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saltygilmores · 2 months ago

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Thoughts While Watching Gilmore Girls-Season 3, Episode 12. “Lorelai Out Of Water” Part 3

Lorelai woke Rory up at 5am so she could be awake to meet Alex before their fishy date. Okay, understandable. Alex is an angel. Meeting him is absofuckinglutely worth a five am wake up. Look alive, Rory Gil! You're in the presence of greatness.

Hello, my darling fishy boy. They're so flippin cute.

That is some robe you got there Gilmore. Very cute.

YES ALEX I WILL MARRY YOU! Ahem. I mean, you should marry him Lorelai. Don't let the wormhole get him. Cut to later that day at a Korean Wedding. Dom Daddy Dave thinks Lane looks pretty in her dress. That's about it.

Well, that's nice of you Lane, but just like so many other utterances, this one comes with a big fat asterik. A nice fat juicy BUT.

BLASPHEMY! YOUNG LADY, YOU MARCH YOUR KEISTER TO TO THE WASHROOM THIS INSTANCE, AND RINSE YOUR MOUTH WITH SOAP!

Before she and Jess became an item, she was all Rah Rah Shishboombah Yay Jess, then they start dating and now she's bored and has no problem throwing Jess under the bus like in so many of Milo Ventimiglia's fantasies. SELF COUNTERPOINT: Two years of trying to defend Jess to people who distrust him for a myriad of nonsense reasons has worn her the fuck out. SELF COUNTERPOINT COUNTERPOINT: Rory is maturing enough to not care about other people's opinions? No, no, that doesn't sound right. Lane then sheepishly admits that she was full of hot air and didn't actually mean she was happy for them. This is coming from someone who propped Dean up on the regular for years so I don't take her opinion on other people's men seriously anyway. Rory didn’t even like Dean.

It's still never made completely clear WHY Lane doesn't like Jess. Is this still about the car accident? This is definitely still about the car accident. Rory: You like Smashing Pumpkins and I don't. Lane: That's just because you're close minded and blind. If DDD is Lane's Smashing Pumpkins then Jess is what band to Rory? Show your work. Use a number two pencil.

Okay miss I Must Protect My Besty. Where were you the last 3 years while Dean was stalking, manipulating and emotionally abusing your besty?

Mm hmm. That's right. Sit down. To no one's freaking surprise, Lane does not give one single example of what she is protecting Rory from.

This quadruple date would create a Swirling Vortex of Dorkdom the likes of which had never been seen before. SELF COUNTERPOINT: Keg Max? No, no. We don't talk about Keg Max. Lane then regales Rory with the story of a Korean couple, a story in which the wife endures years of verbal abuse from her husband, and being ordered to cook his meals. She snaps and attempts to skin her husband alive with a carrot peeler. He survived and they are still married and also, he's somehow the victim in this tale.

The Beaver here only escaped death by carrot peeler because our hero Rory Gilmore swooped in and destroyed his marriage just in the nick of time. And because Lindsay just couldn’t perfect the right ratio of arsenic to meatloaf.

I went to look up this episode's air date to see if Jess' ugly sweater was weather appropriate and learned that this episode aired in January 2003. STAY WITH ME HERE? Okay? The show is more or less on a close timeline. Jess is dressed appropriately, if dorkily, but someone should probably check on Alex and Lorelai. Because I looked up the temperature in Hartford on January 28th, 2003. At 5am on January 28th, 2003 in Hartford, CT it was negative four degrees. By 5pm that day, the temperature had risen to a toasty 21 degrees. I mean, Lorelai did concieve Rory on a balcony in the middle of January. It was a toasty 30 degrees at 8pm on January 10th, 1984, a roughly estimated date that she would have bumped uglies with Christopher to concieve Rory. She clearly doesn't mind a frozen wiener. If you want to continue with the weather funsies, here's the website I used. https://www.wunderground.com/history ANYWAY? Luke sees Nicole outside speaking to Taylor and appears all at once concerned, suspicious and smitten (smitten with Nicole. Not Taylor. But also Taylor). Susmitten? Nicole is Luke's Smashing Pumpkins.

Awkward flirting ensues. Luke smiles and giggles stupidly and fumbles his words in a way that we have seen, like, never. We learn that Luke charges 75 cents for a cup of coffee. How quaint. If the Gilmores actually tipped anyone and tipped a healthy 20% that would be a whole...15 cents per cup in Jess' pocket. I mean, they do drink a lot of Folgers, those nickels and dimes could really add up over time. After working for a few days he might be able to afford a pack of baseball cards. But they don't tip, so this is all a made up fictional story. ANYWAY.

Me, sighing wearily, with the Gift (Burden) of Hindsight™: Don't do it, man.

Look at this doofwad. More Korean wedding boredom, nothing happens. Rory can't come to the boring wedding reception of some Korean couple she doesn't even know because she has a date with Jess and of course this bothers Lane, mildly anyway. It's been established that Rory has dutifully attended dozens of these weddings of complete strangers in Lane's family since childhood, for some reason, and this is presumably the last one. She's paid her dues. Lane invites Rory to invite Jess to the wedding reception. He had to be cajoled into going to a fun carnival. I think he would rather cut off his own pinky or tell the police where he buried the bodies than go to a wedding reception of one of Lane's relatives, a Lane who for all he knows at this point thinks he's the scum of the earth. Lane realizes this was a stupid idea. I think it's funny that Lane tells Rory "Tell Jess hi for me." Doesn't he sit behind you in class girl? Lane at school the next day: Hi Jess. Jess: Hey. Mama Kim then tries to set Lane up with some other boy to take her to the prom, while DDD is standing nearby. So Lane gathers her courage and tries to plead her case to Mama Kim and admits she has a crush on Dom Daddy Dave.

It would be so funny if she said Jess instead of Dave. Poor Mrs Kim though. Died of a heart attack so young.

"Him?"

Whomp whomp.

The show's fish budget must have swelled in just a few episodes, because they managed to wrangled one very much living, breathing fish. Compared to just a few episodes prior, when we had Finding Zeemo:

Lorelai appears to have survived hypothermia although its possible she's not admitting to Rory that she lost a few toes. She somehow managed to catch a fish in negative four degree weather. Alex presumably did not question Lorelai’s motives and helped her pack up this live fish, which survived the sub zero temperatures, so she could bring it back to her home where she would dump the poor doomed creature into her tub. A third date with Alex is a go. While the exact fate of the bathtub fish is unclear, much like Lorelai and Alex's relations ship...or Lane and Dave's relationship...or Jess and Rory's relationship...and Luke and Nicole's relationship...or Dean's relationship with Lindsay's carrot peeler... its fate is certain to be a grim one.

#gilmore girls #denise rewatches gilmore girls #rory gilmore #lorelai gilmore #alex #luke danes #nicole #jess mariano #lane kim #dave #3x12 #gilmore girls season 3 #lorelai out of water #loow

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beigetiger · 8 days ago

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Phase 2 definitely has writing problems, but one thing I’ve been thinking about lately that I think was done well was the cultural differences between the sorcerers of our home world and the sorcerers in Dimension X.

Because of course they’re really different, they’ve had 300 years to grow and develop different, and have done so in very different fashions.

One of them decided that it was somehow their right to take over and enslave the mortals of their world, creating a society built upon magic and ignoring the people dying beneath them. From what we’ve seen, they live peaceful, easy lives and rarely have to work for much, the only condition being that they worship the Faceless Ones and never think a bad thought of Mevolent, which at this point is easy for nearly everyone! They live in a 1984-type world and everyone who has survived this long in it is fine with it.

On the other hand, the sorcerers from the main dimension are a MUCH different story. They are a PTSD riddled population that skulks through the shadows, avoiding the light of day where the mortals can ever find out they exist. Violence is normal, it’s an everyday thing for them. Nearly everyone is a warrior. Political beliefs vary WILDLY, perpetuating even more violence and making them constantly live in a world where they are at risk of losing everything from one moment to the next. They’ve spent so long intentionally repressing themselves and never forming any real culture that the moment one does start to form away from the eyes of mortals, it almost immediately starts bending towards fascism (something I’d also like to talk about later).

But the starkest difference, in my humble opinion, is the mindset difference that has come with their extremely different lifestyles. Sorcerers from the main dimension (I wish it had a name) have learned their whole lives to have bendable morals, bendable beliefs, bendable everything. Mortals live short lives and so they learn things fast, and sorcerers have had to constantly update who they are and how they function in order to effortlessly be able to act “normal”, which is enforced in their society and punished brutally if not followed. These sorcerers have learned to be able to strip themselves down to the very bare bones of who they are and be able to build themselves back up in order to better conform with whatever society they’re currently living in. Utterly adaptable, created to be perfectly undetectable.

Leibniz sorcerers, on the other hand, have never had to put in that work. Because of their long lives, they’re allowed to update their moral codes and their lifestyles slowly, possibly over decades or even centuries. It means that while one of “our” sorcerers is constantly taking in new information to find out how to perfect and exploit it, the Leibniz sorcerers might just deny its existence or validity in order to avoid altering themselves. After all, why would they? Unless it’s an order from Mevolent, they have no pressure to do so.

And so reading Seasons of War kiiiind of feels like watching a bunch of alley cats live among and then brutally judge pampered housecats. It’s funny to say the least but it’s also so fascinating to think about the cultural implications and how all of it might change in the future. After all, Dimension X is under very new rulership and Roarhaven now exists. There’s much potential for change.

#skulduggery pleasant #heyyyy I’m back with more bullshit #I am gonna write that analysis about fascism. for reasons #listen it’s been fascinating to me for a while and now is a better time than ever #i am once again skulduggeryposting #spamming you all with text. again.#text cut of mercy be upon ye

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goldenrods · 4 months ago

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Instead of being repressed, sex is being expressed and expressed and expressed. And it's not the sex of intimacy, mutuality, and equality, which the pro-sex people deride as "vanilla," that's being promoted and acted out. It's the supposedly kinky variety - the sex of dominance and subordination. How prevalent is this kind of sex? Consider John Briere and Neil Malamuth's 1983 study, which found that 60 percent of a sample of 350 ordinary male students indicated a likelihood of sexually coercing (read raping) a woman, and Diana Russell's 1978 study, which found that only 7.8 percent of a probability sample of 930 women had not been sexually harassed or assaulted. If you put these together, you realize that sexual dominance and subordination are a majority experience. Obviously the thought police are falling down on the job.

To be fair, not all the pro-sex people contend that male sexuality is repressed. Some believe that sexual repression is the particular plight of women, indeed, the only noteworthy problem of women. The argument goes like this: Because of our sexual repression, we must unquestionably make use of any means available to stimulate our desires - sex roles, pornography, whips and chains, swastikas, you name it. It is suggested that the more our desires and fantasies are like those of sexist men, the better. If only women can uncover our repressed sexual fantasies and give free reign to them, so it goes, then we will be liberated, too.

This apparently was the rationale behind an exercise Paula Webster conducted in a workshop at the 1982 Barnard conference on sexuality, organized by "pro-sex feminists." There she asked the women participating to write down, anonymously, their most forbidden sexual fantasies. Some of them went like this: "I want to buy a strap-on dildo"; "I want to fantasize about being a porn star"; "I want to rape a woman"; "I want to sleep with a young girl"; "I want to be fucked into insensibility every which way."

I'd like to break a real taboo at this point, and raise a few questions that the pro-sex people consistently evade. Where do these sadistic and masochistic fantasies come from? To borrow from Simone de Beauvoir, are they born or are they made? Are the really agents of our liberation? If we are aroused by them, does it automatically follow that we are empowered by them?

To begin to answer these questions, we have to look beyond the fantasies themselves to the culture in which they develop. It is not just coincidence that they imitate the violence men do to women and girls. Think about the implications for our sexuality of the following statistics: More than a third of us were sexually abused as children (Russell, 1984). For many of us, our first sexual experience was a sexual assault. Forty-four percent of us will be raped (Russell, 1984). The environment in which we learn about and experience our bodies and sexuality is a world not of sexual freedom but of sexual force. Is it any surprise that it is often force that we eroticize? Sadistic and masochistic fantasies may be part of our sexuality, but they are no more our freedom than the culture of misogyny and sexual violence that engendered them.

The inescapable fallacy of the sexual repression thesis, as applied to women by the pro-sex people, is that it looks at sexuality within a context of largely mythical sexual restrictions and outside an environment of real, ongoing male sexual exploitation and abuse. In doing so, it turns what is done to women's sexuality by external oppression into something we do to ourselves in our heads. It suggests that if only women can break through internal "taboos," we will have sexual freedom and indeed we will be free. It ignores the real political lesson of woman's sexual experience: women cannot have sexual freedom, or any other kind of freedom, until we dismantle the system of sexual oppression in which we live.

The failure to recognize and confront this system is most evident in pro-sex thinking about pleasure and danger. It is significant that the pro-sexers use the word "danger" to describe the less-than-rosy side of women's sexual experiences. Danger connotes the threat of something harmful. It does not describe the actual denigration, exploitation, violence that are done to women daily. Danger is the boogeyman in the dark. It is not the continuous insults, the leers and entreaties, the chattel status of our bodies, the real brutal fucks, the rapes, and beatings.

By making the sexual use and abuse of women into just a scary game, the pro-sex people can locate pleasure for women squarely in its midst. "Pleasure and danger" really mean "pleasure in danger"; "coming to power" means "orgasm within a system of power over and power against women." What is ignored is that the governing sexual system exists to keep women from exercising real power and experiencing authentic pleasure. Within its perimeters, there is no meaningful choice, real agency, or genuine pleasure.

Acting out the roles of dominance and submission that the system forces on us is not the same as choosing them. Experiencing arousal and orgasm in the course of acting out these roles is not defining our own sexuality. I've come to believe that a human being can learn to eroticize anything - including banging one's head against a brick wall. I think that this is pretty much what sex has been for women - except that it's often more like being banged against a brick wall. Women learn to eroticize this abuse in spite of our bodies and against our interests. The sexuality our culture offers women today through pornography is not new, not avant-garde, not revolutionary. It's the same male supremacy has always forced on us: being used as the instrument of someone else's sexual agency - the instrument of someone socially male.

When Women Defend Pornography, Dorchen Leidholdt.

#feminism #radical feminism #anti sw #antiporn #radfem

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gothhabiba · 1 year ago

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Literacy is a contested term that both shapes and is shaped by our understandings of divisions among individuals, social groups and institutions. Many earlier approaches to literacy treated it as a neutral technology or skill: the simple ability to read and write. Indeed, there have been trends in both academia and development discourse to represent literacy as a problem of technology in which literacy learning is viewed as a straightforward and unproblematic process of an individual’s acquiring and applying decoding skills to matching a string of sounds to their graphic symbols and vice versa (Schieffelin and Charlier Doucet 1998; Wagner 1993). The technical skills needed to read and write are imagined as neutral and universally applicable regardless of the particularities of the cultural or social environment in which they are being deployed. This trend, commonly referred to as the “autonomous model” of literacy acquisition, has been repeatedly shown to inform literacy projects developed by international organizations (Street 1984; Street 1995).

Literacy has been widely assumed to cause cognitive differences between individuals and has been argued to be the basis of a “great divide” between cultures — so called “oral cultures” and “literate cultures” — and as such has frequently been used to mark the difference between the "civilized" and "uncivilized." [...] [Walter] Ong, in his article “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” describes literacy as an “imperious” force that establishes itself as the cognitive foundation of human expression and thought (Ong 1986). He argues that “functional literate human beings… are beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing” (24). The view of literacy held by international organizations and development projects has emerged from these earlier positions. They tend to discuss literacy as a material that can be measured, bought or sold as part of a market economy and posit that a certain level of literacy is necessary in order for a nation’s economy to develop and compete in the global market.

Over the past two decades, numerous scholars have argued for a historical approach to understanding literacy that pays explicit attention to how literacy practices shape and are shaped by discourses of power, identity and subject formation. New Literacy Studies theorists, and most particularly Brian Street, are the most commonly cited critics of autonomous models of literacy. Street claims that all models about literacy, particularly those that posit literacy as a universal, individual skill, are embedded in particular power relations. In the context of the developing world moreover, these are power relations that often favor Western models of orality, literacy, rationality, and logical thought. Indeed, even the claim that literacy is a neutral technology reveals particular ideologies about language and its relationship to power (Blommaert 2005; Blommaert, et al. 2006; Collins and Blot 2003; Street 1995).

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 36-8.

Blommaert, Jan 2005 Creativity within Constraints: Hetero-Graphy. In Discourse. Pp. 107-123 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan, Lies Creve, and Evita Willaert 2006 On Being Declared Illiterate: Language-Ideological Disqualification in Dutch Classes for Immigrants in Belgium. Language & Communication 26(1):34-54.

Collins, James, and Richard K Blot 2003 Literacy and Literacies: Texts Power and Identity. Volume 22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ong, Walter J. 1986 Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought. In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. G. Baumann, ed. Pp. 23-50. New York: Clerendon Press.

Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Rachelle Charlier Doucet 1998 The "Real" Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice. In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard, and P.V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 285-316. New York: Oxford University Press.

Street, Brian V. 1995 Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography, and Education. London; New York: Longman.

Wagner, Daniel A. 1993 Literacy, Culture, and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco. Cambridge [England]; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

#Jennifer Lee Hall #readings #quote #literacy

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deathlygristly · 7 months ago

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I am reading the reblogs and tags on an older post that goes around the dash occasionally. It's about reading. I'm sure you've seen it - someone talks about Divergent books and 1984 and then someone reblogs it and calls 1984 rape apologism? Which is really weird?

The spousal person ordered a print of this Kate Beaton comic many years ago and he hung it up in the hallway and he told me to go look at it whenever I said my writing was bad:

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=44

The first two panels do a fairly decent job of explaining 1984. Which is just....a really simple book. It's like wow look fascism sucks! And that's it, pretty much. Like yeah, obviously you could write papers and essays and a thesis and probably do a whole body of academic work on the particulars of it, but really it's just that Orwell thought fascism sucked. Which it does, so I don't see the problem?

Anyway I am pretty sure a lot of the people on that post come from a very different society than I do, even though the education system they say they hate is the American one. Which, hey, our education is locally funded and controlled so maybe it's just that my working class southern Appalachian rural county schools were a lot better than their schools? Or is it maybe what I've suspected before, that I graduated before No Child Left Behind?

I can't recall my English teachers ever being authoritarian to the extent so many other people claim their English teachers were. Not that I can recall that much about English or school at all, really, but I think I would remember if they marched around all "No, your essay is WRONG and only MY opinion is right!!!" all the time.

But then it's true that I don't remember it that well because I just wrote essays the night before they were due or sometimes in the classes before English if it was a class later in the day, and then I got a good grade and nice comments on it and then I got on with my life. I don't think I ever invested nearly as much emotional energy and idea of my self-worth into English class as the people on that post did. Which maybe that's why they remember it so well? Certainly it's probably a large part of why they still have Big Emotions about it.

Anyway my point is that sometimes I read how people write about their own reading and I'm like oh. This is why I shouldn't care what people say about my work that much. I clearly did not write it for these people who experience the world and fiction and the written word in a way that I cannot imagine at all and that I would have never known existed as a possibility if I hadn't read their own words about it.

Like the version of the post that gets the most reblogs ends with an essay about how in the last few decades people have come to expect characters to be "relatable" and to be like them and to think and experience things the way they do? And there's all this self-identity and irrational and false beliefs about your own moral purity involved?

If you come to my work with that sort of thing in your heart you will bounce off of it, and I have finally come to understand that the bouncing off is for the best for both of us.

If you're new here and you haven't read my stuff yet, here's the pinned post with the directory on my Simblr: Story Index.

Anyway, gotta go to bed now. It's just....I don't think I ever realized just how differently people experience fiction and books and the written word from how I experience it before. Like in the tags someone said they expected 1984 to be more Hunger Games-esque? How is that person perceiving reality? I want to live inside their brain for a bit to learn.

#long post

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texancommie07 · 9 months ago

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"And everything was made for you and me

All of it was made for you and me

'Cause it just belongs to you and me

So let's take a ride and see what's mine"

Heavy Metal Valentines Day One: Confession

December 16th, 1984. Billy Had Only Been In Hawkins For About Two Months, And He Hated It Here. In Fact He Hated Everything About The Place.

Well... Almost Everything...

There Was One Thing There He Liked, Loved Even. The Problem Was How To Go About It.

Billy Didn't Know, He Wasn't The Kind Of Guy Who Caught Feelings, Well Ever Really, So He Did The First Things That Came To His Mind That Put Him At The Least Amount Of Risk Towards Getting His Shit Knocked.

He Wrote A Letter. Stupid Right? Well It Gets Even Stupider When You Know That He Didn't Even Come Up With The Letter. Nope, Just Took Some Lines That Were Commonly Used On Him, Slapped Them Together And Hoped For The Best.

Now He Just Has To Wait.

--------------------------------------------------

He Stood At The Rickety Old Table In The Woods. It Was About 9:00 p.m. And The Silence Was Creeping Him Out. You Didn't Really Get Quiet In California. He Was About To Head Home, Assuming That They Just Thought It Was A Joke, Until He Heard Footsteps.

"Hey Billy."

He Turned To Face Them. "The Hell Do You Mean 'Hey', How'd You Even Know I Was Here?" It Made No Sense. He Knew Eddie's Eyes Were Good, But It Was So Dark Out You Couldn't See A Foot Infront Of You. And He Was Facing Away!

"You Wrote The Letter, Right? The One Shoved In My Locker? I Recognized Your Handwriting."

"Oh..."

Billy Stood There, Slightly Stunned. He Didn't Know How To Move Forward, He Hadn't Really Planned This Far. He Didn't Even Expect Eddie To Show Up.

"So, Are You Gonna Tell Me What The Note Was About, Or Are You Just Trying To Have A Staring Contest With Me?" Even With How Dark It Was, Billy Could Practically See The Grin On Eddie's Face.

"Shut Up. You...I Haven't Been Here Long, But This Place Sucks. It's A Shit Hole Full Of Shit People."

"Very Astute Observation, Tiger. Anything Else You Wanna Tell Me About That Place Before We Continue The Grand Tour?"

"Shut Up! Lemme Finish Jackass." Billy Heard The Russeling Of Fabric As He Watched The Blob Of Eddie's Shadow Put It's Hands Up.

"I Hate This Place And Absolutely Nothing Good In It... Except For You... You're The Only Decent Thing About This Place. Hell, If People Saw The Way We Interacted, They Might Even Call Us Friends. But I Don't Wanna Be Friends." He Paused, Taking A Breath Before Speaking Up Again.

"I Wanna Be More Than That..I Like You More Than That. I Want You More Than That."

Billy Stopped, His Eyes Having Finally Started To Rejust After Opening Them Again(When Did He Close Them?), To Look At Eddie. They Were...Smiling?

There's No Way, But It Couldn't Be Anything Else, Billy Could See The Way Their Teeth Reflected The Moons Light.

"Well Well Well, Big Bad Billy Hargrove Is In Love With The Town Freak. Can't Say I Saw That Coming. Though, Can't Really Say I'm Upset About It. That'd Make Me A Pretty Big Hypocrite, Considering I'm Pretty Sure I Fell First."

Wait, "Fell First?"

"Oh Yeah, I Was Mildly Obsessed With You The Moment You Got Here, You Make Quite The Entrance, I Must Say. I Thought It Would Pass Like Most Feelings Like That, Aesthetic Attraction And Nothing More. But Then I Started Dealing With You, And, If I'm Being Completely Honest, I Think I Was Gone After Our Second Meeting."

Eddie's Tone Seemed Almost Sheepish, Like They Were Ashamed Of Admitting It, At Least To Billy. Billy Took The Risk.

"So, What I'm Hearing Is, You Wanna Be My Boyfriend, Maybe?" The Second The Words Left His Mouth He Cringed. God, He Was So Good With Women, How Was He Struggling This Hard?

Although, Maybe His Skills With Men Weren't As Terrible As He Thought, As Eddie Let Out A Cackle At His Response, Their Stupid Goblin Laugh Echoing Off The Trees.

"Yes Billy, I Would Be Delighted To Be Your Boyfriend."

Billy Was Actually Sunned, He Almost Couldn't Find It In Him To Speak. Almost.

"Can I Kiss You?"

"Please."

Sketch

#billy deserved better #eddie deserves better #mungrove #gay eddie munson #gay billy hargrove #my art i guess #heavymetalvalentines #Lyrics Are From “The Passenger” By Iggy Pop #Go Easy On Me I'm Not The Best Writer #billy antis dni

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kermitscavern · 1 year ago

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Watch the World Turn Green

For @thefreakandthehair's Spicy Six Summer Challenge! It's a day late but shhh no it isn't

Dialogue Prompt: "How did everything get so green so fast?" | Pairing: Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler | Rating: T | CW: None | Word Count: 4k

Robin has always hated the winter. It’s cold, it’s grey, there’s nothing to do, and she gets sad. It gets harder and harder to drag herself out of bed, her days blend into one long string of schoolworkbedschoolworkbed, and to make it worse, senioritis has been setting in hard. She usually spends every January-through-March counting down the days till spring hits. At least the groundhog saw his shadow this year, predicting an early spring. God bless Punxsutawney Phil. So come March, she keeps her eyes peeled for the budding crocuses, the first patches of green grass, and the fresh buds coming from winter-dormant trees. The allergies suck, but spring brings Ultimate Frisbee season (hey, she has to get her sports credit somehow) enough warmth to make her lips stop turning blue, and color. She loves to see the color come back.

It was only the second of February, though, and those days seemed so far away it didn’t even make sense to dream of them. There's been one person making her days a little less dreary, though.

When Robin got bored, she decided to pick a piece of eye-candy in her classes, y’know, to pass the time. They weren’t real crushes, just a bit of fun, someone to daydream about during math class.

She shared Biology, Stats, and Modern Lit with Nancy Wheeler.

So besides being convenient, she was also really cute, which helped. And even better, she was Steve’s ex— she had passed many a slow shift at Family Video watching Steve’s face turn increasingly entertaining colors as she asked if Nancy’s lips were really as soft as they looked, if he thought she was a B or C cup.

So yeah. It was fun. And Nancy was really smart, too.

It started when they had been paired up for an assignment about 1984. Nancy had never been Robin’s favorite person, she was too preppy, too clean cut, and besides, she was Steve’s ex, so she was predisposed to hate her. But ah. Haha. Oops. Sorry Steve-o, but the loins want what the loins want. (Steve had smacked her for that one, it hadn’t been serious, but it did sting a little.) Nope, it turned out Nancy was really cool and pretty and witty and just the right kind of innocent that drove Robin wild.

And even though Robin was an absolute wuss, it turned out it was much easier to invite pretty girls over when it was under the pretext of homework. They did talk about 1984 a little bit, but they got kind of distracted when Nancy started berating her for not reading that weeks chapter— Robin tried to look apologetic but she kept getting distracted by the quirk of her lips as Nancy tried to keep a straight face through “telling her off,” the gentle whack of her manicured fingers leaving tingling ghosts across her skin.

She was down bad. Oh no. Oh no no no no no. Now this, this was a problem. As long as she didn’t think she actually liked Nancy Wheeler, she was all set. But as soon as the feelings became serious, she turned into an absolute mess. She tried to hide the truth from herself. It didn’t work.

The next time she had a shift at Family Video with Steve, it took about twenty minutes before Steve was asking her what was up.

“So… How’s Nancy?” He had asked, nudging her in the side, wiggling his brows suggestively. “She was meant to come over last night, right? You get to figure out how soft her lips are for yourself?”

She shoved him back, not unkindly. “Shut up.” She grumped. “Nothing happened.”

Steve froze. “Oh.” He said. “So something did happen, just not for her.”

Robin was glaring daggers. “Shut the hell up. Now.”

The next time Nancy came over, it was just to hang out. They had started getting coffee after school together, so that was a thing that happened now. They hung out.

Something was off from the moment Nancy came in, though. She rushed them up to her room, her lips a hard line, her eyes avoiding Robin’s as she asked how her day had been.

“Nance, it was fine, how was yours?” Robin asked, freaked out enough to place a comforting hand on her shoulder without her brain spinning a thousand unpleasant tales about the consequences.

“I- So- Well- So Jonathan and I—” She started, took a deep breath, looked at Robin with tears in her eyes, and spit out, “So Jonathan and I are over. Like, done. It’s finished. We’re… done.” She gave one last pathetic sniffle and keeled over, effectively crying into Robin’s lap.

Right. So. This was happening. Robin was having trouble stopping herself from short circuiting. She was always awful at this kind of stuff— emotions, comforting people, et cetera. She had no idea how some people just had the perfect things to say, all the time.

But she tried, carefully lowering her hand to Nancy’s softsoftsoft curls, stroking them in what she hoped was a soothing way. “There there,” she stuttered out, wracking her brain for how they handled situations like this in movies. “It’ll be okay, he doesn’t deserve you. Um. Plenty of fish in the sea.”

Nancy sniffled, raising her head from her lap. “You’re pretty awful at this.” She cracked a small smile, looking unreal and yet so, so human with her red and shiny eyes. “Haven’t you ever been broken up with before?”

“Um. No.” She admitted, breaking eye contact with Nancy as she worried a lip between her teeth.

“Lucky.” Nancy chuckled, laying back in Robin’s lap.

“I mean, yes and no…” Robin said quietly, glad Nancy wasn’t able to see her face turning red as the girl in her lap grabbed her hand and gently started playing with her fingers.

“Hmm…” Nancy hummed after a moment. “So you’ve never been in a relationship?”

“Nope.” She got out, trying not to squeak, trying to fight the urge to grab Nancy’s hand and pepper it with little kisses and tell her she shouldn’t be wasting her precious tears over Jonathan, that she deserved so much better than some stupid boy.

“How about on a date?” She pressed on, and while Robin was starting to feel a little shy about her inexperience, she hoped this was at least getting Nancy’d mind off him.

“No, not even.”

A beat. “Ever kissed anyone?” She asked so gently, her eyes coming up to reach Robin’s.

Robin swallowed, blushing but unable to take her eyes away from the angel in her lap. “Uh. No.” She breathed out. Not like there was much chance to in small-town Indiana.

A couple moments of silence. Nancy brought her eyes away and looked across the room, hand almost imperceptibly squeezing Robins before she asked in the barest whisper, “Because you’ve never found another girl who wanted to?”

Robin froze, all warm and fuzzy feelings going freezing cold. She felt like she wanted to throw up, hell, she just might. “I— No—” She stuttered, “That’s not—”

Nancy froze her with a look. Voice wavering, “Robin…” she said, catching her eye and stopping her stuttering, “I… I want to.” She admitted, jaw set, on the verge of tears again, with more bravery than Robin would ever have.

Robin breathed. “Okay,” she said, trying some of Nancy’s bravery on for size. “I want to, too.” She admitted for the first time since she got way too high with Steve in the Scoops bathroom after work, for the second time in her life because she couldn’t even look in the mirror and say it without looking away.

A deep breath. “Robin,” Nancy coaxed, their confessions hanging heavy in the air, “will you… kiss me?”

Robin was terrified, mouth gone dry, brain completely short-circuited. She was in disbelief, and frozen.

Nancy squeezed her hand again, the delicate tears perched so precariously on her lashes. “Please?” She asked again, looking so fragile that she might break with the slightest touch, the smallest word said in the wrong tone.

“Okay.” She breathed, squeezing her eyes shut as she leaned down, because she was still so scared this wasn’t real. But Nancy’s lips were real when they met, and yes, they were just as soft as they looked.

And if she had any sense, she would be terrified of being a rebound, of a mistake made in a vulnerable moment, or worse yet, the butt of a practical joke. But she was too infatuated for that to cross her mind, and besides, Nancy didn’t seem like the type.

She let herself have this. She let them have this moment, in case they never got to have another one. It was soft, and gentle, and so full of care. Robin could taste her strawberry lipgloss, confirming her suspicions that that was why she could never tear her eyes away from her shiny lips.

They broke after a moment, and Robin felt her mouth going a mile a minute. “I’m so sorry, are you sure you still want to do this? It’s okay if you don’t, we can just pretend it never happened, I’m cool with that— also was that really bad? I’m sorry it probably was, I really don’t know what I’m doing, I—“

Nancy cut her off with a hand gently cupping her cheek, as she sat up properly. “Hey,” she said, gently directing Robin’s frantic eyes to meet hers. “It’s okay. I do want to do this. I want to do this with you. You’re not doing badly, just follow my lead, okay? It’s easy. Relax.” She slowly leaned in again, and Robin let herself relax a little more into the better angle. Her eyes fluttered closed as she gripped onto Nancy’s arm, the other hand coming up to her shoulder. She felt awkward, and there was definitely still some anxiety buzzing around, but she was starting to let herself enjoy the experience of kissing Nancy Wheeler.

Just as she was beginning to get into the rhythm, the last of her walls coming down, she felt a tongue prod against her lips. “Mmf!” She squeaked in surprise, pulling back.

Nancy looked up at her, concern starting to creep across her features. “I’m sorry— is this— is this okay?”

“Yeah,” Robin breathed. “Just surprised, that’s all. Um. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Especially not when it comes to um. Tongues.”

Nancy smiled at her fondly. “That’s alright, just do what I do, okay? Try to feel the rhythm. You don’t have to apologize.”

Robin smiled at her gratefully, before Nancy was gently pushing her back onto the bed, their lips reconnecting. She dutifully opened her mouth to let Nancy lick in, and should probably have been more embarrassed by the sound it elicited from her. But as it was she was so in awe of what was happening, she was hardly even aware of herself.

The introduction of tongues brought a new intensity to the game, the innocent kitten kisses turning more involved as the pair found their footing. After a couple of minutes, Nancy sat up to readjust herself, bringing a leg over Robin’s hips so she straddled the girl lying beneath her. “You’re so hot,” she told her, voice low and husky as a grin worked its way across her lips, with a glint in her eye that made Robin’s stomach turn. She felt hands sneak under her shirt, fingers tracing shapes across her stomach with feather-light touches, leaving goosebumps in their wake.

“Yeah?” Robin breathed, her chest rising and falling as she tried to hide the fact she was panting. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her, and she certainly hadn’t imagined this for her first kiss.

“Yeah.” Nancy grinned, raking a hand through her hair in a move she must have calculated to destroy Robin. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the girl on top of her, eyes tracing the curves of her waist, her chest, her neck, mesmerized by the way the curls bounced on her shoulders as she shook her hair out. Nancy caught her staring and returned her a devilish grin as she leaned down again, bracing herself with an arm beside her head.

Fuck. “So are you.” She told her, Nancy now so close their noses were nearly touching. She caught her smile before she was dipping down again, reconnecting their lips.

She felt her hips stutter as Nancy’s roaming hand found her chest, cutting off a groan as she did so. She felt Nancy’s hips roll down in response, and Robin brought a knee up to support them, slotting it between Nancy’s legs. She groaned into her mouth as she ground against it, her head dropping into the hollow of her neck as she continued to rub herself against Robin’s thigh. Robin was seeing stars just listening to her. She couldn’t believe she had Hawkin’s perfect princess making downright filthy sounds into her ear, making her hot all over.

She gasped again as she felt a nip at her neck, Nancy sucking and biting at the sensitive skin below her ear. She knew enough to know she’d have a bitch of bruise to cover the next morning. Thank god her mom had bought her some makeup for her sixteenth birthday. When Nancy sat up again, it was to rip off her shirt, Robin’s brain going blank as her hands flew to her own shirt next as she felt Nancy pulling it over her head with an urgent “offoffoff.” She felt a hand on her chest pushing her back against the pillows, Nancy looking unreal as she dipped down again, this time working her lips down her chest and along her braline. A hand flew up to Nancy’s shoulder as she felt a hand sneak behind her back to the clasp of her bra.

Nancy stopped abruptly and sat up, worry creasing her brow as she looked into Robin’s pleading eyes. Robin felt a blush creep up her neck and across her cheeks, a deep pit of embarrassment filling her stomach.

Nancy dipped her head, muttering a quiet ”Fuck,” mostly to herself. She gave Robin an apologetic smile as she rolled off her, the pair now lying side by side on the bed. Robin felt her head shift to look at her, and matched the action at Nancy’s soft, “hey,”

“I’m really sorry—” She began, but Nancy cut her off, finding her hand and giving it a soft squeeze.

“No, hey, don’t say that, I’m sorry. I took it too far, and I should’ve known better.” She watched her eyes dip, before fluttering back to meet hers.

“It’s really okay, it’s just all a bit much all at once, and I’m not saying I don’t want to, uh, go further, because I do, it’s just—” she felt herself rambling, unable to meet Nancy’s eyes because she’s pretty sure she just told her that she wanted to like, have sex with her or something. She was brought back to reality by Nancy reaching over and placing a soft kiss on her cheek.

“—a lot.” She finishes for her. “Don’t worry, I get it. We don’t have to do everything all at once.” She drifted off to a murmur at the end as she trailed a few more kisses across her jaw and down her neck, making Robin shiver. “It’s probably best to stop now anyway,” she continued, placing a final kiss to Robin’s lips before sitting up. “It’s getting late, and my mom wants me home for dinner.”

“I— Oh— Okay,” was all she was able to get out, propping herself up on her elbows as she watched Nancy tug her shirt back on. Her skin still felt like it was on fire, her brain still reeling from what just happened.

Once she’d fixed herself, she turned back to Robin, a fond smile gracing her lips as she took in what must be her sorry state. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, half asking, half promising, as she pulled Robin up with a hand, rubbing soft circles into the back with her thumb.

“Sounds good,” She told her, clearing her throat as she found her voice again. “Yeah, sounds good.” Nancy left her with another of her treasured smiles as she slipped out the door, and Robin shook her head to try to clear the fog.

There was no way that had just happened, right? There was no way she had just had her first kiss, with Nancy Wheeler of all people, with her panting in her ear, trying to take them to second? third? base. And yet, as she looked in the mirror, a hand flew up in horror to blossoming blue mark on her neck as her mom called, ”Robbie! Dinner!

~*~

The next few weeks were a strange time for Robin. She and Nancy definitely had a… thing. She was over at the Wheeler residence almost every day, usually making out. But they also talked, and did homework, and when it was late enough that Nancy started talking about her insecurities, Robin would try to tell her how amazing she was without sounding like the completely lovesick idiot she was.

Sure, it had started out as a silly crush, and then it had been fun to fool around, but now that Robin was getting to know the real Nancy, the one who huffed in her sleep, who was cranky in the morning and late at night, who liked to make her guests pancakes because it was the one recipe her mom had taught her that she was actually good at, she was starting to fall a little bit in love. But even though that was the case, she wasn’t sure she was even ready for a relationship, if she even wanted one. She rarely got to keep the good things in her life, so who’s to say Nancy wouldn’t just drop her as soon as a cute boy looked her way, who knew if Nancy would even go out with her if she asked? Wanting to kiss a girl and wanting to date one were two very different things.

So the grey days continued to drudge on, and Robin tried to pull back to stop herself from getting too attached. And Nancy was having none of it.

“Robin,” Nancy grabbed her leg. “What’s going on?” The pair were sitting on Nancy’s bed, and Robin had not-so-elegantly ended a makeout sesh because she had “homework to do,” but was really because she was having trouble keeping her hands under control.

"I told you,” she said, avoiding her gaze as she twisted out of her hand to pack her bag. “I have a lot of stuff due tomorrow, I gotta head out. Sorry.”

She froze when Nancy grabbed her shoulder, her other hand coming up to cup her face and face it towards herself. “Bullshit. Somethings been going on, you’ve been completely off lately. Is something going on? Do you want to stop? …Did I do something?"

Robin couldn’t stand the guilt in Nancy’s big blue eyes. Her stomach dropped. “No, it’s not you, god it’s not you, trust me. I’ve just been, I don’t know. I’m not sure how I feel. I’m not sure this is a good idea. Do you even want to keep doing… this?” She asked, gesturing between them wildly. “Like, what are we even doing here? Fuck!” She was breathing heavily, eyes a little wild as she unleashed all her anxieties.

“Of course I want to keep doing this,” said Nancy in a small voice that broke Robin’s heart. “But if you want to stop I get it, Rob, it’s just, I really like you.”

“You do?” Robin felt like she could only whisper, the moment between them was so fragile. “Because god I like you so much, I’m just so scared, all the time. And I’m not sure I can do this anymore, like this. I’m terrified I need more, and I’m terrified I’ll scare you away.” She wasn’t sure where this was all coming from, this bravery, and bluntness. She had a sneaking suspicion her brain had turned off and she was working on autopilot.

She watched, terrified, as Nancy chewed her lip, eyes cast down as she thought. “You mean like, date?”

“God, yes. Nancy Wheeler, will you go on a date with me?” She blurted, fed up with the turmoil in her head. She needed an answer, yes or no, so she could just move on with her life.

“Yes.” She said quietly, but as her gaze came up again a grin was spread across her face. Robin felt a smile split hers too as she leaned forward, connecting their lips in a desperate celebration.

“She said yes!” She raved, elation finishing off her adrenaline high. She felt snapped back to reality, a million thoughts and possibilities running through her head. For once, the future seemed hopeful.

~*~

Life with Nancy was good, so good. She had no idea how she made it through winters before her. Yes, the cold and grey still sucked, and she was still eager for frisbee season, but she wasn’t counting down the days anymore. She didn’t need a future to distract herself with when she was so happy every day, with Nancy. On their first date, Nancy asked her to be her girlfriend, and Robin wouldn’t stop raving to Steve for weeks. Classes still sucked, but she shared a whole three with Nancy, and she saw her at lunch and in the halls and after school. The winter was still depressing, but she had Nancy as her guiding light through the darkness. The wind was still terribly cold, but she had Nancy to bundle her in her arms, to warm her frost bitten hands between hers with a tut.

Before long, it was warm enough to plan a proper “outside date,” a picnic. Robin dug out the mini tea set from elementary school, and they got together at Nancy’s house to make tea sandwiches and slice fruit. They found a quiet spot on top of hill, an expanse of forest and buried rooftops visible beneath them, and they felt above it all. They laid out the blanket and ate their sandwiches and drank their tea and reveled in each others company, and when that was done they lay down, sides pressed together and thumbs tracing gentle circles between them.

After a while, the chit chat petered out, and Robin started to doze, lost in her thoughts. She felt a hand stroking her hair, and leaned up to grin at her girlfriend. She was caught by the scene in front of her, her eyes locked on Nancy’s. In one staggering moment, she realized she had never been happier. She took a moment to look around herself— the sky was a dazzling blue, the flowers were coming into bloom, birds were chittering in the trees, dashes of red and black flitting between branches, and although she was still cozied up in a sweater, the wind didn’t have the same bite it did during the winter months. She was taken aback by a sudden thought— ”How did everything get so green so fast?”

#lexssummerfanworkschallenge #stranger things #stranger things fic #st fic #ronance #robin buckley #nancy wheeler #robin x nancy #kermits creations #first kiss #getting together #this was so fun to work on thanks for setting it up lex !!

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princeescaluswords · 9 months ago

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This is more a comparison thought, but with the release of the X Men ‘97 trailer there’s been an increase in the “Wolverine is the real leader, Scott (Summers) is a dolt” sort of comments. Because I saw a text post about Scott (McCall)’s leadership skills I immediately made a, admittedly simplistic, comparison.

Fandom so often attaches themselves to the loud and angry characters, often the most reactionary, and declare them the most proactive and real leaders. I see it as a common thread in fandom, and one I worth a further discussion. How often characters with ideals, who consider the ramifications of actions, who attempt a steady hand are dismissed for the characters that meet our desire for action and violence.

I don’t believe I’ve fully formed thoughts on this, but it was an immediate consideration after seeing posts.

Before I tackle this question, I want to clarify that I only read Marvel Comics from 1984 to 1995 and then again from 2007 to 2013. I did read back issues during both periods, but those are the time periods where my opinion were set, and so there might be things from outside those time frames which do not impact my analysis.

The first time I stopped reading was due to two trends that simply made me uninterested. During the 1980s, the X-Men comics had adventures but there was at least some degree of being grounded in everyday life. The 80s X-men worried about fitting in with the people around them and about having a life outside the spandex and fighting off the Brood and the Marauders, etc. When Riptide put Nightcrawler in a coma, it influenced how other characters reacted to events. By about the summer of 1995, I didn't find that anymore in X-men.

The early 90s also saw the rise of the antihero in Marvel and a greater emphasis on bombast. The Punisher became a hero. Wolverine stopped worrying about his body count. There was no slow build up in the comics to a pulse-pounding conclusion; instead, there were pulse-pounding conclusions every three months. The comics I read slowly pulled away from "people with powers" and into what I referred to as "powers with a name tag attached." It was most likely me aging out of my interests.

The second time, I picked up the comics out of nostalgia and I found that there was a new level of maturity to be found in the storytelling. Characters like Captain America and Charles Xavier were being pushed out of their roles; a new generation had to learn how to protect themselves and others. And then came "Time Runs Out." It did, but in this case it was the time running out was my interest in the comics. Marvel Comics, like Hollywood, decided to go for retreads of original characters than take a risk on something new.

Both times, nuanced visions of leadership were the first thing to go. The "best" leader became the character who ignored everything but resolving the immediate problem as quickly as possible. With that criteria, Wolverine and characters like him -- lets call them what they are, killers -- were the best choice. But just as importantly, leaders who attempted to address systemic problems in the comic's world, the things that created the immediate problem were portrayed as bootlickers too inured to suffering to even notice it (various leaders of the Avengers), anxious managers whose refusal to act decisively simply perpetuated the problems (Cyclops and Spider-man), or hide-bound egoists too infatuated with their own visions and status to want to actually solve the problem.

Yes, I'm talking about Charles Xavier.

Don't get me wrong, Deadly Genesis is rightfully praised, and the terrible errors that Xavier committed there are legitimate criticisms of the character and how he approached resolving mutant oppression. But Marvel, as it frequently does, saw a golden goose and then beat it to death. Xavier barely remained a hero, instead becoming a stand-in for every corrupted politician in the history of the world. The thoughtful recognition of Xavier's sacrifice, his nobility, and his ultimate belief in the necessity of finding common ground was obliterated for the next episode of "What Did Charlie Do Now?"

The X-men wouldn't have been what they were without Charles's vision. The present writers know that too, they just resent it. I feel that Cyclops, too, has been robbed of his principles in order to become a Wolverine with speeches. When you can't tell the difference between one of Cyclops' bubbles and one of Magneto's speech bubbles, something's gone wrong. (This is not a criticism of Magneto. I thoroughly enjoy his perspective as one among many.) As far as I can tell, there are only two types of leaders in Marvel Comics who aren't villains: manipulative old people who have lost touch with the people they're trying to protect and the Voices of Generational Violence Embodied. I'm sure that there are people who enjoy that, but I'm not one of them.

#Marvel critical #x-men comics #media criticism

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whoreviewswho · 8 months ago

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A Finely Tuned Response - Frontios, 1984

An analysis of Doctor Who of the early to mid 1980s is, somewhat inevitably, an examination of wasted potential and this is a particularly pertinent point to consider when embarking on a critical look at Frontios. To some extent, Frontios is business as usual for the Peter Davison era. Along with The Awakening, it stands-out for being one of only two stories in the season that is not carrying the weight of an enormous event. It is four episodes long, features a typical Doctor Who monster, slots itself effortlessly into the action-packed militaristic flavour of the Davison era and repurposes the trappings of past base-under-siege serials for good measure. This is probably why it gets such little attention from the fandom on the whole; Frontios is a story conceived to slip under the radar.

But I think that Frontios does anything but be unnoticeable. It is screaming to be noticed because I think that this story, more than any other of the Davison era, is the story of untapped potential. Frontios takes everything that we know about the Davison era, every aspect of it that was working, and offers us a glimpse into an alternate reality where everything else also works just a little bit better still. This is thanks to former script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, one of a handful of writers who could comfortably stake the claim of one of the most underrated in the series' history. Bidmead script edited the show from 1980-1981, the entirety of season eighteen, and is notable for following through with John Nathan-Turner's intention to shift the style of storytelling in Doctor Who away from the high-concept, camp adventure series of the previous regime toward more serious-minded stories that had a basis in real-world science. In Bidmead's own words, "[Doctor Who] exemplified for young viewers the power of scientific thinking to solve problems. Science stretched into fantastic future shapes, yes, but the show had a serious social purpose. It must never be silly, never be mere magic....we tried to build our stories on solid, if fancifully extended, scientific ideas."

It is worth stating the obvious here; this philosophy returns the show to its 1963 roots of being educational as well as entertaining. The result of Bidmead and JNT's collaboration was a run of seven stories that had an entirely unique flavour for the franchise. Stories that were rich in theme and subtext, revelling in the unknown possibilities of bleeding edge theories. Take Warrior's Gate, for example. Taking place in the theoretical zero point between positive and negative space, that serial watches like a surreal, poetic and atmospheric novel that meditates on I-Ching philosophy, exploring notions of action, free-will and entropy. Warrior's Gate is a dense and thoughtful production whose characters and setting all interlink to form a greater thematic whole. A bit over twelve months later, Doctor Who was broadcasting stories like Earthshock.

That sounds a little bit more disingenuous than perhaps it should because Earthshock is not a bad story in and of itself but it is a very different story. The tumultuous production of Warrior's Gate and the overall difficulties of Bidmead's position lead to his resignation at the end of season eighteen. The post would eventually be filled by Eric Saward whose conception of what made for a good Doctor Who story wildly contrasted with Bidmead's. Earthshock proved to be the template, the definitive statement for what his ambitions were with Doctor Who; a thrilling, action-packed adventure with a confident blend of character drama and sci-fi serial antics. To use a low-hanging and easy shorthand example, if Bidmead's Doctor Who could be compared to say a Christopher Nolan film then Saward is somewhat of a Zack Snyder.

But this brings us back to the accusation of wasted potential because I would argue that the Fifth Doctor's era is marked by inconsistency more than it is by abject failure. I find it rather interesting that both JNT/Bidmead Who and JNT/Saward Who make a concerted effort to return the programme to something resembling the original conception of the show but in polar opposite ways. In the latter case, it was a more superficial attempt with the turn back toward an ensemble cast and the attempt at tighter stitching from one serial to the next. Most episodes of the Davison era connect in some direct way to the previous one, even if that connection usually little more than a couple of lines at the top of the episode addressing something from the previous one.

The approach that JNT and Saward were aiming for in these three years together, that of an explosive science-fiction soap-opera, is a perfectly valid take on the programme. It was even an effective one on occasion. The problems with Saward's tenure as script-editor are myriad and deserving of dissecting in a piece more dedicated to him but suffice it to say that what Frontios accomplishes is a case of a serial coming together in spite of its circumstances instead of coming out of them. When Bidmead was invited back as a freelancer for Davison’s third, and final, season, he incidentally offered a tantalising glimpse into the era that might have been if he had stuck around with the show. If nothing else, he reaffirms one thing; wildly creative and conceptual science-fiction stories can work hand-in-hand with serialised, evolving character drama.

In contrast to what one might expect, Frontios can perhaps best be described as Bidmead’s most traditional Doctor Who story. Saward invited him to contribute a pitch for a serial in season twenty-one but on the condition that he was to craft something in the mould of a traditional Doctor-Who-monster-plot. As Bidmead recalled in a 1988 interview for Doctor Who Magazine; "Eric Saward phoned me up and asked me to do ‘Frontios’. They wanted the monster element, which was a struggle because I always hated ‘Doctor Who’ monsters – partly because they tend to look cheap and mainly because they are so limited on dialogue. Dialogue is so important in a low budget show – it creates the whole effect". In so far as being a typical monster story for Doctor Who, the broad strokes of Frontios appear to offer little in the way of innovation. Our trio unexpectedly find themselves among colony of humans in the far future only to quickly discover that an unknown, alien threat is causing colonists to disappear into the planet itself. On one level, perhaps this is disappointing for the staunch season eighteen fans (god forbid those nerds ever out themselves) that Bidmead’s final effort on-screen is such traditional fare but, make no mistake, this is Bidmead all over. Where else would one find a story that revels so much in making the setting a character unto itself, or an active threat in this case. There is an almost primal irrational fear underpinning the horror of Frontios which is that of the Earth dropping from beneath you, consuming you without a trace. It is a great idea and legitimately terrifying at a conceptual level. Frontios is the last hope for humanity, the final place that they can run to and this here is the horror at the end of human existence; what comes for us all when there is nowhere left to run?

Frontios is a story about people being where they shouldn’t which is about as clued-in to the central premise of Doctor Who as one could possibly be; the entire franchise is a story of things being where they shouldn't. I love the Doctor’s initial flat refusal to explore Frontios in any way because “knowledge has its limits”. It is an interesting slice of lore, that never really gets picked up on again, that the Time Lords have a limited scope of the arc of history. Perhaps because pulling on this thread could lend too much credence to the theory that Time Lords are future human beings. After all, is there any particular reason why the Time Lords knowledge has a cut off point that coincides with the near end of humanity? It is an effective shorthand to illustrate the stakes at play here and set the scene for the audience but remains an oddly intriguing nugget of lore too. I would not be surprised if this story directly influenced Russell T Davies when he came to writing Utopia since that story also presents the Doctor as going further than ever before and having the immediate reaction of wanting to leave. In this case, I adore that as soon as the Doctor does land, he immediately launches into helping the humans despite what his rational mind has concluded. It is also a little bit weird that the Doctor’s behaviour ultimately leads to no consequences from the Time Lords. We are told repeatedly that he is forbidden to interfere here and that the time laws do not permit his actions. If Saward were a bit more on his ball, perhaps this could have been the inciting incident that puts the Doctor back on trial two seasons from now as opposed to just…well, nothing really.

Bidmead does not write small scale stories. Even this one, which is relatively small fry in the narrative of this season, is as high stakes as actually destroying the TARDIS. Bidmead claims to have done this to give the Doctor no form of security, have him just as desperate and endangered as the humans. Everything is against the Doctor here which makes for a nice unintentional parallel to The Caves of Androzani (also penned by a former script editor) where the same can be said but he’s just a lot less lucky. What is frustrating is that the script makes really no attempt to explain exactly why or how the TARDIS is destroyed. The Gravis does not even know it is there. The Doctor does have one line about it toward the climax; "It's, er it's been spatially distributed to optimise the, er, the packing efficiency of, er, the real time envelope" which sounds dreadfully like he is making it up. Is he suggesting that the TARDIS folded in on itself in an effort to protect itself from the meteor strike? Or was the meteor strike actually supposed to have splintered it? Surely not that second thing since Tegan and Turlough found it to be largely closed off just moments after landing, I have no idea what is really going on here and have yet to find a clear answer in the text but it is a lovely way to visually illustrate the consequences of the Doctor going behind where he even feels he is permitted to travel.

If there is anything that significantly hurts Frontios then it is the production. While not necessarily cheap, the horrific cliffhanger to part three is realised about as well as it could be, this story is hampered by shoddy direction from Ron Jones and some generally poor design. A lot of the horror that ought to be here is nearly squandered by the way the thing is assembled and that is truly frustrating. There is some god awful acting attempting to ‘lift’ some rubble in episode one. How that made it to screen I will never know. In concept, the Tractators are a deeply disturbing villainous creature with their inhuman features and mental powers to ensnare any victim they choose no matter how hard they run. Their plot to chop up human beings to ensure their machinery works was so freaky that Steven Moffat likely stole it to be much scarier in 2006. Bidmead based the monsters on woodlice and, while that intention extended into the design, the Tractators are the textbook definition of a lumbering “Doctor Who monster”. Practically every moment of action they have in the entire story falls completely flat and the monsters are not even remotely scary. They just look like crap. Apparently Jones hired dancers as he imagined the Tractators to curl up like woodlice, something that Bidmead intended in the script. Visual effects designer Dave Harvard did not get this memo it seems. There is a distinct lack of menace and thrill displayed onscreen here despite what are, really, a perfectly strong set of scripts to work from. It is a real shame.

Thankfully, the production can deliver on Bidmead's well-developed supporting cast and he provides a compelling far-future colony for the TARDIS team to get entangled up with. Range is a much an endearing scientist figure to pair the Doctor up with as Plantagenet and Brazen make an irritating opposing force. It is a decidedly bleak vision of the future; a fascist, totalitarian state. In her analysis of the serial, Elizabeth Sandifer makes the suggestion that Bidmead’s more cerebral, world-building story is constantly under jeopardy by Eric Saward’s stock-standard military story, invading the scenes as an opposing force that tries to stop the story from happening. Whether Bidmead was deliberately poking at Saward's tendencies as a writer remains to be seen but it is a very fun read regardless. Bidmead has cited the 1982 Lebanon War as an influence on his scripts which, as of time of writing this article in March 2024, is an interesting situation to cite. The Lebanon War took place between June 6 1982 and June 5 1985 between the Israel Defence Forces and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The inspiration from the war can certainly be identified in what Frontios would become though it would be absurd too suggest that the story is analogous for the conflict itself. Certainly, the broad strokes of the situation informed the plot but the most significant contribution was an aesthetic one with the serial's war-torn landscape that is clearly suffering from a near constant bombardment that has slowly increased in frequency and intensity over several decades. Indeed, as Range and the Doctor state;

RANGE: Captain Revere assumed that the barrage was some sort of softening up process. Heralding an invasion, he said. DOCTOR: Hmm, someone else thinks this is their territory.

Revere is half-right. Frontios is an invasion story; the humans are the invaders. This flavour of anti-colonial storytelling is not particularly new ground for Doctor Who to tread and would certainly continue to be well-walked although the allegory becomes a little bit murky in this case with the suggestion that the Tractators are not indigenous to Frontios either. Perhaps the situation of two invading forces staking claim to a land that rightfully belongs to neither was ripped straight from the headlines but the absence of a third party makes it a rather more simplistic and less challenging situation to depict. Again, the influence is purely aesthetic. Cutting edge political satire doesn’t seem to be something Bidmead is particularly interested in anyway, regardless of his effectiveness in writing it.

So, we can conclude that the Tractators are likely not indigenous from pretty early on in the story thanks to Turlough who is awarded one of his strongest roles in any story pos-Enlightenment. Following his failed plot to murder the Doctor, the shifty and morally ambiguous nature of Turlough became an aspect of his character that was largely cast aside. Turlough was introduced as an untrustworthy and selfish survivalist whose past life before exile on Earth were primed to make him a greatly compelling member of the TARDIS team moving forward. However, instead of gradually unravelling this mystery and pushing Turlough’s relationship with his “friends” to their furthest extent, the character spent most of his stories was just separated from the Doctor for about half of the runtime to simply complain and look a bit suss from time to time. A lot of potential character work seemed to be abandoned and relegated to these four scripts and his final story, Planet of Fire. This is yet another example of Saward's limits as a script editor and really the most damning one considering part of this period's mission statement was to be a quasi soap-opera.

After laying eyes on the Tractators, we see a new side to Turlough; pure, genuine fear. Our first glimpses at his origins are finally awarded to us when a race memory is unlocked within him that sees him recoil from the action in a catatonic state. He has a primal reaction to the creatures below the surface. Being the only person with knowledge of the monsters, he gradually pulls himself together and returns to help the Doctor. While not especially interesting an arc in itself, this is a rewarding series of events to put Turlough through if you have been following his story since Mawdryn Undead since it seems that only now he has truly embraced being a force for good with the Doctor and not just a traveller in it only for himself. This is all really solid stuff and Mark Strickson does a decent enough job with it. Turlough lamenting that nobody expects anything heroic of him is a really lovely character moment and this story marks a significant turning point for the character that comes too late. This is the kind of on-going melodrama that should have been present in this era the entire time and this particular development for Turlough needed to happen at, at the latest, the end of the last season. Not two stories before his departure. For his active role as a companion to be claimed eight stories into his run (effectively after twenty-eight episodes on the show) is ludicrous. Even more frustratingly, Turlough takes a backseat again in the next story leaving Planet of Fire to race his character to the finish line and it proves once more that the potential for greatness is all there but this was too little too late.

Tegan is the most sidelined of the three which is irritating not only because this would prove to be her penultimate appearance on the show but also because it officially becomes a pattern of the third story now to give her no kind of active role in narrative. The next serial would do that too though it could be argued by design which is a weak defence in the face of a whole season awarding her next to no material. Given where her character was set to go in Resurrection of the Daleks this and the nature of her departing the TARDIS, this would have been a great time to highlight the brutality of the Doctor’s travels and drop her in the midst of some truly awful acts. Long-form story was really not Eric Saward’s strongest skill.

And then we have the Doctor. Three stories away from his own dramatic exit and finally he feels like he has fully come into his own. This is perhaps the most frustrating realisation to grapple with in regards to Bidmead’s leaving the show; the man knows how to write the Doctor. His take on the character sees the frustratingly underdeveloped Fifth Doctor in a fully authoritative role; barking out orders and opinions to whoever he pleases and commanding presence as much as he needs to. This is a character I would have loved to see for three seasons and it pains me that he is only really found here and in Androzani. At the heart of Frontios is a very simple story that about leadership in a decidedly anti-militaristic sort of way. The humans are being driven by the military but lacking in unity as their leadership in Brazen and Plantagenet is a self, arrogant and narrow-minded leadership that dismisses their scientists and the Doctor when he arrives. As we learn about the Tractators, their leadership is flawed too as the creatures are revealed to be naturally passive without the command, being enslaved, by the Gravis. So, we have the Doctor who is driven but understanding. He listens to the facts, he makes measured judgements and he considers the breadth of his actions. The Doctor is the shining example of good leadership in this colony. It is a very simple moral but who ever said that simplicity was a bad thing?

Sandifer made the acute observation in her Warrior's Gate article that "The Doctor that Bidmead wants are the Doctors that [David] Whitaker wrote for �� the small and seemingly harmless men who skulked and observed and learned to understand the system before making a single decisive move within it. Not the Doctors of the 70s – big, starring leading men who were the centre of attention and whose charisma and likability drove the entire story". Here we have found ourselves with, frankly, the biggest victim of wasted potential in Peter Davison's run which, obviously is Peter Davison. It is well-documented that part of JNT's strategy in casting Davison was to provide a stark contrast to the scene-stealing Tom Baker. The Fifth Doctor was a less commanding and intrusive presence by design which is all well and good if your target is a more Whitaker-style take on the character. The problem is simply that they missed.

To this day, the Fifth Doctor comes under fire for being a bland incarnation but that is only half of the truth. What fans criticise as blandness is what I would sooner articulate as a lack of definition. The Fifth Doctor as a character was primarily defined by the things that he was not in comparison to the previous four actors instead of the things that he actually was. This Doctor was not old, he was not commanding, he was not infallible, he was not funny, he was not flippant, he was not cruel, he was not Tom Baker – he was not a lot of things and the things that he was varied greatly from one story to the next. Perhaps this is a little unfair since there was at least an intention of who the Fifth Doctor was supposed to be, even if it was not fully realised onscreen. It is at this point that I feel compelled to clarify also that Davison was not at all the problem here. He is an excellent actor who had very strong and compelling instincts of how to play the part, some of which he and JNT agreed on. In 1981, Davison conducted an interview with Radio Times where he made an attempt to outline his vision for the role;

"I’ll be a much younger Dr. Who, and I’ll be wearing a kind of Victorian cricketing outfit to accentuate my youth. I’d like my Doctor to be heroic and resourceful. I feel that, over the years, ‘Doctor Who’ has become less vital, no longer struggling for survival, depending on instant, miraculous solutions to problems. The suspense of ‘Now how’s he going to get out of this tight corner?’ has been missing. I want to restore that. My Doctor will be flawed. He’ll have the best intentions and he will in the end win through, but he will not always act for the best. Sometimes, he’ll even endanger his companions. But I want him to have a sort of reckless innocence."

This is not quite a description of who the Fifth Doctor is not but in terms of being a definitive statement on what he is it is still somewhat lacking. “Heroic and resourceful" are satisfactory descriptors and the suggestion that he has a “reckless innocence” seems to indicate that he is perhaps simply naive. To say that he is flawed is not particularly revealing without actually delving into what the flaws are but this is certainly a start. There is a blueprint here with which to construct a fully-realised character but the one that made it to screen oscillated wildly from seeming compelling to inoffensive to, yes, bland.

Given the revolving door of script-editors during season nineteen's production, it is perhaps not surprising that, despite having some strong stories on the whole, it was not a definitive opening statement for the Fifth Doctor. Castrovalva took the Doctor out of action for most of its runtime and then had him in the post-regenerative non-character state that left him open to hopefully be defined later on down the track. The larger part of season nineteen fails to define him particularly well with Four to Doomsday, Kinda and Black Orchid each shooting for the unassuming observer type but fail to give him any truly distinct character traits nor a particularly engaging role in the narrative. It shows a near complete misunderstanding of the Whitaker-style Doctor depicting him not as a mercurial learner but a passive observer. The Visitation and Time-Flight shift gears from this to am extent presenting something in the mould of Jon Pertwee's Doctor on paper. The former, however, leaves him still largely sidelined by its comedy supporting character and the latter makes the unfortunate misstep of being Time-Flight.

The Fifth Doctor in season nineteen is a character whose role in the story is dictated by the narrative conventions of Doctor Who. His name is in the title, he is a heroic character therefore he will heroically save the day even if the plot could have happily rolled on much the same without his involvement at all. Black Orchid even takes this to the extreme when it, upon stumbling upon an opportunity for some drama when the Doctor comes under suspicion for murder, he gets away with it by taking the supporting cast into the TARDIS and going "See? I'm Doctor Who so I must be innocent". The only story to offer any glimmer of the characterisation and subversion that was promised is Earthshock but even that immature, emotionally unregulated character would never really come back onscreen.

Season twenty seems to bring little else to the table besides his being generally nice but a bit exasperated at times (and it is worth noting that the subpar quality of the scriptwriting in season twenty is what ensured Davison would not sign on beyond his three year contract). The Fifth Doctor's lack of authority too often came as a failing in the storytelling instead of a failing in the character. Take how he fails to command a scene with the Brigadier in Mawdryn Undead or the lack of interest anybody has in him during Warriors of the Deep. Snakedance is really the only serial that took this idea and ran when Christopher Bailey had to the good sense to present a realistic reaction to the Doctor showing up prophesying doom for all and made that escalation most of his role in the story. The problem hit its peak by the time The Five Doctors made it to screen which, of course, made an embarrassing show of what little characterisation the Fifth Doctor was awarded. Standing next to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee would be difficult for anyone but the Fifth Doctor managed to make it seem impossible.

Part of the problem with the Doctor's lack of definition, of course, stemmed from the approach, or rather the production team's inability to scale the mountain that they had raised for themselves. Having a leading cast as big as four and small as three for all but one of his stories often left the Doctor struggling to command the narrative in any way. It became easy to lean on an archetypical idea of who 'the Doctor' is to make the stories work. This is symptomatic of the broader issue that this production team was not up to the task that they set themselves of introducing a larger cast for a soap-opera style. Darren Mooney, for the m0vie blog, articulated the issue well in his article “Doctor Who?” The Deconstructed Davison Doctor;

"[T]he Fifth Doctor’s era offered a weird funhouse mirror of the [soap-opera] genre. The companions were all given strong archetypal personalities that were designed to play off one another, but without any detail or humanity to round out those archetypes into characterisation. More than that, there was no real sense of progression or character development. None of the companions grew or evolved."

Consequently, this left the most valuable asset for character definition, his relationships to everybody else, severely under-utilised. Again, this was not Eric Saward's strength but, further to that, it was not even his interest. Saward often claimed that the aspect of Doctor Who that compelled him the most were the worlds and characters explored rather than our main ensemble. A perfectly fine stance but not a particularly good focus to take in the most serialised version of the show since it first began.

Something always worth considering when engaging in any form of art criticism is the relationship between artistic intention and audience interpretation. Obviously, the former informs the latter; an artistic work presents evidence and information that is collected and interpreted by the audience. There are a number of ways with which to use this relationship as the basis of a critique. One option is the focus primarily on intention; the artist means for the piece to accomplish X thing and I have assessed the evidence provided to form a conclusion as to why I think it is or is not successful in that endeavour. This option is only viable if that intention has been made clear in some context outside of the actual work itself. Another way to engage is to ignore intention entirely, the death of the author approach; I gathered evidence from the text and interpreted it in this way which I did or did not enjoy for X reasons. Generally speaking, I find that the most insightful and compelling criticism comes from a mixture of both approaches. I find it equally as valuable to glean the context of which the work is made and what the artist is intending to do as I do being able to allow the work to speak to me and take on a life of its own.

In the case of the character of the Doctor between 1982 and 1984, there is a lot to engage with here. As established above, the artistic intention of the Fifth Doctor was deeply confused and underdeveloped. So let us turn to an interpretive reading, the most popular one that has developed among fans over time which is that the story of the Fifth Doctor is tragedy. This reading suggests that this Doctor is a victim of a circumstance, a moral crusader and conventional hero who becomes worn down and killed by the cruel and ruthless universe around him. It is a really compelling take and there is a good amount of evidence to substantiate it. Earthshock is the earliest example where the Doctor’s role in the climax consists primarily of him failing to negotiate with the Cyber-Leader with no option left but to just murder him as he watches his young friend die in an act of heroism he inspired. Then we have Snakedance where his walking into the story doing his typical Doctor thing sees him vilified and antagonised for the larger part of the runtime. Season twenty-one is where the evidence really ramps up. Warriors of the Deep attempts a similar outcome to Earthshock with the Doctor’s lack of authority leading to him enabling a massacre. Frontios sees him literally drawn into a place he shouldn’t be despite his best intentions. Resurrection of the Daleks is such a clusterfuck that it causes Tegan to leave the Doctor altogether and then his simply being on Androzani places him squarely in the middle of events so devastating that everybody there except for Peri winds up dead.

As a reading on his era, this interpretation holds up very well. It is exactly the kind of character development that should have been the crux of Davison's time on the show and is the kind of thing suggested by the publicity and discussions of his character back in 1981. What makes it so frustrating is how much this was not really present in the artistic intent. Yes, the Fifth Doctor was fallible and one of his companions died but this was little more than an aesthetic choice for the larger part of the era. As Sandifer articulated perfectly in her Earthshock analysis;

"What we get [with Adric's death] isn’t drama. It’s the hollow shell of drama – a major character death, a silent credit sequence, a few minutes of horrified and morose main characters at the tail end of this and the start of Time-Flight, and then everybody – the audience included – moves on. It’s not one of the most dramatic sequences of the 1980s. It’s a cheap sham designed to look like drama. It’s a sequence designed to rile up controversy – the exact sort of death scene that would be created by an executive who believes that art should 'soothe, not distract'".

Earthshock was the most important story of the JNT/Saward administration and it makes it also emblematic of a number of things it fails to get right. Adric's death was wasted potential. If the overall arc of the Fifth Doctor's story is a man who has the best intentions but gets beaten down by everything around him, that needs to be in any way at the forefront of his character and his actions in the stories. Eric Saward thought it important to depict violence in a visceral and impactful way which serves the interpretation but was not a calculated move to develop an actual arc.

By the time season twenty-one came around, Davison had hit breaking point with the bland material and an actual character began to emerge. Beginning with this serial, his Doctor finally showed signs of some consistent characterisation. His Doctor had become snarkier and wittier, his occasional emotional outbursts in season nineteen filtering through as a genuine resentment for authority and pig-headedness. As Davison himself stated;

"Frontios was excellent, an extremely well-rounded script that got hold of the way I saw the part of the Doctor, and made his dialogue and actions fit in with this. I enjoyed it because there was really something there to latch onto in rehearsal and make your own. If you like, it had enough there without the actors having to try to embellish a weak storyline."

Thus, this is why Frontios shines so brightly. With some stronger material to play as well in this story through to his final appearance, Davison gets the best chance of his era to actually act. The Doctor is no longer a passive afterthought in the narrative and the season gains a genuine momentum with escalation from one story to the next until the entire narrative structure of Doctor Who breaks down in The Caves of Androzani. Frontios marks the beginning of the Davison era finally starting to land on what really works. We have a Doctor that is genuinely compelling, a very compelling and unique companion in Turlough and a genuinely interesting story that nails the Eric Saward approach to thrilling, action-packed Doctor Who (if only really in the script than actually on-screen). Frontios is really spearheading this last leg of the Davison era and not by mistake.This is a highpoint of season twenty-one and, indeed, of all ‘80s Who. While this is probably Bidmead's weakest script technically (I'd probably watch this over Castrovalva), it demonstrates that old ideas done well still undeniably make for a story that is done really well but it is no surprise that this solid story is consistently overshadowed by the more obviously ambitious milestones of the Davison era. This is the story the Davison era needed but it is a story that just came too late to save it altogether.

A final word: I had no other place to mention this but the Doctor’s line about being a hat person is a little amusing at this point in his life since he hasn’t been seen wearing one for three stories now – he last donned it in The King’s Demons and won’t again until the story after this

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chanshoesunite · 2 years ago

Text

24 Days of CHRISMAS: Day 19

Content info: YN is on a winter holiday with her uni friends and their friends, among them the distant but incredibly hot Chan. Chan and YN end up having to share a room. And there’s only one bed. The actual one bed problem will be solved in Part 2.

Word count: 1984

Warnings: none

When you hesitatingly agreed to share a room with Chan, nobody mentioned that there would only be one bed.

You never liked the idea of going away for New Year’s Eve. People always act like this particular night needs to be super special and super fun, which is an idea you find inherently depressing. After all, trying too hard never works, anyway.

You have only been friends with Jisung, Minho and Hyunjin since the beginning of the summer semester, meeting them in the university library in a little adventure that was caused by Hyunjin illegally sneaking his dog in, but it has been true platonic love from the beginning. So, when they announced that they would rent a cabin in the mountains for New Year’s and that you absolutely HAD to come, you said yes.

It’s early in the morning of the 30th of December, and you’re wrapped in plenty of layers as you’re waiting for Minho to pick you up. You’re going to be ten people at the cabin, apparently, so you’re taking two separate cars.

A silver Hyundai approaches you and honks, and you excitedly wave as the car comes to a stop in front of you. Hyunjin jumps out, happily hugging you before grabbing your overnight bag and tossing it into the car boot. You add a box of groceries you said you’d bring and climb into the back seat to find only Jisung there.

“Good morning,” you greet your friends, hugging Jisung and fluffing up Minho’s hair, “I thought someone else was driving with us?”

“Changbin and his girlfriend are sick,” Ji explains sadly, “which means we’ll only be eight people in total. But we called ahead, and they’ll actually get their money back, so I guess that’s worth something.”

You fall back in your seat. “But now I’m the only girl!” you pout, not actually worried – it’s not like it mattered before.

Hyunjin turns around to raise his eyebrows at you. “Don’t be a wuss,” he says. “We’ll have so much fun!”

You nod in answer. Your boys always have your back, they won’t be suddenly weird about you being the only girl. “I made us a road trip playlist,” you announce, and a minute later, you’re all happily singing along to a Charlie Puth song. Any reservations you might have had about going away for the weekend as the only girl among seven boys vanish as you spend the next two hours singing, sharing cookies and chatting with your three friends.

…

You are the second car to arrive, but only by a few minutes – the other four boys have only just picked up the keys from the reception hut. The huts, which are actually rather large wooden houses, are arranged in a loose circle on the side of a smaller mountain, facing a wonderful view over the snow-covered valley. They are far enough apart for privacy, but only a few minutes’ walk from the main building.

You all jump out of the car to greet the others, but you hang back a little because you’ve actually never met them before. Jisung quickly realizes what you’re experiencing, though, and, grabbing your hand, pulls you into the circle.

“Everyone, this is YN,” he announces lovingly, like a grandpa showing off his newest grandchild. “YN, this is Jeongin, our youngest. He looks very sweet, and he will be, but likely only to you.” He points at a boy with blond hair whose grin is both charming and evil.

“And this is Felix. Felix is our sunshine and the person you’ll want to ask about breakfast because his brownies are legendary.” “Hey, YN, I’m so excited to finally meet you! The others have kept you to themselves, but I can’t wait for us to be firm friends!” The freckled boy comes up to hug you, and you are touched by the kind gesture, embracing him back.

“This is Seungmin, he looks serious, but don’t worry, he’ll make fun of you, too.” Seungmin smiles shyly, and you smile back, not knowing what to do with that introduction.

“And this is Chan,” Jisung concludes, pointing at the guy who comes out of the hut, apparently already busy carrying the luggage inside. “He’s kind of the dad of the group.”

Chan only gives a quick nod before grabbing more luggage and going back to the hut. Weird. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want you there? Which would be too bad – the bit of face you can spy between beanie and scarf looks kind.

“Happy to meet you all,” you announce, trying to shake the awkwardness of Chan not really greeting you.

“It’s so cool that you actually came, Noona,” Felix says, grabbing your arm and pulling you towards the hut. “We were afraid you wouldn’t want to be the only girl here.”

You don’t have the heart to admit you might have given this more thought if you’d known earlier and simply smile at your new freckled friend. “I wouldn’t miss all the fun!”

Felix squeals and grabs to help you with your luggage. Together, all of you haul the backpacks and provision boxes into the wooden hut.

Once inside, you are surprised by how much bigger it feels on the inside. From the outside, it looked like the perfect gingerbread house, dusted with snow, but you find yourself in a little hall where you can store all of your shoes and jackets that opens into a huge open space with couches and a big dining table. With everything being made of wood, it could have felt overpowering, but there are lovely accents of colourful rugs and cushions as well as pictures on the walls and a big bookshelf so that the room feels extremely cosy. There’s also a decently sized kitchen with all the newest appliances, a big bathroom and a bedroom with a queen-size bed in it. A set of stairs leads to the first floor where you expect the rest of the bedrooms to be located.

“This is wonderful,” you exclaim as you wander into the kitchen where Minho is already putting away the food. He smiles at you. “I’m glad you like it,” he says. “Want to help with lunch?”

Minho knows you enjoy cooking, so you agree, and soon you’re both cutting veggies for the pasta dish you’ll be having, humming along to the music coming out of his Bluetooth speaker.

“Noona?” You look up to see Felix standing in the doorway. He looks a bit nervous. “There seems to be a slight problem, but it doesn’t have to be, not really?” He sounds questioning, so you stop cutting to properly look at him. “What’s wrong?”

Hyunjin comes into the kitchen, followed by Jisung. “Well,” he starts, “we expected to get a six-bedroom cabin, but with two people missing…” He glances at Ji, who blurts out: “You’re going to have to share a bedroom!”

You blink. “Oh-kay?” you say, because that doesn’t sound that dramatic. “Are there only four bedrooms?” Hyunjin nods sheepishly. “And we’ve sort of already though about it. I am staying with Felix, and the maknaes want to stay in a room together, and you know how Jisung and Minho are besties, so…” He hesitates. “Would you be cool sharing the room with Chan?” Uff. That is slightly awkward. But at the same time, is it really? You don’t know him yet, maybe he’s a laugh and you’ll have a great time. And you also don’t want to make this difficult for everyone – you’ll literally only sleep in the same room. “I don’t mind if he doesn’t!” you say, smiling brightly.

Chan enters the room, having heard your last words. “If I snore, you can kick me out and I’ll take the living room couch,” he promises, meeting your eyes for the first time. There’s a little twinge inside your heart as he does, and he blushes. You smile slightly. “I’ll take you up on that,” you mock-threaten, and the boys all guffaw, relieved to have solved the potentially troubling situation. “I’ll bring your bag to the room, then,” Hyunjin promises, and they all leave hurriedly, worried you and Minho might give them something to do in the kitchen. The last one, Jisung, doesn’t get spared, though, and Minho makes him set the table.

“That was sweet of you, YNnie,” Jisung says as he grabs the cutlery. “I’m sure it’s awkward to stay with someone you don’t know. But trust me, Chan is the best person ever. He is just a tiny bit shy in the beginning.” He gives you an encouraging pat on the back, almost stabbing you with eight forks in doing so.

“Ya!” Minho yells, throwing a wet dishcloth at him. “Don’t you dare stab the only person here who actually lifts a finger to help me!”

…

After lunch, someone gets out the boardgames, and that is the exact moment that ends all of your plans to explore your surroundings. The gaming frenzy grabs the eight of you. The boys are all extremely competitive, one round of Codenames turns into ten rounds, and people only leave for short bathroom breaks or to get more water from the kitchen. After hours of laughing and screaming and friendships almost ending multiple times, Minho disappears for a bit to make all of you cheese toasties, which you eat while playing Activity, and the game afternoon turns into a game night.

You all also have a drink or too, but not too much, because who wants to be hungover on New Year’s Eve? Nobody, that’s who.

Weirdly enough, it’s almost always the maknaes and Chan against you and your trio of uni friends, so it’s really hard to bond with your roommate when you’re constantly trying to defeat him at various games. You have a lot of opportunity to look at him, though, and what you realise is that this boy is fucking ripped under his clothes. The fireplace makes it warm enough so that you’re all wearing short-sleeved t-shirts, and Chan’s is obviously working overtime to contain his broad shoulders and muscled arms.

Chan is also incredibly sweet. Maybe not to you, he is civil, sure, but not more. However, he really cares for his friends, especially the younger ones, making sure they’re always comfortable. He’s a good hyung, and it endears him to you even further.

Basically, at the end of the day, you’ve barely talked to your roommate, but you’ve stared at his arms for hours. And you’re also just slightly tipsy. That’s not going to be weird AT all.

At around midnight, Minho calls it a day, and you get first slot at the downstairs bathroom. Coming out changed into your pyjamas with brushed teeth and cared-for skin, you notice you actually don’t know which room you’ll be staying in. You tell Jeongin, whose turn it is to use the bathroom after you.

“You’re staying down here, Noona,” he says, smiling at you, before he closes the door behind himself.

Downstairs.

Wait.

A distinct memory of one (1) queen sized bed surfaces in your mind.

The size of bed you’d only want to sleep in with someone you know well.

You stand there alone in the hallway, contemplating feigning a sickness and having to leave. You can’t even anticipate how awkward it is going to be to walk into the bedroom and slip into bed next to Chan, possibly having to climb over him as the bed is set against the wall. Chan, who was so quiet, so distant and who is also so. Fucking. Hot. ???

Fuck.

You accept your fate and march back into the bedroom. At least you’re not embarrassed of your pyjamas – the plaid trousers and black tank top are fine. You find Chan, sitting on the bed, in nothing but grey sweatpants.

As in, shirtless. What the actual fuck. How are you supposed to survive this?!

~Day 20, Part 2~

#tortoise: UHMMMMMMM?!?!?!?!? WHAT??!! MORE PLEASE?! AAAAH!!! BEAUTIFUL!!#author hare #24 days of chrismas #bang chan fanfic #skz fanfic #bang chan x yn #bang chan x reader #bang chan drabble #bang chan imagine #skz imagine #sharing a bed trope #bang chan scenarios #sharing a bed with bang chan #sharing a bed

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mcflymemes · 2 years ago

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INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM PROMPTS * assorted dialogue from the 1984 film

step on it!

is it short for something?

i'll be asleep in five minutes.

where's the antidote?

trouble? what kind of trouble?

what a vivid imagination.

they're just fear and folklore.

you're gonna get killed chasing after your damn fortune and glory.

hold on to your potatoes!

very funny. very funny!

i was happy in shanghai!

i'm all right.

where's my gun? WHERE'S MY GUN?

our plane crashed.

better hurry up or you won't get to hear it.

aren't you gonna introduce us?

we're in trouble!

listen, i just met you!

i'm not so sure.

you're too proud to admit that you're crazy about me.

are you not eating?

we're all vulnerable to vicious rumor.

no! what are you doing? you fool!

this is the night i slipped right through your fingers.

he's not coming.

this is not my idea of a swell time!

i could have been your greatest adventure.

i've got something for you.

my friends were rich; we went to parties all the time in limousines!

i hate the water, and i hate being wet... and i hate YOU!

if i have offended you, i am sorry.

you will become a true believer.

we! are! going! to! die!

hey! no time for love!

wait! wait! he's mine!

i burned my fingers and i cracked a nail!

for crying out loud, there's a kid driving the car!

if you want me, you know where to find me.

to get out you must take the left tunnel.

maybe. but not today.

after all the fun we've had together?

you never told me you spoke my language.

there are no stories anymore.

the newspapers greatly exaggerated the incident.

i can't believe i'm not going.

five minutes. you'll be back over here in five minutes.

what exactly was it they say was stolen?

i'll tell you in the morning.

nothing shocks me.

there's nothing you have that i could possibly want.

ooh, what big birds!

we've got company!

no, it wasn't my hands.

anything can happen.

is he nuts?

i hate being outside!

i'm allowing you to tag along.

too much to drink?

the biggest trouble with her is the noise.

what kind of a name is that?

step where i step, and don't touch anything.

no thanks. no more adventures.

there are two dead people in here!

it's not usual for a guest to insult his host.

so why don't you give your mouth a rest?

you are in a position unsuitable to give orders.

you know what your problem is? you're too used to getting your own way.

i'm a singer! i could lose my voice!

i keep telling you, you listen to me more, you live longer.

are you trying to develop a sense of humor or am i going deaf?

maybe he likes older women.

you haven't been able to take your eyes off of me.

oh shit.

you know i did.

wake up! you're my best friend! wake up!

i can't believe this.

you know how to fly, don't you?

look, just... stand against the wall.

you have insulted my son.

give me your hat.

i think we'll camp here tonight.

i spared his life.

i'm sorry. i thought we were talking about folklore.

hang on, we're going for a ride!

it wasn't me! it's her!

hard to believe, isn't it?

where's my razor?

i'm not going to have anything nice to say about this place when i get back!

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mithliya · 9 months ago

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idk what that anon was yapping about. i’m a zionist (which does not mean what most people think it means—all it means is that i believe jewish people deserve to live in our homeland without persecution) who hates what the israeli govt is doing right now and i don’t understand how you get from “rape is bad no matter the victim” to “brown people caused the holocaust”. like, did we forget what is considered aryan? because palestinians *arent*.

hmm i think now is perhaps not the time to be a centrist either. israel’s govt rn does not exist in a vacuum. the onset of political zionism expressed the same goals that the current israeli govt is enacting. the idea that jewish ppl from around the world all share one homeland in palestine also means that the land is not for palestinians.

read plan dalet. read the end goal of early zionists. understand that what is being opposed isn’t the mere existence of a jewish state, it’s the existence of a jewish state to the detriment of the existing native population.

also zionism today means sth different from what zionism meant 130 years ago:

here are some early zionist goals:

extensive aid for a large development plan, which would enable the evacuation of large Arab tracts of lands for our colonization, through an agreement with the [Arab] fellahin.

(Heller, Yosef. Bama’vak Lemedinah, Hamediniyut Hatzionit Bashanim 1936–1948 [The Struggle for the State: The Zionist Policy 1936-1948], Jerusalem, 1984, p. 118)

I would very much like the Arabs to go to Iraq. And I hope they will go there sometime . . . agricultural conditions in Iraq are better than in the Land of Israel because of the quality of the soil. Secondly, they will be in an Arab state and not in a Jewish state. We cannot remove them from here. Not only because we cannot, even if an exchange has been carried out between the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Turks, between Turkey and Greece. But today they would not accept this.

What we can demand today is that all Transjordan be included within the Land of Israel . . . on condition that Transjordan would either be made available for Jewish colonization or for the resettlement of those Arabs whose lands [in Palestine] we would purchase. Against this, the most conscientious person could not argue . . . For the Arabs of the Galilee, Transjordan is a province . . . this will be for the resettlement of Palestine’s Arabs. This is the land problem . . . Now the Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land . . . because this country belongs to us and not to them . . . .

(Ussishkin)

If it was permissible to move an Arab from the Galilee to Judea, why is it impossible to move an Arab from Hebron to Transjordan, which is much closer? There are vast expanses of land there and we are overcrowded. . . . Even the High Commissioner agrees to a transfer to Transjordan if we equip the peasants with land and money. If the Peel Commission and the London Government accept, we’ll remove the land problem from the agenda.

(Source: Simha Flapan, long time head of the Mapam party’s Arab department, in Zionism and the Palestinians, p. 261, citing Protocols of the Executive Meeting)

these are the words of several zionists! read ben-gvir’s extreme racism, herzl’s goals, and more and if you think what is being done today is wrong, reasonably you would think that the things that were done in pursuit of a “jewish homeland” was also wrong.

‘Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.’

(Leo Motzkin)

#zionism #anonymous #zionist lies

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yelena-bellova · 3 months ago

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UNLUCKY: A STRANGER THINGS STORY (OC) - CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Chapter Fifteen: Halloween

Series Masterlist l OC Profile

Plot: Steve, Nancy and Christine’s efforts to have a normal night at Tina’s party get derailed.

Word Count: 1.8k

Warnings: language, alcohol

————

October 31st, 1984

However chaotic I thought Tina’s party might be, it was worse.

The invitations had clearly spread farther than our school. There were at least 150 people and the number was growing. There was a massive keg set up outside, the air smelled more like smoke than actual air, the music shook the walls of the house. I hadn’t been to many parties, but this one seemed completely out of control.

Steve, Nancy and I moved around, mostly talking with friends of Steve’s. Anyone outside of them I knew definitely wasn’t invited or just didn’t want to come. I couldn’t blame them. I could think of twenty different places that sounded nicer. And cleaner.

“You’re doing it again.”

I could barely make out Steve’s voice through the noise, even in the corner the three of us had found. “Doing what?”

“Making that face,” he nodded toward me.

Out my right ear, I could hear someone vomiting nearby. Out my left, I couldn’t hear anything over the metal music blaring. “Can’t imagine why,” I retorted.

Whatever little peace we’d found was quickly interrupted. Coming our way was Tommy, Steve’s old friend and one of my many torturers, plus the blonde guy I’d seen the day before in the parking lot.

“We got ourselves a new Keg King, Harrington,” Tommy jeered.

Various bystanders started taunting Steve as well, but the tall blonde didn’t say a word. He simply puffed his cigarette and took a domineering step towards Steve, who took off his sunglasses to glare right back.

Nancy, who had been just as uncomfortable as me all night, turned on her heels and walked off. I kept an eye on her head bobbing through the crowd, about to follow her when the crowd of guys realized my presence.

The blonde guy moved from Steve to me. He stayed silent, running the full length of my body with his eyes. The same way it had gone yesterday, the same exposed feeling took me over. I held his gaze, not because I enjoyed it but because he unsettled me. The same way you wouldn’t take your eyes off a snake slithering closer and closer…

“Hey, hey,” Steve started to move into the space between us.

“Steve,” I took a step away from them both.

“Got a bodyguard now, Harrington?” Tommy taunted.

Steve was ready to say something when I grabbed his arm. “Steve.”

The firmness with which I said his name broke him out of their trance. We had bigger problems. I nodded in the direction Nancy had gone and he followed me.

“You know that asshole?” Steve asked.

“No,” I weaved through the crowd, looking for Nancy, “Where the hell is she?”

We paused a moment before Steve gestured toward the kitchen, “There.”

Spinning and ducking our way there, we got to Nancy as she was chugging a full glass of what looked like punch, but definitely wasn’t.

“Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy. Take it easy,” Steve tried to stop her, “Nance, Nance, Nance…”

She came up for air, her tone sharp and biting. “We’re just being stupid teenagers for the night. Wasn’t that the deal?”

Before either of us could argue, Nancy downed the last of her drink and swung back into the crowd.

Steve and I looked to one another “I’m gonna…” he pointed in Nancy’s general direction.

“Go.”

“You good?”

“I’m fine, go,” I pushed, there were bigger problems to deal with than my social standing. I could survive a few minutes on my own.

Steve marched through the crowd and I went the opposite direction. I noticed the guys we’d just gotten away from still parked where we’d been and made a sharp turn. I ended up smack in the middle of the chaos.

From behind me, I could hear a group of girls start singing a screeching, mocking imitation of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ They were laughing by the time I turned around. Stupidly, I’d thought I’d have a holiday off from their teasing or that dressing up as someone so popular would buy me some protection.

Keeping my head down, I made my way further through the crowd. All that resulted in was getting bumped by couples making out and screamed at by my drunken classmates.

It was all too much. I settled against the furthest wall away from the noise. The more I tried to convince myself I was having fun, the more I got proved I wasn’t.

It took about twenty minutes until the smell of smoke became too much. Thankfully, the moment I was heading outside for fresh air, I spotted the last person I’d expected to see.

“Jonathan!”

He turned at his name and found me, “Hey.”

I pushed past grinding couples to get to him. “What happened to trick-or-treating?”

“He didn’t need me,” Jonathan shrugged good-heartedly before taking full stock of where he was, “This is…”

I grimaced while he laughed. Around Steve and Nancy, I could try and find the fun in a lot of things. It was harder to do with Jonathan.

“I thought you’d be here with Steve and Nancy.”

“Yeah, they’re-“

I turned around just in time to see Steve speed walking through the crowd, brushing past me and Jonathan without so much as a look. No Nancy in sight.

“I’ll be right back,” I touched his arm and looked to where Steve had come from, “Can you…?”

“I got it,” he replied, already on the move looking for Nancy.

I shoved my way out the door, chasing Steve’s black clad figure. “Steve!”

He didn’t stop for me.

“Steve!” I called once more, “Steve, what happened?”

He finally turned, his eyes full of tears and his hair falling in his face. I’d never seen him so emotional. “Ask Nancy,” he said before turning his back once more.

He didn’t stop for anyone as he found his car, getting in and driving off. Leaving Nancy and I stranded.

Unsure of what to do, I rushed back into the party and traced Steve’s path back. Halfway there, I found Jonathan half-carrying and half-dragging Nancy through the room.

“We gotta get her outta here,” he said as I rushed to help him, “Where’s Steve?”

“I’m fine,” Nancy slurred, trying and failing to fight us off. There was red punch staining her top and her breath reeked of alcohol.

“He left,” I answered Jonathan, quickly replying to his stunned expression, “I don’t know.”

We managed to get outside, though getting Nancy down the steps of the house was difficult. Thankfully, Jonathan was parked close by and we were able to pour her in the passenger seat.

“How much did she have?” Jonathan asked once she was belted in.

“I don’t know,” I shook my head, “We split up for twenty minutes.”

Jonathan sighed and we got into the car.

We silently drove back to the Wheelers, where Jonathan was supposed to pick up Will anyway. Nancy had fallen asleep on the way there, forcing us to wake her up when we arrived. Jonathan and I threw each of her arms around our necks and helped her across the lawn.

I entered the house first, checking for either Mr or Mrs. Wheeler, who were thankfully already in bed. We maneuvered Nancy up the stairs and got her into her room.

Jonathan laid her down in her bed, carefully removing her boots which I took and set aside. When I turned back, I watched him gently placing her quilt over her and tucking her in. He was so careful, so tender, it broke my heart.

Nancy stirred then and reached out for his arm, “Jonathan.”

Once again, I felt like I was witnessing a moment too private for anyone to see. Nancy held onto Jonathan until her eyes fluttered back shut. But the pained look in Jonathan’s stayed long after.

I didn’t know whether to speak or move or breathe. Jonathan looked up to me, his voice strangling itself, “Will you take care of her?”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

Looking like he was torn between staying and running as fast he could, Jonathan fidgeted in place before moving himself out the room.

“Jonathan,” I chased after him, “Jonathan.”

He paused at the stairs but couldn’t meet my gaze. His eyes were glowing with unshed tears. His posture was so rigid I thought he might snap. He’d just carried the girl he loved to bed and had to leave her.

“Just…” he paused, “Just tell her Steve asked me to take her home,” he finally looked to me, “Okay?”

He bounded down the stairs before I could answer, leaving me standing in the hallway.

I sighed and ran my hands over my face. Steve was AWOL, Nancy was wasted and Jonathan was wrecked. How had things fallen apart so quickly?

Just then, Mrs. Wheeler came out of her bedroom, dressed in her robe. “Christine?”

“Hi,” I startled.

“Did you guys just get back?” She smiled.

I stood strategically in the doorway to block Nancy, “Yeah. I’m, uh, I’m really tired and Nancy said I could stay the night. A-as long as that’s okay with you.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she waved me off, “Do you need anything?”

“Could I just use the phone?” I asked, “I need to call home and let Hopper know where I am.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wheeler continued onto the bathroom, “Sleep well.”

“Thanks,” I distractedly said as I shut Nancy’s door, sealing her off. I hurried downstairs to the phone and dialed our number.

Hopper didn’t pick up till the last ring, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Why’re you calling? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I fiddled with the cord, “I’m just tired so I’m gonna spend the night at the Wheelers.“

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Hopper sounded distracted.

“Is everything okay there?”

He sighed, “It’s not great.”

“W-well, what happened?” I started to panic, “Do I need to come home?”

“No,” he said definitively, “We’re fine. It’s my mess to clean up.”

Whatever had gone wrong during his and El’s night, I wasn’t going to be told about. And the not knowing made my anxiety worse. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“Okay,” I sighed, “I’ll be home by eight.”

“Okay. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” I promised before hanging up.

There were too many problems at the moment to know how to handle them all. I had to trust that Hopper had whatever had gone wrong under control. I had to handle the mess in front of me.

I tiptoed back into Nancy’s room, though it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d have tromped through. She was passed out.

I took off my black flats and climbed into the other side of her bed, exhausted and lugging around a full mind. I had to force myself to swallow the truth that I couldn’t solve anything right then. Tomorrow, I’d deal with whatever was wrong at home. Tomorrow, I’d find out from Nancy what had happened. Tomorrow, I’d make sure Steve was alright.

But right now, all I wanted to do was sleep.

————

Unlucky Taglist: @lanadelray1989

#steve harrington x oc #steve harrington x original character #nancy wheeler x oc #jonathan byers x oc #jim hopper x oc #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things fanfic #stranger things fic #stranger things x oc #stranger things oc #unlucky

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