#at most a few of them are classically considered cringe

[squeakadeeks]

sometimes it's fun to talk about what you're watching/into, but there's a small handful of series that i like but will literally never say a word about them or give any indication that i like them online. i promise it's not anything problematic, there's just something refreshing about having an interest that the internet knows fuckall about. like babygirl i am consuming media in the dark recesses of my apartment that will forever remain unbenounced to the watchful eye of the online masses.

[calcifiedunderland]

Pride & Prejudice: A TWSTed AU

ft. Overblot Gang x GN Reader

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single leader in possession of power, fortune, and intellect, must be in want of a partner.”

“Pfft-“ you snorted to yourself, flipping through the pages. ��What kind of story is this?”

Earlier that day, you and Grim had decided to clear out one of the rooms at Ramshackle. After a brief jump-scare from Crowley (who showed you how to make furniture out of a magic hammer?), the two of you were now on your way to making a ‘Guest Room.’ Finally, gone were the days of your friends groaning about your dusty couch and cobweb-filled living room!

But that also meant that the boxes in the room had to be moved out. Most of them held thread-bare cloth and other dusty knickknacks, but a few held books that looked as though they hadn’t been held in ages. Out of sheer curiosity and boredom (and the fact that Ramshackle had no internet whatsoever), you cracked open one of them and started reading, with Grim snoozing soundly on your lap.

“What are you reading, Prefect?” One of the Ramshackle ghosts wafted to you, resting on the armchair back behind you. You turned the book to read the cover, frowning, “Prejudice and Pride, by Jean August. It’s kind of ridiculous.” You ran a hand over the dusty cover, “I think we had something like this in my world, too.”

The ghost immediately grinned, “I remember this from when I was alive!” He dove in front of you, taking the book and flipping through it at phantom speed. “This was one of our required readings! Ah, you living folk miss out on the classics,” he sighed wistfully. “Here, this was the best part!”

You took the book and read through it. It seemed to be a love confession, where the main male lead was telling the female lead how much he ‘ardently admired and loved her’ and failed miserably.

“Wow, that’s cringe,” you winced, skimming the page. “And also unrealistic. I mean, who falls in love with someone they hate? And who starts a love confession with ‘you suck, but I love you anyway I guess’? Why the hell would they think that would even work?!” You and the ghost laughed, and continued reading together.

~•~

“The Prefect is… interesting, but not enough to tempt me!”

He remembered telling his dorm mates this exact phrase, after bristling at a group of underclassmen gossiping amongst themselves. It was no secret that you and he were close - after several overblots at school, it would’ve been impossible not to be. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself. It wasn’t like he laid awake at night, thinking about you right? How ridiculous would that be!

Meanwhile in his room, several hours later, the young dorm leader frowned, feeling restless. It was already close to sunrise, but he wasn’t able to drift off to sleep despite the exhaustions that came with leading an entire dorm. Instead of sleep and his impending responsibilities, his mind drifted.

Over the school year, he’d been able to push down his feelings (Sevens knew it was easy, and his overblot proved it), but now, it was impossible to deny it. This will not do, he thought, huffing irritably and sitting up in bed, absently rubbing his temple.

In vain, he’d struggled. But it couldn’t be denied, and despite his best and fiercest efforts to negate it, his feelings couldn’t be repressed. You’d proven yourself to be an unrelenting figure at Night Raven College - someone who he thought would be insignificant compared to his talent and renown. And yet. And yet.

Somehow you’d wormed your way into his life, to where it hurt to think of you as insignificant. Because how could an extraordinary person like you ever be insignificant? In his pre-overblot days, he was stubborn and yet still too prideful to even consider another way of thinking. But then you came along, and made him question everything, from previous prejudices to his own bittersweet pride.

You, who fell unceremoniously out of a coffin during the sorting ceremony with a little blue fiery cat, and scurried around the school running errands and odd jobs. You, who was once a passing glance, who became one of the things in the school he looked forward to seeing the most. You, with your heart of gold unshaken by the trials and tribulations thrown at you, day after day.

The feeling dawned on him, settling heavily and uncomfortably in their entire being. As the sun began rising, his mind reeled and he closed his eyes, the light bathing his room in a soft, pleasant glow. A warmth enveloped the room, but then a sudden chill ran down his spine. It was then, that he realized it:

He truly and ardently admired and loved you.

Now, he simply had to tell you so.

~

Now, dear Prefect, take his hand:

The Rose Red Tyrant: R. Rosehearts

The Usurper from the Wilds: L. Kingscholar

The Merchant from the Depths: A. Ashengrotto

The Schemer of the Scalding Sands: J. Viper

The Beautiful Tyrant: V. Schoenheit

The Keeper of the Underworld: I. Shroud

The Ruler of the Abyss: M. Draconia

———

notes: i really hope this wasn’t too cringe towards the end with the P&P refs but here we go! Seven chapters to plan AH, I can’t believe I twst-ified jane austen 💀

Chapters are coming soon!! A few are in the works!

Thank you to everyone who was interested in this idea!! What started as some brainrot has become bigger brainrot lmao, I fully appreciate it~

Take care shrimpies!!

———

Taglist: @eclecticprincecollector

@ars-tral @cerisescherries, @thehollowwriter, @twst-eeps,

(If your user is in bold, I wasn’t able to tag you for some reason 😅)

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

[catmomjudy]

I’ve often wondered if Buck is the actual introvert and Eddie is the extravert in their friendship.

I was trying to find something else over the weekend, and came across some articles on PTSD/trauma and damaged extraverts (who then appear to be introverts because they become afraid of trusting people). Eddie certainly presents as an extravert:

He seems to have a wide acquaintance/friends group (other firefighters, like Julie and now Tommy; the poker group; the basketball group; the dispatch ladies).

His first day at the 118 was classic extravert behavior—he fits in quickly and chats easily with everyone.

When Buck is standoffish on Day 1, Eddie pursues HIM. He wants to get along with everyone and wants to be friendly with all of his coworkers.

He chats easily with others about THEIR deep subjects (his conversation with May in season 5 comes to mind).

Extraverts tend to have a lot of people they know and are friendly with. They’ll still have deeper relationships, of course, but they’ll consider any number of people to be “friends,” and they are approachable and easy to talk to.

That doesn’t mean that they share their own inner thoughts, though—it’s often surface-level. It actually makes selecting and nurturing people/relationships where they can develop enough trust to share that innermost-feeling-stuff more difficult. And it’s that trust issue that made me wonder if Eddie was an extravert who had trouble diving past the surface relationships because of past trauma. He does trust people, but it’s a select few (Buck; Bobby). Otherwise, people only see the surface. An example would be his coworkers not knowing that he had a son and, later, a wife, until it became necessary (worried during the earthquake and asked a direct question) or beyond his control (Shannon showing up at the firehouse).

Buck appears to be an extravert, but I was actually thinking about Myers-Briggs types for the 118 at one point (while driving in my car, of course!!) and realized that Buck isn’t an extravert at all.

Think about HIS first day at the 118–he was shy and hesitant.

Buck being a “player” in season 1 was more about making connections—reveling in being Seen. Plus he’s incredibly awkward when HE tries to approach new people—I’ve always assumed that the women he slept with approached him because Buck-in-pursuit is just embarrassingly awkward. See his first conversation with Taylor for the cringe of it all.

The women he’s dated have, in most cases pursued him—or at least put the first step forward. Abby called him repeatedly. While he and Ali obviously exchanged numbers, she is the one who calls him and asks him out in 2x08. He met Taylor and Natalia on calls, and they were both inviting and forward. The one time HE tried to pursue dating, we got Veronica.

He doesn’t appear to have any close friends (or even people he hangs out with or activities he goes to) outside of the 118 circle.

Buck is outgoing within his friend/family group, but that’s common introverted behavior—they build that group and keep it close (they’ll fight for this—lawsuit, anyone?), and are comfortable being chatty to people in that select group. Outside of that group, and the awkward conversation and stuttering starts. They don’t necessarily have poor social awareness (particularly when observing OTHER people—I.e. people-watching), but they overthink and internalize it, making them self-conscious.

P.S. A true extravert would have gone to hang out at basketball with Eddie even if he sat and cheered (and razzed) on the sidelines and then got to go out for beers afterward with the group.

(My Myers-Briggs/Keirsey geekiness is showing again.)

(Expanded from comments on a reblog, so yes, you may have seen this before. Originally written after 7x04 and later updated, but nothing in his current relationship with Tommy refutes this.)

(Edited 8/10/24 to correct error.)

[lesbicosmos-writes]

again very very late but i wrote a fic for the day 6 prompt of @paynelandpromptfest !!

prompt: star / "make a wish"

summary: charles and edwin are in love and they stargaze on the roof on christmas thats it thats the fic <3

notes: very late for the prompt day but in time for christmas so that's all that matters <3

also on ao3!!

in a sky full of stars, i think i see you

Christmas had always been both Edwin and Charles’s favourite holiday, even when they were alive. Edwin because he loved the traditions, the decorations, the general joy of it all, and Charles because he loved giving gifts to people. Even if he didn’t receive anything in return, he loved seeing people’s reactions to things he got for them. Also, Christmas was about one of the only times where he felt like he could relax in his own house. They always had family over for a few days, so his dad was less rough. For just a few days, he could pretend like they were a normal family.

But nothing compared to Christmas with Edwin.

He hadn’t expected Edwin to love the holiday as much as he did, but it was amazing being able to show him the way traditions had changed since he was alive. They celebrated in their own special way every year, picking up little routines and rituals constantly.

Their Christmas was always a mixture of things Edwin loved when he was alive, things Charles loved when he was alive, and more modern things. Their office was decorated with both the holly and paperchains of Edwin’s childhood, and the brightly coloured lights and baubles that brought nostalgia for Charles. They’d play both classic carols and more modern hits on their record player. It was strange and a little all over the place but it was perfect and it was them.

Then, Crystal and Niko came into their afterlives and suddenly there were more people to celebrate with. Crystal raised an eyebrow at their strange little rituals at first, but eventually realised that they were just so true to the boys. Of course this would be how they celebrate.

This year specifically, since the relationship between the two of them had developed another layer if intimacy, yet another tradition had manifested itself in Charles and Edwin’s festive routine – mistletoe. There was a sprig hung from every doorway in the office, and the two took every possible opportunity to kiss beneath it. Edwin had always thought the idea a little silly when he was alive, but he hadn’t considered it in the context of himself having someone he could openly love in that way to kiss under the shining white berries. He’d always just been forced to sit there and cringe while his extended family members pretended that they hadn’t noticed the plant before despite having already kissed beneath it several times in the past two hours. It was quite ironic, in retrospect, that he was now the one in their place seizing every opportunity to get his lips on Charles’s, despite the fact he didn’t really need an excuse to at all.

The girls had gone out to do their own celebrations on Christmas Eve, then crashed at the office for the night so they could all open gifts together at the crack of dawn – much to the insistence of Charles and Niko.

A case came up in the middle of the day that they all had to run out and solve, but for the most part, their Christmas was a fairly chilled one, the four of them all just playing games together in the office. Edwin scoffed at the terrible jokes in the crackers, and Charles once again got very sad he couldn’t eat when Niko and Crystal brought in practically their entire kitchen cupboard’s worth of savoury snacks. Edwin vowed to find some spell that would allow ghosts to eat.

Eventually the girls fell asleep on the sofa, leaving Charles and Edwin practically alone in the office.

“It’s a surprisingly clear night,” Edwin noted, gazing out of the office window above the streets of London.

Brightly coloured lights shone in the surrounding streets, and they could quietly hear the music and chatter of the party going on in one of the blocks of flats across the road. Edwin looked up, away from the lights, and had an idea.

“I think this would be a perfect night for stargazing. Would you care to join me on the roof, Charles?”

“Course, mate,” Charles replied.

Language was one of Edwin’s passions, and he would constantly correct people if they used a word incorrectly or at the wrong time. And yet, he never corrected Charles calling him mate despite their growing romance. Somehow he had managed to take a common moniker used between friends and turn it into the most romantic petname Edwin could imagine. It was the way he said it; so naturally, so proudly, so full of love and feeling. Besides, there was nothing to correct about it in the first place. They were mates – best mates – and always would be. No matter the changes their relationship went through, no matter the colour or shape of the feelings between them; at their core they would always be two best friends. Two boys who found each other in their worst moments, a light in the other’s darkness, and felt nothing but love. Love – not just attraction - for the other person, just because of who they were. Edwin had always thought it was beautiful.

So when Charles called him mate, with that soft glint in his eyes and that smitten smile on his face, Edwin didn’t question or correct. He just smiled back.

“I’ll be out in a sec though, yeah? I’ve got an idea.”

“An idea?” Edwin asked, intrigued.

“Yeah, and it’s a surprise idea so you go sit up on the roof and I’ll meet you there.”

Charles pressed a soft kiss to Edwin’s cheek before ushering him out of the office.

Edwin took an unnecessary breath as he stepped out onto the roof of the abandoned building their office resided in, as though acclimatising to the cold December air despite being unable to feel its effects on his skin.

He looked up at the sky. From several storeys up, the light pollution wasn’t quite as bad - although it was still central London, so that didn’t really make much difference. Only a few constellations were visible directly above. He’d always thought it was a shame, really, the fact that advancements in technology meant they were no longer able to observe the natural universe around them to quite the same degree.

Edwin had always loved stargazing. When he was alive, his family had bought him books about the stars for Christmas every year since he was a small child, and he was obsessed. He never really understood the astrological beliefs surrounding them – although he had become more intrigued after reading the book Monty gave him in Port Townsend. No, he was always more captivated by the science behind them; those huge spheres of energy roaring away lightyears away from Earth. It made him feel insignificant at times, but he’d become used to that. It was easier to accept his insignificance on a cosmic scale than to accept it on a much closer one.

Then he met Charles, and gradually his thoughts about the cosmos became much less about insignificance and more about how lucky they were that they existed. Knowing that there was so much out there, and yet here was the only place that life had been found, that a new kind of life could somehow begin even after death; it felt special.

He never felt insignificant when Charles was by his side.

As though aware Edwin was thinking about him – which he probably was, considering there’s rarely a time Edwin isn’t - Charles stepped onto the roof behind him. Edwin turned around to find him standing there with a pile of blankets and pillows in his arms.

“Charles,” Edwin chuckled, shaking his head slightly as he walked towards him.

“What?”

“We do not feel the cold!”

“I know but, like, it’s the vibe innit? Snuggling up together under blankets and watching the stars.”

“You’re quite the hopeless romantic, aren’t you?”

“Yep,” Charles grinned, stepping towards Edwin and handing him a few pillows from the pile.

They set their little spot up – one blanket on the ground to sit on with pillows against the wall – and sat beside one another, the other two blankets covering them both.

Edwin swore he felt a rush of warmth as he relaxed into the soft knitted material, but he was quite sure that was less to do with the blankets themselves and more to do with Charles’s presence, leaning his head on his shoulder and cuddling up close. They were facing each other just a little, their hands clasped together in between them covered by the thick blanket.

“This is nice,” Charles said, gently brushing his thumb over Edwin’s hand in the way he knew drove him a little insane with affection.

“Hmm,” Edwin hummed in agreement.

They sat together in silence for a while, snuggled up to one another, until Charles turned his head just enough to whisper in Edwin’s ear.

“Make a wish,” he said.

“Charles, there aren’t any comets,” Edwin smiled.

“Make one anyway. There's always a shooting star somewhere.”

He had a point.

“The greatest wish I never even thought I was allowed to have has already come true. I don’t know what else there is,” he said, looking down at the top of Charles’s head on his shoulder.

“Well, I wish that every Christmas is as brills as this one.”

“You know if you say it aloud it won’t come true?” Edwin moved his head away from Charles momentarily, questioning.

“Nah. That doesn’t count when it’s you.” Charles looked up into his eyes. “Telling you doesn’t feel like revealing it to someone. It’s like you already know anyway.”

Edwin just smiled.

“Go on then, what’s yours?”

“Hmm. I suppose...” Edwin thought for a moment. “I wish for an infinite bookshelf.”

“Oh.” Charles laughed, taken aback.

“What?”

“Sorry, I guess I was expecting it to be something about us.”

“I told you, I already have everything I could possibly wish for in that department,” Edwin said proudly.

“You flirt,” Charles grinned, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “Infinite bookshelf would be pretty brills, though. It’d be like my backpack, only way more organised.”

“We could have several libraries worth of books and yet never run out of space in the office.”

“That’d definitely make case research easier.”

“Precisely. Which would leave us with more time for... other things.”

Charles moved out of the embrace but kept one arm around Edwin’s waist, his eyebrow raising with his smirk.

“Oh yeah?” he teased. “What other things you thinking of?”

“You know what things I’m thinking of.”

“Damn, who would’ve taken Edwin Payne for an insatiable horny teenager?” Charles said, he amusement evident in his voice.

Edwin laughed, a real open from-the-heart laugh that Charles had never heard around anyone but himself and the girls. “It’s you. You corrupted me,” he half-joked.

“Can’t exactly say I’m complaining.” Charles pulled him closer so that he could press light kisses to Edwin’s neck.

“Besides, I didn’t only mean... that,” Edwin argued, his voice shaking slightly at the contact. “I also meant we would have more time for things like this,” he Charles’s hand a light squeeze under the blanket.

“This is definitely good, love,” Charles replied, squeezing back and shuffling somehow even closer, nuzzling his head into his neck.

They couldn’t fall asleep, not really, but they got as close as they could; snuggled up against each other on the rooftop as the 25th of December ticked away into the 26th.

They’d stargazed on Christmas a few times before, the first time being December of 1990, back when they’d barely known each other a year and had just set up the agency, operating out of a treehouse in an old woman’s back garden. They’d climbed on top of the wooden structure, and Edwin pointed out all the constellations they could see above the horizon. That night, there had been a shooting star passing overhead, and Edwin had wished on it. He’d wished that Charles would stay with him for the rest of their afterlives. At the time, he’d thought it foolish and naïve. Surely Charles would eventually move on, perhaps Edwin would – they couldn’t spend the rest of eternity playing detective together, could they?

Well, thirty-four years on, Edwin was starting to believe that maybe that wish had come true, but it wasn’t entirely down to the star.

Sure, their little Christmas routine changed over the years; but so had their existences, their relationship, the people around them. And no matter what changed, the holidays always brought the same warmth to the still hearts of two boys who may not have been given as many Christmases to live as they should have been, but more than made up for it in their afterlives, and would continue to do so for as long as there were stars in the sky to wish upon.  

[freakblrbookkeeperofficial]

Blog Name: I didn't get to say goodbye

Username: @cringelordofchaos

Aliases: @mr-broom, @x-daisy-x, @hailey-i-guess, @xjaded-sadiex, @background-bg-chan, @xx0blooming-orchid0xx, @totallysean, @freakblr-lore, @tmf-tournaments

Type of Blog: Original Freakblr Seven

Date created: Late 2022-Early 2023

Reason Created: N/A (Non Applicable)

Last Active: Present Day

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

@cringelordofchaos is one of the more noticeable and still active members of Freakblr. And is also been cited as one of the Freakblr Original Seven, giving them special status on this blog. As previously mentioned, all Freakblr Original Users are sourced from @sobeksewerrat's post from several months back.

Cringelordofchaos stated that the main reason they joined tumblr in general, is because this is where they were able to find content for their favorite fandoms. "I noticed that when I search up cringe ships I like and go to Google images most of the things sourced back to "Tumblr", and so I realized that Tumblr could be a place I could be more accepted at, that people wouldn't judge me for being cringe, for my personality, fandoms, interests, ships or queer identity, and I wanted in." They even gave a reason for the name of their blog, "I made the blog called "cringelordofchaos", to reflect the fronte part of myself I was willing to share."

Though, they specifically found Freakblr like many of us do. Through, "@tmf-confessions!(While scrolling through the TMF tag on tumblr I came across . There were barely like, 15 posts at the time if not less when I first discovered the blog, and each post had like 2 likes from the same people, and that blog really was a primary catalyst for sharing your thoughts or anything related to TMF really, we all quickly became mutuals cuz again there weren't many of us"

They described the early days as many Freakblr Original Users and older members of the community do. "It was great! It was a pretty small group of people, like what? 3/4/5 of us at first? We mostly hung out at @tmf-confessions, right? And we were pretty tight since there were so few of us, and we let ourselves go wild and do all sorts of shit." It seems many believe the early days to be best, when activity was at an all time high and when there was a sense of freedom and almost casual community.

Cringelordofchaos has several aliases/alternate blogs. It's quite impressive. I listed many in the above section of this post. but some of note would be: @freakblr-lore and @tmf-tournaments. Still, the rest are just as important, making up their identity in Freakblr and the mark they've left on the community thus far.

When asked about blogs of note, chaos specifically mentioned haileyxaustin (left tumblr) and roryheart (deactivated). As well as zzstar-head, b0ytr4sh and zoeyhoeyisalive (deleted). Through just these connections, it's clear Chaos is/was very involved in this community.

They also noted that they were very close with @sobeksewerrat and @undeserved-halo.

When asked about enemies they said they felt they had no enemies. "I don't think I have any enemies ??? I consider myself pretty close to most of the OG7 + some others to the point where we talk abt much else more than tmf."

The memory Chaos decided to share is one that's considered classic amongst members of Freakblr, specifically those older members of the community. "When berry (@strawberry-pretzels) revealed they had rats that laid eggs, I mean that's always going to be iconic." They also had another memory, that's much more obscure in contrast to the previous one. "The time Roxy said she wears socks with tights." But, i think it's important to note they also said this, "I find each moment in this community equally important and special."

As mentioned previously, like many older members of Freakblr, they had mentioned not an aversion too new Freakblr, but a longing for it's earliest moments. "I liked the older days of Freakblr much, much better. Since there were less of us we all pretty much knew each other, we were pretty tight like an actual friend group and had a ton of inside jokes n stuff the new Freakblrs don't know, and we used the Freakblr tag for non-tmf related stuff more." There was, as mentioned, a sense of casual community. A tight knit group that felt more like friends than just strangers bonding over the fandom. "In short we were all much closer and it all felt so special and if the community wasn't as small as it was before I don't think I would've met my closest mutuals." Like I said, this seems to be the consensus among many Freakblr Users who were around for the early days.

Cringelordofchaos is one of the Freakblr Blogs I consider to be memorable. You can find their comments and reblogs in many older Freakblr posts. And even outside of Freakblr they pop up in places like Ao3 comment sections. While not as active in Freakblr spheres specifically anymore, they are still an active member of the overall tumblr community. And when you think about Freakblr, it's hard not to think of their blog. Like all Freakblr Original users they've left their mark on the community and will always be remembered by us.

As a final quote to sum up their thoughts and feelings on Freakblr, Chaos had this to say:

"This place is a perfectly imperfect disaster and I don't wish to ever leave."

[myfairkatiecat]

Do you have any general writing tips

I'm aware that my writing is still pretty amateur and I'm wanting to try and get better and elevate it

Specifically my descriptions are lacking

Honestly the way you get better at writing is by doing it. And by reading.

When I got my start in fandom when I was eleven, I’d been writing stories for a long time so decided to try my hand at fanfiction. I wasn’t that amazing but I had proper grammar so I considered myself superior to everyone (I look back at that stuff and majorly cringe, though). I was present on wattpad and the kotlc wiki and was obsessed with writing and reading fanfic.

My writing stagnated. Realistically I wasn’t that bad for an eleven year old. I was actually on track to be pretty good based on where I was at. But I stopped getting better. I started reading more fanfiction than actual literature and writing more fanfiction than original stuff. When I wrote fanfic, I was going for a certain kind of reaction/playing with characters like dolls WHICH IS APPROPRIATE FOR FANFIC but wasn’t making me a better writer.

Eventually I had a fandom slump right before covid and was writing a lot more original stuff. That was the year I finished my first novel (albeit, NOT A GOOD ONE. I repeat IT WAS NOT GOOD) and was reading a ton of YA books as well as classics. That’s when I progressed again.

During Covid I got involved with the Star Wars fandom and started writing more fanfiction again. I gave myself over to the most crackish Star Wars writing ever and I don’t regret it bc I wrote some seriously hysterical stuff. But the REASON I did that was this: fanfiction became to me a way to get little ideas with my characters out of my head, to present the characters to others, and to write something for myself.

Reading fanfic was still fun for me, but I made sure I was balancing it with reading other things.

That’s when I kept getting better.

As I got better my fanfics got better naturally, but I stopped worrying about them. That’s why some of my fics like living in a blur read as very amateurish: I don’t think about the writing really at all. Fanfiction didn’t prove to be a helpful place for me to work on my writing. That’s why my fanfic quality is always a few steps behind where I’m at as a writer and also why my fanfic quality naturally progresses as I learn and get better.

I believe people can practice and improve their writing through fanfiction. Don’t get me wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily what works for everyone. However, if you’re coming to me for writing advice, my BIGGEST piece of advice is: WRITE ORIGINAL CONTENT.

Writing original content forces you to think more about the world building, plot structure, and character threads. When you’re writing fanfiction, thinking about those things is very helpful, but since the world and characters are already kinda there, it can be easy to skip over those things. Becoming practiced at working with them improves fanfic quality!

If your writing style reads as wattpad style it’s because you read wattpad fanfics. That isn’t a bad thing. (Again. This is coming from me, KATIE, of all people.) As a writer you’re operating within the wattpad system: you read and enjoy fics, and then you write similar ones for others to read and enjoy. If something about your writing style bothers you, you have to break out of the system and consume other things that will influence your style as well as write in your own style and develop your own voice.

So! That’s storytime and sage life advice from Katie! If you want tips on story structure/characterization/overcoming writer’s block and stuff like that, just let me know! But if your main complaint is that your writing sounds amateurish, you can only become less of an amateur by doing it, and if doing it isn’t working, perhaps you’re in a Katie-situation where fandom is stagnating your writing and you’d benefit from trying my Make Original Content Trick!

[alpydk]

Recovery

Possibly the most self indulgent, self insert, cringe, comfort fluff I have ever written and you know what? I don't care.

Yesterday I went to the city. I had an interview for a course that went well. I did not have a panic attack at all. I was, by all accounts, normal. And so this is for me. My own pat on the back.

Word Count - 2283 - CW - Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Sickening levels of comfort and fluff

The last time you left the house you broke down within thirty minutes, the car halted, the engine left running. Your friend didn’t know what to do or say as you struggled to breathe, the tears falling from unfocused eyes. You could only whine between sobs that you just wanted to be who you used to be. 

You had tried pinpointing where the fear had come from: EMDR, medication, exposure therapy. None of it had worked, and you had instead found yourself slowly becoming worse. It started with flying, and then a long car journey across the country. Soon all sailing was out of bounds, easy to avoid away from the coast. The train to the therapist’s office had once been a time to unwind, watching a series on your phone. Now it was a half hour of muscles tensed and a tight knot in your throat that refused to budge. 

Mindfulness became travel sickness meds became anxiety medication that you never spoke of to others. You were functioning fine. There was nothing to worry about. So why did your heart pound without reason? Why did you repeat to yourself that you couldn’t do it as the wheels turned? Why did you feel as if all eyes were constantly on you, judging you?

Now it was time for another regular check at the doctor’s office, another set of questions you’d rehearsed answers to, another prescription given from what felt like a randomly chosen lucky dip of pills. The supposed miracle cure everyone had assured you would be effective. They’d said it about the last ones too and the ones before them as well. Oh, the side effects will just be temporary. They might have been, but the memories were permanent, the increased anxiety long lasting. 

The doctor would walk in, mumble something under his breath, the scent of coffee and hand sanitizer seeping from his pores. He’d part listen to what you had to say before tapping a few keys, considering what options were available for ‘hysteria’, not that’s what was written, of course. It may well have been with how dismissive he was. You knew what to expect because that’s what had happened so many times over, just another pit-stop on the slow ride down to rock bottom.

“Hey there. I’m Dr. Chase.”

The voice is young, clear. The scent of coffee and hand sanitizer mild against the ocean salt of his unblemished skin. Now it is you that struggles to listen to everything as you take in the sight of him, the clear blue eyes, the soft lips that you know will brighten up a room if they just curved into a smile. Hysteria – uncontrollable emotion or excitement. You’d let him write that in your file. Hell, you’d even live up to the meaning, if only for his acknowledgement.

“Sorry, your regular doctor’s retired. I’m gonna be taking over from now on. You doing alright there?”

You nod and answer his questions as he goes, lost in the way he moves around the room. Even when sitting still, a pen is being twisted between his fingers or his foot is tapping a tune you know only he can hear. You wonder if he’d sing with his unmistakable Aussie accent. What music would he enjoy most? Possibly the classics. Or would he be stuck in his own teenage angst era like you are? He can’t be much older than you, surely?

“I’m sorry. What?” He’s been waiting for your answer, you realise, his gaze patient. He’s listening, paying attention. You’re not a burden, not an inconvenience in his day. Finally, someone cares, notices.

“You’re flying? Where to?”

Had you mentioned flying? You couldn’t remember as you’d watched him lean over to pick up the pen he had dropped. Shameless, terrible behaviour as you’d imagined what lay beneath the lab coat. Firm thighs you could pin yourself around, a trail of dark hair you’d follow with your fingertips. Flying. You mumble out a reply, hoping your cheeks don’t match the red pen now being held in those lips. “Europe. A convention there.”

He nods in approval, letting you carry on your explanation, the pen being balanced between his teeth as he takes in each word you say. This is not how the appointments normally go. Usually, they do all the talking. In and out in record speed before you’ve even clocked how uncomfortable you feel.

“You travel a lot, then?”

You bristle in reflex, the mask up, the fortress ready. “Oh yeah, loads.”

“Aha...”

He can see right through your lie. You’re just the same as everyone else, after all. He takes a seat opposite you, sliding over as if he were casually in an office and not a medical room of a hospital funded by millionaires. “Where’s the furthest you’ve been, then?”

He’s reading you under the guise of examination. He takes your arm, placing it in the cuff to check your blood pressure. You’re trying to focus on the answer, going back to days when travel wasn’t a problem but his warm hands on your pale flesh are too distracting. Prague... Or was it Morocco? You can barely remember that far back. In the last ten years, the furthest you’ve gone willingly was an hour on a train.

The cuff tightens. The reading getting worse, you’re sure, as you still have not answered his question. He’s not repeated it. He’s not said anything, but your silence is all he’s needed to work it out.

“Don’t get out much?”

You can only nod. You’re ashamed, a failure of a human. How stupid it is that appointments like this are the highlight of a week? And even then, you know you’re going to be worn out as soon as you get home. Pathetic are the words you’d use to describe it. But not to others, of course. Only yourself. Only you are weak, pathetic, stupid.

That smile brightens up the room. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s pretty common, actually.”

Yeah, it is. But it’s lonely. “Maybe...” You want to change the subject. Don’t want him to see you like that. He’s a doctor, he’s seen it all, but you can’t be remembered like that. Not to him. “So... Checks all good?”

Thankfully, he doesn’t press and gives you the all good to leave, slowly removing the cuff from your arm. His hands linger a moment longer than expected, but you don’t mind, lost in the depths of his eyes. You wonder how it would feel to run your fingers through his hair, to hear his voice as you fall asleep, resting your head on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. Would he call you beautiful or simply show you how he felt? Would he say those three words and most of all mean them?

---

You’re not sure when the current course of meds began working. Maybe it was during a shopping trip where you stepped into a random store you’d never tried before. Maybe it was you started dancing in your living room, not caring that you looked terrible. All you knew was that things were changing. Yes, your creative hobbies had dwindled with the months, your words feeling empty on the page before you, your attention span shorter than the list of tasks completed. But you finally had hope. Hope that you would make that flight.

The trip out that day had been one you’d worried about. An hour of public transport, thankfully alone to avoid the concerns of others, an important meeting concerning your future, and then the confining walls of the city before returning to sanctuary. All your faith in medication and grounding techniques. Halfway... Almost there.... Positive thinking.

You step off the bus, legs shaking, and you hope no one can see the way your eyes are darting around, looking for a safe place to catch your breath. The meeting comes and goes before you even have time to panic; the questions going over your head as you focus more on appearing calm than knowledgeable. But you survive. Now comes the last hurdle: simply getting home.

You stand outside the building, the city a prison surrounding you. Towering concrete monstrosities closing in. The hustle and bustle of the world flows around you, a tempestuous current that drags you along, a feather in a storm.

A hand catches yours, warm and soft, and pulls you from the flood. No longer is there the whirlpool. There are only those pale blue eyes that see through your defences, the smile of golden sunlight glistening through the dawn. There is only him and you.  

“A little far from home, aren’t you?”

Words catch in your throat, not from panic, but from relief. Chase is right. You are far from home. For the first time in months, you’ve accomplished something. You’re exhausted, your muscles and mind aching each in their own way. All you want is to sleep, to shut down as the adrenaline ceases its endless torment. You answer, but trail out, more excited at sharing your achievement with someone. “I did it...”

Now you’re both smiling, the city forgotten around you. Robert keeps hold of your hand and you don’t question it. You don’t question any of it as he hugs you in public, your face buried in the crook of his neck, the saltwater filling your senses. He whispers words of how he is proud of you. This man who barely knows you, yet sees deeper into your soul than any other in your life.

How did this ever happen? Is this the medication? Will you wake up at home having never left the self built confines of your prison? Will you realise that all this is a cruel dream, based on one chance meeting? The doubts creep in, the hope fading, the realisation of the storm around you building. If only it were true...

---

Another day, another appointment. The chemical lighting setting the small room in an uncomfortable white glow. Dr. Chase enters the room, quick to flick through the file in front of him. You can’t bear to look at him after your visit to the city, your mind taking you on a journey before pushing you off the cliff.

“So, how’ve you been?”

You nod, give a dismissal answer, still unable to meet his gaze. “Fine, I guess.”

“Ready for your trip?”

“Yeah.” You’re not. What hope you had has gone and you consider cancelling it all.

He slides the chair between your legs as he had before, the cuff in his hands at the ready. His touch is as pleasant as ever. “Spotted you in the city a few weeks back.”

You lift your head, meeting the inquisitive nature of his eyes. He had seen you? He’d been there?

“Would’ve come and chatted, but you know, wasn’t sure you were up for that.”

Now you’re reading him, this open book in front of you. One that almost seems embarrassed to be admitting this. He’s confident, extroverted, good looking. And yet he didn’t take the chance? The faded wedding band on his finger, the tired lines under his eyes, the light stubble upon his chin, the tinge of black coffee on those lips. What lies beneath the surface, what secrets, what blemishes beneath unblemished skin?

 “You should’ve.” You’re not sure what’s come over you. That was rude, wasn’t it? To make demands of a person in such a way was unheard of from your mouth and yet you meant it. Maybe it could have been more than fantasy, more than a cruel dream.

“I’m here now, ain’t I?”

A warm palm moves along your arm. You try to remind yourself it’s all routine, but it feels different to last time: more intimate, an exploration rather than examination. Your heart is pounding, but it is not the recognisable beat of anxiety. It’s the rhythm of wanting, of longing. It is the tides washing on the shores of distant beaches, the breeze dancing between light cotton drapes. Your hand finds his, fingers entwine, and you can do nothing but swallow the nerves.

He speaks, the quiet lilt of his accent joining the song in your chest. “Have you celebrated?”

Chase’s question confuses you. Celebrated what? Leaving the house? Who does that? “Um...no?”

His thumb strokes the side of your hand. This is celebration enough for anything you might have achieved. A small callous on his finger catches your knuckle and you look down, turning his hand in yours. His hands so perfect, aside from one small mark. How many other marks are there like this upon his body? Hidden truths behind impenetrable walls.

“Violin.”

Makes sense, but now you want more. To know more, hear more. Will he tell you of his family, of being a child, of his hopes and dreams, of the faded wedding band, of his accent and saltwater? Will he let you in? Will you let him in?

“Let me treat you for the evening. A meal and movie at my place or yours. Your choice.”

You’d pinch yourself if it didn’t make you look more insane than you already felt. Was he really asking that? “I’m sorry, what?”

His grin is the only answer you need, his hands placed over your own. Warmth, safety. You know he can’t fix you, can’t save you from yourself. But he gives you that hope back and you know he will be there to celebrate each baby step to recovery. You’ll make that flight. You’ll enjoy your trip, and when you return, he will be waiting.  

Calm ocean waves, golden sunlight, adventure outside yourself. All waiting, just for you.  

[blood-and-pizza]

All this animosity towards the horror animatronics makes me a little upset, but I gotta ask how are the Nightmares looked upon by the others in the estate? I really wanna know especially Nightmare Freddy since he has children

All the family-friendly animatronics, and most of the maintenance team, are scared of the Nightmares.

Out of all the horror animatronics, the Nightmares are the rowdiest. They're very loud and aren't intimidated by much due to their enormous size and sharp body parts. They're the most fun-loving out of everyone at the Estate, and aren't afraid to break a few rules, so long as no one human gets hurt.

(Seriously, the Nightmares never EVER want to hurt a human. They are super adamant about that. That doesn't stop the Maintenance team from being scared shitless of these tall metal behemoths due them being enormous safety hazards.)

Although Withered Freddy is considered the "leader" of the horror animatronics, he tends to be backed up by Nightmare Freddy, Nightmare Fredbear, and Nightmare. Not only do they provide an intimidation factor to anyone who tries to screw around with Withered Freddy, the Nightmares tend to be astonishingly competent at giving the relatively inexperienced Withered Freddy advice. For this reason, the Nightmares are loved by the other horror animatronics, as well as most of the Funtimes (Circus Baby thinks they're ugly, edgy, and cringe).

Because Nightmare Freddy is close to Withered Freddy, the Freddles are basically spoiled rotten by the horror animatronics, as well as most of the Funtimes. The family-friendly animatronics are a little wary of the triplets because of who their father is more than anything else, but because they're children they're still treated with a lot of kindness. Admittedly, newcomers are initially startled by the Freddles for their physical appearances... but hang out with them, and you'll find they're just normal kids who really love their papa.

Nightmare Freddy is kind of a master at juggling his parenting with all the leadership responsibilities he has at the Estate. You will not find a better multitasker. He's feared and admired, and while he's proud of it, he's way more concerned about his triplets and their happiness.

I do admit the Freddles don't like how their papa is spoken about by the other animatronics. This eventually leads to them having a heart-to-heart conversation with Classic Freddy, which further leads to changes at the Estate that mend the rift between the family-friendly animatronics and the horror ones.

The horror animatronics don't get mistreated forever. It does change. It just takes a bit of time.

[starrynightarchive]

19, 6, 42, 22, 38, 33, 47, 50, 92, 90, 72, 75, 70

answer them all

demanding. hello to you too anon

19. what's been keeping you up at night lately?

your mom.

ok just kidding. uhhh not much. maybe the mistakes I need to fix and this distinct feeling of wrongness that lingers.

6. what role do you play in your group of friends?

let's ask them shall we

42. how did you meet your best friend(s)?

aha i actually wanted someone to ask this one! I'll give you three stories

sri: when i was in kindergarten i remember very clearly seeing this fucker in the restroom. she pulled out her handkerchief and made a banana out of it? i was not impressed. but she then proceeded to eat it/put it in her mouth. which I was impressed with. and then she saw me when I got stuck on the very top of this giraffe thing which you can climb. a teacher had to come up and get me down. bitch was just staring at me the whole time. didn't move a muscle. i love her so very much.

vhas: ok so. i had (have. love her very very much she's a menace and we met in a whole other way) a best friend and I got them into wattpad when I was 13. or 12. idk. then that friend in turn went to a classmate and made them join wattpad. so now all three of us started writing very bad very cringe stories. i was writing a straight romance paranormal story and vhas was writing some tragic yaoi godbles. i read it and fell in love with his writing. so one day, without warning, I just went up to him and said "hey! i love your writing!" and fucked right off. no intro no how are you no nothing. we ended up talking in hangouts (rip) and I made covers for his stories and shit. and then the rest is history.

sree: this is the menace friend. she lives really close to my house. first way we met was through our school bus (we took the same one and I sat next to her one day). she was reading harry potter and we figured that we both loved books. i introduced her to a few. and the very same week I went to my classical music class and they were there. i was like ??? but we became quick friends. proximity, similar interests, orange slices and stupidity. yeah. they're pretty neat.

22. how old were you when you joined the internet?

around 12, i think

38. what is your love language? i'm very expressive about my love for people, but the main ones are: physical touch, words of affirmation and gift giving.

33. have you ever thought about changing your name?

nope! i love my name very very much :D

47. how well-decorated is your bedroom?

not much. at first i had a sticky notes wall filled with quotes poetry etc etc but then had to take it down because it was getting dusty. then there's this huge ass micky mouse sticker stuck on my wardrobe (my dad bought it when I was a kid). skk chibi figurines and iwaoi standee both from my lovely friend vhas. then books. a few magnets stuck to my wardrobe. that's all

50. what do you consider most important in a romantic/platonic partner? being ready to put in work in the relationship. must be an open communicator/must be willing to try. oh, and a good sense of humour (this is very specific btw. i have a type. i will not elaborate).

92. who's in your dream blunt rotation? great question. idk if I'll ever smoke weed but. if I do tay will be my go-to person (@spiderbends)

90. weirdest habit?

i bite people. is that weird? idk

72. which is more important when it comes to clothing, comfort or style?

comfort all the wayyyy

75. how would you describe your favorite person?

icarus. burning wings. the kindest smile. the bravest man. lover, healer, believer. object of all my sweet dreams and sweetest nightmares.

70. when it comes to affection/intimacy, do you prefer to stick to one person or are you more open about it?

intimacy/affection to me isn't strictly connected to romance. and I'm a very affectionate person by nature. i love fiercely. all my loved ones will be bombarded with my love. get loved, loser.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really That Bad?

Disney and Dreamworks have been locked in combat since day one, and honestly, can you blame them? The Katzenberg/Eisner feud is pretty legendary, with both men taking potshots at each other in films, and the drama behind stuff like A Bug’s Life and Antz has been done to death. The thing is, in the early years of Dreamworks, it was pretty clear that no matter how hard they tried, Disney was the one who was taking the Ws when it came to the cinemas. Stuff like Sinbad and The Road to El Dorado were flopping pretty hard, and while The Prince of Egypt was a success, the failure of the former two ended Dreamoworks’s hopes of ever competing with Disney in the 2D animated market. What’s a studio to do in a situation like that? Well, someBODY ONCE TOLD ME...

Shrek didn’t just solidify Dreamworks as a contender, that movie changed the course of animation in the 2000s all on its own. With its snarky humor, pop culture references, awesome pop soundtrack as opposed to musical numbers, and celebrity cast, Shrek codified many trends for animation going forward—for better and for worse. But whatever impact the film had pales in comparison to one simple, unignorable fact: This movie came out on top over Disney. It won the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Picture, and considering how long Disney was in that game that must have really fucking stung. While Disney spent the early 2000s floundering and releasing flops that would only become cult classics later, Dreamworks was riding that green wave Shrek produced all the way to the bank. What’s a studio to do in a situation like that? Well, someBODY ONCE…

Oh no.

Chicken Little was Disney’s blatant attempt at making their own Shrek (with blackjack! And hookers!), but to say that things didn’t pan out well for Disney there is a vast understatement. Michael Eisner made sure to meddle as much as possible, turning a more straightforward adaptation of the fairy tale into a snarky, self-deprecating comedy about baseball and aliens, which certainly is a choice. This choice had some dire consequences; while not a bomb by any means, the film ruined the already-struggling career of The Emperor’s New Groove director Mark Dindal, producer Randy Fullmer left Disney with Dindal and went into making guitars, and ultimately Eisner himself became a victim of the film as well, with it being the final blow to his tenure at Disney after a decade of failed investments. Eisner ended up passing the torch to Bob Iger, who turned out to be a better leader than Eisner who never did or said anything quite as stupid!

Audience reaction to the movie has always been pretty mixed, to say the least. Reviewers on YouTube such as Schafrillas, Doug Walker, and Mr. Enter have used the film as their punching bag at various points, with the latter in particular helping shape the image of Buck Cluck as Disney’s most vile father figure. Audiences these days aren’t particularly receptive to it either, with most people considering it Disney’s absolute worst film, though there are nostalgic viewers with a soft spot for it. I first watched the film myself a few years back, and I was thoroughly disgusted and unimpressed by what I saw; for the longest time, I had it higher than Doogal on my list of the worst films ever. Fucking Doogal! Can a film really be that bad?!

Well, I decided to give it a second chance and find out if maybe my perception was just colored by all the negative reviews. Is Chicken Little really that bad, or is this just a so-so Shrek ripoff that people overreacted to?

THE GOOD

Most of the characters in this movie are actually decent, even if they’re a little cringe. Chicken Little himself is a likable dork, which only makes all the suffering and setbacks he goes through that much harder to watch; I think they made him too likable, y’know? His friend group is pretty solid as well, with Abby being an okay love interest, Runt being a nice guy (or maybe I should say Nice Guy considering what he does with a bimbofied Foxy Loxy at the end), and Fish Out of Water being a cute “lol so random XD” character. They aren’t the best thing ever, but they’re all pretty decent. I can see why Zach Braff likes voicing the title character so much, and it is cool he got to be in the best Kingdom Hearts game, so that’s something!

Though of, course none of them hold a candle to the absolute Chad that is Morkubine Porcupine, a character so fucking cool that he refuses to give this movie the dignity of more than three single words out of his mouth. If he had more dialogue, the whole movie might collapse under the sheer power of his voice. He’s like Black Bolt, except a porcupine, and in a marginally better piece of Disney media.

There’s a great sequence at the end of the movie that has a Pee-wee’s Big Adventure-esque film within the film about Chicken Little’s exploits… except he’s a ridiculously buff rooster voiced by Adam West in a film that looks like an insane version of Star Fox from the brief clips we see of it. Runt is in there as a hardcore, ugly warthog and Abby is an overly-sexualized space bimbo, but I’m not even particularly bothered by the fact they gave the girl chicken breasts because Adam West’s chicken breasts are so much more massive. 

The entire scene, as brief as it is, is delightful thanks to West being West, and it honestly makes you wish that the whole movie was just a ridiculous space battle adventure… And everyone’s wish was granted when they released a pretty good video game based on this silly concept!

Of course, as is typical of any Disney movie, the best part is without a doubt the villain: Buck Cluck, Chicken Little’s own father.

 In his youth, he was a strapping sports star, and because of this he feels a deep sense of shame at his son’s wild antics and is completely unable to relate to him. He constantly puts him down in front of others to try and salvage his own reputation, throwing him under the bus at every opportunity and refusing to support him. And even after Chicken Little pushes himself to the limit and becomes a baseball star all so he can earn even the slightest smidgen of his father’s respect, Buck is quick to cast him aside once more all so that he can try and keep the dignity among the townsfolk he mooched off of his son’s victory. Buck Cluck is the proto-Mother Gothel, a distant and absent parent for the ages, and one of the most despicable foes the studio has ever produced. Hell, I might even go as far as to say he’s one of the greatest villains of all ti-

Wait, hold on. I’m being informed that Buck… isn’t intentionally a villain? He’s supposed to be… sympathetic…?

THE BAD

I’VE COME TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT! BUCK “THE CUCK” CLUCK’S A BITCH-ASS MOTHERFUCKER!

Ok, ok, let’s be serious for a second. I’m gonna get a bit controversial here, but Buck Cluck isn’t nearly as evil as people make him out to be.

Let me explain: While the film’s narrative completely and utterly fails to make his redemption feel earned at all, it’s not like he was ever really intentionally or even physically abusive like Frollo, Gothel, or Lady Tremaine were. Buck Cluck has a very real problem a parent can have, in that he has a hard time relating to his son while being a single parent that is likely still dealing with the loss of his wife. The issue is the movie doesn’t bother trying to flesh him or his feelings out and tries its damndest to make him look like a good guy all while he emotionally neglects his child.

All this being said, his vocal performance from The Princess Diaries director Garry Marshall is actually pretty great, he gets a few good jokes here and there, and it’s actually really endearingly goofy when he overcompensates with loving his son in the third act. While I’m never going to stop treating the character like he’s Chicken Hitler, I want it to be clear that my jabs at him are very much in the same vein as someone like Huey Emmerich. The difference, of course, is that Huey is an intentional case of making a character you love to hate, while Buck is accidental. And that’s why this segment is here, in “The Bad” part of the review: The movie failed this man so bad that he is put alongside characters like Shou Tucker, Ragyo Kiryuin, and Fire Lord Ozai in animated parent rankings. How do you fuck up that badly? Mainly by deleting the scenes where he actually gets development or characterization beyond being a lousy parent, that’s how!

These writing issues don’t just affect Buck, though; literally the entire movie is as messy as that Kentucky fried bastard’s characterization. The main issue is with the story itself. Now, when you have a movie called Chicken Little, you kind of expect an adaptation of the fable of the same name. And since this is Disney, you wouldn’t be stupid to assume that’s what they’d do, considering adapting fables, myths, and fairy tales is basically their bread and butter. But that is decidedly not what they did here; instead, they decided to make Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius by way of Shrek, because movies like that were popular at the time, and what we’re left with is a film populated by mean-spirited jerkasses who do nothing but dump on our likable main character as he takes part in a story to win the love of his dad via baseball that suddenly, out of completely nowhere, turns into an alien invasion movie about halfway through. Absolutely none of these elements work well together, and the film comes off felling like it was stitched together from unrelated scripts and turned into an unholy Frankenstein of bad ideas.

Not helping helping the disjointed story are the desperate attempts to seem cool. I like Morkubine Porcupine, he’s one of the better gags in the film, but he is so plainly a desperate attempt at creating an ensemble darkhorse that it hurts (the fact it actually worked in spite of this is nothing short of miraculous). The humor is very much aping Shrek, with lots of snarky humor and mean-spirited characters which ends up not working because it’s too cruel, and even ignoring that the pop culture references (a staple of Dreamworks at the time) just all come out of nowhere. Why is the fish reenacting King Kong? Why are these animals watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, and why is Indy still a human? Why did Disney think referencing the lemming suicide myth was a good idea when they literally perpetuated that myth by driving lemmings off a cliff for a movie?

Then there’s the animation. It is so blatantly obvious that this is Disney’s first time making a fully computer animated movie without Pixar’s help. A lot of characters look really unpolished, and even worse is that a lot of the characters are extremely overanimated. If you wanna see what I mean, watch Abby at the end of the dodgeball scene when she’s talking to Chicken Little. She just never fucking stops moving! Once you notice it, it becomes really distracting.

But by far the worst thing this movie does is the constant needle drops. This movie would make The Super Mario Bros. Movie blush with its overuse of licensed music, and it sure feels like Suicide Squad took notes from this because they cram so many tracks in here it’s not even funny. Sometimes they even just have thew characters sing them because… who fucking knows. Barenaked Ladies gets a pretty fat W with their song “One Little Slip” playing over our introduction to Chicken Little, but after that we either get the most obvious songs possible for any given seen (“It’s the End of the World as We Know It” plays over the alien invasion at the end, because of course it does) to “what the actual fuck is this doing here in the movie” (“Wannabe” by the Spice Girls is sung by Runt and Abby during a karaoke session, proving that canceling the Spice World review was not enough to save me from this band).

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Alright guys, here comes my hottest take ever: Chicken Little… isn’t that bad.

Now, don’t get me wrong! This movie is still not really good at all. It’s disjointed, mean-spirited, confused, and stuffed to the brim with the tropes and trappings of every bad animated movie of the 2000s. But all of that is also what helps make this so genuinely fascinating! When Dreamworks did stuff like this, it was whatever, that studio is a rising contender in the animation game… but this is Disney! This is THE animation studio, the biggest around, and they’re making every single mistake possible because they want to try and beat Dreamworks at their own game, and they are failing at it! It’s honestly so funny that they tried to make their own version of Shrek without any sort of understanding of what made Shrek work.

But even beyond that, even though this movie is bad, it’s not really worse than Shark Tale is, and that is a premier so bad it’s good film. Really, this movie is the opposite of that film in many ways. Where that film had a world that was too overly nice and propped up the shittiest main character animated at the time, this movie has an insanely cruel world where the sweet, charming, heavily traumatized child is incessantly beaten down and belittled to the point you half expect him to try and dive headfirst into a deep fryer; where that film had a single generic plot that was at least remarkably consistent, this film has two separate plots that don’t go together at all and just end up making both halves of the film feel stupid and pointless; and where in that film Oscar is desperately seeking love from his peers due to his sheer selfishness, Chicken Little just wants the love and respect of his father. Pile on that the mountain of similarities, from the overuse of lame pop culture references for the sake of pop culture references gags to the bland love interests, and you have the Awesomely Bad Animation Double Feature of your dreams.

So yeah, I think the rating it has is about what it deserves. This is easily one of Disney’s weakest entries for sure, but it’s not without its moments and it has some amusing jokes, charming characters, and Adam West as a buff space chicken. If you go in with lowered expectations, you might be amused, but honestly I get why this film is so absolutely despised. It really isn’t great at all, and is firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category. You can’t really expect much more from a movie that presents a character whose biggest crime was just being an asshole getting their personality overwritten with a girly-girl one that the comic relief fat guy insists is perfect as a hilarious joke and then leads into a dance party ending where the whole cast sings Elton John.

...Or you could expect more if it weren’t for that son of a bitch Buck Cluck. Fuck that guy.

[ardenigh]

More questions on Tegan & Lucky!

What sort of media would Lucky be interested in?

What sort of books and journals are in Tegan's collection?

What bike did Tegan have and what is Lucky's? How did Lucky get his?

What are Tegan's associates doing about Lucky being around instead of him?

Whether for his curiosity of meeting new people and places or distancing himself from Tegan's social circles, would Lucky consider moving somewhere else?

Since Lucky is still legally seen as Tegan, would he get his name changed?

Since Tegan is the king of street racing, would it be fitting that he also has an unbeatable skeeball highscore in every arcade he's been to?

i was going to open this answer by going "well it's your lucky day" but i just made myself cringe with it lol

it is time for boy lore!

What sort of media would Lucky be interested in?

I think he likes weird mixed-media and self-published stuff, honestly. Audio dramas, video essays. Things he can put on while he’s on the road or stretched out watching the clouds. Reading is nice, too, but he focuses best when he's just gotten up and isn't moving yet.

He likes a classic slasher from time to time, too, but only with other people. Corn-syrup blood and cheesy practical effects are just kind of better enjoyed together.

What sort of books and journals are in Tegan's collection?

Make no mistake, Tegan was a NERD. Aeronautical anthologies, astronomy texts, those weird Barnes & Noble historical coffee table selections. Poetry, like a lot of poetry. Tegan's very much a Yeats boy, although he was also fond of Rilke and Rimbaud. There’s also, like, a few dusty language textbooks, the sort that you buy on a kick and never get around to actually studying. And he wrote a lot. Memo pads and leatherbound Walgreens journals, that sort of thing. Crack one of those suckers open and you get a free tongue-in-cheek existential crisis in mechanical pencil, 'cause that's what he had on tap 80% of the time.

What bike did Tegan have and what is Lucky's? How did Lucky get his?

Tegan had a 2012 BMW F800ST! Torquey and balanced and really well cared for. Midnight blue with some subtle yellow and white accents, little bit of a Van Gogh homage (nerd).

Of course, Janus had mixed feelings on the whole racing thing, but he also recognizing that having a motorcycle was an integral part of his brother’s identity, so he arranged for a replacement — a Sprint 1050. They are both sort of sharp in the front, and honestly, like, a bike is a bike. Only thing is that a bike is not a bike, and so while Lucky does get things done with the Sprint, it’s a little bit too finicky for his taste. He ends up trading with another local bike enthusiast for something a little more his style, and that — a Yamaha FJR1300 — ends up being his trademark bike. He gets it done up in his colors and everything. :)

What are Tegan's associates doing about Lucky being around instead of him?

Aside from the fact that he just isn’t around as much as they’re used to, I think that most of his acquaintances are just convinced that Tegan sort of got scared off the scene by the crash. First one of his career, right? And bad enough to take him off the map for months. I think that what strikes them as the strangest is the way that he just doesn’t seem to engage in the racing game at all anymore — he just seems to be a full-time courier, now.

When they ask, though, he’s genial. Maybe a little vague. Something's ever so slightly off about him. It’s weird, but who wouldn’t be? The crash was pretty bad. I’m still sorting everything out. Everyone doing okay? Nothing like an NDE to really mellow someone out. He’s still welcome, though, and sometimes he takes people up on invitations on the town, but the atmosphere’s a little different now that Holloway doesn’t step up and dazzle whole rooms like he used to.

Tegan’s best friend is canny enough and close enough that she knows what Lucky’s deal is — anyway, she’s been busy in the interim with trying to suss out what got him killed in the first place. How is she coping with the recent development that the bestie has been format wiped and now perceives way more and also way less than she is comfortable with? Uh. Really well. Don't ask her any more questions.

Whether for his curiosity of meeting new people and places or distancing himself from Tegan's social circles, would Lucky consider moving somewhere else?

Lucky would love traveling, I can tell you that much. You know those people who will tour from one coast to another with a backpack and their bike? That's right up his alley.

As far as leaving permanently, though, Lucky is a creature of sentiment. He's got ties to the city, inherited though they were, and once he starts making them his own, it'll get that much harder to actually leave it behind.

He is going touring though. Someday.

Since Lucky is still legally seen as Tegan, would he get his name changed?

Maybe after enough time’s passed. Feels disrespectful to immediately start over, you know? I think a part of Lucky seeks to understand who Tegan was, and it might just be sentimentality, but wearing the name feels like a part of that, almost? You wear the name, you read the journals, you find the person still lingering in the apartment, the idle nail-carvings on the end table, the weighted blankets and sleep playlists.

In the end, if he gets too used to it, he might just start telling people that he is Lucky, yeah, but he was named after a brother who passed away. Maybe Tegan would be amused.

Since Tegan is the king of street racing, would it be fitting that he also has an unbeatable skeeball highscore in every arcade he's been to

YES. Is it anywhere near as prestigious? Absolutely not, but it's fun to see the neighborhood teens placing bets to see who can beat him.

Did Tegan have any tattoos? If so, what where they and what meaning did it have to him?

He’s got a simple one stretching horizontally above his shoulder blades, the phases of the moon. He would’ve had more, but he had too many ideas for them and often sketched down concepts in his journals and never actually committed to them. Lots of thought went into maybe getting a line or two from poems he liked inked, but he never got the chance.

If Tegan did have tattoos, would Lucky be interested in getting one as well?

The first tattoo Lucky gets might be for Tegan. Some poem on his bicep or chest. But in you is the presence that / will be, when all the stars are dead, maybe. A lonely impulse of delight / drove to thus tumult in the clouds. That one will take some thought.

Other than that, maybe a spade? Is that too on the nose?

[articianne]

Where should I start if i want to get I to the fire emblem series?

this is going to be a pretty biased answer, so... im sorry in advance! this is also a long one, so I'm putting them under a cut.

u have a fair number of options here. All of the ones I'm recommending released in the last decade, mostly because games older than that are NOT friendly to new players due to their difficulty. once u get used to the combat, then 100% some of the older games are fantastic to get into.

ill put them in order of my recommendation, including the new release of engage! i have vastly different reasons for why i may recommend each one.

1) awakening

this one is the beginning of the more "social" games, i.e. the horny chess stuff (cough dating sim). i think this one is the one that's recommended as a "Start Here!" game the most, and for good reason! i absolutely love it for what it is, and it has a good balance of combat, story, and the matchmaking stuff. i recommend this first to anyone who heard of fire emblem's social mechanics and, as a result, wants to dive in. it also has lore that goes back to the very beginning of fire emblem to FE 1. not much, but it does. from here, u can go back and do older games, or keep going and play the newer ones. Either way u'll be happy with the gameplay choices they added in the last decade or u'll enjoy harder combat from before then. this is my 2nd or 3rd favorite FE game!!

2) engage

i am really surprised i'm able to say this game considering it just came out, but it honestly is a really good place to start, unless downgrading in graphics is a big issue. i honestly have nearly no issues with this one—granted I'm not done with it but it's got a bit of romance for the protag, a tone in the story similar to 80% of the other games, REALLY FUN COMBAT, and somehow literally every other protag in the series without spoiling things for other games.

it is also VERY cheesy, maybe even more than normal, and the plot is fairly predictable (as far as I can tell). but cheese is a mainstay in FE games. if that's not up ur alley, prepare to either cringe or relish in anime. i fucking love it lmao

the only complaint i have, and this is literally my only complaint so i am truly nitpicking, is that for some reason like 20% of the girls in this game have vtuber hair that goes down to their ankles, and i don't know why. I don't know why this was a style choice, or if there's a plot reason, or whatever, but a lot of them have it. I don't even have a problem with "toothpaste pepsi mc" anymore. m!Alear is WILDLY endearing to me, but f!Alear's hair is so fucking long. i just. How.

3) shadows of valentia

im probably an outlier in recommending this, but i swear i have a good reason. this is the newest "classic" game because it's a remake of FE 2—i.e. if u don't care about matchmaking or having the protag marry someone of ur choosing, or if u simply wanna get a taste for the older style of games first before going to the games with more stuff to do, then i recommend this one. The story is fantastic, it's fully voice acted with some of THE BEST acting (and also music) I've honestly ever heard. but i am definitely biased since this is my favorite FE game and one of my fav games of all time. however, it really is just combat and story, with a few spare support conversations between characters for the sake of stat boosts (all the romance is canon within the story—can't change a bit about that).

4) three houses

this is the last one out of the "play this first" i'll recommend, because ill be honest, I'm not a fan of 3h's gameplay. I do like many of the characters, I think the serious tone of the game is great, but the gameplay really soured a lot of it for me. There's a calendar system that steamrolls the story so ur mostly just there for the ride as the hours clock by. As well as that, many of the combat skills that other games share with each other aren't a thing in this one, so combat mechanics can be a hard shift going from this game to anything else.

that being said, this is a great place to start if u want a game that will introduce u to the strategy mechanic that also isn't campy, cheesy, filled with anime tropes, whatever. the game is serious, with different routes and loads of choices for matchmaking galore. the only caveat is literally no other game in the franchise is like this. many of the other games are about light & dark and our friends make us strong and My Whole Personality Is About This One Thing. which i personally LOVE. but if that isn't for u, i would start with 3h, get used to the gameplay, warm up to the idea of campiness. and if u still think it's not for u, then great, u played 3 houses and probably enjoyed it a lot and u can wait until a new game comes out that may match the tone.

hope this helped!

[insipid-drivel]

Patrick Stump is also zeroing in on what actually is a very real - but very under-discussed - aspect of brain development between ages ~15-30.

At around age 14 or 15, both from sociological and biological standpoints, it's considered completely healthy and developmentally normal for early-to-mid-teenagers to begin exploring music and forms of expression outside of what their family unit has exposed them to.

Say you grew up in a family that loves its classic bands; Elvis, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Led Zepplin, The Rolling Stones, and what-have-you. If you grew up loving the music your guardians/parents listened to, great! If you hated it? Also fine! All indicative of a pretty normal developmental experience.

Once we enter into those mid-teen years, it's also extremely common and normal to develop a larger interest in listening to and watching the media our friends and peers are interested in. These are wonderful years from a developmental standpoint! You're growing! You're exploring new forms of expression! You're forming preferences and building a sense of independent identity with them; learning what you want to keep cherishing from your nuclear family and childhood, and what you don't. You're developing your individual tastes and doing a great job at growing into your own sense of identity and self. It's a vital part of development.

Cut to around age 20-25. "Guilty pleasures" become a subject whispered about amongst your closest and most trusted of social connections and family. "Ugh, I can't believe how obsessed I was with Fall Out Boy..." you may admonish yourself in front of your friends as you're delving into what you feel are the socially acceptable tunes of your "adult" years (lol, you're not even 26 yet, just wait). As you close in on 30, some of those songs from your teen obsession years start rolling out as "classics". You may hear one of your personal favorite "oldies" in the supermarket - the true death knell of coolness.

But here's the interesting thing: by around age 25, your brain is wiring itself to sense and detect the value of nostalgia, and of impact of your decision-making skills on your long-term future. It's after about age 25 in neurobiology that you start seeing a big spike in the rates of 20-somethings expressing concerns for the future, getting involved in learning about how to Be An Adult, acquire the necessary skills to survive into the foreseeable future (taxes, rent, general self-sufficiency), and even learning to forgive that cringe-based side of yourself that's been a major part of your personality for a few years now.

By the time you turn 30, the 20-somethings and teens out there are remixing the songs you loved when you were 15 as throwback remixes. Music stars that are just hitting the big charts are doing covers of That One Fall Out Boy Song That Got You Every Time It Came On Your iTunes. Most kids you know think it's that artists original track and not a cover. You clench your teeth on that, the shame of admitting your love for Fall Out Boy still a burdensome weight.

You're not quite sure the exact moment it happened, but suddenly, you miss that album. You look up a song or two you remember on Spotify or YouTube. You brace to cringe at your godawful tastes from 15 years in the future.

But you don't end up cringing. In fact, this is the third time you've hit the "replay" option for the whole album. There are new albums that came out after you started to feel the sense that it wasn't cool to listen to them anymore, and now you have a bunch of new stuff to listen to. What? The band is still together? They're still touring and putting out singles?

You can feel that thrumming urge to throw your imagination into the rhythm of the beat, or wiggling your hips to it, rising up like it did when you were 15. You wait for the embarrassment and shame to roll in when one of the younger kids at work catches you jamming to Thnks fr th Mmrs. They ask you what you're listening to. They have no idea it's Fall Out Boy. They've heard of Fall Out Boy, but you realize that it's only because you listened to so much of their stuff when you were 15-19 that you know their sound and beat flow by heart even all those years later, while they only seem to know a couple of their biggest hits. Only you remember the glory of the Ancient Texts.

Now that 20-something group of kids that work with you are bopping their heads to Fall Out Boy songs. Suddenly, you walk in to work one day and they're listening to Panic! At The Disco and The All-American Rejects.

The "guilt" part in "guilty pleasure" finally dissolves. Music is just music now; you either like it, or it's not for you. You Are Free Of The Burdensome Vestiges Of Teenage Music Shame*.

patrick stump, 2006 / 2023

[taehyungie-ah]

Allow me to (re)introduce myself.

Hello world of Tumblr,

I am kinda sorta possibly using this blog again for the first time in years, so I figured I could give a little update. Lowkey considering just making a whole new blog maybe because some of the memories tied to this one are a bit... cringe. But I also have a massive amount of good, not-so-cringey memories here too, so I don't want to leave it. I might just totally revamp... hmmm...

Uhhh, where to start. Hi, I'm Ana (or SakuraFairy in most other corners of the internet)

This used to be a mostly k-pop blog? But I've really fallen out of that whole fandom for a lot of reasons; however, I still keep up with my old faves occasionally, and I still listen to K-pop every now and then when I'm working or something, but for the most part, I am not a hardcore fan like I used to be lol

I mostly just play (more like obsess over) video games now, a majority of them "cozy" games like Stardew and My Time at Sandrock (my biggest obsessions currently), Minecraft, Sims, those types of games. I've been playing video games since I came outta the womb, but I don't remember if I posted much about that before... Either way, there's probably gonna be a lot of game related stuff here from now lol

I'm also super into art and different forms of creative media, which is the biggest reason I fell back into Tumblr since a lot of artists post on here. I'm not an artist myself, but I could look at someone's art blog for literal hourssss. Any kind of art too - OCs, fanart, classical/historical, pottery, paintings, digital drawings, short comics, poetry-- literally any kind of art at all. So there might be a bit of that here as well.

Speaking of art, I really like manga/anime as well, although I'm mostly into josei and shojo titles. (Fruits Basket, my beloved) Occasionally, I go through a phase where I'm obsessed with Demon Slayer, so don't be alarmed if I suddenly post nothing but Demon Slayer when the new season comes out lmao

Oooh also, I really like cartoons. Like Steven Universe, The Owl House, Avatar the Last Airbender, Bob's Burgers... probably a few other ones I'm missing, but those are like the main ones.

Uhhhm, other than that, I can't think of anything else off the top of my head? So, I guess...

Nice to meet you (again) （＾∀＾）ﾉｼ

[absolutebl]

So at your recommendation (and after seeing the show incorporated elements of BDSM), I gave Unforgetten Night's first episode a go.

And as a kinkster who happens to be a Service Dom, I'm left feeling how I often feel watching media portrayals of BDSM. Discontented.

Where do we begin.

Firstly, thank god we have consent established (RACK and all), but did Kamol tell Kim what he was going to do to him beforehand? Or did he pull a Christian Grey and talk about a "game room" and then go 'Surprise! Hope you consented to this!'? I'll presume it was established off screen.

Sad we got no negotiation scene considering how integral it is. Especially considering the sub is in an emotional state, potentially drunk (you found em in a bar, visibly drinking), and could easily slip into sub-space or may be unable retract consent during the scene due to being in a bad headspace

Speaking of consent, no safe words? Not even the classic traffic lights system that everyone speaks of but I've yet to see used IRL?

Also, if a sub says "do anything you want with me" while crying, asking you to help them forget their ex, you simply don't.

Then the actual scene itself. Jesus.

Those cuffs were pathetically loose, weren't even properly chained on, and so couched, it makes me wonder if the previous guy underwent a scene or accidentally ran into Vegas and mistook him for Kamol.

I mean, the cuff was drooping down his arm lol.

Then we have the flogging. Kamol has clearly never touched a flogger before. That technique is so bad, it made me cringe in sympathy for his poor wrists. Just have him flog an 8 pattern onto Kim's back. That's it. Simple and easy and basic and realistic.

Then the wax/temp play. Decent enough there. Only concerns here are that we don't see the dom checking the wax temp before pouring it on to the sub, and that *usually*, doms don't tend to pool drip wax like that, But I've known it to happen. Generally though, most doms I'm friends with and myself just go for streaks, Jackson Pollock, but heavily controlled style. So not that bad in itself.

Kinda sad that every portrayal of BDSM has to end with rough sex, even though BDSM is so much more than that, but at least we have something unique with what I presume is a Bite Kink.

Yay we got aftercare at least. However the previous aforementioned sub got thrown out after a scene while he was in clear distress. That is such shitty dom behaviour, especially considering the likelihood of subdrop, which makes me instantly angry with Kamol.

The acting, editing, camera work, and narrative presentation was as much of a trash fire as you made it out to be. The editing this episode was serving Indian Soap Opera realness.

What did you think of it? Particularly from a BDSM perspective as I believe you engage in kink aswell? Did it live up to all your expectations?

Goodness I don't expect them to get it RIGHT. I expect kink rep to be, if possible, WORSE than queer rep. It always is. I can't think of any visual medium that's done kink correctly, and I include all movies, TV shows, series, MVs, and most porn in that one. I mean there are a few books out there. But that's it/ Honestly, that's why we have dungeons. I mean I guess a few of the pro domme shows tried? Love & Leashes was... cute?

This show is/will be/and was always gonna be a disaster in all ways.

That's what I am here for. I absolutely have no intentions of defending it.

Be kinda hilarious, actually, if they did everything else terrible but like got the kink SPOT on.

Snicker.

Bet there's a kink for that...