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spine-buster · 4 years ago

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peaceful easy feeling ft. b.boeser | one

A/N: Here’s the beginning of my new mini-series! I hope you all enjoy it. It will definitely be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, so be prepared! There will be five parts!

SUPPORT MY WRITING HERE: https://ko-fi.com/spine_buster

CONTENT WARNING: parents with disease/sickness (Parkinson’s); swearing; sex; alcohol use; lots of emotions.

* * * * *

Brock Boeser felt like he was at some sort of Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, with everybody around the circle introducing themselves and their similar predicaments. The group was in a big meeting room at the local community centre, and when he walked in, he saw a group of dads playing basketball in the gym. He sort of wanted to join them instead of being here, in this room, with all these people that he didn’t know talking about what they were going to talk about, but he’d done this back in Minnesota, at his mother’s behest with his siblings, and he was going to do it here, too, in Vancouver, to make her happy and ease her mind and to make sure that he was easing his own mind.

“Um, hello everyone. My name is Brock Boeser. I’m from Minnesota, but I’m living in Vancouver. And um, I’m here with you all because my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.”

“Hello Brock,” everyone smiled at him, and he smiled and nodded back.

“So it was your dad that was diagnosed,” the leader, a kind, older woman named Esther who had greeted him at the door and stuck with him until everybody sat down, egged on a conversation. He knew she was doing it because he was new; everybody in this room probably already knew each other. A part of him actually wondered if anybody knew who he was. “When?”

“Um, he—he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2010,” Brock revealed, stuttering it out. He knew he’d have to be open at these things – open so people could empathize with him, open so he could empathize with others – but it was still tough for him to do so. “But he—it’s—it’s not just Parkinson’s. Two years after he was diagnosed, he was in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. In 2017, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He beat it but then in June it returned to his liver and chest. In July, he had a heart attack and his heart stopped beating for 15 minutes. I was with him and—I—it’s—it’s a lot, as you can imagine,” he tried not to start crying right then and there. Imagine that – first meeting with a Parkinson’s Society of BC support group and he’d bawl like a baby.

“Goodness me, Brock,” Esther said. “He has support at home?”

“Um, well, money isn’t an issue now, but when I was growing up my mom worked three jobs to make sure we were all taken care of,” he revealed. “I’d pitch in too wherever I could, obviously.”

“But it’s been tough for a number of years.”

Brock paused. It had been tough for a number of years. It had been really tough for a number of years. He nodded his head. “Yes ma’am. I try to take it day by day.”

Esther nodded as well. “I don’t know if you pray, Brock, but I know a couple of members around the circle do, and, well – you’ll be kept in all our prayers.”

Brock saw a few people nod their head. Another older woman, probably his mom’s age, clutching a rosary; a Sikh man dressed in a casual suit; a younger woman, probably in her thirties, with short blonde hair. He appreciated the sentiment. He knew that people took prayer very seriously – that people suffering took prayer very seriously. It was, realistically, one of the kindest things somebody could ever say to you: “I’m praying for you.” “Thank you very much,” he said, nodding his head once.

***

There was an arrangement of cookies at the end of the meeting. Even after the 90 minutes of everybody talking about their experiences and emotions, they apparently liked to stick around afterwards as well just to mingle. It didn’t all have to be doom and gloom, he thought. It didn’t all have to be about Parkinson’s or about sick people or losing your loved ones all the time. Maybe some people just wanted to talk about the news. Maybe some people just wanted to talk about sports. The weather. Anything. Anything to make a connection with someone beyond something so tragic.

After stuffing an entire Fudge-O cookie into his mouth, he looked up to see a young woman staring at him, holding her trenchcoat in her arms. She was smiling to let him know she was friendly. He was embarrassed because he knew she just saw him stuff an entire Fudge-O into his mouth. “Hi,” he said, his mouth still full of cookie, the sound of his voice reflecting that fact.

“You’re Brock Boeser, right?” she asked sweetly. “You play for the Vancouver Canucks?”

“Yeah,” Brock couldn’t help but smile. He swallowed the rest of the cookie even though he didn’t really finish chewing it. “That’s me. Are you a fan?”

“My step-brothers are more so than I am,” she said. “But I’m a fan of the team, yeah. I’m Grace Gillespie,” she extended her hand to shake his. “God, they’re not gonna believe me when I say I met you. They’re gonna freak.”

Brock couldn’t help but chuckle slightly. “Do you—I mean, do you want a picture? I don’t mind at all. I’ll sign an autograph on a napkin if you want me to.”

“Well…it’s a bit awkward to ask you at a Parkinson’s Society of BC meeting, but we could go to the Starbucks down the street and I could buy you a coffee.”

Brock was slightly taken aback at her forwardness. He shouldn’t have been. Girls came up to him all the time. All the time. And they were most definitely not shy. But he wasn’t exactly expecting it to happen here, of all places. A bar, sure. Out with Petey or any of the other guys, absolutely. But not here. “Yeah…yeah sure,” he stuttered out.

“Then we should go,” Grace smiled. She turned to look behind her. Brock saw Esther picking up a few Oreos. “Thank you for leading another great session, Esther,” Grace said.

“Oh you are most welcome Miss Gillespie. How is Hamish these days? You didn’t speak much today.”

“He’s been doing fine lately. His caregivers have been working around the clock for him. They just work wonders, don’t they?”

Esther nodded. “They are angels on Earth. Anyways – we’ll catch up next week,” she said, leaning slightly on her leg to look beyond Grace and to Brock. “I hope to see you here again next week, Brock.”

“Thank you, Esther. See you next week,” he said, realizing he made the commitment before he could even realize what he was saying.

***

“I take that was your first meeting?” Grace asked as she set down the two lattes on the table against the window where Brock was waiting.

“Was it really obvious?” Brock asked.

Grace shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t want to make him feel self-conscious. “It was the stuttering that gave it away, at least to me. I know I stuttered a lot the first few times I came to these meetings. I wasn’t the most comfortable talking about my dad’s condition to a room full of virtual strangers. But within just a few months I realized the people in that room are the kindest, most empathetic, most amazing people that I’ve ever interacted with. So I became a lot more open.”

Brock was transfixed by every word that Grace was saying. “So you’ve been coming here a long time,” he said.

Grace nodded. “My dad got diagnosed with Parkinson’s when I was fourteen. I didn’t start coming here until I was about eighteen, though.”

Brock knew he shouldn’t ask. He knew he shouldn’t. But his brain had ulterior motives, and his mouth – well, his mouth listened to his brain, because it apparently needed to know. “Is your—is your dad like my dad?” he asked. “Does he have, like, other problems complicating things?”

Grace shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “But the Parkinson’s is enough for him. I mean he was diagnosed just short of ten years ago and he’s already on puréed foods. It’s not—I mean, you know as well as I do that it doesn’t regularly develop that fast. But that’s…I don’t know how you do it.”

Brock didn’t know either. Some days he didn’t. “I just take it day by day,” he said simply, just like he said in the meeting. “If I think about it too much…that’s when it’s bad.”

“I hear ya,” Grace said, taking a sip of her coffee. “But let’s…not talk about this for too long. Do you like Vancouver? Do you find it nice?”

Brock appreciated the change in topic. “I love it here,” he nodded his head, smiling. “The city’s great. The fans are great. My teammates – I mean they’re amazing. What do you do?”

“I’m a dance teacher at Goh Ballet – little kids and teens, mostly.”

He wasn’t expecting that. She was drop dead gorgeous, sure – Brock wasn’t blind – but he wasn’t expecting to hear she was a dancer. “Do you, like, dance in the real ballet?”

Grace snorted slightly at his phrasing of ‘real ballet’. “No. I pursued it only up until a certain point. I was good, but uh, I stopped when my dad got diagnosed.”

“Why? Don’t they always tell people like us to have, like, an outlet or whatever?”

“They do. But I loved my dad more than I loved dance. And I would have rather spent the time that I was spending on dance with him instead.”

He understood where she was coming from, and he wasn’t there to judge her. “And your brothers you mentioned, did they help too?”

“Oh no no no. Sorry – I should have specified. I’m an only child. Like, the only child between my parents. But they divorced when I was six and when my mom re-married I gained two step-brothers, Jasper and Theo.”

“How was the divorce?” Brock found himself asking.

“You ever see footage of a nuclear bomb exploding?” Grace giggled as she asked the question. It caused Brock to laugh too even though the analogy she was making was dreadful. “It was awful. The type of divorce nobody deserves, you know? I became a pawn, basically, and my parents would only speak to each other through lawyers. Even stuff concerning me. It was bad.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“It was. But it’s the only life I know,” she said. “He was lucky my mom ended up marrying another rich guy. I mean, my mom only marries rich men,” she giggled slightly again. “That’s how Jasper and Theo became my step-brothers.”

“So your family has money?” Brock clarified. “What’s it from? Dad a lawyer or something?”

“Not exactly,” Grace said. “My dad and his brothers own a private equity firm that started like this,” she pinched her fingers together, “and went like…” she continued, spreading her fingers and moving her hands around her like a bomb explosion. “Gillespie Brothers Investments. I’m sure as a Vancouver Canuck you’ve heard of them. I mean they wanted to buy the Canucks before the Aquilinis.”

Brock hadn’t heard of them, but he now knew he’d have to do some snooping when he got home. “I haven’t heard of them. But I mean – sounds like they were successful.”

“Three billion dollars is pretty successful to me,” Grace quipped.

“B—Billion,” Brock sputtered out. “With a B.”

“With a B,” Grace nodded. Brock had no idea he was sitting across from the daughter of a billionaire. She didn’t act like a billionaire. Not like Brock knew what billionaires acted like. He’d never met one before in his life. Well, besides Francesco. “But tell me more about what you like about Vancouver. What about the nature? I always kind of fine a good long walk along the Seawall or through Stanley Park really clears my mind from all…this. What about you?”

Brock smiled. “I find the white noise of downtown clears my mind.”

***

“You want my number,” Grace said as a statement rather than a question as she and Brock exited the Starbucks. They were kicked out. They’d been there for so long that they’d been kicked out because they were closing. Their coffees had gotten cold. They hadn’t ordered new ones. And now they found themselves on the deserted sidewalk, jackets put on hastily, and Grace came up with that.

Brock looked down at her. They’d been able to look into each other’s soul for the past few hours. “Of course I want your number,” he said. There was no reason to hide it. No reason to deny it. No reason to have to wait until next week to see her again as they sat around in a circle in a community centre talking about their parents.

He took out his phone. She gave him her number. He texted his name to hers so she’d have his. When that dance was done, she looked up at him. “I’m really glad I met you tonight,” she said, her voice sincere.

Brock nodded. “I’m glad I met you too. I—I really enjoyed this. And I mean—I needed it.”

Grace smiled, nodding her head. “I needed it too.”

“D’you—” Brock stopped, trying not to get too far ahead of himself. “D’you need a ride home?”

“Oh no no, my driver is right there,” she motioned her head towards a black Mercedes waiting by the curb.

Brock hadn’t noticed the car until now. “Chauffeur?”

“Billionaire dad,” she winked. Brock understood. She took a few steps back before smiling one more time. “Call me,” she said, before flipping her hair over her shoulder and walking towards the Mercedes and getting into the backseat. Brock watched as it drove off, making a right at the end of the street.

He would definitely be calling.

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border-spam · 4 years ago

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Does troy really have a split jaw or is that fanon?

It's total fanon!

The design of the split lines across his cheekbones and chin coupled with the cheek clips and v shaped hinge outline next to his ears lead to a lot of people coming to that same outcome, that there is something up with his mouth from a prosthetic/mod standpoint.

So much of his design is never mentioned once or referenced in any way (hightech spinal rig with tattoos under it, neuro connector, mech arm that's much older and doesn't seem related to the spine and neuroport, implants on bicep, face mod etc) that like Tyreen's scars and possible lower body Siren markings, fandom took over when it came to coming up with logical explanations for 'em.

This actually touches ground with some Ao3 comments I wanted to share as they are all Leech Lord compliant, so I'll list them here alongside links to the fics they were related to (note warnings!)

You leave no avenue for characterization unexplored. Troy's facial prostheses finally receiving backstory is amazing

- Maw (Gore/Bodyhorror)

I LOVE the idea of it being not just decorative shit on his face, but my MO for any content I make is always based around asking why, over and over, and trying to make sense of what material I'm using in the first place. The modded mouth is a popular piece of fanon but you know... why? Why would he do that shit to himself. WHY would he want to be grotesque, why would he be chasing the reaction people would have to it when canonically he seems to really not be interested in fan attention the same way Tyreen is, what's the difference to him between being adored as his persona or being lusted after as a monster, etc. I just love deep-diving into the logic behind character and world building? It's what adds meat to the bone for me.

Big 'ol character and worldbuilding / lore responses list under the cut -

He could afford better robots but these ones UNDERSTAND Ty, don't you get it?

- Good night in (tooth rotting fluff)

Hey just because it's mangled and broken, and can't perform its intended function to a degree expected of it by everyone around it... and it's got rusty sharp bits it accidentally hurts you with sometimes... and it's cranky but it doesn't mean it... and sometimes it errors out in a way that's mildly disturbing in a way you can't place.. uh.. doesn't mean you should just GIVE UP ON IT you know? He can fix them :) They will be fine :) No one should just throw away something that's trying so hard just because it's damaged... haha... :')

It's so hard seeing how much they tear each other down when they're the only thing they have left. And what a poor self-image Tyreen has beyond all that glitter and bluster...

- Wolf in sheep's clothing

The twins function well enough as a unit till tensions rise, and I was trying to seed in The Leech's influence on them in earlier work like this too - towards anyone else Ty would become MORE aggressively confident, more assured in her complete and utter dominance of the situation, her flawlessness, but against Troy who see's her for what she is, it turns inwards and eats at her instead of lashing outwards. He switches from relatively submissive around her to almost surgical levels of dissection, he knows exactly how to go for the jugular with words, and doesn't hold back. She's The Leech's mouth but he's its eyes and it's only when they lose control emotionally enough for it to claw to the surface of their psyches that you get an idea of how much it really affects them individually. GB had an absolute goldmine on their hands here of cosmic/body horror and the concept of toxic family when all you have is each other, there's so much to work with, and I figure it's a factor in why some people still really enjoy messing around with Calypso content.

I like how you allow Troy to be a disabled character, how his congenital defects and prosthetics colour his outlook and appear in ways big and small in all these vignettes. It's easy, I think, to see him as largely untroubled by his health apart from when he needs a charge from Tyreen in the game, but you allow him to struggle with his weakness.

- Chronic (Drug use)

I'm really glad to hear that's coming through in the writing because it's something I noticed a lot too. Very often when Troy, or other characters canonically disabled / chronically unwell are written it's "told" and not "shown". Chronic pain, illness, it's not something that is just a little tickbox in a life or some descriptive terms added to a character synopsis, it's something you live and deal with. There are bad days. There are times it is a negative that has to be worked around or faced in ways that aren't pleasant. It doesn't make you lesser or weak to have times where illness does leave you unable to function to a level you want to, it's not a failure for you to be unable to perform tasks when a disability or flair up means it's not viable. I feel personally that by showing scenes like this where his health and body issues do have a very visceral and impossible to ignore the effect on his ability to function, and going through his mental processes of dealing with and managing them, it brings the character across as stronger than if he never seemed to be shown dealing with symptoms or weaknesses. People are more than their disabilities and conditions, those aren't just kinda taglines to add onto a character's description and then never address. I feel like doing that in a way undermines what people deal with who manage chronic illness, pain, and who have disabilities that affect their daily lives negatively. Appreciating the effort it takes to manage them is important.

What I really like about these is that you can really understand as a reader how their dynamic must have evolved. How even before Leda's death Tyreen would have felt demonized while Troy got the attention because of his condition, because he was less willful.

- Starlight, Moonbright

Ah man, absolutely - and that shit stayed with them. It wasn't his fault and he never wanted it, but of course their parents would have had their extremely ill child at the forefront of their thoughts, especially during weeks when he was.. bad. Tyreen by nature even without The Leech's influence is a little attention seeker, she'd be the life of any party and she BLOSSOMS if she's got the spotlight, but as a little kid who's got literally no one but her parents and her brother, and who all three of which can't give her nearly as much time as she deserved? That's rough. That's really unfair. That coupled with The Leech's warping effect on their egos as they grew up and the bitterness and resentment they harbored in different ways created a reverse dynamic. She'd never be out of the Galaxy's attention again, and he'd have no choice but to take his rightful place in her shadow.

I love how you illustrate both how much more, and yet how much less Troy is now. How the blameless child, full of potential, is inextricably linked to the brutal, larger-than-life avatar he fashions.

- DeLeon ( Graphic Violence / Gore / Hallucinations)

He's molded the monster he is now out of the bones of the man he should have been - there's no going back really. There's nothing left to go back to. He broke Troy DeLeon apart to build the persona that acts like an iron lung now, suffocating him breath by breath while forcing him to still take them. That life is over, he killed it before it had a chance, but the idea of it is still there in his subconscious. Somewhere in the absolute trainwreck of Troy's brain is the tiny, flickering belief that maaaaaybe one day this will all be over and he can shuck off the bracer and spines, peel off all the shit he's covered his skin with, and just go back to not being Calypso. DeLeon here isn't some aspect of his mental state or his sins haunting him - it's The Leech, spitting venom at a host it loathes in something that's not sound or comprehensible language. His subconscious has just translated it into something it can understand - his greatest regret.

On if Borderlands Humans originated on Earth -

There's a really tenuous link between BL verse and rEarth, but it's there and can't be ignored. The cultures, accents, terminologies, so many are Earth specific despite these people being spread across galaxies, so hell yes - Earth as an emergence point makes total sense. The next question then, is why is it never mentioned - and you can cover for that with a lot of things like say, tt was so long ago that it's not relevant to anything that would ever be discussed, or it could be a mass evacuation from a catastrophe there is little record of now. I like to go with something along those lines, that the first human Siren host emergence on earth just absolutely decimated the planet. Like, we were doing fine till this random woman somewhere in the ass-end of nowhere develops weird markings overnight, then goes apocalyptic. The first Leech maybe, not understanding her powers and having them rip across continents in a spread of crackling electric death that only left husked shells of plants and animals in its wake, or the first Firehawk who went nuclear and burned the sky, or the first Voidgrasp who lost control and began to collapse the planet's core - some extreme shit that had humans fleeing en masse with barely any preparation and HUGE swathes of history and knowledge left behind. That would cover so many social things surviving into the BL verse, cultures, accents, cooking, that shit comes with us regardless of what we were able to throw into escape ships. Like so much data would be stored on any tech and data arrays within the vessels people would use to leave a dying planet even in an insane rush, but that shit waters down over time - if you're farming barely edible plants on some planet that smells like farts, are you really gonna be that stressed about teaching your kids history from a lost planet when your current concerns are not being eaten by something with 19 legs and 4 buttholes? Don't think so.

On if the other Siren entities are as influential to their hosts as The Leech -

I touch on it a wee bit throughout LL, but the others are FAR more passive and meld more to their host's whims. The Firehawk Siren wouldn't.. like.. care? If the host was burning down a planet or fighting off an evil corporation? They are removed from any nonsense happening on this side, they might not even really be able to tell, it's like asking an amoeba or a collection of sentient atomic particles what its opinion is on Brexit. That's not really its priority. The Leech is so aggressive in its control of the twins and desperation to drive them towards an outcome it desires only cause it's split, broken, removed from the song, and completely lost. We're talking a caged, half-mad animal removed from its natural environment and left totally isolated from its own kind for millennia. It's in pain, it's confused, it wants to find its way back to the song and the others and where it belongs, but it's stopped by a barrier it can't comprehend ( the twins and being ripped between them), so in its impotent rage it feeds back that hatred onto them. It's not really sentient in the way we would describe functional intelligence, but it wants, and craves, and FEELS. And it feels very, very angry.

Big thanks to @undergoingcalibrations for talking through so much of this with me!

Asks are Open!

#borderlands #borderlands 2 #borderlands 3 #bl3 #troy calypso #tyreen calypso #calypso twins #sirens #leech lord #my hcs #my writing

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dovebuffy92 · 3 years ago

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https://www.fanbolt.com/113723/for-all-mankind-season-2-review-cold-war-friendships/

For All Mankind Season 2, created by Ronald D Moore, reveals that man’s journey to the moon both turns the Cold War piping hot and brings people with disparate points of view together. The second season takes place a decade later, in the 1980s.

Ed Baldwin is now the chief of the Astronaut office; his wife Karen owns The Outpost bar, and they have an adopted seventeen-year-old daughter, Vietnamese American Kelly. Ellen Wilson is about to return home from a long stint as the commander of the Jamestown Base on the moon to become a NASA administrator. Tracy Stevens is a super-star astronaut who wears fancy dresses on talk shows while her ex-husband Gordo drinks away his depression. Molly Cobb is secretly flooded with radiation on the moon after an hour outside during a solar storm rescuing Dutch astronaut Wubbo Johannes Ockels. After being benched for a decade, Danielle Poole is itching to go back to space. All the astronauts struggle to find their place in this new decade.

The sexual affair between Karen Baldwin and Danny Stevens makes zero sense. Karen and Ed’s marriage has been struggling since their eleven-year-old son Shane died in 1974. The fact that Ed was not home when Shane died nearly led to their divorce. They stayed together to raise their Kelly. Kelly is a senior in high school applying to the Naval Academy at Annapolis because she wants to be like her father. Ed has been staying home all these years because of his guilt over being on the moon during Shane’s car accident. Kelly and Karen permit him to return to the moon after seeing how eaten up he has been staying home all these years. Karen can’t deal with her husband risking his life for the Pathfinder Mission. She sells the Outpost Bar to Sam, so all of her tethers to her everyday life are cut away.

So, it does make sense that Karen has an affair, but with a stranger, not Danny. First off, Danny was best friends with her son Shane. Karen raised both boys since Danny’s parents Tracey and Gordo, are active astronauts. In the 1970s, Tracey could no longer stay home with her son after school because she started training. So, Karen and Danny have more of a mother-son relationship than a friendship. Secondly, Karen hasn’t shown any romantic attraction to the twenty-so-year-old young Naval Academy cadet for most of the season. Danny works as a part-time waiter at the Outpost, and he is only a couple of years older than her daughter Kelly, and he must remind her of Shane. If Ronald D. Moore wanted one big push to implode the Baldwin’s marriage, then she should have had an affair with a customer at the bar or just broke down over Ed returning to space. Danny’s crush on Karen makes sense, but not her feelings for him. Danny and Kelly having sex even one time is genuinely bizarre.

This season of For All Mankind dove deeper into the Cold War, the Apollo-Soyuz mission is a perfect vehicle for that exploration. The Apollo-Soyuz mission is based on an actual historical 1975 event that marked the end of the space race when the two modules docked together, and the Soviets and Americans shook hands. In the fictional and actual world, the mission is designed to promote peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. Throughout the second season, Danielle desperately tries to make the mission happen. As a Black woman, Danielle feels both the responsibility and desire to command a mission since she sacrificed her career to help Gordo hide his mental breakdown.

The Apollo-Soyuz is primarily a ceremonial mission but is her only opportunity for command. Danielle bonds with the cosmonauts over beer, burgers, cheers for lost comrades, pride over their space programs, and Laika, the Soviet dog who died sacrificing for the people she loved. Even though these cosmonauts and astronauts are supposed to be enemies, their common humanity wins out. Danielle puts up with being locked up in Star City, USSR. The Soviet Union officials kept the astronauts as hostages after a Soviet jet shot down a South Korean commercial airplane full of American passengers, including the head of NASA, Thomas Paine. The Soviets keep the astronaut’s prisoners to stop the Americans from retaliating. Calm heads win out. A secret agent lets her out after discussing how the mission could change the world. Apollo and Soyuz are stuck rotating Earth’s orbit when the modules finally launch because, supposedly, the Soviets have some mechanical error. The two crews speak together through the radios.

Meanwhile, the reasons for the delay become apparent, the American armed spacecraft Pathfinder and Soviet spacecraft Buran fly to the dark side of the moon, ready to launch missiles at each other if the other acts aggressively. The United States preps for a nuclear strike. Margo orders Danielle to land back on Earth, but she refuses. Instead, Apollo and Soyuz, against orders, conduct their mission of peace. They all shake each other’s hands after connecting the modules on national television. All of them are smiling in real celebration. Regan warms at the sights of the cosmonauts and astronauts shaking each other’s hands and calls for peace. Nuclear war is avoided. Moments of real friendship through collaboration can lead to understanding.

I would recommend For All Mankind Season 2 for lovers of alternative history and space program fans. The more extensive introduction of the Soviet Union this season explores the fundamental tensions of the cold war and the explosive “warm” space race that we narrowly avoided.

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northoftheroad · 5 years ago

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Hi! I'm really sorry to bother you! But I was wondering if you could give us a list of recommended stories with dick after his Robin days. Like after bruce fired him and he became nightwing? All up to the time he had to become batman? I really love your content by the way ☺️!!!

Gosh, this turned out to be even more tricky than the Robin list, and it's frightfully long!

One reason is that storytelling has changed since Dick was Robin. Back in the Golden and Silver age, with very few exceptions, comics were stand-alone short stories. In later decades, it's usually arcs that span at least a couple of issues. Some themes can run for a very long time. For instance, Dick was brainwashed by Brother Blood in New Teen Titans vol 1 # 22 (in 1982), and that would have consequences until The New Teen Titans vol 2 #31 (1987).

There are also a looot of stories – apart from guest appearances, Nightwing is a regular/lead character in several books named New Teen Titans/Titans and suchlike, 1980-1996 and 1999-2009; Outsiders vol 3 (2003-2007); Nightwing vol 1 (1995) and vol 2 (1996–2007). In team titles, several characters compete for attention. Also, I have read and know the Nightwing books more than his team titles, so they will be more prominent on my list.

There are a bunch of stories where Dick has a pretty small role and won't be in a lot of panels, but those panels can be "important" and often quoted when it comes to Dick. For instance, Bruce Wayne: Murderer/Fugitive, Hush, Under the Hood...

So, you'll have to take this for what it is. A very personal list, with stories I like (and remember), or have some fun panels, or are "important". Because certain stories are essential to the character's history, regardless if you like them or not. (And if you want more of Dick with Kory/Starfire, read the New Teen Titans titles.) If you'd like to see a synopsis before you commit to reading – because did I mention it is a very long list indeed? – the dc.fandom.com wiki page will often provide.

(Or you could do the sensible thing, and see this as more of "the complete history of pre-Batman Nightwing, and ask somebody else for recommendations...)

The Judas contract (when Dick becomes Nightwing). The New Teen Titans # 39-40, Tales of the Teen Titans #41-44, Annual #3. (1984)

Trivial Pursuits. NewTeen Titans vol 2 # 32. (A nice breather, when the Titans try just to relax together. It goes as well as can be expected.) (1987)

Batman # 416. (First post-Crisis meeting with Jason Todd) (1988)

The Cheshire Contract. Action Comics Weekly # 613-618 (Dick helps Roy find his daughter.) (1988)

The New Titans # 55. (Dick learns about Jason's death when the Titans return to Earth after a long period in space. He goes to Bruce to talk and what follows is the infamous scene when Bruce hits Dick, says he should never have had a partner and tells Dick to leave and leave the keys with Alfred.) (1989)

Batman year Three. Batman # 436–439. (Flashbacks with a retelling of Dick's origin, during Bruce's third year as Batman. In the "now", Dick tries to reach out to Bruce and Dick's parents' murderer is about to be set free.) (1989)

A Lonely Place of Dying. Batman # 440-442, New Titans # 60-61. (1990)

The New Titans # 65. (Tim turns up at Dick's place to learn what it is to be Batman's partner.) (1990)

Total Chaos. (In issues of Deathstroke the Terminator, New Titans and Team Titans.) (Mirage, a woman from an alternate future and who has illusion casting powers, takes the form of Starfire and sleeps with Dick, who is shamed by his team members for being unfaithful to Kory, even though this is rape. So, an important fact to know but not something I would recommend to read.) (1992)

Knightfall Prodigal (Dick's first longer stint as Batman. And he takes care of Tim and the Manor on his own!) In Batman #512-514 and three other titles. (1994-1995)

Nightwing Alfred's Return (Kind of fun, when Dick seeks out Alfred, who left Bruce's service because Bruce wasn't taking care of himself, in London.) (1995)

Nightwing vol 1 # 1-4. (I don't love this, but it is a milestone in that it's the first Nightwing solo series, Dick momentarily decides to leave the hero business, and gets his by now classic fingerstripe suit.) #1-4 (1995)

Like Riding a Bike. (Donna checks up on Dick.) The Batman Chronicles # 7. (1996)

(Nightwing vol 2 began in 1996.)

Nightwing vol 2 # 6. (Tim and Dick talk and fight crooks.) (1997)

Nightwing vol 2 # 12-16. (Batman pays a visit and Dick makes his custom made car.) (1997)

The Flash plus Nightwing. (Dick and Wally on vacation.) (1997)

Then & Now. Teen Titans vol 2 #12-15. (The original four Titan boys find themselves fighting their past selves.) (1997)

Nightwing vol 2 # 25. (Tim and Dick talk and ride on train roofs. Dick has decided to become a cop.) (1998)

Detective Comics # 725 (A heart-to-heart between Bruce and Dick.) (1998)

The Technis Imperative. JLA/Titans #1-3. (1998-1999)

The Titans (1999) # 2. (The start of a new Titans team, Dick tells Superman to give them some room.) (1999)

Nightwing vol 2 # 32–34. (Dick at the Police Academy.) (1999)

Nightwing vol 2 # 35–39. (On a mission from Batman: To take control of Blackgate Prison. Afterwards, he recuperates at Barbara's when her place is attacked.) (1999-2000)

The Titans (1999) #15–16. (The original five Titans try to work out some difficulties.) 2000.

Transference. Batman: Gotham Knights #8-11. (2000)

Nightwing vol 2 # 45-46. (The Hunt for Oracle.) (2000)

Action Comics # 771. (Nightwing and Superman hang out and work together – what's not to like!) 2000

Gods of Gotham. Wonder Woman # 164-167. (2001)

Nightwing vol 2 # 54-58. (Blockbuster, Nightwing's main adversary in Blüdhaven, hires an old enemy of Dick's to deal with the vigilante: Shrike. A character from Robin Year One.) (2001)

Matatoa. Batman: Gotham Knights # 16-17. (Bruce adopts Dick.) (2001)

Who Is Troia? The Titans (1999) # 23-25. (A visit from the Titan's children from the Kingdom Come universe.). (2001)

Retribution. Batman: Gotham Knights # 20-21. (2001)

Nightwing vol 2 # 64. (Nightwing as Santa's elf.) (2001)

Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive (in several titles). (Dick refuses to believe that Bruce can be a murderer and it causes friction with for instance Tim. Also, a big fight between Dick and Bruce when the latter says he is going to abandon his Bruce identity.) (2002)

Nightwing vol 2 # 75. (Flashback's to Dick's early years with Bruce. Plus the first appearance of Tarantula (Catalina Flores; a controversial figure in Dick's history, she straddled the line between vigilante and villain.)) (2002)

Hush. Batman # 608–619. (# 615 for Dick, but it might be confusing only to read one issue.) (2002-2003)

The Obsidian Age. JLA vol 1 # 68-75. (The Justice League members disappear, Dick leads a new team for a few issues. In # 73, Bruce is quoted:" The only time I ever feel pride is when I look at Nightwing. Sometimes I think he's the only thing I ever did right."). (2002-2003)

Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day # 1-3 (Donna is killed. Dick is devastated and declares that the Titans are finished.) (2003)

Nightwing vol 2 # 80-83. (Deathstroke is in Blüdhaven to kill someone close to Dick. Bruce asks when he will quit the force, Dick wants to stay as a cop, but when he saves Amy Rohrbach, she recognizes that Dick is Nightwing and fires him.) (2003)

Nightwing vol 2 # 86. (Dick, forced to rest after being injured, solves crimes on America's Most Wanted and drives Barbara up the wall.) (2003)

The Outsiders vol 3 # 1 (Roy talks Dick, who dissolved the Titans after Donna's death, into leading a new team, promising they will not be a family.) (2003)

Nightwing vol 2 # 87-100. (Definitely one of the darkest periods points in Dick's life pre-Flashpoint. Tarantula breaks up him and Barbara. Blockbuster destroys his circus, his home and kills people just for talking to Dick. Tarantula kills Blockbuster and Nightwing is too exhausted to prevent it, and afterwards, she rapes him (# 93). Not necessarily an arc I would recommend to read, but fans discuss it a lot.) (2003-2004)

The Outsiders vol 3 # 11 (Roy is angsting about going back to the hero business after narrowly surviving being shot, sparring and heart-to-heart with Dick follows.) (2004)

Under the Hood. Batman # 635-641, 645-650, Annual # 25. (2004-2006)

Nightwing Year One. Nightwing vol 2 # 101-106. (I honestly don't care much for this story, but it's good to know that it's one of several retellings of how Dick became Nightwing.) (2005)

Supergirl (2005) # 3 (Supergirl has a huuuge crush on Nightwing... ) (2005)

Silent partner. The Outsiders vol 3 # 21-23. (Dick goes ballistic when he realizes Batman has been funding the Outsiders, Roy admits Batman has been feeding him information. Only it wasn't Batman – it was Deathstroke in disguise.) (2005)

DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy # 1-4. (2005)

Nightwing vol 2 # 107–117. (Dick leaves Nightwing, starts working for the mob and trains Deathstroke's daughter. I think the author has some kind of resolution to the crisis Dick had gone through the last years in mind, but Infinite Crisis got in the way. Blüdhaven is destroyed in a nuclear explosion.)

Infinite Crisis. (DC had planned to let Dick die, he is central to the story even if he's not very visible.) (2005-2006)

Targets. Nightwing vol 2 # 125-128. (Dick hunts for a day job in New York and gets buried alive, which leads to some retrospection on his behalf. There's also fights with a guy with a weaponized armour.) (2007)

The Brave and the Bold # 15. Nightwing and Hawkman. (Deadman, inside Hawkman, says that Dick Grayson is the one guy that every crimefighter trusts.) (2007)

Outsiders: Five of a Kind – Nightwing/Boomerang. (It ends with Batman telling Dick: "Go back to the good fight, Dick. Leave the bad fight to us.") (2007)

Wrath Child. (A story from when Dick was fairly new as Nightwing.) Batman Confidential # 13-16. (2008)

Freefall. Nightwing vol 2 # 140–146. (Dick starts freefalling as a new hobby; Bruce is not pleased. And he gets a new daytime job, as a museum curator. Oh, and there's Talia al Ghul, too.) (2008)

Robin # 175. (Some fun panels with flashbacks with Dick and Tim.) (2008)

The Great Leap. Nightwing vol 2 # 147–151. (Two-Face wants Nightwing to save a life.) (2008-2009)

Titans (2008) # 10. (Dick leaves the Titans because he needs to go back to Gotham and "take care of my other family." (2009)

Nightwing vol 2 # 152-153. (That time when Ra's al Ghul called Dick detective. And Dick packed up and left New York to move back to Gotham.) (2009)

Batman # 682. (Just for the line about how Dick made colour come into their monochrome lives ;-) ) (2009)

Detective Comics # 85, Batman # 684 (Dick mourning Bruce) (2009)

The Secret Six # 9. (Some of the members of the Secret Six feel they should be the new Batman.) (2009)

Battle for the Cowl # 1-3. (2009)

#ash-devito #Dick Grayson #Nightwing #Robin #Batman #Richard Grayson

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victorluvsalice · 4 years ago

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AU Thursday: Fallout of Darkness -- Another Meme

I unfortunately don’t recall where I got this one, though I do remember picking it up in the #fallout 4 tag -- I think a number of people were using it for their Sole Survivors. Which is what I did! With the added twist of “let me do this universe’s Alice as well!” So you get double the information for the same price! :P

Note: This is vaguely set I’d say about halfway through the plot of Fallout 4 -- Victor and Alice have had the run-in with Ug-Qualtoth and gotten Alice sunlight immunity (see this post for more details), and they’ve met at least most of the other companions. Also yes, pets -- Victor does indeed adopt the “wounded dog” encounter in my verse! (And if anyone knows of a mod that lets you send her to a settlement for real. . .) Please remember I haven’t actually played much of the main plot myself, so things may be a little vague/prone to changing once I get further in!

name ➔

V: Victor Fitzwilliam Van Dort – my mother wanted me to have an "aristocratic" middle name, for some reason.

A: Alice Pleasance Liddell – yes, just like the historical Alice. I guess after Lizzie decided I should be "Alice," my parents decided to go whole hog with the reference.

are you single ➔

V: [with a warm look at Alice] No, I'm not.

A: [with a warm look back] Not anymore.

are you happy ➔

V: [still with that warm look at Alice] Very much so.

A: [smiling] A lot happier than I was in the past, that's for sure. Which is kind of sad, given it's post the nuclear apocalypse now. . .

are you angry ➔

V: [thoughtful] I – I was for a while. Not so much anymore – the worst of it has cooled. But – there's some things I think I'll always be angry about.

A: I think my answer's about the same. Given some of the nonsense we've been through, some low-level anger is just to be expected, honestly.

are your parents still married ➔

V: . . .they were when the bombs dropped.

A: Mine were when that bastard Bumby set our house on fire to cover up what he'd done to my sister.

NINE FACTS

birthplace ➔

V: Burtonsville – it's a tiny village in England. I don't actually remember it, though – my parents moved to Boston when I was only about a year and a half old. I grew up here in Boston and the surrounding area.

A: Oxford, England – my father was the Dean of Christ Church at the college when he was alive. I have fond memories, but I haven't been back since the fire.

hair color ➔

V: Black. Mother occasionally insisted it was dark brown, but – black.

A: Black, though weirdly I actually was almost a redhead as a child. It darkened straight through brown to this as I grew up. I've never been sure why it got so dark, though I suspect all that time lying in Rutledge, getting probably-inadequate nutrition and light for a growing girl, didn't help matters.

eye color ➔

V: Dark brown.

A: Green, though Victor likes being poetic with descriptions like "emerald fire" sometimes.

mood ➔

V: . . .er – generally anxious? Trying to be helpful regardless?

A: Sarcastic? To hide that I'm more worried than I let on?

gender ➔

V: Male, he/him.

A: Female, she/her.

summer or winter ➔

V: Summer – I'm not a fan of the cold. Though spring's my actual favorite season – I love seeing everything come back to life.

A: I feel like I should like winter more, because of the longer nights, but now that we've actually fixed the sunlight issue. . .yes, summer. I'm not really a fan of the cold either.

morning or afternoon ➔

V: Afternoon – I've never been that much of a morning person, and mornings tend to be – stressful in the Commonwealth.

A: To be fair, so are the afternoons, but – yes, generally you're not dealing with threats still wiping the sleep from your eyes in said afternoons. And in my case, they're closer to night, which is still the time when I feel most myself, so. . .

EIGHT THINGS ABOUT YOUR LOVE LIFE

are you in love ➔

V: [exchanging a very warm look with Alice] Yes.

A: [giving it right back] Very much so.

do you believe in love at first sight ➔

V: Maybe not true love, but attraction? A sense of connection, kinship? Certainly – that's how I felt when I first met Victoria, and later Emily.

A: I can get behind that – my mother said she felt a pull toward my father when they first met. . .but I don't think love at first sight exists. You need to get to know someone – form a solid bond first.

who ended your last relationship ➔

V: [darkly cheerful] The American and Chinese governments, throwing nuclear missiles at each other! [sighing] No, that’s not quite fair – yes, they drove us into Vault 111, but the ones who actually murdered my wife and girlfriend were Kellogg and the Institute. The former more obviously than the latter, but. . . [voice cracks] Damn it, what was wrong with putting everyone's life support back on. . .

A: [puts a comforting hand on his arm] In my case, I never really had a romantic relationship before – even friendships were kind of fleeting, or long-distance. I've gone along with flirtations in the past to get meals, sure, but none of those ever turned into relationships. The closest I had was – well, Heather getting blood-bonded to me, which I didn't even mean to do. I was just trying to help her, and I didn't realize at the time. . . [bites her lip] I ended that – sent her away before she could get hurt by my enemies, explaining that what would make me happiest would be for her to be with her grandmother and stay in college. I wanted to go back and maybe try to help her some more once I was done with LaCroix's bullshit, but then. . .I hope she had a good life, in the end.

have you ever broken someone’s heart ➔

V: Not knowingly – goodness, what started off my, Victoria, and Emily's threesome relationship was an attempt not to break anyone's heart! It worked out very well, until. . . [shakes his head]

A: [squeezes his arm gently] I probably broke Heather's heart by sending her away – she looked so sad as she walked out the door. But it was for the best – I dread to think what would have happened to her if the Sabbat had realized I had a ghoul! Other than that – depends on if anyone I've drunk from was hoping for more than just a "quickie." I doubt that, though.

are you afraid of commitments ➔

V: I'm afraid of them being forced on me because of people randomly promoting me every time I even get close to an organization. [sighing, reaching up to fiddle with a chain around his neck] But – maybe a little. Seeing – seeing your wife get shot in front of you. . .then your girlfriend's half-rotted corpse beside her. . .it sticks with you.

A: [nods] Being the only survivor of the house fire that killed your family sticks with you too. As does two of the most prominent men in your life being the bastard who killed them and was trying to wipe your mind, and the bastard who killed you and turned you into a bloodsucker. Add in my own rather unromantic nature, and – yes, I did pretty much avoid commitments for a while. [smiles at Victor] I think I'm a little better about it now, though.

have you hugged someone in the last week ➔

V: Oh, yes – Preston and Piper just the other day, in fact!

A: I'm not usually much of one for being touched, so I don't hug much. . . [thinks for a moment, then hugs Victor] But I'll happily make the answer a "yes" in this case.

have you ever had a secret admirer ➔

V: Does the brief period of time where Emily was crushing on me before Victoria noticed and decided to let her and me know it was okay if we wanted to date too count? Otherwise, I really don't think so. I wasn't popular with girls before meeting Victoria.

A: Bumby never made it clear whether he wanted to just turn me into a prostitute or fuck me himself as well, but I wouldn't count him anyway, because he was a horrible waste of flesh. So I have no idea – don't think so. Heather was – very open about her admiration.

have you ever broken your own heart ➔

V: Again, what happened between me, Victoria, and Emily was an attempt to avoid that. . .I can't say I have. It seems like others always break it for me.

A: Sending Heather away did hurt me a bit – not in the same way it hurt her, but it was nice to have someone else around the haven. . . [looks up at Victor] And I did resist romance initially here. Fortunately tall, dark, and handsome here didn't let me break my own heart.

SIX CHOICES

love or lust ➔

V: Love, definitely. [going pink] I mean, lust can be nice, but. . .

A: Love – even alive, I wasn't particularly interested in sex. And as a vampire, any urges that way now go toward sucking on people's necks. Which I guess is sex-adjacent, but still. . . Maybe "love" for serious relationships, "lust" for getting a meal.

lemonade or iced tea ➔

V: Oh, I haven't had either in ages. . .and I recall needing a lot of sugar for both to enjoy them. . .I guess lemonade. I think I had that more often.

A: Literally can't drink either these days, for multiple reasons. . .but I'm going with lemonade because I have fonder memories of that. And – hmmm. I wonder if it’s possible to make a variation with that “plasma fruit” Ted came up with at Wildwood Cemetery. . .

cats or dogs ➔

V: Dogs! I had a dog growing up, Scraps, who was my best friend! And Victoria, Emily, and I were going to get a dog shortly after. . . [pause, shakes head] And now I have Dogmeat and Mutt! They’re a good pair.

A: Cats! My best friends growing up were the family cat, Dinah, and her two kittens, Snowdrop and Kitty. Being a vampire does tend to make animals rather mistrustful of me, sadly, but I had some luck feeding ferals pre-War. And we managed to trap a cat recently who didn’t immediately try to claw me and run away – I’ve named her Kit-Kat.

a few best friends or many regular friends ➔

V: A few best friends – I'm n-not good with lots of people, and I just. . .I'm always so awkward, s-socially. I'd rather have a couple of people I know I can trust.

A: The same – I don't trust easily, after all the bullshit I've been through. Give me a small circle of people I know have my back over a larger group of more casual friends any day.

wild night out or romantic night in ➔

V: Romantic night in. I'm not much for parties. I like staying home with the people I love and just – being together.

A: Sort of like "love or lust" above, this kind of depends. I like a romantic night in for any actual relationships, but I did my fair share of clubbing to find someone to drink from back in the day.

day or night ➔

V: Well, I do like a good sunny day, but. . . [looking at Alice] I've really come to appreciate the nights in the Commonwealth. And not just because of the stars.

A: [smirking at him] Flatterer. . .but yes, night. For the longest time, it was the only time of day I could be out in. . .and even though it's wonderful now to be able to go out during the day and enjoy that, night is still when I feel most myself.

FIVE HAVE YOU EVERS

been caught sneaking out ➔

Victor: No, but that's because I never did. I grew up in the middle of a plague – I didn't have much incentive to sneak out! It took until I was fourteen for cases to drop enough in our part of Boston for my parents to be comfortable sending me to a school with other children, and by then I was so used to staying at home, sneaking out never occurred to me.

Alice: Oh god, yes, the New Plague, that was horrific. . .on my end, yes, I was. I tried to sneak out a couple of times as a small child to have adventures in the garden late at night or in the middle of storms. . .if my parents didn't catch me, though, my older sister did. I think I only actually got outside once, and even then it was only for a couple of minutes before Lizzie caught up with me. Mostly because she was trying to sneak out too, and didn't want her little sister tagging along.

fallen down/up the stairs ➔

Victor: . . .yes. To both. I – I can be pretty clumsy if I'm n-not paying attention to where I'm going.

Alice: [giving him an odd look] I've fallen down stairs – rushing around as a child on imaginary adventures – but never up. I'm – not entirely sure how you manage that.

wanted something/someone so badly it hurt ➔

V: [tugging at the chain around his neck again, which is revealed to have a blue butterfly pendant and a gold wedding ring strung on it] Yes. Something I can't have, I'm sad to say.

A: [playing with her own necklace, which is an old iron key shaped like the symbol for Venus] Same here. I'd like to think your Victoria and Emily and my parents and Lizzie are in the same place, at least.

wanted to disappear ➔

V: Oh, plenty of times. I have an unfortunate knack for saying the wrong thing and then wishing I could melt into the floor. And – well, I suppose every time I've been hiding from enemies and wanted to just turn invisible counts. . .

A: I wanted to disappear in the asylum a couple of times, in the sense of 'just stop existing.' Survivor's guilt does a number on your brain, let me tell you. . .though I can actually disappear these days, thanks to Obfuscate! Though, annoyingly, I genuinely can't do it if someone's looking.

smile or eyes ➔

V: Oh, back to these? [thoughtful] I – honestly, I think eyes. Victoria and Emily's eyes are one of the things I remember best about them. . . [smiles at Alice] And my current paramour has some of the most beautiful eyes in the Commonwealth.

A: You're going to make me blush despite being dead if you keep on like that. Though, what's good for the goose is good for the gander – while I like your eyes, it's your smile that really warms my undead heart.

shorter or taller ➔

V: Um – shorter out of necessity. I haven't met many women who are six-foot-three.

A: Similarly, I'm five-foot-five, so I kind of have to go taller.

intelligence or attraction ➔

V: . . .I assume this means intelligence or looks, and – I can't deny I like a pretty face, but the main reason I got together with the women I did is because I could hold a good conversation with them. Intelligence.

A: My attraction seems to be based on actually getting to know a person, and I don't suffer fools gladly. Intelligence all the way.

hook-up or relationship ➔

V: Oh, relationship. I never had a hook-up. I can't – I can't just do the "one night stand" thing. I need something a little more.

A: Another one where my actual feelings versus how I'd act to get a meal clash – though admittedly, I never had a "proper" hook-up. I'd just get someone in a quiet spot, suck a bit of blood, and let them get on with their lives. But now that things are better, I'm only too happy to commit myself to a real relationship.

FAMILY

do you and your family get along ➔

V: Well, it’s something of a moot point now, but. . . [he waggles a hand, making a face] I have to admit, I never liked my parents much. They weren’t very “hands-on” in raising me, and I often felt like they considered me a burden. Or a bargaining chip for social status. I did my best not to rock the boat just because upsetting my mother never ended well, but. . . [sigh] It wasn’t good.

A: By contrast, I had a perfectly lovely family life – my parents were kind and encouraged my sister and I in our various pursuits, and Lizzie. . .she was the best older sister a girl could have. I felt like I could tell her anything, and even if the age difference made playing together difficult, she did try whenever she had a spare moment. The reason I have such an “enthusiastic” imagination is because Mama, Papa, and Lizzie never tried to stifle it. I was – I felt so loved and happy the first eight years of my life. . .and then Bumby took it all away. [she looks away] I – it’s not fair.

would you say you have a “messed up life” ➔

V: [completely deadpan] I was frozen at the age of 27 in a vault designed to store people long-term for unknown reasons, and was finally thawed 210 years later, to find my wife and girlfriend dead, my son kidnapped, and the world above having been turned into a wasteland of vicious wildlife, super mutants, and raiders. With parts of it still irradiated because people are STILL launching small nuclear missiles at each other. Also the people who kidnapped my son can apparently make synthetic humans and use them as spies. And in the middle of all this, I’ve somehow ended up the leader of a bunch of little farms and such that composes a ragtag peacekeeping force that is still better than the actual assholes in power armor who have moved in. You tell me.

A: I can top that – turned into a vampire at age 20 after moving to Los Angeles to make sure I was far away from a murder I’d committed, then ended up roaming the world after a literally-explosive end to my time there as everyone’s errand boy. Was in Boston when the bombs dropped and got staked when my hidey-hole collapsed in on me, meaning I too got essentially “frozen” for 210 years, until a raider attacking this fellow here yanked the stake out and I responded by sucking him dry. Leaving me in a post-nuclear apocalypse trying to survive in a world where anyone’s blood might be at least slightly radioactive. Also we discovered that vampires are in fact the result of a little bit of some Lovecraftian horror worshiped by the people over at Dunwich Borers leaking into our world and infecting our souls. So that’s fun.

have you ever run away from home ➔

V: No – again, grew up in a plague, never really wanted to leave the house because of it.

A: I threatened to, once or twice, when upset, but I never followed through. Though I guess my moving to California could be construed as a kind of running away after I killed Bumby. . .but I never thought of Houndsditch as home. Same with Los Angeles, after I left there in the wake of that mess with LaCroix.

have you ever gotten kicked out ➔

V: No, though – sometimes I thought my mother was thinking about it. Whenever my social awkwardness reared its ugly head at one of her parties.

A: My parents were never the sort to do that, and Bumby of course wanted me close at Houndsditch. And I left polite vampire society on my own terms after LaCroix.

FRIENDS

do you secretly hate one of your friends ➔

V: . . .I’m not entirely sure how to classify my relationship with Strong. But I know he thinks more highly of me than I do of him. I – I try to be understanding, but it gets very tiring to listen to him go on about how one day Super Mutants will kill everything.

A: I had to be a lot friendlier to a lot people back in Los Angeles than I would have liked. . .but I don’t think any of them were laboring under the delusion we were actual friends. So no – if I don’t like you, I don’t hide it.

who is your best friend ➔

V: Alice, Preston, and Piper, definitely – they’re the ones I’ve traveled the most with, shared the most with, and just – feel the most comfortable around. [smiles] Oh, and Dogmeat of course.

A: Victor’s definitely my best friend – and frankly, I feel pretty close to Piper and Preston myself. They’re good people. [she smirks] Though Hancock and Nick are definitely the best people to snark with.

who knows everything about you ➔

V: Probably most of the people in the Commonwealth, I’ve had to explain about being frozen and what happened to my son a lot. . .more seriously, I’d say the above three. They’re the people I’m closest to, and the ones I’m most comfortable sharing information with.

A: I don’t know about everything, but – yes, Victor. And probably Piper knows the most after him, given she wanted to interview me for her paper.

#memes #fallout of darkness #tell me where to find shelter #(keeping that old tag for ease of use for the moment)#fallout 4 #vtmb #hopefully this isn't too confusing for everyone #Ted is supposed to be the Tremere living at Wildwood Cemetery along with the other 'rejected Bloodlines Protagonists'#and yes he made Plasma Fruit #because if I'm going all in with this crossover I will go ALL IN #I have a nasty feeling living through coronavirus is going to inspire me whenever I have to write about Fallout's various diseases #also its government #also yes Victor's opinion on Strong is my own #dude I'm trying to like you buuut #Piper and Preston are my current fave companions #but please remember I am kinda stuck in early days in the game itself #we'll see how things evolve as I take on other companions!#however Ada will be respected around here among the robots #she deserves better #queued

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mashkaroom · 4 years ago

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This isn’t related to anything, but frozen 2 was actually...pretty good of a movie, and you can literally see the disney profit model holding it back. firstly, the music was really good -- i was really impressed with the writing team and with the vocal performances, especially by idina menzel. the songs that didn’t make it in because the plot was rearranged were also excellent. wrt to the visuals, i’m not the biggest fan of this specific animation style, but it’s clear it’s very well done -- i’ve no choice but to be impressed. the plot was whatever (also they fully put a couple of trolls in charge of the kindom for a bit -- is there no fucking line of succession in this goddamn kingdom?? maybe the plot of the movie should have been establishing a functional bureaucracy) and they really yada-yada-ed the magic system, which was basically of the central conceit of the movie so...why did they not put more effort into it? the explanation, such as it was, of the magic system was both confusing and ultimately pretty meaningless -- it added next to nothing of value to the lore or theme or worldbuilding. the themes were clearly meant for a more mature audience (which is i guess what you get for waiting 7 years to make a sequel [which btw just wrenched out a memory out of me that frozen 1 came up literally constantly in my 7th grade latin class -- i cannot emphasize enough how bizarre of an experience learning a dead language throughout the entirety of your teenage years along with 400 more of your cohort is]) -- but anyway, they establish all these themes and then don’t commit to them. Like, the central plot conflict of the movie is literally colonialism lmao. it’s such a strange place to discuss it. My suspicion is that they decided right away to go with a “connecting with mother” storyline, since the “women in the same family connecting with each other” bit worked so well in the first movie; then they were like “is this too basic?” and decided that they should wrap that into a “reckoning with ancestry” thread to cash into that “young leftist with white guilt” market. Then they had somebody on the writing staff who was like “what if we made this about colonialism?” So re: those elements, first of all the mother plotline is boring as shit. Like it doesn’t ring true even to losing a loved one early, but it especially rings soooo hollow wrt the actual relationship that is portrayed in the first movie between elsa and her parents. like we see the parents be so misguided it borders on abusive. and that’s a really interesting dynamic, story-wise, bc the parents are dead and can’t redeem themselves but the baggage they left behind is still there, so the burden of processing that falls exclusively on the daughters. i dare say this is something probably relatable to many of us, bc it’s my sense that most people grow up with pretty misguided parents! (lowkey i feel like the best parenting i’ve seen in my circle are parents who basically went off of vibes rather than idk a philosophy or whatever) i actually would have loved to see a children’s movie address dealing with parents in a nuanced way that isn’t just “one of us is right and the other is wrong” but rather addresses what responsibilities parents and children have to each other, how to navigate intent versus effect, what the value (or lack thereof) of forgiveness is, how to uncover your identity when your entire life was shaped by societal and parental expectations, etc. And the Frozen premise is ideally suited for this! Moreover, a lot of these beats actually DO happen in the movie! Into the unknown is basically elsa trying and failing to convince herself that she wants the life she has and any thoughts to the contrary should be dismissed (and it’s gay as hell, but we’ll get to that later). The climax of show yourself literally says that it was the truth about herself rather than her mother that will bring her peace. But all of these beats are facilitated supernaturally rather than by the very fitting preexisting character background, which makes it lack the satisfaction you’d expect in such a resolution. it never features any reckoning with what made her feel the way she did in the first place -- a projection of the mother’s face singing the climactic realization literally undercuts the entire plotline. like here you can see how basically being propaganda for the american lifestyle (in this case the nuclear family e.g.) undercuts their message. this predictably only gets more egregious when they attempt to tackle colonialism. so quick summary of this plotline: anna and elsa’s grandfather basically genocided an indigenous people -- the northuldra -- after tricking them into building a dam that stifles the power of the forest or something. also their mother was actually northuldra. also magic comes from the northuldra forest? it would probably be pretty problematic re: the magical native stereotype if it was clearer what was going on lmao. at the end, anna breaks the dam even though it’ll flood Arendelle; however, elsa (who was literally frozen because of the sins of the past) swoops in at the last moment and freezes the wave so it causes no damage. However, in an earlier version of the story, the wave actually DOES destroy Arendelle and then they rebuild it with a mix of Arendellian and Northuldran architectural styles. this version actually proposed a genuine vision for how to deal with the impacts of colonialism instead of the final movie where sisterly love absolves everyone of consequences.

ok, so about the gay: i know people read a coming out into let it go, and maybe this is just cause i watched frozen 1 when i was still straight, but i didn’t really see it. but the lyrics in frozen 2 elsa’s songs match up so well with the coming out experience, i have difficulty imagining the song-writers weren’t aware of it, especially since people were already calling for elsa to be gay. Like let’s take a look at these songs -- into the unknown first. She sings

“Everyone I've ever loved is here within these walls I'm sorry, secret siren, but I'm blocking out your calls I've had my adventure, I don't need something new I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you”

This idea of having being afraid of ruining relationships even (and especially) with the people you love most by coming out is something that a lot of queer people can relate to. Then she sings:

“Are you here to distract me so I make a big mistake? Or are you someone out there who's a little bit like me? Who knows deep down I'm not where I'm meant to be? Every day's a little harder as I feel your power grow Don't you know there's part of me that longs to go”

How much do i need to explain this? (like all my 7 followers are some form of queer anyway lol) But again this battle of trying to hide but knowing deep down that you can’t, longing for “someone a little bit like me” -- it’s classic queer. Then she sings a bridge-type thing:

“Are you out there? Do you know me? Can you feel me? Can you show me?”

I mean, again, what is this but longing for community. Then in the climactic song “show yourself”, she sings this:

“Something is familiar Like a dream, I can reach but not quite hold I can sense you there Like a friend I've always known”

this is literally just about reading stone butch blues.

The climactic lyric is “You are the one you've been waiting for all your life” (sung to her rather than by her) and i mean again, this is about finally giving yourself permission to live as your true self. And not gonna lie, i dug that shit. it felt quite authentic. obviously they didn’t actually make her gay, bc of course, but she is gay in my heart!

Ok, so what would have made the movie live up to its full potential?

1) fixing that stuff i already said about the parents; it felt like such bs that anna and elsa were dealing with ancestral sins but also their parents were saints whose love fixed everything? how much more interesting would it have been if reckoning with their parents’ impacts on them led them to reckoning with the impacts of their entire ancestry and in turn their society? if reckoning with their personal responsibilities to each other led them to consider their society’s responsibility to fix the past wrongs that allowed it to flourish? this wouldn’t even be counter to disney’s individualism, but it allows for a slight reconceptualization of it that i think would feel fresh.

2) having actual consequences for the colonialism and genocide

3) either cutting all the new magic system stuff or developing it in a way that in turn helps develop the themes. frankly, the “sometimes people are born with magic” that was implied in movie one was enough.

4) making elsa gay, and i say this not just because i want gay characters but because that genuinely makes sense within the story

5) basically, the central theme should have been “i have all this baggage and i can’t resolve it by looking for answers only within my society; in order to be fully at peace with myself, i must work to right the wrongs of my society that obscured the different ways of knowledge that could help people like me; sometimes you must go into the unknown in order to understand the known” which is a message i think very well suited for the united states!

#In general Disney has created this really cowardly mold for children’s media #where the messages rarely go beyond the individual and are universally basic as shit #and that comes from a fundamental lack of respect for the audience #people keep telling me that pixar has deep multidimensional messages #and i’m sorry to say that your standards are just low #like people keep citing inside out to me and the message of that was literally “it’s okay to be sad sometimes”#cheburashka had a more complex message than that.#i know nobody asked for this long-ass analysis #and i myself watched frozen 2 in like may so idek why i started thinking about it again now #but it's just such a weird yet revealing movie #frozen 2 should have been abolishing prisons #but like seriously idk where they pulled colonialism from #but if they wanted to address a serious issue #prisons would have been perfect #because elsa basically spent half her life in a form of incarceration for being a perceived societal menace #i guess that's more difficult to weave into a story arc #oh holy fuck this reminds me that when i was 16 i was paid (very little might i say but nevertheless)#to 'ghostwrite' a witch cozy #whatever the fuck that is #but literally 'witch cozy' was the entirety of the prompt #no plot or characters or anything #there were 3 novellas #in the first one they made me changed the gay love story to a het one lmaoooo #in book 2 she busts a crime ring or sth and then realizes that social determinants made them commit crimes #and then in book 3 she becomes a prison abolitionist lmaooo #she starts running a rehabilitation program in the local prison using theater #this character was so self-insert it was ridiculous #no offense at whoever's writing the flash but 16-yo disaster child me had 15x more social consciousness than yall #sorry to analyze a different piece of media in the tags for another long-ass media analysis #but in s1 of the flash the local prison can't handle the new metahumans

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Toons for Our Times: The Casagrandes: Four Course Catchup

I take some time to catch up with everyone’s faviorite mexican-american family with a four course meal of shenanigans.

Mexican Makeover: The thorny issue of racial identity erasure is handled via a lot of costumes, spicy food and a second Sergio, which suprisingly isn’t my own personal hell. Then again giving rusty a brother wasn’t either so there’s a precident. Uptown Funk: Carl goes full Zach Morris, minus the white privlage, and marries Adelaide to get a free train ride, then let’s his hallucinations talk him into nearly killing everyone. At least the Leprechaun in the sandbox isn’t telling him to burn things anymore. Bo-Bo Business: Hector won’t respect Bobby’s genius new ideas so Bobby sets shop at the near by hong’s market and procedes to nearly get murdered by bunnies. Dear god Anya was right. Blunder Party: Ronnie Anne and Sid host their first event as a couple, a sleepover campout on the roof with their running crew. Adilade and Carl crash it causing their sibling and cousin to send the two on a dangerous scavenger hunt. As you do. Context for what’s going on the page image under the cut.

So yeah I originally wasn’t going to add the Casagrandes to regular coverage.... but what can I say. I had way more to talk about with the recent crop of episodes than I thought, the show often airs with loud house so it increases my coverage output and most importantly.. i’ts just damn good. While still having some kinks to work out, like forgetting to use CJ, the show is just really charming and uses i’ts premise well. So yeah when the show, at least according to the wiki, so expect full coverage of both this years halloween special and the show in full when it comes back in november... and with bobby being hypnotized into thinking he’s a cat apparently.. so yeah i’d be watching anyway, so why not go all in. .So with that out of the way we’ve got a lot of ground to cover so, Golpeteo de pitter, which is spanish for pitter patter... maybe. If google translate mangled that I apologize.

Mexican Makeover:

Like with our last bit of loud house coverage, we start with the least of the episodes first. That being said this one isn’t TERRIBLE, just a waste of a good concept and something intresting to explore. It’s also a real shame given this episode is written by Lalo Alcaraz, the writer of the comic strip La Cucaracha who works as a consultant on the show and previously wrote my favorite episode of the season, Croaked!, which we’ll be talking about soon. But he seems like a great guy, but everyone dosen’t bat a thousand. This episode centers around Rosa, whose mother Mama Lupe, and her parrot sidekick Paco, coming to visit. Paco is a recolor of sergio which actually explains a LOT honestly, as I now feel Sergio is the Quaks to Paco’s Squaks.

As in the crappy recolor who dosen’t have as many skills. As you can tell I don’t like Sergio much. He’s annoying, not very funny and only rarely has his moments and also spent one episode constnatly being obnoxious to Bobby, who as we’ve discussed and will soon discuss some more, is my boy. My precious baby boy. So bullying him is the equilvent of slapping me with a dueling glove. So yeah Paco is better than Sergio, being more laid back, less obnoxious.. and voiced by, of all people, legendary cartonist and the namesake of the parrot sergio, Sergio Aragones. I grew up with the guy in middle and high school as he frequently, and I belivie still does, work for parody magazine MAD Magazine, and while I haven’t read it also did 80′s indie comic Groo the Wanderer with Mark Evainer of Garfield and Friends Fame. The guy’s really damn funny and it was a real treat to find out he’s involved here, especailly since the namesakes for the loud pets have all sadly passed, so it’s nice at least one pet namesake between shows gets to guest star. But my fanboying aside, Rosa is worried she hasn’t been making her family Mexican enough and thus goes a bit absolutley nuts. She steals the kids clothes and replaces them with various traditional mexican outfits, which is a bit psycotic, and gives us a shot of carl’s ass when he compalins about his underwear being replaced, which...

Yes thank you wayne. I’m sure even some of the 7 year old’s watching this don’t want to see a fellow 7 year old’s butt. Stop that. There’s a reason the parent show stopped the gag of having Lincoln in his underwear all the time and it wasn’t just because only chris savino thought it was funny. It’s especially creepy given after Savino’s sexual harassment, John K’s reveal of being a pedophile and whatever Dan Schinder did they refuse to talk about to the public but has ciruclated around, you TIHNK the’yd be more congizant of not showing borderline child porn. I mean it’s one thing to have a kid in underpants for a gag it’s another to have a close up of his butt. Just stop. Stop. So the episode goes as you’d expect, Rosa keeps pushing things harder without explaining herself, including trying to force the kids to speak in spanish, feeding them extra spicy food and againt eh whole replacing their clothes thing.. which\ do look nice though and we do get that blessed image of bobby up top. The kids eventually confront Rosa who reveals she just dosent’ want to give her mom a heart attack, they go along with it with Sergio feeding ronnie anne spanish, which is nice continuity as her not knowing i’ts come up before, and everyone putting on a show.. which goes horribly wrong with super spicy food understandably not being built for a 80-100 year old woman, and while i’ts nice Bobby’s buddy par, we’ll cover their episode at some point too, shows up he also heavy metals so hard it knocks her over and destroys the painting, which yeah of course. Rosa comes clean and Lupe.. is entirely fine with it and feels that culture is more in values than in what you know about it, though she will teach them a few things because knowing where you came from is still important. Also Paco returns and.. why coudln’t both he and Lupe stay. For all my issues with the episode besides Carl’s butt shot, which we’ll get to in a second, I do really like Lupe and Paco is better than sergio in every way shape and form apart from the name. just color him read and have him smother sergio in his sleep and we’re up a better parot.

Final Thoughts for Mexican Makeover: This one was eh. I saved my thoughts on the main plot for here because it IS a topic worth talking about: loss of cultural idetntity, especailly for first or second generation, as our main kids and their parents are, kids, how to ballance the cultures, what really matters.. it’s all good, deep really senstiive topics that i’m in no way qulaified to entirley judge because i’m very much white and am not going to whitesplain topics that I have no personal experince with. But I can at least say they could’ve done MORE with this. For one thing Maria was absent, and it would’ve been REALLY intresting to get her take on it since Croaked! established she didn’t really give Ronnie Anne at the very least much of a lesson in their heritage. You can’t really BLAME HER: She works a demanding job, ended up having to raise them alone, and is tired a lot. As I said i’ts a VERY complex topic that’s created some VERY brilliant works around the subject, and while i’m not asking for “Moonlight... for Kids!” I am asking you to explore something like this. How aclimated the kids are to white culture is a topic worth exploring and could’ve been a special and while yes I know, it probably would’ve been “A Very Special Episode”..sometimes you need to tackle complex topics for kids. The Proud Family was also a screwball comedy, but it tackled the civil rights movement, xenophobia and other heavy subjects from time to time.. it also thought music piracy was the root of all evil but as I said no one bats a thousand. And it wouldn’t lack jokes as Alcaraz’s career is in satire: He knows how to write jokes about heavily charged topics and be clever about it on the freaking comics page, and given The Casagrandes like it’s sister show is basically a comic strip in animated form, he has the right format tow ork with it just ultimately becomes instead the cliche “person is coming time to hide everything we’ve been doing plot”, which has never been that good and is even worse on top of a more interesting idea. I don’t expect the show to be super deep all the time but I expect better than broaching a clearly difficult subject and not really giving it any weight.

Uptown Funk: Now we’re past the one I was eh on because I knew how it’d turn out, and somehow got even less on board as it wasted a good concept and good ideas, and to the one out of the four I was most pumped for. And of all things it was a CARL episode. I passingly mentioned last time I didn’t like Carl, and that opinon’s started to change. I’m still not a huge fan, his voice is grating and he STILL hasn’t given up on Lori seasons later after Clyde long has and the other show long regonized this was a bad idea. Buuut i’ve come to realize he has his moments, with Monster Cash, which i’ll cover very soon for Halloween Havoc, and this very episdoe which is utterly fantastic. Though part of that is also the supporting cast, who were the reason I was pumped. I talked abotu the Changs Breifly in my Operation Dad review but since Adalaide and Stanley are more promenent here and Becca will be, if not in person, in Croaked!, i’ll gladly dive into them. The Changs are the Casagrandes next door neighbors and EASILY one of the best parts of the show. A lovely interacial nuclear family, the four are all really likeable and distinct. I’ve talked about Sid before, so we’ll save more of that for in a bit. Stanley her dorky dad voiced by Kim Jeong who works as the subway conductor for Great Lakes City. He’s just a treat, in both sense of hte word, and really sweet interacting with his daughter and has a tendency to make small apperances due to Ronnie Anne and Sid riding the subway wherever they need to go. As i’ve said it’s nice to see Ken Jeong get to play a goofy, normal-ish dad and be funny without having to either play an over the top lunatic, weirdo or asshole. I love community but Chang could be a lot but this Chang is alright.. and probably dosen’t speak to his community college student brother that often for his family’s saftey. He does have Rabi Chang, his other brother over a lot though. Look if Teen Titans go can be jammed into the same multiverse as ok ko and steven universe, this show can take place in the same unvierse as community.

Becca is stan’s wife and the head zookeeper at the zoo as well as the runner of their various shows, voiced by melissa joan hart and while not around as mcuh as her husband, is still a delight and it’s a delight to have clarissa back. Also together with her husband they make one hell of a couple to get sandiwthced between.. and no shame there, and yes i’m aware they have kids, i’d be happy to help raise them. I”m no asshole.

Anyways speaking of those kids, we lastly have Adalaide, the star of this show and an adorable 6 year old and as Sid calls her “A sass bucket” which is accurate both for 6 year olds in general, and for this one, though like most kids her age she flips from being adorable to entirely blunt when warranted. She also has a Frog, named Froggy II. We’ll get into what happened to Froggy I and how she met Froggy II in October.

So yeah two of my faviorite side characters, I consider sid main, PLUS one of my other faviorites Vito in a supporting roll. What’s not to love? As for the plot Carl brushes off Adalaide, because he’s a little jerk festival, but changes his tune when he overhears Stanley offering to have Adilaide join him on the train even see the control. Carl being a fanboy for trains among many other things which I shall list now: Things Carl’s a Fanboy For: 1. Money 2. Petty Schemes 3. Zack Morris 4. The Ladies 5. AC Slater 6. Luchadores 7. Trains.

He naturally has his eyes light up like a christler buliding and given numbers 2 and 3 on the list quickly comes up with a scheme to get that train ride, since Stanely offered her a plus one. Granted he could’ve PROBABLY just asked Stanley for a ride and being the upstanding guy he is, and given Carl’s also a train nerd and stanley is their king, he would’ve said yes, but this is the same boy who thought his adult cousin’s same aged girlfriend would want to go out with him when said girlfriend lives in a house with at least 3 girls close to his age instead she could set him up with. The boy is more of a short term planner, like most schemers in fiction really, he sees the dollar signs like eddy from ed edd n eddy and has some good ideas, but not the more obvious solutions that aren’t as scheme based around him. I swear if this kid didn’t have a moral center this would be him in 50 years

I mean the only reason the boy hasn’t used sharks or explosives is because his parents and grandparents won’t’t let him.

Anyways Addie is skepteical for about 5 seconds and my one real complaint about the episode is it felt like she was genuinely skeptical, and playing him slightly with their games.. but it turns out nope she just genuinely bought it. But as smart as she is she’s also only 6, and her being adorably trusting works just as well. So they play games. They have a tea party, with carl wearing a truly glorious peacock that I guarnatee sid has worn both for playing with her sister and just to feel fancy. They then play with Froggy.. which gets uncomfotable as Adaladie forces Carl to kiss him, and then basically goes full on “NOW KISS” when it fails to turn froggy into a prince and Froggy runs because he wisely dosen’t want to make out with Carl, and is omly passable and not disturbing instead because she’s 6 and dosen’t know better. They then play chase froggy, which Carl wins but gets flies thrown at him in hte process so does he really? They get to their final game superheroes, with carly playing his faviorite el falcone.. but also being the hostage while Adalaide saves him because this is 2020, she don’t need to be no damsel in distress. And this to me is why the episode works.. Carl IS a huge jerk here, manipulating a younger child who just wants to be his friend to get a train ride he could’ve gotten just by asking her.. but he gets put through the ringer, and most of his “humilation” is stuff that isn’t that bad: Tea is alright, there’s no shame in wearing makeup or a veil, and being rescued by a woman is awesome. It’s just Carl’s own baby’s first toxic masuclinity that makes these situations minus kissing froggy uncomfortable, so it adds to it as Addy’s doing nothing wrong really and any pain on carl’s part is an accident on hers. She’s just an imaginatiee little lady and he’s jsut a jerk. But they pair well together his underserved ego with her adorablility and creativity and as we’ll see smarts. Part of the reason I was so excited is their one real scene togehter in monster cash, when Carl is throiwng everyon’es money back at them which is also the best bit of the episode and we’ll get to that when we cover it her response is a stern “Don’t you even dare” and he hands it back to her because you don’t mess with Addy.

Addy then brings up pretend marriage and while Carl has his first , and probably not last, panic attack over comitment he does realilze this can be used and gets his train ride over it, with the two taking Froggy along as their baby. But being Carl, he’s not ready for marriage to a strong judge on the supreme court who makes him change the diapers and humilaties him in public, whcih i’d be more upset about if again he didn’t deserve it. We also have VITO! Local itallian, the Mercado’s best customer and Hector’s only friend. He also has his two winer dogs with him which.. yes. Just yes. And they have matching hats and sweaters because Vito is the best. Hedecides to toss froggy and book it for the train car. Adalaide realizes she’s been played and is understandably pissed but sadly, needing to find her friend her husband threw, dosen’t storm into Stanley’s conductor car and throw him off the train.

Instead Carl geeks out with Stanley over the train, which means he probably is meant to marry into this family, and Stanley’s glart awards. When Stanley’s called away to deal with the frog fracas, Carl is left told not to touch anything. So the obvious happens.. Carl hallunciates a bunch of pre school level choo choos who tell him to press the button. I love .. everything about this. It’s just pure hilarity and insanity and I’m here for it and a really creative, and insane gag and a nice take on the shoulder devil trope.

Naturally Carl, being Carl, presses the big button which turns on the ac and then blasts Stan’s train mix. Which sadly isn’t just this over and over and over and over again.

youtube

With Carl possibly banned from trains for life he naturally turns to his wife for help, who is none to happy with his bullshit, and not willing to help him because why would she? But Carl.. genuinely apologizes. It’s why I mentioned he has a moral center. Unlike say Zack morris 80% of hte time or Eddy from Ed Edd N Eddy at his worst, Carl can FEEL human emotions like guilt, and while he does need Addy’s help to not get in massive trouble, you can tell he genuinely feels bad about hurting her and is only asking because she’s his only hope and for the sake of the various passengers who if she dosen’t step in will go off the rails on a crazy train, she agrees. Turns out though Addy is pretty badass on top of being adorable, and uses Froggy II as a grappling hook, then turns out to have inherited her dad’s knowledge of trains, which was foreshadowed earlier as she said she’s gone with him a lot and was bored at his offer and won two time junior glart awards.. which given that likely includes teens and tweens, is Valeria Richards levels of acomplished. God damn kid. Kudos. Stanley gets understandably mad at carl But Addy covers for him and since she saved her dad’s awards, Carl can live.. and come back sometimes. Carl, first through his action figure then himself apologizes for being a jerk toa ddy and manipulating her.. a genuine one that shows he means it and finds she’s pretty cool. Gues this marriage CAN be saved. And so we end this episode as you’d expect.

No.. for one thing i’td be leprechaun-train monstrosity. For another the happy couple team up as superheros and thwart froggy being hit by a train , who greatfully smooches carl who, having grown, takes it in stride. Happy end

Final Thoughts: I love this one. It was funny, intresting and had carl develop as a character while fleshing addy out and giving us some great stanley stuff. It made having a jerk as the protagnist here work and made me go from begrudgingly liking carl to actuallyl iking him. while he’s pretty terrible here he suffers for most of his actions and learns from it, and he and Adelade ahve a great dynamic that we thankfully do indeed see again this very marathon. But first. IT’S BOBBY TIME.

Bo-Bo Buisness It’s my first episode starring Bobby on this blog and i’ts been TOO long and there will be more to come I promise. As i’ve made no secret of Bobby is my faviorite character here, and as you can tell that’s a tight race, and is just.. great here. The move to the city fleshed him out by giving him drive with his desire to run the mercado, franchise it, and go to buisness school to do all of it properly, while keeping his loveable sweetness, stupidity and relationship with Lori which has gone from deeply unhealthy to awwwwwwwww.

So naturally I was on board for another Bobby Bonaza, and this one like most of his eps is pretty good: This time around it focuses on Bobby’s hard work ethic and youthful energy..and it leading him AWAY from the mercado. Bobby tries setting up free wifi and a table like a cafe in the Mercado, but Hector flatly refuses and refuses anthing Bobby comes up with, citing his 30 years running the place sucessfully, while Bobby cites his less than a year of it and his book of ideas, though Hector refuses to budge. And what I like here is that while hector IS still the bad guy here, it’s not in a one dimensional “Jerk for the episode’ way this show’s sister episode tends to fall into. Or treating a character being a jerk like their the wronged party, or.. you get the idea. Point is hector has SOME points: He has run a small buisness in a huge city for 30 years, beating out gentrification, racisim, big buisness and other threats to run at thriving mercado, even with another market across the street. He also owns a sizeable apartment with room for two diffrent families, 5 adults, 6 kids, a dog and an asshole, and his wife is super for the building as a whole. He’s done MARVELOUSLY for himself and deserves to be proud and his stubborness likely comes from just how much he’s been able to acomplish while others fell around him. However.. Bobby is still sympathetic. It’s very clear working here is his dream job: His plan for his life is to expland the place into a franchise and run it himself one day, he’s the clear sucessor and Hector wont’ be around forever.. probably for a LONNNG time still, and his ghost will probably haunt the place with Rosa’s scolding him, but since ghosts can’t own property probably, someone has to take over. Bobby is his clear sucessor and his ideas aren’t bad.. poorly exceuted in this case, but not bad. As we’ll see in a bit the table idea can work, bobby just didn’t think it through and Hector could’ve HELPED HIM with it and as we’ll see most of the ideas Bobby ends up doing elsehwere are just common sense for this day and age and the one that isn’t is the one that does him in. But Hector, likely seeing any change as a threat to his bottom line and his legacy, rejects him out of hand. H’es likely scared that his protege can do BETTER, or worried that one wrong move could cost him his life’s work. I also find this ironic since a few episodes ago, though I still need to see it, Bobby himself had the same problem letting go and letting someone else control the buisness with his sister and cousins running the place while he had his anniversary with Lori. Bobby DESERVES to be given his shot.. and so when he decides to quit the mercado in a huff and take his table and his ideas with him.. you agree with him. Sure he’s leaving the family legacy.. but if Hector wont let him make it his own or appricate how much fucking work he does or love he has for the place, then what legacy is there? That got heavy. We get a great joke next as bobby makes a metaphor about the dinosaurs.. then wonders what happened to them and like me on any given day stops to google it.. and since he uses a laptop unlike me and my desktop computer or phone, and his table, he inadveratly sets up a table outside.. which fixes the problems with his idea, if by accident and impresses Mr.Hong the owner of a nearbye market who could use a fresh faced go getter like bobby and hires him right on sight and agrees to start putting his ideas in.

And the wifi table.. is a huge sucess and putting it outside gave the customers more room, so it fixes the one flaw in his plan, and serving out cafe and snacks I can’t prounounce or spell properly, bobby shows his idea WOULD have worked: instead of creating loiterers it simply gives customers like Vito, who pretty much lives at the Mercado anyway so why not, a place to sit, eat and check their email and stuff, and bobby’s a good enough salesman he can convince them to eat and given the mercado already has a customers only policy on toilets.. they could’ve just made the table purchase only, and once per hour, and their regulars would’ve lapepd it up. Hector refuses to accept this though and stews and drives sergio and carl away.. which yeah if you can out asshole Sergio, you may be the bad guy here. The two feud over dinner to their family’s confusion, and to Rosa’s annoyance and dope slaps when she spills her hard worked on food over their petty sniping but bobby’ sstar continues to rise with a music video for hongs including that bit seen above, rapping and just.. whatever the fuck that video was it was the third best rap in nick history behind that “nnnnnnick” rap and this.

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So yeah with the comeerical, Hongs has tons of customers, and Hector stews more. However things can’t be good forever, as the last 4 years have proven they can be bad for an especially long time but good? Sadly no, as Bobby gets what he always wanted: The keys to the store.. maybe not the store he wanted but still and gets to run hongs solo. Sadly though Bobby ends up fucking up, letting people bring their pets which wrecks the place, and ends up with bobby getting swarmed by an ever multiplying batch of bunnies.

As Bobby is cuddled to death, his exact words, Hector finally relents and saves the boy from literally drowning, and the two get the rabbits out.. but well with social media and all that hong knows what happen and bobby’s fired. But back at the Mercado, Hector rehires bobby, and genuinely apologizes. I do feel it comes a bit quick.. but I guess after your grandson almost got bunnied to death, you rethink your life choices. Bobby admits he was in over his head while Hector genuinely admits Bobby has good ideas and he was being a stubborn jackass and decides he can use them after all. Starting with the commerical where the two perform a nice mexican song, the whole family adorably dresses up like various mercado items as seen at the veyr top and we also get this.

Yes, yes to all of this. And we’re out.. for a moment then back in but you get it.

Final Thoughts for Bo Bo Buisness: While not the best Bobby episode, that would be the one that introduces Par and again i’ll get to that one, this one is still pretty good. While I do feel Hector turns around a bit quick, otherwise it’s funny enough and has enough character stuff with bobbby, even if i’ts mostly just from knowing him in this series to work out. I”m not ANTI-nonsense episodes, I just don’t want them there when ther’es clearly a way heavier issue your steping around. This wasn’t the BEST the series has done comedy wise but it was fun enough. Alright one more...

Blunder Party:

And we end on another pretty good one. And oddly for this show it’s the only Ronnie Anne focused one of the four. Usually she’s dead center but it seems the series is getting comfortable enough, much like it’s parent show, to ease out of focusing on just one character as the viewpoint and letting the others breathe. Still this was a good un and let’s talk about it.

It’s Party Time and Ronnie and Sid are having a sleepover on the roof. Their first party of a couple.. i’m so proud of by baby gays.. or gabies as I call them. I mean.. yes i’m not subtle with my shipping but they act less like close friends and more like two tiny lebisan awww factories. Anywho the whole crew’s here, which as with a lot of things this episode let’s talk about them: Casey, Nikki and Sameeer were introduced in a loud house I haven’t seen and naturally carried over to the show proper, showing up when Lincoln visted in an episode I will defintely cover at some point, and accepting Ronnie Anne wasn’t a born city kid. They have neat designs, are nicely diverse, and while lthey do need some fleshing out, given that like Lincoln’s own friend team squad they show up in a good chunk of ronnie anne episodes, we got time for that so we’re good. There’s also new addition Laird, the school’s own screech powers, and your standard awkward dork whose not that great. So yes even this group has a waste of a character, though he’s not AS bad as rusty or useless as Liam, just feeling a bit less essentail than Ronnie Anne’s running crew, who match her general vibne, and Sid whose her soulmate.

But as the pizza arrives via Sergio, because he has to be useful at least once, our heroes soon find the party crashed by Great Lakes City’s newest power couple: Carl and Adelaide! Looking like their fucking team rocket. Seriously I had other options for this episode, including bobby sliding around on his back comically, so it says something just how great that iamge is and how fucking gloriously smug yet awesome they look.

The two want to join and even outdo the big kids at stretcing and flinging pizza, but as many little siblings like myself know all too well, the big siblings don’t want you there. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to hang with my brothers friends, but he refused frome lementary all the way up to high school. It was maddening. SO I sympathize with them, but i’ve grown tor ealize grown up kids want to have their own time and fun so I sympathize with both parties: Carl and Addy just want pizza and games and to hang with the big kids and Ronnie Anne and Sid just want to host a party as a couple without watching their siblings.

However Carl forces a compromise.. by using his special mood.. whining loudly and summoning Rosa.. whos eriously just.. teleports behind the kids. I thought only Lucy could do that in this unvierse. Respect.

Rosa however is resonable. While she dosen’t want the kids to be excluded, and it’s understandable and nice of her: The kids just wan’t to feel included and Rosa is resonable enough to say they will have to leave eventually wehn it’s time for bed. A fair compromise. Also i’d wonder why Adelaide is here but I assume the Chang Parents had her come over there, which Rosa being the lovely person she is agreed to. I didn’t get into her above but I do like Rosa a lot as a character as she’s a resonable authority figure.. but liable to slip into her own foibles, and is kind and loving with her family if strong and strict when she needs to lower the boom. Mostly on Hector who i’m amazed survived last episode and getting his own grandson to leave in one piece.

But yeah I mean I can only imagine what’s going on there...

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Also sex obviously, but since I obviously can’t and won’t show you that, have this video to jodeci’s freak n you instead and let your imagination fill the blanks if you want.

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I will use this song any time I can. Anyway, Sid being the peach she is tries to convince Ronnie anne all is not lost. Earlier she used a metaphor saying how they had all the perfect ingredents like a smore, and now adds pizzza.. which ot be fair a pizza smore, but using bagles or something sounds great, but pizza on a smore sounds like my own personal hell.. though Sid likes it so i’ll let it live.. for now. That’s also why Sergio is alive. FOr now.

But even sid has a limit and the power couple soon break those: An attempted scary ghost story session goes bad as they break poor sameer by predicting eveyr story he has even the one the poor kid wings, and he and his prehinsile hair are sad. Cheer up kid at least you can probably go live on Krakoa at some point. Free health care, free housing, living on a giant paradise. Good stuff.

The two then ruin an attempted dance party, which unlike the above which was just bad timing, this time their just obnoxious as addy wnats to ballet, and Carl wants to... put it to his butt whle playing fart noises. Okay for starters.

Secondly if he wanted to do that he could’ve got a cd of Nickleback cheaper and no one would’ve noticed.. then again they might of thought the poor boy had Dihera. Somehow this isn’t the last draw. Nikki, being a real one, holds a gross drink contest which carl spits out on the crowd.. which really WHAT DID YOU ALL EXPECT. This is how those things end. WIth spit up and fury.

Anyways enough is enough, so our ambigiously gay duo hatch a plan and send the little kids on a scavanger hunt. So while the Ronnie’s Running Crew have fun, and spot bobby and his best buddy par and bobby flop on some mangos and slide around on mango juice all episode as a result, the dream team work on getting that list done. From getting one of Hector’s nosehairs to Mr. Nakamura’s faviorite sweatervest (which takes a while) , to Carlota’s diary they do it with flair. Of note is the two having to steal Sergio’s crackes.. and nearly getting murdeered by the parot who seriously looks like he’s about to skin a child.. thankfully when HE does a shining by crashing through the door, he just gets stuck so no child murder tonight. Horay! Well until Carlota finds out her diary missing then this happens.

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But things get dire when the kids think they see the smaller kids get stuck in par’s truck. Thankfully bobby knows where his best friend is at all times, because he’s consdierate and knows where he’s headed next, and the kids end up following him, while Sameer stays behind to distract with his hair puppets since Rosa wants to little ones to go to bed.

Sid and Ronnie anne and co head to the dump , shenagins insue and they think they lost their sibling and cousin.. only to find them, the two having gotten a mango that looks like Vito and won.. and Sid and Ronnie apologizing and admitting their scam. In a nice bit though while Carl gets upset, Addy quickly points out they DID ruin their fun, and crash the party, and Carl begrudingly admits he’s wrong. Again, keep them married show. Carl needs Addy to keep him honest and Addy needs carl to hide the bodies of her enmies. They make a good pair, just like their big sis and cousin.

Anyways, Ronnie Anne and Sid ask to have the kids for just a bit longer to repair them and again this is why I repsect Rosa. She finds out the kids disobeyed her or at least found a loophole but isn’t mad and gets both sides learned from it. Our kidlets get a giant ass smore for their heroic efforrts, Nikki returns Carlota’s diary in secret to avoid their deaths while Sergio is arrested for attempted murder of two minors. A good night all around. Bobby joins in to close out, which isn’t met with any resitance because who dosen’t love bobby, while Hector wakes up to the vito mango and wonders what happened to him.. okay apparently Vito’s been turned into a non-sapient piece of fruit before and I want details show. Final Thoughts Finally: A pretty good one. Carly and Adleadie continue to prove to a hell of a combo, whie the proven dream team of Sid and Ronnie Anne work well off their younger counterparts. It overall leads to a fun episode with lots of great gags.. and also bobby sliding around on his back comically like he’s a goddamn roomba and I am hear for it. Just overally really good stuff and a really fun plot. This really feels like stife of the party done right. Both sides screw up but make up instead of one just getting their way because protaganist. And overall this batch of episodes was really damn good and I look forward to watching the series reguarlly from now on. Until then, just one more day then this blog gets all spooky! SO stay tuned, stay safe and go team venture! Play us out nickleback! WAIT WHY DID i SAY THAT NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO

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wolfenm · 5 years ago

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Wei Wuxian’s story fixed what Tony Stark’s broke ....

Prefacing this to say that I do love RDJ and Tony Stark and Marvel, etc (though, for many reasons, I still refuse to see Endgame). But I was just struck a moment ago by how much more I adore Wei Wuxian, and how much better / more satisfyingly I feel he was handled on a couple of story points that are similar to Tony’s. SPOILERS for the MCU to-date, and for The Untamed / Chen Qing Ling (and technically Mo Dao Zu Shi, but I prefer the show’s depiction of the character, over the book, so this is written with the show specifically in mind).

One thing I’ve argued with people about in the past is how, I feel, it was character assasination to have Tony Stark get / stay angry at Bucky (and thus Steve, for defending him) for the death of Tony’s parents. Hell, when I ficced Bucky being found before Civil War, I had Tony see getting Bucky’s mind back as the perfect revenge on HYDRA! So I was thoroughly baffled at Tony going apeshit against Bucky in Civil War. I loved that movie in general, but that storypoint felt hella contrived just to have some excuse to depict an “iconic” moment from the comics (from a plot I likewise felt was a bit too contrived / threw Tony under the bus for drama, but I digress).

I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that Tony Stark, the man who created BARF, wouldn’t grasp, sooner or later, that Bucky was fucking MIND-RAPED by HYDRA, and was thus as much a victim as Tony’s parents. And so I then ficced Tony coming to his senses and using BARF to help Bucky … only for me to subsequently be disappointed again on that front by the MCU canon. (I also refuse to believe that Tony couldn’t understand how and why Steve would put his love of Bucky before everything and everyone else – Tony had two {or three, if Happy counts} people like that in his life during Civil War {Pepper and Rhodey}, and then Peter and Morgan. Digressing again, sorry.) But people have been all, “It totally makes sense for him to be like that!” – even though he’s supposed to be a good guy, a hero!

I’m even more disturbed by the sentiment I’ve often come across that Tony *needed* to die to complete his arc of learning to be selfless. Last time I checked, he already tried to sacrifice himself in The Avengers, when he took a nuclear warhead through a wormhole! I’ve seen so much hate towards him for all he did in Age of Ultron, but THERE, his actions actually made sense to me, more or less (even if I didn’t exactly agree with them): he *thought* he was doing a good thing. I could see the logic in his conclusion, and things COULD have turned out well, if not for certain data points he’d missed / him being overconfident. Atonement is about cleaning up your mess, not specifically about dying – especially if you still have people to live for!

So then we have Wei Wuxian. Like Tony Stark, he’s brash and confident and inventive and can sometimes run roughshod over people – and certain things he does are highly frowned upon by others. He comes to regret, at least for a time, the controversial path he carves for himself (like Tony regretting being a weapons manufacturer).

But when a group of innocent people, survivors from the Wen Clan – the same family as a couple of the show’s villains, but a different branch – were being mistreated and even killed because everyone else felt they were as guilty as the true villains (for not standing with everyone against the evil members of their clan, never mind that they had been threatened by them too – Bucky under HYDRA, anyone?), Wei Wuxian – who, mind, had gone on a murderous spree to slaughter the truly evil Wens via malicious means – sacrificed everything, getting exiled by his clan, and living in poverty and under threat, to defend those innocents. Even after feeling extreme wrath towards his mortal enemies, he understood right and wrong enough to not paint everyone with the same clan name with the same brush. He could have *just* saved Wen Qing and Wen Ning (to whom he owed a mountain of gratitude, even though his clan brother Jiang Cheng, who owed the same debt yet didn’t stand up for them them, faulted Wei Wuxian for putting them over his own clan), but no – Wei Wuxian went against the world, *even his loved ones*, to do the right thing, saving all the survivors of Wen Qing’s people from deadly servitude.

And then there came a point where Wei Wuxian’s world was ablaze. It’s understandable that Wei Wuxian was initially furious with Wen Ning’s part in what went down (Wen Ning killed Wei Wuxian’s brother-in-law, unknowingly under someone else’s control, but that wasn’t discovered until much later), but Wei Wuxian still was immediately horrified and extremely distressed by the idea of Wen Ning giving his life in atonement (and later, Wei Wuxian was endlessly concerned for Wen Ning).

Anyway, Wei Wuxian had reason to believe it was his OWN fault that certain horrible things happened (he didn’t know about outside interference by someone with murderous intentions and little concern for collateral damage). And so, Wei Wuxian committed suicide, feeling that the world, including his "lifelong confidant"/"soulmate", was better off without him and his disastrous creation (the Stygian Tiger Amulet, which he’d actually controlled better than he’d thought, but the concept of it did end up being misused by others, so …).

BUT THAT WASN’T THE END OF HIS STORY. In fact, as all versions open with the announcement of his death, in media res, it’s technically the *beginning*! Years later, he’s resurrected, solves a series of murders, acts as a mentor for some youths, learns a lot of truths (including what had really happened with his brother-in-law’s death, and that there were those who’d actually loved and missed him when he’d died), and presumably goes on to a bright future – a LIFE with his soulmate, putting his talents to further use for the benefit of humanity. He doesn’t pay the ultimate sacrifice to stop someone else’s mess (like Tony does with Thanos) – his death never made him a hero, just was a tragedy. In fact, many people in his world had said “good riddance” when he’d died, but we learned that they were demonstrably wrong in feeling that way – we were supposed to be sad over it, and relieved when it was undone, and thrilled at his second chance, feel a great wrong had finally been righted! Not feel that it was the best possible outcome!

(Even some of the people I’ve talked to who DO agree that Tony’s end was a tragedy, not deserved / needed for his character, still seem to have WANTED it, felt somebody dying was the best way to end Endgame, and I just can’t relate AT ALL. To me, his best end, the best way to write Tony out so RDJ could retire from the franchise, would have been him just retiring to the lab, as promised to Pepper, and maybe consulting by phone now and then.)

Considering Wei Wuxian went on to save all the clans from annihilation, it’s a good thing he DID come back! And considering how he solved mysteries and saved a few people after THAT, it’s a good thing he didn’t die saving the clans, either!

So poor Tony. Poor Pepper. Poor Morgan. Poor Peter. And poor us.

Thank the gods (and the novel author, and the Untamed showrunners, and actor Xiao Zhan) for Wei Wexian (and his Lan Wangji, his Lan Zhan), healing my little fan heart after Marvel devastated it!💖

#the untamed #wei wuxian #Marvel #tony stark #marvel cinematic universe #anti endgame #character study #mine #2020 #chen qing ling #mo dao zu shi #the grandmaster of demonic cultivation #mcu #wei ying #the yiling patriarch #compassion is what we need examples of not how to die for a cause which is what governments want young people to romanticise and yearn for #dying tragically is not an ideal to strive for but rather a tragedy to avoid inflicting on those who would left behind #I reckon the avengers could have all banded together to use the stones the way the guardians used the power stone together #why does our society want our heroes to die? Ive never gotten to the end of a story & felt it would have been better if my fave charrie die

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tackyink · 4 years ago

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The making of Anomaly, chapter 3

Link to chapter 3

I’ll openly admit that, at this point, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was in a YYH mood and Makoto seemed to have piqued people’s interest, so I thought I might as well keep going.

The chapter opens with Makoto and Yuusuke trying not to die as they run laps around the lake. That’s Amemasu’s home, so when she sinks her head in the lake, there’s a good chance they saw her for the first time in many years.

I didn’t know yet what lived in the lake, and neither did Makoto, but Amemasu had been aware of Mako as early as Nana first brought her to the temple and was shown around the lake. At this point in the story, she hasn’t been in the forest in a long time, so Amemasu probably had a very confusing moment as to who this young Nana lookalike with youki was.

"There is something odd about his aura. I cannot pinpoint it, but it's there."

"As I understand, he died and came back to life."

This is Makoto actually sensing Yuusuke’s weird wavelength that almost got him stuck in the afterlife. Genkai offers a passable explanation, but what Makoto’s picking up isn’t due to his resurrection, it’s the budding demon genes that are still obscured by Yuusuke’s very human… everything.

He wasn't supposed to be there. That's why Kurama's death had been so clear to her, it had to be. Her prediction hadn't accounted for this guy because he just wasn't supposed to be there, wrecking everything he came in contact with. He was tearing down the very paths of fate.

Plucked from the river of life and thrown back in without a care, the ripples he caused were affecting the people he crossed paths with.

The mother of all anomalies. The source of her headaches for over a week. It had been his fault all along.

I cannot stress enough that this wasn’t planned and I was just following Makoto’s thoughts to their logical conclusion. Luckily for me, Makoto turned out to be a very reflexive character, and I think a lot of Anomaly’s charm is due to this: we as fans know the story in a way that is hard to be surprised anymore, but re-experiencing these events through the eyes of someone with inside knowledge of how things work in-universe and no idea of how events will play out opens up many avenues for analysis. She notices things that our familiarity or ingrained first impressions make us overlook. At least, that’s how it worked for me.

And Anomaly could very well have ended here, with its main mystery resolved, but I was having way too much fun to let go yet.

I didn’t expect Mako and Yuusuke to get along so well. I honestly thought she’d just write him off as dumb and loud and he’d think she was off-putting and had a stick up her ass. I didn’t realize until I had them alone in the same room that Yuusuke and Fumiko are not so different, and Mako was used to dealing with her more than with anybody else. I think she finds some comfort in people who are so radically different to her, who’s always gone through life restraining herself. And after his trip through the afterlife, Yuusuke is not the judgmental type, so when he brings up her oddities, he does so in the same straightforward way Fumi does, with no ill intent. She knows how rare that is and appreciates it.

The other thing that I cannot stress enough is that Kurama is a nightmare to write. Their little back and forth after school was torture to write because I can never figure out what is going through his head. Rereading this with some perspective, I’d say that he found her funny and he was very curious about Makoto’s power. He’s taken a liking to her, of course, since she was worried about him and his mother back at the hospital, but at this point she’s a bit of a sociological experiment to him. Though, to be fair, all the connections Kurama forms along YYH have that feel. Human World relationships are a novelty he hasn’t experienced much.

"I'm sure you look fantastic when you exercise. Not a hair out of place, all prim and proper with your clothes neatly pressed."

I just want to point out that I share Makoto’s saltiness regarding this matter.

"Good morning, Makoto," he said amicably.

She refused to take her eyes off the road. "Are you a stalker?"

It’s fun to write people with little regards for social conventions.

At any rate, the entire conversation they have during the run was me trying to set the inner workings and limits of Mako’s ability for my own benefit as much as for the readers.

By the time Mako’s back to the temple, Yuusuke has surpassed her, maybe not in energy reserves, but 100% in technique. He’s a prodigy and she’s slow, she’s assumed that there are some things she simply cannot do, and this is why she won’t catch up to the others in terms of battling skill for the rest of the fic.

Mako’s habit of counting to three fit so well with it being a habit from training as a child, like a ballerina counting steps, that when I thought of it I was like, ‘Oh, so that’s why she does that!’

Genkai hummed and, after a few seconds, she said, "You should also know that you are always welcome here."

This small remark was, in the end, what decided Makoto’s fate at the end of the fic. I kept coming back to this sentence, thinking of how Genkai wanted the temple grounds to become a refuge for non-humans. She knew that Makoto was bound to feel out of place no matter where she went and wanted to help with that in her own way. It sort of worked, in the sense that it became Mako’s home down the line, but Makoto never felt it hers. She always felt like she was just the keeper of the grounds, waiting for the true master to come back, and she sticks to the philosophy of welcoming everyone, first to honor Genkai’s wishes, later on because she realizes that it is important for everybody to have a place like that. This is something I would love to explore in the sequel, if I ever get around to writing it.

As for her parents, they are just regular good people. They aren’t very interesting, nor were they meant to be. Mako’s home life is the model of what a nuclear family is supposed to be: happy suburban couple with a kid, a two story house, stable jobs, a nice car, and not a worry in life other than doing too much overtime. Makoto is weird enough for all of them, so her family didn’t need to be.

#making of anomaly

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bygosscarmine · 5 years ago

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We Who See Thestrals

A Harry Potter post-canon fic: Luna Lovegood x George Weasley

hopefully that isn’t a shocker at this point

Go to Chapter 1

2: George Weasley, Talent Manager

2183 words

They went clattering down the stairs to the shop's main floor, where Luna was standing behind a cleared table, with a circle of children of varying ages. As they got closer, George realized she was doing Muggle magic. Her soft voice pattered through a nonsense description of space and time, while the cards seemed to leap from her hands--not necessarily that strange to a wizarding audience, but different cards seemed to leap out of the deck and show themselves as she said words related to hearts or kings or seven and so on.

"Not that," said Ron, annoyed. "It's the Pygmy Puffs!"

George went to the big glass enclosure, and peered in. The coloration and markings range seemed to be normal but...

"Gobstopping Goblins," he whispered.

There was a nest of baby Puffs in the corner, just naked tiny bean-blobs. All Pygmy Puffs until now had been magically altered Puffskein young. The best results were at about two weeks before birth, but the range of about two weeks around that date was usually fruitful. The tricky bit was transforming only the developing young, not the parent. Never had he dreamed they could actually reproduce the Pygmy mutation naturally.

"Are you telling me that Luna is in some way responsible for inducing the Pygmys to have offspring?" he asked Ron, trying to imagine this process.

"She thinks it has to do with telling them fairy tales. I think it has more to do with the fact that she's built them little homes."

Sure enough, there were little decorated boxes, two large enough to hold a whole pack of Pygmy Puffs, two smaller as if for a nuclear family unit. The nest appeared to be made from the shreds of one of the smaller boxes. The tiny hairless creatures he assumed were the natural children of some couple within the glass container were being hovered around by two pink Pygmy Puffs, who had floated to be between his large head and the nest so he could no longer see it directly.

"You know, I think you're right. Probably you're both right."

He stayed until Luna had finished her magic show, to ask her some more questions.

"What do you think?" she asked. "Is my Muggle magic pretty good now?"

"I saw you finessing that with some summoning," George said severely. "Which just goes to show you are a very skilled witch, since that's not easy real magic, either. What about these guys? You've been giving them the birds and bees talk?"

"Just a little privacy and folklore to build their culture on," she said, reaching down under the mesh top of the cage to let some of the little fur balls cluster against her fingers. "I thought about separating the males and females but Ronald said you didn't know a way to determine sex. Besides, we don't know if they have a binary breeding system."

One of the pink parental puffs bobbed over to Luna's hand cautiously, zoomed at her as if beating her off, and rushed away again. Luna slowly withdrew her hand.

"I don't think they are smart enough to recognize a person," she said somewhat sadly.

"They're probably smarter than they let on," said George, who had never seen the puffs so interested in a human. There was a bit of an issue of bonding with the puffs, which wasn't bad for shop profits, but wasn't quite what he liked as an inventor. Puffskeins seemed just barely large enough to have the brains to recognize a familiar human. Pygmy Puffs, not so much.

Maybe they were usually just too immature.

"Was there anything else?" Luna asked.

"Sorry?" George was a little startled.

"You came down here in such a rush, and I hate to keep you from your work. Ron said you only come down to work in the shop when it's really crazy."

"Well, yes," George said. "Rather. Summer hols coming up, will need to be up to snuff so we can just offload our goods on the children who will be loose for a few months."

"So was there anything else you needed to ask me about?"

"Nothing I needed to ask, but plenty I'd like to," he said, grinning. "How long did you practice the cards before coming up with that little twist?"

"I bought a pack and the pamphlet and took it home," said Luna. "So I've had a lot of hours at home working on it."

She seemed to be apologizing for not being an instant expert.

"I have never seen anyone over the age of fourteen put so much effort into card-tricks before. I am impressed."

"Oh," said Luna, nonplussed.

"I was also going to ask you to consult on my ideas for a new mothers line of products, but somehow I don't think you're the right candidate for that."

"Can I see your workshop, though? I'm very curious about that," Luna said. "Ronald said you wouldn't want to be disturbed but he just went to get you so you're already interrupted."

"Certainly you can." He was pleased, really. "I just got off the phone with Neville, but maybe you can give me an opinion on the algae pet I'm developing."

"A phone?"

"Not a Muggle phone," George hurried to say. "I'll show you what I mean with that, too."

"I'd like to talk to Neville, too," she said. Her always slightly wistful voice was not necessarily more melancholy as she said this, but he was strangely afraid it was.

"Rhodie, we'll be back in a jiff," George called out. "I'm curious about our numbers of Pygmy sales to availability over the summer last year, if you have a minute to check on that."

He ushered Luna up the cramped stairs in the stock-room, where the muted sounds of children shouting at the Snap made the sense of having slipped out of the world more acute. He always felt that a little, coming up here, but leading a newcomer through the maze of boxes with their slight coating of inevitable dust, the sound of their footsteps in the heavy quiet, made it stronger.

"Did you have this one made?" Luna said when they came to the cabinet.

"Well spotted," said George, fairly sure he should be feeling a little shame about conspicuous wealth right now, but just feeling a bit pepped up. "It's pretty new. We had to actually do a lot of research and a little guesswork to get it made. Very complicated magic, have a feeling the originals were dark in nature. Nothing a little ingenuity couldn't fix!"

He opened the door. "Usually I'd say, after you, but always watch a man go first into his vanishing cabinet. I'll leave the door open on the way out."

He stepped through.

For a few moments, he was unsure if she'd lost her nerve to come. Or something bad had happened with the cabinet.

Then she stepped out nonchalantly, staring at the lintel of the door keenly, as if she'd been inspecting it.

"That felt like nothing. Really, apparating could well be replaced by a few of these in wizarding gathering places and we'd all be so much more comfortable."

"True," said George.

Now a pang of consumer guilt hit him, so he did not volunteer that to keep this one working accurately he had to limit daily use. Luna took in the room around them and he considered it himself. It was cleanish and brighter than most wizarding research facilities. He had a rather large terrace-house and the attic formed his laboratory. Everything from modern muggle science equipment to herbs hung from the gabled roof, with the highest center part over the working table, where he'd installed an intake fan so he could easily air out the fumes. He'd bespelled it to also make any colorful or intriguing fumes clear.

Just the kinds of precautions he and Fred had found out the hard way in their room laboratory all those years ago.

"How do you call Neville?" Luna asked.

"Here, see this? Do you remember the extendable ears?"

"Sure."

He held out the bits of rubber-covered foam that now were just as long as a fingertip, and brightly colored so he lost fewer of them. "It's actually connected to the Floo network, so you may see things slightly green for a moment, but you just have to give the address."

Luna gingerly took them but nearly immediately dropped the first one she tried to put in. George swiftly bent down to pick it up, and said, "Here."

He brushed some of her rampant hair away from her ear and squeezed the earplug before setting it in her ear. "Like this," he said, showing her how to compress it. She put in the other without too much issue, knowing know she could safely push it inward.

"What's Neville's fireplace?" she asked, a little too loudly.

"Twelve, Hogwarts."

The earplugs didn't really dampen sound much, so he didn't have to yell. But Luna did, as if jumping into a fireplace, and he grinned.

"Hello, Neville," she said next, in a normal tone of voice. "Did I startle you? Yes, it's me, Luna. Oh, this marvelous!"

She gave George an incandescent smile, and jumped a little. "Neville, how's Pomfrey? Oh, good. I thought that tonic should help his scalewort. I have to go. Maybe George will lend me his ears again. Goodbye, Neville!"

After a pause she said in a whisper, "Do I just take them off?"

"Yes," he said, holding out his hand. "Before I had them turn off with a word, but it was annoying to hear other people say half the word all the time, and it's easier if they just stop when one or the other takes them off."

She dropped them in his hand, scrutinizing them slightly, then turned to the desk beside them. "Were you talking to Neville about this?"

The goldfish bowls with the hopeful algae pets were lined up, labelled so he could track the various tests he'd done. Currently there were twelve. The first six he'd given up on as past further experiments were now living with his female relatives, and a few were set downstairs in the shop as a teaser while they waited for Neville to come pick them up.

"Yes. It's tricky to work with biological things. I don't have the hang of it. Neville secretly disapproves of me messing with nature, or I'd just ask him to be my inventor."

George raked his hair up on end as he stared at the blobs of algae that loosely resembled the heads of the Green Man but not enough.

"I suppose using a cutting charm to just fix them isn't enough," said Luna. "You want them to develop for real so people know what they are."

"And it's pretty easy to get them to look vaguely like people in an ugly way. We always think things look like people."

"You want them to be cute? One of your mom-line?"

"Yes," said George, a little surprised she had connected those thoughts. "If I figure out how to affect their shape more, then I can make them trolls or fairies or crones or princes. Then people can pick what they like."

"Yes, and then people can really talk to them, like a friend."

George had not considered this angle, but it made sense.

"Well, it's just something I'm asking anyone for leads about. Feel free to look around and ask about anything you find intriguing."

She pattered around, hands holding her hair back from falling on anything. It was so unconscious he suddenly saw her as a tiny witch in her mother's test kitchen, keeping her hands out of the range of anything dangerous. He had known her mother had been killed by a failed experiment, which he had promptly tried to forget, as an inventor prone to explosions himself.

"What is this?" she asked, leaning over a pan of starts.

"I'm just trying to learn more about botany and magic. They're violets."

She looked up, eyes glinting. She was laughing, for some reason, about him growing flowers. The skylights diffused the light well through the room, but she was wreathed in sun, since he'd put the starts right in the path of the light.

"Well, probably should send you back through to keep Rhodie in line." He stood, "It's been lovely having you. And don't listen to Ron if he says I'm not to be disturbed. I say that to him because I find him disturbing."

Luna chuckled, and swished out through the cabinet, which he shut with deliberation. Then he went downstairs from his house and out the door to walk all the way to The Three Broomsticks instead of just going out his own shop door and turning left.

By the time his friends showed up for the late Brazil v. Mozambique match, he was three pints in. Angelina swung her way in, and halted next to George to say, "Blimey, George. Why are you sodden already?"

"Just enjoying a night off," he said vehemently.

Go to Chapter 3

#We Who See Thestrals #Luna Lovegood X George Weasley #Luna Lovegood #George Weasley #pygmy puffs #Weasleys Wizard Wheezes #rarepair #harry potter #fanfiction

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soulvomit · 5 years ago

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The Memetic Race to the Bottom

On Tumblr, I started seeing that there is a real way how good ideas can go bad simply because the ideas just don’t scale very well outside of the specific conversation they originated in. (The cultural appropriation conversation is one of these.) This does not invalidate the original idea - but a big danger is that a idea dumbing down too much, can make people reluctant to engage with it at all once it’s gotten beyond its original space, so that the scaling into the general public becomes part of the extinction/invalidation cycle of that idea rather than leading to the broad adoption of it. (And then once it does scale to the public, the pushback can cause a full on pendulum swing in the culture - which is where I feel like we are at with the main social meme I’ll be using as an example. The present mainstream culture is a huge *pushback* on that meme, which I’m calling Toxic Independence.) The example I’ll mainly use here, is what I’m calling Toxic Independence, mainly because “Anti-Codependency/Neediness/Enabling Culture” is just too much of a mouthful. This didn’t start off the Objectivist-adjacent space of normalized sociopathy that it became. Codependency, neediness, and enabling, after all, are all actually real things that very much need discussion. But the broader culture just did not know what to do with these concepts once they reached escape velocity into the mass consciousness. In many cases, the idea breaching into mainstream public consciousness, is actually the last stage before it completely gets discarded. This doesn’t always happen, but I feel like I’ve seen it happen with enough ideas. All it takes is for the most dumbed down version of the idea, to become the new “poster child” for that idea, and lots of people to broadly reject it. Eventually, the idea dies out. Another thing that can happen is that a meme can go extinct if the original people with the idea, end up getting deplatformed. Or if the torch just isn’t passed to the next generation. That’s how so many of the more positive Boomer social memes ended up lost by the 1980s, and ultimately, forgotten. The activist/counterculture Boomers were deplatformed and also weren’t the ones having the kids. Every hippie that moved to rural Oregon in the mid-late 70s was a voice lost, and the yuppie Boomers became the dominant cultural force in a lot of spaces. And they managed to pass *some* memes on to Gen X (Toxic Independence or Anti-Codependency/Neediness/Enabling Culture was still a big part of many of my middle class Gen X spaces in the 00s). But sometimes the meme contains the seeds of its own extinction. I feel like Toxic Independence did. Instead of a broad conversation that I hear in most of my spaces, it’s now a niche conversation in a couple of very, very specific spaces. I would have to actually seek out those conversations. And I still hear people talk about codependence - but it’s in specific addiction/recovery-specific contexts, or among much older people, and nobody seems to be trying to make it the Grand Unified Field Theory of People anymore the way that they were in the 80s. Sometimes the meme comes under broad attack by the culture itself. As left/right political polarization was picking up speed in the last decade or so, you started seeing Toxic Independence under attack by both the Left *and* the Right, and not even by the most extreme factions of each. The hetero female version came under attack via both intersectional feminism *and* traditionalism, for example. The male version became even more niche and subcultural. The Personal Development movement of the 00s was probably this meme’s final form. But even PD environments aren’t pushing this anymore to nearly the same extent, and the PD people who promoted it, are now mocked to some degree: I don’t feel like people are as universally told to cut off their ill, disabled, or unemployed family members the way they were in the 80s and 90s. I mean, there may still be this pressure in a lot of spaces, but I don’t feel like it’s as overt and aggressive outside of specific socioeconomic niches and professions. When I was around Landmark people in 2016, the conversations were fundamentally different from the ones I had with Landmark people in 2003. Now, it seems like you only get to go away once you become rich enough to throw money at the problem, or are sociopathic enough to be unaffected. Sometimes the conversation moves on because future generations change the conversation via trial and error. It’s coming out in the wash that while the first generation of people to do it en masse may have fucked it up (and then written it off as not at all working - which is what a lot of Toxic Independence was a response to), there’s been a good 50 years of R&D on the problem since. It turns out that cooperative co-living (with mutualistic, not parallel-independent or nuclear, household economies) was the meme that just wouldn’t die. The failures of white hippies weren’t because co-living doesn’t work, but probably owe more to being the first generation of middle class white people to try to figure out for the first time what everyone else has already been doing forever. Sometimes the social space shifts: geek culture is becoming a much bigger share of the middle class than before, and I feel like Toxic Independence never really caught on in geek culture the way it did in the 80s mainstream aspirational space. If anything, geek culture was the one space where a lot of hippie torches ended up passed - for example, the idea that you can have a household that doesn’t consist of one provider male and a bunch of dependents, *and* you can also have a household that doesn’t consist of two fungible co-equal earners each half-financing a significant lifestyle upgrade, and that functional households don’t have to have any one particular shape to them. Most geek spaces I’ve ever been in, have been mixed economy to some degree. Geek households seem to come in a whole variety of shapes. There seems to be a greater acceptance of people helping or even supporting unrelated adults in many geek spaces in ways that I haven’t seen outside of geek culture, which is where we get the conversation about “that guy on the couch” but it’s also why it’s a space I’ve been able to stay in since becoming a low income person with chronic pain. (We really, really need to have a conversation about the geek culture’s problem with grifters and con artists, though. And geek culture could probably *use* a little more conversation about codependency. But this is a serious place where I don’t know how to not throw out babies with the bathwater, because that same discussion is where Toxic Independence came out of. And how to have that conversation but not fuck over the very, very many disabled people in geek culture? I don’t know.) The privilege and ableism assumptions in Toxic Independence made the whole thing fall apart like a house of cards when confronted with the Great Recession and actual intersectionality discourse. Also, the pendulum swing toward online transparency and vulnerability made it so that we began to actually see more of the shape of each other’s lives - and this revealed that so much of Toxic Independence was based on smoke and mirrors. Sometimes the environment around us changes. In the 80s, it was possible to be totally self-contained the way that the books told us to be, on a much lower income than would be required now. In the 80s, you could live like this and be middle income. It’s much harder when you actually have to Now, in many spaces, you probably have to be high professional income to pull this off, at minimum, *and* it assumes you will never end up primary financial support or primary caregiver for *anyone* (unless you’re wealthy enough to not require any kind of mutualistic relationship with any co-caregivers.) (This is a way that traditionalism actually was part of the death knell, I suspect. It tries to hold onto a family shape that even predates Toxic Independence *and* it explicitly identifies Toxic Independence - under other names - as a problem.) Lots of people have had to fundamentally change the shape of their households and lives to *remain* middle class, whereas 80s psychology around being middle class was hugely about shedding as many dependencies as possible. You can only really be totally self-contained the way that the books told us to be in the 80s, if you are financially stable, if your parents are financially well set, and if you have no dependents, and if your social space allows absolutely no weaker parties. It’s clear to me that while Boomers could carry on with Toxic Independence (so long as they actually retire affluent), Toxic Independence stopped working for a lot of Gen X. Most Gen Xrs I know are having to juggle multiple dependencies. Toxic Independence just does not work for the middle class of the Sandwich Generation. Many, many ideas get thrown away because of the Memetic Race to the Bottom; the Memetic Race to the Bottom can make lots of perfectly sound issues very, very difficult to seriously engage, and often the entire framework has to be thrown away. Which means that if there was a grievance by a marginalized party that started the whole conversation, the whole discussion has been taken away from them and the milestone shifted. (This has happened with any discussion of cultural appropriation that isn’t centered specifically in ethnically/racially specific contexts, for example.) When something is in its end phases, you’ll notice that younger people are not taking that idea up. Newer experts aren’t exploring it. The original fans or adherents will still be there, though, and they’ll eventually get older. But the ideas they talk about, will stay within their group, and the memetic space they occupy will lose broad relevance. There is always life experience, educational background, professional context (was this a conversation between academics? Was it a policy conversation?), and *specificity* (such as, specific events - for example, *specific* grievances) in the original conversation, and when the ideas scale, it becomes a race to the bottom for whichever member of the general public (who was the least involved in the original conversation) has the least nuanced, broadest, most authoritarian, most prescriptive interpretation. And this is what happened to codependency, how it devolved from something that actually had a specific meaning and context within addiction psychology (and to my knowledge, still do), to a set of toxic social memes that mainly were about providing a social scaffold for 80s/90s middle class/yuppie selfishness culture - a way to weaponize what amounted to Applied Objectivism 101. I’ve found it really hard to talk about codependency for years because of this. For example, I don’t feel like I’ve met anyone younger than Gen X who identifies as codependent unless they’re actually using it in an addiction/recovery context; that is not the language that Millennials and Zoomers seem to be using. I feel like it’s mostly Boomers, Jones, and Xrs that I’ve heard use these concepts, and I’ve stopped hearing them used by Xrs so much in the past 15 years.

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selfcallednowhere · 5 years ago

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March 4, 2018, San Francisco, CA

I was really excited about this show, the second at the Fillmore in as many nights, because I knew they'd be changing the setlist up a fair amount, as they always do when they play more than one show in a row in the same place. I was even more excited when a bit before the show Flans posted on Facebook that there would be fifteen new songs, which was practically a full half of the show!

They opened with "Pencil Rain"--that one was definitely a surprise. I think the only time I've seen that song outside of the two Lincoln shows I've been to was at one of the Brooklyn New Year's Eve shows a few months before this. I don't think it's one of the absolute best songs on Lincoln, there are definitely other songs I'd rather see, but any song from that album is gonna be some degree of amazing, so it was definitely cool to see it.

Afterwards, Flans said that they know it's disappointing when bands play too many new songs (WRONG--or at least, wrong when the new songs in question are as fantastic as the ones on I Like Fun!), so when they said they were going to play a new song we should pretend it was our favorite song, and they will accept fake emotion.

They played "All Time What," then John said they should introduce the next song by talking about "what makes this song so this song-y."

The song was "Why Does the Sun Shine?", once again with JF singing and JL talking. The heat and light of the sun were caused by the nuclear reaction between "things made out of stuff, microscopic dust, the feelings that separate us, and death." (The last couple made it a very Linnellian list.) There was also some adorable spazziness from him.

After that Flans said half the show would be different than the night before and the other half would be "mind-numbingly the same." He said we'd see that the banter we thought was improvised wasn't (he was joking, but I did see them recycle some banter on this tour, to my slight disillusionment). Then John said that they wouldn't be playing the songs we came back for, and Flans said they were all about "delivering disappointment" and were like General Tso's chicken.

Then Flans said he'd just gotten Netflix and so has been watching a lot of Netflix, including a documentary he'd just watched about the czars. He said that also today "I went to a restaurant where everything was fried, because who wants to live forever?" and that he was "just living my vampire life." Then he said, "We have a day off in Eugene, because who would want a day off in San Francisco? And you wonder why we're bitter." Then he asked John, "How are your problems?" "My problems are awesome."

Next they played "Mammal," which was quite exciting, and then came the next episode in the continuing saga of "Will John Linnell ever manage to successfully sing 'Mrs. Bluebeard' without screwing up the lyrics somehow?" This time he managed to get very close to the end smoothly, and I was trying to somehow send him some sort of mental encouragement ("Almost there! I believe in you!"), but then he messed up the very end, siiiiigh. At this point I pretty much gave up and resigned myself to the fact that he was never going to manage to get it right.

Next they played "She's Actual Size." I've seen this song a ton, but outside of a couple of Apollo 18 shows in the past few years it's almost all been contained within the confines of the very very first shows I went to on the Mink Car tour, back when it featured the epic Dial-A-Drum-Solo bit with Dan Hickey, which made this another surprise. It is a good song both on the album and live, but I've never been a fan of part of the arrangement they've used all the times I've seen it, where towards the end it gets way slowed down and Flans is singing in falsetto and all that (I'm fine with his falsetto at other times, it just bugs me in this one specific instance). But up until that point seeing it was fun.

Next was "The Statue Got Me High," to my great disappointment on keyboard again, but this time I managed to push myself past that disappointment and still really dig the performance, which was good because it's very close to the top in my list of all-time most-beloved songs and I do want to actually be able to enjoy it.

After that John got his accordion on ("Oh now you do," I couldn't help thinking). He introduced the next song as being "one of our tired old songs." When they started playing I saw that was an assessment I most definitely would not agree with, as the song was another one of my all-time favs (it was in fact my favorite song way back when I started getting more deeply into TMBG when I was in high school): "Turn Around"! So I was thrilled about that, of course!

Next they played "When the Lights Come On," which remains my favorite of the new songs they've actually been doing live to see. Afterwards, Flans said that it was from their new album I Like Fun, "available on Bar/None records and tapes." Then he said they really do have it available on vinyl, and that the vinyl was made in the Czech Republic, which is where they make the good stuff. John said if you want "the flat ones that actually play" you have to go there. Then Flans said that records look like calendars, and then was joking about someone in the audience who made a noise like they thought that was "a cruel burn."

Next they played "The Mesopotamians." I'd actually managed to enjoy it the night before after feeling burned out on it for some time, but this time I felt sick of it again.

Afterwards, Flans pointed out that the Oscars were currently happening (I actually didn't know that until he said it--I don't pay much attention to that sort of thing), and that we were all "out of the loop about something that's going to be appalling everyone." Then he was talking about when they announced the wrong winner for Best Picture last year--"What a shitshow. That was the ultimate 'you had one job.'"

They played "This Microphone," and then another surprise that I was really excited to see: "Cyclops Rock"! That's one of my favs on Mink Car and it's totally kickass live (I am an eternal sucker for really high-energy rockin' Flansongs live), and it had popped up a couple of times at other shows I'd been to recently, but not much, so yeh it was a lot of fun.

Next they talked about how Dial-A-Song is back. Flans said some of the songs have had "startling" videos that have gotten Youtube comments just saying something like "Fuck." John said, "That's the response we've been hoping for for 35 years." Then he said his favorite comment they've received is "What sorcery is this?" He asked Flans if he objected to the "Fuck" cos it needed a parental advisory (this amused me cos Flans swears like crazy), and Flans said not at all.

Then they returned to the previous night's discussion of this Tony Robbins guy. Flans said, "He's not an evangelist cos he doesn't have a soul," and told us again that he'd just watched a "fake documentary" about him. John said their conversation wasn't accurately conveying how "completely crazy" he is. Flans said that he "uses disruptive language to break down barriers of communication," which basically means saying "fuck" to "someone who looks related to my great-aunt." John said that was disruptive, and Flans agreed that it was "like being slapped in the face is disruptive." Then John said that if they tried they could be "the Tony Robbins of rock bands."

They closed out the first set the same way they did the night before: "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal" straight into "Birdhouse in Your Soul," which is seriously SO MUCH ROCKIN' OUT AT ONCE, it's almost too much.

The second set started with the Quiet Storm contra-alto clarinet version of "Older" like usual. Then Flans made Marty play part of some Phil Collins song again (or maybe it was a Genesis song and not him solo, I don't even know, I hate Phil Collins and did not recognize it).

They played "I Like Fun," and then Curt got out his euphonium. Flans said the euphonium is what they give you in band when you're too small to play the tuba, and John said euphonium isn't the real name of the instrument, it's a euphemism (a joke that made the word nerd in me happy).

So next they played "Shoehorn with Teeth," which is always a ton of fun live, and I really loved it on accordion (what, as opposed to all the songs I don't love on accordion?). Marty was playing some big bell, and Flans was trying to figure out what it was. Then, he said it wasn't what he thought it was, and he was just confused cos he was getting high from the pot people were smoking. John said it was particularly stinky pot (I'm reasonably bothered by the smell of pot just as a general rule, but I can confirm that whatever people were smoking here seemed to smell even worse than usual), and Flans said it's what they say is "the good stuff" on cop shows. Then John said something about a character played by Tony Roberts in Serpico, who's supposed to be the cool cop but isn't really. Then they were saying that their cultural references are going to be very specific now--they're only going to talk about him, Tony Robbins, Tom Robbins, and Tom Robinson.

Next they played "A Self Called Nowhere," and I know I'm writing some variation of "it was so incredibly special for me" in every single one of these reviews, but that's because it's always true. I know the first time is always going to be the most special time, just because it was the first and I'd been wanting this so intensely for such a long time, but something really great about the times I've seen it since the first couple is they've included Curt on trumpet (since he wasn't with them for the early part of the tour), and I always think he adds so much to the songs he appears on.

Next they played "How Can I Sing Like a Girl?" I saw that one on accordion a ton when they were doing it duo a lot on I think it was the Join Us tour, and it was great that way--I preferred it duo just cos my heart is now and forever all about duo stuff, but this arrangement was fantastic too.

Next they played "Istanbul," the duo version with them being really silly. During the part where Flans is saying "Take me back, please take me back," in falsetto and John's saying "Nooooo" in a really deep voice, John said "Even Tony Robbins says no" one of the times. Like the other times I've seen them do it duo on this tour, the full band came back for the crazy jam session at the end.

They played "Particle Man," then did another awesome big surprise song: "Dig My Grave"--GOD is that song fun live. (It's only just now occurring to me how many of the songs that I was happily surprised by during this run of shows are from Apollo 18, and having the thought that they would've needed to rehearse them for the Apollo 18 show they'd done the previous month, so that's probably why they were sprinklig them into the set here and there.) There were strobes during it, and afterwards Flans said they should've mentioned that there were strobes, but they'd forgotten, and John said that after there were strobes they couldn't remember anything (they'd had roughly the same exchange at the aforementioned Apollo 18 show). Flans said it was like how the kick drum gives you a heart attack, and then recessitates you, and John said Marty always has to play the kick drum an even number of times or they'll die. Flans said "Clear!" (all dramatically like they do on medical TV shows), and then said he doesn't even understand why they say that, and John said "I think that's a Scientology thing." Then Flans said maybe it's just a blessing.

They played "Wicked Little Critta" (as usual the best part about the song for me was watching the closeups of John's hands on his Kaoss Pad and keyboard that were being projected on the screen on the back of the stage--that's about the only time I actually like the screen being there, normally I just find it unpleasantly distracting), and then another big surprise song: the title track from that album. That stirred up a lot of Feelings for me, as it was the very first song they played at my very first show.

They played "I Left My Body," then Flans said that they'd someday figure out a way to do a three-night stand. He said they'd probably have to become a jam band. John said people didn't seem very enthusiastic, and Flans said they'd be drawing an entirely different crowd. John asked if people were yelling "Gross," but then he figured out that they were yelling about the Black Crowes, and Flans explained (like the day before) that there was a poster in their dressing room from a time they played five nights in a row here at the Fillmore and that the poster was "mocking" them.

Someone was yelling out for "Spider" and Flans said that they'd play it even though they're from New York, where the rule is you're not allowed to play requests. He said he'd gone to a sandwich shop where a woman asked the guy to heat up her sandwich and he said "We believe you'd prefer it cold." They actually did play it, but John looked so unenthusiastic when Flans said they were going to. But I mean he didn't really have much choice, he would've looked like a jerk if he'd refused to after Flans already said they were going to. Anyway it was an interesting version of the song, particularly since he played it on accordion (he just happened to already have it on for the following song).

The next song in question was "Subliminal," my reaction to which can be summed up by the "Oh fuck yes" that popped into my head as soon as they started playing it. As my friend Ant put it "That song is better live than it has any right to be," and it's another classic I've only seen a handful of times. I was disappointed by the lack of fake backwards singing at the end, but otherwise it was perfect.

Next they played "Let Me Tell You About My Operation" (my current fav Flansong and absolutely amazing live, so always a welcome addition to the set!). Then there were band intros and the main set wrapping up with "Doctor Worm."

The first encore started with "Spy." During the improv part (which is really what makes that song live), John was playing a sample I heard him employ at several other shows, but I'm not sure what the source is, it's just a woman singing "Now the night has gone."

Next they played "Fingertips," which I've always really loved live but I'm sorry to say I've been getting into burnout with it just recently due to overexposure. However, this particular performance did feature a notable variation: During "I Walk Along Darkened Corridors," Dan appeared up in the balcony and finished the song there! (He actually might've shown up there earlier than that, I'm not sure, but that was when I noticed him.)

The second encore started with "Ana Ng," so between that and "Everything Right is Wrong Again" the previous night I got both my tattoo songs in San Francisco. And they closed the show with "New York City."

So all in all this was a most excellent show. After my prior frustration on this trip with having no variation in the setlist between the first show and the second, it was really exciting to get so many different and exciting surprises between these two Fillmore shows.

The final and really not very exciting JL wardrobe report: the long-sleeved black shirt made another appearance.

#tmbg #show reviews

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thedcdunce · 6 years ago

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The Atom

“Size isn't matter.” - The Atom

Real Name: Raymond “Ray” Palmer

Gender: Male

Height: 6′ 0″

Weight: 180 lbs (82 kg)

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Auburn

Powers:

Microscopic Stability

Abilities:

Judo

Physics

Swordsmanship

Weaknesses:

Missing Hand

Equipment:

Bio-Belt

Katarthan's Sword

Indigo Tribe Staff

Universe:

Earth-One

New Earth

Base of Operations:

Ivy Town, Connecticut

Morlaidh, Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

Citizenship: American

Parents:

David Palmer; father

Susan Palmer; mother

Marital Status:

Divorced (Jean Loring; wife)

Widowed (Laethwen; wife)

Occupation:

Professor

Scientist

Adventurer

Education: PhD Ivy University

First Appearance: Showcase #34 (October, 1961)

Last Appearance: Titans Vol 2 #38 (October, 2011)

Powers

Microscopic Stability: For some reason, Ray's physiology allows him to not explode when he is miniaturized unlike other living things which explode after a short time of being miniaturized.

Abilities

Judo: Ray Palmer often finds himself in situation where physical violence become necessary. As such, he has developed a proficiency in the martial art judo.

Physics: Dr. Palmer has a Ph.D. in physics and was a full professor at Ivy University.

Swordsmanship: The Atom used a long sword as a weapon while living among the Katarthans, gaining considerable skill in its use.

Weaknesses

Missing Hand: He allowed Baracuda to cut off his left hand to save Ryan Choi from the miniverse.

Equipment

Bio-Belt: Originally, Ray's size/weight controls were located in his belt buckle. However, he later moved them to his gloves for greater accessibility and swifter transitions, and in the costume he wore after his days in New Morlaidh, had an encepholpathic grid in his mask that allowed him to do it mentally.

Size Alteration: Able to shrink his body to varying degrees, achieved by storing most of his mass in a pocket dimension. As the Atom, Ray can assume any size from his normal six-foot stature down to sub-microscopic, although he generally deems a height of six inches as most functional.

Mass Alteration: Able to instantly alter his molecular density to whatever degree he desires. Ray can also assume any weight at any height—up to his full 180 pounds.

Flight: He is able to glide on air currents and stiff breezes. A favorite travel method Ray had, was to call some location on the telephone; when the intended phone answered, he could shrink down enough to literally travel through the phone lines in seconds to emerge out of the answering phone.

Superhuman Strength: By shifting all his mass into his fists he can punch with incredible force.

Dimensional Travel: Ray found out that by shrinking beyond the subatomic scale he could slip beneath reality at the quantum level to traverse around the multiverse at will.

Katarthan's Sword: The Atom used a long sword as a weapon while living among the Katarthans, gaining considerable skill in its use.

Indigo Tribe Staff

Personality

Ray Palmer is a hard-working, dedicated man. In fact, "dedicated" is hardly the word for it; "driven" is a little closer to the truth. Once Ray starts working on a problem or puzzle, there is absolutely no stopping him. This single-minded pursuit of his goals is more than a little responsible for Ray's shattered marriage, though it has occasionally come in handy to Ray the crime fighter. In spite of his obsessiveness, Ray is a level-headed hero and a likeable human being.

History

Ray Palmer is the Atom, the Mighty Mite, a superhero with the ability to shrink to incredible sizes while retaining his full mass, making him a formidable combatant. He was a member of the original Justice League of America, where he gained a great deal of respect from his peers. Aside from his crime-fighting career, he is also one of the world's top scientific minds, given his background as a brilliant physicist. He is capable of shrinking to subatomic sizes, and explores the universe on a frontier unknown to any other man.

Origins

Ray Palmer grew up in Ivy Town, Connecticut where he studied physics at Ivy University, under renowned scientists such as Alpheus P. Hyatt. He began dating law student Jean Loring, eventually becoming exclusive. Both graduating and working in their professions, Ray would frequently ask Jean to marry him, but she would always decline, wanting to establish herself as a lawyer before getting married and settling down.

While a physics graduate student, Ray Palmer discovered a tiny fragment of white dwarf star material that had fallen to Earth. Investigating matter compression, Ray theorized that if he were to grind a lens from this fragment and focus ultraviolet light through it, he could shrink anything struck by the light down to a fraction of its original size. Ray rushed off to his laboratory, tried the experiment, and found that it worked exactly as he had imagined but the objects he shrunk became unstable and exploded moments later.

A couple of days later, a disillusioned Ray and some friends became trapped in a cave-in while out spelunking. Ray was forced to risk instability and use the shrinking lens on himself in order to escape the cave and save the lives of his friends. For some reason, however, Ray didn't explode and returned to his normal height. In fact, the shrinking lens worked on his body much better than he had expected, and he developed a set of control devices that gave him limited control over his weight as well as his size. Ray later hypothesized that some unknown "x-factor" in his genetic makeup prevented his atoms from becoming unstable, though many scientists now believe that Ray's ability to shrink was actually made possible by the "Metagene", which is the source of many superhumans' powers.

Early Career

Keeping his discoveries a secret, even from his Jean, Ray created the identity of the Atom and began a career of crime fighting in Ivy Town. In his first recorded adventure, the Atom stopped the crook Carl Ballard from exploiting the tiny alien Kulan Dar, to commit his crimes. Foiling this plot, the Atom became a trusted hero in Ivy Town, and established a great working relationship with the local police. Next, the Atom defended the wealthy Doctor Gordon Heath from a plot against him orchestrated by his caretaker Bates.

The Atom's heroics made him an ally of the CIA, who sent him overseas to rescue Professor Anton Kraft from foreign spies. Returning home, he stopped crooked newspaper reporter Greg Phillips from stealing valuable chess pieces. The Atom met his first super-villain when battling Jason Woodrue, an exile from the Floral Dimension, who attempted to take over the Earth with specially bred plants. The Atom defeated Woodrue with the help of Maya Queen of the Dryads that live in the Floral Dimension. Atom next stopped jewel thief Bart Tranter with the help of the self proclaimed Mr. Odd and recaptures Carl Ballard when he masters Kulan Dar's teleportation abilities.

The Atom would next be used in a bizarre plot by Amos Fortune and other villains to destroy the Justice League of America, using a de-memorizor ray to pit the Atom against the League. With the aid of the Atom, the team of heroes would defeat Fortune and his minions and elect the Atom as a member of their group. Next, the Atom would have his first clash with Chronos, a criminal obsessed with time.

Reconnecting with Professor Hyatt, Ray would learn of Hyatt's experiments with the Time Pool, a device of Hyatt's creation allowing him to "fish" for items out of a tiny portal that can bring items through time. As the Atom, Ray would travel back time to ancient Middle East where he would help a young boy named Hassan best a group of thieves and bring back a golden Dinar for Hyatt's study. When simultaneous nuclear explosions on Earth-One and a parallel world causes the two to merge, the Atom helps the JLA prevent the inhabitants of that world from destroying three major cities on Earth to prevent the cataclysm and work together to revolve the problem.

When visiting Happy Harbor, Rhode Island to give a lecture as Ray Palmer, the Atom comes to the rescue of Entron Kol a visitor from a sub-atomic world who is trapped on Earth and uses a wish fulfillment device to try to draw help to his plight. Returning to Ivy Town, the Atom foils an attempt by a crooked photographer named Elkins from framing Tom Parks for crimes he did not commit. Ray would next attend a JLA meeting were the team would ponder how to get out of a dangerous scenario posed by one of their fans.

When Ray's colleague, the world-traveling Ted Ralston is turned into diamond by a strange stone he brought back from one of his expeditions, Ray would travel into the microscopic world inside the gem where he would clash with the Atlantean tyrant Karl Jat. Next he would foil jewel thief Fred Harris' plot to rob a lake side community using local folklore to hoax the people into thinking the thefts were perpetuated by a ghost. The Atom would next be targeted with the rest of the JLA by the Tornado Tyrant. In another adventure with the Justice League, Ray would aid the League in liberating the people of the micro-world of Starzl, whose three android defenders had turned evil.

Back in Ivy Town, Atom would foil a plot by stage manager Howard Crane from framing former astronaut Peter Venner for crimes he did not commit and in a Time Pool adventure travels back to 18th century London to foil Dick Turpin from stealing the king's gold. The Atom and the rest of the JLA would next be forced into exile from the planet Earth due to the manipulations of Dr. Density, however the JLA would foil this plot, ending their exile. When preventing an invasion of Earth from the Thalens, the Atom would team up with extraterrestrial lawman Hawkman and his partner Hawkgirl, forming a long lasting partnership between the trio.

On another Justice League case, the Atom and his fellow JLA members would clash with Spaceman X. Later the Atom would be present with the JLA in their first team up with the Justice Society of America, their counterparts from Earth-Two, against the Crime Champions, a group of villains from both universes. While on the home front, Ray would battle an escaped Dr. Light, stop Alfred Trask an art gallery employee working the masterpieces his employer has on display, would battle an evil doppelganger created of himself created out of a lab experiment gone awry and thwart an attempted kidnapping of the king of France during a Time Pool adventure to the year 1609. His next meeting with the JLA would be less eventful with the group relating their battle against Queen Bee while Ray would tell them of his encounter against Dr. Light.

Working with the CIA once again, the Atom would go to Vienna to collect the plans for a new anti-gravity metal, however exposes it as a communist plot to destroy America, and back home foils Doro Briggs' theft scheme involving hoaxing people into believing that she can transform into a swan. The Atom aids his fellow Justice League colleagues in once more defeating and capturing their old foe Kanjar Ro and Kraad the Conqueror, tyrant ruler of a sidereal dimension.

Back home, Ray would attend a Ivy University ten-year reunion, where he would foil Jack Archer's attempt to use hypnosis to steal a priceless Buddha statue, followed by a cruise with Jean Loring where he would stymie invaders from Randath. Next Atom and a number of his fellow JLA members would be rapidly aged by Despero, but later restored to normal following Despero's defeat at the hands of his fellow JLA members who were unaffected.

On the home front, Ray would find his powers being used for crime when he is temporarily the prisoner of a crook who uses his body as a power source for a ray gun and later uses the Time Pool to travel to Baltimore circa 1849 where he helps Edgar Alan Poe solve a mystery involving stolen gold coins. Atom would next aid the Flash in stopping an invasion of Earth by Attila-5. Later the Atom and his friends in the Justice League would be manipulated by the ultra-galactic "I", an evil being who's very existence was threatened by the JLA's continued success.

In Ivy Town, Ray would clash once more with Chronos and clear the good name of his civilian identity when he is accused of a crime he did not commit. Back with the Justice League, the Atom is present when Green Lantern relates a solo adventure to the group and would be among the super-powered members of the League to go on "strike" following a UN sanction preventing them from using their powers, all a plot orchestrated by the evil Headmaster Mind. Still with the League, he would be present when a video created by Superman's father Jor-El, regarding the other planets he considered sending his son prior to Krypton's destruction.

Resuming his activities in Ivy Town, Ray would battle his own costume when it briefly gained sentience and aid Doc Magnus in rebuilding the Metal Men and stop the evil Uranium. When visiting his old classmate Ed Thayer, Atom would get caught up in an attempt by foreign spies trying to steal Thayer's Illusion-Maker device and foil the teleporting Hyper-Thief's robberies. Atom is also present when the Justice League invites his ally Hawkman into the group and in attendance of Aquaman's marriage to Mera.

Next, while on vacation the Ray becomes the temporary pawn of criminal inventor Andrew Frost, battles Brain Storm with the JLA, crushes the Hooded Hijackers, and uses the Time Pool to travel to the 19th Century, where he comes to the rescue of writer Jules Verne. Atom would become an unwilling pawn of the Endless One, and is forced to fight some of his fellow JLA members and when restored to normal becomes a victim in one of Dr. Destiny's plots to get revenge against the JLA.

The Atom would have to combat side-effects of his Time Pool adventures when battling the evil Phantom Mask, and spend a brief time thinking he was a flea in a flea circus when spies attempt to replace Ray Palmer with one of their own agents. He would next aid Zatanna search for her missing father on a micro-world ruled by the Druid. Later, joins with the Justice League in once more battling Brain Storm. Going solo, Atom prevents crooks from benefiting from his "stool-pigeon" computer and with the aid of Maya and the Dryads posing as Leprechauns, convince Arthur Ennis to fill a witness report with the police following a robbery. During his next team up with Hawkman, and Hawkgirl against Matter Master, the trio of heroes would trust their secret identities to each other. Atom and his fellow JLA members would team up with the JSA against the evil Johnny Thunder of Earth-One who has manipulated the Thunderbolt into creating Earth-A and the Lawless League, criminal versions of the Justice League.

The CIA once more hires the Atom to stop a group of Russian spies who are attempting to manipulate Jean Loring's father in an attempt to get at the Atom, and on another Time Pool to 18th century London where the Atom prevents one of Professor Hyatt's ancestors from being thrown in debtors' prison. Atom would also aid his fellow JLA members in preventing global disaster and conflict inadvertently created by Andrew Helm's Corti-Conscience machine. Acting solo, he stops a common thug named Eddie Gordon from enslaving the Bat-Knights of the Elvaran people. Atom next helps Batman, Robin, and Elongated Man capture "Numbers" Garvey and his gang.

The Atom also aids the Justice League in defeating the Key during his attack. Returning to Ivy Town, the Atom makes up a story about alien invaders to make the return of a radion-ball sound like a more exciting adventure and foils a robbery plot orchestrated by groundskeeper Billy Knowels. Atom's powers are briefly pilfered by Professor Ivo in a plot against the Flash, when the Flash relates the story to his fellow JLA members including the Atom, they are unaware as they are not using their powers at the time. Next Atom would join the Justice League and Metamorpho in battling the Unimaginable.

After liberating the Floral Dimension and Earth from destruction at the hands of Jason Woodrue, the Atom would join the JLA in curing Batman, Green Lantern, and Flash from a plague infected upon them by the Unimaginable. Atom would return to Ivy Town, to foil a series of robberies orchestrated by Bill Jameson, the so-called "Man in the Ion-Mask". Working with the CIA once more, the Atom would travel to Russia to foil Boris Kalumchuk's plot to poison America with irradiated gold. Ray would next join the Justice League of America in their battle against the Shaggy Man.

Engagement to Jean Loring

Back in Ivy Town, the Atom would earn a new villain in the Bug-Eyed Bandit. During this adventure Jean accepts proposal for marriage for fear that Ray would eventually become too absorbed in his work to ask her anymore. When both Earth-One and Earth-Two are threatened by the Anti-Matter Man, the Atom would be one of the Justice League and Justice Society members gathered to combat the threat.

Going solo in Ivy Town once more, the Atom would crush the Panther Gang and going on another Time Pool journey to 18th century France where he foils an assassination attempt against Benjamin Franklin. Returning to the JLA, the Atom would aid them in stopping the Lord of Time from manipulating Vietnam war hero Sgt. Eddie Brent. Returning home, Atom would clash with once more against his old foe Chronos. Later, when the entire population of Ivy Town suddenly shrinks, Ray learns that a chunk of white dwarf star landing in the city water supply is the cause, and cures the people with no ill side effects. Ray would next work together with his Earth-Two counterpart in foiling a plot by the Thinker to rob Earth-One and escape to Earth-Two. At a JLA meeting, Atom, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Batman and Elongated Man would all learn that of Zatanna's success in freeing her father with the help of magical proxies that she created of the heroes following her respective encounters with each of them.

Ray would return to Ivy Town where he would stumble upon and foil another plot by Eddie Gordon to manipulate the Elvarian Bat-Kights. He is also present when the JLA must face the evil Mastermind, who has turned many of the League members weapons against them. Atom would team-up with Hawkman once more to search for the missing Johnny Burns, a reformed crook, to reunite him with his sick mother. During the encounter, they battle Toyboy, Johnny's evil half brought to life when Mrs. Burns is briefly endowed with mental powers following a scientific accident. Rejoining the JLA, Atom would foil the Royal Flush Gang's attempt to destroy the League.

When paralyzed in a lab accident, Ray manages to get Jean to activate his size-control devices causing him to shrink to microscopic size, freeing him of the paralysis. Before returning to Earth, he would save the sub-atomic people of Palonds from the evil Honds. The Atom would also be present to cheer on a UN-sponsored charity race between Superman and the Flash. He would later team-up with Aquaman against the plankton creature called Galg the Destroyer. After a rematch against the Bug-Eyed Bandit, the Atom would team-up with the Elongated Man against Chronos. After battling the Big Gang, witnessing another race between Superman and the Flash, foiling "Smarts" and his gang, Atom has another Time Pool adventure to London to prevent Colonel Tom Blood from stealing the crown jewels from the Tower of London.

The Atom is one of the members of the Justice League enslaved by Queen Bee, until they are saved by Batgirl. In another revenge plot against the Justice League, Dr. Destiny briefly switches the League's bodies with some of their greatest foes. For a time, Atom would be forced to trade bodies with Jason Woodrue, until Dr. Destiny's ultimate defeat. When twin transmitter towers on Earth-One and Earth-Two cause people to rapidly age either forward or backward, Earth-Two's Atom would have to briefly battle a young and hot-headed Ray Palmer before destroying the towers and returning everyone back to normal. Atom would next work with Batman in foiling the Cannoneer from robbing the Brotherhood Express. The Atom would also be involved in a Justice League case where the group would get embroiled in a gang war between the Pyrotekniks and the Bulleteers in a complex scheme hatched by mobster Leo Locke.

The Atom would soon gain an unusual ally in his next adventure, Major Mynah, a mynah bird that he meets foiling a group of Viet Cong soldiers from raiding a Cambodian temple while on an archeological dig in the region. With the bird injured in the battle, Atom takes the helpful creature to Hawkman who replaces the bird's broken wings with mechanical ones. Major Mynah becomes Ray's pet, following him in both his civilian and costumed identities. After helping the Atom capture crooks, Major Mynah's involvement almost tips Jean off to Ray's secret identity and so he comes up with a method of disguising Mynah for future adventures. The Atom would return to the Justice League and foil the Key's plot of using Superman to destroy the JLA and later battle Dr. Anomaly. Ray and Major Mynah would next go into action to stop an invasion from the alien Physalians from feeding on the humans they have captured. The Atom is one of the JLA members seemingly killed by T.O. Morrow, he is restored to life following Morrow's defeat at the hands of the JSA, their new ally Red Tornado and surviving members of the JLA.

Justice League Mainstay

As time would go on, Ray would eventually get involved in less frequent solo adventures, often teaming up with either Hawkman or getting involved in many of the Justice League's cases.

Ray joins Carter and Sheira Hall on vacation in Mexico City and battles Telka and his followers. With the Justice League, the Atom battles the laughable Generalissimo Demmy Gog of Offalia, in a pathetic attempt to conquer the world. The Atom next is hired by the FBI to break up a spy ring. He succeeds thanks to the intervention of Major Mynah. This would mark the Atom's last use of Major Mynah. The bird's ultimate fate is unknown. Atom also finds himself involved in a revenge plot enacted by criminal Jason Madden, who attempts to kill his former accomplice Chuck Wheeler. Atom aids the Justice League in clearing Green Arrow's name in a murder frame-up plotted by Headmaster Mind and the Tattooed Man. Ray is involved in a Justice League investigation of the new costumed vigilante known as the Creeper.

While attending a science convention with Carter Hall, Ray and Carter are attacked by a man resembling Carter. This gets them embroiled in a battle against the Shiva, Hindu goddess of destruction, who with her army of Nether-Men is attempting to win back worship of humanity. Through the efforts of the Atom, Hawkman and Hawkgirl the plot is thwarted. The Atom would join his fellow Justice League colleagues in traveling to Mars and aiding their comrade Martian Manhunter against the evil Commander Blanx, a battle ends in J'onn J'onzz's resignation from the team. Ray next goes into action as the Atom to foil a plot by rival university professor Horace McByrd to discredit Ray among his peers. Ray next joins the JLA and Hawkgirl in saving Hawkman who has been turned into salt by a group of demons, fighting off their minions a biker gang known as the Gruesome Ghouls in the process. When Professor Heinrich Von Rilk is almost assaulted by Ivy University students for destroying an electron-microscope, Ray learns that Von Rilk did it to prevent an invasion from a microscopic world. Investigating the claims as the Atom, Ray confirms Heinrich's story, and stops the invasion by defeating its vanguard, a creature known as Ag. Atom would be among the members of the Justice League and Justice Society who would ban together to save both universes from the threat of Aquarius, a living star creature bent on revenge for being exiled by his superiors.

When Jean Loring is kidnapped by the people of Jimberen, a microscopic world who believe that she is the descendant of their ruler, Atom and Hawkman team-up to rescue her. However, due to the radiation the people of Jimberen expose Jean to, she is driven insane from the ordeal. With technology on Hawkman and Hawkgirl's homeworld of Thanagar making it possible to cure Jean, Atom would entrust her to the care of Hawkgirl.

Focusing on Justice League business, Atom would be one of the members who would accidentally have an evil duplicate of himself created out of his ego, which would battle new Justice League member Black Canary. When an influential man named John Dough would attempt to turn the United States government against the JLA, manipulating Snapper Carr into betraying the group, the Atom would be involved in the conflict, which would reveal Dough to be none other than the Joker. Atom and the Justice League would soon setup shop in a new base, an orbital satellite above the Earth.

During this time, Atom and the other members of the JLA would team up with the Vigilante against the Doomsters, aliens who threatened to pollute the Earth.

Ray would ultimately learn that Hawkgirl's quest to restore Jean's sanity on Thanagar was met with trouble when both women's souls were stolen by Norch Lor, a scientist from Thanagar who's misguided intention to save the universe from the coming "end of all things" was attempting to collect the souls of all living beings in a Ghenna Box. With the help of Tomar-Re of the Green Lantern Corps, Ray and the Justice League would restore Hawkgirl and Jean's souls to their bodies, Jean however would still remain insane. Atom and Hawkman would travel together en route to Thanagar to try and get Jean the help she needs, and along the way run into the threat that Norch Lor was attempting to protect them from: The insane Jest-Master, who leaves all those in his path completely mad. With the help of the Justice League, Atom and Hawkman would defeat the Jest-Master. In the aftermath of the battle, Jean's constant exposure to Jest-Master's insanity rays would restore her sanity to normal. Returning to Earth, the Atom would once more join the Justice League and the Justice Society in preventing another threat to both Earth-One and Earth-Two. This time coming from a being called Creator2, whom by utilizing Red Tornado's connection to both realities, would attempt to merge the two universes together, threatening to destroy both. Atom and his colleagues would foil this plot, however the Spectre would seemingly perish in the process.

Sword of the Atom

Ray and Jean's marriage would become strained over time as Jean's law practice and Ray's devotion to both science and super-heroics would take time over their romance. Soon, Jean would begin an affair with her fellow lawyer Paul Hoben, which Ray would stumble upon one night. Realizing their marriage was on the rocks, Ray would decide to investigate White Dwarf star radiations he detected out of South America and decide to investigate it without Jean. Taking a flight with some drug runners, he would learn too much about an illegal cocaine field and prompting the pilots to attempt to kill Ray. However, the pilot would be shot and Ray would jump ship and shrink down to Atom size. Ray would be struck by lightning trapping him at a height of six inches. The plane would crash, and because one of the men aboard stole one of Ray's rings, the world would presume him dead and Jean would go on with her life and pursue her relationship with Paul. Ray meanwhile would find himself captured by aliens known as the Katarthans—small aliens whose ancestors were left on Earth centuries ago and live in a world of high technology and barbarism. With a revolt immanent, Ray would be captured along with members of a resistance led by Taren.

Forced into gladiator battles, Ray would learn the Katarthans' language and befriend Taren and learn that he hoped to overthrow their leader Caellich and marry princess Laethwen. The two men would become unknowing pawns of Deraegis who would seek to cause the people to revolt against Caellich so that he could rule. To this end, he would blind Taren, causing the people to protest. Taren, Atom, and Laethwen would escape the arena and flee into the jungles where they would reunite with the rebels. Knowing his end is near, Taren would turn over leadership of the rebels to Atom, and perish while the group fled an army of carnivorous ants. Atom and Laethwen would soon fall in love with each other. Atom would lead the warriors on to Moralaidh to launch a revolution. In the final battle, both Caellich and Deraegis would be slain, but not before Deraegis would activate an old star drive powered by a white dwarf star fragment. Attempting to save his newly adopted people, Ray would dive into the plant to try and stop the reactor from exploding. However the white star radiation would cause him to grow as it irradiated him and smash his way through. Growing to near human height, Ray would frighten the people away before the reactor exploded. Restored to his normal height and in a delirium caused by radiation exposure, Ray would pass out and be found by rescuers. Waking up in the hospital, Ray would come to realize that he no longer had an interest in returning to his old life and have moved on from Jean. Having learned that Jean had come to South America looking for him he would decide to finalize their divorce and try to find Laethwen again.

Returning to Ivy Town to settle his affairs, Ray would realize that there wold be no way to rekindle his romance with Jean. In repairing his size change belt, Ray would find that the process of shrinking would cause him great pain due to his absorption of massive amounts of white dwarf radiation and would fear that constantly changing his size could eventually kill him. Finalizing his divorce from Jean, Ray would put his money on an expedition back into South America, taking along with him writer Norman Brawler to chronicle the experience. The two men would run afoul of drug dealers and Ray would shrink down to Atom, giving up his normal height seemingly for the last time to help destroy the drug operation. Finding the Moralaidh tribe and being reunited with Laethwen, Ray would leave Norman to find his own way back. Norman would publish the tale in a book called The Atom's Farewell, which would become a best seller.

Ray would lead Laethwen's people in building a new New Moralaidh and rebuilding the alien societies lost technology, he and Laethwen would become wed as well. However, his past life could not stay away, as when Jean would marry Paul Hoben and when the newly weds would clear out Ray's lab she would accidentally shrink herself. In order to restore her to her normal height, Paul would have Norman Brawler lead him and Jean to find Ray. However, along the way, Jean would be captured by minions of rebel leader Torgul who had captured many of the Moralaidhian women including Laethwen. Ray would lead a mission to rescue the captured women, which would end in Torgul's death, and the freedom of his people. With Jean restored to her normal height, Ray and Laethwen would wish them farewell, Ray leaving Paul with his old size changing belt.

Ray would remain New Moralaidh's champion but would come at times to aid his old allies in the Justice League of America.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

When the evil Anti-Monitor attempted to destroy the entire multiverse, his opposing force the Monitor would sacrifice his life to shunt the five surviving realities into limbo, however they were slowly merging together causing chaos on all worlds and threatening their destruction in the process. Alexander Luthor, Jr. of Earth-Three and the Harbinger would gather heroes and villains from all realities in an attempt to rally their support in saving what was left of the multiverse. Atom would be among their numbers and would agree to aid in the effort.

Ray would be called in to examine the Red Tornado, who is recaptured by the heroes following a lengthy captivity under the Anti-Monitor who converted the android into an engine of destruction. However, despite the best efforts of the Atom and T.O. Morrow, the Red Tornado would self destruct, causing massive damage to the JLA Satellite, and apparently destroying the Red Tornado.

Later on in the Crisis, when a united group of super-villains from each surviving reality would attempt to conquer each earth, Atom would be among a group of super-heroes dispatched to Earth-S to attempt to quell the uprising in that reality. Although the heroes there were made prisoner, the Atom would be part of a counter attack of heroes that were uncaptured, and would succeed in freeing Billy Batson allowing the boy to change into Captain Marvel and turn the tides of battle.

Changes Caused by Crisis on Infinite Earths

Following the defeat of the Anti-Monitor, the surviving parallel worlds were combined to create a new universe. While, much of the Atom's Pre-Crisis history remains the same, many of his past adventures may have been altered or erased from existence entirely. In particular, Atom's encounters with Hawkman may be different given the extensive changes of Hawkman's origins. The Thanagarian Katar Hol is replaced in Post-Crisis history with Earth native Carter Hall the Hawkman formerly from Earth-Two.

In addition, due to the massive changes in the histories of his fellow JLA colleagues Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the Atom's history may have been altered by proxy and many of his adventures alongside these heroes no longer be part of history.

In addition, many of the adventures that the Atom had with the Justice League of America that involved traveling to other universes, particularly their encounters with the Justice Society of America on Earth-Two, likely no longer exist, or if they do, in a vastly different manner such that the multiversal threat was simply a threat to a single unified universe.

Lastly, the Atom's encounters with his Earth-Two counterpart may no longer be part of history, or if they are, they have been altered in such a way to accommodate the notion that these adventures only happened in a single universe as opposed to having occurred on Earth-One and Earth-Two.

Power of the Atom

The Katarthans and their village were soon wiped out by a horrible fire and the Atom returned to Ivy Town, only to find that one of his friends had written a book exposing Ray's secret identity in his absence. After battling various foes, such as Strobe, Humbug, and Swarm, Ray learned that a US Government agency had engineered the destruction of the Katarthans, in order to induce his return to the States. He avenged the Katarthans by permanently reducing the agents responsible for the massacre to six inches in height. Ray returned to Ivy Town just long enough to bid his friends farewell, and then briefly went into hiding.

Suicide Squad

The shrunken agents, now calling themselves the Micro Squad, vowed revenge on Ray. Ginsburg, one of their number, made an attempt on Ray's life, but died in the attempt. Ray approached Amanda Waller, who convinced him to fake his own death and secretly join the espionage unit known as the Suicide Squad. As a part of this mission, Ray went undercover and Adam Cray served in the Suicide Squad as the new Atom. Adam was killed by Blacksnake and Ray resumed the role of the Atom. Later still, he joined the then-current Justice League on a semi-active basis.

Teen Titans

Al Pratt, the original Atom, died during a battle against Extant in Zero Hour. During this event, Ray was also hit with a blast of chrono-energy that de-aged him into a youth again. He would go on to become a member of the Teen Titans.

Identity Crisis

In time, Ray and Jean were able to be friends again. In the divorce she had received half of his patents. As a gesture of friendship, Jean decided to sign them back to him. Little did he know that this was but one of many facets to Jean's deadly scheme to win Ray back. Since their divorce, Jean had somehow become seriously deranged and believed that the only way to be reunited with Ray was to force the issue. Incredibly, she devised an elaborate plan to endanger Sue Dibny, wife of Elongated Man Ralph Dibny. Jean was privy to the fact that every year on her birthday, Ralph would be absent solving a custom-tailored mystery devised by Sue. She bypassed the Dibnys' security by shrinking down and traveling via the phone lines into their home. She then entered Sue's body and obstructed the blood flow to her brain. To cover up this evidence, Jean scorched Sue's body.

Jean knew that this event would send all the heroes scrambling to protect their loved ones and—hopefully—drive Ray back into her arms. Jean employed two other schemes to cover her tracks. First, she faked an attempt on her life, then she hired Captain Boomerang to kill Robin's father Jack Drake. She supplied Drake with a gun to defend himself, hoping that Boomerang would be killed and that everyone would believe he was Sue's killer as well. Eventually, Dr. Mid-Nite's autopsy of Sue's body revealed the truth, and the Atom himself elicited a confession from Jean after she inadvertently spilled the beans when asking about a letter sent to Jack along with the gun. Ray managed to put two and two together because Batman had taken the letter away from the crime scene even before the police arrived, so only he and the Leaguers were supposed to know of its existence. She was promptly admitted to Arkham Asylum. With Jean's incarceration, Ray was overwhelmed with despair, and shrank continuously until he vanished completely into a microscopic or subatomic world.

Ray's legacy would continue on with Ryan Choi utilizing a version of his costume and shrinking device to become the current Atom for a short time.

Countdown

During the missing year following the events known as the second Crisis, Palmer's technology is employed by Supernova to shrink and grow in size in order to enter and exit the bottle city of Kandor.

Ray took refuge the Nanoverse, and met a young mystic who told him about the new reformed existence of the Multiverse. He traveled through different realities and find himself in Earth-51, where its heroes eradicate supercrime and create a utopian Earth. There he witness his Earth-51 counterpart's death and took his role in this reality including marrying this world's Jean Loring.

While there he study much about his Earth-51 counterpart and discover he never became the Atom and acted as a scientist consultant to the Earth-51 Justice League. Also this Ray gifted with the ability to be immune to all kinds of diseases and viruses. Furthermore, the Earth-51 Palmer worked on preventing the deadly Morticoccus Virus, and knowing that in every reality of the Multiverse there is deadly chance that the virus would appear decided to travel the Multiverse and inoculate each inhabitants with his immune system. Realizing the importance of his counterpart's work, Ray carry on Earth-51 Ray's work and travel to different worlds inoculating each denizen of every Earth with a resistance to the Morticoccus Virus.

Unknowable to Ray the Monitors and the Challengers from Beyond were scouring the reformed Multiverse for him as they believe that he maybe the one to prevent a cataclysm known as the Great Disaster. Eventually the Challengers discover him and learns his history on Earth-51. Shortly afterward Bob reveals his intention in killing Ray. With the Challengers' help, Ray escapes but witness the death of his Earth-51 friends and his alternate wife.

Despite what the Challengers were told by the Monitors, Ray reveals to them that it was the Ray Palmer of Earth-51 who was meant to stop the Great Disaster.

After joining the Challengers, teaming up with Jimmy Olsen, Forager, Harley Quinn, Holly Robinson, Mary Marvel, and Firestorm on Apokolips, Ray discovers that Karate Kid was infected with the Morticoccus Virus. Following the damages to the planet by the Pied Piper and Brother Eye, Ray secretly eavesdropped on Monitor Solomon and Darkseid, learning that Darkseid wanted to remake reality and Solomon wanted the Great Disaster to happen. Alerted by this, Ray returned to the others and was pressured into curing Karate Kid.

Ray and the others were then teleported back to the reconstructed Earth-51 and seek advance medical attention from Project Cadmus; however, once they were at Cadmus Karate Kid was already dead.

Ray helped the scientists at Cadmus in finding a cure to the Morticoccus Virus after the virus was released to the world. Despite everything he has done, the Great Disaster prevailed forcing Ray and his friends to return back to their Earth.

After returning to their world, Jimmy Olsen is kidnapped by Mary Marvel, who has been corrupted by Darkseid. Ray hitches a ride from within Jimmy. When Darkseid takes control of Jimmy's powers, Ray locates and shuts down the control sphere inside Jimmy's brain, but is then swarmed by Apokoliptian antibodies. While escaping this onslaught, Ray discovers the "battery" containing the New God spirit energies. Ray removes it from Jimmy's head and shatters it, releasing the energies.

Ray later joins Donna, Kyle, and Forager in their new mission as border guards to the Multiverse, realizing that there is nothing left for him on New Earth anymore. However, Palmer returns to New Earth one more time, upon realizing that his old nemesis Chronos had taken his identity to mislead a young pretender to his identity, Ryan Choi. After helping his successor to once again save Ivy Town, he returns to the Multiverse with a new sense of fulfillment, leaving his town in the hands of a new, capable hero.

During the Final Crisis, Ray returns to New Earth and works with Choi again to aid in the efforts to evacuate the last free humans.

Blackest Night

During the events of the Blackest Night, Ray asks Hawkman to visit his wife Jean Loring's grave to be honored as a fallen member of the community, but Hawkman refuses due to her murdering Sue Dibny. Ray later called Hawkman again, over the phone. Atom is then invited to visit Carter in order to discuss his heartache over his wife which the deceased Carter planned on killing him.

Arriving at Carter's house, he was attacked by the Black Lantern Hawkman and Hawkgirl, and only escaped by miniaturizing himself and hiding in Carter's Black Lantern Ring. Ray did a thorough exploration of the ring, discovering that it was nothing like Hal Jordan's power ring, instead made of dark matter with micro-wormholes sending energy to an unknown source. Jumping out, he helped Hal and Barry Allen fight off the Black Lantern Justice Leaguers, with his compassion attracting the Black Lantern Dibnys. Ralph mocked Ray for still being love with Jean after she killed Sue, but the two Dibny Lanterns were destroyed by the Indigo Tribe, the wielders of the indigo light of compassion, then teleporting the three living Leaguers to the Hall of Justice, where they met up with Firestorm Jason Rusch and Mera. After Indigo-1, leader of the Indigo Tribe, explained that the Black Lanterns were expressions of darkness which considered the living to be invaders, Barry and Hal pointed out that Ralph and Sue had no reaction to each others' attack, leading Ray to conclude that the Black rings were some sort of organic computer that rebooted the body without restoring their essences. Before they could plan a proper counter-attack, the Black Lantern League arrived and attacked, and the Indigo Tribe teleported Hal away, leaving Ray, Barry, and Mera without a means to effectively fight the Black Lanterns. Ray had almost been turned into a Black Lantern by a reanimated Batman but ultimately been protected by an unknown force. Ganthet inducts him into the Indigo Tribe as a deputy for his strong compassion.

Indigo-1 claims that she can teleport the armies of each Lantern Corps onto Earth, if given time to meditate. So, the responsibility falls to Ray to protect her while she does so. Before she enters her trance, she reveals to Ray that the indigo staff and his overwhelming compassion allows him to mimic the other powers of the Lantern Corps; she demonstrates this by temporarily becoming a Red Lantern and vomiting corrosive blood all over an attacking company of Black Lanterns. She then enters her trance, while Ray fights off Black Lanterns Hawkman and Hawkgirl by temporarily becoming an Orange Lantern, loudly proclaiming "I want my friends back!" He then summons two orange energy duplicates of Khufu and Chay-Ara to help him fight off his and Indigo-1's attackers. He is briefly successful. But then Jean shows up to torment him, and she leaps into Indigo-1's ring. Ray follows her. He ends up reliving Sue Dibny's death, and is then attacked by various Black Lantern Morlaidhans, the miniscule race he befriended during his time in the Amazon jungle years before. He fights them off and--summoning the powers of a Green Lantern--destroys Jean. Indigo-1 manages to summon the various armies and thanks Ray for his help. He tells her to keep his involvement in the deployment of the troops a secret, and asks that she help him find a way to legitimately resurrect Hawkman and Hawkgirl.

#the atom #atom #raymond ray palmer #raymond palmer #ray palmer #justice league of america #jla #Suicide Squad #Teen Titans #indigo tribe #katarthans #dc #DC comics #thedcdunce

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soap-brain · 6 years ago

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rainy day cuddles for sunrises!culmets? or going through old boxes for the sunrises curlfriends :D

yessssss thank you!

Rainy Day Cuddles

“If the rain doesn’t stop soon, this whole place will be under water,” Hugh says grimly. “The good news: we can only move deeper into this thing. Deeper as in lower. You know, where the water goes. Are you still as desperate to see this place?”

Paul sighs. “I don’t see how the rain is my fault.”

“Sorry. I’m being an ass,” Hugh admits, sitting down next to Paul on the neoprene mat. “But I’m starving. You know, in a movie, I’d now be wondering what you taste like. Luckily for you, and unluckily for me, you don’t have meat on you.”

Paul smiles slightly, but still doesn’t move. He’s conserving energy big time, so he literally hasn’t moved for the past two days, since they ran out of food.

Hugh leans against him.

“Good for you is also that you can’t feel faint from hunger. You know, the annoying thing about all this will be that if we get out of here, I’ll have lost my carefully cultivated muscles. Not that there’s anyone I could impress with them here, but... it’s a nice thought, you know? Getting off this rock and... you know, looking good enough that I can date someone immediately.”

“Why would you want to date someone immediately? Shouldn’t you rather want to find someone who shares similar interests?”

“Maybe I want to get laid.”

“Why?”

“’Cause it’s fun. ‘Cause it makes you feel alive. ‘Cause I haven’t gotten laid in ages. ‘Cause I’m missing that kind of human touch.”

That does make Paul turn towards him.

A tiny wave of rainwater splashes against the pedestal they’re sitting on. If the rain stays as bad, they might have to relocate during the night.

“I could provide that for you. If it’s essential to your wellbeing.”

Hugh sighs and closes his eyes, getting more comfortable on Paul’s shoulder.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? I might not be able to download the required mannerisms, but I’m sure you could explain them to me.”

“Exactly that’s why you couldn’t. It’s not ‘mannerisms’, Paul, it’s - it’s more of a want. Like... you want to please your partner, make them feel good. Those are the ‘mannerisms’ you need. And it doesn’t work if - it’s not a service, you know. Plus, right now? It would burn way too many calories, and I can’t afford that.”

“Okay,” Paul replies.

And that’s that.

They do have to move the tent a bit further upwards later. It’s not far, just up one of the ramps, but they don’t come with a handrail, and Hugh stumbles while walking up. He needs food.

“How long can a human survive without food?” Paul asks once they’re settled down again and Hugh is snuggled up against him again. Not because Paul is warm - he made sure that he has practically no heat output - but at least Paul is soft and feels alive.

“Hm. Depends. Couple weeks.”

“We should’ve rationed better.”

“Should’ve this, could’ve that. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Do we still have a beacon?”

That’s an odd question, but Hugh feels a little too cotton-y to think about why it’s so odd.

“Why?” he asks instead.

“If I’m able to position one at the entrance, I might be able to go outside without losing sight of the monolith through the rain, because I’d be able to watch the beacon’s blips and navigate back that way. I might be able to find something to eat.”

“Okay,” Hugh says.

Paul does just that the next morning (or evening, or noon. It’s hard to tell without their nuclear clocks working, but that’s just another bonus for having found shelter in the monolith. Sure, Paul was really happy to explore the place. Then a bit less happy when it turned out that the thing is practically useless, because as far as they know it’s just an empty building. Then even less happy when the rain that separated them from the rest of their group didn’t let up at all; even less happy when the rain started coming into the monolith.

Hugh spends the time Paul is away lying down and thinking of home. He’s not hungry anymore; he knows that that’s bad, but there isn’t much he can do about that, so why bother worrying about it? If Paul doesn’t find food, they’re screwed anyways. Home, however, is a nice thought.

He thinks about baby Hugh; about the way his mom looks at his dads, about Constanza’s postcards, about waking up to happy noise in the house, about suddenly bursting out into song together. About Camilla’s horse. About the little lavender wands his abuela would braid to let them play witch and wizard with as kids.

There are so many happy thoughts, or dreams, and it seems a bit dumb that the world doesn’t want all that. They could all just be nice to each other and there would be no need for war or pain or death, and everyone could get hugs.

The further Hugh slides off into dreamland, the less he feels the permeating wet cold of the monolith, and the more he feels his home again. Or his parents’ place. Hugh did have an apartment in San Francisco, after all. But his parents’ place was always... warm. Even in the winter when they had such huge problems with the heating constantly breaking, it had still been so warm.

He wakes up toasty. Really, really toasty, Sunday morning with French croissants and hot chocolate in bed-toasty. Someone is breathing shallowly into his ear, arms wrapped around Hugh’s torso, like a personalized big spoon for him.

Hugh is also wrapped in the sleeping bag, his shoes are removed, and there’s the smell of burned wood and grilled fish in the air.

Wait.

Grilled fish?

“Good morning, Hugh.” Paul’s voice is very close Hugh’s ear, sending pleasant shivers down his spine when Paul’s breath fans over the ear’s shell. “You’re awake, so maybe you’d like some fish? I’m not much of a cook, but I managed to find some edibles, and I don’t think I charred them too much.”

They feast on grilled fish, edible plants and even some edible tree bark. Paul wraps an arm around Hugh when they snuggle up again later, and towards the end of the day the rain lets up almost completely and they can go out and find the group again.

also let’s put in some sunrise curlfriends here bc why not! they deserve more content anyways!

Going Through Old Boxes

Michael’s sneeze echoes through the apartment.

“Bless you!” Tilly calls from the kitchen. “Did you open one of the boxes?”

“I did, and I also accidentally disturbed the dust. Why do you keep all these things?”

Tilly finishes pouring the tea, keeping an ear out for her girlfriend. They’re on their last day of packing Tilly’s things up so she can move in with Michael into her pretty loft, and apparently Michael has opinions about what Tilly decides to keep.

Another small sneeze, and then a quiet “What the fuck?”.

“What is it, Mikey?” she calls, picking up both their mugs and heading for the living room.

Michael is staring at an unshapely mass of pink fabric.

“What is this?”

Tilly sets their mugs down before sitting next to Michael again, tucking her legs under herself.

“Well, that’s my first handmade princess dress.”

Michael turns the dress, staring at it with a mixture of puzzlement and criticism.

“How did you put it on?”

“I’d show you, but I grew boobs since I made it, so...”

Michael’s face softens and she gives a small smirk.

“I like them.”

“I know.” Tilly pillows her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. “I also grew a little bit in size, both vertically and horizontally, so I can’t wear this one anymore. There should be pictures though.”

Michael discards the dress carefully, then reaches into the box again, sniffling slightly. Her general dust allergy will not be happy if they keep going through the boxes.

“Is that... you?”

Tilly peeks at the pictures Michael is holding.

“Yeah.”

“Oh noooooo, you were adorable!” Michael squeals. Actually, honest-to-god squeals.

It’s the cutest sound Tilly has heard her girlfriend make, ever.

“Look at your hair! It’s so long, and so crazy! And your smile! You’re missing both your front teeth! Oh, god, you’re so cute! What are you... what happened in this one?”

“Um... I got my hands on the box of strawberries our neighbor brought over, and after that there were no strawberries left and my dress was messed up.”

“To be fair - it is more of a pink potato sack with holes than an actual dress. Can I keep this picture?”

“Not if you insult my dress.” Tilly pokes Michael’s stomach and leans back.

“Alright.” Michael turns towards her, cherry red lips curling into a smile. “Tilly, that’s a beautiful dress, and it shows you have great talent, and you were very cute wearing it. May I please keep this picture?”

“You think we should throw the dress out?”

Michael purses her lips.

“I mean... while I’m not saying that it’s not a work of art... um.”

“... it’s a pink potato sack with holes that still smells of about twenty year old strawberries?”

“Yeaaahh. Please tell me there’s something else other than princess dresses in the other -” She does a quick count. “- twelve boxes?”

“Um... I think box number eight might also have old drawings? And that one over there has all my old diaries, that’s why it was so heavy. Oh - oh, I should show you -” She scoots over to that box, flipping it open and releasing another cloud of dust. “Where is it... the blue one, I think.”

It takes a while for Tilly to flip through the pages until she’s found what she’s looking for.

“Okay,” she says and clears her throat. “Listen to this: ‘March 15th. I think the pretty girl from next door is a lesbian. Today Miss McAntosh explained to us what lesbians are; they’re like boys, except they’re girls. Or not. Sometimes they’re not girls, but they’re not boys, either, just something in between or something different. A lesbian is when you really like other girls. And want to kiss them a lot. I want to kiss a lot of girls very much, I think, only Mom says that that’s gross and gives you cooties. I looked up cooties, but it wasn’t on wikipedia, so maybe cooties don’t exist and kissing girls is actually so much fun mom is afraid I won’t do my homework anymore because kissing girls is more fun that than. Doesn’t really sound believable, but okay. To be honest, magnetic fields don’t sound believable either, and mom had been right about me not liking those, because they’re too complicated. Personally, I think girls are prettier than magnetic fields. I’m going to go out and play now.’ - what?”

Michael has her hand pressed against her mouth, convulsing in silent giggles. She shakes her head and motions for Tilly to go on.

“’March 21st: Update on the girl thing: I kissed Elana. It was rather wet, and she put my tongue into her mouth. She said that’s what her dad does with her mom. Tongues are weird and kind of slimy, but I liked the kissing. We also held hands, and then we climbed a tree and did some more kissing. I like how long her hair is.’ Okay, hold on. Hold on.” Tilly discards the diary and searches for a different book, then leafs through that until she’s found the page. “This is three years later, and we had another sex ed class. ‘October 10th. I saw a breast. It reminded me a little bit of when I was kissing the neighbors’ daughter in the tree in the backyard a few years ago, because it made me feel something similar. Maybe I am a lesbian. Do you turn into a super lesbian when you’ve had enough girl crushes? Do I get a cape? Those are very important questions. Mom says not to be ridiculous, I’m definitely not a lesbian. I mean of course I’m not - dad cut my hair really short and ugly, so I definitely won’t find a girlfriend that way, and then I can’t be a lesbian. I hope it grows again, and fast! I also hope mom doesn’t start talking about the straightening again. Especially because lesbians aren’t straight. Ugh, maybe I’ll find a pretty punk girlfriend with red lips and we’ll run away in her cool car. I might have to learn more about cars though, so I can impress her. Maybe I could also impress her by sewing cool patches on her jacket. I should learn how to do that. Right now.’ And that concludes the thrilling story of my burgeoning lesbianism.” Tilly smacks the book closed. “Did you like it?”

Michael wipes a tear from the corner of her eye.

“That’s just beautiful. You wanted to become a super lesbian by having enough girl crushes to... to do what?”

Tilly drops the diary back into the box and crawls close to Michael.

“I don’t know. Maybe to kiss the prettiest girl?”

Michael’s lips taste of strawberries, and if tiny, eleven year old Tilly had only known how incredibly nice kissing could be.

:DDDDD

>>domesticity prompts

#culmets #curlfriends #discovery #shroom-writing #sad-is-happy-for-deep-people #asks

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