the producers to keep fan favourites active without having to shoehorn them into places where they don’t belong).  I am also a bit concerned about some of this though - how on earth did the boys not get in trouble for filming the dancing girls and posting it to social media?  At most schools I know that would have resulted in some serious discipline action.  However, the most fascinating thing about the social media is the party at the end of the episode.  Sara didn’t start posting much on her stuff until much later in the evening (the reason this post is so late is because I was waiting to watch through all the social media before I worked with it - and there was so much for so long that I was able to notice the patterns in it in a way I didn’t at the time) and then Leonie took over and it was interesting what she chose to show and how non-perfect it all was compared to what Sara was trying to do before she got really incapacitated.  I know it’s not technically part of this episode but the text string between the two of them the next day where Sara panics over how Matteo might take seeing her in such a sloppy drunken state is very telling.  She really really wants to put on a show to make sure he’s not turned off by her not being ‘perfect’ - again, this is all very subtly done but there’s a really strong push to show how much of what is put onto social media isn’t a real and true depiction of who we really are.  And of course that’s most important for Matteo himself.  He’s still very actively putting on a front and it’s only partly to try to cover for the fact that he’s interested in boys not girls.  He’s really not happy or at ease with pretty much any aspect of himself, but he’s also not really willing to show it to anyone.  Except David.  Which we’ll see as we go through the clips.

Clip one - Matteo’s shelf in the fridge is so sad!  Someone (a parent maybe?) should really be making sure he has food and is looking after himself.  We touched a bit last episode on food and nurturing and what we see here is Matteo very much not nurturing himself.  Even more so than Sara, he has no care for his own wellbeing.  Also he’s relying heavily on other people (Hans in this case) to do the heavy lifting for him.  It’s also a major contrast to the playful, if disgusting, sandwich he made with David.  Here it’s really just about putting something in to his body and there’s no thought for anything other than basic survival.  Which is, tbh, a good metaphor for Matteo’s approach to his life at this time.  The chat with Mia again veers close to things that are difficult for Matteo - he’s wearing David’s beanie, trying to get that bit of closeness to him, but then Mia starts asking awkward questions about why the kitchen was so terrible and what Matteo was up to and it’s all a bit tough.  Matteo tries again to deflect and lie to cover his tracks.  Which... is he ever going to learn?  This lying is forever getting him in hot water when he’s caught out.  Jonas even calls him out on it, basically saying ‘if you’re going to use me as an excuse then give me a heads up first’ showing that he has Matteo’s back, but is incapable of helping him if he won’t help himself.  At this point, of course, Matteo has closed off because there’s a lot he finds too hard to talk about but Jonas is already giving those hints that he’d be there for Matteo if only Matteo would let him be.  But at least Mia’s pushing serves one purpose - Matteo makes contact with David again and they manage to connect and get over the little hitch that David’s ditching caused.  Both are still hiding bits of themselves from each other (David more so obviously), but both are quite happy to make these connections and are comfortable with each other.  That David responds is so nice; it sets up the dynamic so different to the original and Matteo is much more secure in David’s friendship than Isak was with Even at this point just because of this.  Then of course Matteo does the gay test, and it’s clear he already knows but he’s just sort of trying to work through some things.  It leads to some of the things he says later that are quite unfortunate (both to the boys about the dance teacher in this episode and to Hans later about the ways to be gay), but I think there’s a genuine desire to figure out what gay might look like rather than any truly homophobic stuff.  societal expectations and stereotypes and our own internal biases mess with us big time!!

Clip two - There’s not a lot of difference with the dancing girls clip, but it’s nice to see David again and the interactions between him and Matteo are a lot more natural than with Isak and Even.  I guess because these two are in the same year, it’s much easier to pass off knowing each other and so Matteo really is a lot more casual than Isak ever was.  The tone of the ‘why does he have to be so gay’ is different here too - Matteo’s much more low key and subdued when he’s called out on ‘why do we insult gays’ and he’s apologising fairly quickly.  It really is much more obvious that he’s trying to work out what ‘gay’ is than trying to distance himself from the idea of being gay.  He has a lot of issues and a lot of stuff to work through but it’s entrenched in an entirely different way to the og even though the words are almost exactly the same.  The power of acting and body language!!  Of course, this makes sense for both characters too - Isak and Matteo have different experiences and different lives and so they each act in a way that makes sense for them.  I’m super impressed that the same conversation can look so different - both actors are very very good.

Clip three - This scene with Matteo and Sara works much better for me than the one with Isak and Emma.  But perhaps that’s because Sara is allowed to be much more of a rounded character rather than a plot device.  We can say all we like (and Leonie is so clearly right there with us) that Sara needs to wake up and see how badly Matteo is treating her, but the way this is developing makes it clear why she thinks and acts the way she does and we can have a lot of sympathy for her even while rolling our eyes at how obviously this is not working out.  This right here is the moment where Matteo really should have said ‘yeah sorry, this isn’t working for me’ but he chooses not to because he still wants that security of having ‘someone’ if the thing with David turns out the way he expects it to (eg, David and Leonie being a thing).  He wants the ability to hide and say ‘see, there was nothing there, I have a girlfriend so I’m not at all upset that David has one too’ and it’s shitty behaviour and it’s totally unfair to Sara, but at this point Matteo can’t see beyond his own needs.  Sara is very clearly not happy with the situation and she rightly feels sidelined and unappreciated but she is still willing to accept his word when she puts those words into his mouth.  She’s still invested in this fantasy in her head and she is carefully scripting it so that it goes the way she wants it to.  Like last week when she was talking over Matteo to avoid hearing anything he’s saying, here she’s literally telling him what to say to get the outcome she wants.  Leonie has quite obviously got a better handle on the situation, but Sara doesn’t want to hear it.  Sara, again bless her, is very open about what she wants and needs from a relationship and how she’s feeling.  She refuses to take Matteo’s very half-hearted attempt at sweet talking her at face value and demands some accountability.  But it’s the very nature of those demands that sets her doom.  She tells him what she needs and he gives it to her - only it’s a very pale and weak imitation of what she would really like.  He uses her communication skills to play her.

Clip four - I loathe how no-one takes Matteo’s wants and needs into account, pretty much ever.  He’s in such a rut of being used to just going with the flow that even when he tries to assert his own wants people straight up ignore him.  It’s sad that he allows Kiki etc to basically commandeer his home for their party but it’s very much in keeping with how everything else is going.  Last week, Kiki was super irritated because she had a picture of how things were going to go (they would have their event and Matteo would host it) and she couldn’t deal with things not being under her control.  I suspect that if Sara hadn’t been with them and hadn’t done the speaking for Matteo, he would have been bullied into doing what she wanted then too.  He clearly doesn't want to do this , but at least he uses it as a way to get closer to David.  ‘Well, this party idea sucks, but maybe I can get this guy I like there’ and so he goes right up to him and invites him.  While he’s quite checked out of significant parts of his life, when Matteo really wants something he’s not scared of going after it.  Of course, as we see in later events, this gets him in trouble at times.  But for right now it’s nice to see him taking some small control of his life.  This is only possible, of course, because he was able to connect with David fairly quickly after he left last week.  The fact that they are able to do this is testament to how easily they do understand each other and even while its awkward, this relationship doesn’t have the underlying tensions that the one with Sara does.  It’s awkward in a positive way.

Clip five - there’s lots going on in this one.  The studying and how little interest and engagement Matteo has with it.  The consequent stalking of David on Sara’s account, the flow over into looking for David’s favourite movie, and of course Hans and his intrusion into Matteo’s quiet space again and then his attempt at using grindr.  It’s a slow, fairly quiet clip and yet Matteo ends up doing a lot in it.  It shows again, I think, just how much he values his time by himself and how much it works for him to be allowed to do things at his own pace.  I’ve said before I really enjoy seeing the characters in their own environments being chill and just hanging with themselves.  It shows us a lot of how they are.  In this case, Matteo moves very quickly from the boredom of the studying to things he has more interest in.  Like David.  He’s restless and disengaged, using all of his tricks to try to distract himself (playing with plants etc) and then very quickly giving up on what he should do.  I like that we get these sorts of smaller, lower key indications of how much David means to him as well.  It’s not big grandiose expressions of interest, but he watches the movie because David likes it.  He can’t even let himself stare at the picture for too long because it feels like a huge admission (he literally breaks eye contact with it and looks away the way he often does with David himself).  It’s in these unguarded moments in his own space that we really see Matteo and he’s a mess, but he’s a mess who really does want connection and to find meaning with someone.  

Clip six - We all love this one, right?  It’s such a nice moment with David and their almost-kissing is very intense.  But there’s a lot going on before that that I also want to look at.  First, the way the boys call Matteo a ‘player’?????? how???? That’s his girlfriend?????  He is playing her and stringing her along when he shouldn’t, but he’s not playing the field which is generally what we mean when we say this sort of thing.  He has one girl and that one girl has made it pretty clear that he is hers.  In many ways Matteo would be better off if he was playing the field - then there’s no expectations and he gets a rep as a ladies man.  But this works better for him - he can sort of fall into it and follow along with it without having to put any effort in at all.  She literally speaks for him, even.  I have always found it fascinating how much Matteo keeps to himself in this clip.  He hugs the walls like they’re his home and Sara is out there in the middle and there’s such a disconnect between the way they’re both acting.  How would Matteo have coped with the expectations Sara outlines about sex had she not got so blind drunk she had to be taken home?  It seems like it would have led to something very awkward and maybe she’d have finally got the picture.

Laura's little visit to see Matteo is cute too.  Obviously she knows that David is interested and so she checks him out.  It’s a shame it’s interrupted by Hans who then monopolises Matteo, but she was quite deliberate in finding him and speaking with him and I love the sibling support.  David’s shirt he chooses to appeal to Matteo is hilarious too.  The thought process (and the discussions with Laura at home beforehand) must have been brilliant.  ‘I always wear black and am mysterious and aloof and cool, but to attract this boy I will wear a white shirt with a stupid picture on it’ - that it does attract Matteo just shows how attuned David is to his future boyfriend.  Maybe he’s stalking the instagrams too - the Matteo Monday and Florenzi Friday do suggest that this is something that might appeal to Matteo.  

Hans and Andi bother me too.  In much the same way that I dislike that Sara assumes that Matteo not wanting sex with her means he’s gay (like?  It’s okay not to want sex!!  It doesn’t say anything about your sexuality), I don’t like that Hans has talked about Matteo to Andi and allows him to be so forward and aggressively sexual with someone who is very obviously not willing to be out.  I know Hans is trying to be there for Matteo and to encourage him to accept himself (I think it’s pretty clear that he knows or thinks Matteo likes guys).  But this is a party with all of Matteo’s friends.  What did they think would happen?  Why did they think he’d react in any way other than the one he does?  Hans looks confused when Matteo pushes away and leaves, but why?  This behaviour is entirely consistent with everything we know of his character. That it ends in an actual panic attack makes it all much more sad and difficult to watch.  Honestly, outing people when they’re not ready is not cool and Hans should know this.

The panic attack itself is so well done.  There’s no dialogue and yet we can see very obviously how Matteo is feeling and just how ‘normal’ this is to him.  He has a set of behaviours that he follows to try to take the edge off.  He throws things (this is his go-to when he’s stressed and he does it a LOT), he tries weed and he finally tries music and sitting by himself, cuddling a cushion for comfort.  I know a million people have discussed this at length, but I don’t think we can speak about this clip without at least touching on it.  Everything about it is done so well and it all combines to allow Matteo’s feelings to shine through.  I love that it’s allowed to happen at a party and that we see very clearly how these things can be overwhelming for characters.  I won’t go on anymore, but it’s just great and the acting is so perfect.  I genuinely think this small part of this clip is probably my favourite acting out of everything in this show.

And then of course we have the stuff after everyone else has left.  Again, a million people have discussed this in a million ways, but I love how this scene again shows how easily they get each other, how good they are at communicating with each other and how quickly they get on the same page.  Matteo has no trouble at all saying what he thinks and pressing for information.  This parallels Sara in some ways - she is like this with Matteo, making her wants and needs clear and putting herself on the line.  Again, this is all very good set up for later on when Matteo finally finds himself in her position and realises just how much his behaviour hurt her because he’s living her side.  However, unlike Matteo, David is quite clear and honest back.  And that’s why they can so quickly move into a potential kiss.  As with Matteo and Sara, there are close ups as they lean into each other, but somehow it feels like there’s more space for them to breathe here.  The camera allows them both to be in the frame naturally, whether Sara is often invading into Matteo’s shots.  Here, they’re both on board and both want it.  I like that Matteo gets a moment to be open and himself after his experience with Andi.  It must take a lot of courage to do this after he was so badly affected earlier.  Testament to David’s calming presence which reassures rather than pushes, and how honest they are with each other - there’s no way David could miss how relieved Matteo is when he finds out that Laura is David’s sister not his girlfriend.  They’re both very brave here - David for telling Matteo he looks good and Matteo for trying to take that next step even after his panic attack.   And I think that’s a nice place to leave this.  Because that’s already such a lot and this has all already been said before.  

[autistic-lalli]

I dont know how to properly frame my question, but autistic!lalli has always been a headcanon I readily claimed as canon in my heart because it MAKES PERFECT SENSE in my brain. But besides me, what I'd like to ask is what traits/habits/behaviors Lalli has that immediately clicked to you that he was autistic? Or showed that he was? Like, gush to me about them

(this is mainly so I can get better at writing him and also because I'm curious to know! Actually, SLAP me with EVERYTHING about Lalli, if you can 😂 I'd love to actually know everything)

This topic was also requested by @the-story-isnt-over-yet ! This post is for both y’all :)

I’m going to try to keep this organized, but we’ll see how successful I am. First up, I’ll talk through Lalli’s general traits, then the traits I picked out quickly and resonated with, and then I’ll touch on a couple other things that stand out to me!

Sensory Experience

Lalli repeatedly displays sensory-avoiding and sensory-seeking behaviors. He likes soft textures and sweets—he picks himself up a big ol’ fluffy cloak in Adventure 2, and his mind conjures him a nice and soft one in his dreamspace, and we all know how he feels about pastries. He’s always willing to eat sweets and breads, which suggests that Lalli has samefoods as well (samefoods are like a comfort food, but taken up to eleven; foods that always sound good, sometimes to the point that they’re the only thing an autistic person can eat.) It’s just a single line, but where Lalli tells Emil that he hates blueberries, it makes me think of a very specific picture (I’ll link it later if I can find it.) Blueberries, and other fruit, don’t taste the same every time! Some are sweet, some are sour, some are mushy, some are grainy, and some are juicy. When you don’t know what to expect from a food, this makes it hard to want to eat it, even if some aspect of the flavor is good.

But I digress! One thing that I resonated with right away with Lalli is that he clearly has sensitive proprioceptive awareness. That just means the sense of where your body is in space. When Lalli sleeps or hides under a bunk or table, he’s reducing his sensory input. Being in a small space is comforting because there’s less space to be aware of.

Lalli is also sensitive to touch, which is a fairly easy trait to spot. He doesn’t like the friendly punches the crew delivers, and even balks at Emil’s touch when he’s upset. There are exceptions, but those exceptions come at times when Lalli is calm and expecting the touch to occur.

And sound! Lalli doesn’t like loud sounds, in particular loud people (sorry, Sigrun.) This is a great place to talk about Lalli’s shutdowns. We don’t see Lalli experience meltdowns, but he does have a shutdown a couple times. Shutdowns are a response to stress and sensory overload. It looks different for everyone, and since it’s internal, it’s hard to tell how exactly Lalli’s shutdowns run. However, we see him cover his ears to block out sound and hum (“mrr!”) in order to calm himself down. He’s just trying to regulate his sensory experience. His humming is also an example of vocal stimming.

Social Difficulties

Lalli definitely has social difficulties, but it can be hard to tell which difficulties are due to the language barrier and which are due to his brain chemistry. But! Paying attention to the first part of the story, when he’s with all Finnish-speakers, as well as the dream sequences can really help us hone in on those traits.

Lalli, in general, doesn’t understand other people beyond what they say. He doesn’t understand body language or sarcasm—he doesn’t get why everyone’s punching him, he doesn’t know when Tuuri’s joking and when she’s serious, and he stares at Emil because he’s curious about him and doesn’t realize it’s impolite. He doesn’t notice when Emil is rude and doesn’t understand social scripts like saying “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” When he wants to express approval or comfort, he gives a soft pat to the other person. More touch than that might be too much for him, but he does want to express something, and pats are an excellent tool in that way.

Lalli’s inability and/or refusal to learn or use the crew member’s names also gives us insight to how Lalli faces social conundrums. To him, everyone else is more distinguishable by the epithets he gives them—their names don’t mean anything. It’s like naming someone “flower delivery guy” in your phone contacts instead of “Greg.”

Lalli also isn’t easily frightened. The only times we see him be really afraid is when someone he loves is in immediate mortal danger. The everyday stuff like trolls and omens don’t scare him, which is certainly in part just because he’s used to these things. Trolls and spirits are an everyday part of his life. But an unusual lack of fear is a common autistic experience as well, so I suspect it goes beyond Lalli’s accustomation.

Other Traits

A couple other things that didn’t fit into either of the former categories! First of all, the rubik's cube. That’s just autistic solidarity. Emil picked up a stim toy for his bf, we love to see it.

But also, Lalli relies a lot on his routine. That’s probably why the military, and scouting in particular, suited him. He has his own personal routine that is the same day in and day out. He tries to keep a routine on the expedition, but isn’t able to, which increases the amount of stress he’s under. Nothing is predictable, which automatically makes everything more stressful.

Relationships

I also think the dynamics of Lalli’s different relationships are super interesting and really highlight some things that aren’t often covered in media with autistic characters. It’s super heartbreaking the way Onni and Tuuri don’t seem to understand Lalli. Tuuri especially doesn’t understand why Lalli does the things he does, and doesn’t seem to make any effort to understand, which is sadly a common experience for many autistic people.

On the other hand, Emil’s reactions are the complete opposite. As I put it to a friend once, Emil often makes mistakes with Lalli, but he never crosses the same boundary twice. He lets Lalli have agency in their relationship. If Lalli has a boundary that inconveniences Emil, he doesn’t complain about it, he simply adapts. Lalli has very specific needs in his relationships, needs that are both unusual and difficult for him to communicate, so it’s far easier for him to just default to being a loner.

Me & Lalli

On a personal level, I have a whole lot of these traits. I stim with soft things, I’m sensitive to sound, I tend to be hypersensitive with my proprioceptive sense, I had to intentionally teach myself to read body language (I work as a theatre artist, which helped a lot,) I’m not easily frightened, I’m sensitive to touch and sound, and I certainly struggle socially. Furthermore, I actually had an untreated sleep disorder until about a year and a half ago, so I deeply resonated with Lalli’s chronic exhaustion.

Truth be told, I headcanoned Lalli as autistic from his introductory card, and I knew he was autistic within ten pages. Chronically exhausted and doesn’t know what’s going on? Mine now.

The Autism Metaphor

I talk about this some in my autism and superpowers post, but I really love that Lalli is both autistic and is living an autistic metaphor. It’s not uncommon for characters who can see or sense other things (ghosts, spirits, emotions, danger, etc.) to read as autistic, because that’s what autism often feels like. Our sensory experience is so distinct and we are so aware of it that it can feel like a superpower at times--in a good way and in a bad way. We’re living in a sensory world that a lot of neurotypical people don’t understand. Furthermore, these kinds of powers or sensitivities usually come with an isolating social impact in these stories, which only strengthens the metaphor for autism.

But Lalli has both actual autism and is a mage. He sees spirits and omens and can sense when trolls are near, and also is sensitive to sounds and doesn’t like to be touched. These things aren’t related to one another, but they all read as being in the same category, which both deepens the metaphor and makes him really interesting as an autistic character.

This is also why Onni readily reads as autistic as well. We don’t have as much direct evidence for him, and in many ways his trauma seems to run much deeper than it does in Lalli and Tuuri, so it’s hard to separate out what’s a trauma response and what’s an autistic response. Overall, I’m quite a fan of “no Hatakoinen is neurotypical,” but that’s a post for another day ;)

I’ll also be posting a panel or two of an instance where Lalli is displaying an autistic trait each day for the month of April!

[huacheng-zhu]

ok so 2ha. vague spoilers ahead (important spoilers are warned but watch out)

that’s a solid 4.5/5 for me. this novel RUINED me and I loved it for it. it made me feel like very few novels (and even stories in general) did. today I’m STILL shaken over a part of it that I read two days ago, despite the happy ending. I have A Lot of thoughts (shout-out to @whateverwuxian​ who can testify that I couldn’t shut up about it, love you buddy!!) so I just went ahead and [gestures below]

starting with the negative so we can enjoy all the positive later. feel free to discuss but I’m extra sensitive and these are only my personal feelings so they probably won’t change anyway, so be nice please!

what I didn't like:

too many r*pe scenes. I get that the non-con """makes sense""" narratively and thematically but like. they didn't have to be explicit. at the very least not all of them. sorry but too much is too much. there are more non-con sex scenes/flashbacks than consensual sex scenes! stop! we get it! enough now!

not a fan of a 26yo falling in love with a 16yo. if cwn had initiated Anything I would’ve thrown the novel out the window. but thankfully it didn’t happen, I got invested, and nothing mutual happened until mo ran was 22, so I mostly got over it, but I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with it for very personal reasons.

their first time putting it in. it felt so unfair and I was very upset over it. it could’ve worked without going There? why. was that necessary. and it's heartbreaking for both of them, because mo ran didn't want to do it either. he wanted them to take all their time. he wanted to go step by step. all he wanted was to make sure cwn would be happy and comfortable and never hurt again in bed. for their first time that way he wanted it to be special. but it was just. taken away from them, and for what? for nothing there’s absolutely no reason for it. I get there’s the metaphorical foreshadowing of the upcoming reveal aspect (spoilers) both of them not consenting, mo ran being horrified -> the reveal that mo ran was cursed and so would’ve never wanted to treat cwn like this in the past either if he’d had control (end spoilers) but still?? and it’s never brought up again? I know they don’t get the time until the very end but hhhh. yeah I have Feelings over this

some plot twists hit good emotionally but had no point? thinking of the one about xue meng here.

there’s horny, and then there’s mo ran. it’s not a bad thing, it’s just not the kind of stuff I like reading about and book 1 and 2 are A Lot on that side so in book 2 after a while ME, THE BIGGEST ASEXUAL WHO COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT SEX SCENES, WAS LIKE, “oh my god have mercy please just fuck already I beg of you” and indeed they chilled a bit after that. like they were still horny but. less intensely and less all the fucking time. thank god (I still think the farm arc was hilarious to witness though, and I did love it)

kinda wish their reunion at the end was longer and more emotional but that’s just because I love that shit

(spoilers) kinda wish we got to see shi mei again before he went off doing his blind wandering doctor stuff. a talk with ranwan would’ve been very interesting. (end spoilers)

xue meng didn’t get a hug

that one thing at the end you know the one. maybe I'd be more into it if it'd been given time to be explored seriously and wasn't played off as a joke. it kinda ruined the mood of their last scene for me. (spoilers spoilers spoilers this is the end of this section if you don’t want to get spoiled) in that scene I wanted chu wanning to ride off into the sunset with mo ran, not txj. like, txj is the alternate world’s “if there had been no transmigration” version of mo ran 2.0. the whole point is that mo ran IS txj in book 1, but changes and becomes mo ran 2.0. mo ran 2.0, who by the end of the novel has already done all the redemption and deconstruction of his dubious habits. who he was as txj is long behind him. at this point txj will always be a part of who he was, but they are pretty much two 'different' people now. txj disappearing into dust after everything that happens at the end was beautiful symbolism. it meant something. to me there was no point keeping txj around after all that other than for “haha split personalities fighting over cwn’s attention uwu” THAT SAID the fact I'm not a fan of the idea doesn't mean I don't like txj. I care txj a lot and have Emotions over him, and I will definitely eventually explore this in my writing

(still spoilers) the demonic blood reveal was a bit.... deus ex machina? plus I personally would've preferred mo ran staying a regular person (end spoilers)

alright what I liked now:

the themes, both regarding the characters and the various plot elements. this novel really challenges your morals and what you think is right or wrong, what’s redeemable, what’s punishable, and how much one relies on first impressions, amongst other things. this novel is the definition of “don’t judge a book by its cover” but also “look further than the first page” in so many ways

the romance. like I don’t need to say anything there. just, the slow burn, the longing, the yearning, the romance [clutches heart]

the plot twists/reveals. I’m so glad I was barely spoiled (I was spoiled two Big things but very vaguely so I was still surprised) because pretty much all of them had me shouting “WHAT” and/or gaping and/or various “what the fuck!!!”/”holy SHIT”/“NO” reactions

the way a lot of those reveals just completely change your view on things/characters?? that’s my jam

wontons. that was the first time I cried and my first very physical reaction to an event in this novel. I literally felt like time froze. I heard my heart beating. it was painful but AMAZING.

might be nothing in the grand scheme of things but honestly, all the food! I love that mo ran is an excellent cook and can make all those delicious dishes for cwn. as someone who loves to cook for their loved ones I think it’s so lovely that he gets to do that

the character growth. for everyone, but mo ran in particular? like I just. I started off not liking mo ran very much, straight up despising him at times, and in the end I was fucking sobbing over him and cried myself to sleep only to wake up in the middle of the night to cry some more so there’s that

chu wanning? there were aspects of him that I related to heavily, and that felt both like the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known and very special because it doesn’t happen to me that often

the whole deaging arc. that was deaging done right and it had a purpose in the narrative and their relationship growth, I was “!!!!”

I LOVE how they took their time with EVERYTHING once they got together? that it spanned over several weeks? that it started with the confession, then just holding hands, then kissing, then making out, then sex, and even the sex was step by step! it said A LOT about mo ran’s character growth and it respected SO MUCH the fact that cwn is a 32yo (unrelated but (spoilers) I like to argue that yeah he’s been alive for 32 years but when you’ve been asleep and not aging physically nor growing mentally for five years in a way that makes you a 27yo. so when he calls his body “mature and old” and compares himself to shi mei I’m just. buddy your body is just three years older than shi mei’s there’s barely any difference in maturity right there. I know it’s your lack of self-worth speaking, and believe me I get it, but don’t be so hard on yourself. (end spoilers) anyway, this is an unimportant and unrelevant thought that I had during the mirror scene) who has no experience in any of these things whatsoever. he's not pushed into sex like he's going to be comfortable right off the bat and like it isn’t such a big change in a life that’s been ascetic so far. mo ran is aware of that! and when they have their first time mo ran, who’s been maybe even more horny than cwn all this time - seriously horny is that guy’s middle name, who initiated the sex, what does he say!!! "don't worry about me, tonight, I just want to make you feel good"??? mo ran?? your character development??? I appreciated that so much.

the pain. I’m still bleeding on the floor despite the happy ending but yeah. I like angst and I was not disappointed. it didn’t feel that gratuitious to me, more like, brutally honest? I don’t cry that easily but by the end I think I’d cried, what, close to ten times??

quite a few excellent quotes [lies down] “I realized - I had grown into the you in my heart”?? “hell is too cold”??? I highlighted more but those two are the ones that always come to my mind first

most of the time the flashbacks were perfectly inserted for maximum emotional damage and I respect that skill

xue zhengyong. like he’s not my favourite, my favourites are xue meng, nangong si and ye wangxi but? I just adored him so he gets a special mention

the side characters? like, I legit loved Everyone? when I cry over side characters you know it’s serious

THE CONFESSION SCENE. LIKE. HOLY SHIT MY HEART. it comes reaaally close to the vocal one (because hua cheng confesses so many times without words) at the end of tgcf for me. it was beautiful. I was so emotional. the fact that cwn can't say it no matter how much he feels it. like it's always been plain and clear just how much he loves mo ran. but he can't say the words yet and I just. the fact that mo ran gets it? that he doesn't need the words, just that squeeze of fingers, just what cwn is, at that moment, able to give him, and it doesn't mean less to him than words would? it hit home real hard

unless I think of something else, that’s about it! I can’t recommend 2ha enough, that said, I beg of you, heed the warnings. they are NOT overstated. and even if there were no warnings, take care anyways. the angst is serious, it haunts you. angst always makes me feel like my chest is being squeezed and that’s precisely the feeling I’m looking for when I choose to read angst. I have good tolerance to it, so despite not doing entirely well lately, I thought I was tough and went for it, but I’m a CLOWN. the way it’s written ruins you. this morning despite reading the hardest part of the angst on saturday evening, I still had some physical chest pain. so I recommend it with all my heart, but take care of yourselves. 2ha doesn’t fuck around.

[ajokeformur-ray]

You’re my disaster, I’m your ever after // Rosie x J // Anniversary celebrationnn ~ ✨💖🥰✨

Summary: HAPPY FIRST YEAR ANNIVERSARY, DARLING!!🥰💖

A/N: I hope you enjoy this, @loveletterstoledger​, angel!!! I love you so so much and I’m so proud of you. I hope you can find some time for yourself to celebrate this wonderful day with J; you both deserve the world!💕 I read through your self-shipping tag and also your J tags for inspiration and I hope that this is as accurate to the two of you as possible!💗

(I’m so sorry that this is a few days late omg angel🥺 I hope you still enjoy it, though, and that you’ve found time to celebrate your relationship with J!)

Word count: 2, 532.

A single year consists of three hundred and sixty days.

Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours.

Five hundred and twenty five thousand and six hundred minutes. 

The seconds were too small to really matter, but they could still cut you up and slice you to the bone, so powerful were they in larger quantities.

Previously in your life had you been unknowing and perhaps even unbothered by these figures; you just took everything one day at a time and you couldn’t - wouldn’t - look beyond what was right in front of you. Year after year passed you by and, though you tried to live within the moment, sometimes you could only see an endless nothingness which stretched before you. The future was one gigantic question mark and, oh, how it scared you, almost into inaction. But not acting at all was an action within itself, a decision, and so sometimes were you blissfully unaware of the continuing passage of time as you took everything one step at a time, the days all blurring into one until you were forced to take a step back to see just how far you had come. Days passed, weeks passed and seasons flew. Time advanced before you knew it and you had to keep up with it or risk drowning within your own self; slow and steady won the race but when the race’s finish line was not yet in sight, when your goals were not yet achieved, was it all too easy to get lost in all that you had yet to do. Older and wiser were you now, and you knew that looking back into the past was okay as long as you didn’t stare at it and so your life continued. 

You had known that your first anniversary with J was approaching. It was the twenty second of October and you had been waiting - no, yearning - for it ever since the two of you had first solidified whatever it was which existed between the two of you. As ever did the sands of time rapidly drain from the uppermost section in the small hourglass of life, but there was no time this day to stop and to breathe and to reflect on the celebration which was your first year of life together. Oh, how you loathed your current situation. Your soon to be ex-employers were taking more than you had given them and there was little chance to replenish that wasted energy before more was demanded of you. It seemed to be a never ending circle and you were sick of it. You wanted J, more than ever, you needed him, and you needed to be reminded of all of your reasons why, for you couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Though you loved J for all that he was, all that he had ever been and all that he would ever be, there was one thing which you had always really heavily admired about him, and that was his apathy. J may have lived in the world, but he wasn’t touched by it. He was who he was and he did what he did and nothing anyone ever said or did negatively affected him. Insults rolled off of him like water on a duck’s back, though anything which pertained to his face could only be soothed away by the light of your love, and oh, an abundance of it did J have. You had always longed to have a taste of that apathy, to know what it was to be your entire self without fear of judgement or consequence, and with J did you feel like you could experience it. J gave you strength, he gave you courage and he gave you meaning, he gave you life and he gave you love and on this day was he most determined to show that to you. You deserved nothing less and at your word would he strike the match which would burn the entire fucking city to the ground. So devoted to you and so in love with you was he.

Yes, J loved you. He had found you when you were most ready to be able to handle him for all that he was, and the two of you had been together ever since. He had been keeping a careful eye on you recently. He saw your exhaustion, he saw the bags under your eyes which darkened with each morning that you heaved yourself out of bed, feeling the tiredness of tonight like it was the exhaustion of the current moment. J saw you and he didn’t like what he saw. Not. One. Bit. Oh, but you were so strong in your pain, and pretty, too. He wished that you didn’t have to be. He saw everything, even if he didn’t acknowledge it. Today could he see that you needed more of him, you needed the love which you shared, and as if the stars had aligned did that day fall on your anniversary. J wasn’t a man for making plans, no, he was a man of ideas and he didn’t care how those ideas came into fruition just so long as they did, but for today he could, he would, make an exception.

It was all for you. 

You were at work during your anniversary, something which upset and frustrated you to no end, but J’s ideas became increasingly solid as the clock ticked your lives away. He had postponed his day of chaos (not that he had a schedule to keep, of course not, he didn’t make plans) so that he could wait at home for you. J didn’t wait for anyone or anything, though patient could he be when the situation for such a virtue arose, but you were his only exception. You were his and this day was dedicated to such a sentiment. Just like he had been considering for the past few hours, J was waiting for you at the door. Your place of living was just a place but he was your home, and you were his. Though you had been dreaming of encasing yourself into royal purple for the entire day, longing were you to go home, you hadn’t expected or even thought for a second that you would literally walk into a solid and warm wall of dark purple as soon as you crossed the threshold of your home. 

“Wha - J!” You were swept up into J’s arms and you squealed as he cackled right in your ear. You felt a spark of irritation but it quickly melted away with a flash of an intense chocolate gaze and the sensation of full lips crashing down onto your own. J pressed you into him so that every plane of your bodies were aligned. He kissed you so hard, so fiercely, that you quite forgot even your own name as J became all you could touch, feel... taste. Oh, but he was the sweetest nectar you had ever known as he welcomed you home by using his own body to put yours to the test.

“Good, ah - good afternoon, sweets.”

Your eyes slid closed of their own volition at the sound of his voice. oh, how you loved him. “Hi, J,” You kissed him again, not wanting to ever let him go. You knew what day it was and you knew that J knew, too. You were waiting to see who was going to address it or even if it would be addressed at all. “I thought you would be... out.”

Both of you understood the significance behind the emphasis which you placed on that word, and J shrugged easily. Only the slight stiffness of the movement gave away his true intentions as he said, “Later.” He didn’t let you go as he walked with you back, back into your home, towards the bedroom. He relied on muscle memory and even though you needed to shower, you needed to get changed, and your mind filled with things that needed to be done and achieved today and tomorrow, and and and, you could only think about J and the implications of where he was leading you in a literal and in a metaphorical way. Unbeknown to you, all of J’s ideas (never plans) melted away as he reached the bedroom and closed the door behind the both of you with a quiet but firm click. All he wanted in this moment was for the world to melt away, for J to be stripped away into Jack, into the man he used to be and the man you sometimes made him crave to be, and for the two of you to spend lots of time together. All that he did, all that he was, had long since stopped being about terrorising the city of Gotham, if he was being wholly honest with himself. J had always been honest to a fault, it was something else which you loved about him, and he knew that you were his reason for everything.

You slipped away from J, your body cold with the ghost of his embrace and J’s own palms echoing that feeling; so deeply connected and emotionally intertwined were the two of you, and stripped out of your clothes, getting yourself comfortable. The shower could wait. Food could wait. You just wanted your J. That was all you ever wanted, truth be told. You got into bed and barely were you able to sort yourself out and to get comfortable before J obnoxiously threw himself onto the bed. The mattress bounced with the force of him and your body bounced too, once, twice - but not thrice. No, for J’s arm wound around your waist like a boa constrictor and indeed did he squeeze you as he shuffled across the bed to press his chest against yours. Your irritation at J throwing himself down on your bed when he knew how tired you were, how exhausted you had been for so long, melted away like ice in the sunlight. 

All you wanted was your J. Yours. Your eyes roamed over J’s painted visage. The greasepaint was hastily applied and parts had flaked away entirely, revealing only patches of the bare face you knew and loved so well. Who J was, who he really was, was only yours. No one else knew him like you did and no one else ever would. You were J’s only. Similarly, he was your only. Very few, if anyone, understood you like J did. A single look at you would reveal all; your mood, your emotions, the directions of your thoughts... everything was in just a look, an open book were you to the man who knew you even better than you knew yourself. You were strong, and brave, too, and you were extremely mature and so much more than you knew yourself to be. But J could see you. He saw your pains and your efforts, your trials and tribulations, your triumphs and wins. He saw you and he knew that he was your only. 

“Ya’ know I’m good with numbers, doll.” J’s voice was low and gravelly, as if the words he was speaking were grating against his vocal chords. You wondered what he was talking about but you knew he would only tell you what he wanted you to hear verbally. Anything else which he wanted you to listen to would be contained within those chocolate galaxies; it was up to you to pay attention. “But, ah - feelin’s I’m not so good at,” J’s hand came up to rest over your heart, his fingers splayed so that he could touch as much of you as he could all at once, a tactile couple were you. You would know his hands anywhere, no matter where they were or what they were doing. The power of knowing that he had killed many people with his bare hands in violent and brutal ways but that they were only ever so tender with you always gave you a giddy feeling which was unlike anything else you had ever felt or ever would again. “We’ve, ah... a whole year ago, I found ya’. Or... maybe you found me. Look, listen, it - it doesn’t matter.” J pressed down on that part of your chest where your heart was beating out a wild tattoo against the confines of your rib cage. “The point is - “ he kissed your forehead, his full lips slightly chapped but so warm against your skin, “That I’m here and I ain’t goin’ anywhere. We’ve had a whole... year.”

You heard everything that J was saying and you listened, as always did you to the man who guarded and protected his heart as fiercely as you did with his. “I love you, J.” Jack. You nearly said it. Nearly. But you were unsure of yourself in this moment, not knowing were you of how he would react to hearing his name spoken in such a domestic setting.

“Say it,” J was now gently encouraging, interchangeable was he. 

“I love you... Jack.” Happy anniversary. You felt your heart swelling with love in its rawest and purest form, and one of your hands came up to interlock your fingers with the hand which was still pressed over your heart. You kissed J, then, taking what was already yours. 

J didn’t say it back, he never did, but he didn’t need to. Actions spoke louder than words and in this moment, there with you, J was screaming at you. This day had been seemingly mundane, but when you were alone with J, your love and your life, every moment was special.

Yes, a single year consists of three hundred and sixty days.

Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours.

Five hundred and twenty five thousand and six hundred minutes.

The seconds were too small to really matter, but they could still cut you up and slice you to the bone, so powerful were they in larger quantities. 

But J would never allow that to happen to you. He carefully cradled you in the palms of his calloused, greasepaint stained and busy hands, and he kept you safe within the sands of time. There was nothing J wouldn’t do for you, there was nothing he wouldn’t be for you, and as your first anniversary ended did J know beyond all shadow of a doubt that he wanted many more years with you.

J’s thoughts echoed your own in that moment, and the universe listened. It listened, it heard the two of you and it saw your undying and death defying love for each other, which was so powerful that it ultimately transcended physicality. Not even in Death would you part, for the Grim Reaper wouldn’t dare to disrupt the power of love. The two of you were made for each other, and in every single timeline, in every universe, in everything, would the two of you find each other and fall together again and again and again.

You were J’s disaster, he was your happy ever after, and neither of you would ever have it any other way.

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Maou-jou 1 | Munou na Nana 1 | Grace of the Gods 1 | IWGP 1 | Akudama 1 | Crusade 1 | JJK 1 | HypMic 2 (also brief thoughts on the dog and cat TV short because I had them)

Maou-jou 1

I sampled this manga with what’s called a “Viz sampler”. I only ever seem to find those at libraries, so I’d assume only they and bookstores can get those.

…Twilight looks like Maou Sadao (Hataraku Maou-sama!).

“Dawner”??? I can read katakana, ya idjits. His name is Akatsuki. Update: The translator must’ve gone, “Dawn is a girl’s name. Let’s tack on an -er so it looks like a guy’s name.”

Aw, Hiro Shimono is Akatsuki. If it were Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, we could’ve gotten a Kirito joke out of it.

Oh! 快眠 (Kaimin) = good rest, literally “happy sleep”. Hence this is the nation of Goodreste. I see.

The lightning effect is soooooooooo cool! *eyes glitter at the particle effects*

I’m gonna die from cuteness from all the teddies and seals!

The little fanfare is so cute and the yokudekimashita reminds me of my days playing the arcade game Bomberman (which had a flower sticker much like this one). I wanna see this get a dub and succeed on all its merits! It’s basically my baby already…bar the fact it took a bit to work up to the first good bit of comedy.

The teddy demons are called Debiakuma, a pun on kuma (bear), devil and akuma (devil). Lessee…After “lesser demon”, there’s more text…“Fluffy bears that can be also used as pets. They give in easily to temptation. A lot of them live in the demon castle, so the princess likes to gather their fur, dye it and spin nice cotton out of it. Warning: A lot of them will either run away or call you their friend./Occasionally act as friends for the princess.”

LOL, I recognised that voice of the Scissors guy straight away…although I didn’t know who it belonged to. That’s Suwabe. (It doesn’t sound like Suwabe, I would’ve thought it to be Takuma Terashima or something.)

Aw, the Japanese version is more boring this time. It’s just Scissor Magician (in the singular for both).

*hears Scissors Demon going -ageruwa”, which is a feminine sentence ending…that’s Suwabe trying to (voice) act effeminate???!!!

These trumpet sounds never get old.

LOL, Siberian huskies dressed as Russians…

Okay, my turn again: Hari means needle, toge means thorn. Next to “His stomach is soft”, part of the subs are cut off due to Funimation’s hardsubs, but I can read “he is proud of his defence” on the 2nd line, “is the type to not refuse when relied on” on the 2nd-last line and “his favourite food is strange bird chawanmushi” on the last line.

I love how parts of the castle are upside down for no reason at all except to look cool…architects must hate that, though.

I hadn’t heard of “seesaw battles” until now. but the metaphor does make sense...kind of.

What about changing the mattress? Update: She does do that…kind of.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Kirito was under my nose all along! Damn Demon Kinggggggggggggggggggg!

Kamina glasses on one of the background trees! Cute tapir! Ahhhhhhhh, it’s so cuteeeeeeee!

Anyways, that’s a fun show. Not as fun as HypMic, but still fun after it gains momentum.

Munou na Nana 1

I remember seeing spoilers for a twist at the end…let’s hope I don’t anticipate it. That would kill the entire anime for me.

The message actually says something about how the island is a nest for enemies of humanity.

There’s the ice narcissist I saw in the promo stuff, right on cue. I’ve never heard of his voice actor Hiromichi Tezuka before, although he does sound like Hiroshi Kamiya or someone much better.

Why do I get the feeling once the title character arrives, even Nanao will get powers…? Or maybe Nana is the catalyst for Nanao’s powers awakening or something? (Just realised having a Nana and a Nanao together in the same anime is confusing…)

Subbers spelt “noblesse oblige” wrong, unless it was deliberately done as such.

I predicted the “duke it out” line.

There’s a menu on the wall of the restaurant.

Maybe Nanao’s “talent” is his leadership stat or something?

Or maybe even Nanao is an enemy of humanity and doesn’t know it? (Sorry, speculation going into overdrive…that usually happens with superpower works like this for me, because I like to analyse them.)

Maybe Nanao can see the future, like the protag from Koi to Producer?

Technically, shouldn’t ice be weak against fire…? Or am I too used to the Pokemon system?

Called it! Nanao has a hidden power! (That reminds me: I still don’t know what Lucien’s (from Koi to Producer’s) power really is.)

Vigilantes is really good at exploring how people can expand on their own powers.

…wow, I heard rumours that the main character was going to die, but I’d pegged Nana to die, not Nanao.

Onodera is clearly important…maybe he was the one with the wind powers? Or was Nana lying about that?

…dude, the red eyes are kinda obvious that Nana is evil in some way, or at least really devious.

Grace of the Gods 1

All I really know of this is that it’s got slimes and it’s an isekai/SoL hybrid…That’s it.

…I am not, I repeat NOT, on board for a harem centred around an 11 year old!

Ryoma speaks with an unnatural amount of starts and stops, hence the caveman speak.

What’s Jil’s role in the party…?

Why would you even need to know 4 high-level skills? Isn’t it better to know all of them?

LOL, I knew the isekaid guy was meant to have a hard life so he could start over with slimes, but…stick Doppo in this and it’s basically the same thing. At least Doppo tries to resist his bosses behind their backs, this guy just did the whole gaman thing and look where that got him!

If he worked for a black company with no overtime and so forth, how did he know about a recent anime trend, eh??? Sounds suspect. Update: Unless he was thinking about 90s isekai, which still involved less reincarnation than this.

I noticed the gods have senbei (the rice crackers with the seaweed). Western-looking gods probably shouldn’t have senbei, unless…they did that to make Ryoma feel more at home?

Seriously, how does a guy with no overtime still have time for online games? Even if he were getting just ads for them, he probably wouldn’t have paid enough attention to be able to figure out what the cliches are, right? Either that, or the Dragon Quest system is older than I think it is.

Slimes don’t have paws…or hands or other appendages…to give…

…I’m not sure what to think there. Am I meant to think the slimes are cute? Am I meant to think the catgirls/animal girls are cute? The answer to those questions is “no”, so…eh.

IWGP 1

Basically, I chose this for associations with HypMic.

…the best first impression involves a CGI car. Of course. <- (sarcastic)

Given HypMic, I almost expected a rap battle…nahhhh…Rap battles don’t look so cool outside HypMic, man.

The owl is a pun. Fukurou (owl) matches ‘bukuro (bag, which is the 2nd character in “Ikebukuro”). There’s also an owl statue used as a meeting spot, much like Hachiko in Shibuya…(I learnt a bunch of things about the division territory through HypMic. Let me show off…)

I think the character designer for this anime also did Joker Game…that’s throwing me off a little. Also, they had a prime opportunity to use a Buster Bros song, so I’m still a bit miffed about that – this OP’s kinda standard. Update: The character designer is Junichiro Taniguchi – my insinct was wrong on him. He did Touken Ranbu Hanamaru’s character designs.

“Smoking kills” – Yuuuuuuuup. That’s true.

Why do I get the feeling all the male otaku will wanna bang Makoto’s mother (to put it lightly)…?

Curiously, the one who hates drugs in HypMic is Jyuto, who’s not from Ikebukuro Division at all. Hmm…

Yokoyama’s voice sounds familiar…but I’m not sure why. Update: If I had to guess, I’d say he’s Saito Soma or someone who sounds similar, so maybe Takuma Terashima, Daisuke Ono or something like that. Update 2: Takahiro Sakurai. See? I knew I knew that voice.

“Big Rei” (“Rei-nii”). That’s different from Ichi-nii (what Saburo calls Ichiro) and could also be goroawase for 02.

Uni of Tokyo is the most prestigious uni in Japan. It has quite the reputation.

…is it just me, or does Makoto have a piercing in his left ear? IWGP also happens to happily work with my existing character, although said character has a piercing in his right ear.

Zero One kinda looks like Uta (Tokyo Ghoul), LOL.

…and of course the girl has to rely on the dude. *sigh* Welp, we can throw drugs off the list for “things that count as TV-MA to Funimation” – IWGP is rated M (not 15+ explicitly, but that’s what it stands for normally) in my region.

This ED song…that’s the sort of song I was expecting from HypMic, Akudama or this.

Seems both Makoto and Takashi have earrings…maybe in both ears? Takashi’s are yellow, I could confirm that much.

…this is decent, but putting it up against its competitors is a bit harsh.

Crusade 1 (cont. from sneak peek - it’s in the title here because this is where it’s completed)

Turns out that preview was most of the episode…like “14 of 24 minutes” long.

Wait, how did Alice fall forward and end up in the princess carry pose? I remember having trouble with that when a character in a story of mine had the same problem.

…Iska-nii…(?)

That opera house looks pretty darn modern to me…

…eh…that was middling. Nothing any ol’ adaption of Romeo and Juliet couldn’t do, bar the CGI for the magic fight in the middle. (There was a fluffy griffin thing in the middle there, though.)

Akudama 1

Ume + Kimura and a cool urban aesthetic. Let’s go!

This is kinda Tron-like, eh?

Ooh, now it’s more like Cop Craft.

Kimura seems to use his gruffer voice more than his Ichiro voice, but Ume is actually worse on that fron with his ordinary voice…Welp, at least his ordinary voice sounds like it fits right in with the Courier. I almost expect an Ocean’s Eleven thing (or Now You See Me, since I’ve actually watched that) from this. Update: Turns out Kimura is the pompadour guy, not the fighter.

You can tell Ordinary Person is an okay person because she keeps saving cats. A bit cliché, but it’ll do.

Ohhhhhh…I can see where this plotline is going. Ordinary Person pretends to be Swindler to get herself out of this mess, but then she keeps getting involved with the Akudama. It’s a typical plot for a typical gal, common to insert a viewpoint character in series that require one, or a magical girl ally.

Wow, those missiles look like a**.

LOL, Hoodlum’s sentence is kinda measly in comparison to most of them. Plus, when he yelled, that sounded more accurate to Ichiro than Fighter was, so…yeah, sorry I messed up.

…Ordinary Person has some real bullseye…uh, eyes.

This could be a top contender…aside from the CGI, which does look a bit funky. I’m getting a death game vibe here, but I don’t know if that’s really the case. Also, it’s a lot of fun, but the possible intolerable thing here is Ordinary Person’s screaming – the pretense she has to keep up seems like it’ll fit right in though.

JJK 1

I read the manga once, dropped it and then read it again and didn’t realise why I dropped it.

Fushiguro has long eyelashes, tbh. Itadori comments on that at one point, I think.

Oh, it was a fish (carp) in the manga. I couldn’t figure out what the Japanese equivalent was just from the Kokkuri board.

This track club teacher is a bit of a freak, honestly. Meddling in kids’ affairs is probably illegal to some extent.

Itadori is known as “tiger” because the kanji for “tiger” is in the surname. Update: Also, the Czech dude Mirko was called “the Croatian tiger”, if a tweet I read is any indication.

I like how there’s more comedy in this one. They show the world records, so you have standards to compare Itadori against.

This is an almost beat-for-beat adaption, bar the slight comedy of the records being added (and not explaning who Mirko is). The contrast makes this better.

“People really can die.” – That’s summoning some real energy of “People die when they are killed.”

(Brief thoughts on the dog and cat short: I enjoyed that more than I thought I would. The picture of a realistic cat – someone’s actual photo of their cat?- that serves as a punchline never gets old and in fact, sometimes contributes to the humour.)

HypMic 2

LOL, TV-MA warning strikes again.

“Kore wa prologue/Hajimete no ippo/Fumidasanai yatsu ni wa/???? shinpo.” – The translation is really good for the bits I can read…the problem is I can’t read the bottom left corner. Update: The part in the bottom left is nai...That’s it.

…uh, even people from around the world can read 24 hour time??? You don’t need subs to read Arabic numerals???

…couldn’t you have just told Ichiro verbally, Saburo…? Update: Come to think of it, kids these days are more on their phones than ever, so it makes sense but also kind of doesn’t.

You don’t really need subs for laughter either…

I’d never heard of “pulling rank” before…hmm: “to use one's high position in a society, organization, group, etc., to order someone to do something or to get special treatment or privileges.”

…and here comes the F word here to mess with us again. Japanese nastiness is conveyed using words that might be considered “soft” in English, hence the sudden jump to use the F word a bunch, but the subbers could use some variety in their swearing. I mean, “dips**t” worked where it did because subbers made Samatoki go overboard with the F word, but…you could stand to use that more, maybe(?)

I like how even the Tenderloins guy rhymes where he’s meant to. It’s the prelude to a battle, after all. (He kinda looks like Kotaro from Zombieland Saga.)

…I freaked out for a second. I swore I saw a similar-looking restaurant (udon shop, located on the left of one of the shots) while in Japan. Also, we finally get to see Ichiro’s reputation at work.

…I still have no idea what a “steelo” is after all this time, but I didn’t realise I was staring at a part of Ore ga Ichiro until I saw it in context. Also, it was kinda derpy – but still really in character – for Ichiro to run to his destination with his arms up like the Glico man in Osaka (except he had his head down).

I get a weird feeling the subbers may have used the wiki translation because I’m using it as a reference and the language seems oddly similar for the most part…

The kick Ichiro does seems like it references the OP.

Notice the location is Nishiguchi Kouen…the West Gate Park. *raises eyebrows at the IWGP anime*

…oh! It occurred to me that the sign the BB do with their hands is…well, a lowercase B. (LOL, if you read my previous line funny, it rhymes.)

Gentaro doing the peace sign to his chest…that was random the first time, because it doesn’t seem in character, but then it does for Dice and possibly Ramuda, so Gentaro probably just chose to go along with it (“to add to his image as a rapper,” maybe…?).

Oh, Saburo has airpods in…those aren’t good for blocking sound, are they…?

Notice the owl on the…uh, café(?)…Ichiro goes to.

That one “holy shit!” made me laugh like a madman. Where it came from, I don’t know, but it was so random I had to laugh at it.

This makes me wonder…if you use a mic that’s different to your personal mic, does it produce the same speakers? No one’s ever addressed that before (much like how no one questions if magical girls always need the same transformation device – I wanted to make a plot on that someday, but I can’t seem to find a comprehensible way to pull it off…LOL, that reminds me, I even had a HypMic version of that featuring Samatoki at one point, but it probably makes even less sense than the standard one because it activates via physical contact. It’s notable – in my head – for Nemu’s version of the “power” being “Samatoki can’t swear, no matter how hard he tries”).

I’m pretty sure that round thing wasn’t part of Ichiro’s rings, ever. (…Unless that was the head of his spoon or something.)

…Microwave? (referring to the shot inside the hospital, which seems to be based off ARB)

The series normally transitions from BB -> MTC -> FP -> MTR, so it was interesting to see that shuffled up. Update: That’s if it has to have an order, but notably ARB breaks this standard a lot by assigning colours to each solo and then arranging interactions based on not repeating those colours (aside from the Sky High Tower event). With 4 things there are 4! = 24 possible combinations and 6! = 720 possible combinations if you count DH and BAT, so as we move forward with those 2 divisions...prepare for more shuffling.

…is Jiro gonna steal a ball? I thought it was just bikes anime characters stole. (LOL)

The mic changes the background, too, huh? Never expected that from more than the speakers.

…and of course, s*** explodes and the day is saved once again....by the Buster Bros!!! (LOL, but also *sigh*)

Hmm, so this anime’s real plotline probably involves this trio: Rex, Tom and Iris. They’re probably foreign in some way, judging by Tom and Rex. Maybe they’re aligned with a foreign government or something? Update: If you look at the credits, their full names seem to be Tom Whisper Weathercock, Iris Innocent Traiter (sic) (LOL) and…Taroumaru Rex…? (romanisations confirmed for all katakana)

Sadamezuka was voiced by the ubiquitous Kenjiro Tsuda.

It seems Cola Bintarou (aka Subaru Kimura) was on the case again today. He wrote the new song for BB, called RUN THIS CITY, along with Gesshoku Kaigi.

Of course, I’m going to keep this anime on my list...I’m just a bit worried about myself going forward, because I realised my ego got a bit inflated trying to defend the series from haters. I’ve never had a series where I’ve been a fan from the beginning that wasn’t already a known quantity for a while (Muhyo and Roji’s, Furuba). With Boueibu, I was discovering things alongside other people (or even later in a lot of cases) since it was anime-original.

[imacrowcawcaw]

1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 23, 29, 38 😘❤️ Hope you’re having a wonderful day!

Hi mimi thank you so much for all the questions!!! This is gonna be really long lol - also, sorry it took a while, Tumblr kept glitching and erasing EVERYTHING

1. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them? Oh my god SO MANY! I have roughly 50 works in progress, and so many more ideas running through my head - I just haven't had the energy or the time lately to actually work on them. One that keeps coming back to me is Sam and Danny chilling in bed on a lazy Saturday, after a sleepover, and Sam announces that if they had sex, it would be the best either of them ever experienced. They debate for a while, and of course end up getting it on... it'll happen someday.

4. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic. There's a lot of fluff and heartfeltwords; I try to keep it lighthearted too, though, and throw in what I hope is some funny stuff; smut of course, or at least some kissing; metaphors and figurative language galore. I feel like I'm still very much trying to find my voice and my style, so I think my fics differ a lot in their styles, but there are things that I generally like.

5. Share one of your strengths. Hmm, I was going to say that I know how grammar works (that feels rude but- ) actually I'm going to say that I always turn out things that I really enjoy. That may be more of a personal strength - i.e. it only matter to me - but if I post something I am satisfied (enough) with it. I like my work! I write what I want, even with requests, and I put my all into my writing because I want it to be such good quality that it would make me squeal if I came across it.

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

"Dude, that's disgusting."

Danny just smiled at Josh, showing off a rather gross mouthful of mangled food, and kept eating his pineapple pizza.

"Seriously, pineapple doesn't belong on pizza. Can't you just eat regular toppings like the rest of us?"

Danny shook his head and swallowed. "Nuh-uh, I can't. I'm not like the rest of you."

"Hmm, you know, you're right: you're not like the rest of us. It's way hotter in the Wagner corner." Josh looked at him coyly, licking BBQ sauce from his chicken wings off of his fingertips.

Danny froze and Josh laughed, using a napkin to scrub away the rest of the sauce and continuing to messily eat his 'regular' pizza. Danny shook his head, closing the lid of his box to save the rest for later.

Idk if anyone other than @satans-helper would be interested in Josh and Danny (like, together, or at least flirting) but.... I thought this was good. It was fun to write - still not anywhere near done, though - and I think it captures them pretty well. I think dialogue is good when the characters speak for themselves, literally, without having to rely completely on prose to give it meaning.

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

"The bass pumped through Sam in the same rhythm as his cannabis-speckled blood, sludgey warmth crawling in his veins as he took a second hit of the blunt being passed around. Hidden away from the eyes of management constantly trying to tighten the reins, as if they weren't rock stars in - or perhaps even before - their prime, he let the dark corner he and a few new acquaintances occupied be his cover from an eventual scolding."

Let this be a little teaser for the Collab Zara and I are doing (!!!) lol. I think it's some of my best writing; lyrical but not too long as I'm learning how to do it right, offering information with every little part, setting the scene in a concise but not info-dump way, some bit of irony and humor.

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write? Ohhh man, well there have definitely been MANY that I've gotten stuck on for months, if not over a year -- but, the finished fic that was hardest was probably "Forever", to be totally honest. I think it turned t out very well, but I revised over and over and over, and scrapped a very large portion of it. I know what I wanted, but it wasn't coming for a very long time.

10. Which fic has been the easiest to write? "Blood Brothers". It just flowed so well, I sat and types furiously in my phone for a good 3 hours without stopping, and it was born.

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across? There's quite a few pieces that I always think of: write what you want to read, adjectives and adverbs slow the pace (learned this recently and it's very handy), sometimes straight-forward is best, don't be afraid to scrap things and start over.

15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose? Oh man, that's a hard choice. I think that "Eyes of Juniper" (metallica fic, not finished 😔) would actually be the best choice, because it's funny, I would love to see the guys in the 80s, and, while it deals with bodies/nudity/sexuality it wouldn't be a straight up porn film lol.

17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order? A mix of both, I think it just depends on how my ideas are flowing. If I'm really on a roll and know I won't be interrupted, then I'll just write it chronologically. But, if I have a small idea, or I know how I want to end but dont know how to begin, then I'll just start writing something. I'm always afraid I'll forget what I want if I don't write it down, so I work on what I'm able to and fill in the rest later.

20. Describe your perfect writing conditions. Well, I usually end up doing the most of my writing hunched over sitting on me bed in the dark and furiously typing on my phone lmao. I would love to get a laptop and a dedicated space, but it's just not gonna happen rn. So, I'll go with dark, undisturbed, comfortable

23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why? there are quite a few that I can look back at and be like noooo what was I doing. I think, though, one that could be really really amazing if revised would be "Black Dog", a guns n roses fic I wrote. It was good, but one of my firsts. My style has improved, and I think I could just make it a lot better, and the dialogue at the end could be a lot more clear and realistic sounding

29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose? Oh mannnn there are so many fics that have made me want to somehow write/find more, I'll go with "Angel of Apple Valley" (pairing: Duzzy fandom: gnr, on rockfic, I cant find it rn though sorry). It was so amazing and I still think about it. I don't think I could do anywhere near justice to the original, so of course I wouldnt actually, but I just really want more

38. Talk about a review that made your day. Ohhh ok pretty much every review makes me suoer hapoy, but the lovely helena_s_renn left me a comment on Ch. 4 of "Skin on Skin, Hearts Laid Bare" and it nearly made me cry

"Girl, I think you've discovered your voice. This has an intensity beyond any of your other work that I've read thus far (not saying the previous isn't good - it is!!). I was glued to my phone by the eyes, didn't want it to end, and yet it did in what seemed like 5 seconds. Danny's acceptance of Sam's physical needs without asking anything more of him than "just sleep with me" is love. On that subject, I think you've thrown more words at the wellspring of Sanny Love from Sam's perspective than one would have thought possible, and they all ring true."

Like, holy shit thanks?!?! Lol. But really, I've been seriously trying to find my style, and to hear this from one of the writers I respect the most was huge. I felt like a favorite teacher was giving me a hug and telling me i did good!!!

[uneryx]

Renee Gets Salty About Dark Magic

This post got long, and got away from me, so I’ll tl;dr it

1. dark magic is a metaphor for consumption and materialism and is ultimately bad because it harms others unnecessarily and is not a sustainable resource

2. the elves were dicks for banishing humans but (especially if humans sucked all the magic out of the land themselves) they were kind of justified, even if it was an extreme measure

3. Eating meat is not the same as dark magic if you’re looking at things from an animistic point of view, which the elves likely do

4. it’s okay to like problematic characters and you don’t have to portray Ezran as a monstrous enfant terrible to feel okay about thinking Viren is justified in what he does.  In fact, pretty please stop doing this, everyone in all fandoms. It’s fine if you don’t like the protags but that doesn’t mean you get to say Ezran or Rayla or whoever is EVIL. It’s called Ron the Death Eater and it’s a fandom trope that has pissed me off for going on fifteen years. Deliberately misreading the text isn’t cute. Stop doing it.

5. The show isn’t over, be patient, you’ll probably get to see some comeuppance for stuff anyway. And if you don’t, there’s always fanfiction. 

6. For the love of baby adoraburrs please tag posts that go in the vein of “the writing is bad because Viren is portrayed as a classic villain/elves good humans bad/the protags aren’t held accountalbe” with “TDP CRITICAL” I would greatly appreciate it because I’m getting super annoyed with posts that deliberately misrepresent canon to uphold a favored side and it’s affecting my enjoyment of the show. Now! Actual long and discourse-heavy post under the cut!

 Ugh I don’t want to start a big ol’ argument with people because I’m still on vacation and don’t want to spend the rest of today arguing about cartoons on the internet, but this has been on the kettle for a while and I feel QUITE STRONGLY about some of these things, so just... let me express my views here and don’t come for me because I’m about to talk about religion and sociology. 

Dark Magic is a metaphor for unchecked consumption and capitalism.  1. The theory i’m seeing floating around that got my dander up is that the elves and dragons drained the western half of the continent of magic to keep magic away from humans. I think that, based on what we’ve learned from canon, this is highly unlikely and would be weaker writing than what I think actually happened. Instead, Dark magic was going on for a good solid 800 years (Rise of Elarion is 2000 years before canon) before Sol Regem faced off with Viard (1200 years before canon). The division of Xadia was another 200 years after that. Humans had a solid honking millennium of unchecked dark magic. It is quite likely that the reason the west is entirely devoid of magic, and that humans were banished there, is because they sucked all the magic out of that half themselves. Poor innocent baby humans nothing. They got a taste of power and progress and, like real world humans, let that get WAY out of control.

2. “But Lujanne eats bugs, she’s a hypocrite for saying Claudia can’t squish bugs for pancakes” I want you to go down to your local new-age/witchy bookstore and find yourself an animist that eats meat. You are going to get glared at SO HARD if you whip out the “you think animals have souls but you eat meat!” chestnut. Because here’s the thing.

Eating meat/animal products is an act of life, necessary to sustain the life of someone else. We don’t vilify wolves for eating deer. You gotta eat to live your life, and the human (or, we can assume, bipedal humanoid) diet includes a need for complex protein chains, quite often found in animal meat. 

But the reason that we find cannibalism repulsive in western society is because it’s eating another human, despite the fact that humans are made of meat. It’s eating something that we consider sentient, dignified and possessed of a soul. Of course, the taboo also derives from the fact that you can contract prion disease from consuming human meat, but people in 11th century Normandy didn’t know that.  It is quite likely, especially given what we’ve seen of magical creatures and Ezran’s ability to talk to animals, that elves view non-human/elf creatures as sentient and possessed of a soul. If that’s the case, then OF COURSE they would see dark magic as horrific.

But eating meat is not on the same level because, as we see from the assassins, death is a part of life, and sometimes necessary. I imagine that hunting and taking a creature’s life for food is an act that is done with respect. The creatures are honored or thanked before they’re eaten or turned into leather. Highly ritualized to dignify that creature’s life.  Dark magic doesn’t do that. Dark magic sucks the whole life out, without so much of a how do you do.  It’s treating a person like a thing. It’s sucking all the life and essence out of someone so you can shoot fireballs or make fluffy pancakes. Lets be real - you don’t need to do either of those things, so the creature thus died in vain. 3. “The elves are selfish bastards for hogging all the magic.” I agree. Granted, their attitudes may have cooled in the ensuing centuries. It’s a new dawn, the era of Zubeia. We might see elves getting over their uppity selves and working to help teach humans magic. We might also see the show explore that kind of prejudice as Callum learns more magic. In fact, I hope we do. However, two wrongs dont make a right.  If Japan bombs the absolute fuckshit out of Hawaii, that does not make it okay to flash-fry Nagasaki with a weapon that blights the land and its people for years and years afterward.

To the elves (who are magical creatures and therefore totally usable as spell components), that’s what dark magic is. Suddenly, haha oh fuck, the humans have a fucking NUKE that every elf and dragon in Xadia is vulnerable to.  If a weapon was devised that ONLY a certain portion of the population was affected by, you better bet your sweet bippy that people would panic and make it forbidden and illegal, and severely punish the people who created it. ESPECIALLY if those people were already marginalized. Sucks, don’t it? Doesn’t mean the writing is bad for portraying people having a realistic reaction to something that is harmful to them. The elves aren’t justified in hogging the magic, and I hope future chapters will explore that. But the elves ARE a liiiiiittle bit justified in freaking out. I hold they could’ve come up with a better solution than BANISH HUMANS, but they didn’t. Makes for interesting story conflict, doesn’t it? 4. “Humans NEED dark magic!” / “Calling dark magic a shortcut is dumb” Did they tho? Did they really? Really really? We, modern day humans, don’t NEED smart phones (which rely on several rare earth minerals and are causing untold ecological disaster in areas where they’re miend). We, modern day humans, don’t NEED coal power (which is controlled by coal companies, who keep telling us that we totally do, despite many scientists saying that renewable energy is ready to go whenever). We don’t NEED blackberries from Mexico year-round, or a whole hell of a lot of the things we have come to rely on and consider part of our every day lives. All of these things are unnecessary and shortcuts to progress.

The only - ONLY! - good, necessary thing we’ve seen in canon that dark magic was required for was using the magma titan’s heart for saving people from famine.

A lot of the complaints about sustainable energy and efforts to heal the planet as climate change become increasingly a crisis stem from the fact that doing things RIGHT, in a way that is sustainable and doesn’t strip every last resource out of our home, is that it takes time. It takes SO MUCH TIME to do things properly. Yeah, we can keep going with our coal and our gas-guzzler cars and our fracking and our rare-earth metals... but we ARE going to run out. And then what?  Dark magic is the same principle. Eventually, you’re going to run out of resources. 

5. Where I think the show is going My main beef with those (and there’s a lot of ya, so I’m not intending to single anyone out) who say that the writing is lazy for dark magic bad elfs good is that the show is not over. Wonderstorm is doing their damndest to give us the saga. And they’ve said, out right, that there WILL be books, if nothing else.

You can’t judge a story’s merits when it’s only been half told. Right now, what the show has done is it has shown us the worst and best of the elves (for example, Khessa’s purity test vs Rayla refusing to kill Ez so she doesn’t perpetuate a cycle of violence) and the worst and best of the humans (ex: Viren forcibly turning thousands of people into monsters against their will vs Viren risking his life in order to save thousands of people from famine). The show has done well to demonstrate that there is good and bad in everyone, and it’s the choices you make and the respect you show others’ autonomy that makes you a good or bad person. The dominoes are in place. The saga has only begun. Being mad that Ezran burned an army (that he likely knew from Soren was invulnerable to fire) or that Aanya shot Kasef in the face (when Opeli would have told her that Kasef conspired behind Ezran’s back to usurp the throne, which is AN ACT OF WAR btw) means you aren’t looking at the big picture. There WILL be consequences for those actions in later seasons, mark my words.

I’m sorry if you’re a Viren or Claudia stan, but they have made choices that hurt other people, and it is in no way shape or form Ezran or Callum or Rayla or ANYONE ELSE’S fault that they made the choices they did. Instead of being mad at the show for not portraying your fav as an innocent victim, be glad that you got such a wonderfully complex set of villains who, quite likely, will get a bomb-ass redemption arc. In fact, I’ll bet you anything that Viren’s walk back from the edge has already begun. The dude fucking DIED, and he’s not going to be eager to get in there and get all grabby with the power any time soon. 

That’s what good writing IS - conflict. Tension. People making morally questionable choices. We like it because every day people are hypocrites and morally questionable. You, and I, and everyone we know. Nobody’s perfect and getting cranky and painting the protagonists with the broad villain brush so you can feel good about liking a problematic fave is... some peak tumblr bullshit, tbh.  It’s okay to like characters who aren’t perfect. How fucking boring fiction would be if everyone was perfect.

Now if I can ask my mutuals to please tag their criticisms of the show that go in the vein of “the writing is bad because dark magic is portrayed so negatively/they don’t hold the protags accountable/elves good humans bad” with “TDP critical” I would greatly appreciate it. It’s getting to the degree where things are becoming very not fun and making me cranky.  Thank you, Renee out. 

[clairen45]

Thank you so much for you bird meta, I used to compare Porgs to Ewoks, now I love 'em! I'd really love to have your insight on two matters I came upon rewatching Kylo scenes in TFA 1) did he know he was going to kill Han all along (and play his dad with the "will you help me?" speech?) or wasn't his mind made until the last second? 2) Did he sense Rey before he was told about her? Otherwise why ask for BB8 to be "unharmed" (metaphor for Rey?) and say "again" when feeling the pull to the light?

Dear Anon,

I am sorry it took me some time to answer your question… Thank you for the kind comments on the bird meta. I know Ewoks have their fans, but like you, it seems, I was never one of them. They were ok enough as a concept, and I see the point of having them to show a point about David and Goliath, guerilla warfare, and the fact that nature always wins in the end. I know they were also supposed to be cutesy and appeal to kids. I was a kid when the movie was originally relased and they never appealed to me. If anything they upset me. Plus, they are not so cutesy: they would have gladly eaten the whole crew had they had the chance. It’s not just Granola and Tree hugging, you guys, they are vicious hunters and carnivorous. As far as I am concerned they have four redeeming qualities:

they did a great makeover on Leia

I love their village (which also makes for the best Lego set honestly)

they introduced Warwick Davis to the world (I am a fan of Willow and I love that this actor is in every Star Wars movise since ROTJ. It’s like a Where’s Warwick game every time).

The Nub Yub song (which was outrageously deleted from the edited versions of the OT and turned into crappy Pan flute music)

And then there is the unspeakable: the Ewok movies they did afterwards. Brrrrr…. Talk about crappy spin offs! I know they want to forget about them, but they did, they did! So, no, for me, you can’t compare the Porgs and the Ewoks. I don’t think porgs are as intrusive as Ewoks were. And also, where porgs represent fertility and the resilience of life and love, Ewoks were evil cock-blockers. They were!!!! Items: trying to get Han’s attention away from Leia by cuddling with his leg, or jumping in in the middle of their kiss after the destruction of the Death Star. No, that’s not cute!

Now, back to your important questions. That is some heavy stuff!

1)Did he know he was going to kill Han, and was he playing cat and mouse with him? NO, to the N, to the O. I don’t believe it one minute. First, remember that he senses his father. He knows he is on Starkiller base. In one deleted scene, he even finds the MF. Is he tracking his father? Not really… He is more about looking for the girl. In the movie, we know he is aware his father is near him, because he turns his head in the direction of Han. Twice he pauses, when entering the structure, and then when passing by his father hidden behind a column. Does he go after him? No, far from it: he stomps away as far as he can… When his father calls him, he also pauses, not turning right away, as if debating…as if delaying as much as he can. He avoids the confrontation. I think he is probably scared of the outcome. By the way, love the symbolism of the bridge. It conveys the idea of a decision being suspended, not made, of a transition, of being caught in the middle. He hasn’t fully crossed the bridge yet, he is at the midpoint: it can go any place from there. Which to me is there to signify that the decision of killing his father has NOT been made. And I don’t think that he was toying with him either. He starts angry and aggressive, but, with the actual mask off, there falls also the psychological mask and the cool façade.

I believe everything about his pain and dilemma. This is a boy who has been requested to kill his father because he loved him too much and that it was seen as a weakness. He is not allowed any attachment. Take the important line: “[your son] was weak and foolish, like his father. So I destroyed him”. Killing his father is really more about killing himself, his feelings, his emotions, what Snoke views as abject sentimentalism. Han is the embodiment of sentimentalism. And we know that Kylo has not been able to suppress his emotions twice: when looking at Finn after the village massacre (which brought forth his feelings of guilt), and when meeting Rey (compassion, desire, curiosity). Meeting his father is the ultimate test in TFA, and a test where he miserably fails before and after the deed: he is unable to repress his emotions before and after killing his father. His face tells it all. And if it were not clear enough (apparently it wasn’t for a lot of people), Snoke was very vocal about the failure of the whole thing: ‘‘the deed split you to the bone”, “you have too much the heart of your father”. The whole line about “the seed lives” can also very much apply about Solo. Yes, Ben is the seed of the Jedi through his mother, but he is very much so the seed of his father. That’s actually the whole point of the “seed” reference. Han still lives through him, because he has not been able to kill his emotions, his feelings.

In th novelizations, especially the Junior one, they give us more clues about that. Both novelizations (adult and junior) insist on the fact that Ben has tears in his eyes during his conversation with his father. And in the adult version, we know this is no ploy: Kylo was not expecting to cry, the sensation seems unfamiliar and strange to him. In the adult version, though, Kylo seems more intent on looking after his father, trying to find his hiding place, “prepared for whatever might ensue”. Dark Kylo is still very much a topic. But in the Junior novelization, this is very different. Han is not sure whether his son saw him or not (which hints that maybe he did but chose to ignore), and then passes him by (instead of looking for him in the adult version). Emphasis is put on the sadness in Kylo’s eyes, which is actually the last vision Han has of his son, and his last vision before dying: a boy with sad eyes. Not cruel. Not victorious. The description of Kylo through Han’s eyes is also very reminiscent of someone who has been abused: “everything about him was narrow and stark, as if he had starved himself of nourrishment”. Kylo is like a member of a cult, or a sect, that has been brainwashed: such sects usually rely on sleep and food deprivation…

So, yes, this is a last second decision. As the light suddenly turning dark underlines. It’s like a cloud passing in front of the sun, something that curiously happened to Luke as well when debating about killing Kylo, two moments that are key in his arc, then. The fleeting moment when Luke hesitates but DOES NOT kill his nephew is what loses Ben, and turns him into Kylo, strong dark sider.. The fleeting moment when Kylo hesitates and KILLS Han is what weakens the dark sider. Interesting parallel.

2)Did he sense Rey before he was told about her? Otherwise why ask for BB8 to be “unharmed” (metaphor for Rey?) and say “again” when feeling the pull to the light?

I really hope we will eventually get the idea that he had visions of Rey before meeting her. It may have been distorted or partial. Or maybe it happened when he was a kid and he barely remembers. Rey’s Force vision was hinting at some prior knowledge, since we were supposed to get young Ben with Snoke (which they kept in the novelizations), and that in the movie Kylo’s figure is turning towards her twice. Of course, these could be visions of the future. And this is how we can tell that the visions are partial or distorted because there is no reason in the future for him to keep his mask. Of course, we know from Yoda, that the visions of the future are everchanging and Kylo, at the time, was intent on keeping his mask, so the future had not been altered yet… Anyways, there is someting eery about his reactions to “the girl”. Everyone caught up on that. And I think this eeriness is also a big part of what prompted the whole; she is his sister, his cousin, or what not… Because everybody got the idea that he had prior knowledge of her: “the girl I have heard so much about”. This is a weird line because honestly he has only heard talk about “a girl” twice in the movie: from Mitaka and from the stormtrooper saying that a girl was spotted in the forest… That’s not a lot of intel. It doesn’t come from Snoke either, because even if he starts talking about an awakening, he doesn’t mention a girl at all, and in TLJ he seems surprised that Rey is the opposite in the Force to Kylo. Kylo acknowledges Rey as the awakening when he sees her with the saber.. I doubt that they conducted an investigation on Jakku about the girl… It’s a possibility, but I doubt it. So it must be something else… Dreams, visions? Will we ever know? That’s the best possibility, though.

I like your idea of the parallel between Rey and BB8. Kylo does start looking for the droid, and yes, he wants it “unharmed”. To be honest,  there is no reason normally for the stormtroopers to be shooting at a droid, especially a rather innocuous BB unit (I know BB8 is bad ass, but still…). Shooting at the droid might damage the information it carries, so I understand he wants to minimize possible damages, but still, it is a weird way of thinking. And indeed the BB unit is off his mind as soon as he sees Rey. Admittedly because he knows she has seen the map, but before he retrieves this information from her head, it would have made more sense for him to be looking after the droid than the girl. Who would care about the girl? He does? He goes straight for her. And this substitution is weird enough that even Hux acknowledges it when Kylo is speaking to Snoke. This is unconventional. Of course, Kylo can rationalize by finding excuses such as “she has seen the map”, “she is strong with the Force” so potentially valuable, but the fact is that he strayed from the original mission.

As for the pull to the light, I am not suprised that he says “again”. I am sure that must have happened to him many times. It just becomes stronger because his coming to Jakku has triggered the dormant connection between him and Rey…

Thank you again for the questions! I hope I have covered them ok enough…

[miishae-archived]

Copied and pasted from an old rp blog of mine, that I feel is very important to read:

Question I was asked: ❝MAY I ASK SOMETHING ABOUT AUTISM AND THE COMMUNITY? I KNOW YOU CAN ONLY SPEAK FOR YOURSELF SO I WILL KEEP IT MORE CENTERED TI YOUR PERSONAL PREFERENCES AND WHAT YOU'VE SEEN TO BE A GENERAL CONSENSUS?❞

Not very many people are aware what Autism or even Autism Spectrum Disorder is. Honestly, I’ve seen a lot of people tend to think of it as “diaper wearing, drooling idiots”

I’m going to start off by talking about my own personality first, and why it should not be outright dismissed as being ‘oversensitive’.

I am on the spectrum disorder. I’m very high functioning, as in, I am able to live on my own, with a boyfriend. I’m able to work, I’m able to walk around in society without causing a disturbance. But just because I appear ‘normal’ doesn’t mean I am.

I’m very very awkward. I get emotional and burnt out really quickly, especially in social situations. I don’t like physical contact, and I don’t like people yapping at me constantly. This is sensory overload. I get tired and cranky, and a lot of times am seen as rude for this.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for how little people understand autism. I constantly have to point it out, because even my loved ones don’t understand me. I can talk to someone over and over about not touching me or shutting up for awhile and giving me some space, and they’d just ask me a lot of questions that really don’t need answering.

I don’t talk much, and it’s not because I’m shy or introverted. I was originally diagnosed with having Nonverbal Learning Disorder, and while I don’t know if that is an outdated diagnosis or not, it aptly describes my social skills still. Link

How it relates to me personally though: I suck at social cues. I suck at maintaining eye contact, I don’t read body language well, and I tend to be brutally honest to a fault. What I think is a reasonable and fair statement can come across as rude and offensive to someone else. It was not my intention to be rude, and since people would rather be offended and passive aggressive, I don’t know how else to word things and I’m sorry, but you need to work with me and not shut down on me. How else am I going to learn how to interact with you?

I’m also incredibly literal minded. I know on tumblr it seems like I’m sarcastic and witty, and I know I crack a lot of jokes, but you would not believe the amount of times I’ve had to go to someone off tumblr and ask “what did this person mean? I don’t understand.”

It’s literally because I don’t understand you. I don’t get a lot of metaphors or jokes, and everyone else will be laughing and I’m sitting over here like “I don’t get it?” and no one wants to explain the joke because “I mean, it’s obvious!” No, it isn’t. Not to me.

I also tend to get hung up on certain things for long periods of time. I hate change in my routine. I hate changing things up because honesty: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But as far as ‘obsessions’ go? Video games comes to mind. I could tell you all about the Borderlands series and how it’s a great game filled with fan-fucking-tastic characters and how it’s an entire world built on survival and it’s dystopian and cyberpunk and-

Or I could tell you when I was a kid and the LOTR moves first came out, I was obsessed with them. I launched into repeated lectures about how the behind-the-scenes worked, or how they did this camera trick, or why that scene was the best to film, and OH did you know Viggo Mortensen was not the original Aragorn? He was called in last minute and only came on because his son was a huge fan and pushed his dad into filming.

I know no one actually cares, but I still care. If you let me talk about something I care about, I will TALK.

This is just the personality side of autism. How ableism comes into play is very subtle. And everyone can be ableist. Friends and family who come to me asking to understand, only to say “okay cool” and forget about it ten minutes later.

I have friends who casually throw around the R-slur. I catch myself using it from time to time, and I’m desperately working to unlearn it. But that word is so heavily used by so many people, and it’s so insulting to hear it thrown around so casually. But worse than that are the people who actually use ‘autism’ as a slur.

“A guy complaining about being friendzoned? He’s autistic.”

“If you play Minecraft you’re autistic I don’t make the rules.”

First off, statements like these are annoying, because they lump a good majority of people into one category, and second off, it’s assumed that people who are autistic are drooling idiots.

There’s a reason it’s a fucking spectrum, okay? I know quite a few people who are on the spectrum, and I’ve heard of other people who are on the spectrum. Everyone has different levels of coping and living. I’m not my cousin, who does need help, because he can’t function on his own.

I’m probably worse off than someone who can hold a stable job and learn to drive and fully function, and I admit that I do need my hand held on some things.

It’s quite possible to unlearn your way of thinking. Quit throwing around slurs as insults. They’re insulting, and frankly, tired. If you want to insult someone, there are far more creative ways to do so.

But it’s not just insults that are the problem. It’s people not caring enough. It’s people who feel the need to speak over us. You don’t get to tell me what I can or can’t find insulting. Frankly, I can’t stand blanket “these words are ableist” lists, because more often than not, they’re written by neurotypicals who are trying to appear Woke™, except that they argue with actual NDs who disagree with their assessment.

Also, and this is a BIG ONE FOR ME

DO NOT ASSUME EVERYONE WITH AUTISM IS A CHILD. I am so tired of seeing mental health awareness posts right here on fucking TUMBLR, of all places, with messages for children. I am 33 years old. I’m so far from a child or even a teenager, and I feel like putting my hair in pigtails and wearing little jumpers every time I see one of these super condescending PSAs about mental health awareness or autism awareness. Adults with autism exist, please quit excluding us in your misguided efforts to raise awareness.

I do agree that it’s not my job to educate you. You can ask questions, and I can answer, but I’m not your encyclopedia source. There are tons of helpful links and websites you can go to learn more about autism, spectrum disorder, and anything else that might be linked.

That being said, don’t go the opposite direction and completely ignore its existence. By ignoring it, you’re only contributing to the rampancy that ableism is. It’s very real and very damaging. It’s big things, like me being denied food stamps in my state because they didn’t believe I was disabled and I couldn’t get proof without them wanting to assign a counselor and them wanting to thrust me into the working world anyway (which was the whole reason I mentioned I was autistic, because I need fucking help?) and little things like “You’re too sensitive, just deal with it.”

Ask questions. Look up resources. Not just for autism, but for anything related to mental health or physical health. Ableism is rampant in able-bodied people too. My brother in law is in a wheelchair and faces quite a bit of ableism himself.

All this being said, please please watch how you talk/interact with people. Much like I need to learn social cues and how to interact with you, You guys need to understand that my personality isn’t going to change. This is literally who I am, and who I always will be, so you have to be patient. You have to recognize that I’m trying, and I’m not perfect.

And most importantly of all I guess, we’re not disabled. We’re different. We think differently, and we act a little off. But we’re not bad people. Not all of us, at least. (There are people who play up the “I’m-disabled-be-nice-to-me card” and they should be held accountable for their horrible actions)

Personally, I’m trying. I’m tired, and exhausted, and lonely. I have next to nobody to rely on, and I know I have a lifetime of learning how to behave better ahead of me, and I’m just tired. but I’m still hanging in there, in the best way I know how: by being me. If I can educate myself and learn about how ableism is a problem, so can you.

[elizabethrobertajones]

13x13 watching notes

*goes to sit at the unpopular table*

Went to bed at 10, up at 7 for the ole watching Supernatural grind... *offers you all a chocolate biscuit*

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*waves hi at Michael* *and Kevin*

All the PoC are shoved in an AU... Thankfully now Rowena is back I can't say with the SOLE major female character but

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Oh gosh they're using Yockey's dialogue to explain everything, I don't know if I should laugh or cry

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IS CAS OKAY?

Why are you spitting blood... You weren't stabbed THAT badly were you?

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*remembers stabbing Lucifer*

You know in AtlA where Zuko made a good decision and prompty collapsed in an angst coma at the inner turmoil of doing the right thing?

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I have no clue why that all happened except to allow Lucifer to leg it.

Which, I mean, at least something happened to explain why Lucifer legged it.

-

WHIMSICAL MUSIC.

OTT HETERO NONSENSE

I guess Dabb era means they're allowed to destroy expensive wedding cakes again now no one can tell him off for it

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Is that an Observer?

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Oh, creepy cupid

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It can not be good for Lucifer to eat cupid grace even more than normal grace because it's probably a Voldemort thing about love hurting him blah blah blah

Marghe was talking about this episode being a potential 9x03 parallel and I agree - and Lucifer's already messing up by voluntarily stealing grace just to keep himself alive for his own wanting to be alive purposes at the first opportunity. And we have cupids instead of reapers

and also I guess Cas wants to go back to the Bunker and no one's gonna boot him out if we're lucky :P

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Poor cupid. You only looked creepy as a circumstantial thing to watching these people fall in love with a besotted smile, no one understands your work :<

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Omg we didn't even see if Cas stole a car to get back... I must KNOW

-

Anyway here's the sneak preview scene

Oh it gets worse; Cas is like "I met with Lucifer" instead of "Lucifer showed up and I had to hustle him off to a bar to stop the angels coming back and killing us, and then when I tried to contact you he stole my phone, and btw thanks for coming to my rescue in time."

Aka Cas can only be on the backfoot in this argument by his own social ineptitude at describing it/because the writers want him there

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"She's alive. That's all I know, sorry." Yes, good. Because Jack's with her so he'll make it all good and honestly the fact we haven't seen what's going on there since 13x09 is kinda weird because this is all time passing that Jack is with Mary and they only have one clip to show us of that - this is stretching the dramatic irony writing of the season to breaking point by not revisiting them sooner, as it's a loose end that would have IMMEDIATE pay off aka they aren't just sitting there staring at each other for months, and we know off-screen since BEFORE CHRISTMAS that Jack would help Mary and whatever delays are keeping him and idk his new BFF Kev from busting back to our world are manufactured to fill these weeks. I mean not like they can't have delays and problems, especially as Jack is out untested learning what's up with himself away from all his parental influences, as his big test, but the storytelling in the main part of the show is relying on what's happening in the AU for tension and Lucifer telling Cas she was being tortured is like, the last time HE saw her, and WE know Jack is with her so things are probably different, and now Cas is lying to the Winchesters about Mary so as not to upset them while unintentionally perhaps backing up whatever is going on with Jack. Or not! Who knows! It's been long enough the one glimpse of them staring at each other is starting to wear thin to give us any meaningful dramatic irony in these moments and they really ought to have had at least a teaser in the AU in 13x11

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Yep here's the parallel to the street scene in 9x03, except that Mark P is such a ham that he's doing a pantomime version of "I'm cold" complete with the directing showing us some warmer winter coats in case we didn't get the message, and then he starts staring at food... He can't be human so idk why without headcanoning hard about why it's affecting him so much when Cas immediately stopped caring about food when he stole grace.

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Maybe, I headcanon, being stabbed was bad enough that all the grace he had and stole went to repairing himself but it's a finite supply and he's already to the stage Cas was in in 10x01

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Oh now he's miming being hungry. "Hungry? Ew!"

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The fact he was looking at burgers as a Cas parallel and not a fried chicken joint for immediate emotional pay off is honestly the biggest failing of this episode so far

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Asmodeus is like "shit they got away as soon as my back was turned" Ketch is like "lol (but posh)"

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They have a weird staring each other down moment which Ketch either wins or Buckleming think that Asmodeus won but Ketch still won because Asmodeus admits to being monumentally stupid before giving Ketch his orders.

Like

I literally can not tell what the intent was here which is the most meta commentary on their dialogue I have ever witnessed and if it was not 7:30am and still mostly dark I would be howling with laughter. As it is, I feel a tear appearing in my eye as I take another chocolate biscuit.

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Now HERE is a surpringly good use of dramatic irony from Buckleming which unfortunately is not actually betrayed anywhere in their dialogue (e.g. "I stabbed him but he seems to be fine") when Asmodeus tells Ketch an angel blade to the heart will down Lucifer at this point. Basically relying on that this happened at the end of last episode (and the directing reminds us in flashbacks & recap) to confirm the dramatic irony and with these writers I'm only like 63% sure they meant to do this because I have a strong nagging doubt that they don't even read anyone else's scripts.

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If Asmodeus/Ketch becomes this fandom's Kylux I'm outta here

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*Lucifer fails to learn basic human decency from the homeless man* I'm really hoping this is a metaphor which they actually stick to - that he's self-serving and mean and refuses to even adapt his behaviour as a guise to benefit from human decency by pretending to be nice to get what he wants then...

They could just be showing him to be hopeless now and then use a stronger inciting incident later - Jack is a motivator for him like basically nothing else, but none of this *so far* indicates we should actually care about him as a person regardless of what he might do for Cas's son later in the season

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I also thought he might offer to heal the guy for food that didn't come from a dumpster but instead he's getting a tip off about Sister Jo

(Honestly, I've never dumpster dived but the stats about throwing perfectly good food away are so horrific that this seems like really misrepresenting dumpster diving, mostly because it implies the restaurant would keep food around long enough for it to go slimy and smelly, rather than throw it out while it's still completely good but no longer something they can sell, e.g. unclaimed pizzas, mishapen stuff, slightly burnt things, etc.

The fact that Buckleming seem unaware that "Next day pizza" is literally a thing and not gross and that fast food doesn't immediately expire but that you can eat left over pizza the next day without incurring any wrath of god speaks a lot to their privilege and Hollywood's impression of poverty, and this utopia where there's no waste and you can just throw out last night's pizza which is now skanky and rotten, and eat something better >.>)

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Huh, Dean and Cas appear to be alone and Dean is apologising for not knowing he'd been kidnapped which is literally the sort of scene which I'd hope would mean no one is in my inbox saying he doesn't care this time around.

"I-I-I-We should have known it wasn't you."

Sooooooooooooooooooooo close. SO CLOSE. SOOOOOO CLOOOOOOOOOSE.

Awww they're making excuses at each other. "He's a shapeshifter. I got myself captured." "but if Sam and I knew..."

"I'm fine Dean." "You sure about that?"

in 100 years when I get here THAT's going in the "Dean n Cas are in love" meta series.

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"I told Kelly I would protect HER son. I intend to keep that promise."

Interestingly, we're halfway through the season and Cas appears to have no idea Jack thinks Cas is his father, or any inclination to do more than protect him out of the goodness of his heart and another promise to look after someone in need of protection, making no positive affirmations to suggest he thinks of Jack in a fatherly way. Noted last episode, feeling the urge to comment this episode :P

I am not implying this is an entirely bad or ominous thing or whatever, but 1: Cas barely knows him so this is perhaps more healthy, 2: I am still dubious about how Jack originally nabbed himself a guardian angel and Cas has made NO comment on this scenario or, 3: discussed what it felt like on his end of what Dean has been accusing Jack of "sockpuppeting" Cas... I think it was much more grey area than that and Dean's mostly stopped accusing Jack of it, but it leaves massive questions. And 4: it means Cas is still doing this as a duty to Kelly rather than personal investment/parent feelings as his outwardly stated motivations, and it plays into the grey area of 5: we still thematically have Cas with a guardian angel burden just like I thought after 12x19 that this is what Jack wanted from Cas and after the presentation of how it was so bad for Cas to be the Winchesters' guardian that season, coming to a head in 12x19, I still think that his relationship with Jack is offering an alternative to directly critiquing that relationship anymore without damage between himself and the Winchesters, but still allowing some exploration of duty and the guardian angel burden, and perhaps the show is in no rush to have Cas leap into fatherhood when this parallel serves his arc so much better. Which also means 6: that nothing is over despite the progress he's made towards personal growth recently and all his old trauma and burdens are still hanging from him, he's just in a better place than he was with various new hopes and directions.

-

Dean says nothing, and Moose Interruption Occurs.

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I have been wondering since the first promo clips revealing Donatello returning if they'd try and have a prophet-off with the AU and use his powers to either connect with Kevin or the AU... I wonder how right I'm about to accidentally be now we know a bit more about all this

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"... Now, it's gonna be harder than it sounds"

you think.

So this is Dean completely ignoring Billie's warnings and going full steam ahead huh

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*pulls out the demon tablet as well*

Oh boy you guys are really getting into the bad decisions

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Not mentioning what happened to the angel tablet is a pretty good swerve around reminding us Cas destroyed it "all for one man" because he's "in love with humanity" but you can't get past me that easily *taps nose*

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... this is a good time to remind everyone that Gadreel left all of Kevin's notes on the table when he walked out with the angel tablet.

You know

the notes where Kevin translated the entire angel tablet including the footnotes into ancient Sumerian

you know

a language

that maybe

someone who's been around

since ancient sumerian times

might be able to read

you know

like

Cas

*points at him for emphasis*

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https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/170677457313/i-i-hit-a-wall-translating-the-tablet-into

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Also seriously why would the same spell be on both tablets. I'd be extremely Buckleming disappointed if it was, and much much happier if 13x12 was an ominous warning about going around reading strange tomes and tablets and just doing whatever freaking spells you half understand that you find on them.

Remember, Kevin is a super-genius Princeton applicant who even in the AU was nurtured by Michael to be super smart like his freaking COURT WIZARD, and did a lot of maths and theory to make it work that apparently even Michael couldn't. (Obligatory throwback to the intro of the tablets and the reminder that human creativity and genius can do what super-smart monsters can't, via Charlie, Kevin's narrative pair.)

-

Chicken wings, huh

(37 buckets tracks with how many bad hotdogs Kevin ate and gave himself a stroke over while translating the demon tablet the first time, I suppose.)

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I mean we knew it was coming, because set spoilers, but you KNOW how much happier I would have been if it had been the Lucifer thing. You know.

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Meanwhile: the extent to which I don't trust Buckleming is that I am wondering if the director cut an anvil line when they're like "who's killing angels!?" and it just cuts to the next Lucifer scene wordlessly

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I also would have no clue how intentional the "who's killing angels" connection is to 4x16 where that was the line of interrogation on Alastair and it turned out the first angels to be killed on the show were by Uriel for Lucifer, meaning that question still at the end of the day is answered by "lucifer"

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Hi Danneel

Query: if she is an angel, what does SHE need the cash for? :P

I assume that "for the fallen" sign is high irony about her being a fallen angel and she's pretending it's a charity donation in exchange for healing

I suppose she can buy nice outfits with it

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*exposition crime scene*

tiny redeeming factor about Dean talking about how boned they are and Cas turning to look at him and agreeing "epically"

Also for the first time they're all in long coats together praise the lord

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Okay I think her name is Eliel? I am not sure how to spell that at all, I'm just guessing because it sounded like "L I L" and then I angel-fied it, so tl;dr I'm gonna keep calling her Sister Jo and/or Danneel :P

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Oh good some exposition. Well at least she has literally explained the money is for the nice outfits XD

I like her. She's not scared of Lucifer, and she's one of the angels who slipped notice after the fall and started living her life as she wanted.

"So... Ca-ching!" I really like her now :P

This puts her in direct opposition to Cas not just at the start of season 10 when he was rounding up fallen angels and sending them back to Heaven with Hannah - when his heart wasn't really in it anyway - but more directly and importantly with 9x22 where he had sent a large amount of his army out to local hospitals to perform miracles on the DL for no reward except,  you know, angels should help people. Their hearts are in completely different places, with completely different understandings of what angels can and should do on earth if they are to be here.

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She bargains for her life with the same thing the wraith was going to do with Patience in 13x03, and how we've seen some monsters feeding in the past - notably the grigori angel that was eating soul energy in the place of grace but was essentially the same set up.

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Lucifer's also found someone smart enough to help him who he might actually listen to (since the homeless man would have helped had he listened but he wouldn't respect what a human says vs another angel maybe giving him some pointers for surviving down here).

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Sam, being the good wingman, leaves Dean n Cas to interview someone together while heading off alone

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Sam's hair is ENORMOUSLY fluffy

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Which reminds me, it's pouring with rain outside so I'm not going to get away with leaving my hair a day after getting it dyed, I sort of need to wash it BEFORE the sky does it for me and turns everything I own purple :P Idk if I'll be able to finish the episode before I have to go to yoga... hm. It's finally daylight-ish

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Oh of course they have creepy sexy grace eating going on because this whole grace vampire concept wasn't sexy enough when it was bald little cupids.

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*Dean casually in the foreground pulling out an angel blade*

That is your WIFE, sir

-

And you should hear what she and Lucifer were doing

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Cas goes first :D

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LOL Ketch

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"Oh it's only you"

How DARE

the original flavour TFW line up has just busted into the room with you, you are in the presence of GODS

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"Isn't it possible that I'm simply trying to strike a blow for the good of humanity?"

"No, that's not possible"

Listen Cas's snark is weaponised now. How did Ketch not crumble into ASH

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no one says Huzzah

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Thanks Cas

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Listen however many gifs there are of that move (omg Cas looking at Dean, Dean nodding to him, Cas Doing The Thing) there are not enough so I'm gonna just... make one...

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Lol, just throw him in the trunk.

"I like that plan."

Oh the wall dividers from the fake 5x04 set are on the stage too. It's DEFINITELY being used for performances of Supernatural The Musical in between healing sessions

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Aniel? Eniel?

Danniel

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Stop putting Cas in the backseat to moodily stare into the middle distance between the Winchesters! He's earned shotgun a million times over! He was in PRISON and you DIDN'T KNOW

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A neon sign where all the letters are out except "AU" in "Restaurant"

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At this point I'm assuming Danniel is seducing Lucifer for her own purposes and honestly whatever go for it I guess, if you win, and this isn't any creepier than it already is

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The fact he ate a cupid and all that is probably relevant

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Tbh them flopping onto the bed after is still somehow the least weird of all the weird crap Buckleming have made the characters do and I don't know if I'm numb to it or because it's Lucifer I have negative investment in his character anyways but you know, whatever floats their boat :P

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"It's always so strange, that final moment, when I've lost just enough grace that I'm almost - " "Human." "I feel... emotions. Sensations. Things they must feel."

Honestly she's sounding more like Cas or Hannah than Lucifer going through his experience, almost like being a more generic angel, as soon as she loses grace she gets more affected than he does in the ways he's been affected where he cares only about being cold and hungry. And lonely. Bleh :P A concession to emotional weakness - he does love to be adored and surrounded by people who'll tell him how great he is.

He says he can't see how they go on but she says she sees how there can be pain, "but also hope. Love even. Angels can only imagine."

She's reeeeeally getting back to that Cas in 10x01 dialogue where Hannah was confused about human things, and Cas described to her what they were and that they were good things to feel on earth.

Ow.

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She envies humans, because they can "Be anything."

it's like we've come full swerve back to the stuff from the start of season 10 that was so exciting for Cas exploring the intricacies of humanity... Yikes.

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Wow her job sucked :P I can see why she went and asked for change when facing an eternity of that... More suggestions that Heaven is not really something that can or should be restored, never mind how volatile it was and how the angels engineered the original apocalypse. The entire system is pointless and just makes dangerous bored angels... The kind of angels who hop on the Lucifer bandwagon as soon as it comes into town because being righteous on behalf of Heaven is pointless to them. Why take a stance against Lucifer in the first place if your moral alignment was always to Heaven first and Heaven sucked that much.

"Goodness" is not an inherent alignment for angels... Looking to a leadership they trust to be good is what they were built to do, and assuming their causes are good because they're on them is another pitfall of that. The other is just all the angels who turn against Heaven entirely >.>

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Lucifer says he's "going to be a father" which, uh, seems like this episode was written last year and then re-written for THIS year because he really ought to be talking about how he IS a father and he's looking for his son...

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He starts maybe feeling feelings, and hastily gets up to start posturing, at which point he does actually say he's going to find his son.

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Lol, HERE'S Casmodeus in a scene that doesn't have anything to do with anything.

Donatello casually tells Casmodeus that he has the demon tablet. Honestly, they probably ought to have, you know... explained everything that happened to Kevin to him... Like oh hey btw this is one of the most desired objects in the universe being the word of god n all and wowweee we've had some problems with people stealing it and our prophets in the past. Maybe sit tight and don't answer the door?

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Or go out and get huge buckets of chicken and chat to any of us who isn't where you think we should be

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Please don't start talking about the ingredients for the spell in public

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dear god the worst bit is they made a character plausibly dumb enough to drop the idiot ball for them to the point where Asmodeus is probably best served to just leave Donatello where he is and walk him back and forth from the chicken place every day

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They become unexpected friends and at the end of the day he can't bring himself to kill his goofy prophet buddy

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"I'm the only person on the planet who can read the thing"

Budddyyyy.

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Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude. Now he's just telling Casmodeus that Jack's in the AU and

*takes his chicken away* You're grounded. Just. Go to your room.

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Asmodeus's voice coming out of Cas is wrong and bad.

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Asmodeus is unimpressed with your offbrand chicken

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aw crap I have to go

Last 10 minutes drama when I get home... They'll open 100 portals and it will be a Mess.

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it never bodes well in a Buckleming episode when there's 10 minutes to go and TFW get out the car to go confront Lucifer.

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Danniel is like "Castiel, what are you doing here?" like it wouldn't be blatantly obvious :P

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I am pretty sure she's tricking them into thinking she's more of a hostage than she is but it's hard to tell tbh, given these writers and their history of writing sexy encounters between characters which should not have sexy encounters, and that sort of tension in the writing is not particularly where you want the ambiguity to be resting in character dynamics :P

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I think maybe she is after telling Lucifer that she told them how weak he was, assuming that he's actually strong enough to take them out and has been snacking on her grace non-stop  somehow

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Okay yeah she is betraying them for love, and I add a confused "phew" onto the end of that thought. I have no idea how I feel about them tbh and I never worked it out on the bus ride around town >.>

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Ketch really wants them to stab him, huh? He hasn't said anything this conversation to de-escalate the situation, used a demon bomb on a room full of angels, including Cas so if it had worked it would have hurt him but it didn't even work so he just wasted something expensive, and then he's like, fine, let's all work together and Sam's like dude no and Ketch is like, fine, will you trust me if I tell you I'm working for Asmodeus?

Dean's like "... they don't let me say fuck on this network but how the fuck does that help??"

Ketch offers to pass information BACK to them from Asmodeus, which absolutely does not patch up the leak of their prophet wandering off to get fried chicken and coming back with KFC

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"I'm the lesser of at least three evils" that isn't really very reassuring either mate

-

Also with the terrible sales pitch: Lucifer trying to convince the angels to let him run Heaven with Danniel as his queen

I can't even work out if he's pretending he can make new angels or not, but I sort of feel like he totally can't and it would go about as well as the Plum sisters trying to resurrect their mom, who in this weird instance stands in for God

-

"How would you like your wings back" baaaaad idea

-

Cut to Donatello munching a million chicken wings

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How is he not dead

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*Cas side-eyes the enormous pile of chicken wings too*

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"We need him" Yeah, being needed still sucks and even if you need someone you can still want to shoot them as soon as they're not useful >.>

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Oh dear, Lucifer got what he wanted. And Danniel is his queen, exactly as SHE wanted.

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And Ketch and Asmodeus are back to sharing a drink like THEY wanted since they were on a holiday cruise together when Cas escaped and are apparently just an item now

-

Oh no apparently he was going shopping getting some artefact

An archangel blade which doesn't look anything like any sword we've ever seen any archangel ever hold before and also no one has ever stabbed an archangel with

-

uuuuuuuuuuuugh

-

I don't like this at all and it's entirely because Gabriel had such a good story in the first place and I really really LIKE him. And whatever they explain is going to have to be stupid by neccessity, they're not gonna bring Raphael back which is only somewhat mitigated by bringing Michael back in a black vessel but whatever, if you have all 3 of the others running around and never give Raphael another go, it just looks bad because now we have a forgotten archangel just chilling down in season 5/6 being completely ignored for another go around when all the others do >.>

ALSO HE DIED GOOD and 9x18 was great and all but uggghh it was good because he was safely still DEAD

I mean I guess since Lucifer got free again his sacrifice was pretty much in vain anyway so maybe he should get another crack at killing him but uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugghhhhhhh

I'm going to guess I'm the biggest killjoy at the party right now, which is weird because I actually like 99% of this episode as not being terrible and for Buckleming one of their best non-rapey non-racist, only a few random dropped idiot balls episodes... And I'm assuming the Gabriel decision comes at a higher level, or at least needed a lot of approval and working into other plots.

But uuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhh. That just means I disapprove all over this place and this isn't a criticism of a Buckleming thing, it's the fact that I've had lukewarm to tepid interest in Gabriel coming back the entire time and now he's back and I'm gonna have to live with this >.>

[tevis-larsen]

...Do all of them for any OC of your choosing. ( good luck have fun I'm not sorry at all )

I picked the garbage man. Also, you’re the actual worst ldskfdlfs this took forever

1. What’s their full name? Why was that chosen? Does it mean anything?Durzog gor-Malak. He changed his name when he left the stronghold. his last name has particular meaning as it represents his feeling of not being connected to either

traditional orc maleness or femaleness. Also it shows his stronger-than-average connection to malacath, since he’s the out cast of outcasts and already acting as a

sort of champion of malacath even before the events of Skyrim

2. Do they have any titles? How did they get them?He just was told that he’s the dragonborn and doesn’t yet understand what that means fully

3. Did they have a good childhood? What are fond memories they have of it? What’s a bad memory? He had a pretty rough childhood, both in and out of the stronghold. One of his favorite things was when he was learning smithing. he loves forging new weapons so most

of his positive memories involve working at the forge. His worst memory would be when he was kicked out of the stronghold, he tends to block that one out.

4. What is their relationship with their parents? What’s a good and bad memory with them? Did they know both parents? He did know his parents. He was always a source of disappointment though and never really fit in. He tries to block out most of his memories of his family

5. Do they have any siblings? What’s their names? What is their relationship with them? Has their relationship changed since they were kids to adults?He doesn’t remember much from the stronghold and doesn’t like to think about it. (i haven’t decided but either way they certainly do not talk anymore)

6. What were they like at school? Did they enjoy it? Did they finish? What level of higher education did they reach? What subjects did they enjoy? Which did they

hate?I… do strongholds even have school? I mean he learned smithing from a young age like all orcs but he was particularly skilled at it as he practiced often to get

away from everyone else

7. Did they have lots of friends as a child? Did they keep any of their childhood friends into adulthood? No ;; he had no friends as a child, there were hardly any peers in the stronghold and he fucked off into the mountains at such a young age and spent so much of his

life as a wanderer, he has hardly interacted with anyone for years other than traders and the like

8. Did they have pets as a child? Do they have pets as an adult? Do they like animals? He does like animals but has never had a pet. He’ll sometimes become friends with them when he lives in the wilderness by giving them bits of his food but they never

stay for very long

9. Do animals like them? Do they get on well with animals? See above

10. Do they like children? Do children like them? Do they have or want any children? What would they be like as a parent? Or as a godparent/babysitter/ect?He hates most people for rejecting him and forcing him to live on his own his whole life. But children very rarely treat him that way, especially the ones too young

to understand. He has a soft spot for children in general

11. Do they have any special diet requirements? Are they a vegetarian? Vegan? Have any allergies?None, he has a particularly strong stomach from eating all sorts of mushrooms and vegetation in the mountains

12. What is their favourite food? Any sort of cooked meat. It’s quite hard to find and prepare on your own so it was a rare thing for him

13. What is their least favourite food?mushrooms. he’s eaten so many damn mushrooms, he’s just sick of them

14. Do they have any specific memories of food/a restaurant/meal?He used to cook with his mother in the stronghold. It was one of the few things they did together and since he was good at it, he never got into trouble while they

were cooking so he likes it, but hasn’t had the opportunity to properly cook in years (he will when he meets Gulrog however, she’s a chef)

15. Are they good at cooking? Do they enjoy it? What do others think of their cooking?See above lol

16. Do they collect anything? What do they do with it? Where do they keep it? Books! He taught himself to read while living in the mountains and collected and traded books with merchants when he went near towns. He always had at least 2 or 3

books with him to keep himself entertained and vaguely connected to the outside world

17. Do they like to take photos? What do they like to take photos of? Selfies? What do they do with their photos?uhhhh no

18. What’s their favourite genre of: books, music, tv shows, films, video games and anything elseHe loves history books, stories of legendary heroes and battles, but also boring historical accounts of important events. He just likes knowing about things that

happened even if they don’t have a practical application

19. What’s their least favourite genres?Romance books and fictional stories. Anything where there are characters to relate to. He has especially low empathy and finds it difficult to understand the

characters and their motivations

20. Do they like musicals? Music in general? What do they do when they’re favourite song comes?He does like music and knows a few bard songs though he doesn’t know any instruments. He’s a fairly stoic fellow so no dancing but foot tapping, swaying and singing

along are all things he might do in a crowded tavern if others are doing the same

21. Do they have a temper? Are they patient? What are they like when they do lose their temper?He isn’t patient but doesn’t have much of a temper. He isn’t level-headed exactly but it takes a lot to get him legitimately angry. And he’s a scary sort of orc when

he does get angry

22. What are their favourite insults to use? What do they insult people for? Or do they prefer to bitch behind someone’s back?Anything attacking honor or strength of character. he’ll insult someone for being cowardly or not standing up for themselves. He quite likes the nords “milk-drinker”

comments and has used that from time to time

23. Do they have a good memory? Short term or long term? Are they good with names? Or faces?He has a pretty good memory when it comes to things like dates and facts, but its terrible when it comes to people and faces since he’s almost never seen the same

person twice

24. What is their sleeping pattern like? Do they snore? What do they like to sleep on? A soft or hard mattress?He’s a very heavy sleeper and can quite literally sleep anywhere if need be. As long as he doesn’t have to support his own weight, its fair game for sleeping

25. What do they find funny? Do they have a good sense of humour? Are they funny themselves?He doesn’t get a lot of traditional humor and a lot of the jokes he tells himself rely on obscure knowledge of history, so by the time he can explain a joke, no one

really finds it funny anymore

26. How do they act when they’re happy? Do they sing? Dance? Hum? Or do they hide their emotions? He’s quite stoic and doesn’t show his emotions very often

27. What makes them sad? Do they cry regularly? Do they cry openly or hide it? What are they like they are sad?He just becomes more quiet than usual, isolates even more somehow and just deals with it like that, he would never let anyone catch onto his true feelings s that

would show weakness

28. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?Being rejected again. He isolates himself because he wouldn’t be able to find a new home, a place where he belongs, only to have it taken away from him Again

29. What do they do when they find out someone else’s fear? Do they tease them? Or get very over protective? He’s very protective if he does decide to care about someone. but even if he’s not, he would never make fun of someone for something like that. Having fear is normal

but acting despite it is what matters most. Being a coward about it, however, is unacceptable

30. Do they exercise? Regularly? Or only when forced? What do they act like pre-work out and post-work out?Not actively, but he’s quite fit due to his travelling and fighting

31. Do they drink? What are they like drunk? What are they like hungover? How do they act when other people are drunk or hungover? Kind or teasing?He drinks a lot. Like, all the time. He’s never very social but is a bit more willing to engage in conversation while drunk. He gets hungover a lot and the way he

combats it is by drinking more.

32. What do they dress like? What sorta shops do they buy clothes from? Do they wear the fashion that they like? What do they wear to sleep? Do they wear makeup?

What’s their hair like?Ooh i was hoping i would get this question. He wears ragged robes, straight up just the stained, ripped under clothes he wears under his armor. the only exception is

his blacksmithing clothing which he enchanted himself

33. What underwear do they wear? Boxers or briefs? Lacey? Comfy granny panties?I’m sure it’s like braies or something idk but tight enough to stay out of his way while fighting

34. What is their body type? How tall are they? Do they like their body?Even after being changed by Malacath, he isn’t very big, he’s muscular but by no means buff. His body does what he needs it to and thats what matters to him

35. What’s their guilty pleasure? What is their totally unguilty pleasure? I don’t think he has one, he doesn’t care what people think enough to be guilty about what he enjoys

36. What are they good at? What hobbies do they like? Can they sing?He’s good at cooking, fighting, and smithing. He loves reading and drinking. and he tries to sing but probably isn’t very great at it

37. Do they like to read? Are they a fast or slow reader? Do they like poetry? Fictional or non fiction?He loves reading but is very slow. As stated before, he loves reading about history the most and can’t understand poetry if his life depended on it, too many metaphors

38. What do they admire in others? What talents do they wish they had?Bravery and honor. He doesn’t really have the time to think about what he wishes he could do. he does what he can and the day that’s not enough maybe then he’ll think about it

39. Do they like letters? Or prefer emails/messaging? No friends

40. Do they like energy drinks? Coffee? Sugary food? Or can they naturally stay awake and alert?Whatever tamriel’s equivalent to coffee is, he drinks it by the gallon im sure

41. What’s their sexuality? What do they find attractive? Physically and mentally? What do they like/need in a relationship?I dont think he knows. It was never something he’d even considered. I don’t think he’ll ever be romantic with someone but if he were, I doubt something like gender would even matter to him

42. What are their goals? What would they sacrifice anything for? What is their secret ambition?His goal is just to survive, continue to work for Malacath and maybe figure out the dragonborn stuff, but long term, he doesn’t have any plans or goals or ambitions, he never even considered having a future

43. Are they religious? What do they think of religion? What do they think of religious people? What do they think of non religious people?He worships Malacath and has ever since finding a shrine in the wilderness. When he fixed it up, the daedra spoke to him and gave him a task and he’s been worshipping him ever since

44. What is their favourite season? Type of weather? Are they good in the cold or the heat? What weather do they complain in the most? He doesn’t really mind any weather. He’s learned to survive in the cold and the heat. But I suppose having lived in the mountains, he’s most adapted to the cold. He loves rain though, because he straight up doesn’t bathe

45. How do other people see them? Is it similar to how they see themselves? Others see him usually as a mysterious stranger. A small orc that doesn’t say much but carries a big axe. He doesn’t really see himself at all, he figures he just is, and doesn’t think about it beyond that

46. Do they make a good first impression? Does their first impression reflect them accurately? How do they introduce themselves?He doesn’t understand introductions or really any social norms so he just sort of stumbles his way through it, either coming off as rude or stupid depending on what part he messes up first

47. How do they act in a formal occasion? What do they think of black tie wear? Do they enjoy fancy parties and love to chit chat or loathe the whole event?He would be Completely Clueless and probably knock a bunch of stuff over with the axe he insisted on carrying in

48. Do they enjoy any parties? If so what kind? Do they organise the party or just turn up? How do they act? What if they didn’t want to go but were dragged along by

a friend? Never been to one, but would probably hate them

49. What is their most valued object? Are they sentimental? Is there something they have to take everywhere with them?ooh this is good. He actually ended up killing Erandur during Vaermina’s quest. In a moment of panic, he followed the daedra’s instructions and killed him. He’s terribly guilty about it and so carries the Skull of corruption and a cloak from one of the priests around as a reminder not to trust the other princes. Also Volendrung now

50. If they could only take one bag of stuff somewhere with them: what would they pack? What do they consider their essentials?Armor, weapons, food, a knife/dagger, bow, axe for wood, waterskin, and optional is a lantern/torch, rope, tent, sleeping roll and mortar and pestle. he’s very much a minimalist