#and then you proceed to be an ass to women in general

[mysicklove]

I’m sorry but I’m not a woman’s so that’s mean I don’t want to read x female reader cuz I don’t have a pussy

incel anon this one wasnt funny :/ can u say something more misogynistic so i can laugh at you? litterally have one job 🙄🙄🙄

[controlaltdelete-my-existence]

early db is soo underrated like you have kid goku being an absolute menace bulma gives a pig a permanent laxative then later gets turned into a carrot. a blue creature of indeterminable species keeps ordering around a dog in a ninja costume and a hot chick he found from a damn spy ad in the newspaper and goku straight up strands some motherfuckers on the moon until the end of time. Goofy as hell

[poggersbathwater]

vivziepop: this show is about criticising Christianity"

proceeds to: woobify sinners and make them overlords as a reward,for some reason all or most sinners (cannibals, rapists,murderers....etc) are queer,villainized Adam the first human (had nothing to do with Christianity at the time he got created and it's not his fault that god made him for a woman and just wanted peaceful life with her) who lost two women because of lucifer,made lucifer the good innocent guy (let's ignore that he is the main reason why humanity is suffering), "7 DEADLY SINS ARE GOOD FOR YOU ACTUALLY! LUST IS ABOUT CONSENT AND GLUTTONY ARE ABOUT SELF CONTROL,EXCEPT FOR GREED CAUSE THERE'S NO SUCH A THING AS A GOOD GREED CAUSE FUCK RICH!....btw please buy my Valentino cups! (I Wonder why 7 sins are deadly in a first place if they're caring and healthy according to viv)" "Wait.....are you telling me that stolas is a wise high ranking demon who give knowledge to those who summon him? Nonsense! Stolas is a horny softie who needs his imp slave to protect him! Screw accuracy! And you know what? I am making the rest of ars goetia and turn them into birds and had nothing to do with their demonology because I just need to use their names to make more characters"

(Yeah sorry about stolas accuracy part,it's just that I am tired of "not everything should be accurate" argument,that's like making thoth a Egyptian god of wisdom into a weak softie hypocrite character who is obsessed with sex and have nothing to do with his wisdom and knowledge,actually there's a lot of interesting things about thoth that makes him respected amongst gods and if viv wrote him he would be nothing but a joke character that have no personality outside of sex and victimhood mentally)

Alright lightning round here

Woobifying (idk what that means but i imagine it means glorification) sinners: I think the overlords are there to run businesses and industries in Hell, not to reward them exactly- but I do see the point you're making. The worse they are, the more power they have, which doesn't look too good for Hell's case.

Having most of the sinners be queer: Yeah I.. also get this one. It's weird how no fascists or.. well, generally bigoted people are there, but all the characters that ARE there happen to be queer. And I'm not saying queer people can't be bad, they can, but when there's more queer people than bigots in a place that's supposed to have the bad people... yeahhhhh no

Villainizing Adam: Yeah I hate how they turn Adam into a righteous douche- though it could make sense, since he did eat the fruit too (it probably changed his behavior a lot), turning him into a righteous douche who's bitter he lost his wife was.. kinda messed up.

The characterization of the sins: YEAH ACTUALLY THIS ONE SUCKS !! The whole point of Gluttony is that you just keep indulging without a care- the whole point of lust is that it's forced and it hurts people- if it wasn't about force, it'd be called love. Because consent is love. Force and betrayal (cheating/infidelity) is lust. The sins being characterized as good people takes away from why they are sins.

Stolas: Okay I don't know much about demon stuff, so I'll leave that alone (the ars goetia isn't talked about in Christianity so that's why I can't answer it), but I will say that stolas being the victim all the time is fucking ass. Yes, stolas has been forced into an arranged marriage. That sucks, it does. But that doesn't excuse any of his actions towards Blitzo, or his emotional unavailability towards Via.

I've never gotten this many asks Holy shit

[hausofmamadas]

SE LA ARRANCA A MORDIDAS | mystery of Amado's anonymous lady-hustlers, solved

⁂

Holy father who art in heaven, do I have some fucking cracked ass head-canon nonsense for us to👏🏽 day👏🏽 …………….. let’s get to it shall we??

so idk if anyone anyone being the largely nonexistent narcos fandom aka the void Im speaking into remembers that one scene from Narcos in S3 where sleazy!OG!Amado told that one story about those sex workers who robbed him blind, mid-mamadita?

anyone ..... no?

dwdwdw that's okay bc I brought some visual aids to assist in our collective remembrance of this glorious occasion

⁂

The scene starts like this: 👇

Okay, yeah, right? legendary? legendary. just truly legendary behavior skfjskj on all fronts. but the identities of these social justice warriors— no wait activists— no wait, crusad— er no, patriarchy demolishers? iconic crimies with a penchant for for mid-fellatic felonies like armed robbery have been completely anonymous thus far.

…………… until now.

Bc as always, Narcoverse papis Doug Miro, Andrés Baiz, and Carlo Bernard, never fail to fill in the blanks except when they do cause Griselda left a lot to be desired and this is arguably the best ep of the show which, yeah. it’s never ideal when the best ep of a 6ep limited series is the 2nd one si me entiendes😬😬😬 but we digress because im 99.99999999999999% sure if these two sex workers from Griselda aren’t also the two legends who hustled Amado’s dick money out his pants pockets without having to fire so much as a single shot, I’m fairly certain they’re at least inspired by and carrying the torch aka bottling and distilling that Big Dick Energy to perfection of those brave women.

What gave me this idea? So glad you asked dear reader you didn’t but we’ll just pretend you did cause this my haus KEKW…. No like even I rolled my eyes at my own self for that but i couldn’t refrain either.

It all happened when I was nursing my new obsession with a one, Mr. Darío Sepúlveda a name I would most certainly believe to be fucking fake were he not an irl human bean.

👇👇 THIS slice of sweet, cherry pie right tf here

And I stumbled upon this one specific part, where the look on this chick’s face is SO FUCKINGKDHDHDGWVE SIMILAR to Amado’s face, when he’s explaining 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇how the burgling commences when the gurgling is interrupted by with an uncomfortable silence, as this chick proceeds to, hog still in mouth, cease any and all throat activity and fuckingskdfjskl just stare. up. at. him.

all 🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

Like tell me homegirl’s face here👇👇 👇👇 doesn’t look just like it????????????

YOU CANTSJSHSJSHWUS YOU cANT. EVIDENCE IS IRREFUTABLE.

Anyway. Movingright along.

So, if aforementioned homegirl is the 🙇🏻‍♀️ from la historia del grande señor de los cielos, then that makes this ☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️ ... homegirl’s accomplice

with the👇👇sidearm

and like the general only slightly subtle "I eat dicks like urs for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack" vibes that this duo is serving throughout but esp below bc never will I ever not refer to a fuckboy as mancito from now until I'm in my grave alsdkjfa like MANCITO. THE WAY SHE SAYS IT WITH SUCH ALSKDJFKS CONTEMPT, CAN YOU STAND IT????? makes it so clear in my mind's eye how they could 100000000000%% be the unnamed heroes thieves from Amado's little story

also full 180 just on the low but can we all moment of silence for this 👇👇 FUCKINGSDLDFJ LOOK ON DARIO'S FACE WHEN SHE CORRECTS HIM, "quien te dijo eso? ... un mancito?" LIKE HE FUCKIGNSLDFKJSLKJ KNOWS, HE KNOWS HE HAS ERRED ON THIS PATH, HE KNOWS HE CANNOT PASS GO, CANNOT COLLECT 200 DOLLARS AND HE HAS THE GOOD SENSE TO BE GRACIOUS ABOUT IT AND IMAS;DFLIJA;LWEJF;KAJWE;FAKJ; SFUCKINGS DFKLJSLDF JA;K CRYING, SCREAMING, THROWING UP, INCONSOLABLE. LIKE LOOK. AT THIS. OKAY, THAT A MAN, NO MANCITO

*smacks own face, jiggles head back and forth, takes deep breath* anyway.... back to the story

and this is where this prob super unhinged really solidifies bc let's join hands class and pledge alliegance to the most impressive and noteworthy alpha but in the most non-cringe way assertion of dominance I have ever fucking witnessed in all my days. Like, legit the next time i'm into a dude the way i say this like it's not an 'if' bc RIP to my love life lbr fuck all that playing coy, fuck all that flirting. We just gonna get right to the point bc imma climb all over his lap, purr in his face, and ask about his hobbies like it's the 1978 equivalent of a Hinge profile SKSKKSK

and the next time I am spurned I will absolutely grab his junk in a naked hahahaksdjfk grab for a proper leash power to gain the upper hand in the situation and shame any and all menfolk who claim to not like me bc I'm not their 'type.' which like sksjsjsjs admittedly poor Dario just said that as a pretense to get the chisme from the chick who hates Grislenda bc the look of unconcealed regret on his face when Mistress Mamma Crotch Snatcher Morton gets up seems like a good indicator he would've paid to play with his balls

BUT LIKE SIDE BY SIDE WITH AMADO GETTING TO THE metaphorical CLIMAX bc I sincerely doubt they let him bust, mid-robbery OF HIS STORY, CAN WE NOT SEE HOW CLEARLY THESE TWO WOMEN WERE THE ONES WHO JACKED AMADO OFF– NO WAIT THEY DECIDEDLY DID NOT DO THAT ALL OF AMADO’S SHIT, LIKE CAUGHT PAPI WITH HIS ACTUAL PANTS DOWN SKSJSB

and lest any of us were convinced that Lady "Hijueputa Mandona Esa" who hates Griselda wasn't the one holding the gun on Toque, telling Amado she's gonna have her friend chew clear through his disco stick like some froot by the foot, please refer to exhibit B here ☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️where she's manspreading for jesus in these fucking hot pants. I mean try to tell me that ain't power. c'mon

AND THEN THE WAY SHE FUCKINGSLDFKJSL HUSTLES DARIO FOR EXTRA CASH, ALL "you gotta pay me more than that pittance bc yeah, she were a mouthy bitch but I didn't hate her that bad" ensuring he had no choice but to leave a tip, just like our pobre mujeriego, himbo extraordinaire, Sleazy!OG!Amado

And if this isn't the most iconic reminder to tip your servers, folks which everyone should be doing already I truly don't know what is.

═

taglist: @ashlingnarcos @tofuwildcard @narcolini @drabbles-mc

[demetriandelibinaryboyfriends]

HIIIIII HAPPY MIGUETRI MONDAY!!! It was only a matter of time before my post-S6 shitposting about them started, I fear ^^;

ANYWAYS I was thinking about this mlm-ass hoodie everyone is talking about, and I need to yap about my own headcanon about it. Bear with me!!!

So tbh this seems like...a really weird wardrobe choice to me. Miguel is, imho, the closest thing this cast of characters has to a Token Straight Guy™️. (Like I know I kinda ship him with Demetri or in a poly Miguetreli arrangement, but I'm mostly clowning! It's kind of an AU for me because to me he doesn't actually read as queer in canon.)

But this hoodie is just. Undeniably the gay mlm flag??? Plain and simple??? Out of all the characters to put in this article of clothing, this is baffling me the most. Especially showing him in it while he trains with his long-term girlfriend who he loves very much???

(Side note: I feel like Miguel is aware of what the mlm flag looks like. Moon told him about all the pride flags! Although him accidentally buying a gay pride flag hoodie would in fact be very funny, it doesn't strike me as particularly likely.)

So here's what I'm thinking: This is not a hoodie Miguel Diaz bought. It was a gift from Demetri.

If anyone's been following me for a while, they might have heard me talk about how I think queerness runs in Demetri's family. He seems to have a single mom, and he's never once mentioned his dad. It's very much giving "lesbian woman who didn't realize her sexuality until she already had a kid with a man, for better or for worse." And Demetri's dad being gone...maybe he left Demetri's mom because he was gay??? Or left her FOR a man, perhaps??? I think Demetri's parents 100% had him during a lavender marriage they may or may not have even REALIZED was a lavender marriage.

Anyways, these are just my wild little headcanons, but I do think Demetri's mom has always known he's gay. She sees a lot of herself and Dem's dad in him, and she doesn't want him to make the same mistakes she did and wait until middle age to finally accept his sexuality. SO, naturally, she starts trying to nudge him toward...Realizing Some Things. Including buying and gifting him a fucking gay flag hoodie. Because, like her son, Mrs. Alexopoulos lacks any and all subtlety.

Demetri realizes what she's trying to do, but he pretends he doesn't. He's all "Wow! Thanks! I love the colors!" and then proceeds to never wear this item of clothing to school ever because the poor man gets bullied for enough already. He wears it in private and maybe to the grocery store or something, but not where he'll be around other kids (except maybe Eli, who he has definitely bitched about this at length to. "UGH, why does everyone think I am gay, I am NOT gay!!! I like women, Eli!!! I totally want Yasmine to spit in my face!!! I also want to make out with and exchange handjobs with women, I promise!!! No, I'm not getting defensive!!!"). Hence why we have not seen The Gay Flag Hoodie until now.

Flash forward to The Karate Wars. Demetri has started training on the regular and has grown MASSIVELY, especially his fucking shoulders. Tragically, they are now too broad and jacked and he is too much of an Absolute Unit to fit into the mlm flag hoodie anymore 💔 But it's still perfectly good!!! Quite comfortable and honestly barely worn! So what does Demetri do????

He gives it to his bestie like the generous closeted hero he is.

Miguel is aware he's wearing the mlm flag, by the way. He is okay with this. This is his way of showing he's an ally! Although it WOULD lead to a very amusing conversation with Sam when they first meet up to train.

Sam, eyeing the mlm flag hoodie dubiously: Miguel, um...is there something you wanted to tell me? Miguel: Oh! It was a present from Demetri! Sam, who also absolutely knows What's Up here: ...no explanation necessary, actually.

[thegreymoon]

The Story of Minglan

Oh, Minglan.

This is what happens when you take the attitude of "It's no big deal if my husband sleeps with morally questionable other women." 🙄

I am fully on his side on this issue but I feel like hasn't done a good enough job of expressing just how disgusting he personally finds these concubines that everyone keeps trying to force on him. Minglan has been brainwashed by the patriarchy and it will take her a while to find her ground and feel secure enough to put her foot down, but what is stopping him from advocating for himself?

My guy, just say NO.

***

LMAO, he's the ruthless and stupid one?

Chang'er's death is his fault? I cannot with this evil narcissist.

***

Fuck you.

Maybe if your garbage ass had not kidnapped him, he wouldn't have gotten sick. And if he had, they would have been able to afford a doctor.

***

I hope he really rips her limb from limb.

The more I see of her and of Lin Qinshuang, the more valid I find Mo Ran for deep-frying fucking Song Qiutong.

***

Unfortunately, Minglan talked him out of torturing her to death 😕

***

LOL, let's hope that at least the piece of shit maternal uncle gets tortured.

***

Please tell me we will get to see a beheading 😭

I am so sick and tired of these people. They have been trying to murder Gu Tingye for fifty episodes now. I am so done 😭😭

***

I love it when cats make guest appearances in dramas 💙

***

Hell person.

***

In general, I am not pleased with how this story has handled Manniang and her children. It all seems sanitised and on easy mode for Minglan because the true circumstances of him having this whole family before marrying her diminishes the romance as it is and making it any more realistic would probably have snapped a lot of people out of rooting for the main couple because they could no longer idealise it.

I mean, look at this:

If this show was realistic, the odds are that Rong-jie, with a vindictive, abusive, neglectful biological mother who abandoned her like this, would have taken all that trauma out on Minglan because this is how kids tend to react in such situations. She would have given her stepmother hell because she was there and a convenient target, while the narcissistic, toxic, neglectful bio mother was not.

Also, killing Chang-er is the writers taking the easy way out because now they have eliminated Gu Tingye's eldest son and possible heir from competing with Minglan's children for the title and the wealth. It's such a cop-out. With Chang-er in the picture, the only way Minglan's children could inherit would be if Gu Tingye refused to acknowledge him as a son, which would absolutely destroy his image and tank the character in the eyes of the viewers.

This way, Minlgan's children get all the benefits without her having to fight for them at the detriment of Tingye's older children and Tingye gets to preserve his image of a doting and responsible father, putting all the negative connotations of his irresponsible first common-law marriage onto the evil Manniang. Gu Tingye and Minglan maintain their noble images and Manniang is scapegoated to enable this. It just leaves me feeling a lot of ick.

It may be unfair of me, but I respect the writing on this show a whole lot less because of these decisions. The truth is, overall, this drama is better written than 99% of other dramas so I feel extremely weird getting hung up on this and letting it get so magnified in my head, but I feel like the fact that the rest of this drama is so realistic and well-written works against them here. There are standards here that were set and I am expecting the rest of the story to proceed on that level, but these standards are no longer being met because meeting them implies compromising the untarnished image of the main characters. It is so convenient and such an obvious cop-out, that I genuinely feel swindled and somewhat salty about it.

***

So selfish and so fucking evil.

What did Rong-jie ever do to her?

She is the one who abandoned her, she's the one who took the boy out and caused his death. She will just blame anyone except herself for her shit selfish decisions.

***

WTF.

Rong-jie is going to need so much therapy, which is unfortunately not a thing in Song Dynasty China.

***

Fucking finally, some good decisions.

***

Oh, yeah, Xiaotao and Shito are definitely a thing.

***

So gorgeous 🧡

Definitely a potential reference pic.

***

She is the poster child for an untreated personality disorder.

I'm so glad I live in the XXI century where mental health care is available, not that it prevents a whole lot of people from still acting like this and blowing up entire lives.

***

Don't you worry, evildoer, your comeuppance is also coming!

[soulc-hilde]

The Bear

If there’s anything more frustrating is doing a series for a show that has writers who don’t properly go about their job. For example, for my series Bear in the Wild which is based on and follows The Bear tv show, Storer and whoever else is co-writing the show - probably - don’t know how they want to go about the show or what to do.

Cause what I remember reading, is that the show wasn’t even supposed to go on for this long which is a congratulations well deserved. However, I don’t think Storer was ideally prepared to take the show higher. Hear me out…

The viewers are split between those who want Carmen to find the light within his life and heal, those who wish to see him be in a relationship with Sydney, and some who may want him with Claire or any BETTER character that can be added in.

From my perspective, I can see how Sydney and Carmen can be a couple. For those who are too hooked onto the fact that they work together - Carmen’s ENTIRE family is heavily involved with the restaurant since he was a kid. That separation is non-existent.

However, the point of this post isn’t about ships. It’s about the writing and the caring of the show. The first two seasons were killer, amazing. The pacing was perfect, the plot of each season was explored within their episodes consistently, and there’s obvious chemistry between Sydney and Carmen.

Romantic or Platonic, who gives a fuck. It's there, that's material that they can work on.

Season 3 fails because it’s inconsistent, it removes our deuteragonist Sydney and replaces her with tertiary characters like the Faks. THE FAKS??

If this season’s theme, its plot, was to dive into each character’s background and how they’re tied within one another, GO FOR IT. Even better, do that but stick to your focal cast which consists of Carmen, Sydney, Richie, Natalie, Tina, Marcus, Ebra, and… maybe the Faks.

Tell us about our seven fishes, how’d they come across Michael? What was his role in their life, outside of being the boss? It’s The Beef/The Bear. Everybody is family. Tell us how The Beef became a home. Talk to us about Sydney’s family, hell Marcus’ mother died at the end of Season 2… let’s dive into that.

Instead, I’m staring at John Cena as a Fak and I’m learning about Thing 1 and Thing 2? I’m receiving vague hints that Claire’s best friend can’t read red flags to save her fucking life and got associated with a Fak? Why would anyone to do that to themselves?

How does this contribute to The Bear? Or to the Season in general?

Claire is the type of girl in reality where you have to tell them to shut the fuck up or else you’ll punch the shit out of them. She pushes and she pushes until you give her the answer she wants.

In the eyes of a WOC, she acts like a typical white woman that was never told no because she was too pretty or talked so soft when in reality, she looked like everyone else and talks as if she’s being stalked and needs saved. Claire ain’t no different than any other plain jane.

So, what makes her so special in Storer’s eyes that she gets to be Carmen’s love interest?

Can’t say that it’s the nostalgia that holds them together cause I’m pretty sure that while they were both acquainted, she wasn’t an actual friend of Carmen’s. She was the out of reach girl who he had a crush on and knew of. Instead of initiating that bond during those times, she initiates it through his family.

Specifically, Michael, Richie, The Faks, and Donna.

Instead of understanding that the fake number meant he didn’t want to talk to her, she goes through Fak and proceeds to keep calling him. He doesn’t owe her shit, not even the toilet paper he used to wipe his ass and yet, we’re watching this grown ass woman hunt this man down when he didn’t want to talk.

If this was the other way around, it would immediately be an example of harassment against women. But Claire? Oh no, this is apparently supposed to be her fighting for her chance at love or getting close to his heart.

Girl, you're a damn pest. Get sprayed.

And let's not even get into one of the promotion interviews. Why is the cast split by the comedic reliefs, the siblings, and the Blacks?? Um... Tell us how you really feel, say that shit with your chest whoever set that up.

Storer was not prepared to create another season and that happens to all shows. I mean, how many shows you've start strong but then there was either a change on staff or it received crazy hype and decided to add seasons to follow the momentum but things went to shit?

There's ways to recover from that. However, here's where Storer really fucked up.

In recent years, the generation of BIPOC have been wishing to see themselves as characters who do the things that the most overhyped white character does.

Cook? Farm? Paint? Rich? Anxious? Depressed? Happy family?

After so many years of "progression" within the industry, we receive these characters that are supposedly in these non-stereotypical roles and won't be used for the plot (especially if they're a woman of color) but then when the final product is out...

Where was that regular-degular character you had?

And thankfully, there's some shows who have been successful with giving us that representation. And it's not about us wanting white directors and writers to tell our story as people. Y'all already had that control and look where we're at now.

We want y'all to get your head out of your asses and realize that there's more to the world than Ashley with the blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes.

In The Bear, we get that with Sydney, Ebra, Tina, and Marcus. Now, with Sydney, as I said, she's the deuteragonist. Both her and Richie. Where the fuck was she this season? Why is her role being pushed to the back and the likes of the Faks and the Pest being pushed to the front?

They're for damn sure not on the promotional posters. Especially, Claire. They're not one of the main characters. If anything, they're foil characters and/or tertiary characters.

They are either to help further the plot to reach our ending destination, especially if they surround the main character(s), or add little substance here and there before disappearing.

Storer fucked up. He knew what type of audience he had, he saw the reception that both Sydney and Carmen (Ayo and Jeremy) received for their roles and yet when it came to this season, he played in their faces and with their time. And that's fucked up.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Snake Eyes 5

Warnings: noncon, coercion, manipulation. Proceed with caution.

Note: thanks all for reading and I hope you’re excited for this one. All feedback is more than welcome and loved and appreciated. Reblogs are most helpful.

Part of The Club AU

The service industry is less than formal. There’s not much red tape in the hiring process and less administrative restraints. So, after a short video interview with Sif, you accept a job for the weekend. It’s not entirely your choice of venue, a yacht, but the pay even before gratuity is enough to convince you.

More peculiar about the job is that it’s not a single night. You’re slated to work through the weekend at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It beats handing out shots to tipsy coeds; these wealthy investors will have deeper pockets.

So much for being destitute all at the whim of that snake. It’s the nature of the business. Gigs don’t last long and when they do, you’re miserable. If it was up to you, you’d be working at one of the upscale cocktail bars in the downtown core but they rarely open up applications.

You pack a bag and take your time getting ready. There’s a dress code of course. All black, no pants. You know these sorts of events. They only hire women and their purpose is more than serving, they have to be nice to look at. Well, you can doll yourself up.

You put on a sleek halter blouses with a leather skirt. You’ll sweat your ass off but it’s what you got. You have just enough outfits to last you through two days. Oh, and some anti-nausea meds to counteract the sea sickness.

The job will reimburse you for the cost of the uber. You don’t think you’ve ever been to the dock. You weren’t a part of the college crowd with their party boats and aren’t generally a fan of being on the water. You tip the driver on your phone as you get out and look around.

There are two other girls in black hovering around. You approach them, assuming they're in the same boat as you. The pun barely worth thinking. 

“Hey, um, are you meeting Sif?” You ask.

“You must be the new girl,” they look at you with their drawn on brows, “Tara,” the tall redhead introduces herself.

“Zadie,” the shorter woman with the spiral curls flicks her lashes derisively.

You offer your name in return, sensing their coolness. They’ve worked together a while, that means you’re the rookie, you have to prove yourself. That isn’t difficult, you have faith in your own skills.

“You’re pretty,” Tara preens, “love the gloss.”

“Thanks,” you accept the compliment.

“I could never pull that shade off,” she continues, “very harsh.”

You nod and force a smile. You’re sure that is only the beginning of your act. You shoulder your bag and turn on your heel listlessly. You’re not here to make friends.

“Girls,” Sif’s heels draw your attention as they click across the dock, “thank you for waiting. The captain was a bit late with his safety review. Ugh, so we have to hurry with set up. The investors will be arriving shortly. Can’t have you standing out here like a bunch of stray cats.”

“What happened to Katie?” Zadie asks as she steps forward first.

“She’s at her sister’s wedding,” Sif returns smoothly, “don’t worry, she’s vetted and very capable,” the dark haired woman gives you an appraising look, “you might learn a few things, Zee.”

Zadie rolls her eyes and Tara grins over her shoulder, trying to hide her amusement. You shrug and follow them towards the boarding ramp. Right, just don’t think about the water.

🍸

The boat is a flurry. After you are shown your cramped cabin, leaving your bag on the bed, you are taken to the gala deck. There, you are acquainted with the bar and set to your prep. The familiarity of the work welcomes you in and your nerves calm even as the subtle swell of the water rocks the ship.

As you work in tandem with the other girls, the lights adjust and music begins to waft around the space. You look out at the tables, set and ready for diners. It seems a rather overdone event. You’re not sure if you had yacht money, you would waste it on these pompous displays. Maybe that’s why you don’t have any money.

The first investors begin to trickle in. You hear Sif’s voice rise above the building din as she beckons them in and shows them their seats. Some sort of auction for charity. Funny, how these things are always fundraisers…

As the crowd burgeons in, the first patrons of the night come by the bar. Tara elbows past you to take the lead. You let her. You know her type. They approach the job like a competition. No use playing that game.

“Miss, a drink,” you hear from your left. You turn to greet the man, his silty tone only registering once you face him. Loki smirks as he drapes his arm over the trim, “I believe you know my preference.”

You withhold a scowl. You don’t know how to respond. You can’t scream at him so you turn and begin to put together a dry martini. You feel him watching you. Of course, he’s one of them.

“Mr. Laufeyson,” Zadie comes up behind you, “nice to see you.”

“You too,” he says silkily.

“Hon, why don’t you let me take over for Mr. Laufeyson?” She offers as she touches your arm.

“She’s got it,” he shoos her with his fingers.

You present him the tall glass and meet his eye. He watches you with that imperious gloating grin. He reaches for it, sliding it closer with two fingers around the stem.

“Now I should be suitably bolstered to face my guests,” he declares. You squint at him, his guests? “Darling, should you require anything, you know you only need ask. I do take pride in accommodating my staff well.”

You blink, lips sealed and tight. His eyes rove up and down as he lifts his martini, “cheers.” He takes a sip and winks, before spinning on his heel and strutting off. You should’ve known it was all too easy.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

Girl Squad: Assemble!

So I was staying with my sister for a week in July, and the entire time I was there, she was trying to cram this book into my hands. I was super leery because I had read ACOWAR, but I finally acquiesced--mostly on the strength of the little bits of Nessian from ACOWAR that I had enjoyed.

Reader...

I was absolutely floored by this book. It was leaps and bounds better than ACOWAR, and I found Nesta a way more interesting protagonist than Feyre. I also appreciated that she and Cassian weren't perfect off the jump; everyone got to make mistakes and everyone got to figure it out. I also adored the girl squad Nesta built for herself. So let's talk A Court of Silver Flames.

Hi, hello, welcome. This is your SPOILER WARNING. Proceed at your own risk.

One kind of cannot exist in book fandom spaces on the internet without knowing that ACOSF is a polarizing book. People love and hate Nesta, and there are legitimate, evidence- and text-based reasons for both sides. If you found Nessian to be Satan's Power Couple, this is not the review for you, because while both Nesta and Cassian are flawed characters, I enjoyed the hell out of them and this is going to be largely positive--although there are a couple of things we need to talk about that are less glowingly positive. But overall, I liked Nesta, and I liked her relationships with Cassian and her girl squad.

In terms of structure and sentence-level writing, this book was surprising. SJM still does that thing where she uses words that don't make either connotative or denotative sense (seriously, if Cassian's fly has stays in it, then something is DEEPLY wrong), but the pacing and structure of the plot and character arcs felt smoother and more intentional than the entirety of ACOWAR did, and there was just straight up more plot per page than ACOTAR or ACOMAF had. There was also more sex--and I know this is somewhat controversial too, but I defend this by noting that part of Nesta's coping ability with her trauma was to go hypersexual, so having her relationship with Cassian be extremely physical made sense in terms of Nesta's character arc. She even had a little monologue about the difference between fucking and lovemaking that I thought was actually really good for Nesta. Being able to identify different needs and contexts--as well as their inherent fluidity--was real growth for her emotionally. In general, I wasn't bored by this book the way I was by ACOTAR and I wasn't going "WTAF is happening" like I was with ACOWAR. Getting away from Rhys and Feyre seems to have really set SJM up to write a story, not her favorite ship, and I think readers can really see the difference.

At this point, I want to shift into character group/ship headings, because that's the easiest way to address the disparate parts of this book.

Nessian

Nessian is my favorite ship in the ACOTAR books, because Nesta and Cassian are interesting characters to watch, and they're allowed to fuck up and fix things. For example, Nesta is kind of godawful at communicating and following directions. She full-on does not stay in the tree, and almost gets herself murdered to death by "kelpies." She does also find the mask, so she gets a bit of leeway, but she gives Cassian more than a few hear attacks because she's prickly but has a soft gooey center that she is often acting out to protect. She would literally cut her own nose off to spite her face before admitting that's what she's doing, but that's very much what is happening for her. And Cassian is smart enough to eventually figure out what Nesta is doing.

My favorite example of THAT is when Cassian puts together than Nesta pissed off Clotho specifically to get his ass in the library long enough to show off his teaching skills and methods to prove that he's a safe person to all the women in the library. He's literally walking out the door afterward when the penny drops and it's adorable. This isn't to say he never screws up, though.

He REALLY fucks up when Nesta spills the baby wings beans. Did we need to push Nesta to the point of literal physical collapse on that hike? No, no we did not. That was fucked up, my dude. But they do talk it out and they work through it. What they don't ever really work through is Cassian being in the worst possible position in the Nesta-Rhys relationship. Cassian is a murder himbo (affectionate). Off the battlefield, he's a cute slab of muscle with a single brain cell and a good heart. He is also deeply tied to Rhys in a way that is perhaps not entirely healthy, so he absolutely goes back and forth between putting Nesta first and putting Rhys first. Which is messy and uncomfortable and gets baby ex machina-ed at the end rather than actually sorted out. Like, the worst, most toxic part of the Nessian ship is Rhysand and the Inner Circle. And that never really gets resolved because Cass will never leave the Inner Circle, and Nesta is never going to be fully accepted in it.

Despite that, however, I do love that Cassian arrives at the point of trusting Nesta to the point where he trusts that she can girlboss HERSELF out of the Blood Rite. We all know that if that had been Feysand, Rhys would have broken every rule ever and hung the consequences. I love that Cassian is actually held to the rules and has to trust Nesta and his relationship with her and their (admittedly rocky) past to get her out of that situation alive. And she ultimately chooses him again and hauls his ass out of the fire too. They just complement each other well, and I enjoyed watching them negotiate the relationship--even if I missed the mate bond snapping into place entirely because what even WAS that writing, SJM???

I know that some fans criticize the pattern of "solve your depression and trauma with hiking and combat training" in the ACOTAR books, but I found that it made more sense for Nesta than it ever did for Feyre. Nesta has a deep desire for control and enough power not to feel helpless. She's also got a genuinely good sense of "the most good for the greatest number of people," and that plus her general boyfriend makes it make sense that she would end up reforming the Valkyries.

Nesta's Girl Squad

Which brings us nicely to Nesta's girl squad. I absolutely ADORE that Nesta goes out and finds friends outside the Inner Circle. Her relationship with the Inner Circle is toxic on a GOOD day, and they quite simply cannot support Nesta in the way she needs to be supported. So Nesta goes out and finds people who can and will.

Gwyn and Emerie are really fun characters, and the best parts of the girl squad for me were not so much the Valkyrie training (although I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy that) but the parts where the three reclaim the parts of girlhood and girl friendship that they were denied. They have a SLEEPOVER. They make plot-relevant FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS. They SHARE SMUTTY ROMANCE NOVELS and TALK ABOUT THEM. Literally this is the most wholesome relationship and it's a genuine treat to see Nesta form bonds outside of the fate of Prythian and her sister's complicated in-laws. This was probably the part of the book that I loved best (yeah, possibly even more than Nessian being Nessian), because we finally got away from the toxic sniping from Mor, the sheer evil of Ianthe and Amarantha, and the deeply fucked-up sibling relationship between Nesta and Feyre.

The girl squad just likes and supports each other.

That happens rarely enough in books that where there are strong, positive bonds among female characters, I always love it. Did Emerie and Gwyn get the amount and depth of development I'd have liked? No. Was that justified? Yeah, kind of. It was Nessian's book, it's a romance, and the fact that we even GOT a girl squad in a straight romance is a win as far as I'm concerned. Did it start as a trauma pack bond? Also yes, but like...that's just on-brand for ACOTAR, and at least Nesta's girl squad does the work of dealing with and processing their trauma.

*Side eyes the hundreds of years that Mor, Az, and Cass have been sidestepping around whatever the fuck their little triangle is*

The Feysand Thing and Nesta

Ok. I know why we had to have Feysand in this book. Plot reasons are a valid reason to include characters. That said...the pregnancy subplot was too stupid for words. It turns Rhysand--who I was already not enamored with after ACOWAR--into a patriarchal anti-choice asshole. It's Feyre's body, she gets to have 100% of the information about what it's doing and what her options are. And Rhys, dear, if you're too much of a coward to "take away Feyre's happiness" by telling her that giving birth is almost certain to kill her, make the healer do it. Yell, scream, and beat your chest, if that makes you feel better about it, but FOR FUCKS SAKE, tell her what's going on with the pregnancy. There was an opportunity to have a real conversation about abortion (because apparently C-sections aren't a thing in Velaris), but SJM didn't bother taking it. Instead we were stuck with a STUPIDLY overprotective and stressed Rhys. He is a massive dick to Nesta for this whole book, he's protective to the point of literal murder (which is not a good look), and frankly Nesta having to save his entire family's lives for him to stop literally wanting her dead feels...icky.

Also, I cannot not be on Amren's side over the stupid death pact that Feyre and Rhysand made. That was somehow EVEN STUPIDER than the pregnancy subplot, and uh...were I a citizen of Velaris, I would not be super happy with how the succession of the court is set up OR the fact that my 500-year-old High Lord thought that making a death pact with a 20-something who has a high-risk pregnancy was a good idea. Like...there are no brain cells at work here.

Nesta might not have had the best of intentions when she tells Feyre that Rhys has been lying to her and she's probably going to die, but like...FEYRE HAD A RIGHT TO KNOW. And If Rhys had balls, he'd have been the one to tell her or arrange for the healer to tell her.

Literally Nesta and Rhysand are never going to be friends, and that's FINE. But Nesta should not have to live with his bullshit.

Nesta and the House of Winds

Nesta has a pet magic house. It's amazing, I wouldn't change a thing.

The Stays Thing

There have been multiple posts about this on my blog, but of all the "words mean things" crimes SJM has committed in her books, the one that goes "Cassian's cock strained against the stays and buttons of his pants" is absolutely the worst one. For context, these are stays:

Stays are a boned support garment for the upper body that have historically been worn by people with breasts. I have no idea how you'd even BEGIN to put a pair of stays in the fly of a pair of pants, but if SJM meant that Cassian was straining against his own type of support garment, then the word she wanted was "jockstrap." She could even have gone with "cup" or "athletic supporter." Literally any word that describes a garment that keeps penises from flopping wildly about during physical exercise would have worked here, but nooooooo, we got "stays." I might actually be madder about this than I was about the use if "twist" in ACOWAR, because at least with that one, the word was in the ballpark.

Literally all my friends have heard this rant, but the winning response was from my sister who looked at me and went, "When I read it, I assumed they were the things that made his pants stays [sic] up."

Reader, she got the screech of rage she wanted from me with that response.

Nesta's Death Magic

Ok, I am so deeply conflicted about how Nesta's death magic was handled in the book. This idea had so much potential and some HELLA cool moments, but I can't say that I love that she gave up 99% of it at the end. I get why, and I even get that Nesta was probably more comfortable without the phenomenal cosmic powers, but the execution kind of felt like it was one more thing she had to surrender to not poke holes in Rhysand's fragile-ass ego. IDK, I'm conflicted, and your mileage may vary, but I didnt want to not mention the badass powers and Nesta's sheer force of will in controlling and directing it.

Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed Nesta's book, and I would absolutely recommend reading this one. It's an SJM book, so you're getting a fair number of expected flaws with it, but in and around those flaws, there are interesting characters and a compelling story.

[tenshiblogposts]

Hawks x reader

Character: Tamaki Keigo / Hawks

Fandom: my hero academia.

Warnings: yandere themes, mentions of drug usage, minor character death, the pic at the end is related to said death so please proceed with caution.

Additional note: This is set in the Ancient Greek era. Might be historically inaccurate.

Also I feel like I half assed this but idk🤷🏻‍♀️

Yandere general!Hawks who from the moment he laid his eyes on you, while you were washing clothes in the river, he couldn't think about anything else.

Yandere general!Hawks who changed his ways when it came to women, he stopped sleeping around, and tried his hardest to be faithful. Although you didn't even know about his feelings for you.

Yandere general!Hawks who built a fantasy, that he so believed it was a reality, about you being madly in love with him, waiting for him every time he went to war and giving him as many children as your tantalizing body could handle.

Yandere general!Hawks who kept a very close eye on you stalking you, making sure that nobody was trying to make a stupid move on you. Nobody touches what's his.

Yandere general!Hawks who wiggled his way into your family's heart, and hopefully yours.

Yandere general!Hawks who made his presence known in your life. He stuck to you like a shadow, you must be grateful for him.

Yandere general!Hawks who had a lot of opportunities to take you away from this cruel world, to keep you safe and to himself, but decided against it. For now.

Yandere general!Hawks who brought war trophies with him for you, ranging from golden jewelry to the hearts of his enemies. He know that you'll keep them close to your pretty little heart.

Yandere general!Hawks who noticed a suspicious guy around you,smiling and laughing about one thing or another and you responding back, but you would never betray him. He knows it, he's sure of it.

Yandere general!Hawks who spotted the same guy hovering around your home in the middle of the night.

Yandere general!Hawks who saw red once you climbed down your window to meet with said guy, even daring to kiss him! Oh no! Was the guy forcing you to be with him? He can't have that!

Yandere general!Hawks who nearly abandoned his duties to make sure that you were safe, there's no way in hell he would let that scum control you! You were his and his alone!

Yandere general!Hawks who tried harder to keep tabs on everyone and everything you interacted with, from the old guy managing the food stall, to the street cat you kept feeding everyday.

Yandere general!Hawks who returned to his senses. He wouldn't abandoned his position for you, no, he will use it for his own benefit.

Yandere warrior!Hawks who had decided that enough was enough, you would be his, whether you liked it or not.

Yandere general!Hawks who saw your worried pretty face when you didn't find the old guy at the same place like every day, and saw his wife crying, saying something about someone framing him and he was going to be executed the following day.

Yandere general!Hawks who felt satisfaction when the cat you oh so cared for wasn't there. The dogs will get extra treats today.

"I am the only one deserving of your attention, my Dove"

Yandere general!Hawks who was ready to kill anyone and anything, as long as he could gaze into your pretty eyes for as long as he wanted.

"And now, for the last obstacle"

Yandere general!Hawks who formed a solid plan.

Yandere general!Hawks who "accidentally" stumbled upon you in the market, and invited you for tea at his house.

Yandere general!Hawks who was giddy the entire way back to his house once you accepted his offer.

Yandere general!Hawks who drugged you, and tied you to a chair.

Yandere general!Hawks who waited patiently for you, to show you his great achievement. You'll surely appreciate it!

Yandere general!Hawks who had his biggest gift for in the confinements of his hands, and once he saw those captivating eyes of yours fluttering open, he presented the gift to you

"Don't worry, My Dove, I took care of your pesky problem, he will never hurt you again"

[pencil-peach]

G Witch Onscreen Text: Episode 14

Part 15! Of the G Witch! Onscreen Text Analysis! Where I transcribe and discuss! Onscreen Text! And also just generally analyze the episodes! When I have time!

We are on Episode 14! "What They Wish For!"

Click Here! To go back! To Episode 13! Or! Go to the Masterpost!

Or! If you'd like! Join me! Beneath the Cut! (This one is really long! Wow!)

Before we start, something I forgot to discuss at the end of last episode, but there's this moment when Prospera asks Miorine if she'll be friends with Suletta again after the investigation, and Miorine says that of course she will.

Afterwards, Prospera pauses and smiles before proceeding to discuss Quiet Zero with her. I like to think she was genuinely relieved for a second, knowing how much she means to Suletta. (And also it maybe makes her easier to manipulate too. It can be both. Tomatoes tomatoes.)

We learn here that Prospera had been in talks with Delling about Quiet Zero since before she sent Suletta to Asticassia. Something that always gets to me about the timeline of events regarding Quiet Zero is Delling's behavior in Episode 2 during the trial.

Clearly he was devoted to developing Quiet Zero, so what was his goal with the trial? Prospera seemed to act as if she genuinely needed to convince Delling to accept Aerial by blackmailing Vim, and Delling seemed to be genuine when he spoke of disposing Aerial and "Getting Rid Of" Suletta

Prospera even makes a face like she wasn't expecting this. Was Delling trying to find a way to proceed on QZ without making use of a Gundam, and Prospera purposefully went behind his back to proceed with the plan in her own way? Delling does say, "Right now, Quiet Zero is still MY project," to her, as if he thinks she's getting ahead of herself.

Or maybe he just didn't want Aerial to be at the school, and wanted it to increase its Permet Score in some backwater sectors in space, and was just going to pretend to get rid of it and ship Suletta and Aerial to some distant war front. Who knows!

Utterly meaningless little detail, but I'm learning Japanese and I wanted to point it out. The title of this episode is "What They Wish For," and in the original JP name, the word they use for "They" is "彼女たち" (kanojotachi), which is the "they" you use when referring to a group made up only of girls. If it's a group of men or men and women, you use "彼ら" (karera).

So the title here is most likely referring to Sophie and Suletta in regards to their duel. It's probably obvious but it's a neat little thing that doesn't translate 1 to 1.

At the GUND-ARM Inc booth, they've set up a little info tablet for the prosthetic legs. How cute! Wish it was legible.

OHHHHH FUUUUUUCKKK!!!!!! Rubbing hands down my face FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKK!!!!! Okay lets go.

TEXT: (TOP LEFT)

ASTICASSIA SCHOOL OF TECHNOLOGY Welcome to ASTICASSIA, a front for learning that cultivates the pilots, engineers, and managers on whom the future of the Benerit Group relies.

As a higher education facility operated by the Benerit Group, we train the personnel who will form the core of the space development business.

The Asticassia School of Technology is a higher education facility operated by the Benerit Group. It implements a boarding school system that teaches the basics of communal living, a highly advanced professional curriculum, and a comprehensive instructional program in which we have invested all the technological confidence and accomplishments that the Group has built up in the mobile suit industry. Here we train the personnel who will support the space development business in the future. *To enroll, recommendations from Benerit Group [investment?] companies are required.

Chairman of the school board: Delling Rembran.

(BOTTOM LEFT) (NIKAS STUPID ASS HAND IS IN THE WAY THIS IS MY BEST APPROXIMATION)

[Enrichment?] [School Grounds?]

In the educational front constructed at Front Sector 73, there are schoolhouse areas where students can study in state-of-the-art facilities, residential areas where a House system fosters cooperation as they eat and sleep alongside their comrades, and tactical testing sectors where they can perform combat exercises with mobile suits. Interfront Monorail systems are also installed for travel between areas, enabling smooth movement. The schoolhouse areas include facilities such as cafeterias where students can relax during breaks between classes, and training rooms to promote the maintenance of mental and physical fitness.

Curriculum Fostering Independence

[??] an educational policy of respecting our students' independence, the curriculum has adapted a system of free choice. In addition to compulsory subjects that are common to all three special courses, students can build their own curriculum, selecting from classes corresponding to the department in which they belong, making choices specific to the improvement of their personal skills.

Equipment Complete facilities and mobile suits

The Burion company's Demi Trainer is used for mobile suit training exercises at the school. There are also many mobile craft, and a full compliment of maintenance docks equipped with cutting-edge technology. Thus pilots and mechanics can perform their exercises in the most perfect environment and facilities. [Burion company's Demi Trainer]

(Righthand side)

Special Courses Three Special Courses

Three specialized courses have been established at the school. The "Piloting Department" develops high grade pilots, the "Mechanics Department" creates professionals in the maintenance of mobile suits and working equipment, and the "Management Strategy Department" trains experts in corporate management. In each of these three-year special courses, students learn from the ground up under the guidance of outstanding instructors.

1. Piloting

A course to develop "high-grade pilots" with outstanding skills as mobile suit pilots, able to participate in development projects and conduct instructional training for ordinary pilots. In addition to control techniques, their skills as pilots are cultivated from many different perspectives, including physical training and immersive courses to understand the construction of mobile suits and mobile craft. *Enrollment in this special course is limited to those with mobile suit operating experience.

2. Mechanics

A course to create professional mechanics and engineers who can handle the maintenance, repair, design, and development of mobile suits and mobile craft. Its aim is to train personnel skilled in fast and reliable maintenance, who can perform customization and tuning for different pilots and environments, as well as designing and developing new mobile suits and mobile craft. In addition to basic technology, this department also places great emphases on creativity

3. Management Strategy

A course that teaches the knowhow of corporate management. The curriculum has been designed to instill abilities that are indispensable for managers, such as information analysis skills, the foresight to anticipate the trends of the times, fast and accurate judgement, and management skills for motivating subordinates.

(The Curriculum section is incredibly blurry, as the blur effect on the screen in this shot seemingly increases from left to right for some reason. This section is already incredibly long, so for the sake of legibility (and my sanity) I'll omit them from this transcription for now. Apologies, I'll try and make a separate post giving my best guesses as to what they say later.)

HOKAY. During Nika's flashback where she talks about how the DOF allowed her to go to Asticassia, we see her reading an actual Asticassia info pamphlet. A lot of this is just reiterating info we already know, but we actually Do learn some new info that clarifies some things about how Asticassia works

We learn that in order to enroll in the school broadly, it's REQUIRED to have a recommendation from a Benerit Group verified company. It's not like a normal school where it simply increases your chances of getting admitted, it's a baseline requirement. That's why Nika, Sophie, and Norea needed fake companies only registered in the group by name.

Somewhat more importantly, we also get an explanation as to why there seem to be so few piloting students at Asticassia as opposed to the other 2 courses. It's because a student needs to have Mobile Suit operating experience as a PRE-REQUISITE to enroll for the course. Asticassia's Piloting program isn't a course where one can learn to be a pilot, it's a course that reinforces and improves the skills a pilot must already have. (A lot of other things make sense too, like, the fact that students are responsible for the support and repair of their own mobile suits, or that the school doesn't provide any mobile suits other than Demi Trainers for class.)

It's not new information, but now that I think about it the fact that Burion is the company that supplies Asticassia with its Demi Trainers is probably why Secelia and Rouji are allowed to be members of the Dueling Committee, despite their company not being in the upper echelon of the Group, nor either of them being piloting students themselves.

Nothing about the Dueling or Holder systems are explained in this pamphlet, at least, nothing on this page. Suletta didn't know anything about it before arriving to the school, so if I had to make a guess, I figure it's only something you learn once you get to the school. (Or maybe it's just...explained on another page.)

All the lovely things stated about the school's grounds and house system are really funny when you remember that Earth house looks like this.

I like this scene where Norea hands 5lan his phone back. She doesn't even hide the fact that she stole it, and then she reveals to him that he knows about him and his relationship to Peil (Probably because she read his email correspondence with them.) 5lan calmly takes it back, not to plussed about it, and probably not interested in even telling Peil the phone was stolen at all. They both say that the other is annoying. True love!

There's this bit where Suletta tells Sophie about her promise to Miorine, and she responds by calmly and emotionlessly repeating out loud everything she knows about her before cutting back to her usual outgoing personality. This is the only time we ever really see her do something like this. I wonder if this is something she does often when she's deep in thought about something.

In this scene, Suletta is also still unaware about the reality of the situation. She says she can't let Sophie win their duel because in her mind, if she does, she'll lose her status as Holder. When Sophie runs away, Suletta reaches out, telling her that they need to do the dueling vow. She doesn't understand what's really happening.

TEXT: RUMBLE RING The Rumble Ring, the main event of the Open Campus, is about to begin! All participating students, please report to the 9th Tactical Testing Sector. All viewers[...]

The Rumble Ring event screen. We never see the full thing so we don't know where the viewers are told to go. [Punches the wall in anger] FUCK!!!! WHY CANT WE KNOW!!!!!

Lauda says that the rumble ring will be the last thing he does before he becomes CEO of JHM. It's sad that he has to bear that burden on his own, but we later see that Petra was working as his assistant while he was CEO. It's sweet that she seemingly unenrolled too, just to follow him.

Couple of fun things about this scene, so, firstly, underneath the photos of Sabina and Renee, in the window, we can see Renee and Sabina's fans holding up signs and hearts and cheering them on.

The other is that, in this battle, Sabina and Renee are using different mobile suits. In the Earth House duel, the Grassley Girls were all using Beguir-Pentes, while in the Rumble Ring, Sabina and Renee using Heindrees. We can actually see that the UI on their photos has been updated to reflect this.

Now, this is clearly not, like, a standard thing, right? Like, we only ever see these specific Pre-Duel spreads for the Grassley Girls. Shaddiq himself doesn't even have one, so it's not like it's a Grassley thing. So that probably, definitely means that these are fanmade spreads, and there's either one, or a group of extremely dedicated Grassley Girl Fans who make them.

Oh, and because I didn't notice last time, all the Grassley Girls have a shape flourish around on their Duel Info. Sabina, Renee, and Henao all have a star, but Maisie and Ireesha have a heart.

A funny thing about the Rumble Ring (That you will only notice if you do some stupid thing like rewatching this show double digit number of times like I have.) Is that, when the 9th Tactical Testing Sector fades out into its simulated environment, it shows a dark, overcast sky. But during the actual Rumble Ring, the sky is clearly, um. Not that. This isn't a case of a prior animation having been used without edits either. Up to now, every single simulated environment has been unique, including this one. It seems there might've just been a miscommunication between the environment artists who were in charge of the simulator scene and the background artists responsible for the Rumble Ring scenes. Maybe nobody caught it or had time to fix it before the episode aired. I wonder if they fixed it in the Blu-ray version?

Unlike Guel's Dilanza, Lauda's isn't custom colored. It uses the same color of the base model. I wonder if he requested that.

When Norea targets Chuchu's cockpit, she receives an alert on her monitor saying ALERT YOUR COCKPIT IS BEING TARGETED. That's how she knows Norea had done it and managed to shield herself.

Rouji then states that they must not have the regulation program installed, so in addition to limiting beam output, the program also ensures an MS is unable to target an opposing MS' cockpit, so as to avoid a lethal attack.

I like that Secelia knows when to drop the snark and keep a steady head when it comes to people's safety.

Maybe I'm just a bit too sentimental, but there's something about this scene, where Chuchu is about to fully give into her wrath and follow the same path Norea went down, only to be brought to her senses by somebody yelling for help that really makes me mourn the time that G Witch didn't have to tell its story. Even just a little bit more time to explore that idea....ah well, it is what it is, and I still love this scene.

This is the screen that pulls up when Norea tries to contact Sophie and cant get a signal because she's out of range. But more interestingly, this is our first look at the Thorn (and presumably Ur)'s main menu (it's faded out behind the Communication mode UI)

It's the same as Aerial's! Not surprising, but pretty cool.

Sophie's death is kind of interesting when you think about it. At this point, Eri has produced a miniature data storm, and thus taken control of the Gundvolvas and the Ur.

But Sophie still pushes through and manages to maintain control of Ur, pushing herself closer and closer to Aerial, even still being able to defeat the now rogue Gundvolvas.

We learn later in Episode 22 that in order to maintain control of a Gundam in Eri's Data Storm, you have to clear Score 5. But Sophie's case is still somewhat different. When Suletta Pilots Calibarn, she's told that it doesn't have a filter for data storm feedback, but as a result can produce a higher score within the same amount of Permet.

That means that, despite Sophie and Suletta each having surpassed Score 5, Suletta in Calibarn is actually not being exposed to as much Permet as Sophie is in this scene. (Sophie and Suletta have a similar Permet Scar Pattern on their faces, but unlike Suletta, the Permet scars are running through Sophie's Eyes.)

And Sophie doesn't have Suletta's natural resistance to data storms either, so on top of that Permet Exposure, the Data Storm is frying her too.

Norea wasn't lying when she said that she died before Suletta could kill her.

This is scene is such a sad conclusion to her duel with Sophie. The whole fight, Sophie is forcing her to confront and ask herself uncomfortable questions.

When Sophie tells her why she kills, Suletta tells her it's wrong, that you can't kill other people just to get what you want, and then she remembers Miorine's horrified face, and remembers that she did the same thing to save her.

When Sophie forces her to ask herself what Aerial was built to do, what she needs all these weapons for, she freezes. She doesn't know the answer.

And when she sees that Sophie has died, Norea tells her to her face that Gundams will eventually kill anyone who continues to pilot them. Something her mother told her wasn't true.

But...when she talks to Aerial, she can only rationalize it by saying that Sophie had to be wrong. That Gundams are supposed to save people. Because that's what her mother told her. And above all else, at the core of Suletta's being, the very foundational idea that she has built her entire life up from is the belief that her mother loves her and would never lie to her.

Eri can only tell Suletta what she thinks will make her feel better. That it's okay, because she saved everybody. And Suletta agrees, because again, move forward gain two. Just like mom says. And just like that, all 3 of the uncomfortable ideas that Suletta had to confront during her duel with Sophie are completely shut down.

But even as she says that, with a smile on her face, she's crying. Deep down, she doesn't want to do this. Deep down, she knows that it's wrong. Deep down, she's in so much pain. But it's fine. It's okay, because even if it hurts, even if it's unbearable, it has to be right. It has to be right, because her mother is always right.

You could say a lot about Miorine's actions in episode 17, and maybe it wasn't the best way, but separating her from her mother was not a mistake.

Thank you for reaching the end of this part! Quite a long one huh??!??!?! I don't blame you if you couldn't finish this one...there was just so much to talk about!!!

For my final gift...

Erm...

Here's the theme that plays for a majority of Norea and Sophie's attack on Asticassia. This theme also plays a bit during the infiltration of Quiet Zero.

A fun fact about this episode is that it has one of the few Enemy/Non-Aerial Gundam battles that "Pharact" doesn't play at some point for. Click to go to Episode 15! >>

Click to go to the Masterpost! >>

[dustedmagazine]

Music for Films, Vol. IV: Once upon a Time…in Benedict Canyon or, Tarantino, Redux

(N.B., I wrote an earlier piece in this series about Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof [2007], which seemed to me to represent the apotheosis of that director’s postmodern sensibility, for cinema and for its use of pop music. That still seems accurate to me. But Tarantino’s Once upon a Time…in Hollywood [2019] turns out to be a much more interesting engagement with both of those aspects of his filmmaking, and with postmodernism, generally — and it’s also a film I admire a bit more. So we go around again. If, however, you are sick of Tarantino and of chatter about his films, I get it. For sure, he’s irritating as hell in interviews — and below, I start with some of my own irritation at his winking and ironical guffawing. But, as is the case with someone like Richard Hell, it’s useful to separate the man from the work, and if you can pull that off, the work can be pretty great.)

There are moments in Once upon a Time…in Hollywood at which Quentin Tarantino’s auto-referentiality tips over from risible cleverness into unsavory self-obsession. See the scene about 80 minutes into the film, during which Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, effortlessly cool) finally picks up the always hitching and emphatically sexually available Pussycat (Margaret Qualley, breathlessly feral). After they connect on their shared histories with Spahn Movie Ranch, Pussycat settles into the Coupe de Ville’s massive bench seat and, inevitably, puts her feet up on the dash. Her toes smush into the windshield; the bottoms of her feet are filthy. You can just about feel Tarantino hyperventilating — or maybe he’s laughing his ass off at us. Tarantino and feet, it’s an exhausted punchline by now. And the moment is almost a direct quotation, a visually inverted rendition of the opening shot of the narrative portion of Death Proof, in which Butterfly’s (Vanessa Ferlito) feet rest on the dash of Shanna’s (Jordan Ladd) Honda Civic. Tarantino seems to want you to make the connection, and, perhaps, to feel a little bit gross about the fact that you can.

The whole scene is shot through with problematic erotic energies, generated less so by Pussycat’s directness (“Obviously I’m not too young to fuck you, but obviously you are too old to fuck me”), more so by Cliff’s reasons for not pursuing her (“What I’m too old to do is go to jail for poontang”). And Tarantino has Dee Clark’s “Hey Little Girl” lasciviously jangling from the Coupe de Ville’s radio: “Hey little girl in the high school sweater / Gee, but I’d like to know you better / Just a-swinging your books and chewing gum / A-looking just like a juicy plum.” Gee. I get the crassness of the choice, which provides an intensification of the more playful song accompanying Cliff’s first look at Pussycat on a different LA street (and about 63 minutes earlier in the film), Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” With all the signaling, ogling and panting, it’s easy to forget the song that immediately proceeds “Hey Little Girl,” sonically framing the initial gestures of Cliff and Pussycat’s conversation.

The song is typical of Neil Diamond’s peculiar talent for constructing gravid schmaltz that is neither too serious nor too cloyingly mawkish (mostly, anyways). That emotional tonality seems a less than intuitive choice for Cliff and Pussycat’s encounter — until we remember why she wants a lift to Spahn Ranch, and who might be there to meet them. Diamond’s Brother Love is a religious huckster, a metaphysical con man, and so, in part, was Charles Manson, a wannabe acid-soaked Svengali who managed to bewitch more folks than seems believable. Pussycat’s passionate desire for Cliff to meet him (“Charlie is reeeeally gonna dig you”) suggests Manson’s poisonous influence over her. She is thus the fictional avatar of numerous women and girls, like Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins and Squeaky Fromme, who fell under Manson’s influence, utterly convinced of his psychic and prophetic powers.

Manson, as is widely known, was erstwhile friends with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and with producer Terry Melcher. Manson first went to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, where Manson Family members would eventually murder Sharon Tate and several others, looking for Melcher. Manson was attempting a career as sort of demented folksinger manque, and he wanted to bug Melcher about it. By 1969 Melcher was coasting on the rep he had built producing the Byrds’ hit records from 1965 and most of Paul Revere & the Raiders’ sides from 1965 to 1968 (and that band’s singer Mark Lindsay also briefly lived at 10050 Cielo), including this tune:

Watching Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) bounce around the room is a charming experience, and Robbie’s still-youthful beauty is an interesting counterpoint to the aesthetic pleasures of Pitt’s middle-aged body. In truth, Robbie isn’t given all that much to do in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood; mostly Tarantino seems to have told her, “Okay, be adorable” (though we should also note that it isn’t hugely easy to be adorable on demand). There may be an intent in that: to revise the dominant filmic profile on Tate, the sex kitten in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and half-naked beach bunny in Don’t Make Waves (1967), presentations underscored by a nude-photo-supplemented article on the actor in Playboy. Tarantino renders Tate beautiful — not much else one can do with Robbie — but never insists on her as a libidinally charged presence (save for a shot or two of her feet …).

Hence the smart choice of the Paul Revere & the Raiders tune. Their goofy costumes and bright vocal harmonies cast them very much in the mold of the British Invasion, with Beatles-ish overtones of mop-topped sweetness, and the explicitly anti-dope messaging of the band’s hit “Kicks” further associated them with a cleaned-up vibe, distinct from druggy counterculture. In the film, Tate teases Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), “Aw, what’s the matter? You afraid I’ll tell your friend Jim Morrison you were dancing to Paul Revere & the Raiders?” Morrison doesn’t appear in the movie, but in just another minute of screen time, Manson (Damon Herriman) does. Sebring stops him at the front door of 10050 Cielo, and when Tate approaches (walking past a massive reproduction of a poster for Don’t Make Waves, Tarantino just can’t help himself), Sebring tells her, “It’s okay, honey, it’s a friend of Terry’s.”

Of course, the arc of history tells us that it’s not okay. The sheen of good feeling and innocent kicks pop culture was attempting to sell in the late Sixties had been mussed up by all the “fucking hippies” that Cliff and Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio) continuously curse at as they drive the Strip. Even Spahn Ranch, in the film formerly the production site for Dalton’s hit cowboy show Bounty Law!, has been overrun by Manson’s accumulating freaks. That’s another historical fact that Tarantino lovingly recreates, reducing the Ranch to a relic, a dusty ghost town haunted by sweaty, fried, raggedy heads and a legion of young women, Pussycat among them (Dakota Fanning turns in a terrific performance as Squeaky: paranoid, overheated, drenched in weird, wanton ambiguities).

Their presence is disorienting, but it can’t entirely dislodge the visual logic of the cowboy film, the Western. In part, that’s due to the sheer amount of time the film devotes to painstaking reconstructions of Westerns, in cinema and TV, in LA and Italy; see especially all the minutes of Dalton on set, filming his guest appearance for the pilot of Lancer, a Western that ran on CBS through the late 1960s (and we should note that Bruce Dern, who portrays George Spahn in Tarantino’s film, did some work on Lancer early in his career). But the more interesting nods and allusions to the Western cluster around Cliff: buckling on a holster-style work belt when he fixes Rick’s TV antenna; staring down the line-up of Manson Family women who gather across the dirt lane in Spahn Ranch, like bandits inviting a gunfight; and most emphatically, his shoot-out-style stand-off with Tex Watson (Austin Butler, and more on that just below). Appropriately, when Cliff gets his first few minutes of solo camera time early on in the film, Tarantino scores it with a song that works through numerous tropes of the Western antihero.

Some might assert that a Gram Parsons tune would better suit both the Western style and LA in 1969. But I’ll argue for the Seger song, even though it was recorded when he styled his band as the Bob Seger System, not yet the Silver Bullet Band (which would get us semiotically closer to the gun and the cowboy). “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” (1969) is certainly a rhythmic match for Cliff, as he careens through the city’s streets and freeways in his beat-to-shit Karmann Ghia. And check out the lyrics: a tale of a “ramblin’ man” who left home at thirteen; a past-master of roulette and dice; rugged and a little ugly, but full of macho sexual confidence. All he needs is the horse. Most significant, the song’s lyric speaker eventually notes, “Gotta keep moving, never gonna slow down / You can have your funky world, see you around.” That’s Cliff to a tee, but it’s also Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, who is always ready to ditch the scene when the civilized world becomes too much its petulant, cynical self. Better out in the bush, among the cacti and canyons. And while the usage of “funky” seems a poor fit for a cowboy’s mouth, it’s right on point for the film’s take on LA, as it lurches into counterculture’s violent dissolution.

It's unfair to counterculture to peg that dissolution to the Tate-Labianca murders. We can more meaningfully reference the 1970 explosion at 18 West 11th Street in NYC, or Eldridge Cleaver’s fugitive conversion to evangelical Christianity, or Altamont, or any number of other events, betrayals and tragedies. But the Manson Family’s perverted use of countercultural language (“revolution,” “the pigs,” “grokking”) is particularly galling in its confusions and lunatic bloody mindedness. Tarantino is tuned into it: see Sadie’s (Mikey Madison) deranged rant about “pigs” and “fascists.” Even a year earlier, other speakers were using the terms with much greater clarity, and many of those speakers were black.

So what do we do with this:

Black confronts white. Bad guys threaten good guy. The stand-off morphs into a massacre, but not before Cliff brings up the Western again, reminding us of Spahn Ranch and of Tex on his “horsie,” belittling him and adding to Cliff’s inability to take Manson’s minions at all seriously (Cliff, to Tex: “Uh, you are?” Tex, intoning: “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” Cliff, dismissive: “No, it was dumber than that…”). Soon Brandy the pit bull is chewing Tex and Sadie to pieces, and Cliff is hammering Katie’s (Madisen Beaty) head into any number of hard, angled surfaces. (Let’s not linger on Dalton’s flamethrower.) The violence is gratuitous, meaty, precisely staged and shot. It’s a Tarantino film, after all. And in this brutally antic sequence, the film and the director shift into another generic form, very dear to Tarantino: the revenge drama.

A number of Tarantino’s films have employed revenge plots: all of Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007), Django Unchained (2012). Inglourious Basterds (2009, featuring a cartoonish but still satisfying performance from Pitt) expanded its revenge to world-historical scale, using film as a weapon for culture to take its vengeance on Hitler, and on the Nazi Party’s development of cinema as a vector for political propaganda. Once upon a Time…in Hollywood is less expansive but still has complex dimensions: American pop takes its revenge on Manson, rolling back his invasion of LA’s industrial and cultural turf and reversing — if only symbolically — his extinguishment of Tate and her career, of all the images and roles she might have given us.

But it’s possible to discern other layers to the vengeance, if one listens. Running throughout the fight sequence is the Vanilla Fudge’s bombastic, psych-rock rendition of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (1967), which is both a suitable and a strange choice. Suitable, in that its acid intensities resonate with Manson and with Cliff, who is tripping throughout the scene. Strange, though, in its lack of a clear thematic relation to the scene’s action, which seems to have guided other songs’ selections — certainly “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” and “Hey Little Girl,” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and even, in its limited way, “Good Thing.” So why would Tarantino abandon that logic here, at the film’s big, bloody climax?

As ever, with Tarantino, the layers have histories.

“You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” of course, was first recorded and released by the Supremes, for whom it was a #1 charting single in 1966. There’s a sort of pattern suggested by the film, of utterances and meanings developed in black American culture that are quickly adopted and refitted, frequently rendered vanilla (hello) and commodified, by white culture. To be sure, the Supremes also produced a successful commodity with their version of the tune. But the play among those songs and vinyl sides suggests a more problematic set of appropriations — among them, Weatherman’s use of the revolutionary language developed by the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael, which Billy Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and others spouted and spun out to fringe actors, like Manson, who degraded it, rendering it nearly meaningless.

“Helter Skelter” was another of the Manson Family’s watchwords, and another of Manson’s nutty notions, alleging that the Beatles song was endowed with the power to launch a race war in America. Manson’s racism mixed paranoia with his megalomania. He envisioned an America in which blacks would murder all the white people, save for him and his followers. In his view, blacks were too incompetent to govern themselves; they would need a white leader, and it would be Manson. So while Ayers and Dohrn called cops pigs in an attempt to make common cause with black revolutionaries (who were deeply skeptical of the white kids and their enthusiasms), Manson and his minions called cops pigs out of a chaotic psycho-social melange of persecution, ressentiment and bizarre apocalyptic divination.

So maybe we should linger on Dalton’s flamethrower a bit, after all. He uses it to torch Sadie to death, the Mansonite most earnest in her identification of him as another “piggie.” Close to the film’s beginning, there’s an ersatz movie clip drawn from The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey, in which Dalton, as the fictive hero McCluskey, uses the same flamethrower to burn a bunch of Nazi officers to death. It’s another Tarantino callback, to the climax of Inglourious Basterds and the incineration of many, many more fascists (and that scene had the benefit of the fever dream of Shoshanna Dreyfus’s [Melanie Laurent] face, projected onto the celluloid-fed inferno and madly laughing, surely one of the best images Tarantino has ever concocted). But the visual synonymy identifies Sadie with the Nazis. She seems to be the fascist. She has certainly been infected by Manson’s racist manias and linguistic depredations.

That may be too clever, by half — but with Tarantino, that sort of playful cascade of images and associations that ends up feeling meaningful is generally what we get, and in this case, there is a sort of critique to be made. If the postmodern in part emerged amid the collapse of counterculture’s revolutionary agendas, Once upon a Time…in Hollywood directs its wrath at a symbol of that collapse, and of the resulting nightmares borne on dope, irrationally enraged agony (especially over Vietnam, news of which occasionally issues from car radios in the film) and harebrained political analysis by kids reading texts that had currency amid a very, very different conjuncture. While Tarantino’s revenge narrative morphs generic forms again at the end, into alternate history, there’s a way in which that mutation can be read as a useful provocation. Not just a thought experiment, or a gesture lionizing fiction’s weirding power, in some ironized celebration of relativist spectacle. But a reminder that while history has to happen the way it happens, our histories are constructions, and they tell very partial and very particular stories. It’s an old saw, now, to recommend postmodernity’s meta- moves and pop cultural saturations as testing grounds for our reading strategies, but that doesn’t make the assertion any less cogent. Perhaps, to burn through the layers of images, to burn down the funhouse of contemporary revisionisms and to fight the fascists, who continue to manipulate media, what we need is a powerful instrument: our minds, tempered by their interactions with tempting narratives that wish to tell us pleasant stories.

Or mavbe we just want to watch Sharon dance, Manson be damned.

Jonathan Shaw

[hockeybazooka]

https://www.tumblr.com/hockeybazooka/752572383341215744/this-is-gonna-sound-mad-hypocritical-of-me-seeing?source=share

(I'm so sorry for so much text)

I agree with this.

Like bro you're cute, handsome but you're a sht, nasty person. Why can't men (women too tho) like these be respectful towards their girlfriend and relationship (? talking especially about those ones that have gf that you can tell that they're (the gf) in love and really want to be happy with them.

And then the ones who dates girls that are exactly the same as them (cheaters, unfaithful, etc.) and then proceed to have the most toxic relationship ever. Breaking up, getting back together, breaking up, together again. Like they think they're JB and SG or what. They won't let each other go, why?? Because the woman is pretty and hot, and because he's hot , handsome, rich and famous. Lmao

Sorry, I hate people like that. And like you said, it might be/sound hypocritical, bc at the end we end up being thirsty(? for them, I would never be in a relationship with a man like that, because nothing good ever comes from being with a person like that.

OMG SOMEBODY ELSE GETS THIS. Like the stuff I've witnessed isn't that bad yet because it was all varsity HS sports cheating/general drama stuff. Like wdym my teammate was in a on and off again toxic situationship w/ a four-star D1 commit fsu football player and wdym my classmates soccer teammate is dating cooper flagg❓❓ Athletes are SAURRR toxic and messy it's insane bc why are you pretending to be single at games and why does the gf put up w/ it!?!? But I'm getting ready for the college level athlete toxicity and we all know how bad it gets 😭

But at the end of the we still simp for these toxic ass athletes and I don't know why smh-

I actually have a few more of these athlete stories shoved up my ass 😺 I've got NBA and NFL players, no hockey tho cuz it's existence is obsolete here lmao.

[coffeestainedcamera]

Anyways, I loved Poor Things and it's up there with Boy and Heron, They Cloned Tyrone, Barbie, Asteroid City, and M3gan for fave of the year for me. So, let's first set the scene here.

I show up at the theater, expecting only like three other people (based on our online ticketing system). Then the room gets completely packed by everyone from other twenty-somethings to elderly couples. I haven't seen this big a turnout since the Barbie screening, prob.

So, anyways, we all start watching and begin dying of laughter. It's in the basic slapstick, like Bella impulsively smacking Max in the intro. But it's also in all her unfiltered observations that aren't very socially acceptable!

Ok yeah, now we're hitting spoilers so just gonna toss a cut in.

Yeah, she's ultimately kind of like the revived guy in Frankenstein, except her dad actually cares for her. It's in the small stuff like giving her a name and not tossing her at the first signs of trouble. But both doctors still didn't really give a rat's ass about their kids' basic bodily autonomy when first making them.

Did Bella's mom ever ask to be brought back? Nah, so he respected that basic bit. Would she have been okay with her kid's brain animating her corpse? Ehhhhhhhh, doubtful, especially considering that she offed herself to escape her expected role as a good rich mama. Can't really ask her, but that's not gonna stop science here (much like in the case of Dr. Frankenstein and his son).

Yeah, that's not exactly a promising start to a parent-kid relationship. We have basic standards of good parenting like actively trying to educate the kid and not committing incest, but the bar is kind of in hell. Still, he ultimately respects her autonomy and lets her make the impulsive decision to run off on a trip with some lawyer. After giving away her hand in marriage without her own permission, like a proper Victorian papa! Still, wow, he actually let her out. Amazing, showstopping, revolutionary.

Anyways. Mr. Lawyer is a total elderly creeper. He wants Bella, but when she's uneducated and controllable. The second he catches her reading philosophy books? Tosses them overboard and rages at the lady who gave them to her. Then he pathetically tries to off her.

Ruffalo has no right being as funny as he is in this role. Still, it's a performance that makes sense in the context of this absurd comedy. He's a pathetic manbaby that's angry that his girlfriend is actively trying to improve herself while he's stagnant (and gasp, she might figure out that he's a giant creep that women his age stay away from). The second she screws someone else, he rages. And he doesn't respect her coworkers in Paris! But he does it with this expression of inept rage, so we all couldn't help but laugh at his breakdown at being dumped once Bella learns more about the world.

Side note, but the most laughs in the theater happened when Bella was completely disregarding social norms. You want a lady that only spews niceties in public? Well, sorry she very inappropriately threw one at your dinner companion's talk of her personal issues. Lol.

You're upset she's dancing by herself in public? Hope you have fun squirming while she takes the lead in the dance with you, then.

Oh, and sorry she's outearning you and proceeds to quit that overly strict workplace when she feels like it. And also finds a gf down there.

And sod it, if Mama was rocking generic Victorian clothes, we're rocking pieces that would've made Viviene Westwood proud!

Side note but that production and costume design were delicious. Plus, that color grading. I'm still obsessed with the vivid blue dress of her mom in her one final moment of freedom, versus that painful grayness of that mansion. Oh, and the vividness of Bella's world trip!

Anyways, very much a "vibes" kind of movie but we were all a very specific kind of hedonist that proceeded to laugh and actually comment on everything. It's a bleak comedy and while this all sounds like a massive breach of theater etiquette, it actually was fine. My favorite bit was at the mad scientist antics at the end. "No, don't bring your dad back, he never asked!" "HELL YEAHHHHHH" (yes, these were both reactions to the man-goat scene).

Ну, типа, ты же был таким козлом, в переносном смысле! Может ты хочешь стать одним буквально?:)))

In short, 10/10, would rec either going solo or with someone very, very understanding.

[toffyrats]

i hate narcissistic christians.

the kinda christains that take advantage of literal CHILDREN and tell them about the horrors of hell so that they’ll get scared and convert

the kinda christians that read “love your neighbor as yourself” and “god so loved the world” and then proceed to treat anyone not a christian like the scum of the earth

the kinda christians that make anything they don’t support seem like the villian in the story and don’t tell their kids about actual world problems (i didn’t learn climate change was an actual issue until a few years ago.)

the kinda christians that don’t give their kids a choice. if they’re anything other than conservative, pro-life, straight, and fully christian, they’ll say things like “its just a phase” or “they’ve fallen away from god”.

show respect to god’s earth my ASS because none of you fucking do that. your kids get scared of you and think they have to hide from you because they can’t tell you their opinions without getting in trouble.

THERE ARE FUCKING FLOWERS IN ANTARCTICA. you could tell a CHILD that and they’d know that’s not good.

so you’d tell your child about HELL but not human trafficking? how about women’s rights?? climate change? eating the rich? racism? the suicide rate of teens in 2023? THERE ARE WORSE PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD THAN THE LGBT COMMUNITY THAT IS DOING NOTHING TO YOU

but no, you’re not going to tell the newest generation any of that because it’s too radical. “history repeats itself” yeah. maybe you shoukd WARN THEM SO IT DOESNT. teach them helpful history, not just what’s in the bible.

my own fucking mother has told me women don’t deserve rights and that men have always and will always rule the world. she said women shouldn’t work, vote, anything that we’ve fought for. she’s lied to me as a child to make the left seem absolutely ridiculous. i’ve gotten grounded for genderbending a character. i’m scared to show my family any of my art now.

and then you’ll go and blame your kids opinions on social media. YEAH. social media tought me the things you wouldn’t.

you guys seriously need to grow tf up. the world is falling apart and all you fucking care about is the rapture. i still barely know how the american government WORKS and i’m SEVENTEEN. please just. be helpful for once

[spindrifters]

😡👀💋 for the ask xxxx

😡which fic did the characters control the most (like you wrote a whole ass plan AND THEY DECIDED TO FUCK IT UP)?

Is this not... what writing is...? Idk man, I'm a total pantser (as in, flying by the seat of my pants) when it comes to writing. I start off with a General Concept and the characters tell me what to do. I will say, I had no idea that marginalia was going to be as Sirius-centric as it is. I thought this was the Remus show, and I started out thinking in my little writer brain that I had to show Sirius' POV as well because otherwise it was going to come off as Stockholm Syndrome, but it took all of writing that one first chapter to realize like. Oh. This is a story about cycles of abuse and navigating your ethics under forced complicity on both ends.

👀what’s a fic written by someone else that you REALLY wish you wrote yourself?

Don't Panic by redspottywellies. I adore this fic so much. Sirius stuns Hagrid and takes Harry on Halloween '81, enlists Remus, and the three of them go on the run. The whole Order proceeds to chase after them across the UK, through hostels and train stations and moors, all while they're trying to deal with grief and some seriously broken trust. Also they're both women now because fuck you.

💋do you have any guilty pleasure ships that you really want to write for but are scared to?

Not really? Prongsfoot might be the closest, though it's less because I'm scared and more that I've never hit on a fic idea I've actually felt compelled to write.

fic writer ask game!