#and other things. i Feel the spin. meanwhile i have no reference on what is expected for someone to feel towards their own creation

[malkaviian]

this is going to sound extremely stupid but i have been thinking for a few days now and. i think donnarose may as well became a special interest???? these little guys genuinely make me happy and i love developing them, thinking about their relationships with each other, it's just too much fun. but since i'm a whole autism with personhood i don't know if my level of enjoyment is normal and akin to someone with their own ocs or im once again having an autism moment. so idk

[cookie-crumblr]

!!!MINORS DNI!!!

CW’s: A SPOILER FOR THE INNOCENT ROUTE(not gonna say what it is XD) Dead dove do not eat, yandere, bully, F!Bimbo reader, reader referred to as she/her, one night stands, p in v, exhibitionism, condom use, creampie, multiple partners(not at the same time),

How F!Bimbo!Reader,

Meets him,

“Uhg, excuse you,” You say, standing tall, with your hands on your hips, even at the man that towers over you.

You were the one to smack into him, straight into his chest in fact.

He grins and pinches the cherry of his cigarette to put it out, before bending over you. His forearm is above you against the wall, his loose fist boxing you in. You don’t relent.

He snorts, bringing his other hand to your chin. “Think you’re a tough slut huh?”

You roll your eyes and push his arm out of your way.

He stares after you a little in shock without even realizing it. You remain on his mind the rest of the day.

How F!Bimbo!Reader,

Finds out,

you now share a room with the guy you ran into earlier.

“This doesn’t change our plans.” You say. You met this other cutie at a club in a strip not too far off campus.

“You’re gonna fuck this freak?” The tall strawberry blonde sizes up your fuck buddy.

“I could say the same about your lil piece,” You blow a pale pink bubble while inspecting her under your intense gaze.

She pulls on his hand, and he shakes her off as he holds your gaze.

Your “date” grabs your hand, and you rip it away to flick him off. “Ew. Don’t fucking touch me.” You push him by his chest down onto the bed. “Well, if you wanna stand around ‘n watch or whatever, be my guest. But i’m gonna get some.”

You hop on top and grind down expertly, seemingly ignoring the other couple in your room. Secretly, the knowledge of the guy with all the scars watching you is the only thing making you wet.

Mesmerized by your hips as you move them, he stands frozen.

You’re the thing to put him in, and now to pull him back out of his trance, “Hey! Big guy, ya hear me?? I asked what your name is”

“‘S Ezra” he tries his hardest to catch his breath before you notice.

“Kay, Ezra, you got a condom or what?”

“Here,” he tosses one your way.

“Thanks, this loser here didn’t bring any. To. A. Club.” you point a manicured finger at the man under you while rolling your eyes.

“Woah!” the chick Ezra brought is lifted into his lap.

He puts a condom on, lining himself up with her.

You put your guy’s condom on and guide him into you.

“Uuuunnnf” The guy beneath you convulses a little.

“No fucking way. Did you just fucking come!?” You feel rage bubble and roil in your gut. “Fuck you! get outta here!”

“Wh-what? I’m s-sor—”

“Get. Out.” You practically jump off of him, and shove him out the door, fly still down, and limp dick still out.

Meanwhile, Ezra next to you is having no better luck. He’s trying not to stare at you while letting his chick get herself off on him.

You spark up a cigarette and pout.

The woman works herself to sleep before he can even get close. And the only thing that would have made him come, would have been watching you do it first.

You’re both disappointed and frustrated.

You risk the glance at him, not wanting to be seen as weak at all, but desperation outweighs the possible costs.

The second your eyes meet however he jumps to his feet.

You eye up that tall dish of a man(and his thick cock) as he swiftly stalks over, feeling giddy.

He pushes you into the small mattress, and pulls your body to him by your ankles.

He ops to lay behind you and hold your leg up.

“Play with yourself” He whispers dangerously close to your lips and stares deep into your eyes.

“N-no kissing.” You say, feeling a little bit shy all of a sudden…“I still have rules”

He snorts as he rubs his bare dick against your skin, getting your slick along his length. “Fine, no kissin’. One of my rules too ‘nyway”

You start expertly spinning a couple pretty and done up fingers on your clit.

“hah! Finally!” You moan gutturally as he enters you. His cock is thick enough to stretch you almost painfully. You keegle around him pleasuring you both.

“Such a tight fucking cunt” he grunts breathlessly.

“You like it? c’mon and fuck it like you own it.” You snap.

“Mmf, you’ll take what i give ya, slut” he starts a deep, and punishing rhythm.

Your body bounces with each slam and it feels absolutely divine.

“Fuck! Yes!!” You egg him on and pull your own leg tighter to your chest.

The muscles in his legs are all completely taught as he quickens his thrusts, and keeps the same force.

He brings you deliciously to your edge, and you push yourself over with your fingers. “Ahh!! Fucking Finally!”

“Such a fuckin’ slut, comin’ on this cock” He lets go of your leg opting to slap your thigh raw.

Your brows knit, “Ffff-fuck” Your legs are starting to shake with the overstimulation.

He continues to stuff you full, and slap you over and over again.

His hips shudder and with a few even quicker, deeper thrusts, he finishes inside you. You both cry out! You come again along with him and feel satisfied for the first time in so long.

“You better be ready to go again”

[crusherthedoctor]

A guide on how to draw Trudy "officially".

Over the years, Trudy has received the occasional fanart, and I can never be grateful enough for every last one of them. <3 However, possibly due to not being an artist myself (unless you count purposefully terrible MSPaint doodles), I sometimes get asked what her intended reference is supposed to be. As in, how is she officially meant to translate in the Yuji Uekawa style alongside the other Sonic cast members.

In the past, I've been hesitant to clarify because truth be told, I don't care too deeply about every detail being completely accurate in fanart: I'm always perfectly satisfied and delighted to see how artists handle her regardless, no matter their spin on it. You wanna make her even taller? Go right ahead. :D You wanna make her hair reach further down? Knock yourself out. :D Boots going all the way up to her thighs? Hehe long leg horsie. :D But since it's something I've been asked more than once, I feel it's about time that I finally give a rundown for those who are interested in keeping her proportions, colours, facial expressions, and other such features canon-adjacent, so to speak.

I'll be numbering my points, because bullet points always seem to get smushed together no matter how I space them, which never fails to aggravate me lol. There's a lot to go over, but I hope I've compiled and summarized them as conveniently as possible. ^^ Alright, now let's make like a Mach Speed secton and go:

1. Trudy's official height is 3'06". For comparison, Rouge is 3'05", and Sonic himself is 3'03". (Originally Trudy was shorter than Rouge, but since Trudy remaining tall in spite of her condition is already a thing, it just felt right this way the more I thought about it.)

2. Trudy's shade of green is much more softer and minty than most green characters in the franchise (Vector, Jet, Scourge, Scourge With A Vagina, etc), as a harsher shade would clash with her portrayal.

3. The rule for her clothing:

Darker blue = headscarf + bandana Medium blue = top + boots Lighter blue = gloves + boot cuffs Brown = breeches + glove cuffs

4. Her muzzle and inner ears are peach, but lighter and more pale than other characters who have peach for those features.

5. Speaking of the ears, they're a teensy bit bigger than Sonic's, but not by much. They're also more rhombus-shaped by comparison.

6. She has five bangs in total, though it may often look like four due to her headscarf.

7. Her eye shape is exactly as it's presented in the image below. The general shape is tsurime, similar to Blaze, but rounder and softer to convey Trudy's personality, and how despite the rough experiences she went through while growing up, they haven't changed her kind heart. Her eyelashes and their length are also exactly as they appear here.

...also, while she's commonly depicted with half-lidded eyes, they're NOT like that all the time like in Rouge and Vanilla's case. Her eyes are fully open in her default state like most of the cast, she's just prone to half-lidded eyes due to her tender demeanour.

And of course, her sclera is NOT the usual white. :P It might look white from afar, but upon closer inspection, it's actually a very subtle light blue. This is often an effect of EDS in real life, so I figured it would be a good way of conveying it visually within the specific framework of a Sonic character. Meanwhile, the shade of brown used is much more warm than cool.

8. She actually has a little boop for her nose (complete with the two nostrils in place of the traditional black dot), it's just not obvious when looking at her from the front, like a mind trick of sorts. It's easier to notice from the side or from other particular angles, like so.

9. There's no easy way of putting this, so I'm gonna come right at ya with it: Trudy does indeed have breasts. Not as overt as Rouge (I say that out of endearment, not out of Bumblekast-flavored contempt), but it's there all the same to indicate she's a bit older than Amy and Cream.

10. Likewise, her legs are on the thick side. Again, more subtly so than Rouge, but still notable when compared to the pipe frames of Amy, Cream, Blaze, etc. And yes, just like horses in real life, she also has a prominent... er, behind, but this too is not quite as blatant as Rouge, since her top tends to obscure some of it, at least when standing up.

11. Her tail reaches down to just above her feet, and can be used to convey some of her emotions, such as slowly swaying when happy, or raising ever so slightly to show her contempt towards a villain. The joke is that she's "politely" telling them they can kiss her ass.

12. Her ponytail reaches down to her back, and in its default state, it forms an S-shape. It's also so close to her back that it may look as though the top and bottom alike are fully glued to her lol. It's not, obviously, but it's another mind trick per say. The height and width of the big upper half are near-equal, for maximum roundness. :3

...however, when she's in motion, be it mild or major, the ponytail can react accordingly in order to convey said motion. This never needs to be portrayed super realistically, what matters is that it looks cute and/or amusing. :3 :3 :3

Basically, if you're familiar with the Shantae franchise, and you know how animated the titular protagonist's ponytail can get, you can play around just as much with Trudy's ponytail.

13. Her gloves are just like Rouge's gloves: they go above her elbows, and fit her arms smoothly even with the small triangular gap on the brown cuffs. They're very much intended to invoke the feeling of classic princess gloves, to contrast the tomboy aspects of her attire.

14. Trudy's boots are yet another mind trick: while they technically go up to her knees like Amy's boots, they end up looking as long as Rouge's boots due to Trudy having longer legs than Amy. :P As for the feet, while they may seem similarly shaped to Amy's boots from a brief glance, the toes have recently been mildly altered to be a little more visually distinct and to reflect Trudy being older than Amy, so the toes are slightly longer and pointed now, as seen below. Despite this, they still lack heels, because heels are a no-no for Trudy's sensitive hooves.

15. Despite her bandana seemingly appearing smaller than her face when she's not using it, it somehow covers the entire lower half of her face perfectly fine like a ninja mask when she is using it. What sorcery is this??? Same reason Amy can pull her hammer out of thin air. Cartoon logic, deal with it.

16. As you can see in the second image above, Trudy's top has a window, which can be easy to overlook since you normally only see it when she has her bandana up. And on the subject of her top, as you may have noticed in a few images earlier, the top also has two small triangular cuts at the bottom of both her sides.

17. As for other details that are normally concealed by her clothing, her body has some pale peach that matches her muzzle and inner ears: it starts exactly at her *ahem* chest, and goes down across the middle portion of her front, ending where the stomach ends. Her feet - or rather, her hooves - resemble the typical round and toeless texture of most Sonic characters, except they're grey, with a little bit of fluff over them like so.

18. Trudy can certainly show a wide range of facial expressions, even playful and silly ones that you might not expect from her, but even so, they are always presented in a dignified and restrained manner. She's also not the type to lose her temper outright, preferring Tranquil Fury, so you won't be seeing her gnashing her teeth madly.

In other words, if Trudy shows visible disgust towards Eggman and his nefarious ways, she would not pull a Jack Nicholson Joker grimace ala Tracy Yardley's Sonic while doing so. She would much rather turn her head a little to the side and turn her nose up at him all proper-like.

19. And finally, simply put, the design of her trusty bow is as it appears here:

...and her whip, in its finalized form, can easily be described as being able to extend like a regular whip, while the handle resembles a rapier handle.

Bonus Fun Fact: During the very early stages of Trudy's design, I considered giving her a cape that reached down to just below the knees, so as to fit her unique mix of refined-yet-quirky. It wasn't super-detailed or anything, it was simple enough, but elegant nonetheless. However, I decided against it due to fears of it potentially making the design too cluttered, and also thinking about Trudy's design not causing inconvenience if she were actually playable in a game.

That said, I still think about it from time to time, as while it may not be part of her finalized attire, I still think a cape could look endearing on her, partly due to an old comic by Skaru, so if anyone wants to try their hand at drawing her with one, that's perfectly fine with me. :> Plus, with those who already accuse Trudy of being a Whisper ripoff, despite Trudy existing long before IDW Sonic in general was even a thing, it'd be a funny way of baiting them lmao.

And that's about it, assuming I don't remember something else five seconds after uploading this post! So for any artists who prefer to draw her with her "canon" proportions and whatnot, I hope this guide is able to help. ^^ Credit for all the art used in this post goes to: @skaruresonic @star-stages @nuncadisponible @sonikkuruzu @eva-of-the-sea @thespeedhighway @aquillis-main @la-nom-nom @latias-eevee-hatori

[hauntingjasper]

Well... we have the headcanons about Gumball and Marshall, could you tell us your headcanons about Gumlee (it's my favorite ship, I love them so much!)

Ofc! 🫶

1- I'll start off with their height difference, the spin-off made me love Gumball/Gary being taller than Marshall. (My hc for Marshall Lee is like 6’0. I don't think I mentioned that on his headcanons list hghshshsjue)

2- As for their story together, I think that Marshall Lee would've caught feelings first, but because they were still just friends at the time + Gumball being arospec and only developing feelings later + denial, he didn't say anything about it. Still, they were pretty affectionate with each other, resulting in multiple questions if they were dating. I think that's worth like,, , half a millennium together.

3- That's pretty much canon at this point but I love the thought of Gumball always making extra red or pink food for Marshall Lee. The equivalent of this in the human world would be Marshall Lee being a bit of a picky eater and Gary having his preferences in mind when he's cooking for both of them. He might also ask if he wants to try one thing or another.

4- Gumball has the habit of checking Marshall Lee's temperature when they're cuddling or when they're somewhere warmer. I've said this before in another ask post but Marshall can't produce or maintain body heat properly, so he tends to stay closer to things that emanate heat. It won't make him feel as warm as a normal person would, but it helps a little. Gumball has to put his hand on Marshall's face or neck to check how warm he is at least once, not for study reasons, but because he just likes to do that.

5- Meanwhile, Marshall Lee likes to put his ice cold hands on him at random just to startle him.

6- Still on the temperature thing, Gumball doesn't mind being touchy with him, especially during the summer, despite Marshall Lee being practically an ice rock, but.. sometimes, it's preferable that Marshall is fully covered and has a blanket 😭

7- Kinda nsfw, but they're switches. Gumball tops more often though, I said what I said.

8- They sometimes use nicknames for each other, of course. Gumball calls him Mars or "Schnucki", I looked it up and apparently it means "Schmoopy" in German, and then I found out that there is such a thing as a "Schmoopy couple". They're not as obnoxious as the definition says when it comes to PDA, though. Marshall Lee calls him anything that has to do with candy, but he'll especially call him Bubba, Bubbaloo or Bubs. He might call him Gary too as a nickname, Gumball's name is different in this. His full name is Gareth Victor Gumball, and "Gareth" just makes Marshall giggle.

9- Obligatory clothes sharing headcanon. To this day they keep a few of each other's shirts.

10- Marshall Lee already bit Gumball once, at his request, to see if he would turn into a vampire. He didn't. Now he keeps biting him to show affection.

11- Okay so from what I've seen, it's incorrect to refer to a prince as "Your Majesty", since that's how you should refer to a King or Queen. You should say "Your Highness" when referring to a prince/princess. My headcanon is that there's some correlation between Marshall Lee purposely using the wrong title when they're exes, the fact that he technically outranks Gumball as The Vampire King and that he's petty. I don't know how to elaborate it but the thought is there 🫴

12- Between Gumball and Marshall Lee, Marshall is the most protective of them and he's more prone to jealousy. It's easy to tell when he's jealous, because he'll instantly hold onto Gumball and stare until the person leaves. I think Gumball would get sarcastic when he's jealous.

I think that's all. Thank you for the ask!

[frosted-plasma]

what’s your thoughts on the Futurama revival

Anon I'm so sorry you're going to be victim to the longest post you will ever see. I hate it I hate it I hate it

HUGE /neg rant incoming (this show is my special interest and has been for YEARS. This will all be rambling)

THEY FUCKING COMPLETELY DISREGARDED "MEANWHILE." It directly contradicts it. "I offered to reset time to the moment before time stopped!" Okay, but you didn't though. The entire tragedy of the ending was that they'd be doomed to relive their lives from the moment they met (s1 e1) on loop. "Want to go around again?" Okay so that line doesn't make sense anymore!!! I had theories upon theories before the season came out and I was beyond disappointed. This show has shown it can do deep thought-out themes, I was fully hoping for them to show them reliving the past again, maybe its their 1,000th time reliving it, maybe Fry or Leela notices for once that something is familiar about it. Hell maybe there's a 1 in a million chance that they DON'T break the button! Free will and all, maybe things aren't 100% the same each run and they get lucky once. This also could have been used to recap old seasons for people who didn't rewatch them

They don't know how much time has passed?? I understand that was an excuse to make it the year 3023, but why would you do that? What's the point??

Things such as the Scary Door reboot don't make sense, not to mention the overuse of "haha it's a reboot!! Get it?? It's a reboot!! We got cancelled!!!" jokes but I'll get to that later. Timeline things just don't make sense anymore because of the time freeze. It's an awful awful awful writing choice. They unfroze time right where it paused, canonically, they show them unfreezing exactly there, it makes zero sense. How is there new technology and new TV shows when no time has passed. I'm ignoring that it's "10 years later" because it isn't, you can't just say that without showing it, it literally isn't

Even the smaller jokes feel very dragged out? Like Bender laughing at Fry setting a goal in episode one. He laughs and Leela smacks him, his head spins around and it's funny, then his body does an extra spin for no reason other than to emphasize that it's a joke? I guess? And then not even a minute later she slaps his hand again and it dramatically flies back and hits Zoidberg. Do you get what I'm saying? It's just too much focus on every single bit

I do like the updated intro! The added details to the city in the background is super super cool!! I love the thought they put into it (Bender hanging out of the ship on the magnet is a bit much considering all of the other references they included, but I'll let it slide. Just doesn't feel necessary to me in the intro)

The animation is rigged now:/ it's bound to happen nowadays, it just feels sad to look at for me (in general, not just with this show) the characters (ESPECIALLY Fry) feel very off model sometimes:(

Fry's hardly in the first episode. Odd writing choice considering he's the main character

Oh my GOD. The Hulu/reboot references. It's EXHAUSTING to watch. The amount of 2023 references they crammed into this season is physically painful, they drag them out for SO LONG

(in the first ep) the non-binary robots joke was funny and the scenes with Calculon and the Robot Devil were the only scenes that felt like old Futurama! Their voice acting was great and it was funny! The rest of the voice acting feels very lackluster and most of the other jokes just didn't get me

Calculon and the Robot Devil were the funniest characters, that's how dumbed down they made Bender, he's not my favorite that season

The plots are just. Bad. I hate to say it I really do. Shut up with the reboot jokes, the covid19 jokes, the only decent one was the bit mining episode because it actually used the idea as a real jumping off point and that episode still wasn't revolutionary. The other half of the episodes are pure callbacks. The one with Amy and Kifs kids was cute because it had a reason to exist! It wasn't a very funny episode but it was cute!! The other ones like the worm parasites in nibblers litter box (OR GOD FORBID THE ONE WHERE THE TIME MACHINE SHOWS UP OUT OF NOWHERE AGAIN WITH NO DRIVER??) make me MAD with how lazy of an excuse they are to cram in a reference without matching the rest of the lore

I'm fully assuming the reboot came from a place of love from the writers and the VAs but personally I didn't think the new season was very funny nor did it add anything new to the series, and it felt very very bland and dumbed down and I didn't even pay attention to the last few episodes because of it (that is saying something coming from me)

I rewatched the first episode for this so this is mainly talking about that one. Tell me if you want me to talk about the others I have so many thoughts this is me summarizing like all hell I hate the plots so much and this is my all time favorite show I'm still going to watch the next season and I still have high hopes for it

[protege-not-protagonist]

Criminal Minds: The Protégé Chapter 1

Ch 1: Please, Not Another Auditor.

Blurb: After deciding to leave the BAU, Spencer is now a full time professor at the FBI Academy, teaching profiling and criminology. Spencer is struggling to live life without the BAU, but that is to be expected when it has been all he has known for almost 2 decades. The BAU meanwhile, struggled to find someone to fill the genius shaped hole in the team when he left, and they still are struggling. At least, that's how the newest profiler, Agent Grace Matthews feels. Grace is good at what she's good at, it's why the bureau accepted her earlier than most. But how could anyone live up Dr. Reid's legacy? So, when Grace answers a call intended for her desk's previous owner, she jumps at the chance to meet her predecessor and ask him for some advice. Together, they find a kinship… but unfortunately, they also uncover a disturbing pattern in the deaths of inmates and patients the BAU have helped put away.

Masterlist

Audience: recommened mature audience for depictions of violence and sexual references

Author's Note: You might have recognised this story from it's previous iteration on Ao3. I had a bit of a personal crisis and deleted my account. So I am re-editing what I have saved on my computer and reuploading it with some fixed continuity errors now that I finished CM Evolution. Will be cross posted here and on Ao3. This fic is dedicated to giving Spencer a happy ending, serving my desire to write crime/mystery and getting my horrific idea's for unsubs out of my head. Set in 2023, and mostly canon compliant. Sorry this is all plot, no peen. But promise there will be a love interest for Spencer, and Grace acts as a wingman for. This more a found family/ give Spencer a smol bean to mentor fic.

TW: murder, prison, criminology terms

Five years ago: Honolulu women's state penitentiary, Hawaii, April 29th 2017

‘So, what do you think detective?’ Rossi asked as the guard buzzed them through to the observation room.

‘Chief thinks based on the evidence before this fourth victim showed up, we caught our girl.’ Detective Fahnu sighed.

‘That’s all well and good, but I asked what you think Mark, cause this is a real bad time to call in a favour. Back home, a real spaghetti stick of an FBI agent, who happens to be like family to me, is in the clink, and we’re busting our asses trying to get him out before he dies. And you calling me here means I had to ask my boss if I can fly off to Hawaii for a weekend. It looks real bad, okay? So you better have a gut churning reason to keep me here, or I’m gone.’

‘It’s more head spinning than gut churning,’ Fahnu nodded through the mirrored glass window at the inmate sitting cuffed to the desk. ‘It’s just never sat right how fast we closed this one. Kauai is a small island, Li’hue is an even smaller town, people are terrified and out for blood, it’s been bad for tourism, and the local government is calling for heads Dave. Chief wanted this case solved fast. We made a profile, and she fit the bill.

‘She’s a loner, got the whole Wednesday Addams thing goin’ for her, spends her free time in cemeteries, works at a funeral home, no friends at school, quiet, never had a boyfriend or anything like that. But had a good family, didn’t so much as sneeze out of turn in public, school, work, even here she is a model prisoner after the first month. We all knew her at the station, not from any trouble, but she was a paper waster, reporting dead animals, reporting goddamn rocks being moved, cats that went missing, insisting there was a serial killer out there… well what do you know, one turns up, and she inserts herself into the investigation, you people said they do that. So with no other leads or suspects, she starts looking promising. So we got a warrant, and we found… well you know what we found and then there was the internet history.

'And here we are eight months later. I’m not sure what to think Dave, cause I know her family and character witnesses, they’re good people, they don’t lie. But neither does evidence and until this new victim showed up, all of it pointed to her. Someones playing games and I don’t know who it is.’

‘And she plead guilty?’ Rossi asked.

‘I’m not even sure about that anymore, you have the case file there?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Does it have her records while in Kauai Jail?’

Rossi flicked through it again, he saw her 3 weeks here in solitary till she turned 18 and could be placed in a cell in E block, but strangely her transfer and county jail records were missing. ‘No.’

Detective Fahnu passed him a yellow envelope. ‘These somehow never made it across my desk until this week after number four showed up.’ Rossi opened the folder and winced. ‘As soon as I saw those… I knew I made the right call asking you to come. I can’t sleep Dave, I gotta know we caught the right one.’

‘Well, either way you’ve got someone else to catch, the new victim had traces of Semen still on them?’

‘You’re right, we’re running it now hopefully it'll give us a lead, I'm sorry I can’t stay for this, we’re conducting family interviews in an hour, I at least need to be there on conference call but, let me know how this goes. I appreciate this a lot.’

‘Don’t sweat it, I’ll call you tonight, when this is done. Take care Mark.’ Rossi waved the detective off and took one more look over the files, especially the new ones from the county jail.

He observed the girl in the interview room. Her head hung over the desk as she leant on her elbows and bounced her leg. Her buzzed cropped hair now starkly different from the long curly mane in the mugshot that had been taken in November last year. She looked up and peered at the glass, only able to see her reflection, but somehow she sensed his stare and met his eyes.

It was time.

---------

Quantico FBI Academy, VA Thursday July 2023 11:15 am

‘And it is this repeated and obsessive element of an M.O. that can indicate a paraphilia. Paedophilia, necrophilia are well known paraphilia that are criminal in nature. Now paraphilia can be anything, it doesn’t have to be a criminal act, but it can form part of a signature. Can anyone name what type of paraphilia dendrophilia is?’ he asked.

Blank faces met him. Well, the faces that looked up from their notes frantically were blank. The two auditors of the class always disconcertingly looked like their minds were elsewhere. One day, Spencer sighed quietly to himself. One day someone would know. ‘It’s…’

‘Trees,’ a quiet, unfamiliar voice called out hesitantly from the back row. ‘It’s an attraction to trees, dendro from the Greek dendron meaning tree, philia also Greek, meaning strong fondness and love amongst equals.’

The voice was not one of his students this term; he was certain. He could pick their voices. Spencer swiveled his head, scanning his students to get a glimpse of the first person to answer that question since he started asking it. His suspicions were confirmed; she was not supposed to be in this class. The voice belonged to a young woman, probably early twenties, with dark hair in braided pigtails on either side of her head. She fidgeted with her glasses before stuffing her hands back into her cardigan pockets. Their eyes met and she gave him a small smile.

‘…Yes, that’s right, trees. Any ideas what kind of behaviour might be displayed in a signature if a criminal has dendrophilia?’

‘They might like to perform their crimes outdoors in wooded areas, or bury victims under trees so they can revisit crime scenes and get off on the fact the trees are being sustained by a victim's decomposition. Or they might hide bodies in hollow trees, it would depend on an unsub’s preferences,’ she suggested, he could see she had a lot more to say, but she sat there, nervously looking at other students, as if prompting them to say something.

It was then Spencer placed her. He was right; she wasn't a current student. She had been in a few of his classes when he was teaching part time, two years ago. He couldn’t put a name to her face or much of her cohort to be honest. It bothered him. They had switched to online correspondence in the first semester of 2020. Only the first two classes with her cohort were in person, in which she had been silent. But, she should have graduated by now. Why was she here? Oh God, please not another auditor, he thought.

He cleared his throat, turned his attention back to the class. ‘Does anyone who's actually in this class have something to add?’ His gaze might as well have been poisoned the way some of the young students avoided it. ‘No? Okay, I know I blindsided you with that one, but, our guest is right. It may seem inconceivable to some of you that people would actually become aroused by trees, but in my experience paraphilia can be developed from anything and everything.’

He glanced back at her. Now she was clutching a canvas messenger bag tightly against her chest with one hand, and texting with the other. She obviously wasn’t here for the content or to audit him. So, he deduced that she was waiting for him to finish. He tried his best to continue as normal, now hoping that she wasn’t one of his fans that his lectures seemed to attract. ‘Now the assigned reading for next week will go further into how a paraphilia can be imprinted on a person, but I thought the basics of paraphilia would be an important background for the case study this week because it interacts with the stages of development and the importance of a love map. This is a case study from 1995…’

-------

Spencer concluded the class five minutes early and packed up his things, warily glancing at her. The canvas messenger bag she had with her had a few pins on it for personalisation, but the way she gripped it so tight made him dread what was in it. She didn’t appear armed, but she seemed dressed in a way that would convey she was non threatening. It was not unusual, but it was certainly unique for a woman her age; a plain beige cardigan over a pale-floral-patterned collared blouse, navy culottes, and smart, vintage-style, leather loafers. Paired with her youthful hair style, it made him wary. It screamed sweet and innocent, like it was a purposeful statement. If she had consciously decided to dress that way, it was bad news for him.

As she stood, he observed she was on the tall side for a woman, at least 5'9 was his estimate from measuring her against the door frame. She smiled at the students file past her as she held the door open for them. She glanced at him expectantly as the last student left the hall. Suspicion turned to dread. He needed to go. He had no more classes for the day, but she wouldn’t know that. He power walked toward the door.

She smiled at him politely. ‘Dr Reid, I'll only need a few minutes of your time-’

‘I’m sorry. I have a class across the other side of the academy, I have to go, another time perhaps-’

‘Umm… No you don’t, it's Thursday,' she said with a chuckle.

He stilled. How would she know that? Had she been stalking him? His heart hammered, and he started to walk again, quickening his pace. He had to get to a populated area. Now.

‘Dr Reid?’ she called after him. Her shoes made no sound behind him. How was she so quiet for someone that tall? He glanced behind him to see she was two steps behind. ‘Dr Reid, I'm sorry if I spoke out of turn back there. Please, I just want to talk!’

‘I really must go.’

‘Okay, maybe we can sit down and have coffee some other time? I know you like a double espresso and double-choc-chip muffins. They're my favourite too, though I prefer tea.'

That chilled him to the bone. He began jogging. How long had she been watching him?

‘Doctor, where are you-’ He glanced back, and she was right there, her long legs striding to keep pace with him.

Oh God, she was chasing him. He didn’t have a gun right now. He didn’t carry one while he taught. This hall had cameras and hundreds of FBI cadets in classes behind doors right now. Would she really be that bold? He turned to face her. Perhaps he could reason his way out of this.

‘Look, this won’t end well for you. I don’t know what you think you can do to me, but there’s no way you can get away with anything here-’

‘What?’ She stepped back. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh no!’ She took another step back, ‘Oh no, no no… I’m not stalking you, I’m so sorry! Oh, the schedule and the muffin thing—God I must have come off so creepy, please don't freak out okay? I just… I’m so sorry,’ she fumbled out an apology. Her hand slowly went to the front pocket of her bag, but he didn't panic; the pocket was too small to hold a firearm. He kept his distance, ready to run if he needed to.

Her body language had changed completely. Before she seemed excited and nervous, but now she was utterly, and unmistakably, mortified. Spencer almost felt sorry for her.

‘I’m just grabbing my badge, sorry I-I tried calling to let you know I was coming, but Garcia said you were a technophobe, and I couldn’t wait for snail mail-’ He tilted his head, Garcia? ‘-she also told me your coffee preferences if I needed to bribe you… And I rang the criminology department secretary to see what your office hours were. Vivian, booked me an appointment in your calendar… but that… runs… on email… So you mustnt’ve seen it—you had no idea I was coming did you? God I was really early and weird… I-I- didn’t mean to scare you.’ She held out a familiar leather card holder to him. ‘I’m Special Agent Grace Matthews, I’m a profiler with your old unit, I’m new. I-I-we‘ve met before but, um… You might not remember me. Sorry I really wanted to meet you for a while now, I really admire you… and oh God this has gone so wrong… I am so sorry, I can come back later,’ she finished rambling and stood there, looking as if she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her.

It was like he was seeing himself at 22, struggling to fit in a crowd of suits and stern faces knowing full well that if it weren't for his intellect, he would not be there. He inspected her badge. He noted the birthdate of 12/25/1998. Considering it was a requirement that an applicant be 23 for admission to the bureau, and Grace was currently 24 and already a profiler, he suspected that she might have a similar skill set to him. He remembered both JJ and Garcia mentioned they had a new unit member earlier this year. He remembered JJ saying, “Oh Spence, you’d get on like a house on fire. Never met anyone else who could talk about cholera for 30 minutes, and then say they’re not an expert, they just dabble.”

Spencer offered her a smile. ‘Edward Leonski,’ he said.

‘Wha-Oh,’ she nodded sheepishly, ‘Yep, that was me. Eddie Leonski, “The Brownout Strangler”, I mean, I wasn’t the strangler… That was my final paper… you’d probably remember it cause of the spelling and grammar errors.’

‘No, I have an eidetic memory. I remember everyone’s term papers, but I remember yours particularly because I felt awful only being able to give you a distinction… because of the grammar and spelling mistakes. But the case you analysed, I’d never heard of before, which is always a welcome surprise. It gets a bit boring reading papers about the Zodiac, Bundy, Dhalmer over and over. But you chose a challenge, using original court transcripts, statements and archived letters as sources. And I agree with your theory that he was a narcissist with gynophobia, yet an erotic fascination with women's voices at the same time. The mimicry and self-soothing talk he practiced under stress was especially intriguing, and then added the element of the political tensions of the case. It was a really fascinating read. I had to look into it myself. I agree it is a shame that they declared him sane. There was a lot that was unique about his case that could have been learned if he wasn’t executed.’

‘I know right,’ she grinned. ‘But then again, Sanitariums in the 1940s are not something I would ever wish upon anyone.’

‘No, that’s true,’ he nodded.

Gone was the stuttering and fumbling. Good, he’d hoped a shared interest would make her more comfortable.

‘I'm sorry for scaring you Dr Reid, can I start again?’ she asked hopefully.

‘I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions, and not checking my calendar—through my email? I didn’t even know that they were connected. So sure, we can start again, you apparently have an appointment. So good morning Agent Matthews, did you enjoy the lecture?’

‘I did enjoy the lecture, both times actually, but it’s way better in person. I had some spare time today, and I wanted to meet you cause I have some questions for you and… um some news, not official FBI business but, we might want to go somewhere that is not going to get flooded with students in about… Now.’ Doors to the other lecture halls opened and chatty students filled the hallway.

If he was honest with himself, he had nothing better to do today, and genuinely he missed having people he could enthuse with. Students were intimidated by him, most faculty members were solely academics and they often were disturbed by his anecdotes, and well auditors made him nervous. Not to mention Matthews’ suggestion of muffins had him hungry now.

‘You know what, I actually could really use a coffee. There is a van that parks close to the Eastside of the academy. Their muffins are usually fresh around now too.’

‘Awesome,’ her shoulders relaxed, and they began walking together through the crowd of students, ‘I’ll shout then, after the scare I gave you, I think it’s only fair.’

Next chapter

-------

NOTES: I haven't marked this mature yet. not sure how it works cause it has been ages since I posted a fic on tumblr, have no idea how it's going to handle a criminal minds fic. But oh well.

ALSO GRACE AND REID ARE NOT GOING TO BE THE ROMANTIC FOR EACH OTHER. IN THE TAGS I TRIED TO MAKE THAT CLEAR BUT I KNOW SOME PEOPLE DON'T READ THEM…. but don't worry I have someone else in mind to pair Spencer with, and Grace might go a bit "Operation parent trap" style to get them together. Also Grace will get a love interest to… Hopefully though she won't be too much like Reid and end up with her very own Graeve.

With this fic, I think I'll put specific trigger warnings a the start of each chapter because I plan to have sort of breather chapter in between cases and each case will have a variety of different stuff depending on the unsub. These first few chapters are intended as a bit of fluff and an introduction to Grace. if you love it leave a comment, like it, reblog, ask a question, whatever, it is much appreciated and it really motivates me

[tiarnanabhfainni]

i forgot you can't edit draft ask answers so i have to answer a photo sorry!

what are my opinions on it? i think it's excellent and i wish i could see it live (if someone knows a theatre where it's being staged let me know). mostly i like how deeply interested it is in language and in the dynamics of colonisation. im not necessarily a genius at literary analysis but here were the things that set my brain spinning. under the cut because this got long

1. Language

there are multiple languages at play here. all of the people of baile beag speak irish and only the master of the hedge school and his sons speak english. but hugh also knows greek and latin! his sons clearly also understand a great deal of latin. the infant prodigy is also fluent in classical greek and latin. many of the attendees at the hedge school also understand bits of latin, as far as i remember they all engage in hugh's call and response game. these are not stupid people, they are all clearly capable of engaging with other languages and understanding them. it's just that english is not one of those languages. meanwhile the soldiers are all monoglots who can only speak english. this is underlined by my one of my favourite exchanges in the play where jimmy asks "Nonne Latine loquitar?" and lancey responds "I do not speak Gaelic, sir." the soldier cannot communicate with the locals and they are viewed with suspicion. because the two groups cannot communicate with each other without an intermediary the tension build until it climaxes at the end of the play. i also think it's notable that the only soldier who does engage with the irish language is the only one who gets invited to the dance. it's also interesting that he's the one who's goes missing at the end.

2. Owen and Anglicisation

speaking of intermediaries, this brings us to the character of owen! there are three characters in this play who speak both english and irish fluently. hugh the schoolmaster, manus his son who assists him and owen, the son who left to work in dublin and seems to have been hired by the british army while he was there. he is such an interesting character as he seems to embody the process of anglicisation in the play. im going to get more into his role in expanding the themes of translation as a site of colonisation later but his main job seems to be assisting in anglicising the place names in the area. since he knows irish he can read out the names and give their literal translation so the soldiers know what their options are for changing them. but owen himself is literally anglicised! when they first arrive, both yolland and lancey refer to him as "roland" because they are unfamiliar with his actual name. and it reveals how little they know or respect him as a person (esp lancey). they can't even get his name right and they don't care to. the army has flattened him into the utilitarian role they need him for. which is owen is helping them to do with the place names! they are literally making an ordnance survey for military purposes. the old names are too difficult for soldiers to find their way around so they're changing them to make it easier. and they flatten them to this end. droim dubh literally means black ridge but it gets changed to drom duff which means... nothing. or bun na habhann (mouth of the river) becomes burnfoot which has no link to the actual location in question and mostly is chosen because it sounds nicer than banowen. there is an earlier conversation with his brother where own dismisses the changing of his name, saying "it's only a name. it's still the same me, isn't it?" which seems to the same thought process he goes through with these places. the place stays the same so who cares about the name? this argument is refuted by owen himself in the most significant moment of this scene: the conversation about tobair vree. owen is mostly defending himself here but there is the sense that he does care about the history of the area, that he does feel guilty about what he's doing. and that whole passage is a statement about what is happening. that this process of renaming is erasing a people, a memory, and a history. significantly, it is only after this outburst that he can correct yolland about his own name.

Translation

owen again, what a guy. anyway this play is deeply interested in how translation functions. it's not a purely negative portrayal, hugh's opening scenes are full of little translation games where he invites his students to translate his words back to him. he gives a latin word or phrase and so the whole room participates in this process of making meaning across languages. when jimmy is trying to get his point about athene across he translates portions of the odyssey to hugh, to include him in his reading, to let him understand what is being said. he calls her "the flashing-eyed Athene". translation can be inclusive here. but when owen is asked to translate lancey's words to the students in the hedge school, there is another side of translation. the sharp edge of the blade if you will. he softens lancey's words, he omits information about the military nature of the project, he mistranslates. this is pointed out to him by his brother manus but he shakes it off with some off the cuff quote about uncertain and incipient meaning. the intent of the translator really does matter.

im tired so im gonna stop here but i have so many more thoughts that i could keep going with: yolland' imperial family and how he can't escape that baggage even though he tries, lancey threatening the community with yolland as an excuse, manus' disdain for english and how he literally flees to an irish-speaking island, the new national school and how everyone will speak english (attendance mandatory), hugh not being chosen as schoolmaster, maire viewing english as a way to get out and advance socially, the heartbreaking passage about norfolk and where yolland is from, yolland's own disappearance as a symbol for the souring relations between the army as an enforcer of empire and the locals, the donnelly twins hanging like the sword of damocles over the play, the death of the baby, things that were jokes at the start of the play being deadly serious at the end, hugh always forgetting his third point just like the play leaves so many threads hanging at the end, etc. etc.

[chaifootsteps]

I don’t know if it’s me, but I just think Octavia is going to be an unintentional tragic character if anything that later half of season two suggests.

I remember asking myself two days before the latest episode aired, “wouldn’t Stella know that everything would go to Via?” Then low and behold her brother has to point that out to her. Then starts scheming to manipulate Via because they think she’s a gateway to getting the riches.

Like, the thing that majorly ticks me off is wouldn’t Stella know that? She’s been raising her with Stolas. Why does need to be told this if initially this arranged marriage also included a precautionary heir. There is nothing to say she wouldn’t know that.

Back to Via, her parents—well mostly Stella—but that could because Viv doesn’t want her interacting with her own daughter until they need to for Stolas reasons—refers to her as an “egg” and seemingly forgets she’s Stolas’ heir should he die. Meanwhile as Stolas is making his points, he calls Octavia “that girl” which is…I get they wanted to prove that he may not want to become like his father and wanted to give her a happy childhood, but dude why can’t you say daughter? I don’t know if Viv wants to even commit to this precautionary heir stuff because half the time they keep making Via repeat the same arc which eventually go on three times now.

Like, one of the reasons why parents who may not love each other would still want to stay for the kid which is real, and if they really wanted to commit to the precautionary heir stuff, maybe make Stella want to ask where the Grimoire is and needing to feel like “we have to keep this deal that we both don’t want to do, but our society has rules we must play apart of” and Stolas being torn with wanting to give Via a happy childhood but also knowing that the deal still exists so that just starts the further deterioration of the marriage between him and Stella. Maybe if in the S2 E1 flashbacks it could slowly show him becoming more withdrawn from them if they say he’s tired of it. The ideas from the first episode can work, but it focuses too much on retconning Stolas and Blitz characters that it should’ve focused on how his relationship with Stella deteriorated because neither of them want to be here and would play more into the nobility of the Goetia if that is slowly taking the driving force for the family.

If Via feels guilty of her birth, it could make become more isolated and depressed. The kid would feel guilt if they were the active cause of the pain if that is what the writers are attempting to imply but only loosely using the pieces that there and trying to spin it by making us feel more sad for the Dad than the daughter who is scared of being abandoned, thinking she isn’t wanted and apparently planning to guilt trip her even more.

I am with in being scared of them possibly turning the audience against Via instead of sympathizing with her. People either already understand where Stolas is coming from in S2 E2, which is fair, we don’t want invalidate victims of spousal abuse, but if they do it a third time then the writers run the risk of making the audience think Via is selfish or something. Or probably those who would blame Stella more whichever comes first.

Sorry for the ramble.

Nah, rambles are always welcome, we love rambles around here. And this was a great one!

Stolas, Stella, and Octavia are frustrating because all three are in an immensely shitty situation put together by forces outside of their control. None of them are handling it well, but Via's got the excuse of being a child caught between two deeply unhappy parents. There's so much potential there, so much to explore, and Vivzie and Brandon won't because that would involve holding Stolas accountable for literally any wrongdoing. It would involve letting Via be the bigger victim here, and we can't have that, can we?

[somethingimworkingon]

How to save your brain from being eaten by AI (maybe): keep a sketchbook

At the beginning of May I started bookmarking photographers who are using AI in interesting ways, to add to my Instagram collection of digital art references (#artdirectionneversleeps). Later that month I did my own first experiments using NightCafe to visualise ideas for a client. It was entertaining and frustrating, partly because of my lack of prompt skills, and partly because the "styles" you could apply to your "artwork" looked exactly like bad fantasy art from the 1980s.

However, by June, photographers I was working with were using Midjourney to conceptualise setups – still with a bit of that tacky SciFi book cover feel, but it was proving genuinely useful to talk about how sets might be designed, for instance. By July, I was seeing film directors use AI for pitching storyboards, and my lovely students at Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design using it for presentation mock-ups.

That's just three months. From AI being a "what?" to becoming a completely logical, natural part of the image-making process, for at least some parts of the creative industries. The speed of change is head-spinning. And this is just the beginning.

Meanwhile, also in May, I was teaching at CNC on a really fun module about Brand Identity Design. Part of this involved the students keeping a sketchbook, to explore and develop their ideas. One of my lectures was about WHY people keep sketchbooks, and I illustrated several points with quotes from designers, architects and artists, and pages from my own sketchbooks from waaaaay back in the day.

Because WBITD, when I was an art student, I kept sketchbooks constantly. Not only was it a course requirement, for me it was also a way to stave off boredom and depression: it's hard to think negative thoughts when your brain is absorbed in analysing the curves of a hand or a coffee cup or a flower. When my best friend and I used to Interrail around Italy, I would draw our cafe tables and the local streets, and we'd get rewarded with extra drinks and desserts by kindly waiters.

Somewhere around the mid 90s I gave up sketching, partly because life got more hectic, and partly because smartphones got invented. When Emma and I started the BID course this summer, it had been a very long time indeed since I cracked open a sketchbook. And, erm, even though I did buy one – a lovely, spiral-bound, hard covered book with wonderful heavyweight paper, from Seawhite of Brighton – it took me another few months to start using it.

Two things pushed me into finally starting: firstly, it's #drawugst and I thought I should try a drawing a day, every day, during August. I started on Tuesday, August 1st, with a graphite pencil sketch of my aloe plant. I did it in semi-darkness, around 9pm, and my hand-eye coordination felt a but rusty, but following the heavy curves of the plant was satisfying.

On Wednesday I drew fallen agapanthus blossoms, playing with coloured marker pens (of which I have a ridiculously huge collection, almost never used). This was a reminder of the importance of not trying to control the end result while you're sketching. Because you just can't.

Yesterday evening I scribbled our messy after-dinner table. I used the graphite pencil, a Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth charcoal pencil, and an Edding 1225 calligraphy pen – and blackberries. The fruit, not the redundant communication device. Blackberry juice is a fabulous art material – it gives this beautiful purple inky result, and it's such a pleasure to smear all over the paper. I'd picked the berries earlier this evening on Wormwood Scrubs, just to add to the satisfaction of the whole experience. (And this morning I made almond milk smoothies with the rest of them.)

The other thing which made me finally restart a sketchbook after all this time is AI. I can see that it is just going to get bigger, more powerful, and more indispensable in my industry. I'm not going to worry about losing my job to a bot (I don't have "a job", anyhow), but I am concerned about what it will do to our creativity.

When you use one tool extensively it starts to train your brain, you develop habits and shortcuts. It's one thing to have tricks for making the most of Photoshop, or to have routines when you set up an InDesign document. But when you're trying to generate ideas you need to keep an open mind. To look at things from different angles. To look again, look harder. Try wacky ideas. Draw with your food. Stick things onto the pages. Doodle. Take a line for a walk. Write notes to self. Be creative. Be messy. Be human.

[devintrinidad]

YEAH!! Reducing characters to one aspect of their personality upsets me a lot!! It feels like they become tropes instead of characters and it makes all the dynamics really boring. Just because she has difficulties in her work life doesn't mean she'd struggle in other aspects of life too! I know it's common to have protagonists with "strong will" but it really works for her otherwise she would have given up a long time ago.

Meanwhile U-1146 has always excelled in his worklife (if it's wrong please let me know as I haven't read the manga), But relationships are a whole different territory for him and something he never expected to have. And having ae-3803 guide him through it would be 1) absolutely ADORABLE, 2) Really good for him to feel taken care off and get to actually *relax*, and for her to let herself out in her area of expertise (emotions)

Also another reason I think he is charmed by her determination is since he is talented at his job, he never had to work really hard to get good. Of course he had to work hard and fail plenty of times, but he never had to go the extra mile to simple probe himself (again lmk if I'm wrong!). And so he finds her determination admirable because he is thinking "wow. She goes through a lot yet never falters despite what anyone says. I would have given up a long time ago", at least that's what he believes.

NsshqjdhwAhs I just love the "I love my beautiful wife" guys he is so shy and madly in love it's ADORABLE. The first time she invites him to small spoon, I think he would instantly melt bc he never realized how much he likes *this*. I'd even argue he instantly falls asleep LMAO (and she takes 30 pics of it ofc)

Yeah, I absolutely hate it when characters become a husk of their former selves. I think that it's always best to refer to canon material in terms of characterization, but I always try to put a little spin on it to make sure that it's in my style. :D

But yeah, I think it's implied that 1146 has pretty much excelled in many aspects of his professional life (there hasn't been any evidence stating otherwise, but it's been a while). Romantic relationships across different cells probably isn't forbidden, but I imagine that as a member of the white blood cells, 1146 and his fellow neutrophils don't get exposed to other cell types, be it platonic or romantic. It would be more plausible if he were to fall for someone who is also an immune cell like him, but I would suppose that he would also fall flat on his face no matter the cell type!

I absolutely adore 3803 because she represents who I want to be as a person. Cheerful, dedicated, but always determined to do better and improve herself! At the very end of Main, she is the one taking the reigns against the pathogens and instilling hope in her fellow coworkers and 1146 that all is not lost! (Been a while, but I think that was the gist of it).

Maybe 3803 dated or flirted with a few other cells beforehand, so she's all too aware of first date jitters and the exhilaration of puppy crushes and young love, but with 1146 she's experiencing it all over again, but this time, she's the one who will hold his hand and catch him if he falls. It probably makes her feel wanted in the best way possible and she's eager to make sure that their romantic (or platonic) relationship with each other remains a positive thing that will last until the end of their lives.

"Also another reason I think he is charmed by her determination is since he is talented at his job, he never had to work really hard to get good. Of course he had to work hard and fail plenty of times, but he never had to go the extra mile to simple probe himself (again lmk if I'm wrong!)."--> MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY. He's at first intrigued by her and a little in awe at her innocence at the start of the series (considering that there are trillions of cells, how are they going to meet again??? Yet, they do keep seeing each other and it validates 3803's hope and trust that everything will turn out great, especially when she trains and improves herself, and that makes 1146 see that there's more to life than just living his role as an immune cell!). Gosh, their dynamic just makes me want to squeeze them tight together! :D

HE IS THE ABSOLUTE WIFE GUY And he means it with his entire heart!

3803 is the big spoon and he realizes that he's so much warmer now (it coud be the blush on his face, but he'll never tell) and softer (definitely softer because the barracks can't possibly be too comfortable!) that he does melt into her embrace!

3803 does take photos (and keeps a select few as her lockscreen) and she lets the rest of the WBC squad peek at it. The WBC tease 1146 for it, but they are secretly so happy that their leader has someone who will make him feel so safe and loved that he just immediately melts.

(Let's just hope Dendritic Cell doesn't accidentally take a peek at those pictures because he might try to bribe 3803 for a few of them)

Thank you so much for the great analysis of 1146 and 3803's relationship! A gem to read and a sight to behold!

Thanks again and as always, I hope that you have a wonderful day! :D

[vampiresuns]

As They Covered The Sun With Swords They Had Bloodied, I Found Your Eyes Like A Worship Song of Old (Part 2)

A Tamnana centric spin-off to @ilyamatic​'s pirate au. Tamryn & the Olenevs belong to @valhallanrose​.

You can find Part 1 here.

Series Summary: 16k words. Set during the first decades of the XVIII century, Aelius Anatole, or Inti Ankuwilla, as history might or might not remember him, meets a certain Tamryn Olenev when his family relocates from Poland to Venice. In meeting each other and falling for each other, the two of them will discover a kingdom of their own, where they can figure out what it is to exist despite all odds telling you not to.

Part 2: 6k words. After sharing a furtive kiss on a deserted alleyway in Venice, Anatole’s job catches up to them. With the promise of returning, Anatole sets off to the Caribbean and upon his return, he decides to face Tamryn’s parents before confessing his feelings to him. Meanwhile, Tamryn frets, prays and finds a strange form on solidarity in Milenko.

Content warnings: Minors DNI. This is a piece of historical fiction set in the early XVIII century, during the golden age of piracy. As such it may contain depictions, allusions and episodes of racism towards black and indigenous peoples, anti-semitism, islamophobia, and LGBTQ people, as well as legitimate aspects of colonial violence.

Footnotes can be found at the end of the piece if applicable. Check part 1 for the main references and background research used for this piece.

Late at night, Tamryn had been going over the same detail of his project over, and over again.

“Alright honey, I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” Evalina said.

Tamryn kept going over his project.

“Tamryn.”

His mother called his name again: “Tamryn.”

Only when she gently shook his shoulder, he realised she was talking to him.

Tamryn grew more and more distracted as days passed. Half agony, half hope, altogether dreading Anatole might regret what he did. He knew he had held his hand, he could still hear him promising he would come back but that wasn’t enough to calm his fears, especially when the fear of him changing his mind about him hid a fear much, much worse: that Anatole might not come back.

Tamryn hadn’t told his family what had happened between him and Anatole yet. Part of him wanted to, longing the familiar feeling of crying to his parents (as he had the honour to have good parents who understood him) and them comforting him about it. He could almost hear their voices telling him it would be just fine, he just had to be patient. For his own reasons he had opted not to say a thing yet, at least not to them.

His gut twisted at the idea it might end up in nothing, having a kiss under the golden light of the early evening to haunt him for the rest of his life. Tamryn didn’t know if he could forget that kiss, let alone the man who delivered it.

To no avail, he wondered often what Anatole must be doing. News of him was scarce. The Olenevs didn’t know a lot of details about what the Cassano did exactly. A House of accountants, some public servants, some scholars, musicians, artists, people of science, printers; at least on the outside. Eccentric as they were, they were good people. They also knew that was not all there was to them.

They helped people they knew as much, that’s how they have come to know them: another family that needed to make haste to leave Kraków, also for their own security and wellbeing, had been helped by the Cassano before. They knew their methods weren’t particularly straightforward, nor orthodox, but they got things done. Tamryn didn’t doubt Anatole was helping people, but ignorance wasn’t bliss, it was a torment.

The Cassano were also extremely private. During the five months Anatole was away, Tamryn learnt it was less due to mistrust (even if that was a considerable element) and more due to protection of their clients, closest friends, associates and collaborators.

Some of their clients were easy to locate and identify. The Cassano ran their business and lent their service with a public facade of acceptability and exceptional skill at plausible deniability. Plenty of people required help keeping account of their affairs for which they felt professional help was better than house servants.

Yet, Tamryn and his family had learnt that their most important clients had, for all effects and purposes, no names: they kept their identities with an iron grip. Even Anatole’s father, who liked to bounce ideas back and forth with Evalina on his own blueprints, never made explicit what they were for, if they were commissions or just silly drawings he indulged himself with. Nor did Anatole’s mother, Qhispi Sisa. She often talked about approaches to medicine with his father and Zelda, but now that Tamryn thought about it, she had never said what she used it for, nor who, beyond their usual house visits.

Tamryn had always missed Anatole when he was away, but at least the other times there had been letters. On this occasion there was none. Not even a note. He had tried to ask Amparo one day, when she came to see Zelda, only to be met with a gentle refusal to answer questions about her cousin, which differed from Amparo’s purposeful reluctance to explain herself.

Milenko was no different. Tamryn knew him and Anatole had been abroad together more than once during these last two years, so perhaps he would spare details about Anatole’s business. It wasn’t that Tamryn didn’t respect his privacy, it wasn’t that he didn’t understand Anatole not giving him information yet was a way to keep him safe (the thought that Anatole was taking care of him, no matter the distance, made him feel dizzy), but he just wanted something to hold onto. Some indication that he might be alright.

When he mustered the courage to ask him, Milenko knew what Tamryn would say before he even said it. “You’re in love. Nothing I say will ease your heart, Tamryn. You will worry anyway.”

“But you’ve been with him, while working.”

“Nothing that I say about myself in that regard will ease your heart either. Let it float away in the water. I like to think it carries my prayers so he is safe. There is life in water, Yhwh is the water.

“I know what it’s like when the heart misses the name spoken for it,” Milenko paused, taking just a little pity on him. He sighed. “Alright, it’s not news, precisely, but are you familiar with Rabbi Al-Harizi?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Suspected as much,” Milenko said with warmth and an audible smile. “Part of my family lived in Spain before we were driven away from it. My nono’s family went there all the way from Aksum and Ethiopia; but mi vava’s family was from the peninsula, but you know what happened there. As it may, Al-Harizi could have some verses which you might appreciate. Would you like to borrow the book so someone else might read it for you?”

“I don’t mind if you do”

Milenko thanked him, and read:

If the son of ‘Amram had seen the face of my beloved, his ringlets, and his gloriously beautiful face blushing whilst imbibing alcohol, he would not have written in his Torah, “…and with a man”(1)

Tamryn would feel his face heat up. “I don’t think that helps. At all.”

Milenko took his hands in his, laughing as he squeezed them. “Be thankful I’m not pulling out The Conference of Birds or any Attar at all.”

“You’re worse than Amparo.”

“Believe me I am not, but What do all seek so earnestly? 'Tis Love. / What do they whisper to each other? Love. / Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts. / In Love no longer "thou" and "I" exist, / For Self has passed away in the Beloved!” (2)

All he could do for Anatole was to include him in his prayers. So Tamryn prayed for him, for his safe return, for more time. That Anatole may come back and kiss him again, or if not, at least that they could talk about it. Every time he said his name Tamryn felt the ghost of Anatole’s lips against his own. He hoped that too was a prayer. A prayer crowned with the sentiment that anything was worth it if it was for love, like his father said.

He should’ve expected Zelda noticing the way he muttered Anatole’s name between his prayers.

“That’s the third time you mention him. Did something happen? You look more lost than usual even since he left.”

“Hey.”

“I know you care about him, I just want to make sure you’re alright, and you’re not keeping anything inside that dumb big heart of yours, when it should be said out loud.”

His mouth became a waterfall of words. He had never been good at keeping things from his family, but he had always been notoriously bad at keeping them from Zelda.

* * *

Somewhere in the Atlantic ocean, Decimo Lemione’s body sunk and rotted in the water, his skull shattered with several pistol shots.

Anatole didn’t think he ought to be pitied. Yes, the ocean was big, but he wouldn’t be alone: he would have half his family to make him company.

* * *

Andrico was late. Of course he was late. Anatole had no time to waste. He needed to find the papers from the Casa de Contratación and get the fuck out of there. Decimo might have been dead, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still be ambushed.

He heard someone approach the room.

“Oh, you’re not who I’m expecting.”

Anatole hated when things got violent for no reason (“It was just a little trespassing,” he muttered to himself after the second, third guard had come to check why the first, then second, person who had come to check on this room wasn’t returning). He hated it as much as he hated being inconvenienced. Only the fourth guard recognised him, but he was dealt with before he finished saying his name.

“Very rude, I am trying to keep a semblance of privacy—” a fifth person came in. “Oh, where the fuck is Andrico.”

He showed up 15 minutes after the fifth, and hopefully last guard had been dealt with, coming into the room with Jean-Marc, his Quartermaster, when Anatole was finding something to clean his sword, Dawn Piercer, with.

Anatole shot him a murderous look. “Glad to see the Solanaise II is sailing again, glad to see you’re in one piece. Far less glad to see you’re fucking late, El-Saieh. I’ve been waiting here for forty-five minutes.”

“Forty-five,” he repeated, hissing through his teeth.

“What are you doing here? I’m supposed to meet— No. You’re my accountant?”

“For someone who had the audacity to be three-quarters of an hour late, you have no right to be that irritated.” Anatole turned to Jean-Marc, walking over a dead body to hug him. “Marco! You, however, I am glad to see.”

Jean-Marc whistled. “I always knew you’d be one to watch out for.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, but thank you.”

“So Zia Solange didn’t tell him?”

“She sure fucking didn’t.”

Anatole snorted, not even trying to hide how amused he was. Still, he was a professional, and the sooner he was done with this, the sooner he went over the Solanaise II’s accounts and routes, the sooner he could go back to Venice.

 “Look, Andrico I know last time we saw each other we didn’t part on the best of terms, but this is different. You know it is. I am willing to set that aside for the sake of the contract, if that’s alright with you. My plan is to keep you alive for long enough, and I don’t think Solange asked for me to see your accounts only to piss you off.”

“Put what aside?” Drico asked, cocking his head to the side, in the same way Anatole’s dogs did. “I apologised for that! You’re the one who hasn’t accepted my apology for offering you friendship—”

Anatole sighed. “You’re worse than dealing with Christians.”

“Excuse me.”

Jean-Marc pinched the bridge of the nose. “Andrico, Anatole, the contract.”

“He called me worse than a Christian!”

“And I’m going to call you something even worse if you keep making me waste my time where we could be easily ambushed. Again.”

Andrico eyed the dead people, then Anatole. In many ways, before him stood someone he had known forever; in many ways, before him stood someone he had never met before. “You changed.”

“If you say so.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Andrico, the contract.”

He grabbed Anatole’s hand and shook it, despite feeling like somehow this would come back to bite him on the ass. “Deal.”

“Excellent! First of all, as your accountant,” Anatole said with something akin to murderous politeness, “next time you’re this late, or late in any unjustifiable manner whatsoever, I’ll feed you to the Mami Wata myself. Second of all, I found the papers from the Casa de Contratación and I have this,” Anatole showed them a signet ring. “It's only a matter of leaving it in the right place now and to get out of here. And thank all Gods-I-don’t-have-contempt-for that you brought Marco with you. I know you’re terrible with accounts when you’re in a sulky mood.”

“I’m not sulking.”

Jean-Marc groaned.

Once they were back at the Cassano’s safe-house, while Andrico was too busy proving him right by being taciturn and ill-tempered about his circumstances, Jean-Marc made conversation with Anatole. He told Anatole about his travels, and Anatole told him about his. The sooner he was done here, he had said, the quicker he could go back.

“So soon?”

“I left some, hm, business unfinished, and I want to be done with that before I come back in a more permanent fashion.”

“I see. With this business you mention, that is. Or alone?”

Anatole smiled at him and told him nothing. 

* * *

It had been five months and a couple of weeks since he had last seen Tamryn, five months and a couple weeks since he had kissed him. Hadn’t it been because he wanted to wash his hair properly before he drove himself crazy and speak with his parents about what he was about to do, Anatole would’ve docked off in Venice and gone straight towards the Olenevs’ house.

His lips had haunted his every hour, as if the kiss itself had been as long as his exile. Yet, if the desire to see him again had pushed him forward, now that he was in the same place as him, his heart threatened to escape his chest through his mouth out of nerves alone.

What if he was angry at him for not writing? What if he had changed his mind? What if Evalina and Galen didn’t approve of him like this? Anatole thought they did, they both seemed to be both aware and protective of both Tamryn’s and Zelda’s choices in companions, as long as they were good for them.

It didn’t matter. All the reasons he had used to give himself hope and grit when he was away, all the beautiful things in nature, in his quarters,  in the island, in people; all those beautiful details  that he longed to show and tell Tamryn about were whisked away, as if they were trunks he had left on the ship and only now realised so.

The idea of being rejected made him physically ill. He knew his skin was intact, but he felt it crawl out of his body. Anatole hated this feeling. He hated how, despite feeling it all of his life, he still couldn’t get used to it, nor stop it, nor anticipate it. He had been learning, slowly, how to deal with it, but it made him overwhelmed and queasy.

The feeling itself had nothing to do with Tamryn and everything to do with Anatole’s mind. His mind has never known how to stop thinking, how to stop doing things, how to stop bouncing off the walls and digging his claws into certain things. For good or for evil.

He made a whining noise. His three dogs, three pomeranians he had “borrowed'' during one of his working seasons a couple of years ago named Duke, Zapa and Astrid, echoed it. His mapachitli tried to climb him, which Anatole had to stop by holding him in his arms, lest he damaged the fabric of his favourite suit.

Some of the people who had tried to capture Andrico (hired swords, privateers, bastards overall) when he was waiting for the latter had him in a miniscule pen. Before leaving, Anatole had released it, but it refused to go back to the wild, following Anatole instead. No matter how many times he tried to release it, the mapachitli came back.

The witty little thing even followed him to the ship. Anatole did the only thing he could think of: washing him, drying him, and taking care of it.

Now it was there, between his arms as Anatole was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. “I’m going to die.”

“No you’re not, Inti,” his father said as he kissed his brow.

“I am.”

“You are,” his mother said as she also gave him a kiss, “but not now. It will be alright, and we’ll be right behind you. Are you taking the dogs?”

“I think it’s more of a matter of the dogs not letting me get out of their sight.” 

If it weren’t because his grit and determination were stronger than his nerves, he would’ve never made it out of the house. He looked at himself in the nearest mirror one last time: instead of his usual working attire of boots, fitted trousers with buttons to secure the waist-band, a shirt and perhaps a cravat that had been embroidered by his mother, he opted for one of his more formal suits. A fitted coat that reached his knees over a vest, a carefully crafted white shirt with lace details. While he still wore fitted trousers that reached his calves (mostly because he hated the feel of breeches’ clasps around his legs), he opted for dress shoes.

He pressed his coat against his skin, where the inner breast pocket should be. Right, he could do this.

He still wanted to vomit, but it was better to do things while his bones threatened to vibrate out of his flesh than not do them at all. 

* * *

Evalina and Galen greeted Anatole in their foyer, exchanging pleasantries and asking him about his journey: if it had been good, if he was in good health, if the weather was agreeable for sea-travel  and if his nondescript obligations had been alright.

As he did every time he stepped inside their home, Anatole left his cane —the one that had a stiletto rapier inside— by the door. The Olenevs already knew his dogs, the three of them trained enough to be decent guests and not to bark at Pomarańczowy, Evalina’s cat. The mapachitli had stayed back home. It was too small still to roam by the dogs, and in case of an emergency, Anatole needed to be able to manoeuvre a sword.

Sometimes he thought paranoia and overthinking would kill him, but they hadn’t yet. He supposed there was something auspicious about that.

Evalina and Galen had never seen him like this. He looked pale, despite clearly having acquired a slight tan that made his skin deeper and more freckles when oversea. He was shaking and spoke in circles, with a nervous verbosity they had never witnessed in him. They had heard him talk to his heart's content about things he was passionate about, but the way he spoke in the throes of academic passion was not the way he was speaking himself into a spiral now.

“If you came for Tamryn, I’m afraid he’s not home, but you’re always welcome to wait with us.”

“It’s not Tamryn who I want to see,” he said, fidgeting with his own hands. “I mean I do, I just mean right now, as in right-now-immediately.” He sat down, he sat up, he circled one of their sofas, he sat back in it by swinging his legs over the back of it. “I,” he paused, exhaling a nervous breath, “I need to speak to you both, as a matter of fact.”

Galen and Evalina exchanged a look between each other that, in itself, was an entire conversation, in the way only people who had been together for years could. Evalina offered him tea, hoping it will give him pause so he may speak freely, saying they will be happy to hear what he has to say.

Galen, however, offered him a light teasing smile. “Oh no,” he said, “I wonder what it is.”

Evalina whacked his arm, chastising him in Yiddish. Anatole didn’t speak the language very well yet, so he only understood something along the lines of “tea”, “offer”, and “tease him”.

In the time he was away he had prepared a speech in his head. He had even written it down, afraid his mind would consume itself with something else and he would forget it. He brought it out of one of his inner pockets, only to fold and unfold the parchment as he read none of its contents.

The only thing he managed to say before crying was “I”.

This is it, I have ruined all my chances for not being able to be better, as I know I ought to be, he thought, forgetting his hosts felt nothing but kindness for him. How could they not when he was so caring of their son.

Galen brought tea, which Anatole tried to drink but one of his dogs had made it to his lap.

“No, Astrid, get down.”

Impervious to her human, she tried to lick his tears.

“We’ve never asked, what kind of dogs are they?” Galen asked, offering him a reassuring smile, hoping speaking about something else would help him calm his nerves.

Anatole managed to wrangle Astrid down, but now he couldn’t stand up as all three of his dogs decided to perch themselves against his legs, trying to comfort him. He appreciated the change of topic as he, shakily, took the cup of tea.

“We know you only like spiced tea.”

“Thank you,” he sniffled. “I’m sorry. They’re pomeranians.”

Evalina and Galen both raised a curious, alert eyebrow. “You mean Polish spitzes? Those Pomeranians?”

“Yes.”

“How did you even manage to get a hand on three of them?”

“If I want to be completely honest, I stole them,” he laughed. Before his nerves could undermine him any further, he stopped himself from thinking the watery chuckle sounded pathetic. He was trying his best. He wasn’t pathetic. He was brave and strong, and he was around people whom he trusted.

With slow breaths, he calmed down somewhat and took a tiny sip of tea. “In truth, I don’t think certain types of people deserve good things… but I didn’t come here to talk about my job, or my political opinions, at least not just yet.”

At the same time as Galen told him he could take his time, Antole said: “I’m in love with Tamryn.”

Silence fell on the room.

“So tell him that?” Evalina said, tentatively. Anatole stared at her as if she had begun speaking in tongues.

“That’s not the point, though. I mean, I do plan to ask him to m—, rather, I mean, tell him, if that’s okay with you. Please do let me finish before I ruin the impression you have of me again. I want to ask him but I refuse to ask him before I talk to the two of you, no matter if I cry or if my voice shakes. As long as you allow me the audience I need to speak to you before I do that.

“I don’t think there’s more important people in this world, to Tamryn, than his family and his community. Even if I didn’t know Tamryn as I do, I would know how important community is for you, not because it is also important for me and the likes of me, but because I see it in Milenko and Zia Aurora and her siblings. The Tesfaye are nothing without their community.

“My job is dangerous, my job involves travelling at sea back and forth. I will tell Tamryn, but you must know first: my family does a lot of things, but our most important guild is not the ones we make public, but those which we don’t speak of. We administrate and protect several pirate communities. These pirate communities actively sabotage Imperial ships. It matters not the empire: what matters is this. Justice.

“Conquistadores take African peoples from their land and lives, in vile kidnapping as if they didn’t deserve their freedom. They take our lands and exploit our people to die in mines like Minas Gerais and Potosí and Nueva España, like we were nothing but things to be crushed under their ambition and their cruelty. Things to be re-educated, when what they mean is ‘eliminated’.

“We refuse to let that stand. I refuse to let that stand. This is not something I will stop doing and you have to know it because I do not love Tamryn to leave him here while I have a life away from him. I want him to occupy every waking thought I have and share with him every waking hour. I want to live with him and love him as if he were my husband. I know you suspect I rather entertain men, and everything I have seen in you makes me think you also know it about Tamryn.

“Not only that but I can tell you respect it, that you even protect it, instead of pushing him into a union with a woman that would’ve made him unhappy or unfulfilled, not because there was something wrong with the woman in question but because he did not like women. If I could, were I allowed to exist and love as a man and to marry other men, I would’ve come here today to ask your son’s hand in marriage, hoping toI propose to him and that he said to me: ‘yes’.

“But,” his voice shook again, yet he kept on going forward, “I cannot. Not because of lack of wanting, not for lack of the most profound love I have ever felt for someone. But despite all my fears, nerves, overthinking or doubts, I am yet to find something I allow these people, who think they know anything about people like us when they do not, to rule over my life. So I ask, because I love him more than I have ever loved any other man, and I plan to love him from this day forward for as long as he has me, as long as he has me.

“I cannot swear or promise this on the same grounds of your faith in your God, not because it’s a problem to me, but because you see me as I am. I am a half Quechua man, and I please ask you to understand I want no religion to claim me, because the one which could’ve was taken from me when my mother was severed from her own people. Perhaps even before.

“But I will do whatever I must that I’m either allowed or obliged to do under it as long as it is custom, so I can show you I truly do love your son. I know a bit, but I also know you do things differently from my Milan, but I am willing to learn him, just as I know he is willing to learn me.

“I can offer him protection, and as long as I’m able nothing will be lacking if he wants it, and we will visit if he wishes to come with me, and I will do everything in my power to keep him safe, because if nothing else convinces you, please take my word when I say I would never forgive myself if something happened to him because of me.

“I do not want to deny myself the chance that he may love me as I love him, because I had been doing that ever since I met him, and I love him too much to hide it.”

Somewhere mid speech he had begun petting Zapa’s fur in self-soothing motions. Now that he had said his piece, he was still nervous but what was done was done: he had spoken truthfully, and few things were as important to him as his own word. Now he waited, moments seeming longer than they were as Galen and Evalina shared another of their knowing looks.

Without words, Evalina asked Galen if there was something he wanted to say. Without words, he indicated to her that she should speak first.

She sat beside him, gently ushering Anatole’s dogs so she wouldn’t step on them by accident. Just as gently he took his hands and just as gently she spoke: “It is said in the shtetl that Elohim calls out the name of the one a boy is meant to marry upon his birth, and that to find the one that he has willed for us is one of the greatest fulfillments of the divine will.

“It is a bond meant to endure forever, it is our joy, it is our completion when we find the one decreed for us by heaven. If Elohim has called you for our son, sweet boy, if you are the one to make him happiest in this world and the next, then we will not interfere - we will celebrate you loudest of all.”

He must be hearing things. He surely must become nervous enough for his mind to become delirious, surely that must be it. Yet, Evalina cupped his face and kissed his brow like she did with her own children. A dog barked, all dogs barked as Galen had to widen his steps because they insisted on walking between his legs.

Galen squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “But you should be telling our son. You are going to tell our son, right?”

Reality caught up with him. They were giving him their blessing to tell Tamryn what he felt for him. If smiles could dazzle and momentarily blind, like the sun the eyes after stepping out of a tunnel did, Anatole’s smile would’ve dazzled Evalina and Galen into seeing spots.

He tried to speak but all he could do was smile.

Evalina squeezed his hands. “I assume he will, won’t you darling? If you’re still undecided, I have more to say to convince you. I am very persuasive.”

“She is.”

“But if you don’t, we will need to have a conversation.”

Anatole frowned as he tried to think. “Wait, did he tell you something?”

Evalina and Galen exchanged curious looks. “Should he have told us something?”

Anatole’s cheeks lit up with a blush that felt alien on his cheeks. With a laugh, Tamryn’s parents said they didn’t need to know. 

* * *

Anatole’s heart stopped with the sound of the door opening. It remained suspended when it closed, frantically starting to beat again when Tamryn’s voice came through the hallway. That he was home, that Zelda would come back later because she had made way to the Cassano’s house, that the commission they had gotten was delivered with no problem. That he even helped one of their neighbours with a faucet that wouldn’t work.

Evalina and Galen smiled at Anatole, then called out to their son: “We’re in the drawing room.”

Anatole stood up, being unable to wait a minute longer, but Evalina ushered him to do so, whispering to him that it’ll be a nice surprise. In the foyer, Tamryn shuffled with his things, peeling layers of clothing and who knew what else. To him, it was another day of arriving home after running errands.

Anatole’s dogs weren’t as patient as their owner, three sets of paws announcing their way through the hallway, excitedly greeting Tamryn who greeted them just the same, in the most adorable cooing voice Anatole had ever heard.

“Why are you three paying us a visit? Are Vlad and Sisa at home?”

He was expecting his parents to reply to him, but it was someone else’s voice that reached him. A voice that felt like a dream or a memory, a voice that came with footsteps that stopped after a couple steps.

“No, no yet,” Anatole said. “They will later, but for now it’s just me.”

A sharp breath came out of Tamryn. He had been lingering around the docks, trying to get news of ships, but he must have gotten his information wrong because the sailors there told him the weather wasn’t in the best condition from timely arrivals. Tamryn had always liked the sounds of the waves against the shore, the sounds of birds flying up high —free and unrestrained— and the sounds of people who worked there going on with their daily jobs; but he wanted to think maybe the wind would carry news of his Anatole.

Not directly, of course, he knew as much. Anatole had been a ghost in the docks, his purpose hidden from official records or unwanted questions, but ships came carrying produce and people from the west all the time. He wanted to think that the auspicious news he heard was about him. Now he was here, close enough that all Tamryn needed to do was walk towards him.

Tamryn tried not to cry. He was unsuccessful.

“I’m sorry I didn’t write. There was a,” Anatole came closer to him, “a lead on a potential capture on Andrico, my Client. I didn’t want a letter to accidentally end in the wrong hands. Not when,” he was close enough to reach out to him now, “not when I would never forgive myself if harm came to you because of me.”

“What, what does that mean?”

“That I’m in love with you and if that’s agreeable to you, for as long as you’ll have me, I want to, I’d like to—”

Anatole couldn’t finish his sentence. Tamryn reached for him, holding him between his arms in the warmest, safest embrace Anatole had ever experienced. He held onto him as if he might disappear at any moment, lifting him and spinning him around in the tight hallway of his parents house.

“All I have wanted is for you to come back safe, and you’re here, you’re here.”

In their spinning Tamryn hit the wall with his back, making him tumble. He didn’t let go of Anatole, who managed to keep himself somewhat upright by freeing one of his arms from Tamryn’s hold and  frantically trying to reach the opposite wall.

“Solnishko, are you alright?”

With eyes closed, he buried his face in Tamryn’s chest. He never wanted to leave it.

“I’ve never been better.”

* * *

FOOTNOTES

(1) This is the source used for the translation here. Al-Harizi was an Andalusian jew and if there is one thing you can trust them with, is the gayass medieval poetry, everyone say thank you Rabbi Al-Harizi. One of the works referenced in part 1  (A Rainbow Thread) speaks more of him.

(2) Attar of Nishapur, "Intoxicated by the Wine of Love" as translated by Margaret Smith.

Because I am not really writing Milan if Attar of Nishapur does not make an appearance.

[ani-soup]

The New Velma Series Has Me Going Jinkies!

When the new animated series Velma launched a few weeks ago, it did something that no other show in the history of entertainment has done: unite everyone on the internet in hatred of it. For the first time, people on both sides of the political aisle expressed their disappointment of the new Scooby-Doo spin-off, which premiered on HBO Max on January 12 in the year of Our Lord 2023. But why is it so?

Well, for starters, it could have something to do with the fact that the teaser trailer, which outright mocked fans for wanting the show to stay true to the source material. Because attacking the people who consume your product always ends well (am I right, G4TV?).

It could also have to do with the fact that for this “incarnation” of Scooby Doo, the gang’s characters  have all been skewered and butchered and tossed to the wayside. For example,  Daphne Blake, who was the team mom in previous incarnations, is now a vapid high school bully not unlike the type you would see in Mean Girls. This mishandling of such a popular character was such that her OG voice actress, Grey DeLisle, actually made fun of the show using her character’s catchphrase.

Grey DeLisle on Twitter: "JEEPERS!!! #velmadinkley https://t.co/SaPva18G2u" / Twitter

The butchering doesn’t stop there. Fred, who was commonly depicted as the smart, charismatic leader who was obsessed with traps, is now a rude, spoiled, privileged manchild who is commonly the butt of other people’s jokes. At one point, Velma remarks that Fred is unable to feed himself during a court hearing, and cue a scene where Fred is trying (and failing miserably) to do so, much to the amusement of everyone in the court. He is also something of a misogynist, at point claiming that he can't remember Velma's name because he blatantly thinks that she's unattractive.  This version of Shaggy, now named Norville, meanwhile, is now a beta male who is trying (and failing) to win Velma’s affection and has none of the original counterpart’s charm or cowardice (though his love of snacks remains). I’m fully willing to bet that Norville is not gonna last a minute against Ultra Instinct Shaggy. One common criticism of the new series is that there is virtually no Scooby Doo in this show, despite being a spin-off of the Scooby Doo property.  Well, considering how his human companions have been dragged through the mud, this is probably the best thing to our beloved Great Dane.

Speaking of Velma, I’ve saved the worst for last. From the minute it was announced that she would be brownwashed and voiced by Mindy Kaling, I instantly knew not to expect the best from the franchise. Mindy Kaling is one of those unfunny comedians who relies too much on shock humor, not to mention she’s a raging liberal SJW. The last bit is important because she’s what is commonly referred to as an NPC. Her response to the news that people were not on board with the new South Asian Velma was that “tHeY’rE jUsT rAcIsT!” (Ms. Kaling, I feel the need to inform you that as a fellow South Asian, I also do not like your bastardization of one of my favorite childhood franchises.) Not to mention a clip has recently surfaced of her unashamedly admitting of her giving an improvised kiss to a fellow actor and threatening to have him fired if he told anyone about this. What’s even more disturbing is that the audience was laughing the entire time, as if sexual assault to a man is hilarious. (Imagine if the genders were reversed, would it still be funny then?) As for Velma herself, I can’t say that I really like her, considering how she treats everyone in her vicinity. While her previous incarnations were snarky as well, they were a lot less mean-spirited compared to this version, who is clearly unhinged and more judgmental and bitter towards just about anyone. Who wants to be about such a bundle of positivity and joy all the time?

It's no surprise that so many people have come to despise both the show and the creator. It currently sits at a record 1.3/10 on IMDB, and has been dubbed the worst animated show in modern history. (No, seriously!) There are plenty of ways to make an adult reboot of a children’s franchise. This is not one of them. Whether you’re familiar with Scooby or not, this show isn’t for you. You’re better off watching either Scoobynatural or Mystery Incorporated if you want to see a darker, edgier Scooby Doo done properly.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be watching some What’s New Scooby Doo? as a palate cleanser for whatever the hell this mess is.

[nikofortuna]

Poem: The End

The disaster inspiring this poem is a plague. It’s much less descriptive of the actual event than it is of the feelings of the author, which as I mentioned before is my character. Additionally at this point everybody engaged in the roleplay event has been planning to start a rebellion against the person who has been causing all of the disasters.

The End

Time and time it happens again,

Disaster strikes and locks us in,

Snow and Flame make heads spin,

Tides and Strain seek to win,

As if living was the greatest sin.

At leisure it takes away our kin,

While supplies too are running thin,

We are left to bury the fallen men.

Is it our fate to perish in this plague?

Or is there a cure so that we may endure?

It spread from high up reaching the sky,

But only grasps at the ones that bow far down below.

Stoking fires-

Burning incense-

Stoking fires to purify the bodies,

Burning incense to cleanse the souls.

So it goes ashes to ashes

And dust to dust.

With death we had many clashes,

Now we have to do what we must,

If only to survive at last.

Starting the analysis with the title this time!

So the title alone already reflects how thoroughly done my character is with the current happenings and it has been gradually radicalizing him with this disaster being the last straw in that regard.

Right at the beginning there is a bit of a recounting of the four previous disasters, how often they are occurring and how many lives are cut short every time. The first and last verse lock in every other verse in this stanza between each other through their rhyme scheme, which illustrates the lockdown the people have been experiencing in some way every disaster. Those are also the most important verses as every other verse except those two could be cut and the core meaning of the stanza would still be preserved.

The whole stanza feels a bit less flowery at least to me, which is supposed to showcase how upset my character as the author is that he speaks so directly and clearly.

The next stanza is a lot more flowery in contrast, in part because it has to be in a sense. Verses three and four clearly allude to the illness originating from the palace but only taking the lives of the citizens. It is just vague enough that my character could plausibly deny that the emperor is meant here and just say he means the Heavens instead.

The rhyme scheme in this stanza is a bit different from what I’ve done so far as the rhyming bits are within the same verse each. There are also two parallels to be found here with the subjects standing directly in opposition to each other in both cases. The first two verses set things up with the cure standing against the plague, which then makes it quite clear that the emperor is standing against the people. This verse set up also uplifts the people since structurally they stand in the same position as the cure.

As always we’ve got my favourite poem structure with another double parallel! Two things of fire with one big and the other small and two aspects of a person that are being made clean with those fires being set alight respectively.

In the last stanza the first half is obvious given that those verses are well known and refer to the death that has occurred again. Meanwhile the second half alludes to the citizens of the Crimson Empire rising up against the emperor, who at best is letting them die without interfering and at worst is the direct cause for all of this death. And with it being the only stanza with an uneven number of verses it signals a clear end.

[crimsonxe]

Get your biased bigoted bleeting over things not going how you wanted and/or that you don't have a clue about in misusing the concept of "bad writing"; completely wrong and spreading misinformation; and CRWBY bashing bullshit the fuck out of the main tag shitlord. You want to present the mentally unwell Shane that ignored Monty's own words about M&K being the writers to his animator; as well as by your own words FACTS; I'll stand by said facts, Monty's own words in interviews, his friends, and y'know HIS BROTHER who has told ones like you to stfu with trying to use his brother's name against his show. Though its really telling that you clearly are taking issue with a particular set of vids, which I'm pretty sure I know the reference without a name being mentioned; cause that person actually did their research and is a fan that shreds through the bullshit. Meanwhile your entire post is filled with outright lies, spins, failure in comprehension, and bias. The show's legacy will outlive both you and anything your sorry ass ever does.

Adam is an abusive co-opting TERRORIST that got what he deserved ; which was setup in the Black trailer with him laughingly dismissing the lives of the innocents on the train.

The WF that was swayed by Adam is an incredibly apt to current times anti-extremism storyline. Any group that resorts to violence towards innocents loses any goddamn cause they purport to be for; instead being nothing more than a TERRORIST. This is shown by Yang's showing empathy towards the faunus rights cause and Velvet being shown as a victim of racism vs. extremist terrorists like those under Adam. The main issue there is Sienna having been killed off way too soon, cause she could've served as the "controlled violence" figurehead opposed to Adam's extremism over more of the show to further highlight that message.

Ironwood is an authoritarian genocidal general that threw away his humanity after showing admiration for Salem who tried to throw a city of poor people to the wolves. Yet clearly has his boots down many people throats like its a kink going out of style

Males have never nor ever will be or should be the center of the story. That includes Jaune who isn't given anything outside of his status as a SECONDARY MAIN that has been through some shit.

BB is one the top tier mature wlw slowburns that shows a normalized non-world of gay non-rushed non-aimed at an LGBT+ specific audience with an actual bi character that feels bi that was planned from the start. Not to mention how its development fits so well with Monty's prior work Haloid, where it presented the idea of Master Chief x Samus (hetero fan-pairing); only to rug pull that MC was actually a femme other Spartan still getting with Samus in a wlw pair.

Along with them there's:

2 confirmed canon lesbian characters

1 confirmed gay character

mlm basically canon pair that just needs to come into the show proper from the Before the Dawn book

a married wlw couple w/ kid who're living their best life

a trans character that isn't a joke or centered around being discriminated against as a trans character

Which throws out the homophobia bullshit.

The show respects its femme characters by keeping the story centered on them, not doing fanservice with them, not diminishing their roles, allowing them to be complex, actually having two get together officially, and overall just avoiding the usual sexist tropes especially in anime/manga.

You try to go after separating out CRWBY when time after time even those with issues with RT, they will separate out CRWBY. And if it comes down to obnoxious shitbags like you who's entire basis is being a salty ass little bitch cause things didn't go how YOU wanted it or CRWBY who's story this is; I'm going CRWBY every.single.fucking.time. You're just another piece of shit that thinks the show is bad cause its CRWBY's story not their shitfest version of things.

So as someone with the show from the Red trailer, who followed Monty since Dead Fantasy 4-5, and is LGBT+ thus actually having a stake in the LGBT+ rep; go fuck yourself and get the fuck out of actual fan spaces as your ass isn't one.

RWBY Final Thoughts: Legacy

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. ... [Basically,] they behave like a cult.

This is a repost of a post I made February 1st, 2024 on another site. At the time, it was the final post of a deep-dive recap of RWBY and the history of the show, its fandom, and its direction under Rooster Teeth.

I felt this out with some of my peers and the feedback I got in relation to posting in on Tumblr was that, well, why not? It was my main haunt to begin with, and I may as well, since Rooster Teeth is closing its doors. I'm posting this mainly as a shot in the dark just to see how it gets received. Only minor edits have been made; I'm sure there's some stuff in here that would make people mad, but that applies to pretty much anything someone could say about RWBY. Click the read more to get a glance at how my time with RWBY ultimately wrapped up.

Nine years ago today, Monty Oum died of an allergic reaction. Today is a day of mourning for fans of his work, including RWBY. There’s no sense in waiting. Let’s finish this and heal.

The Showrunners

Miles and Kerry often received the brunt of the attention when it came to RWBY. As the writers of the show, they bore responsibility for the largest chunk of why it eventually went into the shitter, and fan anger against them was almost certainly not helped by the damn near idolization heaped on them by fervent stans. They are, undoubtedly, the focal point of RWBY fans’ parasocial relationship with the show.

Of course, despite sharing about the same credits space as his partner in crime, Kerry tended to fly under the radar a lot, with it being Miles who received the brunt of the fandom’s fury with each successive volume. It’s not hard to see why; the character Miles voices has been consistently over-exposed and is in many ways an obvious creator’s pet, with denials as to this fact falling on deaf ears as Jaune’s screentime continued to balloon past its merits, whereas the character Kerry voices could just about wrangle an average of ten seconds of screentime every three years. Certainly Miles has been in trouble with fans more often than Kerry for the shit he’s said and done. The Ruby body pillow and the Tifa Lockhart ‘prostitute’ comments come to mind. Oh, and the slurs, that one too.

But perhaps the reason Miles gets so much more flak than Kerry is that Miles just...acts like an asshole a lot of the time. Even aside from above examples, Miles’ flaws come out in his writing: he’s petty, holds grudges, can’t take criticism, and just overall has way more power over the story than someone of his caliber should. He’s very poor at disguising his real feelings and often lets them bleed through, and when he actually decides to voice them on purpose, things get ugly—refer to that Cameo about Ironwood.

But as tempting as it is to treat Miles as an out-of-control cockwaffle on the rampage and Kerry as his sympathetic ineffectual shadow, the reality is that they’re co-writers, have been for ten years, and anything Miles gets away with doing is as much Kerry’s fault as his. If the Gray Haddock situation has taught us anything, it’s that more people tend to harbor blame than the one individual that makes an easy scapegoat.

Since aside from aforementioned n-word business, Miles and Kerry are almost never connected to moral outrage, this makes it easy for the stans to uphold them, since all they really have to defend them from is accusations that they didn’t honor Monty’s “vision” for the series. This is only easy because the stans are fucking insane, but that’s for later on down the page.

“Vision” is in quotes because that’s how fans treat it, we all know they don’t really care. Miles and Kerry’s vision matters, and we know that much because of Calixyn’s interview where she all but begged to be told that RWBY Volume 5 was as bad as it was because the “good bois” had control of the show ripped from them. Nope, turns out all that racism, homophobia, and plain shitty writing is all on them. But at least they’re nice!

(Miles was 26 when he said the n-word. I’m 26 now when writing this. I think it’s pretty fair to call him an asshole.)

But the truth is that it’s objectively stupid to think that the direction of RWBY hasn’t changed since Monty’s passing, it’s impossible for it not to have. There are more writers on board than before, and it’s been a long time since he was alive to contribute his thoughts. The real question is whether they at least tried, and I don’t think they did.

I mean, Shane Newville never names Miles and Kerry in his letter, but he does state several times that the choices made for the show were not only not what Monty wanted, but “straight up just shitting all over what Monty made”. I find it very difficult to believe that that insinuation, and all of the people caught up in the net it casts, wouldn’t include those two. And like it or not, but the person who is able to compile tons of clips and interviews over the years as some sort of seeming immutable proof that “CRWBY” are good-hearted people determined to preserve Monty’s vision, isn’t really looking at any more evidence than the person who’s come to the conclusion, based on what they’ve seen, that that the opposite is true. And they’re certainly looking at less evidence than the people who actually did work there around Monty, Miles, and Kerry. The facts sometimes boil down to ‘if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and is implicated in the walls of text like a duck, it’s probably a duck’, guys.

Even in the best case scenario in which the work of Monty Oum turns out to have been treated with dignity and respect (and was just really shittily written from the beginning), the fact remains that Miles and Kerry did not put a quality product into the world. I will be very surprised if either of them manages to get a lead writing position ever again, because once the popularity of RWBY fades, so too will the goodwill they’ve somehow amassed among its fans. RWBY, much like Twilight, is inevitably going to taint the people who were in charge of writing it.

But Miles and Kerry are just two dudes. What exactly is going to happen to those fervent fans who hung on their every word and insisted they were the embodiment of everything pure and innocent? What, exactly, is going to happen to the RWBY fandom that once seemed to be unavoidably populous on the internet?

F, N, D, M

We already went over “constructive criticism” and “worldbuilding”, so let’s add another eternally-misused word to our roster. You know, something I’ve occasionally thought about in terms of online spaces is that no one knows what a “comfort show” is. It’s one of those terms that became too popular almost as soon as it was introduced, to the point that it became meaningless, much like “hyperfixation” and “anxiety”. I see people refer to RWBY as their comfort show and I’m just like...how? A comfort show is supposed to be the show that always puts you in a good headspace, a show you rest easy with because you’ve always connected with it because the love was always there. A comfort show is a show that you watch in your down moments to feel better, not a show you think is just the greatest thing ever, the bees’ knees if you will.

A comfort show is not a show you force yourself to like, it is not a show you defend at all costs, and it is not a show you only still cling to because enjoying it once coincided with a time when you felt popular and among friends. Which, increasingly, seems to have been the case for RWBY fans.

RWBY’s Fandom

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. But I’m doing it now because the RWBY fandom, though now it’s a shadow of its former self, is still a sizable chunk of people and took a lot longer to die than most other fandoms.

The RWBY fandom itself was an especially big and very online fandom, and the show produced an abnormally large amount of big name fans who continued to use their own influence to push its success and keep its momentum going. As I’ve said before, the RWBY fandom is something that Rooster Teeth were able to extract an excessive amount of praise out of for minimal effort; it simply seems to be in RWBY fans’ nature to speculate and theorize and over-analyze and fill in blanks, and to perceive good writing and animation where there is none. But you know how fandom operates—the bigger its size, the more infamous it becomes.

Long since famed for being especially toxic, those who are in the know consider RWBY fans a different breed, really. They create and move narratives at high speed and act quickly to correct any perceived dissent in the ranks, casting out anyone that feels disillusionment with the product and insisting everything is peachy even as their world crumbles around them. To RWBY fans, the “CRWBY” are always separate from the “problematic” aspects of Rooster Teeth (which is basically the whole company) and it doesn’t matter how many of its flaws get highlighted; RWBY and the people that make it are always great, innocent of any harm done and fantastic, and anyone that dislikes them is a villain—even if those people were at one point part of the “CRWBY” themselves. Loyalty is everything. In other words, they behave like a cult.Those acronyms themselves have always bothered me, and I’ve grown a strong distaste for them. Originally they were just a quirk of the show; a format for team names that spawned the name of the show and eventually stopped being relevant altogether. But RWBY fans are simply unable to not use them. It’s not “the fandom” it’s “the FNDM”. They’re not “the RWBY team” or “the RWBY crew”, they’re “CRWBY”. Even people that the fans are actively trying to shame, shun, and harass don’t get to simply be people—they’re “RWDE” and, when that became an actual community of sorts unto itself, was switched to “HTDM”, short for “hatedom”. They remind me distinctly of code words that get formed and passed around in cult movements, identifying terms that quickly provide boxes to put people in and make it easier to sort loyals from disloyals. “Hatedom” itself is another one of those terms that spread and got so prolific it really doesn’t carry any meaning anymore. Real hatedoms are surprisingly rare, guys. Every fandom that becomes big enough for its respective product to become criticized eventually comes to believe it has a ‘hatedom’ because how could someone dislike something I like so much? But a hatedom on its own arises out of very specific circumstances and environments, and causes the spread of hate for a product based on broad foundations that are often unfair to the product and which creates perceptions that spread faster than the work, so that the work is often talked about in mocking reference rather than true dissatisfaction.

RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom guys, it never did. The Last of Us doesn’t have a hatedom. Fairy Tail didn’t have a hatedom. Blackpink doesn’t have a hatedom. Even Marvel doesn’t have a hatedom.

Paris Hilton had a hatedom. Nickelback had a hatedom. Hell, the website Tumblr itself had a hatedom. These were examples of people or products whose reputations spread too quickly and eventually swallowed rational perception of them, with people who have never experienced them or their work dismissing them and the fans who enjoy it wholesale.

Using the term “hatedom” is understandably common because (and in spite of the fact that) it allows for easy miscategorization. A hatedom is not composed of people that were actually exposed to the work, found it lacking, and expressed that. A hatedom does not occur in the wake of a product that was so bad it pissed off its fans and caused them to walk. People don’t hate Metroid: Other M because they can’t stand the sight of a woman being vulnerable and don’t understand challenging drama, they hate it because it was poorly written, badly designed, and tarnished a long-running and highly cherished gaming heroine’s reputation. People didn’t hate Fifty Shades of Grey because of some bias against women expressing their sexual freedom, they hated it because it was a wildly misogynistic and badly-written piece of dreck. People didn’t hate The Last of Us Part II because of homophobia and transphobia, they hated it because it was a misery fest with a tired moral theme that posited itself far more deep and compelling than it really was. And just because people with the above disingenuous views also hated these things does not discount the fact that the works got the reputations they did because they were getting back the exact amount of love and respect that was put into them.

Similarly, RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom. It does, in fact, have an ex-fandom. Those are also things you don’t see very often, but when you do, they almost always follow the same pattern, don’t they? A work which got wildly popular very quickly, took really deep nosedives afterward, and became disowned by the people that had formerly propped it up.

But that’s a discussion for later. What exactly makes RWBY’s fandom so toxic and cult-like, and why and how did it get that way? I think it’s a combination of several key factors that were baked in and collided badly.

The first was ease of access. RWBY was sold extremely well early on, and shared enough similarities with both anime and video games that it attracted many curious people from those communities. Combine that with vibrant colors, an attractive visual aesthetic, an air of badassery, and good music, and it gained a lot of loyal fans quickly—fans of anime and video games, specifically, being fans that tend to get more attached than to other mediums and are known for spending a lot on merchandise. These, in turn, morphed into nostalgic elements ripe for misremembering—people often have difficulty acknowledging that something they once liked isn’t good anymore even on its own, and I think RWBY fans in particular put way too much energy into the show to be able to admit that all the time they spent defending it (and harassing people who criticized it) was for nothing.

That skyhigh rocket to fame early on, of course, was attached to the reputation of Monty Oum, and once he died, he quickly became a martyr, which galvanized the loyalty of the show’s most toxic fans even further. To this day, talking about Monty at all, even for the right reasons, is seen as disrespectful or distasteful unless you’re trying to use him to prop up Rooster Teeth, a double standard I’ve unfortunately run into even in seeming safe spaces. I think if we’re comparing RWBY fandom to a cult, then Monty Oum and his memory can be compared to a central mythologized figure, the center around which are formed all of the pretty lies the members of the cult will tell you. Monty’s name is irreplaceably tied to RWBY, and as such, in order to defend Monty, its fans have to defend RWBY...and you can see where this leads. Attempting to talk about the mistreatment Monty and his family went through at Rooster Teeth is seen as using his name as a weapon—nevermind the fact that Rooster Teeth and their fans regularly use his name as a shield.

Of course, what this really reveals is that many such people don’t care about Monty, who he was, or who he went through, but rather his name alone. In fact, I’ve straight up seen RWBY stans say that people shouldn’t “take Monty’s name in vain”, as if Monty were in fact some sacred religious figure. It’s both bizarre and harmful.

A third factor was popularity. For a lot of the same reasons as, say, Supernatural, the perception of RWBY skews much more broadly between fan and ex-fan than that of the typical over-hyped show. The truth of the matter is that when a show gets popular, or really any work gets popular, enjoying it becomes a cliquey sort of thing. People that enjoyed being into something well-respected and widely known and basically the hottest trend are far more prone to become overly attached, put too much of themselves into it, and remain unequipped to deal with the fact of that trend’s eventual passing, especially if it’s a fall into disgrace rather than a quiet entrance into history. You can still find certain especially toxic big names from the RWBY fandom active and posting, pretending not to notice that their audience has become smaller and smaller over the years. Let’s face facts here, a lot of people that enjoy being part of the “in” crowd never manage to figure out how to accept losses and will do anything to try and regain lost popularity, or fool themselves into thinking they’re still on top of the world.

But we can reason and explain all day. Another truth of the matter is that it shouldn’t be other people’s problem that fans can’t accept reality and adjust, and that the RWBY fandom quite honestly deserves its reputation as abysmally toxic. The way terminal fans of the show have treated anyone who dissents, most prominently Shane Newville and other ex-employees, let alone other ex-fans of the show, is quite frankly disgusting. RWBY stans are difficult to look at in all of their bewildering, teeth-gnashing toxicity and forgive...so I’m not going to. People that still insist there’s nothing wrong with this show or the company making it are, as far as I’m concerned, beyond help, and are part of the problem. Many an ex-employee certainly thinks so.

In a lot of ways, you could call the fandom one of the driving forces of the show’s failure, mostly because they had an abnormally large amount of influence over the show. Pleasing the fans has always been a major goal of the RWBY team (unless you like characters Miles Luna doesn’t, I guess), but it’s almost disturbing how the Rooster Teeth strategy has been to lead them along and bat their eyelashes at every turn and how the fandom laps it up.

Of course, Rooster Teeth feeds the parasocial engine by engaging with the fans as equals, and I was given a disturbing reminder of how many of the people who worked on the show—the ones who aren’t pissed and digging themselves out of trauma ditches—behave exactly as the fans do, tweeting twenty times a day about their favorite ships and memes. By creating the perception that RWBY’s team is just like the RWBY fanbase and wants the same things they want, they tap that line of excess energy that’s kept this fandom going so long despite how far it’s fallen. It’s that “hey! my friend said my ship is going to be canon and he works on the show” feeling.

Of course, a probable reason as to why so many employees who worked on RWBY behave the way RWBY fans do is because a lot of them started out that way. As in, student hires. This has long been an open secret of Rooster Teeth’s M.O. for a while now, hiring people who look up to them and engage heavily with their content. Many an ex-animator has lambasted this tactic because it’s insidious, and purposely designed to make the incoming staff feel honored and indebted and excited so they won’t notice how they’re being fucked over. Arryn Troche, who made the ‘gays greenlighting volume 10’ tweet, rings up as a particularly eerie example considering they have the same rather-uncommon and unconventionally-spelled name as the voice actor for a ship they’re obviously very attached to. A quick search reveals them to have been a longtime fan and cosplayer for the show before being signed on as a junior animator.

And it is the fandom who ultimately makes the legacy for any given work or body of work. So what is RWBY ultimately going to be remembered for?

Legacy

I thought about it for a little while and found five things that are most likely to be associated with RWBY in the public’s memory after its death. The first should come as no surprise to anyone.

Bumbleby

The only part of RWBY that will likely be carried on by fans who stuck with it until the end is, of course, the only part of it that mattered, to many of them. You’ll know from my earlier recaps that shipping was always a big deal in fandom, but due to key choices (or if you prefer, mistakes) made during Volumes 2 and 3, one ship grew larger and more promoted in fandom circles than any others.

This is a combination of the unique features of the RWBY fandom and their one-track mind. The fans are well-known, as I said, to fill in the blanks in a pattern that best suits their narratives, and this works out with Rooster Teeth because it means that any sudden changes in direction they make will always be excused and praised rather than critically examined. Unsurprisingly, Bumbleby’s fandom, now that their victory has been cemented, have doubled down on their narrative that this was the intended goal from the beginning, despite it being plainly obvious that early RWBY was angling for Sun Wukong as the love interest and threw the occasional bones to Blake/Yang shippers to try and play nice.

This used to be one part of the fandom, of course, but as the show continually bombed with viewers and made more and more decisions that pushed them away, all competitors were slowly filtered out as their fans left, until Bumbleby shippers were the fandom. It’s no coincidence that Blake and Yang suddenly started acting unusually touchy and sentimental in Volume Six, following on the heels of a volume of RWBY so wildly unpopular that it woke up the company execs and forced them to acknowledge that the biggest part of their fanbase was only going to remain loyal in exchange for one thing: their ship.

The sad thing is that you can tell Rooster Teeth wanted to explore other options. Volume Five features a rather sudden shift into Yang and Weiss interactions in what I remain positive to this day was an attempt to sway shippers into a potential second choice while Black Sun was still in the oven, and this really represented one of the major errors of Rooster Teeth, in that they failed to understand the audience they were trying so hard to please.

Bumbleby became what I call a “Big Red Button” ship, and it is only the second of its kind that I’ve seen. The first? Destiel.

Yes, there’s a reason I kept comparing RWBY to Supernatural whenever Blake and Yang’s relationship came up. I admit I wasn’t a part of the Supernatural craze in its heyday and have never really enjoyed the show, but I’ve watched enough of it to connect the dots from what cultural osmosis I had to the eventual downfall we saw in November of 2020.

Both Bumbleby and Destiel were held up as the gay ship that would change everything, the biggest ship in the fandom and the one that would’ve been a major push for LGBT visibility, at least during their heydays. The problem was that its fans were not really that interested in LGBT visibility and were simply obsessed with the ship itself, applying it value as a win for LGBT audiences purely to bolster its perceived importance. Fans like this were not ever going to accept any alternatives regardless of the sexual orientations or gender conventions involved. Hence, the metaphor that is “the big red button”. You have a big red button that says “canon gay ship but not the ship you want” and ask the fans you’re trying to court whether they’d press it or not. Whatever they might say out loud, you know none of them is pressing that fucking button, ever.

Both of these Big Red Button ships became what they were due to showrunners being forced into courting an audience they really didn’t care for, and how could you blame them when both were infamously very, very over-active and annoying in general. Just like with RWBY’s well-intentioned but misguided Freezerburn phase in Volume 5, Supernatural also tried to gently shut down fans who then managed to obliviously ignore any and all hints that their ship was not meant to be endgame, and I can say that because “he’s like a brother to me” in any fandom but Supernatural would’ve been a tactical nuclear strike that sent the shippers packing. Once it failed, the gay bait came out in full force. It’s well known by now that, contrary to what one would imagine, the CW was not pulling a profit off of Supernatural’s minor mainstream success pushed by a cult following, so it’s no wonder they eventually resorted to desperately baiting the one audience that was going to stick it out no matter what, provided they had the right relationship dangled in front of them. RWBY went through the same thing.

The main problem with these two ships is that for all its diehards insisted that it was all about the gay representation, their respective shows teased and baited for so long that the world outside the little bubble these shippers lived in had moved on by the time they came to fruition. Gay visibility in media these days, at least western media, is easily available, to the extent that sometimes people believe homophobia is totally over when it really, really isn’t. If you’re looking for gay representation, you can find it plenty of places, and the first place you look probably isn’t going to be Supernatural or RWBY. So the huge wave of viewers that these shippers expected upon their victories was never going to occur, which might could’ve been avoided if the writers had simply grown a pair and made moves towards canon much sooner than before the shows were on their last legs and due to be scrapped.

Or, you know, just been honest. Diversions and alternatives were never going to work. The only thing that these shippers were ever going to understand was a hard no, a “sorry, this ship isn’t going to happen”. But the execs in charge of these shows were never willing to take a hit like that, so instead they dug their own grave.

And where does that leave the shippers, those people who devoted their whole lives to these fictional characters, only to find the show that bore them into the universe dead in a ditch? Well, nowhere good. Much like Supernatural, RWBY is heavily associated with its booming period, the heavily online portion of these shippers’ lives in the early and mid-2010s when it was all the rage, and yet in modern day, it’s seen as a bad neighborhood to hang in, an abandoned mansion at the corner of the street where awful things happened. These shippers don’t have many friends except each other.

Just like RWBY, Supernatural also exists primarily as an ex-fandom now. Much of its former fanbase remember the good days fondly but make no secret that they stopped following it once the writing tanked, and this left the shippers without many allies to associate with since so many of them had been pissed off with the way their shows ultimately became the Destiel Show and the Bumbleby Show, respectively. Contrary to an unfortunately popular idea, these shows did have actual LGBT fanbases, only a lot of their LGBT fans were not on kool-aid and avoided being sucked into a trap called “if you don’t ship this, you’re homophobic”.

You will find that the Bumbleby fandom are often looked on with disdain by quite a number of viewers of RWBY who have accused them of speaking over minorities, sexual and otherwise. Many fans have noted that, aside from Blake’s bisexuality being a seemingly late addition (Arryn Zech is noted to have cast her as straight when discussing Ilia Amitola’s ill-fated crush on her as late as 2019), Blake was very swiftly removed from all faunus characters who held romantic connotations in favor of Yang, implicitly saying that Blake was better committing to a white human woman than to an ethnic faunus male. There are obvious reasons why this left a bad taste in peoples’ mouths. Not to mention, other LGBT fans that invested in the show were not exactly welcomed with open arms.

Fair Game, or as I tend to call it, Qrowver? Qrow x Clover? Yeah, that was huge in Volume 7’s airing days. It very much experienced a rapid ballooning in fans and fandom love...but we all know how that ended. Many a fan who felt heartbroken and, importantly, betrayed by Clover’s sudden and rather pointless death turned on RWBY and Rooster Teeth and accused them of gaybaiting, which is of course exactly what happened. They received no sympathy from Bumbleby shippers—because of course they wouldn’t. If Rooster Teeth would gaybait with Qrow, a popular male character, that would mean they could potentially be gaybaiting with Blake and Yang, too. That was unacceptable, and so ironically the part of the fandom that had always crowed about the importance of extending a hand to LGBT viewers turned on LGBT viewers, valiantly defending Rooster Teeth as they always had.

And because Bumbleby fans had no room in their hearts for anything about RWBY except Bumbleby, and were hostile to anyone who didn’t ship it, they ended up being their own best friends and everyone else’s bad memories. When RWBY has faded from the public’s memory and is no longer a source of active income at all (so, basically right now), one of the only relics you’ll find of this show will be the two women making out in all the fanart you’ll find on the occasional Tumblr blog.

The Bigotry

You could call this section “the Racism” since that’s the biggest part of it, but we’d be remiss in neglecting the harm done to other minorities as well. We’ll get to them in a minute, but race is the thing that’s going to pop to mind when we talk about one of the other things RWBY left behind in the common memory.

One of the longest-running subplots that RWBY ever went through with was the racism subplot. Its basis is one of the things that so severely dates RWBY: creating an in-universe stand-in for people of color through the existence of people with animal traits was something you would absolutely not get away with after 2020, and even by 2016 was something liable to be seen as tacky. Nonetheless, RWBY openly used the faunus as stand-ins for black Americans and the struggles they faced in a white world.

Except that the company, based in Texas and headed largely by white staff, did not feel the importance of that. What slowly started out as a main character’s attempt to redeem an organization she felt had been driven too far and was no longer her home was slowly transformed into a means by which some incredibly racist people could spout off about what they felt were the real issues to be talked about, which were the condemnation they felt was deserved by activists that turned to violence, labeled, a little too quickly, as terrorists.

The 2010s saw a shift in social values, and much as with gay audiences and gay characters, black audiences and black characters—as well as other racial minorities—were experiencing something of a renaissance, with efforts to put the voices of these people into the public’s feeds. It wasn’t just George Floyd in 2020—the unexpected and frankly traumatic reign of Donald Trump as president of the United States galvanized the divide in America and social awareness became a bigger thing than ever, and since Trump was a flagrantly racist person with racist beliefs who enacted racist policies and was uplifted by racist Americans, people pushed back as they felt their lives and existences being threatened by a racist establishment...an establishment which Rooster Teeth came down on the side of very firmly.

No quarter is given to the fictional stand-ins. Sienna Khan’s policies are never examined in-depth, and the only close looks we get at the sorts of activism the White Fang does are at Adam, who is obviously condemned by the narrative and made into everything but a mustache-twirler, with delusional and frankly baffling beliefs of faunus superiority spelled out at length. No matter what concessions Rooster Teeth might’ve tried to make with Sienna’s beliefs before they stuck a sword in her, the fact of the matter is that their beliefs came through in the voices of Ghira and Blake, who made it very clear that the individual motives and experiences of people like Ilia, Corsac, Fennec, Yuma, and the rest simply don’t matter in the face of what they’d been driven to do by them. The whole ‘blacks can be racist’ tone of the final scenes involved in this subplot are both miles removed from the more cautious and neutral tone of early RWBY, and also just a very alarming red flag overall.

I went over this in my Volume 5 Final Thoughts: the shoddiness of the volume does not lie solely with the animation department. Miles and Kerry are known to have had generally sole control of the show up until Volume 7—but we also know that they didn’t have to, if they were writing anything company execs felt wasn’t to their tastes. The sudden twisting of Adam into a homicidal incel ex-boyfriend, along with his mutation into a faunus supremacist, when he was the face of the faunus movement as a whole, along with Sun’s blatant ill will towards the White Fang when he’d previously been willing to give them a chance on Blake’s word, all imply that Miles and Kerry endorsed the worst possible interpretations of racial activists and felt free to condemn them and place responsibility onto the faunus—and by extension, the real-life minorities they represented—to take a stand against the bad seeds within their causes, and the fact no one stopped them from airing this implies the higher-ups felt the same way.

People didn’t just leave RWBY after Volume 5 because of some really badly animated fights—they left because they’d felt too much of the authors’ racism coming through in the narrative and couldn’t comfortably continue watching. Every member of the faunus that had “bad” views was either killed (Adam, Sienna, Fennec), arrested (Corsac, Yuma), or “redeemed” by choosing to fight the first two (Ilia). All of these combined factors, with no room for charitable interpretations…not a good look.

And once Adam was defeated in Volume 5, and the White Fang reformed, that was the last anyone saw of that subplot, which had taken five years to wrap up and somehow still ended too early. Miles and Kerry had washed their hands of it, and references to Blake’s place in society were sparing from then on. This subplot’s inescapable presence throughout the show, combined with how it was dropped out of existence, left no room for redemption, either. No one was going back and saying “maybe this looks really, really bad”.

And so, that’s what a lot of people carried with them as their final and most relevant memories of RWBY: it’s astounding levels of racism. This is a bitter subject for many an ex-RWBY fan, many of whom aren’t white and, even among those that are, it’s simply inexcusable. Meet someone on social media who talks about RWBY at all, and isn’t one of the Bumbleby stans we’ve already discussed? You will find some mention or other of RWBY’s racist elements somewhere within their sphere. And so, that becomes a part of RWBY’s legacy, as a feature of the show that was simply too big to ignore and too poorly-handled to forgive. People don’t get over this shit, man.

This is of course not to mention the well deserved shitty reputation RWBY has for its other bigoted elements, as well. Bumbleby, as we’ve discussed, encompassed pretty much every RWBY stan left standing by 2020, but that left quite a few ex-fans that were fed up with the company’s obvious ploys when it came to sexuality and gender. Remember when I talked about Qrowver up above? Its ballooning and immediate fall from grace was a much-condensed version of RWBY as a whole, and pretty much featured as Rooster Teeth blowing their last remaining patience from LGBT fans to smithereens. The fact of the matter is that when you get down to it, every RWBY volume after Volume 4 was not a good time to be a minority. If you were gay, the show seemed to either ignore or despise you—between the background gays that warranted mockery, the mixed reception Ilia generated, and the outrage that finally boiled over when Clover bit it, part of RWBY’s legacy is how utterly unpleasant it has been for LGBT fans who expected and deserved better.

And so despite entering the scene in 2013 as a supposedly progressive show all for being led by four women, the show died known as a low-effort half-baked cringefest whose politics were always on display and always several years behind the trend.

The Good Days

Of course, another major part of RWBY’s legacy is the early days when everyone actually liked it. This is, again, something the show creators brought on themselves and something fans assisted with. I did mention the nostalgia for the Good Ol’ Days as a significant part of the RWBY fandom’s more cult-like elements, after all. The fact of the matter is, on some level, everyone knows that RWBY has spent several years going downhill. The ex-fans lament this fact, and the diehard stans insist that it’s all just as good as it used to be, primarily by doing what they do quite a lot, and linking completely coincidental elements back to things characters said or did in previous volumes as some sort of evidence that this has been the plan all along.

I’ve run polls on this matter before; even though I’ve recapped Volumes 1-3 thoroughly and shone lights on some pretty significant flaws, you ask anyone what they think the best volume of RWBY was and they’re gonna tell you Volume 3. Yes, even with all of the stalking incel Adam and the deaths of Penny and Pyrrha. It’s the last time RWBY felt cohesive and even though some obvious derailing was in effect, and Shane Newville has openly said that the behind-the-scenes matters were pretty ugly, it’s still the golden child. Shane’s only one person, and it’d be a while before RWBY scandals would become consistent and begin to overshadow the show as a whole.

The RWBY team themselves have certainly nurtured that very much on purpose. That tactic started with them, of course. Many elements that were either unpopular or predicted to ruffle feathers were stated to have originated in earlier volumes, even in situations where this wouldn’t have made sense or where it’s an obvious lie—such as Maria Calavera. They know full well their seasons post-Volume 3 were unpopular and receiving blowback, and tried to minimize it by linking them to more well-respected seasons. Suffice to say that this simply didn’t work. But it does make people remember those earlier volumes. Because so many ex-fans lost their energy for RWBY after its most active period, much of the hype from the hype era is all that you’ll see when you encounter one. Nostalgia wins out in the end, and at least RWBY can say that, as a show, it had enough of a headstart to leave an impression that lasted in a positive way. Although that’s only one side of the coin...

The Scandals

Let’s face facts here, the biggest part of RWBY’s legacy, period, is that it fucking died. It didn’t die instantly, but rather took hit after hit, blow after blow, and slowly had its image tarnished alongside that of the company, which failed to contain repeated scandals as ex-employee after ex-employee after ex-employee spoke out about the abysmal ways they’d been treated.

RWBY is Rooster Teeth’s biggest IP by far and, really, their only one worth talking about. Every other show was either eclipsed by it or unofficially canceled after bad reception. So when Rooster Teeth suffered the consequences of their actions, so did RWBY. It really can’t be overstated how the last few years of RWBY’s existence have been absolutely bombarded by a barrage of terrible Glassdoor reviews and bombshell exposure letters. Fans managed to stay strong through the first few rumblings of ill will, but after Volume 5 shook the fandom loose, discontent entered enough of the fandom sphere to be normalized, and once that happened, it was all downhill. Once people were actually allowed to talk about not liking Rooster Teeth’s content, they sure as hell weren’t going to be dissuaded from talking about not liking Rooster Teeth as a company or its practices.

Separating the art from the artist is a very difficult thing to do and only really appropriate in certain situations. Don’t fall for any kool-aid, guys, it doesn’t make you more mature or ‘above all the drama’ to actively ignore the damage done to real people in the process of getting fictional content out into the world.

If you’re still able to enjoy the Harry Potter books and look back on the good times they gave you in fondness, then fine. If you actually purchased and played the Hogwarts Legacy game programmed by antisemites and which puts money in the pocket of the transphobic owner of the franchise, then yeah, people will be right to give you shit for it. There’s a difference between quietly enjoying a product in a manner that doesn’t hurt anybody, and actively ignoring the people hurt to make that product while feigning concern. The gap in the fandom widened as the repeated leaks and scandals continuously ate away at the protective bubble around Rooster Teeth and it became clear that whatever fans might bleat, Rooster Teeth wasn’t going to ‘learn their lesson and do better’. The habitual cycle of using whatever recent scandal had occurred to cast disappointment and anger on a particular figure and uplift the rest of “CRWBY” (see also: the Gray Haddock issue) gave diminishing returns as the bombs kept dropping. This is part of why RWBY has such an ex-fandom, because if they aren’t enjoying the product and people were hurt to make it, why stay?

Crunching employees so hard they struggle to sleep and suffer debilitating health issues? Writing the n-word on a white board knowing a black employee will see it? Goading someone into trying to kill themselves? Calling an LGBT employee a slur and then making up a public-friendly nickname in place of that slur just to get away with continuing to call her that? Laying off people without warning or a means of letting them stay afloat until another job is found? Not paying or crediting employees and cultivating an environment where those in charge do what they want and those in the public eye reap all the benefit while those without a consistent spotlight get treated like dirt?

Just some of the things I thought up off the top of my head. There’s plenty more in the details. And you can’t blame Fullscreen, you can’t blame Warner, you can’t just write it off as something that happens at animation studios, because it isn’t. Yeah, the work environment in general for animation studios in America is lacking because, ya know, late-stage capitalism hellscape, but that’s dismissive of the point. Rooster Teeth are a bad company and hurt their employees and lie when called on it. It’s impossible to separate RWBY from Rooster Teeth (despite stubborn stans’ best attempts, which themselves have been called out by these same ex-employees) and because of that, RWBY’s legacy is one of corporate abuse and utterly vile behavior towards people that just wanted to make something cool.

People have refused to associate with the show over these things and honestly, they’re right to. RWBY’s ultimate legacy, if we’re honest, is the show that became a shadow of its former self, still trying to dazzle with reminders of its former glory and promises of gay relationships, all while trying to squeeze money out of both the employees who made it and the fans who upheld it. It’s the show that cost hundreds of people their physical and mental health and didn’t even have anything to show for it at the end of the day. It will live on in history as the most bitter of pills to swallow, that something you once liked and wanted to succeed can and will be ruthlessly twisted for profit margins and might actively hate you on the side. And speaking of…

Monty Oum

The biggest travesty of RWBY’s legacy is that Monty Oum is ultimately only the smallest part of it. He’s there, but barely—he’s a name in the credits that quite frankly is only there to keep up the facade of loyalty, when the show had stopped being Monty’s show before he even died and by now can be safely said to resemble nothing he would’ve made.

It’s a shame that for all that Monty was held up as a genius of his craft and a genuinely good man who inspired so many people, all he’s going to be remembered for is...this. A show people only attach his name to in an effort to insist it’s actually worth sticking by. Yes, Monty did other things, had other works, but none of them ever achieved even a fraction of the fame and respect that RWBY had from its first baby steps in 2013.

Maybe this could’ve been avoided if the real carriers of Monty’s legacy—Sheena, his wife, and Shane, his pupil—hadn’t been cast off as they had.

Shane seems to have found a new life and is working with Dillon Gu on animation, but I think we’ve all noticed his name hasn’t gone mainstream yet. I’ve tried to get in touch with him; from what I’ve gleaned, I frankly just advise leaving him alone. He wants to move on and I don’t think the RWBY fandom, which was so awful to him for telling the truth, is ever going to be a place he can feel welcome.

Sheena has mostly been quiet and done her own thing, cosplaying and watching anime and hopefully enjoying herself, although I notice posts on her Twitter feed from last year calling for a New Deal in the animation sector and castigating corporate abuses.

She also plays Hades, a much better product than RWBY with more love put into it and much better LGBT representation, which means her taste is excellent. She has a site now that you can go to, and the about section doesn’t mention Monty, her late husband, at all, for obvious reasons: Sheena doesn’t want to be connected to RWBY. Though, there is something there that’s noteworthy, in the last paragraph:

Still desiring a social element to her career, the animator turned professional cosplayer also has a history in the live stream world. Past broadcasts have included creating costume pieces, playing games with community members and subscribers, RPGs and more. No matter the project, peers or problem, Sheena strives to keep moving forward.

That powerful phrase we all associate with Monty.

It’s a shame that this show had to be Monty’s legacy, and that years off from now, his name isn’t going to mean anything to the public because the project he was passionate about and died making outlived him and his passion. It feels like his legacy was stolen, and his own part in the show’s legacy is held up purely as a pedestal on which the show should rightfully shine.

Every time I think about Monty, I think about how much I don’t want that to be me. For all the years I’ve spent here, with my graphics certifications being wasted since I earned them while I slave away in retail, I wonder if I’m the lucky one. If I were to enter the workforce and do what I loved, would it be worth it in the end? Would what happened to Monty and Sheena and Shane happen to me? Not sure I wanna know.

Snipped here.

[fallingthruspace]

I’ve seen a few posts about the idea of Eddie and Chrissy showing up in season 3 and decided I wanted to expand/put my own spin on it.

Obviously Eddie gets a job at the music store inside Starcourt

He works most of his shifts by himself until the owner tells him that he’s hired another employee

A couple days later Eddie is in the process of carrying something out from the backroom when the owner calls him to come meet his new coworker

Much to Eddie’s surprised it is none other than Chrissy fucking Cunningham the girl he’s been nursing a huge crush on since middle school

Chrissy spends the day learning the ins and outs of the store while she and Eddie get to know each other, and at some point they have what is basically the forest conversation from 4.01

When their shift is over Eddie insists on treating her to ice cream at Scoops Ahoy to celebrate a successful first day. Chrissy tries to politely decline but Eddie insists so she agrees but only on the condition that she can treat him when she gets her first paycheck.

I have a headcanon that Eddie is already friends with Robin in this AU because I fully believe they would be hilariously chaotic besties if given the chance. He wasn’t too fond of Steve at first, but after a few weeks of hanging out at Scoops to bug them Steve and Eddie have something that could almost be called a friendship. They mostly just rag on/snark at each other, but there’s no malice behind it. (Eddie LOOOVES making fun of Steve’s uniform)

Both Robin and Steve are naturally surprised to see Eddie Munson strolling in with Chrissy Cunningham of all people, and Robin spends a good few minutes shooting looks at Eddie because she is 100% aware of his massive crush

Scoops Ahoy becomes a regular hangout for Eddie and Chrissy and that’s where they get to know “Steve’s Kids”, as Eddie refers to them because they’re also always there

Chrissy is still dating Jason who periodically comes to visit her at work and is of course a dick about her working with “the freak”, no matter how much Chrissy tries to convince him that Eddie is completely harmless

Eventually things come to a head and Chrissy breaks up with him, partially because of other things but also because he won’t stop being an asshole towards someone who she now considers a very good friend. Maybe even her best friend. Chrissy feels a little guilty that she’s not as upset about their relationship ending as she should be

Afterword her and Eddie share an ice cream sundae to “celebrate” her dumping Jason. Robin and Steve are proud of her too because they also thought Jason was a huge dick (no one likes Jason)

I feel like Chrissy and Eddie are pretty much oblivious to everything that’s going on for about 80-90% of s3. Like everyone else is dealing with the Upside Down and Russian spies and shit, meanwhile those two are about 2/3 of their way into a slow burn 200k friends to lovers fic on ao3 😂

They probably get dragged into it right after the Scoops Troop escapes from the Russians

Maybe they have the day off or something and they go to see Back to the Future when Steve and Robin plop down next to them, both obviously high off their asses and Steve looking like he just got beat within and inch of his life

They drag the two to the nearest bathroom to get Steve cleaned up and this segways into Steve and Robin’s bathroom convo

After that a lot of shit happens really fast and before Eddie and Chrissy know what’s going on they get roped into the fight against the Upside Down and now there’s a Giant Eldrich Monstrosity in the middle of the food court and they’re helping Lucas Sinclair throw fireworks at it

In the end, Eddie and Chrissy get absorbed into the Party because fighting inter-dimensional monsters has a real way of bonding people together

Steve’s Kids also become Eddie and Chrissy’s Kids, especially Dustin(of course)

Sometime during that summer, Eddie and Chrissy eventually stop beating around the bush and finally get together (much to the relief of Dustin and Robin who have been trying to get them there since before the “mall fire”)

The two naturally cause a stir at Hawkins High when The Freak and The Cheerleader show up for their senior year arm in arm and acting like a couple of lovebirds

When season 4 rolls around Chrissy does NOT get Vecna’d because she actually has a support system now, but others are not so lucky

Jason, of course, still blames Eddie for the murders because he’s a grade A dick and now has the motivation of The Freak “stealing his girl” and the gang has to clear his name while trying to destroy Vecna

Lmao my brain really ran away with this and now I want to write a whole fic for it help

[the-lazy-cat-bakes-souffles]

Why Robin and Nancy could be one of Stranger Things’ best character dynamics

I’m really hoping that Stranger Things 4 delivers when it comes to Robin and Nancy’s relationship. There are so few prominent relationships between the female characters in this show, and by all appearances this will be the one that gets the most screen time and focus in the upcoming season by far (what with Joyce flying off with Murray to find Hopper and El with the boys in California - Max meanwhile seems very emotionally isolated and going by the promo and bts pictures will be paired mainly with Lucas and/or Dustin). Plus this dynamic has all the makings of one of the most meaningful and interesting in the whole series if done right.

Nancy and Robin are strikingly similar characters in some respects but so very different in others. They’re both highly intelligent, curious, determined and ambitious. They’re both dreamers, desperate to push back against and escape the stifling expectations placed upon them by society - particularly that of Hawkins and the small town suburbia it encapsulates - but feel trapped by their circumstances. While Nancy initially tried to ‘fit in’, playing the part of the strait-laced straight-A’s student turned rebellious popular girl, Robin survived by blending in, camouflaging herself with a carefully cultivated persona, and neither approach brought them happiness or fulfillment.

Nancy is astute and driven but also bullheaded, reckless, and ignorant of her own privilege. She can become so absorbed in her own problems she overlooks the needs and feelings of those around her. Robin is creative and laid back but her sarcasm and cynicism belies a lot of deep insecurities. I think Robin will challenge Nancy and her tendency to steamroll over other people in a way she’s never been before (and sorely needs), and Nancy will prompt Robin to reevaluate a lot of preconceived notions she held about her. Just as Robin found unexpected camaraderie and acceptance in Steve, Nancy is someone who knows what it’s like to feel isolated from your peers, whose experiences have taught her to fight back against conformity and submission, to embrace who she is and what she believes in. There’s a lot they can teach each other about themselves.

There’s also a history there. You wouldn’t know it from Season 3, but Nancy and Robin were already familiar with each other (I hope they lampshade this contradiction in the next season because it makes zero sense that Nancy would have no idea who Robin is). Most interestingly, in the Rebel Robin podcast and novel it’s revealed that Robin used to be best friends with Barb before they drifted apart over time, and ultimately (in Robin’s words) Barb ‘chose’ Nancy. There’s an implied sense of resentment that Robin holds towards Nancy, not for ‘stealing’ Barb as such but because Robin watched from afar as Nancy took Barb’s friendship for granted and left her in the lurch while pursuing her relationship with Steve and all that it represented. But that doesn’t stop Robin from looking out for Nancy on multiple occasions.

Especially given that it came out last year and stars Maya Hawke herself (lending it more canon legitimacy than your average spin-off media), Rebel Robin feels like it’s deliberately foreshadowing Robin’s development in Season 4 and by extension her future friendship with Nancy. There’s a particularly interesting scene where Robin’s English teacher and confidant Mr Hauser tells Robin: “It’s hard, losing a friend (referring to Barb). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people in Hawkins who dream like you do. Who could surprise you.” And who should interrupt them at that moment but Nancy Wheeler - it’s really not subtle!

Though they’re inevitably going to butt heads and will start off as an awkward dysfunctional duo, once Robin and Nancy get past their assumptions about each other I can see them truly pushing each other to grow as people and develop a genuinely close bond based on mutual understanding. Their personalities are simultaneously conflicting and complimentary, and above all, there’s a sense that the other is just what they’ve been missing in their lives.

Now that’s a compelling dynamic if I ever saw one.