#and this whole time while trying to cure him jack was feeding off of his blood as an everlasting source of youth

[dixiedingo]

Lorenzo: come on :)))) you know I'm not crazy. My son is crazy! Don't kill me :)))

Rose, already slipping the second switch: sorry did you say smthn?

[misteria247]

Life in a village was a very familiar and boring thing you'd learned growing up. From the moment you were born, you had known nothing else but the village and its way of life. From the hot sun of the savanna hitting your back to the tiny huts that held your fellow villagers. All of these things were things that you knew and grew up with, the same routine everyday for as long as you could remember. A boring routine that you'd come to somewhat dread if you were being honest with yourself, however despite being old enough to leave the village you felt you couldn't. You knew nothing but the stories told of the world outside your village and you'd come to be somewhat anxious at the thought of leaving your home despite how bored you'd become. Plus you had another reason for staying in the quiet, sleepy village. Your beloved father, the chief leader of the village needed you. The two of you took care of one another, and you couldn't imagine life without him being somewhere nearby you.

So you stayed, doing your daily routine that had long since grown stale. You'd wake up and feed your livestock and then help your father and fellow villagers with whatever they needed without compliant. Though sometimes when night fell and you were alone with your thoughts you couldn't help but wish for something to change. For something exciting to happen to your usually mundane existence. However once those thoughts came through you quickly dismissed them not wanting to dwell on such things. After all you had your place among the village and even though it was dull you loved your home and the peace that you'd grown up in.

But what you'd failed to realize was that peace didn't last forever.

It'd been just another day for you. You'd woken up with the rising sun and went to feed your livestock before cleaning up and making breakfast for you and your father. The smell of food cooking had awoken him just as it always did and he'd sat down at the table to eat his meal. The two of you spoke about the errands that needed done when your father had let out a small coughing fit. You gazed at him in concern but he'd waved you off saying that it was nothing. You hesitantly let it go despite the unease you'd felt whenever you'd heard him cough. After you two finished eating you put the dishes away and giving your father a goodbye kiss on his cheek you left your hut and went to start your day. It was around mid day when you'd received the news. You'd been helping one of the older villagers with their garden when your father's adviser came running towards the hut, kicking up dust from behind him.

"Lady (Y/N)! Thank the gods I'd found you-!"

The adviser said in between pants. You stood up from your crouched position, wiping your hands off on your dress, a confused look on your face.

"What's the matter? You're practically out of breath-"

You'd started to say before you were interrupted by the adviser.

"It's your father! He's collapsed!"

The sentence sent an icy chill into your veins, your heart stopping for a moment.

"What?!? Take me to him now!"

You commanded already picking up your bag and ready to go. Everything after that was a blur to you. You followed the adviser back towards the place where your father was. Bursting into the hut you felt your stomach twist into knots when you took sight of him. Your father laid in bed, his skin pale and clammy. His breathing was wispy and rattling slightly as he struggled to breath. Whenever he'd gotten enough air he'd cough, the sound making your heart drop as you realized that the little coughing fit from this morning had gotten worse. The healer was with him, his withered face filled with a solemn look. You could barely process what he'd told you afterwards. Just bits and pieces of the conversation sticking to you like leeches onto your skin.

Severely sick, no known cure, doesn't have much time left.

It was a nightmare. A horrible nightmare that you couldn't wake up from. After you'd dismissed the healer and your father's adviser you'd took over taken care of your father. You refused to leave his side, staying with him all throughout the rest of the day and night. Whenever you weren't with him you searched for a cure to his illness. Soon that day turned into days, then days turned into weeks. The longer time passed the more bleak your father's fate became. With each passing day he grew worse and the healer as well as yourself were at a loss of what to do. So you turned to your father's sacred library and opened the ancient tomes to see if you could find anything, growing more and more desperate for something. Anything to save your beloved father. It was then you'd stumbled upon the legend, one that had been told for generations.

The kingdom of the Afterglow Savanna.

It was said that those who lived there were full of magic and had an abundance of healing herbs and other medicines. Those who sought help for illnesses and other things would go to the people of the land and seek guidance from them. However the land had vanished, no trace of the Afterglow Savanna remained and after many centuries passed the kingdom had been nothing more than a myth. A story told to children before bed or at campfires surrounded by companions. But now.....now you couldn't help but consider it as a possible route to check out. As you closed the tome again you heard your father's raspy rattling cough, the sound making your heart break slightly. Your father was running out of time.

'If there's even a small chance of this place being real.....if there's even a small chance that I can save my father.....then I'll take it. I won't know unless I try.'

With a newfound resolve you began to pack. You grabbed everything you deemed necessary, from the ancient book about the kingdom to food and water. Once your knapsack was full you wrote a note to the healer and the adviser, letting them know that you would be gone for a while and for them to keep an eye on the village. Once written and placed on the desk you silently made your way towards your father's bedroom. You took in the sight of him, his clammy skin and swallow breathing. With quiet steps you made your way to his bed and bent down to give him a kiss on his feverish forehead, fighting the sudden lump in your throat.

"I'll be back papa. I'm going to save you, no matter what. Just please.....hang on. I love you....."

You whispered softly to his unconscious body. With a great amount of effort you pulled yourself away from him and left the hut and disappeared into the night. You passed by all the homes that held your villagers before finally hitting the edge of the village. You stopped for a beat, sudden anxiety hitting you as you realized what exactly what you were planning to do dawned on you. For the first time in your life you were going to leave the village. The only home you'd ever known. You had no idea how you were going to do this, and for a brief moment you considered turning back around and forgetting this whole thing. Then you thought back to your father, remembering how he was before getting sick. You remembered how healthy his (S/C) skin was before it'd been pale and feverish. How the sun hit his hair that he braided with beads and other things and how his (E/C) hues sparkled with pride and love whenever he'd see something you'd accomplished. Your father who raised you when your mother died, your father who was the most important person in your life. Your father who was currently dying from an illness that had no known cure.

'If I turn around now then papa is going to die. I can't let that happen. Come on (Y/N), you can do this. You're the daughter of the greatest chief this village has ever known. A bloodline that is fearless. You can do this, it's in your blood.'

With a deep breath and with a straightened posture, you braced yourself and stepped out of the village line and made your way into the dusty lands that laid ahead of you. With a determined fire burning within your (E/C) eyes you started your journey.

You would save your father.

Even if it killed you.

*..........Hehehehe I know I've got several other things going on in the world of writing but......I couldn't help myself. I'd had this idea in my head for a bit on and off and I'd decided to write something for it. It's not really good but I enjoyed writing it! My thought process was along the lines of this: Princess from a small village goes on a life changing journey to save her father whose been affected by an unknown illness. Along the way she meets a few companions (cough Leona, Ruggie, and Jack) who all are searching for the kingdom of Afterglow Savanna for their own reasons. Possible romance between the two main characters (cough you and Leona). That's all I got so far shdhdhdhg. Anyways I don't know if I'll continue this but I hope you like it! Anyways if any y'all read this I hope you enjoyed it!*

[kinetic-elaboration]

April 10: 2x14 Wolf in the Fold

Watched Wolf in the Fold last night. The only thing I really remembered about this ep going in was that it was a Scotty ep. Which is true but also… slightly misleading. Also that it had to do with Jack the Ripper—which is more true than I remembered!

A decadent intro… I get why Spock isn’t here but I actually DO think he would be into it.

Matchmaker Kirk lol.

Scotty is so awkward. This is the other detail I remembered from this ep, actually: how Scotty wants to applaud using his hands no matter what. (Even with those cool lights RIGHT THERE lol). Old Aberdeen pub crawler…

This is honestly such a bizarre back story: Scotty got a concussion because someone who happened to be a woman made a mistake and now not only is his head all funny but he has a “total resentment toward women.” Like okay, nothing creepily sexist in that concept. Also –they ultimately barely even use it! I know it’s the implied rationale for why he would suddenly start murdering women and also not remembering it but it’s like such a flimsy excuse that they never say it out loud in so many words for fear it should sound too stupid. Which it would. Honestly, you really only need the concussion imo. Why go into the weird misogyny thing at all?

And now Kirk and Bons head off to a brothel, giving me a total resentment toward men.

Nice eerie fog out here. Very Aberdeenian.

Okay, so this woman was stabbed a dozen times but she only screamed once? And then a second later, Scotty had somehow teleported several feet away, still holding the knife? He’s good at his job but he’s not that good. This is already deeply suspicious.

“Therapeutic shore leave.” Trying to cure his hatred of ladies lmao.

So this weird little bald man, Hengist, from Rigel IV. Is he an alien? I suppose he must be. Rigellians are a race, as we know from Journey to Babel. It’s not always clear to me which groups of people are Earth colonists who have migrated to or been born on other planets and which are humanoid aliens.

The Aurelians are a gentle, harmless people. Cute. I like these aliens.

I wish we could hire aliens to be our administrators. Alien Overlord and Taylor.

“I’ll be taking over, since I am the highest official.” He out-officialed him.

I like this guy and his slightly creepy empath priestess wife. I feel like Spock would like them, too.

Speaking of: Spock in the captain’s chair. Hot.

I don’t get how this planet is the only space port around. Like… could not any planet be a space port? What does that even mean?

Oh no, a woman with the lie detector machine! She must be incompetent and/or to be despised.

I love Sybo’s outfit. Her hair and jewelry too. Honestly just a great head-to-toe look.

Another murder! Sorry but this one is on the Aurelian for just leaving the murder weapon out there unattended.

Generally speaking, the costume and set people are doing allllll the work in this episode.

Hengist went to look for suspects and he came up with the victim’s father and fiancé?? He’s not even trying lol. Anyway, he obviously did it.

How can you NOT tell if a lock was picked or not? I mean I know McCoy is a doctor, not a locksmith, but come on. It can’t be that ambiguous.

Spooky mumbo-jumbo.

Interesting that Spock doesn’t trust the mumbo-jumbo either. I guess he only approves of it when it’s Vulcan.

When Sybo says “monstrous evil” the camera is looking right at Hengist. Not suspicious at all. He’s only clearly railroading Scotty, looked right at the second victim before she was killed, was in the perfect position to take the murder weapon after it was carelessly left about, and is the most obvious non-Scotty suspect here.

I love how loyal Bones is. He literally saw Scotty holding Sybo and the knife with blood on his hands and is like “It’s impossible he could have done it.”

So many of the “truth discovery” devices on TOS are truly creepy. Like they’re all clear plot devices, and for that reason depicted as completely reliable, and the more completely reliable they are, the more deeply disturbing they become upon any reflection at all.

That’s a pretty computer though. All those pretty flashing lights! And it runs on floppy disks.

I literally just remembered what happened.

“Scotty, lie to me, how old are you?” / “Twenty-two, Sir.” Yeah, I’d say that’s a lie.

So like this allegedly all-powerful computer is literally just a lie detector. That’s it! A lie detector that picks up on psychological signs of lying, just like our lie detectors today. I mean… you could have just said that straight out. All they do is show what a person believes to be true, so in the case where someone truly doesn’t remember something, the usefulness is… limited.

My mom suggested a Vulcan mind meld which, actually, would pretty much solve the problem! But for once Spock actually treats it like something serious and not to be thrown out as a solution to all problems at the merest suggestion.

Someone needs to do a fashion line based entirely on the Argellian outfits.

Spock is internally eye-rolling at all this drama. I feel like he’s a real advocate for the computers today. That’s like… really his only role.

The computer’s linguistics banks don’t know what this word means? Maybe we should get Uhura on the case.

Plot twist: the killer was Jack the Ripper the WHOLE TIME! The last one you’d ever expect.

I don’t get how the computer made the leap from Redjac to Jack the Ripper since that is not a real word and no one outside of this episode of TOS has ever used it for Jack the Ripper.

“Everyone feeds on death, even vegetarians.” So dark, Spock. So emo.

Aw, alien creatures that derive sustenance from love. Adorable. There should have been an episode devoted to them. (Wait a minute…. Idea coming on…)

Speaking of gaseous cloud aliens…the Companion?

This episode really relies a lot on the computer to provide information and otherwise move the plot along.

Kirk keeps ignoring everyone to just talk to Spock.

“Cloud the issue” lol that’s a good pun. (Already can’t remember who said it but… point stands.)

The cloud entity feeds on women because they are more easily and deeply terrified. That sounds fake but okay. It’s also not in keeping with what Sybo said, is it? She mentioned a hatred of women. That’s not the same as finding women useful.

Hmm, when do we get our Martian Colonies, @ perseverance?

Oh, Rigel IV, you say? There seems to be a Rigellian right here!

This whole history of the entity is bizarre. The first killing sprees (that we know of) are on Earth, and Kirk specifically says that when man left Earth to explore, he took this with him. Does that mean… the cloud creature/entity originated on Earth? Truly a bizarre hypothesis, when you think about it.

Are you the entity, Sir?

There is actually very little Scotty in this Scotty-centric episode.

Lol the knife originates with the hill people of Rigel IV. What is this, Deliverance?

Omg Kirk punched the entity right out of that man!

So to summarize: “Jack the Ripper is actually a gaseous cloud that is capable of infecting the computer system of the Enterprise, thus hijacking the whole ship” is the basic, wacky concept of this episode.

This tranquilizer could quiet a volcano. Where was it during the volcano scene in STID hmm?

Kirk’s plan to keep people from being scared by the maniacal voice of the entity: Tranquilize the entire ship. That’s why he’s paid the big bucks.

Yet another twist on the old Kirk v. Computer plot. Time to use Math to defeat it.

Kirk is so unimpressed with the entity. “Eh, shut that off.” He would not be moved by a haunted house.

“This is the first time I’ve heard a malfunction threaten us.” Sulu can man his post AND be funny; he’s multi-talented.

Kirk and Spock don’t need tranquilizers because they’re smart enough to know this high-pitched voice yelling random threats just isn’t actually scary.

Kirk is really insistent that Sulu man his frickin’ post!

Oh no, not PI!! My nemesis, PI!

I’m really living for Sulu here.

If the entity entered a tranquilized person, it might take up knitting. I gotta say, that doesn’t make any sense as a plot point but I like it anyway.

That was a very efficient tranquilizing job! Everyone in a 400+ person ship in like 10 minutes? Get the medical team on the Enterprise in charge of the vaccine distribution stat.

Kirk just outright assumes that Spock won’t be a hospitable entity choice. And he’s not even wrong! The entity chooses the dead body over Spock or Kirk. It knows when it’s not wanted.

Hengist has been revived!

The entity is honestly, truly hilarious. Die, die, everybody die! Kill! Kill you all! Maniacal laughter! All while being carried by a still utterly unimpressed Kirk down the halls of the ship.

Spock’s like “get out of the way, you tranquilized idiot. Got some entity-scattering to do.”

“I gave them a pretty big shot, Jim!” Think you might have slightly overdone it, Bones? You didn’t need to make everyone useless for 6 hours for a problem that was solved in 5 minutes!

This is one of those moments, Kirk trying to get Spock to see the pretty ladies with him, when Spock seems super gay. Like, I don’t even think he is, that’s not my reading of him, and I also assume that wasn’t the intention here, but that’s just so clearly how it reads.

Aw, Kirk doesn’t want to go the strip club alone. Poor bb.

Weird how Lt. Leslie was in this when he died in the last episode.

Overall, I’d actually have to say that was a very crack-y episode. I liked the ending the best because it was so ridiculous.

What I don’t understand, in addition to whether or not the entity was really supposed to be from Earth, was how it came to be Hengist. Like, it can enter and leave bodies (or computers) at will, so perhaps it just entered Hengist, a normal Rigellian, at some point. But if that’s so, putting him on the transporter and scattering him into space was a pretty cruel thing to do. Also, why did he die (or appear to die) when the entity wasn’t in him? That implies he is the entity’s physical form. But then, first of all, how is also a Rigellian? Like did the entity mate with a Rigellian? Did the entity take over a baby Rigellian? Did the entity just claim to be Rigellian but is really just humanoid in its physical form—we did establish that some aliens, like this one, or creatures or whatever, are gaseous sometimes and solid others, so maybe its solid form is humanoid. Which would fit well with it originating in Earth, although that also brings a new and perhaps unintentional layer of creepiness to the story. I have to assume that’s the situation, but still, wild. And it doesn’t explain this: why does Hengist “die” when the entity “leaves” him, as opposed to just disappear entirely when the entity changes form??

Anyway, I know I’m overthinking this very wacky premise. Overall, I think the episode was fine. It didn’t have enough Scotty (for being a “Scotty episode”) and it changed genres an awful lot for 50 minutes. There was a tad too much misogyny going on. And overall I didn’t feel like the characters—even Kirk, and in actuality this was a Kirk episode much more than a Scotty episode, and purposefully so—were at their most interesting. Tbh Sulu ultimately stole the show in the final minutes.

Next up is the Trouble with Tribbles! Also a funny episode but at least undeniably purposefully so!

[aion-rsa]

House of Dark Shadows: The Craziest Vampire Movie You’ve Never Seen

https://ift.tt/37TdnN3

This article contains House of Dark Shadows spoilers.

In 1970 House of Dark Shadows flipped the vampire subgenre on its head. While certainly a B-horror in the Hammer mold, this chiller wasn’t satisfied with one bloodsucker, or even two. Instead Dark Shadows would turn nearly its whole cast into the ravenous undead, indiscriminately slaughtering beloved heroes and heroines, not caring for a second that they were also the stars of a daytime soap opera—one that was appointment TV for millions of kids across America.

Clearly it was a different time. And therein lies its charm.

When the television series Dark Shadows premiered in 1966, it wasn’t an instant pop culture phenomenon. Creator Dan Curtis was savvy enough to see the appeal in a daytime melodrama draped in a Gothic aesthetic, but he didn’t yet have the necessary hook for his central character as she stepped off a train in New England. Sure, mysterious Victoria Winters (Alexandria Isles) would meet the Collins family, who more or less ruled over the town of Collinsport from their ancestral home of Collinwood, but the reason to stick around only came about a year into the series’ original run.

That eureka moment turned out to be the dapper and effortlessly suave Jonathan Frid. Cast as Barnabas Collins, the Canadian theater actor was initially hired for a single storyline (a set number of episodes) as the heavy: Barnabas was an ancient and forgotten vampire, who’d been buried alive like the family’s dirty little secret after a curse condemned him to drink blood in 1795. Now he was out and wreaking havoc by feasting on the locals and obsessing over Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), whom he was convinced was the reincarnation of his lost love Josette—a fiancée who threw herself off a cliff in the 18th century rather than become Barnabas’ corpse bride.

It was morbid, obviously, but also romantic at a time when vampires were defined by the coldness of Christopher Lee or the goofiness of Scooby-Doo. Instead here was the most pitiable of creatures, one who doesn’t wish to be a vampire, and through impeccable manners and courtesies revealed a soft love for the Collins family, even when he preyed on them. Rather than create a great villain, Curtis inadvertently invented a tragic hero who audiences flocked to, both the typical daytime target demographic and also, surprisingly, kids and teenagers, who’d rush home from school to be lost in a melancholy land of eternal loves, ancient curses, and of course fangs.

Thus Dark Shadows became a blender for all things Gothic. Following in the success of Barnabas’ introduction, the series would go on to add ghosts, werewolves, séances, multiple stints of time travel, and one particularly devilish 18th century witch named Angelique (Lara Parker). It also appropriated every classic horror trope from Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allan Poe, and synthesized them for an audience that was now consuming it along with kid-friendly board games and trading cards.

So why not a movie, too? As early as 1968, Curtis began pursuing the idea of making a Dark Shadows movie, even while the series was still going. Eventually, House of Dark Shadows was the result. Released 50 years ago this week, this toothy amusement was the chance to do everything Curtis wanted with the series, but was prohibited from by Broadcast Standards and Practices censorship, budget constraints… and maybe even audiences’ good taste.

“Blood flows,” actor Roger Davis observed in The Dark Shadows Companion: The 25th Anniversary, which was edited by Scott. “It’s not like the serial. You have a few dabs of blood and the network brass have apoplexy. TV does a mock-up on life. This is in living color. And the vampires really bite.” 

Whereas Dark Shadows, the television show, was appointment TV for those still in middle school, House of Dark Shadows was aimed directly at the drive-in crowd with its emphasis on blood gushing from neck wounds and stakes violently going into almost every character’s heart. As Scott’s book surmised, the film was “entirely the child of its creator,” who would at last have his evil Barnabas. And at a glance, it is an American riff on what had already become kitsch by 1970 thanks to Hammer Film Productions’ seemingly endless line of Dracula movies, plus the knockoffs.

And to be sure, House of Dark Shadows is in many ways a Dracula movie. It’s also insight into how Curtis originally viewed the Barnabas character before Frid went on a charm offensive. Playing almost like a CliffNotes version of Barnabas’ first several storylines on the show, the vampire is awakened during the film’s opening moments because of the foolishness of groundskeeper Willie Loomis (John Karlen). Barnabas then forces poor old Willie to become his living slave and creates a fictitious narrative about being a distant cousin descended from the original Barnabas Collins, whom family lore claims sailed away to London in 1795, never to be heard from again.

Bringing back the “original” Barnabas’ family jewels to ingratiate himself, the Barnabas of 1970 is free to attend family gatherings, fix up an old ruined house on the estate, and even feed on cousin Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), a dear relative who becomes a dead ringer for Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s famed novel. Even so, Carolyn cannot displace Maggie (still Scott) in Barnabas’ eyes, who he is sure is the reincarnation of Josette.

It very much has the narrative beats of a traditional vampire movie, but the charm that lingers a half-century later comes in part from seeing these actors, who are intimately familiar with their characters, going through the paces with better production values. That quality also manifests in Curtis’ sense of atmosphere, now liberated from the stage-bound quality of daytime drawing room drama. I would even argue House of Dark Shadows is one of the more satisfyingly atmospheric vampire movies to come out of the 1970s.

Curtis filmed in the upstate New York’s Tarrytown area, mostly on the actual Gothic Lyndhurst Estate, built in the 1830s, and shot much of the exteriors in the legendary Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Whereas Hammer films tended to rely increasingly on sets during this period, and most B horror movies had no budget for evocative locations, House of Dark Shadows was filming its sequences in between tours of the Lyndhurst Mansion and in the same atmospheric cemetery that helped birth the myth of a Headless Horseman.

Regarding the filming location, screenwriter Sam Hall remarked, “It’s a wild house. I’d hate like hell to live in it.” 

This is only accentuated by the fact Curtis knows how to drain a spooky location dry. Images like vampire Carolyn standing in a window, draped in white, beckoning her lover to become one of the damned is a better use of Lucy iconography than any Dracula movie made before House of Dark Shadows. And the film’s ending sequence reaches an operatic opulence rarely seen, even in vampire cheapies. Barnabas, bathed in a blue light and shrouded in inexplicable fog in the interior of his decrepit home, beckons Maggie, now in a wedding dress, toward him as the famous melody of Josette’s music box twinkles, only now in a weeping minor key.

The corruption of that wistful melody is intriguing. An original part of the Dark Shadows television series, Josette’s music box, and Frid’s soliloquies about it, is what first gave Barnabas his soul, distinguishing him from the general depravity of other pop culture vampires. One could even say Barnabas is the first significantly sympathetic male vampire in fiction. In House of Dark Shadows, he has a more sinister mean streak, but the pathos remains.

Hence why the film plays at times like a gonzo delight. It may feature the original, more wicked Barnabas, but it is still derived from the genteel series, and many of those elements carry over. Take Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) spending half the movie trying to cure Barnabas, a subplot that eventually ends happily for the pair on the show, but less so here. It’s soapy pulp, yet it’s given as much stone-faced gravity as the Collinsport Police Department unquestioningly agreeing to patrol around town with standard issue police crucifixes. One might ask if they keep silver bullets in every squad car too?

The overall effect is bizarre, but endearingly so. It’s also fairly influential, as confirmed by what happened after Dan Curtis dropped Barnabas in favor of another vampire.

Read more

TV

Dark Shadows’ Witch Was As Influential As Its Vampire

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

In 1974, following Dark Shadows’ cancellation, Curtis wrote and directed a Dracula TV movie for CBS that within its opening titles billed itself as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Far removed from Stoker’s novel, the little remembered television film nonetheless starred Jack Palance as the vampire, and introduced several significant elements to the story by overtly making Dracula an undead version of historical figure Vlad the Impaler (which he is not in the novel) and turning Lucy into the reincarnation of his great lost love.

Curtis was in essence trying to recast Dracula as Barnabas Collins. Like House of Dark Shadows, Curtis even sought to build a Gothic atmosphere by filming in real locations, albeit now Eastern Europe. The result was effective in those scenes, even if the rest of the movie failed in no small part because Palance could never wear the tragic cloak so well as Frid.

In spite of its shortcomings, many have fairly speculated on whether Curtis’ Dracula influenced James V. Hart, the screenwriter of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hart was certainly more successful at turning Dracula into a lovelorn prince, and Coppola made that idea permanent in the pop culture imagination. Yet, at the end of the day, they were still remaking the pop culture image of Dracula so as to be closer in line with Barnabas Collins, instead of the other way around.

I would even argue that Coppola’s film is closer in tone with Dark Shadows, at least in its romantic moments, than Tim Burton’s big budget Dark Shadows movie was in 2012. Burton of course attempted to avoid some of the mistakes of House of Dark Shadows, namely by keeping Barnabas as the good guy who is trying to save his family instead of ultimately destroying them, as well as retaining the other fan favorite character, the witchy Angelique (who like all other non-vampire elements was omitted from House of Dark Shadows). But Burton also played her and the whole concept as pure camp, making the Collins’ a subject of ridicule, and their problems a punchline.

Admittedly, there is something faintly camp about the 1960s daytime series and its ‘70s drive-in remake; plots turn on ludicrous developments like Julia falling in love with Barnabas, and then intentionally sabotaging his vampire cure when she realizes he loves a younger woman. But they were sold with absolute sincerity, and in the case of Frid, a palatable conviction.

House of Dark Shadows continues that conviction, no matter how batshit things become. Thus the ending where, accepting he’ll never be cured, Barnabas transforms family patriarch Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds) and even the film’s version of Van Helsing (Thayer David) into vampires. And we get to a finale so madcap that it turns “Renfield” into the last remaining hero. Madness, indeed.

Ironically, House of Dark Shadows was blamed by some for the eventual death of the series. Every character in the film, including Barnabas, had to be written out of the show, for some weeks at a time, so the actors could go shoot a movie upstate (another reason Angelique and other significant characters were left out). This correlated with some of the series’ weaker storylines that lost audiences’ attention.

Additionally, it’s believed parents who went with their children to see the movie in October 1970 were appalled by the amount of blood and sensual subtext in the film. As a result, some may have forbidden their kids from watching the series further… with the show getting cancelled in April 1971.

“The TV ratings fell after the movie,” Scott’s The Dark Shadows Companion revealed. “It has been suggested by some that House of Dark Shadows led to the series’ eventual demise. Perhaps it was the audience’s reaction to seeing their hero Barnabas in an evil light. Perhaps it was because parents attended House of Dark Shadows with their children and, seeing the amount of blood spilled across the screen, discouraged their children’s choice of television viewing material.”

Star Frid was even more unsparing in his final analysis.

“[The film] lacked the charm and naivete of the soap opera,” Frid said. “Every once in a while the show coalesced into a Brigadoonish never-never-land. It wasn’t necessary to bring the rest of the world into Dark Shadows, which is what the film did.”

Nevertheless, both the series and movie left a few marks on the throat of pop culture. The series certainly paved the way for more multidimensional portraits of vampires to be explored, opening the door for, yes, the Coppola Dracula movie, but also Anne Rice and True Blood. In fact, even if House of Dark Shadows might’ve been considered too brutal by parents in 1970, decades of pop culture refinement would find a way to make the sympathetic vampire archetype much more tolerable when instead of drinking from his cousin, he sparkled in the daylight and told his prey they needed to wait until marriage.

Without Barnabas, his series, and his slice of bananas role is House of Dark Shadows, we may never have gotten Lestat, Edward Cullen, or Gary Oldman’s Dracula. At least not as how we know them. Fifty years on, that’s a bloody good legacy for a daytime drama and a B-movie you’ve never seen.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/35Mgq6X

[lucatorahaven]

vampire au post

4 skype convos haphazardly mixed in from very different times

[29/11/2014 4:27:51 AM] Probably Not Assorted Cheeses: Vampire au

Lucas the incompetent vampire who eats mostly animals

Duster was the one who bit him, only bc duster was literally starving n lucas came at a bad time

idk if duster should be born a vampire or not but Wes is one too and together they taught lucas how to survive.

however eventually they had to leave, they offered for lucas to join them but lucas can’t leave his family behind, the kid’s too sentimental :’(

so together they staged his death (which im too lazy to try n think of)

claus knew bout the vampire thing tho, lucas couldn’t live alone like that. He also ended up biting Boney in an accident so hey vampire dog.

claus grew up and eventually had his own family. Lucas could only really watch from afar but then the kids got his age and it was hard to see him and keep the gig up. He visited his parents funeral anonymously and afterwards him and claus stood there just

“sup” “how’re the kids” “twice your age and with kids of their own” “heh, i always thought you would be the one with kids yano?” 

it was very bittersweet, it felt like they’ve never been apart 

“it never stops feeling strange without you” "I know” 

lucas thinks of that conversation a lot

he started off the "younger uncle" then the "weird neighbourhood kid that visits grandpa claus" and inevitably the "weird kid from nowhere who goes to the cemetary every other month to put flowers on graves older than appears to be"

SO without attachments lucas traveled with boney, hoping that they find duster along the way.

eventually lucas comes back to tazmilly but it’s been a couple hundred years now and it’s completely different so he doesn’t recognize it

n lucas one day is caught outside with no shelter, it’s almost morning so he runs into osohe (which is way outta town so he assumed it was abandoned)

vampires can’t enter homes without being invited in because apparently homes are holy land but osohe is fuckn haunted so that doesn’t apply (adding on to the abandoned theory)

that’s how kumatora and him meet, she finds him exploring osohe all “wtf the fuck who are YOU...this me house”

So she gets an awkward lie explanation from lucas 

n she eventually catches on lucas is a vampire n is just DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE I NEVER MET A VAMPIRE BEFORE FUCKN SWEET

lucas is just UM.;;; IS IT OK IF I STAY

"oh dude it's cool!! but u gotta tell me bout yourself bc i never met a vampire before ok?? i live iN THE PERFECT GOTHIC HOME BUT THERE’S NONE!! but here you are and i’m JACKED i gotta go to work tho so brb but afterwards u gotta tell me about yourself ok CYA"

lucas is still processing everything by the time she leaves, but he’s grateful and figures a conversation is the least he can do to repay her

in this au kumatora’s into cryptology bc her house is FULL of books and it’s a common subject (also the fact her castle is filled with ghosts and there are zombies just across the moat, it’s a p convenient hobby)

when she comes back she’s super excited because he’s still there 

lucas is kinda reserved but he still answers questions bc it’s POLITE

she asks bout p much everything?? “HEY do you need that” “y-yes” “is this true?” “not that i know of” “ok experiment time” “uH;;” “wait am i keeping you up?? it’s still daytime” “no it’s okay” 

after exhausting lucas of all his Vampire Facts kuma invites lucas to live at osohe castle, it’s big enough anyways

lucas is wary af bc he doesn't wanna accidentally get close to someone who 1. has a life span and 2. is technically food

but lucas ends up sticking around anyways, boney really likes it and he lowkey enjoys her company

so they keep chillin n lucas tells her how he hunts animals n how he only takes a bit of blood so they don't die and 

IDK I GO BY THE THEORY THAT VAMPIRES HAVE VENOM bc otherwise their entire food source becomes COMPETITION n they can bite but not?? TURN THEM INTO ANYTHIng so controlled blood flow for feeding purposes

also vampires only need to eat once or twice a month? they die around 6+ months without eating from starvation. It all depends on how quickly the blood cells in their body die basically.

ALSO when they bite you it doesn’t hurt bc their saliva numbs it so (sneaky bites) but it still feels weird as shit

bUT YA SO LUCAS N KUMATORA CHAt a whole bunch...you know that “accidentally get close” thing i mentioned? it happened

(it was kinda hard to avoid when the first companion you have that’s not your dog is informed on vampires and vampire goods, that was convenient)

so they keep hangin out and kumatora unlocks his Tragic Backstory

n sometimes kumatora helps him feed? like they go out together finding animals n storing blood

n lucas is fascinated with how technology has advanced bc he doesn't really?? go into towns anymore but he fuckn LOVES it

n they play video games n general COOL FUNTIMES

kumatora let’s lucas borrow her labtop to occupy himself and he looks for other vampires or hints of them

(this is under the assumption that osohe can get electricity in a modern au while still being ignored / abandoned)

n when kumatora goes to work he cleans up the castle n tries to show how much hE REALLY APPRECIATES HEr

n lIKE i also go by the logic that vampires do not do the stereotypical “turn into ashes at sunlight” it is a slow progression that takes up to 12 hours until absolutely turned to a crisp 

so basically if he covers himself and wears a shit ton of sunscreen he can chill in the middle of the day for like...a hour or two

and bc kumatora's WORTH IT he visits her at work n she's all LucAS WHAT ARe yO U DoING??   

lookin like a modern goth kid......has a huge red burn on his cheek..

he blames it on how pale/blonde he is “my brother is ginger you know”

kuma gets super worried n he's all bruh it cool i have like..2 more hours until i need to go to a hospital   

n kumas jsuT I GET OFF IN 4 HOURS GO HOME

kumatora invites him to movie nights with her friends n shit

people start calling lucas kumatora's goth boyfriend “never call him that when he's around or i'll murder you”

theyre all rather cool with lucas and find his speech kinda funny?

"wow look at those teeny boppers" "GET A LOAD OF THIS GUY GOD I LOVE IT" “???????????????" kumas friends ask for lucas more all WHAT SCHOOL DOES HE GO TO WHERE DOES HE LIVE "oh he's......foreign B)"

eventually it comes up how lucas doesn’t really want to be a vampire anymore and kumatoras just “dude i can help you find a cure” bc maybe her hobby is a bit Excessive but live your dreams

but ya lucas is just?? constantly wants to visit kumatora n loves her night shifts!! visits all the time they go on hikes a lot n jusT? GETS SO FUCKIGN ATTACHED IT SCARES HIM CONSTANTLY

they sometimes fall asleep on the couch together n when he's all "wow shes so cute.." he realizes how fucking Deep he’s in this and he’s FUCKED

he tries to distance himself but he Can’t Fucking Do It (just like w/ his fam)

whenever he tries to push her away she looks so upset it kills him 

N HE'S IN SUCH A STRUGGLE BC HE'S JUST

SO HAPPY TO BE AROUND HER??????

N LIKE WHEN THEY CUDDLE N STUFF HE'S JUST SO OVERWHELMED BC oh my god heartbeats!! oh my god she's gonna die before me

n lucas really fucking feels the severity of how FUCKED he is when its her birthday n hes just

yes she's gonna age and he's gonna outlive her n they could never realistically be happy even if by some offhand chance she even RETURNS the feelings

N HE HAS TO HIDE HIS CRYING N STUFF BUT KUMATORA HAS  A 6TH FUCKN SENSE FOR DISTRESSED LUCAS SO SHE'S ALL bruh :( whats up

so he opens up to her about his feelings and anxiety and she hugs him through it, it’s kind of a shitty way to confess 

“idk if i can forgive you for deciding that i’m gonna die before you” “are you threatening murder” “that and no way death’s gonna get me, i’m pretty stubborn”

a lil while passes

“you know... i’m okay with becoming a vampire” lucas refuses bc dude.. you can’t even comprehend the weight of immortality.. what if she regrets it 

“to hell if i make my closest friend suffer because of a life span” “hah i guess that’s the same for me”

they drop the vampire topic for the time being and move on to other ones such as... mutual feelings :^)

they’re both romantically inclined i mean... lucas spent 300+ years being a hermit and kumatora had other things to do

so they take it slow, it’s p much the same as before except.. hey...now when i think “man i wanna hold their hand” i CAN

it'd also be really sad and/or cute if the ghosts in the castle some of them were lucas's family which might be why boney likes it so much but also imagine them kissin on the couch "kuma ghosts r there" "EH THEYRE JUst ghosts" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) claus looks into the camera "after so long... finally my little brother gets some action :')"

but idk if that’s a thing bc it feels kinda weird i feel like kissin n shit wouldn't b very often bc as much as they both loVE IT 

IT'S NOT THAT GREAT FOR A VAMPIRE

YANO.... HEARTS R BEATING... NECK IS RIGHT THERE (lucas still adores it tho)

so back to the topic of Mortality

kuma gets attacked in an alley on the way home from work

n lucas finds her bc they were gonna meet up but he smelt the blood and when he does find her he just goes FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK n didn't know how to save her 

also thinking rationally is hard when OH LOOK AT ALL THAT BLOOD AHhaHA

SO HE BITES HER

he carries her body home n he spends the whole waiting process between DEAD and VAMPIRE crying just "hoyl shti please work please work" “what did i fucking dooooo” “what if i was earlier” “what if i was too late” so many anxieties

kuma wakes up and lucas transistions from panic to HAPPY PANIC OH THANK GOD

she’s really out of it bc of the process and he’s crying apologies “it’s okay you saved me” but he’s still crying, they cuddle for comfort

"hey atleast we did it NOW when i'm a hot sexy 19 yr old and not a wrinkly old lady” “kuma” “i’m tryna make light of the conversation”

so now that kumatora’s a vampire she only works night shifts until she eventually quits. They moved to a new town / whatever so it was easy to avoid having to meet someone in the daytime. facebook helped keep in touch with her friends while still letting the friendship die out.

it took kumatora a bit to get used to being a vampire. she threw up a lot at first and she didn’t like having to drink blood but she did eventually get used to it

idk if they find a cure bc idk what the cure would BE but they eventually find other vampires :^) they continued lucas’s search for duster and probably found him tbh

[douchebagbrainwaves]

CALDER'S SCULPTURES NEVER GET BORING

This is part of what big companies pay extra for is the next Apple, or the market wasn't ready yet, b the founders solved the wrong problem. While writing the prototype, the group has been traversing their network of friends in search of angel investors. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there are few outside the US, startups will do a rolling close, where they can choose for themselves, rely instead on the opinions of other investors. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. I think a bigger problem is that the kind of things most people use computers for, a tenth of your time working on new stuff. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together they cook up new projects of their own, they'd screw it up. Even worse than the spectacular abuses might be the overall decrease in efficiency that would accompany increased secrecy. You don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to be for getting users. A lot of investors hated the idea, but not because of some right turn the country took during the Reagan administration, but because it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, you'd need an impressive-looking sales force to sell it to them as a web service. But with company names there is another possible approach. In fact, the reason startups do better when deprived of this crutch anyway. The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, but now that the things we build are so complicated, there's another way to convince investors to let you do it like a pilot scanning the instrument panel, not like a detective trying to unravel some mystery.

The url is in such cases practically enough by itself to determine whether the email is neutral, the spam probability will hinge on the url, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. For some reason this seems to be toward the merely unpalatable. That means it has to stay popular to stay good. As long as you're profitable. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list. After we fund startups we work closely with them for three months outweighs the inconvenience of moving. In such rounds they won't get the 25 to 40% of the company and demand that it take immediate action to cure any past violations of securities laws. At best you end up with a statistical sort of correctness. Can't you just think of new ideas. In fact, the language encourages you to be omniscient, but actually they tend to be about 15? We're just working on search. One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to try to create a startup hub.

And when people seem to share a certain prickly independence, whenever and wherever they lived. We hated our last TV so much that a competitor will trip them up as that they will trip over themselves. You don't need to raise money, but also as a way of saving you work, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. In theory you could stick together ideas at random like this, but others haven't decided what they'll do afterward. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. Don't be evil. But investors are so fickle that you can learn from them. On the other hand, startup investing is a very strange business. When you have the degenerate case. For a startup, then hand them off to VC firms for the next round. Good ideas and valuable ideas are very close to good ideas, use them, but more than full-time.

So the lower we can get the response rate—whether by filtering, or by redesigning the product in the way of redesign. There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way that seemed to reflect the personality of the city. And while governments might be able to pinch it off at the point where they're used. And no one can tell you, that requires your complete attention. Only a few do so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers is not necessarily that all such offers undervalue startups. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from what happens in college. That's orders of magnitude better than desktop software. Our startup begins when a group of people they didn't already know. If you're starting your own company, because you're only replacing one segment instead of discarding the whole thing. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to pay attention to you. Now survival is the default, instead of paying attention to what users needed, or c the company spent too much and burned through their funding before they started to make the implementation easier to port, but it turned out that many did. You release software as a series A round, the round is going to solve this problem, but it can be good for writing the kinds of programs they want to write desktop software, because desktop software has become a lot less money.

But I think that while stricter laws may not decrease the amount of memory you need for each user's data. One solution to this problem, without waiting for the government. When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. How are they to hear? What a wonderful thing, to be able to reproduce the error and release a fix. US News & World Report. Some time before the release date you assemble a new version of your software by a certain date? And when someone can put on my todo list, I looked to see if there was a problem with acquisitions is that they lead to more ideas.

And then there is the question of what this new Lisp also had powerful libraries for doing what hackers want to do it. Their format is convenient, especially when you're generating code, to have operators that take any number of arguments. This should yield a much sharper estimate of the probability. You have to make their fortunes will continue to work for people with high standards. Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the conventional desktop metaphor. And it has to be modified to: stay upwind for as long as you're still actively developing the product. One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation is when established companies with bad products use patents to suppress small competitors with good products. Result: if it can't contain exciting sales pitches, spam becomes less effective as a marketing vehicle, and fewer businesses want to use. This was not how things worked at Viaweb. He said their business model is a down elevator. Another great thing about Web-based applications. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers.

One easy way to build such a whitelist is to keep a list of the n most admirable people. And the way founders end up net ahead it's not coming out of organs not designed for that purpose. And put this kind of bug is the hardest to find, and also occurs once or twice in a big program is to start from the symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes. It also has to convince instead of commanding. They just want to invest in you, or his only duty is to the advantage of investors. This time the evidence is a mix of good and bad. In effect, this structure gives the investor a free option on the next round of investors can decide in a couple days. You can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet. Writing is the same reason readers like them.

But it's also because money is not the hours but the responsibility. I had to predict now, I'd say that startups will build on, they have to understand the advantages startups get from being in America. Jack Lambert. The defining feature of spam in fact, that would not only not eliminate great variations in wealth, but might even exacerbate them. You might say that it's an accident that it thus helps identify this spam. If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The problem in more traditional places like Europe and Japan goes deeper than the employment laws. A throwaway program is something that more and more programs may turn out to be really useful.

[mittensmorgul]

You know, I feel so sorry for Dough. I haven't seen anyone say this because people focus on Donna and Dean more but I don't think that he left her because "the love wasn't strong enough", as people say. There's a reason why the vamp told him that Donna "is so out of his league" - that was a scene the episode could have as well done without, but they included it to make Doug feel insecure. He's a soft guy, and he most likely has a bunch of stuff he has to deal with, like feelings of inadequacy1/3

2/3 So when the vamp told him that Donna is out of his league? I think it really hit him - because he thinks so too. You could see it on his face. He knows, but he tries not to think about it. But now he had to. And when the time came, he broke up with her - not because he didn't want to share The Life with her, but because he felt undeserving. She is a hero, and who is he? Someone who can admire her from a distance, at the very most. He did not leave her out of a lack of love, he left her3/3 because he loved her more than ever at the end of the episode.Same anon >D 4/? LACK OF COMMUNICATION. I mean, yeah, they talk about movies and TV stuff, and Doug says that as if it's proof of them talking about everything, whereas they are clearly not communicating all the important stuff. His insecurities stay hidden, just as her secret life. Jeez, doesn't that remind you of someone?

Hi there! I agree that there was a definite lack of communication, despite Doug telling Dean and he and Donna used to talk about “everything,” even if he used the context of everything to mean their favorite football team and their favorite reality show... That’s a pretty broad spectrum of “human interest things” to talk about really. Football is manly man stuff, and Real Housewives is girl stuff, right? And Doug was open to and interested in sharing all of that with Donna.

Where does monster hunting fit on that spectrum?

Getting back to Marlon the asshole vampire, I don’t really know how much value Doug placed in his assessment of Donna, you know? Marlon was already someone Doug had judged to be deserving of “The FBI Treatment,” i.e. getting slapped upside the head. Even if Doug didn’t know Marlon was a vampire at the time, he’d judged Marlon HARD for his cavalier attitude about the monster auction, and Marlon’s confessed part in “making a phone call” that had led to Wendy’s abduction by people who wanted to literally sell her for parts, torturing someone on a live video feed, and making jokes about it.

I have a really hard time that Doug gave anything that came out of Marlon’s mouth a second thought... until the fangs came out, you know?

Doug also had the unfortunate and traumatizing experience of being turned into a vampire less than an hour after discovering that vampires were even real. And within a minute of that, he turned on and attempted to kill the person he loved. I mean, in retrospect, the fact that he’d so easily and without a second thought had been about to kill Donna to satisfy his own monstrous thirst, only to be knocked out and wake up having been cured... it had to be incredibly demoralizing and bewildering. To know that-- even with the excuse of temporary vampirism (and wtf?!) that he truly had almost killed the person he loved? and that without Dean’s quick intervention he absolutely would have and wouldn’t have even felt bad about it afterward? Yeah. That’s a lot to deal with.

I think his very human desire to stay the hell out of the monster business is perfectly reasonable, even to the degree that he decided he couldn’t be part of Donna’s life because of it. It was an informed (if emotionally charged in the moment) choice, which is more than a lot of people get when confronted with the reality that monsters exist, and monster hunters exist...

(Sam and Dean never had a choice, you know?)

Donna DID have a choice. She could’ve walked away from 10.08 and said ALRIGHTY THEN GUESS I’M GONNA PRETEND LIKE THAT NEVER HAPPENED. But she didn’t.

Doug got into law enforcement because he wanted to help people. He’s a genuinely good guy with good intentions and a desire to do what’s within his power to make his corner of the world safe and happy. Donna? She’s all about the saving people, and she’s really good at the hunting things. Helping people and SAVING people are two different things when you come right down to it.

Thematically within the Wayward Sisters narrative, since Donna is a big part of that, we’ve seen each of the girls come into hunting in different ways. For some of them it’s barely even a choice (like for Claire), while for others the choice to take on a less active and more supportive role (like Alex) is still important within the group and no less valid a role than the front-line hunters. Then there’s Patience, who has a supernatural gift of her own, but could choose to ignore it and go on living her normal life, but who pushes herself to actively CHOOSE to help because she wouldn’t want to live with herself if she didn’t.

Doug had his brush with the WORST side of hunting on his first go-around (i.e. being turned into a monster himself, and luckily saved because Dean knew how to do that). And the fact that Dean, Sam, AND DONNA were so... cavalier about what had happened to him. His entire LIFE just got picked up and dropped back down, and nothing can ever really be the same for him again, and they’re all making jokes about this entire ordeal, of black market human meat markets and vampires and this horror that’s nothing like he’d ever imagined having to face...

He looked at all of that and said no, I don’t think I can.

And that’s entirely valid, and honestly refreshing to see.

Because I don’t think Doug really thinks he’s not good enough for Donna or whatever. He just knew that Donna and Monster Hunting is sort of a package deal, and that he would NEVER ask her to give up this thing that she loves and needs to do, but that he couldn’t be with her because of that. No matter how much he loved her, that was outside of his ability to deal with.

Like Lisa couldn’t deal with Dean going off hunting, keeping secrets from her, etc. Which kinda came to a head when Dean was turned into a vampire.

Which was referenced heavily in 13.11 so...

Doug did serve as a limited parallel to Dean, both as to where Dean had been back in s6 with Lisa (and with the whole turned-into-a-vampire-once thing), but the current parallel was Dean’s advice to Doug-- that he’s a good guy, he loves Donna, and he should trust her even if he was concerned about her and she didn’t quite seem like herself for the last few weeks, as if something deeper was wrong with her and she wasn’t willing to talk to him about it.

Because Dean is currently going through the same sort of thing with Cas. Cas is very recently back from the dead, and Dean was so ecstatic to have him back that he’s sort of treading very carefully around him. Cas asked Dean to let him handle the search for Jack in his own way, and Dean let him go with the whole “Don’t do anything stupid” line that between them has become a shorthand code phrase expressing worry (from 12.10 when Dean lampshaded it by telling Cas he’s not mad, he’s worried-- because he CARES about him).

Dean is doing his damnedest to try and trust Cas with this, and not go storming in like he did in 12.10, to not second guess Cas’s judgment, even if all his instincts are screaming that Cas seems to be keeping something from him lately (and hello Dramatic Irony! because WE know it’s Asmodeus pretending to be Cas, but DEAN DOES NOT). Dean’s trying to give Doug the answer that he’s been trying to believe in himself.

Which probably means that entire deception is about to be overthrown, and Dean will at the very least have his trust in “Cas” put to the test, and soon.

[mangled-dreams]

Dealings with a Devil (Part 20)

Dealings with a Devil (Part 20)

Reader X Darkiplier

You, Reader, have made a deal with what you believed to be a fantasized version of your favorite YouTuber’s alter ego, Darkiplier after he’d visited you in a dream. You believed Darkiplier to only exist in your dreams and on Markiplier’s YouTube channel, but by some impossible way he’s real and he intends on collecting on your debt to him.  

((Just as an FIY, Sean’s “fiance” is someone I made up and for the sake of the story he still lives in Ireland. I’m trying to stay mostly true to real life but it’s hard sometimes, especially when it doesn’t cross your mind to actually look up facts. lol.))

“So, how was your flight? I heard there was a storm over the Atlantic earlier. Worried you’d be caught up in it.” Sean says gathering the few bags you brought with you to Ireland. You try to make polite conversation and stay engaged with Sean and his fiancée, but it’s hard when Dark and Anti just left you on the plane by yourself without any kind of explanation.

“We hit turbulence and the pilot had to put the fasten seat belt sign on for a while, but other than that it was fine. Is the storm supposed to come inland?” you respond giving a polite and convincing smile. You wonder if Dark will show up by the evening. He already knows he can’t be with you while you and Sean are visiting and working, but he can still lie in your bed and cuddle you.

But you suppose he doesn’t have to keep an eye out for Anti considering he already made his presence known on the plane. What that green goblin is thinking you’ll never know. It’s not his antics that scare you anymore, although you do admit the plan thing was scary—it’s his motives that have you worried. If he plans to kill you then he should do it out right instead of turning you.

If he even did that properly. You have no special powers not even a dark form. The whole telepathy thing with Dark was kind of already there and you’d already been mostly tuned to when Dark is in the same room with you. Climbing into the back seat of the small coupe you continue with the pleasantries all the way to Sean’s house.

Your mind wonders as you stare out into the foggy green hills. Ireland seems much more powerful now that you’re actually here. Maybe you’ll see a ghostie goo or two while you’re visiting. You hope you’ll see your demon at some point again.

“You fallin’ asleep back there?” Sean asks looking through the rearview mirror at you. The corners of his eyes are crinkling as he smiles.

“Kind of, it was a bit of a adrenaline rush on the plane ride.” You respond back smiling at Sean. You genuinely like being in his company. Between him and Mark you hadn’t felt lonely or without entertainment. Honestly it’s like seeing an old friend again.

“I bet. The rides over the big pond are never very fun when there’s a storm brewin’.”  Sean responds as a heard of sheep slowly cross the road way. The young man escorting the group tries to hurry the sheep across to allow the vehicle to pass by. You laugh a little and notice a few small babies the group and coo.

“Like them little ladies, do ya?” Marline asks turning to look back at you.

“I think they’re adorable. From afar. My grandad on my mother’s side had a little farm and some of his goats were meaner than a snake. I tried feeding some of the kids and this really old, grumpy goat ran up and head butted my hip.  Damn thing nearly broke it according to my doctor. Grandpa kept him closed up whenever my brothers and I came to visit.” You say shivering at the thought of Ol’ Prescott.

“Wow, what a mean ol’ fella. “ Marline laughs.

When you finally arrive at the house, Sean and Marline show you to your room. You have your own bathroom with a small shower off to the right of your bed. You smile and thank them before being left to your own to put your clothes away. You’ll be with Sean and Marline for a few days then they’re taking you into London so that you can say to visited England and Scotland.

“Top if the morning to ya laddies! My name’s Jacksepticeye and I’m here with a special guest! Say hello to everybody!” Sean bellows as you look at the camera Sean set up to the left of his usual camera to get a good view of you.

“Hello! Mangled Dreams here once again. I’m stepping out of the nightmares to spend some time with our awesome man, Jack!”  You say smiling big. You and Mark had come up with that little intro after a few bad attempts. Looking to Sean you wonder if it’s too much for his channel. “Is that no good?” you ask a little worried. It shows on your face.

“Are you kidding? That was amazing! Yer a natural!” Sean shouts holding his palm out to you and you smack it instantly. “Hell ya! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Any who! Today we’re going to be playing some demo versions of some games coming out later this year!” Sean says making quick work of loading up the first demo game.

You’d been practicing playing games on the computer for a while now in your spare time to make the videos with Mark and Sean a little bit more like their usual. As long as it’s not a horror game you have pretty good confidence in your skills. You’d found horror games, depending of their quality or amount of gore have a good way of taking away any confidence.

The whole process was once again intriguing and very enlightening. You’d found Sean is just as hands on, if not more so than Mark in the making and editing of his videos. By the end of it you’re wiped. You didn’t think it’d be so taxing to make a video with Sean, but he’s so high energy and so loud and animated it’s hard not to put just as much energy and enthusiasm as he does.

Flopping down on the queen sized bed with a hand made quilt after a delicious home cooked dinner you fight against sleep. You still need to shower and comb your hair our before getting under the covers. Sean’s house is warm but you can feel the Irish cold settling in through the windows.

Struggling you stand up, get out your small bag of toiletries, and head into the bathroom. You start the water to the shower and wait a few minutes as the temperature changes before stepping into the small one person shower.

You shower in peace, well… as much peace as your mind will allow. Dark still hasn’t shown up or even reach out to you. You worry at your bottom lip as you slowly wash your hair. What if he and Anti really got into a fight and one or both is seriously injured?

Silently you cures your inability to visit the Void of your own free will. You curse Dark for being so stubborn. You curse Anti for being such a prick. But in this moment you cures your shampoo for dripping into your eyes!

“Wow! That’s amazing!” Sean gawks at your drawing. He’d given you a small space of your own in his studio to set up your computer and tablet. Like Mark, Sean is going to showcase your art. Today you decided to do an original for Sean featuring his floating eye buddy, Sam.

“Why, thank you. I’m glad you like it.” You respond as you stretch your drawing hand to keep it from cramping. It’s not often you can bust out something so quickly and with such detail. “Do you think your followers will like it?” you ask looking up at Sean and freeze for a moment.

For the briefest of moments you swear Anti’s black eyes looked back at you. You quickly swallow a bit of saliva to wet your suddenly dry throat before Sean looks at you again with a huge, un-Anti looking smile.

“Are you kiddin’? They’ll love it!!” Sean reassures you happily. You can’t help but smile back at the adorable Irishman. Whatever Anti has in plan you know Sean has no part in it. Just like Mark, both are oblivious to their alter-ego’s plots and lives.

“You sure know how to make a girl blush.” You tease batting your hand at Sean as he chuckles.

“Are you ready to hit London?” Marline asks as you ride the ferry to England. Four days later and you still haven’t heard from Dark or Anti… at lease you think you haven’t. There’ve been a few questionable sightings out of the corner of your eyes when it’s just you and Sean recording/playing in his studio.

Sean hasn’t done anything Anti-ish, but it still puts you on edge. Looking to Marline you nod your head. Despite the confusion and worry about your favorite Demon, you’re still looking towards going to London and Scotland. You only have a few days left of your vacation and you want to make the most of them.

“You have no idea.” You respond unable to help the slight, if not horribly done, Irish accent. You groan, Sean has been teasing that you’re picking up his accent after being in Ireland only four days. You strongly denied his accusations, but then… you catch yourself as you’re talking and half to stop and hang your head.

“You’ve been in Ireland too long.” Marline jokes at your expense. To be honest you could probably live your life happily in Ireland. The people, the land, the.. everything is just so perfect.

“I dunno, Marline. I think Ireland is just what I need. It’s so pretty and peaceful. Not to mention the lore and legends.  Oh, it’s a thing of beauty.” You gush watching the coast of Ireland slowly disappear into the mist that always seems to be hanging around.

Your family had been wrong. Coming to Ireland in the fall is perfect.  You’re going to miss Ireland far more than you had California. After all it’s not completely different than living in Washington where it’s green and wet just about year round. Oh yes, you’ll miss Ireland.

Sean grins from ear to ear at your confession. “You’re always welcome in our home. Don’na worry about hotels if you come back to visit. We got cha covered.” Sean reassures you earning a soft chuckle from you.

“I might have to take you up on that offer if the longing for Ireland gets to bad. Just be prepared for me to stay longer than a few days.” You respond high fiving Sean at his prompting.

“You got cha!” he responds in kind.

Part 21

[cursivesugg]

Sick Day || Buttercream

Requests are currently [ CLOSED ]

Masterlist can be found [ HERE ]

Word Count: 1k+

A/N: inspired by the fact that i’m currently dying in bed; enjoy!!xo

“This isn’t what I envisioned when I called Jack and asked him to bring me food.” You mutter under your breath, shoving the metal spoon into your mouth and pushing the ice cream onto the roof of your mouth. Your voice was croaky, and seeing as your nose was clogged up, your voice was a whole lot deeper than it usually was.

As soon as the boys, whom today consisted of Joe, Jack, Josh and Caspar, arrived at your apartment, you were immediately coddled into your duvet and told that you weren’t allowed to move from the sofa in order for you to start getting better. You wanted to be able to roll your eyes and tell them that they were overreacting, but rolling your eyes made your head pound, and talking hurt your throat; and so it’d be a little hypocritical if you did.

“Stop whining, germy.” Jack chuckles, shoving your legs softly through the thick duvet with his foot and grinning at you when you glared at him.

It was a little while later, and you felt as if you were sweating buckets, your eyes had been rubbed red raw and you felt as if you’d been stabbed in the throats multiple times. You couldn’t recall any of your previous pre-summertime flu’s getting quite this bad, although you were sure you told yourself that every year.

“You alright, pretty?” Caspar asks, his eyebrows drawn together in the centre of his forehead as he watched you begin to wriggle in the confides of your duvet. You mumble incoherently, growing more and more frustrated as you try to get yourself out of the duvet, short of breath and wanting to escape from your own skin.

At your erratic movements, the boys jump up and begin to try and calm you down, Josh pushing your hair out of you face, to which it was sticking too, and Joe slowly coaxing you out of the duvet as Jack runs into your bathroom and puts some cold water onto washcloths and Caspar goes to get you a bottle of cold water out of your fridge.

You calmed down after a few seconds, the cold cloth that Jack gently began to wipe across your face causing you to exhale softly in relief and allow your eyes to flutter close at the refreshing feeling. Josh sinks down onto the couch behind you, and allows you to lean back into him when you can’t configure enough energy to hold yourself up anymore.

He runs his hand through your hair, making sure that you didn’t feel suffocated by the thick strands by keeping them away from your neck and face. Jack continues to kneel on the floor beside the couch, the cold cloth continuously being pressed against your skin. You open your eyes groggily when Caspar hands you the bottle of water, smiling weakly in thanks and taking a sip.

Joe was pacing next to your wall of windows, chewing on his nails and constantly glancing back down at you with worry evident on his face. As the oldest, he felt a strange sense of protectiveness over you, even more, when you were sick. In his defense, you’d known each other for a long seven years, and during that time he’d become somewhat of a big brother to you; and so it was a given that when you were this sick, he’d get a little worried.

He eventually managed to calm himself down, and came to take a seat at the other end of the sofa that you were curled up on, running his fingers up and down your bare legs softly.

You open your eyes, covering your mouth as you cough violently for a few seconds before moaning unhappily and pushing your face down against Josh’s leg. Joe frowns, wishing he could do something to help you feel at least a little better, but in reality, there wasn’t much anyone could do to cure a flu, all they could do was wait for it to pass.

You sniffle, circling your legs up further to your chest and reaching for you phone which was sat on the coffee table just within arms reach, using your fingerprint to unlock it and sleepily scrolling through your twitter feed, liking a few tweets from fans who’d figured out by the boys’ tweets and snapchats etc. that you were sick and were sending you their get well wishes.

You’d been scrolling for a while when you came across an amazing piece of art that included you and a few of the other boys, and raised your head to tell them about it but stopping short when you glanced around the room and realised that at some point during your scrolling, they’d felt as if you were peaceful enough to close their eyes and get some sleep themselves.

You giggle to yourself, though with your croaky voice it sounded more like a growl, and reach for Joe’s clogging camera that he’d left on your table, turning it on expertly and panning around the room, keeping your voice quiet as you sink back against josh and begin to talk to the camera. “You see this? This is what happens when you’re a needy sick person and the boys overreact big time.”

You turn off the camera, gently resting it back onto the table and opening up your snapchat, silently moving it all around the room so that each of the boys, including Josh, who was still sat behind you, could be seen. You make sure it’s on mute, so that your croaky breathing couldn’t be heard, and caption the video with ‘snapchat saw it first’.

You lick your cracked lips and wince slightly at the stinging pain, looking around the room and wondering who looked the comfiest. Caspar, who was sat alone on the love seat, looked the most inviting, and so you slowly stand up and walk over to him, picking up your think blanket and cuddling up on the couch, resting your head against his pyjama covered legs and humming softly in content, closing your eyes and feeling yourself drift off to sleep with a small smile on your face as you wondered what the hell you’d do without those boys.

[gamebird]

I realize some of this is the nature of our times, but I look at the build of the actors and actresses they choose to use on screen and see them as a reflection of conditions for the characters.

Finn, for example, is well-built, proportional, muscular, balanced, unblemished. Admittedly he’s no combat veteran with years in the field to account for, but he’s been in military-type training for years and he has no apparent scars at the start of TFA. What this tells me is that the FO feeds their soldiers WELL. They condition them WELL. They allow them rest time. They have a good grip on what is required to build a physically superior trooper. Finn is stacked up, jacked up, BUILT - and you don’t get that way if you’re not eating good food on a regular basis with a lot of gym time. I would surmise also that any injuries he has sustained have been treated quickly and accurately - he doesn’t miss much gym time in long recovery because he blew his knee out or wrenched his back. Also, given his overall stature, he’s been fed well his whole life. Maybe the FO did take him from a family he would never know when he was a little bitty one, but they’ve taken some damn good care of him physically since then.

Kylo Ren is similar. No one has been threatening that man’s food supply. From his build, I take it that Luke’s academy did not enforce asceticism. In Adam Driver’s case, his build is due to standard US (upper?) middle-class background paired with years of military/marine training followed by years of careful body maintenance in his acting career, topped off by a deliberate attempt by the best in the movie industry to bulk him up for his role as Kylo Ren. For Kylo to look as he does, he has to have gone through a similar process. That means even while he was with Luke, he was lifting, fighting, running, eating a lot, and getting prompt medical care.

Rey - for all the talk of one-quarter portions, she does not have the body of someone who has missed much in the way of meals ... recently. Now, it might be that her overall lighter frame is due to not getting much as a youth. Or it might be because she’s female. Sexual dimorphism plays a role here and well-fed, well-developed women are rarely as broad as men (I’m pretending no one gets fat). She also has no scars, good balance, etc. indicating good medical care, although in her case I’ll pretend it’s a side benefit of the Force protecting her from any serious problems.

Hux is a skinny guy, kind of pasty. Contrast that with Finn. I would take it to mean that throughout his life, Hux wasn’t getting enough to eat. He didn’t fill out like the majority of others in the FO. His father was a thick-set man, for example. Speaking of which, his father was also wildly abusive, intentionally underfed his cadets on the idea it would encourage them to be mean, hungry, and self-sufficient (and likely had the same philosophy for his son), and actively subscribed to a survival of the fittest mentality when it came to medical care. If a cadet was too messed up, they were killed, not cured. I look at Domnhall Gleeson’s lean, hollowed out build and see an excellent visual representation of the result of growing up like that.

Phasma is an aberration, if I take the events written in the book ‘Phasma’ as canon. She should be smaller than Daisy Riddle, scarred, wiry, and mean. Instead, she’s tall, broad, untouched, and a good leader (or at least, Star Wars pretends she’s a good leader and surrounds her with loyal, well-trained people, but then every example of her leadership is a train-wreck ... it’s like the writers don’t understand that no one gets the former - loyal, well-trained, obedient people - without the latter - actually good leadership). There is another possibility, which is that Phasma was favored by her clan in ways Sif didn’t go into, and was fed, protected, and trained exceptionally well. That wouldn’t be entirely out of line, because Phasma’s people were trying to reproduce and healthy females were highly valued. Maybe they did pour everything they had into the welfare of their last female members and Sif didn’t go into much detail on that either because she thought it was obvious, she didn’t know it was weird, or she knew it was sexist/favoritist and it was part of her resentment of Phasma in general. That’s what I tell myself for headcanon.

…complete your training and fulfill your destiny

[readbookywooks]

“Yeah, Chuckie?” Newt asked, somewhat sarcastically. “And what’s your bloody question?”

Chuck seemed deep in thought. “Well, they found a dead Griever, right?”

“Yeah,” Newt replied. “Thanks for that bit of news.”

Chuck absently tapped his fork against the table for a few seconds. “Well, then who killed the stupid thing?”

Excellent question, Thomas thought. He waited for Newt to answer, but nothing came. He obviously didn’t have a clue.

CHAPTER 16

Thomas spent the morning with the Keeper of the Gardens, “working his butt off,” as Newt would’ve said. Zart was the tall, black-haired kid who’d stood at the front of the pole during Ben’s Banishment, and who for some odd reason smelled like sour milk. He didn’t say much, but showed Thomas the ropes until he could start working on his own. Weeding, pruning an apricot tree, planting squash and zucchini seeds, picking veggies. He didn’t love it, and mostly ignored the other boys working alongside him, but he didn’t hate it nearly as much as what he’d done for Winston at the Blood House.

Thomas and Zart were weeding a long row of young corn when Thomas decided it was a good time to start asking questions. This Keeper seemed a lot more approachable.

“So, Zart,” he said.

The Keeper glanced up at him, then resumed his work. The kid had droopy eyes and a long face—for some reason he looked as bored as humanly possible. “Yeah, Greenie, what you want?”

“How many Keepers total are there?” Thomas asked, trying to act casual. “And what are the job options?”

“Well, you got the Builders, the Sloppers, Baggers, Cooks, Map-makers, Med-jacks, Track-Hoes, Blood Housers. The Runners, of course. I don’t know, a few more, maybe. Pretty much keep to myself and my own stuff.”

Most of the words were self-explanatory, but Thomas wondered about a couple of them. “What’s a Slopper?” He knew that was what Chuck did, but the boy never wanted to talk about it. Refused to talk about it.

“That’s what the shanks do that can’t do nothin’ else. Clean toilets, clean the showers, clean the kitchen, clean up the Blood House after a slaughter, everything. Spend one day with them suckers—that’ll cure any thoughts of goin’ that direction, I can tell ya that.”

Thomas felt a pang of guilt over Chuck—felt sorry for him. The kid tried so hard to be everyone’s friend, but no one seemed to like him or even pay attention to him. Yeah, he was a little excitable and talked too much, but Thomas was glad enough to have him around.

“What about the Track-hoes?” Thomas asked as he yanked out a huge weed, clumps of dirt swaying on the roots.

Zart cleared his throat and kept on working as he answered. “They’re the ones take care of all the heavy stuff for the Gardens. Trenching and whatnot. During off times they do other stuff round the Glade. Actually, a lot of Gladers have more than one job. Anyone tell you that?”

Thomas ignored the question and moved on, determined to get as many answers as possible. “What about the Baggers? I know they take care of dead people, but it can’t happen that often, can it?”

“Those are the creepy fellas. They act as guards and poh-lice, too. Everyone just likes to call ’em Baggers. Have fun that day, brother.” He snickered, the first time Thomas had heard him do so—there was something very likable about it.

Thomas had more questions. Lots more. Chuck and everyone else around the Glade never wanted to give him the answers to anything. And here was Zart, who seemed perfectly willing. But suddenly Thomas didn’t feel like talking anymore. For some reason the girl had popped into his head again, out of the blue, and then thoughts of Ben, and the dead Griever, which should have been a good thing but everyone acted as if it were anything but.

His new life pretty much sucked.

He drew a deep, long breath. Just work, he thought. And he did.

By the time midafternoon arrived, Thomas was ready to collapse from exhaustion—all that bending over and crawling around on your knees in the dirt was the pits. Blood House, Gardens. Two strikes.

Runner, he thought as he went on break. Just let me be a Runner. Once again he thought about how absurd it was that he wanted it so badly. But even though he didn’t understand it, or where it came from, the desire was undeniable. Just as strong were thoughts of the girl, but he pushed them aside as much as possible.

Tired and sore, he headed to the Kitchen for a snack and some water. He could’ve eaten a full-blown meal despite having had lunch just two hours earlier. Even pig was starting to sound good again.

He bit into an apple, then plopped on the ground beside Chuck. Newt was there, too, but sat alone, ignoring everybody. His eyes were bloodshot, his forehead creased with heavy lines. Thomas watched as Newt chewed his fingernails, something he hadn’t seen the older boy do before.

Chuck noticed and asked the question that was on Thomas’s mind. “What’s wrong with him?” the boy whispered. “Looks like you did when you popped out of the Box.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas replied. “Why don’t you go ask him.”

“I can hear every bloody word you guys are saying,” Newt called in a loud voice. “No wonder people hate sleepin’ next to you shanks.”

Thomas felt like he’d been caught stealing, but he was genuinely concerned—Newt was one of the few people in the Glade he actually liked.

“What is wrong with you?” Chuck asked. “No offense, but you look like klunk.”

“Every lovin’ thing in the universe,” he replied, then fell silent as he stared off into space for a long moment. Thomas almost pushed him with another question, but Newt finally continued. “The girl from the Box. Keeps groanin’ and saying all kinds of weird stuff, but won’t wake up. Medjacks’re doing their best to feed her, but she’s eatin’ less each time. I’m tellin’ ya, something’s very bad about that whole bloody thing.”

Thomas looked down at his apple, then took a bite. It tasted sour now—he realized he was worried about the girl. Concerned for her welfare. As if he knew her.

Newt let out a long sigh. “Shuck it. But that’s not what really has me buggin’.”

“Then what does?” Chuck asked.

Thomas leaned forward, so curious he was able to put the girl out of his mind.

Newt’s eyes narrowed as he looked out toward one of the entrances to the Maze. “Alby and Minho,” he muttered. “They should’ve come back hours ago.”

Before Thomas knew it he was back at work, pulling up weeds again, counting down the minutes until he’d be done with the Gardens. He glanced constantly at the West Door, looking for any sign of Alby and Minho, Newt’s concern having rubbed off on him.

Newt had said they were supposed to have come back by noon, just enough time for them to get to the dead Griever, explore for an hour or two, then return. No wonder he’d looked so upset. When Chuck offered up that maybe they were just exploring and having some fun, Newt had given him a stare so harsh Thomas thought Chuck might spontaneously combust.

He’d never forget the next look that had come over Newt’s face. When Thomas asked why Newt and some others didn’t just go into the Maze and search for their friends, Newt’s expression had changed to outright horror—his cheeks had shrunk into his face, becoming sallow and dark. It gradually passed, and he’d explained that sending out search parties was forbidden, lest even more people be lost, but there was no mistaking the fear that had crossed his face.

Newt was terrified of the Maze.

Whatever had happened to him out there—maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury—had been truly awful.

Thomas tried not to think about it as he put his focus back on yanking weeds.

That night dinner proved to be a somber affair, and it had nothing to do with the food. Frypan and his cooks served up a grand meal of steak, mashed potatoes, green beans and hot rolls. Thomas was quickly learning that jokes about Frypan’s cooking were just that—jokes. Everyone gobbled up his food and usually begged for more. But tonight, the Gladers ate like dead men resurrected for one last meal before being sent to live with the devil.

The Runners had returned at their normal time, and Thomas had grown more and more upset as he watched Newt run from Door to Door as they entered the Glade, not bothering to hide his panic. But Alby and Minho never showed up. Newt forced the Gladers to go on and get some of Frypan’s hard-earned dinner, but he insisted on standing watch for the missing duo. No one said it, but Thomas knew it wouldn’t be long before the Doors closed.

Thomas reluctantly followed orders like the rest of the boys and was sharing a picnic table on the south side of the Homestead with Chuck and Winston. He’d only been able to eat a few bites when he couldn’t take it anymore.

“I can’t stand sitting here while they’re out there missing,” he said as he dropped his fork on the plate. “I’m going over to watch the Doors with Newt.” He stood up and headed out to look.

Not surprisingly, Chuck was right behind him.

They found Newt at the West Door, pacing, running his hands through his hair. He looked up as Thomas and Chuck approached.

“Where are they?” Newt said, his voice thin and strained.

Thomas was touched that Newt cared so much about Alby and Minho—as if they were his own kin. “Why don’t we send out a search party?” he suggested again. It seemed so stupid to sit here and worry themselves to death when they could go out there and find them.

“Bloody he—” Newt started before stopping himself; he closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “We can’t. Okay? Don’t say it again. One hundred percent against the rules. Especially with the buggin’ Doors about to close.”

“But why?” Thomas persisted, in disbelief at Newt’s stubbornness. “Won’t the Grievers get them if they stay out there? Shouldn’t we do something?”

Newt turned on him, his face flushed red, his eyes flamed with fury.

“Shut your hole, Greenie!” he yelled. “Not a bloody week you’ve been here! You think I wouldn’t risk my life in a second to save those lugs?”

“No … I … Sorry. I didn’t mean …” Thomas didn’t know what to say—he was just trying to help.

Newt’s face softened. “You don’t get it yet, Tommy. Going out there at night is beggin’ for death. We’d just be throwin’ more lives away. If those shanks don’t make it back …” He paused, seeming hesitant to say what everyone was thinking. “Both of ’em swore an oath, just like I did. Like we all did. You, too, when you go to your first Gathering and get chosen by a Keeper. Never go out at night. No matter what. Never.”

Thomas looked over at Chuck, who seemed as pale-faced as Newt.

“Newt won’t say it,” the boy said, “so I will. If they’re not back, it means they’re dead. Minho’s too smart to get lost. Impossible. They’re dead.”

Newt said nothing, and Chuck turned and walked back toward the Homestead, his head hanging low. Dead? Thomas thought. The situation had become so grave he didn’t know how to react, felt a pit of emptiness in his heart.

“The shank’s right,” Newt said solemnly. “That’s why we can’t go out. We can’t afford to make things bloody worse than they already are.”

He put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder, then let it slump to his side. Tears moistened Newt’s eyes, and Thomas was sure that even within the dark chamber of memories that were locked away, out of his reach, he’d never seen someone look so sad. The growing darkness of twilight was a perfect fit for how grim things felt to Thomas.

“The Doors close in two minutes,” Newt said, a statement so succinct and final it seemed to hang in the air like a burial shroud caught in a puff of wind. Then he walked away, hunched over, quiet.

Thomas shook his head and looked back into the Maze. He barely knew Alby and Minho. But his chest ached at the thought of them out there, killed by the horrendous creature he’d seen through the window his first morning in the Glade.

A loud boom sounded from all directions, startling Thomas out of his thoughts. Then came the crunching, grinding sound of stone against stone. The Doors were closing for the night.

The right wall rumbled across the ground, spitting dirt and rocks as it moved. The vertical row of connecting rods, so many they seemed to reach the sky far above, slid toward their corresponding holes on the left wall, ready to seal shut until the morning. Once again, Thomas looked in awe at the massive moving wall—it defied any sense of physics. It seemed impossible.

Then a flicker of movement to the left caught his eyes.

Something stirred inside the Maze, down the long corridor in front of him.

At first, a shot of panic raced through him; he stepped back, worried it might be a Griever. But then two forms took shape, stumbling along the alley toward the Door. His eyes finally focused through the initial blindness of fear, and he realized it was Minho, with one of Alby’s arms draped across his shoulders, practically dragging the boy along behind him. Minho looked up, saw Thomas, who knew his eyes must be bulging out of his head.

“They got him!” Minho shouted, his voice strangled and weak with exhaustion. Every step he took seemed like it could be his last.

Thomas was so stunned by the turn of events, it took a moment for him to act. “Newt!” he finally screamed, forcing his gaze away from Minho and Alby to face the other direction. “They’re coming! I can see ’em!” He knew he should run into the Maze and help, but the rule about not leaving the Glade was seared into his mind.

[mittensmorgul]

First up on the TNT loop today: Deja vu! 10.04-- aka that werewolf one with the girl... blah blah blah... (no really, you wouldn’t believe how many people tell me this one’s on their “skip list.” Despite the fact Kate the werewolf from 8.04 is a straight-up Dean mirror...)

The callbacks to the current situation as of 13.03 are just ridiculous.

Sam and Dean have been on a little “vacation” from hunting, because Sam is SCARED of Dean’s powers (having just been cured of being a demon, and still bearing the Mark of Cain). Dean, meanwhile, just wants to feel “normal” and work a job, because it’s HIS normal.

They talk about how “dark” Sam went in the name of curing Dean, how he used a guy to summon a demon (and how that guy ended up dead by Dean’s hand because of it...), before Sam tortured said demon and killed her for info on Dean. Sam minimizes and pushes down the accusation, finally framing it as “I did what I had to” in order to save Dean.

Sam and Dean interview a witness (while wearing forest ranger uniforms) while sitting under the giant Panheads sign from the tattoo shop in 13.02. The guy had thought the monster also attacked a girl, who he later saw at an old abandoned barn and believed she was a ghost... but when Sam and Dean arrive they find a trail of dead chickens leading right to Kate the Werewolf.

They restrain her, question her believing she was the werewolf who killed the man at the bar, and are prepared to kill her... She is surprised by their accusations, but doesn’t resist. Dean points his gun at Kate, but Sam stops him, with “Let me do it.” Because Sam is still wary of Dean doing anything violent for fear it would “feed the mark.” He tells Dean flat out that he doesn’t think Dean’s “ready” for this. (Hello patronizing Mr. Judgypants! Dean doesn’t appreciate it...)

While they’re arguing about Dean’s “readiness” to hunt again, they get a call from the Sheriff that another body’s been found, that Kate couldn’t have killed because she was with them at the time... Meanwhile, Kate escapes. Sam can’t understand why she was so ready to sacrifice herself if she was innocent of the kills, and that leads them to Kate’s sister... who was dying when Kate chose to turn her into a werewolf. Unfortunately, her sister didn’t want to live by Kate’s rules, not killing humans, on the run. She wanted to use the power, to do whatever she wanted... as if she were invincible because of it.

And here’s where the Dean Parallel is strongest: Kate “proves” she’s innocent, because she carries a silver dagger with her that she intends to use on HERSELF if she ever “loses it” again. (Again, she was prepared to take herself out before she could hurt anyone else. Which is the whole “if I can’t save myself, I’ll kill myself” solution that Dean himself internalized back in s2, and has been living with ever since... that he’d most recently faced head-on in 9.10 when he’d thought he might need to kill Gadreel!Sam in order to stop him until Cas helped him find “a better way.”)

Dean LIES to Kate about having a werewolf cure in order to secure her cooperation in finding her sister. Kate would’ve otherwise sacrificed herself DESPITE what her sister was doing, hoping to give her sister a chance to escape. The thing she didn’t understand is that Sam and Dean wanted to stop the RIGHT monster, and like in 8.18, not just any monster will do.

Kate believes them about the non-existent cure, because she’s just so desperate to save her sister. They arrive to find that Tasha has turned two men into werewolves, trying to build her own pack. Tasha and Kate talk, Kate tells her it doesn’t have to be this way, that they can live peacefully without hurting people, but Tasha doesn’t want “to be saved.” She gives Kate an ultimatum, join her pack or walk away. Kate appears to relent, but when she hugs Tasha, she stabs her sister with her silver dagger and runs.

She did what she had to do... knowing that she’d never be able to “control” her sister. She couldn’t save her, so she had to kill her. And she made that horrible choice, but she was allowed to live.

Throughout the episode Sam tried to justify what he’d done in the name of saving Dean, and pressed Dean to talk about his time as a demon. He only backed off when Dean told him he was embarrassed by all of it, but he did justify that he’d done most of the worst things as a demon to people who “deserved” it. But Dean’s also confronting what the Mark might still be doing to him. Being cured of a demon only solved half his problems, and he could still wind up there again if he’s not careful. But locking himself up and doing nothing isn’t a solution...

DEAN Maybe I'm not ready to hunt. [Camera pulls back to show the pain in Dean’s expression and the unshed tears in his eyes.] DEAN [brokenly] But I am just trying to do the right thing, man, 'cause I'm so sick and tired of doing the wrong one.

As of 13.03, Dean may not be ready to hunt, but it’s what he does. It’s his way of doing the right thing, even if he’s just going through the motions right now. And just like Kate, who convinced Dean she was trustworthy by having been prepared to kill herself if she succumbed to the power. Dean could identify with the feeling, except for him at the time, killing himself would only lead to him waking up a demon again thanks to the Mark... He didn’t even have THAT as a comfort at the time.

Which is sort of the situation he’s in regarding Jack right now. From 13.02:

Dean: Okay, what the hell? Give me that. You -- Don't be an idiot. Look, A, this is not gonna do anything to you, okay? And B, you-- What the hell? Jack: Exactly. What the hell am I? I can't control... whatever this is. I will hurt someone. Dean: You know, my brother thinks you can be saved. Jack: You don't believe that. Dean: No, I don't. Jack: So... if you're right? Dean: If I'm right... and it comes to killing you... I'll be the one to do it.

They both know Dean literally has no idea how to even go about killing Jack... they have no weapon that can. Just like Dean back in 10.04, they literally had no weapon that could kill him that wouldn’t just make his whole situation even worse.

So right now, it’s a hollow sort of comfort, but to Dean... it really is a comfort... which he tells Jack while he’s concerned that he will accidentally hurt someone. To Dean, it’s supposed to be a relief to know that someone will be there to stop Jack from going darkside... especially when that was Jack’s immediate concern when Dean made that statement.