#as i say - nate's in a similar position even more obviously

[rebeccasbiscuits]

This may be more to do with behind the scenes logistics, but I do think it's interesting we haven't seen or heard anything about Bex (or the baby!) yet this season, despite Rupert's presence. I know that the settings have been work ones, but I don't think previous season's Rupert would have missed the opportunity to bring Bex to the match where he knew Rebecca would be. We know, in the most horrifying way, that to a pretty strong extent, him marrying a woman called Rebecca and having a child with her (involving two actual real human beings!), was at its core to upset Rebecca. And it's sort of like that now he has a team to use to upset Rebecca with, and Nate to manipulate for his own purposes with the charming over attentiveness we know is his abusive MO, he doesn't bother to bring them around with him anymore.

Suddenly he isn't the 'family man' of 2x10, because he can do more damage as a team owner. Which is just a further insight into how Rupert uses people, and how much all of these people need to get away from this man.

[aardvaark]

Similar in the way cousins are

(im assuming this is re: this rb’ed post about annie edison from community & sophie devereaux from leverage. sorry if im totally incorrect lol)

yeah exactly!! like they have some huge differences in their character traits, including the archetypes they fit, but just some things……

both are - as the original post says - good at manipulating, terrible at acting (but think they’re great actors).

both tend to have friendship/relationship problems that are the result of that manipulation. annie often lies or manipulates people and then does the "disney face" as jeff calls it iirc, to get pity lol. sophie cons the team in season 1 and can’t really apologise.

both of them often attempt to be The Voice Of Reason TM (annie in an intellectual/logical way, sophie in an emotional intelligence way) but both are very much just as unhinged as the rest of their study group/team members.

both are obsessed w the most wet cat of a man to ever exist, but the arcs of jeff/annie and nate/sophie are very different in important ways. nate/sophie end up together. the series is very focused on changing these characters for the better, so they’re both in a better position to be in a healthy relationship.

annie starts off trying to be the respectable, sweet, smart, valedictorian-to-be. as the series progresses, she drops that act more and more and reveals her weirdness more openly, for better or worse lol. sophie starts off with a million masks, not really even knowing herself what’s underneath. and attempting to be the femme fatale to nate’s hardboiled quasi-detective, but eventually reveals her quirks and allows herself to be silly.

annie & abed vs sophie & parker. discuss.

nah but i always thought annie’s whole "trying to force abed to be more empathetic" thing in "Virtual Systems Analysis" was ironic bc she is not very empathetic. or, i guess… whether or not she feels empathy for people, she can do some very selfish or hurtful things if it’s in her own best interests. and it reminds me of a post i saw (which i need to find…) about the early sophie & parker relationship, how sophie is basically like "why can’t you just mask, i invented 300000 masks which i change every hour, it’s not that hard". as if her extreme way of dealing with social situations was the Normal And Healthy Way, and also obviously not considering that parker is autistic. sometimes i think annie’s frustrations with abed in that ep are kinda the same, like… annie, my love, you are so weird and bad at socialising, and you do really strange things to try to seem more normal or get your way (like manipulation), how in the world are you critiquing abed?? for simply being autistic?? it’s tinged with some self-hatred too i think, like she’s so intent on abed acting "normal" (ie, neurotypical) because she puts so much effort into acting "normal", in a different way. and from abed’s end, it’s just like… maybe being yourself is more worthwhile than obsessively covering up every insecurity or quirk or vulnerability to the point it consumes you. similar thing with sophie & parker. idk if im explaining that very well but yeah.

so definitely, they’re not super similar, but… cousins. yes. exactly. they share some features, enough that you can make the connection.

[ladylooch]

My love, I come with a request 🧎‍♀️I humbly ask for some more protective dad!Timo, similar to that blurb of him at Lio’s chippy game…maybe this time Lio is a little younger but obviously everyone can tell he’s going to be a star…and that he’s the son of THE Timo Meier. The opposing team that is having a hard time keeping up and the only way they can think of having a chance is sending out their enforcer after him… Timo is there and parents are yelling, kids are fighting… 🤝 🍻

I am loving our Timo day RN. Yes! Of Course! So this happens when he is in the NHL, but yes, let's explore this when Lio is much younger.

Timo, Liv and I are all watching Lio’s tournament game. The twins are with Lexi and Nico because they’re too wild to sit through a hockey game right now. Lio is playing up in this tournament with U12 kids because of his skill level. However, this tournament has international competition in it, including some big kids on the other team from Canada. I am admittedly nervous and spend the first ten minutes of the game clutching my necklace.

A frown tugs the corners of my mouth down before I glance at Timo who sits with his arms crossed over his chest. There is an opposing player, number 14, that keeps getting very close to checking Lio. He keeps rubbing him out into the boards, keeping it borderline enough to not warrant a call. This latest one is well before Lio got to the puck though.

“How is that not interference?” I mutter to my husband. Timo shakes his head in annoyance.

“I don’t know. Cause this ref is fucking blind.”

“Bad word.” Liv says from where she is coloring between Timo’s feet on the bench below us. Timo looks at the top of her head, then at me. I purse my lips against a laugh, returning my attention to the ice.

Three more interactions happen with this player and Lio before the period ends. 

“Good job, Ben!” A man hollers down. “Show that kid who is boss.” His clapping is thunderous and I have a suspension he’s talking about the same player I’m getting frustrated with. I grab the tournament program, scanning the roster. Sure enough, number 14 is named Ben. I nudge Timo who looks down at the paper.

“Lio’s used to stuff like this. He is fine.” Timo insists, but he tightens his arms against his chest until his muscles balloon larger. His jaw is clenched and I can tell he is grinding his teeth.

“Mommy, can you braid my hair?” Liv asks.

“Sure.” I uncross my legs for her to sit between them. I comb her hair down her back, then split the hair into three sections. I’m just about finished when I hear a thud into the boards, then a gasp from my husband.

“What the fuck was that!” Timo screams next to me, jumping to his feet. I snap my head up, looking to where Lio is crumpled on the ice. Lio’s teammates begin to shove at number 14, his best friend, Nate, taking serious exception. Nate begins to shove at the player until he’s on the ice, then jumps on top of him to continue with his punches.

“Sweet!” Liv cheers, eyes wild with excitement. 

“Livia.” Timo scolds. She cowers down into a squat, still beaming at the ice. I grab Timo’s hand as we watch Lio struggle to a sitting position. The trainer and his coach are talking to him. He nods his head and the two adults help him to his feet. Lio skates off and sits on the bench, seemingly fine, but a little stunned. 

Timo and I are shocked when number14 doesn’t even get a penalty. Only Nate gets a penalty for roughing.

“No way.” I shake my head in disgust, feeling fear lodge into my chest. No consequences for this kid either? There is still half a game left to play and he’s been targeting Lio all game. 

“Awww he’s fine. What a pussy just like his dad. Should call him Nemo with the way he flopped.”

“What the fuck did you just say?” Timo bolts up, taking the bleachers two at a time to go after the man. “You’re real tough calling a nine year old a pussy, you old fuck.”

“Oh that is so many bad words.” Liv says seriously, eyes wide at Timo’s reaction. She suddenly looks very small and unsure, reaching for my arm.

“Ohmygod.” I mutter, clasping a hand on my forehead. Timo gets to the man and immediately knocks two hands in his chest to shove the guy backwards. The guy steps forward again to square up when he regains his balance.

“Timo!” I yelp, leaving my daughter behind to climb the bleachers after him. “No, absolutely not.” I grab at his jacket, trying to pull him away. Both their faces are so close together their noses are touching.

“Tell your kid to keep his head up.”

“Keep his head up?” I scoff, suddenly, snarling in disgust.

“Em. Go back and sit down. I’ve got this.”” Timo’s voice is dangerous.

“No, you need to come back with me and calm down.” I lean closer, switching to Swiss German so the man doesn’t understand. “You have everything to lose here. And our daughter is scared and Lio needs one of us to go down there and make sure he is okay.” 

“Hit me. Pussy.” The guy gloats over me speaking.

“T. No. Protect our family the right way.” I’m not sure if I have gotten through his red haze. HIs shoulders shake with heavy breaths while his nostrils flare. His blue gaze is molten and fierce for several more difficult seconds.

“I hope your son turns out to be a better man than you.” Timo finally says. My shoulders relax. The guy is stunned to silence. Timo grabs my hand and works us back down the bleachers to Liv. He picks her up into his lap. She buries her face into his chest. “You’re okay baby. I’m sorry. That was bad. Daddy lost his temper. I’m sorry.” He smooths her back over her jacket. “You okay?” He asks me. I nod my head. “Go check on Lio. I’ll stay here.”

[aardvaark]

this is why i like episodes where the team gets some moments of clarity about their effects on other people. eg in the order 23 job, where its more about what they can’t do. eliot tries to help that kid by threatening his dad, but the dad doesn’t care. he tries to tell the kid to talk to the police, but the police are buddies with the abusive dad. and while we get a nice little resolution at the end, we do get to see eliot having a bit of a crisis throughout that episode - his talents aren’t helpful here, they’re in this city temporarily & can’t do much long term change, there’s not a simple solution. it really upsets him. a similar moment happens in the tap out job, when the evil guy threatens to hurt/kill the victims if the team leaves town. they can’t control what happens when they leave.

or in the miracle job, they nearly ruin everything for that priest. they definitely cause some damage to the parishioners by faking a miracle & that doesn’t go away once they place the blame elsewhere. again, the big problems are resolved in the end bc its a mostly lighthearted show, but… even then, there’s some tension. nate knows he’s doing some very messed up stuff & his priest friend is still not exactly happy with him at the end of the episode. or in the 12 steps job, where nate gets a bit of a reality check when hurley gives the exact same logic to defend his actions as nate does. basically nate takes the brunt of this "what even is the right thing?" theme.

and in leverage: redemption they make a point of saying at one point that yes, they are the bad guys. the things they do are often very morally wrong even if they lead to a good ending. and it’s not always easy to tell whether ‘the end justifies the means’, as it were, in certain cases, which is why there’s that theme of redemption. they’ve all hurt people & while they’re better at preventing negative consequences now, they’re still responsible for harm they’ve caused.

on a more lighthearted note, there’s also different levels of how much they can harm people (it’s mentioned in episode commentary sometimes too). they inconvenience or upset innocent people sometimes, but it always has to be super temporary. then there’s sort of a tier above that, where if they’re about to cause more serious damage to a bystander, that bystander will say or do something evil for a second… very convenient for the plot but it usually makes sense in context: those bystanders are usually in some position of power themselves, and can therefore abuse that power. and then there’s the mark, and obviously they can do pretty much anything to the mark, but they do have to keep showing us why they’re bad. the more the team torments the mark, the more upset the mark gets, and the more likely the audience will start to feel a bit bad for them. so every few scenes, the mark will do something super messed up and evil again & we as the viewers will be like "oh yeah, that’s right, they only go after incredibly awful people. you can keep torturing him now".

I do wonder about all the people in Leverage who are secondary to the con but affected by it, like all the people who are sent into a panic in order for them to evacuate a building, especially when they use disease or chemical contamination as the trigger. Or the flight attendant in season 1 who Hardison called and said her cat was in a shelter and couldn't be held long.

[disasterbijamietartt]

Okay, so I said I would do a post about Jamie, Keeley & Roy and growth, (im)maturity, accountability, double standards in the fandom and all that shit, but then, oops, I started watching Schitt's Creek, lmao, and now I won't have time to do this before the next episode airs, which probably will give me new things to think about anyways, so I'll just do a full on analysis of anything Jamie, Keeley & Roy during my rewatch between season 2 and 3.

But there is this one thing I noticed and need to get off my chest, and that I hope will be addressed in the last two episodes: The show usually is pretty good at pointing out bullying and presenting it as wrong (Jamie bullying Nate and Sam in season 1, Nate bullying Colin and Will in this season). But when Roy mocks Jamie and has him repeat that he is an ugly ugly boy etc. it is played as a joke and no one holds him accountable for it, even though it is super fucked up if you really think about it. Roy basically abuses his power as his coach to humiliate Jamie - it is childish enough that at that time he probably has ignored Jamie for weeks. Roy is a grown-ass man, like 14 years older than Jamie, and really shouldn't be acting so goddamn immature.

Anyways, when Jamie realizes what's happening, that Roy looked through him and is mocking him, he still begrudgingly plays along, since he truly wants Roy's help. And after "Man City" it just hurts watching the scene, since being treated like this must be something Jamie is painfully used to. And the way Roy gradually gets closer to Jamie, stepping into his personal space is—while being different in tone and overall demeanor—still eerily similar to the way James Tartt sr gets into Jamie's face in "Man City".

(And I'm pretty sure that James Tartt sr called him more than once a pussy for caring about his looks, since he probably sees it as soft and unmanly. And probably gay. Since vanity is a frequent trait used to queer code characters, but that is a whole different conversation.)

And when Jamie gets rightfully pissed and yells at Roy, Roy tries to initiate a physical fight (again: the same way James Tartt sr shoved Jamie—it reminds me of the parallel between Ted yelling at Jamie in "Two Aces" and James Tartt sr yelling at Jamie in "The Hope That Kills You". That has to be a deliberate choice!).

Ted is completely right to tell Roy, that Jamie is the mature one, and Ted doesn't even know what provoked their fight. Roy's audacity to say, that Jamie refuses to stop being an arsehole! ARGH! At no point does Roy acknowledge, that he did wrong and mocked Jamie to get a kick out of it, when Jamie, you know, just wanted to built bridges.

And the whole "Deep down, at your core, you're a prick" line ... Don't even get me started on that.  While Roy didn't know the full extent of the abuse that Jamie suffered through his father, he DID KNOW that Jamie had been acting like a prick because his dad had called him out for being too "soft". That this had been the reason for Jamie to become "tough" and "dominant". But he probably just dismissed it, like everything else hinting at Jamie not being  a complete piece of shit. Roy seems unwilling to change anything about the image he has constructed of Jamie in his head, even though Jamie has obviously changed and everyone else is able to see it.

Only when Roy sees Jamie with his father this image shatters and he sees Jamie for the broken boy he is. He finally has to realize that what he believed about Jamie was wrong. That deep down, at his core, Jamie isn't a prick. And in hindsight he probably realized that what he said and did in "The Signal" was not okay.

And that is why I really need some interaction between them, something, goddammit, where Roy acknowledges he was wrong about Jamie! Because the thing that everyone loves about Roy and Keeley is them admitting to mistakes and being accountable to each other. And so pretty please just let Roy admit his mistakes and be accountable to Jamie too.

Jamie just needs someone to tell him, "the way I treated you wasn't right and I'm sorry. you deserve better. deep down you are a good person." Because he needs positive reenforcement and while his confession to Keeley was about her seeing potential in him becoming a good person, it sounds a lot like he doesn't believe that right now he is already good enough to be loved. That he is worthy of love and respect, now and not at some ominous point in the future.

Now this got longer and more rambling than planned, but I have a very soft spot for one sexy baby.

[melodyalanaroster]

Miracle Romance

"Oh my god." Alana gasped with tears in her eyes. She stood in front of a large mirror and stared at herself. "I finally look like Serenity." She smiled as she left the dressing room and showed herself to Nathaniel. "You look amazing." Nathaniel smiled. Alana began to cry. “For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be like her... And now, even for a few moments... I can be her.” Tears made their way down her face as she smiled. "I guess I have to break your one rule." Nathaniel smiled. "You are not dying your hair black." Alana remarked. "I could wear a wig." Nathaniel replied. “But Nath... We talked about this...” Alana began. "I am not letting anyone else be your Endymion." Nathaniel interjected.

★

Throughout Alana's life, she had made it very clear that Sailor Moon had been a staple to her. It was a staple in the Roster family. By the time Alana reached the point of living in the Black Tower, at least four generations of the family enjoyed it. Including both primary sets of sisters, Margaret and little Ravenna.

She would play pretend with Viktor, Severina and Sam when they were children. She would always be Sailor Moon and Princess Serenity, Viktor was Tuxedo Mask and Prince Endymion, Severina was Sailor Venus and Sam was always Sailor Jupiter. The tree house in Alana's backyard was often the Moon Kingdom and they would frequently save the world. The adventures would always end with the power of love winning and the kids going into the house for a snack.

As the kids reached adolescence, they were forced to stop playing. But, their love of the anime was still prevalent. Alana always kept up with merchandise news and rumors about the release of a second anime. Lynne had made sure that Alana and Sam had their own copies of the manga, original anime and movies. Viktor happily talked about being Endymion to Alana’s Serenity until they were forced to break up. They wanted to continue the fantasy, but circumstance parted them. Severina was always happy to talk to everyone, and toss out ideas for a proper cosplay group, but Sam dampened the idea with the reminder that, as long as Viktor’s and Severina’s fathers remained in control of their lives, they’d never be allowed to do so.

When Lynne moved Alana and Sam to Amouria, things began to change. "She won't shut up about that Nathaniel guy." Viktor growled as he sat down next to Severina. “Viktor, you knew from the day one that you and Mels weren't allowed to be together. She has to find her Endymion." Severina sighed. “But seriously? aunt Lynne moves her and Sam to Amouria and they both immediately find guys they like?” Viktor complained. “You know Mels talks about other guys too. Right now, it could be Castiel, Lysander, Armin or Nathaniel.” Severina tried to make things sound better. “No, it's definitely Nathaniel. She barely mentions the others to me. Mostly about Armin playing games, Castiel being an ass, and Lysander losing his notebook. But she dotes on Nathaniel a lot.” Viktor retorted. Severina sighed. "Viktor... Do you remember what happened to Adonis and Beryl? Their envy got the best of them, they became evil and they died. Please keep a clear head.” She reasoned. "I am not like Adonis and Beryl." Viktor shot. “Viktor, I can't believe I have to be the voice of reason here. Both of our moms made it very clear that aunt Lynne, Mels and Sam have more freedom than we do. They're not blue bloods. They have to find their miracle elsewhere... Although, you and I will probably end up being paired together in an arranged marriage set up by our fathers.” She explained. Viktor thought for a couple of minutes and sighed. "I just thought..." 

The first time Nathaniel ever went into Alana's room, he instantly noticed her Sailor Moon dolls. "They're really hard to find these days... And Sailor Moon means a lot to me..." She said as she explained what the show meant to her. “It's a connection to my past, my closest friends, and my family.” She smiled. Nathaniel looked puzzled for a bit, then smiled. "That's really sweet.". He smiled. He noticed a picture of her, Sam, Severina and Viktor on a shelf and picked it up. “You all look like you’re having so much fun.” He mused. “Yeah... That’s the only time we’ve ever been able to dress up.” Alana sighed, wistfully. The kids were in makeshift Sailor Scout uniforms. Their hair wasn’t perfect, and Viktor’s tux didn’t fit right, but they didn’t care. The photo had been taken a few weeks before Cosima Chevalier’s death, and was one of the last happy memories they had as a group. “Its cute.” Nathaniel chuckled as he looked at her lovingly.

When her mother went into the hospital, Nate arranged it to where Alana and Lynne could sit and watch whatever they wanted in the room. Lynne suggested marathoning Sailor Moon. The days in the hospital weren't as bad when they watched the show and Lynne stayed stable, but there were days where not even fighting evil by moonlight could save the day. But, that didn't keep them from trying. It didn't take them long to get through all five seasons and three movies of the original anime. “I heard they're making a second anime that's supposed to be closer to the manga!” Alana attempted to be cheery. She was sure that she, Severina and Sam had told her about Crystal, but she really couldn’t think of anything positive to say.  “That's lovely! Do you know when it's set to come out?” Lynne asked. “I have no idea. I'm sure Toei will update us when they can!” Alana replied. “I hope its soon.” Lynne smiled. Suddenly, Lynne began coughing and her monitors started to go off. “NURSE! HELP!” Alana cried.

Even when Sam and Alana fought so badly that the Military and RDR felt it was necessary to create a treaty between the two organizations to prevent the sisters from ever being enemies again, it was actually their love of Sailor Moon that truly began to bring them together again. Severina had gotten wind of the fight and forced the girls to go to her house. “OW! RINI! YOU'RE HURTING MY EAR!” Alana whined. “Seriously! What the hell?” Sam whined. “I don't care if I'm hurting you two! This kind of fighting is unacceptable! You two are sisters and you know that this behavior will tear the family apart! I won't allow that!" Severina began to cry as she lead the sisters to her home theater. "What's all this?" Alana asked. "You've forced my hand, so I'm pulling out the big guns!" Severina cried as she grabbed a remote and turned on the screen. Sam and Alana looked at the menu then at each other. "Go figure." Sam grinned. "Of course." Alana grinned. The menu on the screen was the DVD menu to Sailor Moon R: The Promise Of The Rose. By the time the song “The Power Of Love” was playing, tears were streaming down the sisters' faces. "Mels." Sam began to choke. "Sam." Alana's voice wavered. They looked at each other, sadness and regret in their eyes. “Mels... I’m s-so s-sorry f-for what I-I said..” Sam sniffled. “I’m s-sorry t-too S-Sami...” Alana blubbered as she hugged Sam. “I love you.” Sam muttered as she held onto her sister. “I love you too.” Alana murmured. 

When Death’s Domain was getting set up, Alana dedicated a whole room to the series. “You’re seriously going to have an entire room dedicated to Sailor Moon?” Derek had asked. “Yes. Its going to have shelves for merch, posters, and a couch to relax on.” Alana mused. “Melody can have whatever she wants for her apartment. And, if it helps her destress, I most definitely approve.” The  Red Death announced. “Well, the majority of my collection will be in there. There’s going to be something Sailor Moon related in every room.” Alana smiled. “Of course there will be.” Derek facepalmed. “I’m not apologizing. I love Sailor Moon and I wanna showcase it in my home.” Alana laughed. “And I’m sure you’re going to do nothing but post about your collection for a while.” Derek rolled his eyes. “Obviously. Moonies have a good presence online.” Alana mused. “I thought “Moonies” were people who followed the Unification Church?” The Red Death inquired. “Yeah, they are called that, but Sailor Moon fans are also called “Moonies”. I know, in certain circles, I have to be sure to differentiate... But, its what we’re called.” Alana explained as she shrugged her shoulders. The room ended up becoming a paradise for fans of the series. Shelves filled with various collectibles, a couch decorated with two throw pillows and a blanket, a coffee table with two sets of coasters, a large rug, framed posters, plushies, moon and star lights along the walls and showering down the window and a tv mounted on one wall. In contrast to the vast majority of Death’s Domain, the room was an explosion of bright colors.

★

Nathaniel stepped into the restroom for a few minutes. Alana watched the door in anticipation. When he came out, he was running his hands along the circumference of the black wig, making sure it was in its proper place. The thought of how similar he looked to Viktor shot through her mind. She did her best to suppress that thought. "You don't even like cosplay..." She muttered as she smiled. "You do so much for me, I don't mind doing this for you." He grinned. "Nathaniel! I love you!” She cried as she wrapped her arms around him. “I knew I was going to see Princess Serenity, I didn't know Prince Endymion would be with her!” someone called from behind them. They turned around and saw Sam leaning in the doorway. “Sam! I look just like her!” Alana cried. "I wonder if I can get Ken to be Nephrite." Sam commented. “I'm sure he would be if you asked him. You two would be the perfect Jupiter and Nephrite!” Alana beamed. “I didn't know this was turning into a full on cosplay group!” Ken laughed as he walked up behind Sam. "Why not?" Sam asked. "I'm not sure Viktor would appreciate being Kunzite." Alana remarked. “He'd have to get used to it. Since Nathaniel is Endymion, that demotes Viktor to Kunzite.” Sam stated. "Right because when you guys were kids, Viktor was always Endymion." Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Viktor has had years to accept his position in my sister's life. If he doesn't accept it, it will not end well for him.” Sam replied. "Do you think he will?" Nathaniel asked. "If he truly cares about her, he will." Sam nodded. “Viktor has known for years that our time ended long ago. Accepting his new position is painful for him, but he is well aware of the fact that it's something that he must do.” Alana explained.

A few minutes later, Renee walked into the room. “You both look magnificent! The girls and I have gotten a backdrop ready, would you two mind taking a few pictures?” She beamed. Alana smiled and turned to Nathaniel, a very hopeful look on her face. "Would you be okay with that?" She asked. Nathaniel nodded. "Sure." He grinned. They followed Renee into a room. "Oh my god! You two look utterly amazing!”, “You look beautiful Mels! Nathaniel, you look so handsome!”, “True Moon and Earth royalty!” the other girls cooed when they saw them. “I think we should do a cosplay group. I'm Jupiter and Rini will be Venus.” Sam commented when she walked in. "I volunteer to be Mercury!" Renee cheered. "I'll be Mars." Lyra smiled. "I'll be Pluto." Veronica beamed. "I don't mind being Saturn." Nora suggested. "I wonder if we could get Lucy and Noelle to be Uranus and Neptune." Sam pondered. "We could also see about getting Ravenna to be Chibi Moon." Alana proposed. “I think that would be fantastic. Who would be the rest of the Shitennou?” Lyra asked. "I could see if Armin could be Jadeite." Alana thought out loud. "Are we really setting up a cosplay group?" Nathaniel asked. Sam looked at Nath, as if he had said something really stupid. "Do you not realize how highly rated Sailor Moon cosplay groups are?" She asked. Nathaniel shook his head. “Sailor Moon cosplay groups are some of the most elite cosplayers in the anime world. Sailor Moon being one of the most iconic anime in history, it is instantly recognizable. The cosplayers take some of the most beautiful pictures, make some of the coolest videos, and even do events. They may not be unionized like Star Wars' 501st Legion, but they come together and coalesce with great ease whenever they recognize each other. Children who recognize them run up to them the same way that they do with superheroes, and typically, they are nice to them. It is a sisterhood of love and justice.” Sam explained. "Not to mention how fun it would be to finally be in one." Alana cooed. “We'd still need Zoisite.” Veronica stated. "I wonder if Derek could be him." Nora pondered. “Uh, guys? Can we please get to the photoshoot?” Renee asked impatiently. 

After posting for photos for what felt like an eternity, Nathaniel and Alana went into the changing room to get out of their cosplays. "You do look really beautiful in that." Nathaniel smiled as he took the black wig off. Alana blushed. "Do you really think so?" She asked nervously. “Of course. You look magnificent.” He blushed as he walked over to her and kissed her. “Thank you for doing this my love. It means the world to me.” Tears came to Alana's eyes as she spoke. “I love you my Melody.” Nathaniel cooed as he wiped a tear from her cheek. “I love you so much Nathaniel!” She mused as she threw her arms around him.

★

A few weeks later, in the early hours of the morning, several cars arrived at an old castle in the country. “This place looks amazing! Perfect for our photo shoot!” Alana cheered as she got out of the car. “Welcome to the Astarian Royal Palace Lady Melody!” A woman with long brown hair, sunglasses and wearing a knee length blue dress beamed as she walked up to them. “Mrs. Reynard, I presume?” Alana asked as she shook the woman's hand. “Yes ma'am. We spoke over the phone.” the woman smiled. “You are fully aware as to why we need the palace today. Am I correct?” Alana inquired. “Yes. For your little photoshoot. Cosplay, I believe.” Mrs. Reynard replied. “Yes. Sailor Moon. Its important the palace be the backdrop to this shoot.” Alana stated. “The photographer will be here in a few minutes to set up. They'll need time.” Mrs. Reynard explained. “That's fine. We need time to prepare.” Alana smiled.

After a couple of hours, the members of the group began to step out of their respective preparation rooms and into a lounge. Lynne Roster as Queen Serenity, Sam as Sailor Jupiter, Severina as Sailor Venus, Renee as Sailor Mercury, Lyra as Sailor Mars, Noelle as Sailor Uranus, Lucy as Sailor Neptune, Nora as Sailor Saturn, Veronica as Sailor Pluto, Ravenna as Small Lady Serenity, Viktor as Kunzite, Ken as Nephrite, Armin as Jadeite, Derek as Zoisite, Nathaniel as Prince Endymion and Alana as Princess Serenity. When the entire group was gathered in the lounge, tears filled Alana's eyes. “It's so beautiful!” she happily cried out. “Awe! Mels!” Severina cheered as she hugged Alana. “This was a fantastic idea!” Lynne beamed. "How long do we all need to wear this?" Armin asked, slightly uncomfortable. “Just a few hours. We're gonna get a TON of shots! ” someone replied as they walked up. It was a young woman with short platinum blonde hair, bright green eyes, and pale skin. She wore black pants, a white button up top and a deep blue beret. "You all look so regal!" She cheered. “Alright everyone, let me introduce you to you Catarina. She's a friend of mine from boarding school. She's the photographer I told you guys about!” Severina introduced. “Hello everyone! It is an absolute pleasure to meet you all!” Catherine bowed. ” Severina introduced. “Hello everyone! It is an absolute pleasure to meet you all!” Catherine bowed.

The photoshoot took several hours, and took place at various locations within the castle grounds. Lynne insisted on at least one family shot with Sam and Alana, and one with Sam, Alana, Severina, Ravenna, Ken, Nathaniel, and Viktor. “This is odd. I don't quite know the anime, but those characters aren't actually family, aren't they?” Catarina asked, curiously. “Not exactly... I mean, Queen Serenity, Princess Serenity, and Small Lady Serenity are three generations of lunar royalty, and Prince Endymion is Princess Serenity's husband and Sailor Chibi Moon's father... But, this shot isn't about the show's family. It's about their family.” Lyra explained. “Oh. That's sweet!” Catarina smiled. Alana insisted each “couple” got their own picture. Viktor wasn't too happy that his couldn't be with Alana, but he didn't mind posing with Severina. Kentin was very happy to have a romantic pose with Sam. "Nephrite and Jupiter look so fantastic!" Renee cheered. “Are you kidding? I've been wanting to do this set for a long time!” Sam beamed. “My favorite part of all of this. I hate this wig, but being your knight is worth it.” Ken mused as he looked at Sam lovingly. "This is awkward." Derek rolled his eyes when he and Renee had their turn. "Oh grow up!" Renee snapped. "Derek... You know what happens when Renee gets mad!" Alana laughed. “Yeah... She gets pretty scary.” Derek sighed. Everyone laughed as Renee forced Derek into a somewhat romantic pose. "But this is so awkward!" Derek whined. "Just do it!" Renee demanded. When their part of the shoot ended, Derek sat down and shot back a bottle of water. “That was weird. "Lyra, Armin, you're up!" Alana cheered. “Now this will be interesting! ” Ken chuckled. “And in Dragon Ball references Armin! Toei may own both franchises, but now is not the time to try to mix the two!” Sam ordered. “Awe come on! That takes part of the fun out of it!” Armin whined. “Armin, if we were doing a smaller photoshoot, I wouldn't mind a few “fun” shots. So please be more serious.” Alana urgent. "Fine." Armin sighed as he and Lyra took their places in front of the camera. 

“God that was exhausting! Who'd have thought that Cosplay would be THAT much work?” Nathaniel whined he crashed onto the living room couch at Death's Domain. "If you had cosplayed as the Winter Soldier when Armin and I cosplayed as Captain America and Black Widow at that Marvel Exhibition in High School, you would have known, first hand, A LOT sooner!" Alana shot as she crashed down next to him. "You still won't let me live that down?" He asked. "Nope." She chuckled. "Why not?" He asked. “Because Armin and I worked our asses off to do our characters justice and we were hoping you would join in on the fun. Especially considering how Natasha and Bucky get together in the comics several times, so it would have been a cute “couple's cosplay” for you and me. Not to mention how cosplay is more than just “wearing a costume”. When someone properly cosplays, they also wish to play the character, even for just a day. They temporarily escape reality and enter the one the character they're cosplaying as resides in. Weeks, months, and even years are spent building props and even hand making the items and outfits. There is a lot of blood, sweat and tears that go into it!” She explained. "I know you and Armin love it, but I don't think I could do it as often as you want to." Nathaniel sighed. “I get that. Its not for everybody. But, I'm thankful you did it for me.” Alana Mused. “I love you Alana. You always do so much for me... And it has been a long time since I've been the "prince" to your "princess." He grinned. "And I'm sure rubbing it Viktor's face added to your enjoyment.” She chuckled. "That did make it a bit more fun." He smirked. "I really wish you wouldn't antagonize him." She sighed. over you and find someone else. It's the same with Castiel. You're not going to be with him, so he needs to quit pining." He shot. "Yes, but with Castiel, you two have reached a mutual agreement, and he has angered me in such a way that I spat that truth with him." She chimed in. "Which makes the situation with Viktor worse. had your family and Severina telling him for years... Yet he insists." He huffed as he rolled his eyes. "Despite that, he is still one of my best and oldest friends. We were raised together and are still like family. Can you at least try to play nice with him?" She requested. Nathaniel looked at her annoyed. "Please! Pretty please! My sweet Endymion…” Alana begged as she playfully batted her eyes. He thought for a minute and exhaled. “Fine. ” He sighed. "Thank you." She mused. “But if he oversteps the boundaries that you and I put in place, I won't be so kind.” He stated. She cuddled up next to him and kissed his cheek. "I love you Nathaniel." She cooed. He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. "I love you too Alana."

★

Several weeks later, after the images from the photoshoot had been posted and gone viral, an idea came to Severina's mind. She turned to Alana and Sam and smiled. "What?" Sam asked. “What if we did a cosplay concert?!” Severina cheered. “Nope. I'm not singing.” Alana stated. “PLEASE! We could choose a song from Sailor Moon and singing it at a convention!” Severina urged. “Really? What song would we even do?” Sam asked. “What about “Moon Effect”? It's sung by all of the scouts!” Severina cheered. “Please no. I don't sing.” Alana begged. "But, you wouldn't be alone... And we can't do it without our Sailor Moon!" Sam sneered. “Honey... You're such a beautiful singer! Please!!!!” Severina pleaded. “No…” Alana muttered. “Damn it Mels! Just do it! We all know that you sing when you're alone! On top of that, Nath, Rini, Viktor, Mom and I have all been telling you for years that we all think your singing is beautiful! So, just do it!” Sam snapped. "Don't forget how your teammates think so too." Severina added. Alana thought for a few minutes and huffed. “Fine. I'll do it.” She sighed. “Huzzah! Let's do it at Comic Con!” Sam cheered. "No! That’s too big a venue!" Alana pleaded "That's why it should be done there! You'll get over your stage fright on one of the biggest stages on the Convention Circuit!" Sam explained. "My babies singing a Sailor Moon song in full cosplay? I'd love to help you with it!" Lynne cheered as she walked up to them. "Fantastic! We'll make it a family project!" Severina smiled. Alana looked around at the other women, thought for a few minutes, sighed, and sheepishly grinned. “I guess the Roster Family women are putting on a show!”

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

Words cannot describe how badly I've wanted to write something Sailor Moon related to my story... 

Sailor Moon means a lot to me... It was my mom’s and my “thing”. No matter how much we fought, argued, and went at each other’s throats, we always bonded over the series. The first and last time I watched it in it’s entirety was with her just before her disease started taking its hold. She was the one who got me my first bits of merch, who was always happy to talk to me about it. The last Christmas gift I got her was a blanket with all the scouts on it, and she gave me plushies of Luna and Artemis. When mom died, Sailor Moon came to mean so much more to me. My aunt made me pendants with her ashes in them that look like the Legendary Silver Crystal, I got Pluto’s Garnet Rod tattooed on my back, and I became more adamant about collecting items. Each time I get a new item, I feel closer to her... There are times where I’ll even burst into tears because of Sailor Moon making me think of her....

Yes, I used the character sprite of Nathaniel that I edited from the Dark Chocolate Steward to make him look more like Endymion. I made his hair black, and edited his rings and earrings out.

Little tip... The bit about Adonis won't make sense unless you've read the Codename Sailor V manga.... If you’re not in the mood to read it, Adonis was a lowly Venusian soldier who was in love with his princess (Venus). Venus fell in love with Kunzite instead of him. He found her on Earth and cursed her to never be able to have love again, thus freeing more of her time up to focus on her duty as the leader of Princess Serenity’s Sailor Guardians.

This was originally going to be a Valentine's Day special for 2020. Then 2020 became the dumpster fire that it was and my real life needed more of my attention....

The majority of this does take place during the first year between University Life and Love Life. Before Nath and Alana go on their globe trotting adventure. The flashback section takes place at various points in time.

Credit goes to:

Naoko Takeuchi for Sailor Moon

@candysweetposts for the Princess Serenity Pack (seriously, thank you for going through with my request!)

@chinomiko and Beemoov for My Candy Love

[evilwickedme]

ok so to sum up my feelings for leverage: redemption, season 1(a): (long post warning, there’s a tl;dr at the end)

I knew that Hardison wouldn’t be in most of the season due to Aldis Hodge being a busy bee nowadays, but I didn’t realize that meant he’d only be around for the first two episodes. He was sorely missed, not only because of my attachment to him, but also because he’s usually the grounding factor in the group dynamic, and his role as info guy and tech guy was split evenly between two characters who had their own issues.

That said, Hardison is absolutely a highlight of the two episodes he’s in. his speech about redemption was everything I could’ve hoped for (plus, more evidence for the Jewish!Hardison pile...). I wish we’d gotten to see more of his dynamic with Breanna because what we saw was funny and sweet and we don’t generally get to see Hardison taking care of somebody who so desperately needs taking care of. I hope that Aldis Hodge is around for more episodes in 1(b), because what we’re left with feels a little hollow.

Sticking to original leverage characters for now, for the most part the leverage crew still felt true to the original series as characters, even if the show itself was a little bit confused at times. The actors understand their characters and embody them so well that I think one could give them the trashiest script ever and they’d still sell it. Sophie is a particular focus in 1(a) because of Nate’s death, and she’s particularly well written as a result.

That said, I’m super bitter that we saw little to no mastermind!Parker. Parker’s character being given the mastermind role was a big deal and it feels like they’re walking it back because they feel uncomfortable with it. It is eventually given an in-text excuse, but literally in the last episode, and it was not a particularly convincing reason, and in fact contradicted moments from previous episodes (Sophie leaving for a client meeting and ignoring Parker in ep3 comes to mind). It’s frustrating, it makes the end of the original leverage feel pointless, and letting Parker make a decision once in a while is not the same thing at all. The original series repeatedly showed us that while everyone in the team had their strengths, Parker works problems and solves them in unique, interesting ways, and other characters’ days in the limelight tended to be comedic or even failures. It’s a broken promise, and a pretty major broken promise at that.

On a more positive note, Parker’s dynamic with literally everyone was fantastic. She’s possibly the best written character this season. They’ve taken the autism out of the subtext and into the text (although obviously still undiagnosed), and given her coping mechanisms that were taken seriously in the text even when they were played for laughs, which I appreciated. Her attempts to mentor Breanna were sweet, her friendship with Sophie was electric and at times (CRIMES) hilarious, and as usual, she has a fantastic dynamic with Eliot that makes my heart burst. If you don’t think they’re romantically involved, at least acknowledge there’s a life partnership here. They’ve spent the last decade together.

(We’ll get to Harry.)

Eliot isn’t given much arc-wise, which is frustrating since he’s my favorite. He’s being presented as the goal at the end of a redemption arc, ie to keep working at it every day until your soul heals or whatever, and it doesn’t reflect the message they’re trying to convey via Hardison’s speech and our two new characters. He’s got his moments, but I think they under utilized his potential.

Breanna!!! Breanna’s my new favorite, except for Eliot. She’s hilarious, she’s insecure, she’s nerdy and excited in a way that’s similar to Hardison but still distinct in its inherent teenage-girl-ness and I LOVE IT. Unlike the previous series, where Hardison’s “age of the geek” was often a joke played on Hardison, we’re at the point where Eliot and Parker are both right there with him, and so they accept and even appreciate Breanna’s nerdiness. Also, canon gay character? In YOUR Leverage? It’s more likely than you think.

(No, I never thought they’d make ot3 canon on screen. I hoped, but I didn’t think it would actually happen.)

I think Breanna’s the character that will be the most interesting to see grow. She’s got a lot of potential and a list of crimes a mile long (or more). I adore her with all my heart. I want to see her tiktok account.

Harry. Oh, Harry.

It took me a while, but I do like Harry. It took a while, because the narrative positioned him at the same level as Nate back in episode 1 of original Leverage. But in episode 1 we didn’t know the other characters. We had Nate as the POV character, and so we cared about him because we were seeing the world through his eyes. (This is TV Studies 101. I know this, because I took TV Studies 101 in 2019.) In Leverage: Redemption, we no longer have a POV character, for several reasons:

Nate, previously the POV character, is dead.

As it is, by mid-season 3 of leverage Nate was no longer a POV character. This is, coincidentally, the point where the leverage writers realized they had four other characters in the main cast they could do something with, and in-universe, Nate accepted that he was a thief, not a special Good Man.

Sophie is sort of a POV character for the first episode of the revival, but only for the first few minutes. Afterwards, the series settles into the groove of seasons 3-5, i.e., the entire crew is our POV. We know our crew, and we love them as is.

Narratively, however, Redemption insists on positing Harry as the POV character, because it is his redemption we are pursuing most vehemently. And I think they really relied on us already knowing the actor - I’ve never seen him in anything before, so to me he was a completely fresh face and they put almost no effort into selling him to me. Beyond being competent and consistently mildly baffled by the antics of the leverage crew, I honestly don’t know who this man is by the end of EIGHT episodes with him. I have a much better handle on Breanna by the end of 1(a), and I can tell you I knew all five of the original leverage crew better by the end of the first episode of the original series than I do Harry. What’s the name of his daughter, John Rogers. Is he still married. How old is the daughter. Why is none of this worth mentioning. Give him a sense of humor that isn’t reacting to other people’s shenanigans. I’m so frustrated. It’s bad writing.

I did manage to grow to like Harry by the end, but I’m pretty sure this is down to Noah Wyle’s charismatic portrayal of an under-developed character, at least partially. And I never stopped being frustrated at not knowing who this man is at all.

The two highlights of the season are undoubtedly episodes five and six. Episode five was the first time I felt like the episode was more than a collection of good moments between the main cast and mediocre moments between the main cast and also the main plot. The issues with pacing and tone that I suffered through for most of the season were mostly non-existent in ep5 and 6, and at least in episode 5 I attribute that to the pared down cast. They had time to focus not only on our actual characters - Sophie, Parker, Breanna - but also on the case. This is the only client from 1(a) I am going to remember next week without googling it first, mark my words.

Episode six worked for the exact opposite reason - it completely disregarded the client and plot and immersed itself in the characters. Breanna gets a moment to shine, but everybody else gets their bits and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the script that was most fun to write. The characters felt natural, real, and captured the found-family dynamic that’s been missing all season for the first time.

While episode 2 is the weakest episode, I don’t actually have much to say about it. I am disappointed in episode 8. For a mid-season finale, I really expected them to do something. Instead, it was an episode about Nate Ford that copped out of being about Nate Ford (both with fake-Nate and with the new version of him being relayed to us). I would have told the writers to give that energy back to episode 1 and write an episode that’s about anybody who isn’t Harry, oh my God. I know I said I grew to like him but so many episodes were about Harry. He’s the newbie! Why didn’t Hardison get an episode that was actually about him, considering he was only around for two episodes? Why does Eliot have to be the butt of the joke when the theme of the series should directly tie back to him in a much more meaningful way? The last episode parodies their own tagline by saying Eliot isn’t just a hitter, but it deftly avoids noticing that they’ve turned him into nothing more than very muscly comic relief, including in that very episode!

Also, I hated the Marshal. Eliot actively looked uncomfortable around her.

tl;dr

The season took a while, that’s definitely true. But it did find its footing eventually, and by the halfway mark of 1(a) it finally felt cohesive again. The characters were played fantastically even when they weren’t well-written, and if nothing else, the humor landed every time. It still has its kinks and problems to work out, but if you look at it as a brand new show rather than a continuation of one that went off the air over eight years ago, it’s actually doing rather well. I’m choosing to judge it in both lights - according to its own standards, it establishes its identity in episode five; according to Leverage standards, it establishes its connection to its roots in episode six. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed 1(a), and continue to have high hopes for 1(b).

fic writing will commence in three, two, one...

[hesherehesthere]

I’ve come up with a few more points and I’m back with more thoughts.

Nate spitting on himself is something I somehow didn’t touch on in my original post. Nate doesn’t even know how to properly motivate himself without quite literally spitting in his own face; it only makes sense that he wouldn’t be amazing at motivating others either. At times, I do believe that he is acting with the genuine intent to motivate; despite his descent into bullying, I still quite like the scene in 1x7, where he motivates the team by roasting them. Obviously, he does end up toeing the line (and eventually vaulting over said line), but I don’t think his intentions were always 100% cruel. This obviously doesn’t excuse the fact that he often got an ego boost from tearing others down (particularly people that were rude to him in the past and people like Will, who are in a similar position to where he was in the past), but he is actually still quite insecure and timid in his approach to his bullying.

He specifically targets Colin, despite the fact that Jamie and Isaac were just as mean to him. I do think this has something to do with insecurity, because on some level he still doesn’t believe that he can stand up to them. He thinks that Colin (and Will) are easy targets, because they are not “crucial” to the team, at least in his eyes, and they aren’t as physically intimidating. He is still deeply insecure, and gains confidence by tearing people down.

In contrast, Roy gains confidence by building people up. This is show consistently through all three seasons. It is shown with Isaac in 2x5, in which he explicitly says as much in his speech when he’s leaving his pundit job, as well as with Jamie, both in seasons 2 and 3. In 2x6, when Jamie is following Roy’s advice, being a prick and being an actively better player because of it, Roy clearly gets enjoyment out of it. He tries to keep a straight face and pretend he doesn’t, but he obviously enjoys it. This also applies to his personal training with Jamie. It is also shown in S1 a few times; a scene that comes to mind is when Roy helps Sam up and gives him advice on how to cater to the crowd. Building people up- helping them grow and become better- makes him feel useful and needed, which soothes some of his insecurities (if he’s not Roy Kent the footballer, then who is he? What good is he? What’s the point?).

Roy cares about things incredibly deeply. He obviously struggles to express these emotions at times, particularly with words. If he gives himself time to think things through, he can be quite articulate, but it takes him time to get there (i.e having to write multiple drafts of what hr wanted to say to Keeley in 3x10). I think he sometimes cares more than he is comfortable caring. When he does feel those emotions, he often doesn’t know what to do with them, and he tends to express them as anger (which contributes to my autistic Roy Kent manifesto). He carried around an article Trent wrote for 20+ years; it would be crazy to say he’s not insecure or doesn’t care what people think of him. As I mentioned in my original post though, Roy tends to internalize, where Nate takes his insecurity out on others. Despite carrying that article for so long, Keeley asks him explicitly “since when do you care what people think?”. I think it’s safe to say he never told her about it. He thinks of his emotions and his insecurities as his burden to bear, where Nate thinks of them as everyone else’s problem.

This is going to be a long post, and probably all over the place, but I've been really fixated on Roy and Nate as parallels and contrasts to one another, and I have a lot of thoughts.

This rant is particularly going to be about the ways in which Nate and Roy's masculinity presents, how both of them are men with severe insecurities that manifest in different ways, as well as the ways in which Nate's jealousy of Roy contributes to his arc.

When I first saw Ted Lasso, I initially interpreted Nate's arc as being a combination of toxic masculinity merging with the fact that Twitter is fucking poison for your brain. I do think that's part of it, but I think there's a lot more to it as well. With that being said, that's as good a place as any to start.

In my mind, Nate is essentially the embodiment of toxic fragile masculinity, where Roy is more representative of (mostly) non-toxic strong masculinity. Roy's insecurities are not particularly focused on his masculinity. He doesn't care about Keeley gossiping about him until he realizes she's been talking about something he's insecure about, and he hangs out with older women and drag queens, without any worries about how that reflects on him as a man. Roy's insecurities revolve much more around the end of his career and not knowing who he is as a person, with a healthy dose of wondering if he's a bad person or fundamentally unlovable. Roy is masculine in a very traditional kind of way. However, he uses that masculinity to help other people (for example, both Sam and Nate in S1), unlike Nate, who, particularly in S2 onward, comes across as less masculine and more bully.

Roy is also more internal and self destructive, while Nate is more external and lashes out at others as a result of his insecurities.

To continue along thought, I think it's important to note that Roy has always been a big defender of Nate. It is made extremely clear that Roy has never been particularly fond of the way that people (notably Jamie, Isaac and Colin) treat Nate in S1, but it goes beyond that. Roy is also shown to consistently go out of his way to acknowledge, congratulate, and give Nate credit for things, even after he's come on as a coach in S2. All throughout S2, there are a number of different moments where Roy will go to Nate to hug or cheer with him, Roy acknowledges Nate with a little head nod when he comes back on as a coach in 2x5, as well as several verbal scenes (Roy going to Nate's office to congratulate him on his park the bus play, Roy telling Rebecca "This has nothing to do with me, this was all Nate", etc).

A bit of an aside, but this also seems like a testament to the fact that Roy isn't big on grudges, because despite all the reasons he should be disgruntled, he's still more than okay with letting Nate come back to Richmond in S3. "I don't give a fuck. He's great at the shit I suck at." Even after all the fallout, Roy is still acknowledging that Nate is smart, someone he would be willing to work with, and a significant asset to the team.

Roy has always been a big Nate defender, so it hurts that Nate doesn't even seem to see it, particularly into S2, when he has been given more power. Obviously, he does acknowledge and thank Roy in 1x4, but after that point he doesn't seem to think about it much. I think that Nate is essentially blinded by his jealousy of Roy, to the point that he is unable to see his true intentions, because he so desperately wants to be him, or at least be like him.

In 2x5, when Nate is at A Taste of Athens, he laughs at something that Roy says during his pundit stint. He laughs at Roy tearing into Cartrick, specifically when he makes a comment about him pissing his pants. However, it's important to note that Roy was so aggressive in that scene in direct response to Cartrick being overtly sexist, which doesn't seem to be something that Nate particularly acknowledges. I don’t think that Nate agrees with Cartrick by any means, but I also don’t know if it really plays into why he thinks that interaction is funny.

Nate definitely feels personally attacked by Roy's coming back as a coach. This is probably due in part to the fact that he comes back after Ted essentially laughs at him and tells him that he doesn't think that he can help Isaac through his mental block, but that he thinks that Roy can. His insecurities are made worse by being next to Roy, as he feels as though he needs to prove himself.

I think this is supported by the fact that Nate also gets a lot more verbally aggressive after Roy's back, though he was making slow progress in that direction anyways. In some ways it almost feels like he's trying to copy Roy, to compete with him and embody him.

Because of this, I also want to briefly mention the scene where Nate kisses Keeley. I think it is implied throughout the show, as early as S1, that Nate has always liked her, at least a little bit. Keeley is casually touchy and affectionate as a person, and Nate could have interpreted those signals as her (possibly) being into him. Though he clearly regrets kissing her, in the leadup to that scene, he also laughs at Keeley's impression of Roy, where she's gently making fun of him. I think that it could have boosted his ego a bit to hear Roy being put down. I think his jealousy could have combined with that ego boost and played into that scene.

Another thing to mention is the fact that Roy is not particularly threatened by Nate kissing Keeley, where he is threatened by Jamie telling Keeley that he loves her.

Nate is upset about that because he thinks that Roy should be more mad at him, because he is a threat damnit, but I also wonder how much of Roy not being threatened is that he also somewhat considers Nate to be a friend. Though I don't think that Roy is threatened by him, I think it's also clear that he does like Nate, and even respects him. (I think there's also something to be said about the fact that Roy is more threatened by Jamie, not because he's more of a man than Nate, but because he and Keeley have a history, but that's a whole other tangent that I won't go on today).

I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now; sorry if this post didn't make any sense, I mostly wrote it out to try and organize my own thoughts. If someone else gets something out of it, that would be a great bonus.

[haileyyanneupton]

❄ small - one chicago au ❄

Hailey Upton and Adam Ruzek have been friends for as long as they can remember. When Hailey changes schools to be with Adam in her junior year, she’s introduced to a new group of people who feel strangely like home.

pairings: jay halstead x hailey upton adam ruzek x kim burgess kevin atwater x vanessa rojas kelly severide x stella kidd

warnings (chapter specific): swearing

masterlist | series masterlist

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄

❄ four ❄

A little over a week had passed since Jay and Hailey had gone out for coffee and pancakes to work on their assignment, and each of them had decided that they would keep their poems a secret from each other until they had to present it to the class. Secretly, it was because Hailey hadn’t actually started the poem and had nothing to show him — meanwhile, Jay had already worked through at least half. It wasn’t a bad thing; she just hadn’t been able to find the right way to get it down on paper yet. Her plan was to keep collecting as much as she could about her literature partner; the group milkshake date seeming like a relatively good way to do so.

“Yo Upton, Rojas! Are you two coming, or are you just going to keep dragging your feet like slow pokes?” Stella called out to the two as they trailed a few steps behind her and Kim.

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” Vanessa rolled her eyes as she tutted. “Calm your farm, Kidd.”

Hailey only chuckled as the Stella and Vanessa both fought for the passenger seat of Kim’s car, Hailey not minding the back as she climbed in and waited for someone to accompany her. Eventually it ended up being Stella who called heads on a coin that came up tails, leaving her to take the seat beside the blonde.

The girls had all gone in Kim’s car while the guys went in Adam’s, all driving to the same place not too far from their school. It was a Wednesday afternoon and the upperclassmen had been given the afternoon off, allowing the group to finally go out as Adam had suggested a few weeks previously. Hailey’s mouth was already watering at the prospect of a banana milkshake — it was the only banana flavoured thing in the entire world that she liked. She had been buzzing with happiness all day as she awaited twelve o’clock to come; the second it did, she had almost launched herself out of her seat in pre-calculus.

The drive to the milkshake parlour was short, but nonetheless fun. With Fifth Harmony blaring from the radio (courtesy of Kim), the words to Dope were being shouted by all four girls as they pulled up in the parking lot, finding a space right beside Adam’s car as they all jumped out and raced inside where the boys had saved them all a table.

"Look what the cat dragged in," Kelly teased, earning a roll of the eyes from both Stella and Vanessa. "Took you all long enough. Did the car break down or something?"

"We were enjoying our drive here and listening to music, thank you very much."

"And?"

"And. . . we got stuck behind a railway crossing."

"Knew it," Kelly smirked, a mischievous look in his eye as the girls all headed to the counter to place their orders.

As Kim and Stella debated which flavour they would get, Hailey couldn’t help but notice the way that Vanessa was awkwardly hanging back in an empty space smack bang between the front counter and the table that the boys were sitting at. Everybody else seemed blind to it — but Hailey was perceptive. She could see the way that Vanessa studied her feet as if they were the most interesting things in the world, the way she tried to retreat without anybody noticing. Although Hailey didn’t know why, she wasn’t about to let it go unaddressed.

“Hey.” Hailey’s voice was only loud enough for Vanessa to hear as to took a step towards her. “You not getting a milkshake, V?”

Vanessa frowned ever so slightly, her eyes sad despite the fact that she tried not to let it show. “Nah. I — uh — I don’t really feel like one.”

Hailey knew that wasn’t the reason. There was something else. As she thought back over the day briefly to try and work out what could have upset her friend, it suddenly hit Hailey with as much force as a freight train. She felt almost dumb for not realising it sooner, her heart aching for Vanessa as she glanced back over at the girl.

“You can’t —“

Vanessa silenced the girl with a small nod — one that begged her not to go on about the matter. Vanessa couldn’t afford it.

Before Hailey’s brothers had moved out and gotten jobs, her family had been in a similar situation. Obviously it wasn’t the same — Hailey had never been bounced around foster homes — but regardless, the Upton’s were living paycheck to paycheck. Hand me down clothes were all Hailey knew, whether it be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt from her brother or a Spiderman hoodie from Adam, she was always dressed up in somebody else’s leftovers. She didn’t mind too much about that part, but she could remember the first time that she went to school without lunch. She remembered the first time, the second time, even the third time — after that, it all just blurred together. It all just became the usual for Hailey who at the time, was still in third grade in elementary school. As she grew older, things got even just the slightest bit easier — Adam’s parents would always put an extra sandwich in their son’s lunchbox for Hailey, or they’d send both children with a ten dollar bill to pay for a hot lunch if they wanted. When her brother Nate moved out — he had always been there for his youngest and only sister — things changed for the better, financially. He was making good money as a mechanic. He could afford to pay for Hailey’s tuition at a fancy private school, he could send a hundred dollars or so to Anne to cover the groceries; he even started sending Hailey money so that she could buy herself what she could afford to be a teenager. Was it a lot? No. But did it make the difference? Absolutely.

Glancing down at her wallet, Hailey spied the two twenty dollar bills she had shoved in there that morning before leaving for school, the green paper sitting untouched until she took one into her hand, closing her fingers around it so that nobody else could see it. In one swift movement, her hand dropped down to her side and her fingers became interlaced with Vanessa’s as she sneakily and subtly transferred the money from her hand to the brunette’s, leaving the girl with wide eyes as she snapped her head around to face Hailey.

“I-I. . . You didn’t have to —“

“I know I didn’t have to, but I wanted to.”

The small smile on Vanessa’s face dropped for a second as she looked Hailey dead in the eye. “I’m not a charity case you know. I just. . .”

Her voice trailed off as Hailey squeezed her friends hand lightly.

“I know that, V. I know. And I’m not treating you like one. I’m lucky enough to have people look out for me and lighten the load when I need it — you deserve that too.”

“But I’m not going to be able to pay you back Hailey — you know that right? I don’t have a job and I can’t —“

“Vanessa, that’s not what this is. I don’t want you to pay me back. I just know what it’s like to feel like you’re missing out because of something so shallow as money, and now that I’m in a position where I can make your day a little better, I’d like to do so. God knows you’ve done plenty for me since I showed up.”

“I gave you an apple slice, dude!”

“It’s more than that,” Hailey chuckled lightly, her lips curling upwards as she saw Vanessa stare down at the twenty dollar bill with sparkling eyes. “Besides — you do not want to miss out on one of these milkshakes. They’re literally to die for. I would run through the fiery pits of hell, being tortured by satan himself to get one of these milkshakes.”

Vanessa shot the girl a lopsided smirk. “I dunno, Hails — walking up to the counter sounds like a lot less effort.”

Hailey only rolled her eyes with a grin as Kim and Stella finally stepped away, allowing the two other girls to order their drinks before returning back to the table where they would be bought out to them. Hailey took her usual seat between Vanessa and Jay (even when they weren’t in the art room, apparently their seating arrangement still stayed the same). As their milkshakes began coming out, Jay smirked in Hailey’s direction as she took her first sip of the banana flavoured beverage.

“What?” Hailey quizzed, arching a brow as she crossed her arms across her chest expectantly. “There a problem?”

“No. Just . . . observing.”

“You’re observing my milkshake drinking habits?”

“I’m observing your reaction to ordering the most basic drink on the menu.”

Hailey scoffed, openly laughing in the boy’s face as she turned to face him. “That’s rich coming from you, Halstead. You’re about as basic as they come.”

Jay only chuckled with a shake of his head as Kelly cleared his throat dramatically, calling for the attention to be bought upon him. Stella groaned from his left, her forehead resting against the table. Hailey let a small smile of amusement cross her lips; Stella wasn’t normally one to be embarrassed by Kelly’s antics. In fact, normally she joined in — but today, it was different.

“I have an announcement,” Kelly proclaimed, tapping the end of his fingernail upon his milkshake — Hailey thought he looked like a dork, but she also knew he gave absolutely no fucks. “You all must listen very, very closely!”

“Alright, alright, man. We’re listening. Out with it already!”

Kelly shot a lighthearted glare over at Adam who wore a grin in response.

“After much deliberation, there has been a mutual confession between the wonderful, amazing, beautiful, talented, badass —“ Kelly paused for a second to dodge Stella’s fist which was heading straight towards his groin. “— incredibly intimidating Stella Kidd and I. We — uh — we’re. . . “

“What this dumbass is trying to say is that we’re together.” Stella interrupted Kelly as she lifted her head up from the table ever so slightly, her chin resting upon her hands as everybody else broke out into a grin. “I told him we should tell you guys today, but I didn’t expect for him to make it into some kind of theatrical fucking performance.”

“You should have known better then that, Stell. It’s Kelly we’re talking about. King of Dramatics.”

“Yeah, I’m realising that now.”

Hailey was happy for the new couple, but she wasn’t as invested as she could see everybody else was. Apparently, Stella and Kelly had been making heart eyes at each other since freshman year, the rest of the group waiting for one of them to make a move on the other. Hailey knew there was something between them but figured that they were probably just close like she and Adam were — she couldn’t even begin to count how many times people had assumed that she and the boy she had grown up with were dating. Nonetheless, it became evident that Kelly and Stella were much more comfortable with their secret coming out; their hands fell into each other’s as they laughed alongside one another.

Sitting and watching, observing if you will, something suddenly became very apparent to the girl. It was one of those things that once she saw it, she couldn’t un-see it — the sight bought a small, fond smile to her lips as she stayed silent, simply watching. Well, she was — until Jay interrupted her thoughts.

“What are you staring at?” Jay asked, a small smirk on his face as Hailey leaned back slightly so that she could speak only just loud enough for the boy to hear.

“Do you see what I see?”

“Uhhh . . . ” Jay furrowed his brows slightly as Hailey let out a chuckle, shaking her head.

Without realising it, Hailey inched her way closer to Jay as she pressed her back against the cushioned booth they were in, her shoulder brushing against Jay’s as she grew even quieter. The freckled boy hadn’t seemed to notice either, despite the fact that they were practically sitting on top of each other at that point.

“Look at them all,” Hailey couldn’t help but let out a small snort as one hand rested against her thigh, the other holding her banana milkshake close to her chest. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it earlier.”

“I still have no clue what we’re talking about here, Hailey. Give me something to go off of.”

“Right, right,” Hailey grinned up at Jay sheepishly. “So there’s Kelly and there’s Stella. Totally head over heels for each other, yeah?”

Jay nodded soundlessly, a puzzled expression still plastered upon his features.

“Then there’s Vanessa and Kevin. Now I don’t think they realise it just yet, but they’re totally going to be a thing.”

The boy’s eyes widened in realisation. “Holy shit.”

“Wait, just — just wait . . . ” Hailey held up a finger. “Now — look at Adam and Kim.”

If it were at all possible, Jay’s eyes grew even more as he too became fixated on the scene in front of them, the evidence now slapping him in the face. His mouth hung open wide as the corners of his lips turned upwards into a smile.

“I smell a bet coming on.”

Hailey grinned widely once again, a mischievous look on her face as her and Jay’s eyes locked. “You’re on, Halstead.”

“Twenty bucks says Burgess and Ruzek will get together by the end of the year.”

“Please,” Hailey scoffed lightly, folding her arms over one another before taking a sip of her milkshake. “Thirty says they’ll be together by the end of the month.”

“Ah, so you’re a risktaker.” Jay’s trademark smirk met Hailey’s gaze. “I’ll make sure to make a note of that for my poem.”

“Not a risktaker, per say — I just know Adam is an impatient, idiotic dumbass who can’t help himself.”

The mention of Adam’s name caused the boy in question to snap his head over to the blonde, a scowl etched into his features as he shot a playful glare over at the girl, Hailey not backing down from her words even the slightest bit. Before she knew it, everybody was back to their own conversations with people jumping in and out where they wanted to, leaving Hailey to do what she did best — observe. It wasn’t like there was something she was looking for or trying to understand; Hailey had just always been the kind of person who would sit and listen rather than interject herself into the conversation. She found that she learned a lot more that way — people would often tell you their darkest secrets if you let them do the talking.

She would never admit it, but somehow, her eyes kept finding their way to Jay as if his face was a magnet and they were calling her. She studied every part of him closely, taking note of how the corners of his eyes creased when he laughed, counting the freckles that looked as though they had been methodically scattered across his skin in the most perfect way.  Hailey noticed his little quirks and even jotted a few of them down in the notes app of her phone, like how he tilted his head slightly when he didn’t understand something or was asking a question or the way he would run his tongue his bottom lip when he was thinking of something. Every little thing that made him unique soon compiled into an extensive list that Hailey had saved to her notes, ready to use when she eventually found the right way to complete her own literature assignment.

It wasn’t long before everybody packed back into the two cars, this time the order being switched up and mixed around. Hailey had gone in Adam’s car, because, well — duh — meanwhile, Vanessa switched places with Kelly and Kevin who lived closer to Kim and Stella anyway. While Jay and Adam talked each other’s ears off, Hailey was sat in the back seat with Vanessa who looked absolutely wrecked from their day.

“You look exhausted, you poor thing,” Hailey smiled halfheartedly over at the girl.

“Yeah, I am.” Vanessa yawned tiredly. “I was up half the night studying for that precalc test we have.”

“You’re like, the smartest one in the entire class, dude,” Hailey said, looking at her friend with an incredulous look. “You don’t even need to study!"

“Still doesn’t hurt to make sure I know what I need to know. And to make sure I know that I know what I know so that I can make sure you know what I know.”

“I think I just had an aneurysm trying to understand that.”

Vanessa grinned. “You’re welcome.”

The two girls shared a laugh as Vanessa leaned her up against the headrest behind her. Turning to Hailey slowly, the girl wore a small and gratuitous smile as her hand fell into the blonde haired girl’s hand, earning back her attention with the small yet simple gesture. Vanessa was a very physical person — she loved hugs, she loved holding hands with her friends to show them her love and appreciation — Hailey, however new to the group she was, was no exception.

“Hailey. . . I hope you know how much what you did today meant to me.” Vanessa began, her accent coating her words as her eyes fell to her lap. “I got moved to another foster home on Monday and. . . I know it sounds stupid, but asking for money before the first cheque from the state comes in is a big no no if I want to stay somewhere for longer than half a week."

Vanessa’s voice was low and quiet, only loud enough for the blonde sitting beside her to hear as Hailey’s heart squeezed tightly. She hadn’t missed the giant smile on Vanessa’s face as she was handed her Oreo milkshake, or the way her her mood had completely brightened in giddy, goofy happiness as she bounced around and made fun of Kevin. Hailey, despite her tough exterior, would secretly do anything to make the people she cared about smile. Absolutely anything. Without ever second guessing herself.

“I didn’t want you to be left out.” Hailey’s response was at a matching volume. “Feeling like the outsider all of the time. . . It’s not fun. I get that. That’s why I’m so endlessly grateful to have made such good friends here.”

“You? The outsider? That’s hard to imagine.”

“Three words, V. Three words.”

“Hm?”

“Private girls school.”

“. . . Yeah, say no more."

Everything that Hailey had said was the truth. She knew what it was like to be the outsider, she knew what it was like to feel like the ground beneath you was always shaking and about to give out on you no matter what you did. No amount of duct tape would hold it together, and given the fact that Vanessa had just had to uproot her life — again — Hailey could sympathise with what she was going through despite the fact that she would thankfully never understand it fully.

Hailey sighed lightly as she gave Vanessa’s hand a small squeeze. “I wish you could live with me.”

“Can I?”

Though Vanessa was clearly joking, as seen by the smile playing at her lips and her humorous tone, Hailey really did wish she could bring Vanessa to live with her — perhaps just not at her house. With her father. And her mother, who was always excusing the former’s behaviour. Always.

“I’m not sure you’d like it very much at my house.” The blue eyed girl let out an exhale as she spoke. “There’s a reason I spend so much time at Adam’s house.”

“I get it.” Vanessa’s eyes held sympathy towards Hailey. “But hey. . . we’ve got each other, right? We’ve got these two doofuses in the front seat, we’ve got Stella and Kim and Kelly and Kev. And one day we can all run away together and forge a home in the woods using our very minimal survival skills that would definitely not suffice to stop us getting eaten by a bear or something.”

At the sound of Vanessa addressing him and Jay, Adam turned around from the driver’s seat as he pulled up at a stoplight before directing his words to the girls in the back seat.

“Hey! I was a Cub Scout when I was younger, you know! ” He said, his chest puffing out ever so slightly in pride. "We’d be just fine in the woods."

“Adam, shut the hell up,” Hailey laughed as she looked at him incredulously, rolling her eyes at the boy. “You did Cub Scouts for two months and then you quit when you couldn’t get a single badge because they required you actually putting work into them. All you wanted to do was sit there with a juice box and a cookie.”

“Says the one who got kicked out of Girl Scouts for threatening to set a girl’s hair on fire!”

“She deserved it.”

“She was traumatised!”

“Good. I don’t like her. She tried to steal my backpack."

“It was ten years ago, Hailey.”

“It was my favourite backpack!"

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄

aaaaaa! I apologise if this isn’t great I really struggled trying to write this one I don’t even know why 😂

thank you so much to @ruzek-halstead for proofreading! after writing this for so long I definitely lost the ability to do so, so marcia — you’re a literal lifesaver 🥰

tag list: @ruzek-halstead @lissethsrojas @sammywiths @butterflies44 @upsteadheart @shawnscheeks @puckluck28 @karihighman @thetwit @azu1ang3188 @juu-series @justanotheronechicagofan @stinaax @stayupton @fullwattpadmusictree @anna-justice

ps: if anybody ever wants to be added to the tag list, just let me know! it’s so easily done!

[bosspigeon]

the idealistic things i believed

Pairing: M!Detective/Adam du Mortain

Words:  2723

Summary: After misplacing their detective on one of his rare days off, Unit Bravo track him down to the local park, where they find him engaging in an unexpected activity.

And Adam just finds him engaging ;3c

I will not apologize for that dumb joke. TL;DR I just wanted to write about my big sad goth boy and also Adam’s Intense Denial. EXTREMELY last minute title from “No Sunlight” by Death Cab For Cutie

(Note: in my first post, tumblr seems to have shuffled some paragraphs, so i’m reposting to fix it!!! Love this Fully Functional Website!!!)

“You know, Adam, if you ever leave the Agency, you could probably get a job as a private investigator. Maybe even a bloodhound! Just something to think about.”

When Adam actually deigns to look at him, Felix is grinning, hands tucked into his pockets and chin tipped up. Adam rolls his eyes and sighs heavily.

Nate stifles a chuckle under his humming along to the music drifting from the nearby pavilion, where they now know Detective Priestley to be, thanks to Adam tracking him down.

After‌ ‌working with Arlo (the detective, he forcefully amends) ‌for‌ ‌so‌ ‌many‌ ‌months,‌ ‌Adam‌ ‌is‌ ‌deeply‌ ‌attuned‌ ‌to‌ ‌the‌ ‌scent‌ ‌of‌ ‌him.‌ ‌It‌ ‌is‌ ‌easy‌ ‌enough‌ ‌to‌ ‌find‌ ‌his‌ ‌trail‌ ‌and‌ ‌follow‌ ‌it,‌ ‌which,‌ ‌contrary‌ ‌to‌ ‌Felix’s‌ ‌snide‌ ‌comment,‌ ‌is‌ ‌not‌ ‌unusual‌ ‌in‌ ‌their‌ ‌line‌ ‌of‌ ‌work.‌ ‌Relying‌ ‌on‌ ‌their‌ ‌senses‌ ‌has‌ ‌helped‌ ‌them‌ ‌track‌ ‌down‌ ‌many‌ ‌targets‌ ‌in‌ ‌their‌ ‌time‌ ‌as‌ ‌a‌ ‌unit, so Adam does not see the need for Felix to single him out. If anything, Mason would have fared better, seeing as his senses were the strongest of them all. But Mason’s aversion to sunlight, as well as the sounds and smells of a busy weekend at Wayhaven’s Municipal Gardens had proven to be difficult to manage, so Adam took over.

This all could have been avoided had Detective Priestley simply told them he wouldn’t be at home today. Even Agent Priestley had been confused, as her son tended to prefer staying at home on his rare off days.

But, no, he left without telling anyone, and with the recent increase in trapper activity, his mother was keen for at least one of them to keep an eye on him. As the rest of them were unoccupied, Nate was happy to turn it into a “day out.”

At least he seems pleased.

The pavilion is partially screened by a line of tall, tidy, flowering hedges, and the scent of them is thick on the gentle breeze that carries the detective’s low, gentle voice, accompanied by airy instrumental music, as well as a chorus of smaller voices, high-pitched with youthful enthusiasm. The four of them skirt the hedges to find the pavilion’s entrance, and stop to take in the odd sight.

Detective Priestley stands tall and proud at the front of a staggered group of small children, none of whom reach higher than his waist. He is simply dressed in a loose tank top and joggers, his hair braided back to keep it out of his face and a pair of thick-framed glasses perched on his strong nose. The children mimic his posture to varying degrees of success, most of them dressed in similar loose athletic clothing, some in frilly tutus. On a table behind him, his phone is hooked up to a set of speakers that play light, upbeat classical music that Nate obviously not only recognizes, but approves of, as he hums happily and waggles his fingers as if he is directing the symphony.

“Alright,” the detective says, his voice clear and strong, but endlessly gentle, “is everyone ready?”

A chorus of little voices call out an enthusiastic “Yes!”

“Good! First position?” Arlo waits, watching the children quickly position their feet, some of them looking down to make very sure they’re correctly placed. Once the majority of them are in position, he takes the position himself, easily and confidently. The few of them who struggled at first quickly mimic him, and he beams, a strange expression to see on the normally reserved man. “Perfect! Now… second position?”

He repeats the process, waiting for most of them to take the position before he does himself, and allows the rest of them to adjust.

As he guides them through the next, and the next, Nate swats at Mason’s arm and hisses at him to put out his cigarette, which he does with a hearty eye roll. Felix has begun attempting the positions himself, grinning all the while, and Adam is watching the spectacle with his head cocked.

The detective puts them through their paces with a quiet, confident patience, and the children are not only delighted, but clearly well-practiced, even as young as they are. They are also all clearly familiar and comfortable with Detective Priestley, which indicates they are used to being in his care. Once he’s finished with the warm-up routine, he takes a few long steps back, and squares his broad shoulders, falling almost instinctively into what he displayed for the children as third position.

“Alright, so we’re going to go over some things that I taught you last time. I’m going to show you the moves, and we’re going to see if you can tell me what they’re called. Does that sound good?”

There is an exuberant cry of agreement that makes Mason wince, and he stalks away to stand in the shade of a copse of trees, re-lighting the cigarette Nate had him put out.

The detective rises easily onto his toes on one foot, lifting the opposite leg and raising one arm skyward. The motion is effortlessly graceful in a way that is surprising of a man so tall. Adam is entirely entranced, frozen until Arlo drops the pose and smiles at his little class. “Alright, who can tell me what that was?”

The children clamor to answer, hands shooting into the air and waving furiously, with little shouts of “Oh, me! Pick me, Arlo!”

He points to one little girl with her bright ginger hair in braids. “Maisie?” he asks.

“An arabesque!” she practically shouts, loud enough to make Felix grin. The detective laughs warmly, and something strange settles deep into Adam’s gut.

“Good!” the detective says. “Alright, we’ll try a harder one this time, since you’re all so sharp.”

A few of the little ones giggle delightedly and cover their faces, murmuring together and beaming.

He falls into position again, breathing deeply, walking across the pavilion. As he passes the entrance, his eyes catch Adam’s over the heads of his class, and they widen briefly. He pauses, almost stumbling, for just a split second, his ears going faintly red. Adam can hear the sound of his heart, the rush of his blood, even from several feet away. But he breaks eye contact, shakes his head, straightens his posture, and spins to face the far railing, standing parallel to the group of children watching him with rapt attention. And then he rushes forward and leaps into the air, arms raised and long legs outstretched, practically floating across the pavilion, and when he lands, it is on one foot with an assured lightness that hardly makes a sound on the hardwood floor. He spins to face the children, and pointedly does not look at the three vampires blinking at him in stunned silence. His chest is rising and falling a bit more quickly than it was before, his freckled cheeks flushed, but otherwise he looks at ease.

“How about that one?” he asks, smiling.

The children seem less assured of this one, whispering amongst themselves before a little boy with his spiraling curls held out of his face with a colorful strip of cloth calls, “A real big jump!”

A tiny girl with huge dark eyes raises her hand and tremulously asks, “Mister Arlo, are you an angel? ‘Cause you just flew!”

He laughs, sharp and startled and louder than Adam’s ever heard him, beaming so wide his cheeks must surely ache with it. “No, I’m not, but thank you for the compliment,” he chuckles, pale eyes twinkling. “And, actually, Jacobe, you’re not far off. That was called a grand jeté. It means big throw.”

“‘Cause you throw yourself into the air?” the dark-eyed girl asks, still gawking at him like she doesn’t quite believe his not being an angel. Adam thinks, quite without his permission, that he is not entirely convinced himself.

Arlo smiles wider. “Not quite. It’s because you throw one leg out in a certain direction while keeping the other in a particular position when you land.” He does a smaller leap as an example, one that he easily segues into another leg of the lesson, and he leads them all in a quick practice run of several beginner’s forms and moves, letting them prance and bounce and spin across the pavilion, all the while guiding them with the same moves, but on a wider, more sweeping scale with his much larger frame. He looks rather like a lean, graceful bird followed by an eager flock of awkward, but enthusiastic, fledglings, and he effusively praises and gently corrects them, occasionally taking one aside to ease them through moves they struggle with. Each and every one looks up at him as if he hung the moon and stars, sweetly awed by this gentle giant of a human, and when he finally pulls away from them, he leaves an older boy who looks to be around ten to oversee their practice.

He hurries towards Unit Bravo, and his posture immediately changes when he is out of line of sight of his little class, from strong and tall and carefully poised, to hunching, sheepish, and fidgety. “What are you all doing here?” he hisses, glancing over Adam’s head to, presumably, catch sight of Mason lurking under the trees a ways away.

“You’re a ballerina?” Felix blurts, and a vivid red crawls up the detective’s chest and neck to stain his ears and cheeks. The warm rush of it almost makes Adam dizzy.

“No,” he blurts, casting a quick look over his shoulder to make sure he hasn’t interrupted his students. “I was a dancer. A long time ago.”

“Since when?” Felix presses, practically bouncing with the excitement of discovery.

“I went to art school!” he blurts, dragging a hand down his face. “It wasn’t my major or anything, but...” He twitches under the attention, and the flush to his skin clings stubbornly. Prettily.

“Well, you’re clearly very talented,” Nate offers, smiling reassuringly.

“You did not tell Agent Priestley you wouldn’t be home,” Adam finally manages to interject, finding his voice and almost instantly regretting it when the man flinches at his sharp tone. “You should not have left without letting one of us know.”

Arlo rubs anxiously at one arm, the dark band of black ink twisting around his bicep, looking away and down towards his feet. Adam follows his gaze, down to his clearly worn but well taken care of black leather flats. “I’m sorry, I forgot. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to hold a lesson, and the kids were starting to get antsy about it. I was getting a lot of calls, and I figured since things had settled down a bit, I could get back to it.”

Nate quickly interjects before Adam can say anything, putting a hand on his shoulder to stop whatever words (almost certain to be abrasive, even Adam can admit) are about to come. “Of course, perfectly understandable! We wouldn’t want to get in the way of your plans, we just need to know where you are with things still so,” he pinches his lips shut, glancing towards the dancing children, “precarious.”

“It’s usually Sundays, if I can swing it,” Arlo offers sheepishly. “They have a regular teacher, Mrs. Golightly, but sometimes she asks me to fill in because the kids like me. They’ve missed me.” He smiles, tense and strained. “And, I mean, I’ve missed them a lot too. It’s nice to focus on something that’s not, y’know…” He rubs at the side of his neck, thumbing habitually over faint, raised white lines.

Adam clenches his jaw, remembering Arlo, weak and bleeding, dropping to his knees like a hanged man after the rope’s been cut, Murphy biting into his neck and tearing it open--

Nate’s hand squeezes his shoulder just this side of too hard to ground him, and he lets out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding in one tremulous exhale.

“I just wanted some of my old normal back,” Arlo says softly. “I like working with you all, I want to protect this town, but sometimes I just… I really don’t want to think about the fact that there are people out there who want to sell me to the highest bidder so they can bleed me dry. Just want to think about teaching some little ones to pirouette.” He huffs out a weak little laugh, and looks back towards the class, who are following along with their substitute’s instructions like a tiny, well-oiled machine. “That’s Marco,” he explains, gesturing to the older boy confidently leading the lesson. “He’s really good. Thinking about going pro someday.”

“Did you ever think about going pro?” Felix asks.

Arlo squirms and hesitates to answer, though he does still look relieved by the subject change. “Sort of? When I was younger.” He sighs. “It was never going to happen, though. So I mostly just stuck to the hobbyist side of it. Small time school shows and the like.”

“Why wouldn’t it happen?” Adam asks, brows furrowing. Arlo looks up at him, as if surprised it was Adam to speak.

“I’m too bloody tall,” he laughs weakly. “The professional dance world is really competitive, yeah, but it’s also very, ah, particular. You’ve got to look a certain way, fit a certain mold. I could practice all day every day, perfect every technique, but I’m still not going to have a chance when I’m seven inches taller than the tallest guy in any company. There’s technique arguments, too, about what sort of things you can’t do as well as someone smaller, but it usually comes down to looks.” He shrugs his broad shoulders, shoving his hands into the loose pockets of his joggers. “It’s not a big deal. There’s a one in a million chance I’d have made it professionally anyway. And it’s tough on the body, too. Pro careers run short. I like doing it on the side without worrying how long I’ve got left.” He smiles thinly.

Adam’s not sure what he’s going to say to that, lips parting to offer something, but he doesn’t get the chance, because the music suddenly changes from some sweet and tinkling piano to a harsh battery of electric guitar, bass, and drums. Arlo flinches away from him, turning towards the group of children now jumping up and down around the speakers and squealing along to the harsh, growling vocals. He laughs breathlessly.

“Guess the dance playlist ran out,” he says, before hurrying back to tend to the children. Several of them have taken out their ribbons and headbands and are tossing their hair around and miming playing guitar, sticking out their tongues and making odd hand gestures.

Felix cackles, and then runs over to join the fun, leaving Adam and Nate looking on, Nate chortling softly to himself.

“He’s full of surprises, our Arlo,” he says. Adam pulls his gaze away from the detective, bending over to pull off one of his shoes at the insistence of that dark-eyed little girl, to see him smiling that gently knowing smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Quiet,” Adam growls.

“I didn’t say anything,” Nate protests, but he turns back to watch the spectacle that is the detective sitting on the floor while the children pass around his ballet flat so they can compare it to their own. The size difference is comical, and sends the group into paroxysms of laughter. Even Felix, who seems to have ingratiated himself to the class easily enough, offers up his own shoe, and sticks it into the flat. Even Arlo laughs at that, a husky rumble that has Adam pressing a hand to his chest as if to stop the way his heart reacts. Nate raises his eyebrows, and Adam glowers at him, dropping the hand to his side and clenching his fingers hard. “I didn’t say anything,” Nate repeats, “but I do think it’s nice to know something about the detective’s day-to-day life, when he’s not with us, don’t you? Becoming more familiar with his habits. As a friend and not just an obligation?”

“It is useful to know his daily comings and goings to continue to protect him,” Adam allows.

Nate sighs. “It’s a start, certainly,” he says, and Adam refuses to ask what he means by that.

[abigailnussbaum]

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 5

I was going to write weekly reviews of this season, and then with one thing and another ended up dropping it in the spring (hey, remember when there was so much weekly TV that you couldn’t keep up with all your shows? Wonder how long it’ll be before that happens again). I caught up with the entire season this weekend, and honestly, that feels like a better standpoint from which to write about it - I think if I’d stuck with weekly reviews, I would have ended up saying the same thing week after week.

A couple of years ago, Emily VanDerWerff suggested that there is a standard lifecycle for high-concept, large ensemble, off-the-wall genre shows: 

Season 1: still figuring this whole thing out 

Season 2: now we’re cooking with oil 

Season 3: we can do anything! 

Season 4: whoops, no, we’ve gotten a bit over our skis here 

Season 5: ??? 

Legends, I think, encapsulates this progression to a T. The show’s second and third seasons were some of the best and most exciting genre storytelling on television, but last year was a bit of a mess. That’s not entirely the writers’ fault - Nick Zano’s limited availability due to family obligations forced them to beef up the Time Bureau’s role in the season, and their desire to keep Maisie Richardson-Sellers on board even after Amaya’s story had wrapped up led them to create a character, Charlie, who had no real reason for being on the Waverider. But a lot of it was self-inflicted. The cast was too unwieldy, the Time Bureau story seemed designed to expose the thin spots in the show’s self-presentation as irreverent but fundamentally compassionate (it certainly didn’t help that the decision to rewrite Nate Sr. into a good guy was made almost at the last minute, requiring the entirely unconvincing argument that forcing magical creatures to perform in a circus act is somehow morally superior to forcing them to be secret agents), and some of the character choices felt entirely parachuted in (Zari/Nate, anyone?).

Season five, therefore, had a lot of clean up work to do, while also demonstrating that the Legends formula had more life in it than just those two transcendent early seasons. And while this is undeniably a more successful, more enjoyable season than the one preceding it (which also does a great deal to address some of the show’s structural issues, chiefly the overlarge cast), I also can’t help but notice that instead of finding new places for the show to go, what the fifth season delivers instead is a hodgepodge of story elements from seasons two and three. So we’ve got a mystical object that can rewrite reality (The Loom of Fate vs. season two′s The Spear of Destiny); a token hunt across time and space in which the Legends face off against the estranged relatives of one of their members (the totems in season three vs. the search for the pieces of the loom, Amaya’s evil granddaughter vs. Charlie’s evil sisters); a late season loss that forces our characters into a nightmarish alternate reality in which they don’t even remember who they are (the Legion of Evil rewriting the Legends’ lives to make them ordinary and unsatisfying vs. being stuck in TV shows in a world run by the Fates); which comes about because of a betrayal by a member of the team (Charlie in season five, Mick in season two) whose eventual return to the fold enables to Legends to win in the end. There’s even an abandoned, abused girl who has turned evil, and has to be won back to the side of good through the offer of true companionship and understanding (Nora Darhk vs. Astra Logue).

This isn’t exactly a bad thing - a lot of these storytelling beats cut to the very core of what Legends is and what makes it work, so it’s not necessarily wrong for the show to repeat them. And even if the basic structure is the same, Legends just keeps getting more adventurous in how it delivers that structure. I’ve already written about how well done the season’s mockumentary episode was, and the same can be said for the 80s slasher movie riff, the Mr. Rogers parody, and of course, “The One Where We’re Trapped on TV”. Like the multiple universe episode in season four, these are things the show couldn’t have done when it was just a few seasons old, and they’re proof that whatever other issues it has, Legends is constantly pushing the envelope in terms of the kind of tropes and genres it can graft onto a superhero template. That said, there’s a very real possibility that this is all the show will ever be - a standard story template, enlivened by increasingly gonzo riffs on existing tropes.

Some more thoughts on where the season worked and where it didn’t below.

THE GOOD:

I really hated the decision to make Nora a fairy godmother in season four, not least because it felt like yet another way of infantilizing her (it certainly didn’t help that it was a choice she was forced into, and that she spent the remainder of the season catering to the every whim of Gary, a character I still have very mixed feelings towards). But season five really reclaims that choice. Having Nora embrace the fairy godmother life as a way of both helping children and working through her own issues makes a lot of sense, and the character feels happier and more confident than we’ve ever seen her (certainly a step up from how gloomy she was last season). I even like the wardrobe change - once the fairy godmother dress was ditched except for specific occasions, having Nora dress all in teal is a nice touch, and certainly an improvement over her rather boring season four wardrobe. I still think Legends missed a lot in how it handled Nora last season (I will never stop being annoyed that she and Sara didn’t develop a deeper friendship, given how similar their life trajectories have been), but this was a good way of righting the ship, even in a very limited timeframe.

I already mentioned this in the episode review, but watching the rest of the season really cemented my admiration for how quickly the show embeds Behrad into the crew, and makes it feel as if he’s always been there. That’s all the more impressive given that Behrad doesn’t really get an arc in season five. Most of that storytelling energy goes to establish Zari 2.0, and Behrad is, of course, absent for much of the latter half of the season. And yet he feels almost instantly like a fully-rounded character who is integral to the show, so much so that you’re heartbroken by his death (and convinced that it will be rolled back, even though Zari could easily take over his superpower). That’s really excellent work by both the writers and Shayan Sobhian.

I was a bit nervous when Zari 2.0 was introduced, because replacing a heroic, cool-girl-coded, nobly self-sacrificing character with a version of herself who is extremely femme-coded and obsessed with things like fashion and social media is the sort of move that is ripe for easy misogynistic point-scoring in the guise of feminism - of course the Zari who is good with machines and eats donuts is superior to the one who has a perfume line and spends hours in the bathroom every morning! But the show very quickly established that Zari, though certainly not without her flaws, is awesome in any guise, and it did so without trying to change her into “our” Zari, eventually even establishing that they are two completely different people, each with a right to exist (though not simultaneously, unfortunately). I get why the show didn’t keep both Zaris around - it would be asking a lot of Tala Ashe to play two characters, much of the time against herself, not to mention a production nightmare - but I appreciate that it didn’t decide that Zari 2.0 was the lesser version. (Also a nice touch: Behrad, though obviously fond of Zari 1.0, doesn’t think of her as “his” sister, even though to us she’s the “real” version of the character.)

Similarly, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when Ava moved to the Waverider full time - obviously, it would be an improvement on her playing a tinpot fascist at the Time Bureau while the show pretended that this wouldn’t really bother Sara, but at the same time Sara and Ava are both so similar in their functions and abilities that I worried they’d step on each other’s shoes. Instead, the show leaned into their differences and made the season about Ava finding her place as captain of the Waverider, a role she fills in very different ways than Sara while still doing a good job at it. It also allowed her to expand her point of view a little - bonding with Zari 2.0, or reaching out to Astra, both things that would have been outside of her comfort zone in the past. Obviously, this is setup for Ava taking over as captain in season six now that Sara has been abducted (though I hope not for very long - Legends isn’t Legends without Sara), but good on the show for taking the time to bring Ava to a point where she’s ready for this, and in a different way from Sara.

And speaking of looking ahead, the show takes the wise step of thinning out its cast. Personally, I would have kept Ray, Nora, and Mona and written off Constantine and Nate (and possibly also Gary), but either way, it’s good that the writers realized their cast was getting unwieldy. I was concerned, for example, that the show figuring out what to do with Charlie and giving her an elaborate backstory was a sign that she would stay on, but instead she leaves once that story is resolved. And I think that in an earlier season, Astra would have been positioned to stay on the Waverider after the end of the season, but instead she’s clearly a one-off character, who goes off to live her own life once the show has brought her story to a satisfying conclusion. (This also, however, means that Legends has written off two black women in a single season, not to mention Mona, and in fact has only one WOC main character remaining; I hope that’s something season six addresses.)

THE BAD:

I realize that I am very much in the minority on this, but I’m sorry: John Constantine does not belong on Legends of Tomorrow, and certainly not as a main character. Season five feels, in fact, like a perfect demonstration of this simple truth. The early parts of the season feel like two different shows, the Legends show and the Constantine show, that happen to have some points of intersection and shared characters. And even once those storylines converge, it’s notable how John’s quest for the Loom of Fate very quickly becomes Astra’s quest for it, and then Charlie’s, and how they both feel more grounded in that story and more affected by it than he was. What it comes down to, once again, is that John Constantine is a character who can’t change, and putting him on a show that is all about change and growth can’t help but feel unsatisfying for both the character and the show. Season five tries to suggest that change is possible for him - he finally comes clean with Astra and make a real apology to her; he admits that his pursuit of magic has cost him relationships and a chance at happiness; he reaches out to his friends when he thinks his life is about to end; he even quits smoking. But the character just doesn’t have that much give in it. To be John Constantine, he has to be the cynical, arrogant, self-destructive fuck-up we’ve always known. On a show like Legends of Tomorrow, that can work in small doses, but not as the main character that Constantine has been positioned as.

Though I’m glad that the show figured out something to do with Charlie before writing her off, the similarities between her story and Mick’s can’t help but shed a light on how poorly thought out this character has been, and how much her season five story is parachuted in. When Mick betrays the team at the end of season two, it’s barely a season after they’d put him off the ship for being perennially untrustworthy, leading to him becoming their nemesis. They only take him back out of pity for the decades of torture he suffered, and sympathy for the loss of his only friend, Captain Cold. His betrayal is a direct outcome of those cracks in the relationship - he does it because he wants to live in a world where he hasn’t been hurt or hurt others, and where his friend is still alive. When he changes his mind at the end of the season, it’s a culmination of two seasons of character growth, the realization that holding on to the pain in his life is worth it if it means he gets to keep the friendships he formed on the Waverider, and to continue to grow as a person - as expressed by his choice to put Snart back in his timeline, where he will become a better person (and eventually inspire Mick to do the same) but will also die. Charlie’s very similar storyline just doesn’t have this kind of depth. Neither her heel turn nor her face turn feel particularly earned, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it took the writers so long to figure out who this character even was.

For a season of Legends, this was an awfully heteronormative stretch of episodes. Sure, Sara and Ava are still center stage, and that’s fantastic. But every other romantic relationship in the season, and there are quite a few of them, is a straight one. You might blame this on the fact that season five is a housecleaning season, wrapping up dangling storylines like Ray/Nora or Nate/Zari. But even the new characters like Behrad or Lita express only opposite-sex attraction (I guess Astra never demonstrates a preference). I mean, if you give John Constantine two different love interests in a single season and they’re both women, surely something has gone terribly wrong?

And speaking of John Constantine’s love interests, is putting him together with Zari meant to make the old her’s romance with Nate look organic and true to the characters in comparison? Because I can’t think of another reason for it. Do not want.

THE UGLY:

Words cannot express how much I hate the Damien Darhk episode. Not all of it, obviously - the Mr. Rogers riff, as I said, is pretty good (and pays off handsomely later in the season), and pretty much all the Ray/Nora stuff, especially the moment where she realizes she’s not going to lie to her father about the man she loves and the life she’s chosen, are golden. But it is simply mind-boggling that after two seasons in which Nora was firmly established as the survivor of a lifetime of abuse, Legends takes an entire hour to not only rehabilitate Damien, but pretend that he was always a loving father who just made some mistakes. For crying out loud, the man fed his daughter to a demon in order to gain power for himself. It was always an interesting wrinkle in his character that he clearly saw himself as a loving, protective parent, and was even capable of some level of self-sacrifice on Nora’s behalf, but I had assumed that the show realized this was at least partly a self-serving lie. To discover that we’re actually meant to think that one act of sacrifice cancels out a lifetime of abuse is nauseating. I wanted Nora to stand up to her father, but as a victim calling out her abuser, not a loving daughter trying to renegotiate a relationship with an overprotective parent. It certainly doesn’t help that the episode features inexplicably popular wedding story tropes, such as the groom asking the bride’s father for permission to marry her, or the father trying to keep the couple from physical intimacy before the wedding, which are gross in any context but especially so here. I suppose in the end it’s all worth it to be rid of Damien once and for all, but I was squirming with discomfort and rage throughout the entire episode.

[griffelkinn]

Letter to a Man

I wish all men would read this letter. I am a woman who is attracted to men. But it seems impossible to find romance and friendship with a man, as much as I wish I could.

This is a letter I wrote to a man I met on Okcupid, and started a friendship with, and then ended the friendship shortly after.

The reason that I ended the friendship was because while we were on a hike, he began talking at length about his feelings that men suffer from oppression and women are privileged. He also emotionally defended incels and misogynists, and said women needed to be kinder to them. He also expressed sympathy toward rapists.

After our hike, we texted, and he continued expressing supportive feelings toward misogynists. And so over text, I said that I felt we should part ways, and shouldn’t hang out anymore. After that, he sent me a letter in the mail, and I wrote him this letter in return.

I wish all men could read this letter...

“Brian,

I didn't want to cause you pain or sadness, the other day. I knew that I probably did, and that made me feel pain myself.

Your letter was very thoughtful, and I was glad to read it. I appreciated the time you took to write it, and your sincerity. I do hope you'll read this letter, and know that it is a very serious and honest outpouring of my feelings. I want you to understand. I know it might seem like a wall of text, but every word of it feels important to tell you.

When I first moved to San Francisco, my very first friend in the whole state was a guy named Roger. We got along really well, and immediately became very close, and had fun together constantly. We cooked, and lay in the park, and got drunk, and joked around, and tried new snacks, and got ice cream on hot days, and even got some acid on the street and tripped together on Halloween to Nightmare Before Christmas. We were super close for months. Then he randomly started passionately ranting about how rape is a very mild crime, and people shouldn't get too bothered if it happens to them, or punished for doing it either. He went on about how rapists were usually molested at some point, and they deserved sympathy. Not to have their lives negatively impacted by getting in trouble for raping someone. Also, that they can't help doing it, like it's a nervous tic. We talked and argued about it for hours. All of those points. Finally I left, because I was shaking with anger and emotion, and he was very passionately defending everything he'd said with no moving at all.

I was especially shaken by his tirade because it was an exact echo of the many tirades the violent psycho I was trapped living with years ago used to go on. All of those points were favorites of his to passionately rant about. That guy had also been my best friend, before I got a place with him (accessible only by his truck), and also before he dropped his carefully-constructed façade of a great person. He also used to rant about how 15-year-old girls are the most appropriate breeding partners for men, and how women's sports are a joke, and how girls are biologically inclined to bear children and take care of them. Also that men are currently generously "allowing their women to become educated". He had been jailed for rape. He was sadistic, in ways I could never describe.

I didn't see my friend Roger anymore after that. All of his weird rapist-support arguments were so similar to the psycho's, and also extremely suggestive of his own tendencies. He did later tell me in a text that he was one of the rapists he was defending.

Later when I was working at Whole Foods, I became really good friends with this guy named Greg, who also worked there. We became instantly great buddies, and did all kinds of stuff together. We went on road trips, went out for pizza regularly, and learned how to make silicone molds and castings together. We were both really into art and painting. We swapped comics, and discovered Stranger Things together. I actually started getting a crush on him, which was a big thing for me. Then one night we were parked in front of my apartment, cause he was dropping me off after we'd spent a whole day having fun around the city and then making molds at his apartment. We didn't even want to say good night, because we wanted to keep hanging out and talking. We started talking about how we were both really happy that we'd become friends. And then he told me that his last best friend and him had parted badly, and he was disappointed. So then, I told him I'd had something similar happen, and I told him about Roger. I told him about the argument me and Roger had had about rape and rapists, and how that had ended the friendship, and how sad it was. And then Greg said "Well, it does make you think..." And I asked what about. And he then launched into a passionate rant feeling sorry for rapists. I think my jaw hung down 3 feet. I was just stunned. He started talking about Brock Turner, the rapist from a few years ago who was all over the news. The one who got barely any jail time, because the judge felt sorry for him and didn't want his life negatively impacted by his raping that girl.

Greg went on and on about how it was terrible that Brock Turner was going to be known as a rapist now, and how sad that was for him. He'd made one tiny little mistake anyone could make, and now he's gonna be thought of badly. He didn't seem aware of the other person involved whose life actually was negatively impacted. I argued all of his ideas about his "tiny mistake", and also how sad it was for him now. I wanted to understand why Greg was saying this stuff. I must be misunderstanding. We talked about it until 4 in the morning in the car, until finally I had to go inside, because clearly there was no misunderstanding.

As soon as I got into my apartment, I cried on my couch. I was so sad, because I liked Greg so much, and this was how he was. I knew our friendship was over. We decided to get together the next night and see if there was really a misunderstanding that maybe we could figure out had happened. At a bar, he told me it's his nature, when he sees a viewpoint that's hard to agree with at first, to try to figure out a way it could be agreed with. He's just really intelligent and quick and enjoys doing that. That was obviously not what was happening.

Before meeting you on Okcupid, I'd met one other guy this year. He told me he'd forced himself sexually on a girl once, and he was sorry for it now.

A friend I met while living in Maine for a while years ago (between CA and FL) was a guy named Doug, I met on Okcupid. He assaulted me.

Another friend I met on Okcupid in that same stay was a guy named Nate. He assaulted me.

I wanted to tell you about Roger and Greg, because they are really what led to my action after our text conversation. When you and me were walking that day, I didn't react much at the time, but I was very unsettled when you mentioned how rapists were usually molested themselves. I've been just confused and frustrated that I very rarely meet a man who doesn't sympathize with rapists or misogynists. It's like 1 in a million. When you said that, I was internally thinking, you probably feel like Roger and Greg. When you said that you like to try to see the side of people who have an extreme viewpoint, and that's why you tried to see the side of misogynists, it sounded exactly like Greg later explaining his rape-sympathizing.

I know I had lots of fun kayaking with you, and playing 7 Days to Die, and talking about tripping, and watching Chappie. The letter you wrote me was really thoughtful, and made me feel how much you care and how much you were focused on self-awareness, which is really awesome.

I told you about Doug and Nate, because I want you to understand why I have so much hesitancy about hanging out. Sadly, since we haven't known each other long, I am strongly affected by the percentage of times I've made a male friend and had them assault me or reveal that they support rapists.

Those examples are not the only times I've been assaulted.

In my opinion, the number-one cause of the extreme amount of rapists, is how much support rapists get. And misogynists. 99.9% men seem to support them. Male rappers and sportsmen remain heroes after assaulting women. Male judges give rapists such light sentencing that it seems less serious than drug crimes or theft. Movies and tv show heroes and "cool" characters are often raping and joking about it. Everywhere, whenever I turn on the tv it seems like.

I remember when I was a kid, and I used to run around town playing with this big group of all the town kids, and we were all friends. I had some really great friends who were boys, who lived around me, and we used to hang out and mess around and we didn't see each other as a different species. We hadn't been brainwashed yet. It makes me deeply sad that that kind of camaraderie between men and women seems like a fantasy now. I hope it's still around.

It's so upsetting to think about that stuff, and I am filled with so much unease when I'm around people who I think might see me as a "woman-creature" that can never be understood or related to. I walk around thinking in the back of my mind that I might have a violent encounter at any given time, and I'm prepared for it mentally. I'm positive there will be more in the future.

I really want you to understand me, because I don't want you to feel bad or upset or hurt or offended. I know that I offended you and hurt you when I said I thought you were a man like those others. All I knew was that you were saying things that they all say, and that it has hurt me deeply to hear those things from friends in the past. It hurt so much that it makes me not want to risk becoming very close when there's any indication that those feelings about rapists and misogynists are part of someone. From your letter it sounds like you also empathize with those who are hurt by misogyny. You feel bad for your misogynist and racist uncle, and for all others. And empathy is a wonderful quality. Empathy is one of the most important things to have. And the most respectable. But I do think the cause of so much misogyny and rape is this overabundance of sympathy for them (and far too little for the people who are actually seriously hurt by them).

I don't want bad feelings between us. I want good feelings. I have good feelings toward you. I am just sad and tired and just... confused and frustrated that I've never met a man who just completely was angry and disgusted with rapists and misogynists, and spoke as passionately about that as they so often speak passionately about sympathizing with them. I don't know what that means for the state of people right now. I don't say this to single you out or to try and make you feel bad. It's just something I've been thinking a lot about, that's got me down. And hearing certain arguments and opinions about that stuff so often makes me feel down. Also, there were other things you said during our hike that made it seem like you were very emotionally into the idea that men have it harder than women. It really seemed like something you think about a lot and feel strongly about. I was walking in a constant state of "What-the?". Maybe that's not true. It just seemed like a continuous vibe.

I hope you understand that I didn't end things with us out of anything personal with you. I really enjoyed most of our times together, and I will remember them with happiness. I hope you make many more beautiful potteries, and have fun and happiness. Empathy is a great thing to have, it's just that those specific sympathies make me very unhappy to be around, in a really big way, now.

-C”

[kiwismoon]

I heard there's a trans girl in the show. Is it treated well or is it transphobic??

I’ve watched the entirety of the first season, and everything that I saw handled Jules’ character being trans as respectful towards that aspect of her character? It’s sort of hard for me to judge because I personally am cis, although I feel like I would know/recognize the mistreatment of a character. It’s not necessarily ever directly “pointed out” that her character is even trans until she has a backstory episode (at least from my viewing, I believe it does show a few things like her taking hormones and stuff). 

It’s kind of hard for me to tell because there are a few people who (aren’t major characters and are only seen in a few scenes) that I’ve seen where I can’t necessarily tell just because I don’t have the mindset, so to me it looks like there could be a few scenes where characters potentially,,, not directly disrespect her but it could potentially be indirect? No one ever uses the wrong pronouns towards her or misgenders her, and she isn’t ever directly targeted for being trans, (although this show does have some triggering topics and there is one scene with a certain character where it’s kind of iffy on intention/meaning behind what he was saying). 

I feel that they treat her character well, and the actress who plays her,  Hunter Schafer is actually a trans woman (and LGBT rights activist) herself, (which btw I love Hunter Schafer she’s amazing, and she does an amazing job in this role). So I think that’s pretty neat? I feel like it might help with any potential mistreatment or misrepresentation of the character? Everything about her character being trans is, from my view-point, done respectfully.

In my second paragraph, I talk a bit about other characters interacting with her because I was trying to take that into consideration, and with my knowledge and what I’ve seen none of them directly insult or target her based on that, but if you want to know more about that (I’m trying to talk about things without having any spoilers so I feel like I sound ominous) feel free to ask and I’ll make a post tagging with “euphoria spoilers” (so you can blacklist that if you don’t want spoilers), because I know the show does cover some heavy/triggering themes and content.

I hope this answered your question! Also, I would like to add the disclaimer that I may not know some of the more subtle things on if it was treated respectfully that may upset someone who is trans or maybe has more knowledge on it? I only really know from my point of view (and only knowing a few people who are myself) I do worry a bit that I may not be the best, so I tried looking up some articles (which will NOT be spoiler-free) on the character’s trans representation from people who hopefully know more than me and can shed more light on that in case I missed any subtle things that other people might pick up! 

Here are the articles I read:

Article on why/how it tells/portrays an authentic trans character/story

Article on why her character is an interesting trans character (beyond just “being trans”, ie, how the show gives her more depth than that and a bit on how it shows the audience that her character is trans)

Here’s an article on what trans teens are saying about Jules’ character

If you don’t want to have to read those articles because of spoilers, or just don’t want to take the time to read them since they are kind of lengthy, I’ll sum up the one I found most interesting (What trans teens are saying about her character) as I feel it can give insight that I can’t. I’ll include their direct quotes as to not misrepresent what they say/feel: (anything I’m saying/paraphrasing from the article will not be italicized or in quotes)

“Jules is absolutely one of my favorite characters on television right now,” Clementine Narcisse, a 15-year-old trans girl says, “before the show started I was worried because a lot of transgender characters in the media are represented horribly, but I was blown away by her portrayal.”

It seems that many of the viewers like that Jules being trans isn’t the only thing to her character, it's just a part of her identity. 

“She’s introduced as Jules, not as the trans girl, but just a new girl who happens to be transgender. She’s clearly a positive force of energy for Rue. Having a trans character being portrayed this positively in such a popular television series makes me feel so incredible. She’s such a funny, warm-hearted, and sweet character who is very clearly loved by the show. Also, she gives me a lot of great outfit ideas, so that’s always a plus.”

Seventeen-year-old viewer Zoe shares that although she likes Jules, the audience should remember Jules comes from a privileged background. “I don’t think the show acknowledges Jules is very privileged for a trans woman,” she says. “She’s white, skinny, conventionally attractive, and passes well. She also was able to transition at 13 and have a safe place to live, and this is not the reality for many trans teens, including myself.” Zoe says that although she doesn’t feel Jules has directly helped with her own transition, “it feels good to know I’m not alone and see a representation of young trans women on TV.”

I would like to say that there is a scene including her character that Zoe shared that she found to be triggering to her, although it does contain spoilers, so I’ll leave that last quote under the cut. Triggering Warning, (i’ll use strikethrough because I don’t have any other way to block out the triggering warning but please be careful reading the next part just in case also the trigger warning will contain a small spoiler, so please be advised on that as well, though I’ll try to keep it vague) please be advised the quote mentions a character being blackmailed through nudes that she sent, and the scene is honestly kind of intense with how intimidating the other character is towards her.

I hope this answered your question, sorry it was kind of long, I wanted to be thorough without spoiling, and have other people’s opinions/insight included just in case mine might have not been accurate due to any unknown ignorance? On the subject?? OKAY, I’LL STOP TALKING NOW SORRY DFLNSLFDKN...

If you want to read what Zoe had to say about the scene she found a little triggering, it’s under read more. Obviously, I can’t speak for her, but the scene seems to be triggering mainly tied with personal experience (it even made me uncomfortable and anxious due to past experiences), and her character being trans seems to sort of just add to the trigger on a personal level, (at least that’s what it seems to me) as the scene isn’t necessarily any attack based on her character being trans (from what I can tell).

Zoe says that she had to stop watching the latest episode as the scene where Nate printed Jules nudes to blackmail her, caused her to have a panic attack. “That scene was really hard to watch for me because I’ve been in a similar situation and it brought up some stuff that I wasn’t quite ready to deal with. It’s hard for me to see another trans girl going through that stuff, even though I know it’s fictional.” Adding, “I’ve been in situations similar to Jules, being stalked and harassed online. It’s just hard to deal with stuff like that for me.” 

[aeon-wolf]

Legends 4x12

Ya’ll we got so fucking fed tonight. 

Okay so since this post is basically going to be fangirling over Avalance for 70% of it, I’ll get all of the boring stuff out of the way first. If you just want Avalance stuff, jump down to the line break. 

- I am living for Nora’s arc this season. As I’ve said many a time, she is probably my favorite “villain” character that has been on Legends so I’m glad they’re giving her the redemption arc. And it’s been written beautifully. The fact she is trying to change for herself; not for Ray, not for anyone else. But because she knows she’s capable of being a better person and wants to be that person. And then her working with Constantine to trick Neron. I admit I was a bit worried initially they were going to play the betrayal card with her, but I was glad to be proven wrong. And I will never doubt my precious child ever again. 

- We got somewhat introduced to what seems to be Neron’s endgame. Bringing Tabitha into the world and then using magical creatures to scare humans into giving their souls to him. I’m not sure how that second part works exactly, but I’m sure it’ll be explained at some point. Probably in the last five minutes of the season finale knowing Legends. It’s probably a safe bet that Tabitha is a fellow demon if he needed Ava’s body as a vessel for her. 

- I admit Ray and Nate are my least favorite Legends. That isn’t to say I hate them or anything. Just if I had to put all the Legends on the numbered list, they would be at the bottom. So the whole Nate/Ray scenes were really a miss for what I’m interested in Legends for. And with them butting up against Nora/Constantine/Neron scenes and Avalance scenes, they just felt like a drag to watch. That said, I do really feel for Nate. He’s in a difficult position, discovering things about his father and then having to face the demon who killed him. And he’s had some fun to watch growth over the season. 

- I’m really still not here about SteelHacker (or Natari, according to Mona), but I also wish they’d stop playing this “will they, won’t they” with them. Either get them together or don’t. I really am getting kind of annoyed on some level with Zari being like “I like him, but wait no I can’t do that.” I love Zari getting growth, and while I’d infinitely rather see her be single, on some level I can understand her position. Love has always been a liability for her. ARGUS killed her family (if I’m remembering right, I don’t have a great memory), and from what we know about her past, her family were the only people she’s really ever loved deeply. So to protect herself in her dystopian future, she had to cut herself from getting too attached. Thus when she’s running into real budding romantic feelings, it’s hard for her. She’s unsure of herself. And from that standpoint, I don’t mind SteelHacker. Also, I would really like to believe the writers would have liked to put Charlie and Zari together (the eye sex and “You’re straight?” line in this episode), but CW executives (remember the network this show is on everyone) said they met their limit for lgbt+ relationships with Avalance and John/Desmond. Obviously, we can’t know that, but I’ll choose to believe that because it makes me feel better. 

- I also really liked how they portrayed both John/Sara and John/Nora relationships this episode. When Sara insisted on going in after Ava, John seemed to be protective over her in trying to discourage her. After Caity sort of shut down any John/Sara romance stuff at Clexacon (not that there was any indication their dalliance in S3 was any more than what amounted to a drunken one night stand as well as a mistake), I feel like it’s been a bit easier to see their relationship more as almost a brother/sister kind of relationship. Perhaps most akin to twins. They support each other, are protective of one another, but they get on each other’s nerves and annoy the shit out each other, often times for fun. And John/Nora seems almost like a yin/yang relationship. They both are cut from similar cloth, as their conversation outside Neron’s holding cell in the hallway shows. They’re both scared of themselves and their own power, but where John is kind of the tortured soul about it, Nora tries to redeem herself and be better. I think both could learn a lot from the other. 

- There are other little bits and pieces I liked about the episode, but this post is already long enough without talking at all about Avalance, so if you’re curious about anything else, please send me a message. 

AVALANCE!

We, as a fandom, were so fucking fed it’s unreal. It’s such a strange feeling to me to pretty much have an entire episode basically be dedicated to our pairing getting to work out relationship issues and actually talk about the future. 

- So first off, can we talk about how Ava has a cute ass picture of her and Sara in her entryway? It’s such a small thing, but it makes the relationship feel so real. Also when Sara was knocking at Ava’s door, apologizing and facing her fears and wanting to work their relationship out, that was such a growth moment for Sara. I was so proud of how far our emotionally closed off, reformed assassin has come. 

- So basically Ava had been missing for two weeks, which probably was about when they had their fight. And Jes even said at Clexacon that there was supposed to be more to that scene where someone walked in on her having a mental breakdown. I’m thinking a possibility might have been Hank coming in, maybe Ava was late for their meeting and that’s obviously strange for Ava and he tells her to take a leave of absence to get her head on straight after she confesses about her relationship with Sara. And then Neron ambushes her in her apartment shortly after? That’s pure speculation and we’ll probably never know, but it’s fun to think about. 

- The fact that Ava’s hell was set in the Legends version of Ikea was hilarious. Along with all of the little gay shoutouts. They managed to fit in an “out of the closet” joke as well as building furniture together, which was clearly peak gay. And confirmation that Sara is the one to disregard instructions, fail and then have her significant other basically say “I told you so” when they build the thing successfully following directions. 

- I’m glad they clarified her opinions on one of the things Sara and Ava got in a fight about in the first place, how the Bureau was treating magical creatures. I’m not really sure I got the characterizations right in my assumptions, but it seemed to be a defensive fear thing, rather than any sort of malice or callousness. It obviously doesn’t make it right, but it does explain her point of view better than she did in the actual argument scene. 

- As I said, one of the most real things about the entire episode was that Ava and Sara were talking about real problems that you’d normally see a straight couple on a TV show discuss. Long term commitment (shoutout for actually showing them as older wlw which is fucking rare on TV, even if it was only for a moment), them consider what a “normal” life would be like, and address them being two powerful, independent women trying to navigate a relationship when both of them are in pretty unfamiliar territory was a long term relationship. It was about treating Avalance like a normal relationship on the screen. The fact that they are two women wasn’t ignored, but it wasn’t the central point either. It was more like two people, communicating about what they want, recognizing they’ll both have to compromise on some things and work their problems out together that just happen to be two women. It was beautiful and no one can tell me otherwise. I’m sure someone will find a bone to pick with the whole premise, there always is, but I’d just like to recognize that while it may not be perfect, it’s a hell of a lot better than the “bury your gays” tropes that we were dealing with not 3 years ago. As well as other questionable lgbt+ representation decisions on a certain network. 

- I’m kind of glad that it was Ava that wanted the “normal” life. And kind of addressed that there is more to life than her job. I feel like, at least for myself in writing fanfic, I’ve characterized her as someone who basically has no life outside work. And while that might be canonically true at the moment, getting verbal confirmation that Ava does want something more with Sara was great.

- And then again, Sara and her own insecurities over her past and not being able to be the person that Ava “needs” Which like.. fucking props for the ones who wrote the line “Neither of us needs anybody, but you are who I want.”  I feel like in a lot of TV relationships (not just wlw) that they always make characters so dependant on their significant other, *cough Supergirl* and they sacrifice character development of one or both characters in favor of building a relationship. Or propping up one character at the expense of the other. And while Avalance is obviously important, both Sara and Ava have had growth unrelated to their relationship in the last two seasons and that line is kind of just a representation of that fact. 

Anyways, I have a lot more feelings about the episode, but this post is long enough. Please send me inbox messages to fangirl with me if you want. I’m so hyped about this episode. I think moving away from a specific magical fugitive and just focusing on the Legends and the Neron plotline (plus the whole Nate thing) did the episode fluidity a lot of good and from the promo for next episode, it seems like it’ll be similar. 

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Over the weekend, an ABC/Washington Post poll found that most Democrats now back former Vice President Joe Biden, but enthusiasm for his candidacy was, on the other hand, pretty lackluster.

Just 24 percent of his supporters said they were “very” enthusiastic about supporting him. This marked the lowest level of enthusiasm for a Democratic presidential candidate that ABC/Washington Post has found in the last 20 years. And perhaps even more troubling for Biden was that nearly twice as many of President Trump’s supporters (53 percent) said they were “very” enthusiastic about his candidacy.

This, of course, has sparked comparisons to 2016 when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself in a similar situation — running neck-and-neck with Trump and with only 32 percent saying they were “very” enthusiastic about supporting her in September 2016. Biden, of course, is already 8 points below that mark now.

So does Biden have an enthusiasm problem? What’s the case for why he might and the case for why we shouldn’t read too much into this now?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I don’t think this is something Biden should worry about, at least not right now. We’ve just come off a knock-down, drag-out, 15-month-long primary fight. And some would argue it’s still going on, with Sen. Bernie Sanders still contesting the nomination!

It’s a lot to ask for the party to be totally united at this early juncture. I’d guess that, by September, Biden will have as good or better enthusiasm numbers as Clinton did in September 2016.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): It feels so quaint to be debating a horse-race question in the middle of a pandemic.

But basically: I don’t think enthusiasm is a terribly meaningful indicator above and beyond what is already reflected in polls.

Sanders’s voters were more enthusiastic than Biden’s in the primaries. But he’s actually tended to underperform his polls. Sometimes higher enthusiasm means you have a narrower base, and the other candidate has more room to turn out undecideds, etc.

An important qualification to all of this is that most of the polls so far are conducted among registered voters when really we want to see likely voter polls, which won’t really be reliable for another several months.

nrakich: Yeah, Biden leads in most general election national polls right now, but likely-voter polls tend to be a few points better for Republicans than registered-voter polls, and as Nate says, we don’t have a ton of these polls right now.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): It’s hard to say much about enthusiasm right now since we are still in the midst of the Demcoratic primary ending. For instance, I think enthusiasm around him could still grow, especially after Barack and Michelle Obama have enthusiastically endorsed him, Sanders is behind him, and he has picked a running mate who perhaps excites the party.

sarahf: That’s fair, but how do we reconcile that Trump’s very enthusiastic support is so much higher than Biden’s — 29 points?

perry: Trump is the Republican Party’s candidate, and he just won his primary with overwhelming support. The party is unified behind him. People have voted for him once. I’m not surprised his supporters are fairly enthusiastic about him.

natesilver: I don’t care how much higher a quality is that doesn’t matter.

But honestly, I think this discussion is premature in some ways. The general election campaign hasn’t begun. The primary campaign is in a zombie-like state between being sort of finished and sort of not.

We’re in the midst of a pandemic. And we don’t have very many likely-voter polls, and to the extent we do, they’re not liable to be very reliable anyway at this early stage.

Perhaps most importantly, Democrats can be very enthusiastic about beating Trump even if they’re not that enthusiastic about Biden.

perry: Right, that’s the most important thing.

nrakich: Yeah, I find it hard to get worked up by any general-election polling at this point. We’re still so early in this massive news story that could significantly help or hurt Trump.

sarahf: But is it a bad sign for Biden — and enthusiasm for his campaign — that 15 percent of Sanders supporters in the ABC poll say they’ll vote for Trump?

natesilver: Twelve percent of Sanders primary voters voted for Trump in 2016, and another 14 percent voted for a third-party candidate or didn’t vote. So those numbers are in line with four years ago. And there are fewer Sanders voters than there were four years ago, so if anything those numbers are better for Biden than they were for Clinton.

nrakich: Yeah, historically, that would be a totally normal number. In addition to the numbers Nate cites for 2016, another study found that 25 percent of Clinton voters voted for McCain over Obama in 2008.

So it’s not like this is something past presidential candidates haven’t had to overcome as well. It can make a difference in a close election, but bigger factors (e.g., the national environment, the economy) will probably determine the outcome in the end.

sarahf: OK. So what I’m hearing is that the idea that Biden has a real enthusiasm gap is — at least at this point — overrated! But isn’t it at least somewhat worrisome that there now appears to be an effort to draft New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for president?

natesilver: Ohhhhh Sarah, this is such trollbait.

nrakich: Let’s be clear — that “ooh, Andrew Cuomo should run for president!” talk is utterly nonsensical, non-serious and half-baked.

sarahf: It is! I’m not defending it. But look at what happened when that talk took off last fall. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick both entered the race as opposed to throwing their support behind someone else.

natesilver: People don’t understand the process. People think you can magically wave a magic wand and that Cuomo becomes the nominee.

Look, if Biden drops out for some reason (health, scandal, etc.), then, obviously, you’ll need a different nominee.

And I do think Cuomo might be the second-most likely nominee, after Biden.

If you need an emergency replacement nominee because Biden drops out, he’s fairly compatible with Biden ideologically.

And frankly, the “emergency replacement” scenario — while unlikely — is still probably more likely than “Bernie wins all remaining contests by 20 points and wins a pledged-delegate plurality” scenario.

nrakich: I do wonder to what extent people actually believe/want Cuomo to be the nominee, and how much is just a fun daydream.

perry: I live in Kentucky. People are suddenly talking very positively about our Gov. Andy Beshear, who is a Democrat. This is in part because Trump is doing press conferences in which he ignores the evidence and seems as interested in defending himself as he is in addressing the issues. So Cuomo comes off well in comparison, as do other governors, like Ohio’s Mike DeWine, a Republican.

It also helps that Cuomo is doing a lot of media and lives in the media capital of the United States. Plenty of governors would be getting buzz if they were doing a competent job and were based in NYC, for example, Gavin Newsom (California), Jay Inslee (Washington), Beshear, DeWine.

nrakich: I think the Cuomo thing — both talk of him becoming the nominee and his role as a leader on the coronavirus in general — has been overinflated by the New York-centric media.

perry: Also, Biden has not been super-impressive in his media appearances, so there is that.

Cuomo has been better on that front, as have other governors.

sarahf: But Biden has been kind of missing from the coronavirus response, right? Part of that is because, as you all point out, he’s not a current governor tasked with spearheading preventive measures in his state, but it does seem as if it’s harder for him to have a natural place in the conversation.

natesilver: I don’t think anything Biden’s doing right now matters very much.

He’s also done more than the media has generally acknowledged.

perry: I think Biden is in the conversation. But his general ideas (Trump should listen to the medical experts, social distancing should continue) are what basically the media, governors, experts, everyone else is saying. Biden is not trying to stand out in that conversation or be interesting, which I think is normatively good. He is not offering weird ideas to stand out.

natesilver: The narrative is dumb. It’s always dumb at this stage of the campaign, when the primary winner has in all probability been decided but it’s not technically over yet. It would be a lot worse if not for coronavirus since the media would have a lot more news cycles to fill with fake drama.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, Biden hasn’t been as much of a presence on our TV sets, but I don’t think that’s his fault, as Nate pointed out. I think cable news just hasn’t been giving him a lot of airtime. The other day, major networks decided to air Cuomo’s briefing on the coronavirus instead of Biden’s speech.

But what Biden has to say on the coronavirus is more relevant to a majority of the country.

natesilver: It shouldn’t give him a lot of airtime!

Biden’s not hugely relevant at the moment.

nrakich: I think they should give him more than Cuomo! Biden might be president at this time next year. Cuomo governs just 6 percent of the country.

natesilver: Cuomo is dealing with the realities on the ground in a way Biden isn’t. And New York has a lot more than 6 percent of coronavirus cases.

He’s also doing a pretty effective job of communicating about coronavirus data and where the state and the country is in combating the epidemic.

I don’t think he’d get as much press coverage if he hadn’t been doing a good job with the communication side of things. It’s earned media in the truest sense of the word.

sarahf: That’s fair. A lot of what’s happening now is outside of Biden’s control, and obviously, there’s a lot we can’t answer, but Americans still rate Trump really highly on the economy — 57 percent said they approve of how he’s handling it, which marked a new high for him in that same ABC/WaPo poll. What’s more, Trump led Biden on this metric, 50 to 42 percent. Couldn’t that pose a real problem for Biden moving forward, especially if it’s harder for him to be a part of the conversation now?

nrakich: I think this is Exhibit A for it being too early to say anything. It seems like the economy is going to be in real trouble. If unemployment hits 30 percent or the gross domestic product growth rate is -15 percent, I don’t think Americans will continue to approve of Trump’s handling of the economy.

natesilver: No, I don’t think anything about the polls right now tells us very much about what the situation is likely to look like in September, or November.

People haven’t been living with this for very long. A lot of the consequences haven’t happened yet. And after the consequences, there’s the opportunity for a rebound, or a second wave.

You just have to be patient. Right now, I spend a lot more time looking at, say, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Italy than at Trump’s approval rating. I’d argue that the former tells us more about his reelection odds than the latter, since it tells us something about the extent to which a coronavirus epidemic can slow down post-peak.

sarahf: I can’t help but think that part of the narrative is being set now, though, about Biden having an enthusiasm problem. Of course, it could be that enthusiasm for Biden doesn’t really matter because enthusiasm to elect anyone but Trump is a bigger motivating factor, but I do wonder how that plays out in the coming months. Even if the enthusiasm gap isn’t real, could the perception of one still hurt Biden?

natesilver: Just one troll question after another.

sarahf: I know! But I think people are thinking about this — and even if it’s premature now — I do wonder how it takes root, even when it shouldn’t.

nrakich: That’s interesting, Sarah. Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if cable news continually covers Biden with the implication that he is somehow inadequate or not up to the task of beating Trump. I don’t know if that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy or not.

natesilver: I think if anything people tend to overlearn the lessons of the most recent election. A lot of the templates that people applied from the 2016 primaries to the 2020 primaries led to completely wrong predictions, like vastly understating Biden’s chances.

The fact that Democrats are worried about an enthusiasm gap because of 2016 could easily help Biden because it will scare Democrats into voting.

nrakich: I certainly agree that people try way too hard to retrofit the lessons of the previous election. To many (especially those with an anti-Sanders agenda), Clinton lost because Sanders voters weren’t united around her. But can’t it just be enough that she lost because it was an extremely tight election and that happens sometimes?

perry: Biden could very well lose the general election. And he could lose in the same way that Clinton did — a center-left Democrat wins the primary on the strength of older voters, particularly older black voters, but then loses in the general, with Trump winning in key swing states even as he loses the national popular vote.

But Clinton almost won and Biden very much could win. I don’t think Biden has an enthusiasm “problem,” but having enthusiastic supporters who are donating a lot of money, volunteering and eventually turning out to vote in large numbers always helps. So getting as much of Sanders’s crowd on board as possible will be useful for Biden.

Do I think it would be better for Biden if polls showed people were excited to vote for him? Yes, because I do think there is the potential that “people are holding their nose and voting for Biden” becomes a narrative.

nrakich: I also think a lot of the problem is that no one media members or the Twitterati know personally is enthusiastic to vote for Biden. Which of course speaks to the bubbles they live in. But that can have real effects on the narrative, as Perry said.

perry: But it’s hard for me to look at these polls right now and say Biden has an actual enthusiasm problem — or really many problems at all.

[is-i-halloween-yet]

EGO’S HOGWARTS AND ILVERMORNY SORTING

REQUEST: Like if one of the Dark Youtubers was put into, say, the Harry Potter universe, but the reader wouldn't have a part.

Warning: Spoilers. For literally everything. Also I am very behind on Sanders Sides, so please forgive me. Also the AN is important. Read it.  Descriptions get short as they get more obvious in my head but I will explain my thinking if asked!

((AN: Normally I wouldn't do this, but I'm a SLUT for Harry Potter so fine! Just for you beautiful anon. I did this on my personal opinion and it was my goal not to sort everyone in the houses you would think they'd be in. It kinda helped snap me into my writing again so thank you. I almost want to just do this with all sorts of fandoms. Game of Thrones. What God/ Goddess parent they'd have (Rick Riodan stuff) Superhero. Bands. Musicals. You name it! Would love more cause this was fun! Plus now I can casually advertise my Harry Potter imagines Blog: ) so check out @potter-scamander-black-imgines! They are organized by the person and yeah! Those are all the egos I write for so enjoy! I only did the egos that are cannon or the egos I own. Plus, now you guys know who all I will write for. EXCEPT I DON’T WRITE FOR THE YOUTUBERS IN ANY WAY BUT PLATONICLY CAUSE I AM NOT COMFY AND IDK IF THEY ARE EITHER. I also only put down the egos that I have either created or are created by the creator: I ALSO WRITE FOR CHARACTERS LIKE GEAR, A, LIGHT, MARQUESS, ETC BUT I DON’T OWN THEM!!! SO. THEY AIN’T GOING HERE))

Markiplier Ego’s

Mark:

Hufflepuff. Yeah... Almost all Youtubers are Hufflepuff.. But mark is so caring and loyal and passionate... I don't know where else I'd put him. Nevermind fuck you Mark you are fucking Ravenclaw. Fuck you and your brilliant, witty, creative shit. Fuck-

Thunderbird: Yet out of all of them, he yearns for adventure and to try new things, placing him here.

Darkiplier: 

Slytherin. This was obvious. I tried. Cunning, ambition, etc! Dark is the most cunning and determined of the YouTubers Dark!Sides. He thinks of himself and only himself. He acts on only what we strengthen him. I was torn between this and Ravenclaw, but chose this as some of the Ravenclaw traits don't line up.

As for the American school, I would probably place him Horned Serpent. Almost put him in Wampus, but I cannot picture Dark as a solider. While he has the mind, Dark doesn't possess the drive of a solider, and the only other place he would fit would be as a scholar.

Dr. Iplier: 

Slytherin. He doesn’t care about anything but his goal. He is cunning to get there and only has ambition.

Wampus. The mind of a warrior. He has his message and he must spread it. You are dying. Sorry. 

Googleiplier: 

Ravenclaw or Slytherin but I am gonna say Ravenclaw. This entity is as witty as he is intelligent. He has to be creative 

Horned Serpent. His primary objective is answer questions as quickly as possible. How is he not in the house of the scholar?

Bingiplier:

 Gryffindor or Hufflepuff. I say Hufflepuff. While we don’t know much about him, I’d say he is mostly loyal to his cause more than anything else. 

Thunderbird. That skateboard? Uh yeah. He’s got wanderlust. He is an adventurer. 

The Host: 

Ravenclaw. Even in his days as the Author, he has used his own thoughts to narrate the lives of everyone around him. That is creativity. That is wit. 

Horned Serpent. Intelligence and scholars? That’s him. *Drop Mic*

Wilford Warfstash: 

Slytherin. He is cunning, ambitious, and wants nothing more than get to the point of his desires, regardless who he kills or who is sacrificed in the process. He was like this even as William. 

Wampus. No doubt in my mind. He was a solider. Still is at heart. Always will be. 

Abe the Detective:

So. Gryfindor. No question and here is why. He keeps fighting. But he doesn’t for ambition or loyalty. He does it because he has the will to. Because he’s brave. Basically IDK it’s what my heart says.

And Wampus. Just as he is this, he does his job because he has to. He has nothing but to fight on.

Damien the Mayor: 

This was harder than I fucking thought okay. But I am gonna say Hufflepuff. He is loyal. Enough said. Cause I hurt.

And for this I oddly enough am gonna say Horned Serpent. Out of all the options, I think he wants to obtain knowledge in attempts to attain his Hufflepuff loyalty. 

Celine the Seer:

Ravenclaw. I almost said Slytherin, but she took her discomfort with the house and turned it into fuel to learn about what she can do and how she can uncover the secrets. 

And she meets with her brother again in Horned Serpent. Look up for why. 

Mark the Actor:

Slytherin. He is ambitious. He is cunning. He will not stop until he has revenge. 

Wampus. Look up. He is numb. He does what he must and will do so if it ends with blood. 

Benjamin the Butler:

Hufflepuff. Did you watch the livestream? He is such a good loyal boy. 

Pukwudgue. He just wants to heal. He just wants to help. Protect him

Jacksepticeye Ego’s

Jack/ Sean: 

Hufflepuff. Okay. Loyal, compassionate, and so many other traits similar to this are used and surrounded by Sean. I mean PMA, right?

Annnndddd Thunderbird. C'mon is this even a question? Yes I almost said Pukwudgie, cause that's what he does for our community, but our Jackie is a brave green bean who likes to see the world and try new things.

Antisepticeye: 

Gryffindor. Okay. Lemme explain myself. You were all expecting Slytherin. I don't blame you. But here's the thing. While I agree that Anti could be Slytherin, but he is more Gryffindor for his recklessness rather than cunning nature. He is brave, fearless, daring, courageous, and etc. The only thing that separates him from this house is chivalry. Yet even still this house is a better fit. While he has the ambition and self preservation of a Slytherin, in my mind, he is more on the brave side then cunning. After all, who said bravery was a positive thing?

As for the other school, I'm thinking Wampus. Our options are healer, scholar, adventurer, or warrior and Anti is obviously more of a warrior. Calculating and violent. Daring and bold. He will fight hard and he will fight to the bloody end.

Jackaboyman: 

Hufflepuff. In my own head cannon, this boy thinks with one thing, his heart. He jumps straight into things without thought, but it’s not out of bravery or courage. It is out of loyalty and love.

Pukwudgie. He is a lover, not a fighter. So I think he’d rather heal than any of the other options. 

Dr. Schneeplestein: 

Ravenclaw. Yes! He's not evil yall can actually fight me. It was Anti who change the perception of everything. He is smart. Witty. The perfect Ravenclaw.

Pukwudgie. He’s a doctor? So this is obvious? 

Chase Brody: 

Hufflepuff. I almost said Slytherin? But loyalty. Chase is nothing if not loyal. He is loyal to his, wife, to his kids, even to his best friend in a coma. He is and always will be loyal

Thunderbird. Bro Average? Proves? How adventurous he is? ‘nough said. 

Marvin The Magnificent: 

Slytherin. Almost said Ravenclaw! But no! Listen. If you go back to the video, I can infer that he’s got an ambition. He’s gotta be the best at magic. He has to be. 

Thunderbird. He tours. He’s gotta have some adventure in him. Also he has long hair

Jameson Jackson:

Ravenclaw. He’s clearly an artist of some form. And Ravenclaw is the artists home.

This one is hard, but I am gonna guess Horned Serpent. I suppose it would be the old soul in him, but I think he is always trying to learn something new. So this is where I would place him. 

Robbie the Zombie:

Hufflepuff. I think loyalty to his family is his defining trait. 

Horned Serpent, is where his curiosity comes into play. And I haven't devolved Robbie in my eyes yet so this is my start. 

CrankGamePlays Egos 

Ethan:

 Ravenclaw is what I thought at first. Ethan is such a creative boi, but more than that, he is very witty. But I think instead I am gonna have to go with Hufflepuff. Ethan, I know you think you are a Gryfindor, but here's why you aren’t. You get your Gryfindor qualities from your loyalty.

Pukwudgie. He just wants to help! And heal. At least more than the other houses. 

Vladamir: FIND HIM HERE= https://is-i-halloween-yet.tumblr.com/post/177094268858/vlad-vladamir-headcannons

My soft boi is a Hufflepuff. He is so loyal. All he wants to do is help and heal...

AND A PUKWUDGIE. Look up. He’s a healer. 

BlankGamePlays: WE KNOW NOTHING BUT I DON’T CARE

Ravenclaw? He has? Creative? Appearances? 

And Thunderbird? He does? Interesting things? In the videos? He is in?

NateWantsToBattle Egos

Nate: 

Gryffindor. Nate takes chances and is brave. And honestly the only other contender would be the house of Ravenclaw. But my heart declared him more of a lion and I couldn’t disprove it in my head.

Wampus. He charges into everything he does whole heartedly, like a solider, so that is where I shall place him.

NateMare: 

Ravenclaw. This boy is a smartass. He is so witty, but so creative as well. This is where he belongs. 

Wampus. The same reason that Nate is a Wampus. He fights for what he believes is. 

Phantom:

Slytherin. If he has one thing, it is ambition. Enough said. 

Wampus. Wow. All of the Battles are Wampus’. But same reason for other too okay.

Thomas Sander’s Egos

Thomas: 

Gryffindor. So brave. Takes so many chances. Tries so many things. He has the heart of an adventurer if anyone does. 

Pukwudgie. If anyone wants to be a healer or helper it is the YouTuber. And I have said it many times but I will again. Enough said (Will probably say it again sometime soon sorry not sorry). 

Deceit:

Slytherin. He is literally a snake. He is lies. But also lies are cunning I am not saying this house is evil. 

Wampus. Gets the job done. Who cares what it costs. 

Logan: 

Slytherin. While many hear logical and think Ravenclaw, but I think the cunning Slytherin. He is pure logic. Nothing else. 

Horned Serpent. The house of the one seeking knowledge. Make sense? 

Patton: 

Hufflepuff. These folks are essentially fathers. So... It makes sense?

Pukwudgie. Healer and helper and dad? Makes sense. 

Roman: 

Hufflepuff. Roman is his heart. What is the heart if not loyal?

Pukwudgie. I didn’t really think he belonged anywhere else. What is a hero if not a healer?

Virgil: 

Ravenclaw. He is so creative and so smart. This is where the bean belongs. Fight me. 

Wampus. Again. Wasn’t sure where this person is going to be placed, but I am putting him here because he will fight for what he believes in. No matter what.