#at time of posting he just needs three more and alaska is definitely going to give it to him

[pisoprano]

[auroracalisto]

only time will tell

Requested by @123cvcz: Hello，love！Would u like to do a Soulmate AU with Stefan Salvatore X Reader？Hope this isn’t bothering u，have a good day，love❤️

asldkfjalsdjkfas just as i was about to post this, my tumblr completely stopped working so i had to refresh.  anywayyyyy other than that, thank you so much for requesting!!  this was fun to do and i am so tempted to have a part two.

ps idk why the formatting is off give me a minute to fix it

pairings: soulmate!stefan x reader

word count: 1.2k

warnings: uhhhhhhhh vampirism, you were turned, disappearances, cussing, not the whole shabang but it is the vampire diaries so take what you will

His timer didn’t start counting down until 1993.  At that point in time, Stefan was 147.  That would have meant that his soulmate had just been born.  But it started at 21 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 16 hours, and 22 seconds.  

He had often regarded the soulmate timer as a hoax.  Damon had his and lost his soulmate.  As soon as he met his soulmate, she died right in front of him.  It sent Damon into a rage.  And Damon nearly sent Stefan into another ripper phase.  

But that’s a story for another time.  

Stefan stepped out of his car, looking down at his wrist.  It had decreased tremendously.  Today, it read 2 hours.  Sometimes, though, it had gained some time.  As if something had changed with his soulmate and the universe said, “Enough is enough.”  However, today was definitely different.  It kept ticking down.  And he couldn’t do anything to stop it.  

He looked towards the forest and let out a soft sigh.  Klaus wasn’t up to anything good.  Stefan and his friends had to do something to get Klaus to stop rampaging, as often as he did.  So, they decided to meet up and formulate a plan, careful not to let any of the Mikaelson’s know of their whereabouts.  

Damon would be with Elena.  Caroline was somewhere.  It was the same with Bonnie.  

Stefan frowned.  Something felt off… but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.  

“Stefan,” the man heard his brother’s voice.  He frowned and he looked up, seeing Damon walking over with a frown.  “We have a problem.”

Elena came up beside of him, followed by Caroline and Bonnie.  Elena had a deep frown.  

“Caroline’s sibling is missing,” Elena said.  

Stefan frowned deeply as he looked at the girl.  He quickly looked to Caroline. “Sibling?  I thought you were an only child.”

“They were adopted when I was three.  They were six…  They left town as soon as they turned eighteen.”  

“When was that?” Stefan looked at Damon, frowning.  “Why haven’t I ever met them?”

Caroline crossed her arms over her chest.  “[Your name] didn’t have contact with me for about a year before they finally messaged me.  It was an email, with their location.  They were literally in the middle of a small town in Alaska.  [Your name] had no recollection of what happened… and then Klaus showed up,” Caroline cleared her throat. “He showed up and suddenly, they started sending me text messages.  Daily.  Always asking me how I am.  I… I know [Your name]’s missing because I haven’t heard from them in about a day. And I think it has something to do with Klaus.”

Stefan stared Caroline down for a moment.  “And you’re sure they’re missing? They haven’t just run off again, like they did before?”

Caroline frowned.  “[Your name] got away because of the town.  I knew it wasn’t because of me.  Please, I just… I have a really bad feeling about this.  I’m scared something bad has happened, Stefan.”

The vampire sighed and he ran a hand through his hair.  “Alright.  What do we do?”

“We need you to contact Klaus,” Elena said, coming up beside of him. “He trusts you more than any of us.  The two of you used to be friends, yeah?  Just ask him to meet up with you.  Damon and I will go to his house and see if we can find them.”

Stefan frowned but nodded.  

He found himself, just moments later, back at his car and calling Klaus from his cellphone.  

“And to what do I owe this pleasure of hearing your annoying voice?” 

Stefan rolled his eyes.  “Very funny, Klaus.  Listen.  I need to talk to you.  Do you think we could meet up somewhere?”

“Talk to me?  Can you not just tell me now?”

“It has to be in private.”

Klaus sighed over the phone.  He cleared his throat before speaking again.  “Okay.  Mystic Grill, ten minutes.  I haven’t got all day, you know.”

“I know.”

—

Stefan leaned against the edge of the bar as he frowned at Klaus. Klaus kept looking towards the timer on Stefan’s wrist as it edged closer to half an hour.  

Klaus smirked at his old friend.  

“Are you expecting someone?  Nervous, are we?”

“I’m not nervous,” he rolled his eyes and turned back to the counter. He took a sip of his whiskey, watching the ice clink against the edge of the glass.  

Klaus rose an eyebrow.  “Then why have you called me here, hm?” 

“Well,” Stefan began, looking down at his phone.  

Not here.

It was a text from Damon.  

Stefan put his phone away and he looked up at Klaus.  

“Let me ask you something, Klaus,” he said, clearing his throat.  “Do you… do you know where Caroline’s—”

“Is Caroline here?” he asked, interrupting him completely.  He smiled at the man.  “I’ve been meaning to talk to her about something.”

“Talk to her about what?”

Klaus rose an eyebrow and he finished drinking his drink.  

“Well, has she talked to you about [Your name]?”

Stefan turned to face the Original vampire.  

“They came to me a few years ago.  They had been turned and they had no idea where to turn to.  You weren’t here and they were basically alone.  They had made friends with Rebekah sometime ago and decided that they needed to find me,” he chuckled softly.  “Low and behold, they found me.”  

Stefan stared at him.  “[Your name] left because they were turned?”

“That and other reasons,” a voice came from behind the two conversing men. “I’m [Your name].  Would you like to talk any louder?  I don’t know if the office building down on main street heard you.”

Stefan quickly turned his head in your direction, his heart dropping to his stomach.  His timer had stopped, blinking zero for just a moment.  

You tilted your head in confusion before you turned your attention to your own timer.  It read zero, just like the man in front of you had zero on his own.  

“Who…” 

You looked up at Stefan with wide eyes.  “You must be Stefan.  Klaus… told me that you were friends with my sister.  Is she alright?  Is she well?”

“She’s a vampire,” Stefan cleared his throat.  “You… might want to talk to her on your own instead of asking me about her.”

“She’s a vampire?” you weakly asked, frowning.  “That’s exactly why I tried to stay away—so she wouldn’t…  Did you turn her?” 

“No.  No, I didn’t.  I promise.”

You stared him down for a minute.  You couldn’t help but look back down at your timer, sucking in a deep breath.  “I… is yours… did yours just reach zero? Like mine did?”

Stefan nodded, watching you with soft eyes.  “Yes.  Mine did.”

“So that means…”

“You’re soulmates.  Yes, great.  Wonderful figuring this out.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with Caroline—”

You rolled your eyes.  “If you hurt her—”

Klaus shot you a glare before he left the two of you standing by the bar.  

Stefan awkwardly cleared his throat.  “I… I guess I should formally introduce myself.  My name is Stefan Salvatore.”

You looked back at him, and you began to smile a bit.  “[Your full name].  It’s nice to meet you, Stefan.  I… wow, I just… I can’t believe I’ve found my soulmate.”

Stefan couldn’t help but smile at your comment.  “I went for so long thinking I didn’t have one.  It’s… nice to know that the only problem was time.”

[little-diable]

All I need - Jasper Hale (fluff)

Request by anon: A Jasper fluff where they haven't seen each other in a while because the cullens when to visit the Denalis in Alaska and then he comes back after 3 weeks and sees how much she missed him and fluff ensures?

Maybe some of you know “avelynch” on Tiktok, found this song of hers, she posted it 2 days ago. The lyrics in the beginning are hers. Enjoy my loves. xxx

I wish I could remember what it feels like to touch your skin And what your voice sounds like in person I know FaceTime can distort it and I miss it And I’m sick of kissing you in my head Oh baby tell me when can it be real instead  cuz I would do anything to be close to you again and its hard being here half empty  when somewhere different is my favorite part of me if I could just hold you for real that's the only thing I’ll need Baby that's all I need All I need

Jasper had been away for a few days by now, off to Alaska, to visit the Denalis with his family, leaving (y/n) behind in Forks, knowing that they’d struggle with a human being near. The pair had never been away from each other for that long, (y/n) seemed to realize, that she was struggling quite a lot, without him by her side. Even though they’d talk almost everyday via FaceTime, it just wasn’t the same, she longed for his touch, for his calming words every time she’d wake from a nightmare, time couldn’t go by fast enough, she needed him near, he was like the oxygen she’d need to breathe. 

Snow was covering her garden in a white, thick blanket, Christmas was nearing, it would be the first time in three years, that she’d spend it without him by her side. Her heart was clenching as she thought of having to celebrate her favorite holiday, without the Cullens near, it just wouldn’t be the same, no matter how much her parents would try to cheer her up. She thought about mailing Jasper his present, but he’d be home a few days after Christmas anyways, (y/n) didn’t want to miss the smile on his face as he’d unwrap her present. 

“I just miss you.” she was laying on her side, phone placed next to her pillow, eyes focused on Jasper, he was sitting on the sofa, holding his phone in front of his face, he hated to be that far away from her, just like (y/n), he was struggling a lot more, than he had once thought, without her near, he was already counting down the days, till his departure, finally leaving for Forks. “I miss you too darlin’. Look, there’s Alice.”, he pointed the phone in his sisters direction, trying to ignore the wave of guiltiness that overcame him as he watched tears well up in her eyes. 

(Y/n) was sitting in the middle of her room, the soft fabric of her carpet was rubbing against her legs, soft music was blasting from her speakers, calming her down. She was currently trying to wrap up her presents, hands holding onto Jaspers, fingers moving across the fabric of the leather cover of the notebook, knowing how much Jasper liked to write down his thoughts, things that would haunt him at night, memories he made with (y/n), literally anything, that was roaming around in his mind. 

“Food is ready.”, her mom called from the kitchen, it was Christmas evening, (y/n) was dressed in a beautiful dress Alice had gifted her for her last birthday, a tight smile on her lips as she tried not to think about the Cullens too much. With a sigh she sat down at the table, not noticing the way her parents were smiling at each other, almost chuckling, taking in her almost tortured seeming appearance. Both of her parents were totally obsessed with Jasper and his family, they were extremely grateful for the way they cared for their daughter, how much they supported her and loved her like one of their owns. 

Her mother was intensely watching the clock, not keeping herself from smiling brightly as the door bell finally rung, (y/n)s head snapped upwards, “who is that?”,  annoyance clear in her voice. It wasn’t fair, that her parents had invited somebody, while she couldn’t invite Jasper, why did fate hate her that much? She felt like a whiney little child, (y/n) rose from her seat and walked towards the door, today was definitely not her day. 

Golden eyes found hers, “merry Christmas darlin’.”, she was full on sobbing, jumping into his arms, “what are you doing here?”, (y/n) sobbed against his neck, not letting go of him anytime soon. “I couldn’t keep away any longer, knowing how much both of us would suffer on Christmas evening without being close to one another.”, he kissed her forehead, stepping into her house, greeting her parents with a loving hug. 

The four of them were seated around the dining table, talking about all and nothing, (y/n)s fingers were interlaced with Jaspers, eyes completely focused on his handsome features. “Why don’t you go upstairs and pack a few things?”, (y/n) and Jasper would spend some days at the Cullens mansion, enjoying some time alone as his family was still staying with the Denalis. (Y/n) couldn’t shake off the massive smile on her lips, ready to make up for the past three weeks.  

His hands were wrapped around her waist, (y/n) was laying on top of him, head placed against his chest, eyes drawn to the tv, watching one Christmas movie after another, “I love you”, he pulled her in for a kiss, eyes full of love and adoration, it felt good to be home again, knowing that “home” was wherever his mate was. 

[sofyachy]

Misinformation Cookies

Last night, I had a wild hair to make "misinformation cookies" for a potluck. Think fortune cookies, but with less fortune, more bullshit. I came up with 3 dozen unique, artisanally crafted lines of bullshit, but sadly, the making of the cookies is not going to happen in time for the potluck. If you need an idea for a Halloween potluck, feel free to use these:

Facebook algorithms account for 84% of the cockroaches in your breakfast cereal.

Soylent Green is made of cheese fries.

A European underwear model is moving to your city and wants to put $50,000 in your bank account.

Alaskan senators just voted to curb climate change by redirecting the Alaska Pipeline to blow air conditioning back at the arctic.

The Queer Extremists are coming for your shoes!

You have used up all your allotted internet points for the week. Your social media posts weren’t getting enough likes, hearts, or ha-has.

He’s behind you! He’s behind you! Duck!!!

You can melt away that pesky belly fat with a diet of 90% spray cheese.

Mitch McConnell is the way he is because he’s the reincarnation of Mae West and he never figured out what to do with that knowledge.

Q-Anon is putting mind-control drugs in Starbucks’ pumpkin spice lattes!

Ghosts are real. It’s just that they’re not that into you.

J.K. Rowling has seen the error of her ways and announced that Percy Weasley is a transwoman.

Ryan Gosling definitely does not maintain his looks by drinking the blood of the innocent.

Your shirt tag is sticking out.

The 2020 model of pugs have been recalled due to excessive derpiness.

Left-Wing Extremists want us all to convert to metric time! Get ready for 100-minute hours and 10-hour days!

Right-Wing Extremists are coming for your beer!

Science has proven that the vaccine for Wandering Lung Disease causes deadly farts in 73% of gassy rats.

Borneo isn’t a real island. It was drawn onto maps by the cartographers who are profiting from fundraisers aimed at saving the orangutan, which doesn’t exist either.

In 1969, NASA accidentally overshot the moon and hit Alpha Centauri instead. They faked the moon landing footage because they were so embarrassed by their bad math.

You’ve got some schmutz on your face.

Scientists have just bred a new species of Super Squirrel that can pick locks and open doors. They’re coming for your nuts!

Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets. Those were actually Go Pros so they could capture the looks of terror on the Saxons’ faces when they pillaged.

Science has proven that vampires exist. But they don’t drink blood or shy away from sunlight. They do sleep all day and love catnip. Actually, vampires are cats.

One of the extras in The Rocky Horror Picture Show was Richard Nixon.

Exploding Death Spiders have crossed the US border. Entomologists say they will reach Illinois by next week.

Did you know? You can make your own home remedy for appendicitis with baking soda, lemon juice, and neon puffy paint.

Halloween is a liberal conspiracy to teach kids that making and wearing costumes is fun.

Big Candy doesn’t want you to know that the secret ingredient in the plain orange-and-black-wrapped Halloween candy is wood glue.

Science still cannot prove that Kanye West isn’t an android controlled by aliens.

The top 1% control 58% of all percentages.

Tomorrow’s forecast: partly cloudy with a 52% chance of localized tornado bombs.

Whatever you do, don’t look up.

Nancy Pelosi is three raccoons in a pantsuit.

Your message here $5.00

Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a few really, really smart trees.

[phantastus]

Is there any symbolism behind the bird scientific names tags representing Silent Hill characters? Like, did you pick them for any particular reasons? 👀

Oh man, well, I guess I never went into detail about them anywhere. They definitely were picked for a reason but the reason is related to a currently-unwritten fanfic and literally who knows when that’s going to happen (Gravity needs to get finished first and who knows when that’s going to happen :’]), so I might as well try and do it now.

When I was in college I started coming up with concepts and symbolism for a fic project and because I’m obsessed with birds all of it involved birds and the title of the fic was appropriately “Four and Twenty Blackbirds”, with the ‘four’ specifically referring to Harry, James, Heather, and Henry (because they were the main characters). Each of them had a different ‘blackbird’ species representing them. 

So when I decided to make separate aesthetic/inspo tags for individual characters (I already have a #silent feels tag for general SH inspiration, but I am crazy and it was NOT CONVOLUTED ENOUGH FOR ME), I decided to use the scientific bird names since it was conveniently already cemented in my brain. THIS IS GOING TO BE VERY, VERY LONG SO I’M PUTTING IT UNDER A READMORE. Click for pretentious Silent Hill fan analysis.

HARRY MASON | CORVUS BRACHYRYNCHOS (American Crow)

Harry Mason is the “”generic”” all-American protagonist who rises to a heroic status pretty much out of sheer determination and a commitment to his loved one. He’s not an unusual person, in fact he’s deceptively normal-- so the American crow felt right for him since they’re so common. You see them so often you don’t even think about them, but they’re smart, resourceful, and resilient survivors (something that especially comes into play with Harry post-SH1 when he’s eluding the Order). Harry is underestimated because of his normalcy but he’s capable of incredible things.

Also crows (and other corvids) have deep, almost humanlike family bonds between parents and offspring. They’ll maintain relationships even after the babies grow up and become fully self-sufficient, with the adult children regularly visiting their parents and socializing or helping to take care of younger siblings.

In the context of the fic Harry’s symbolic/prophetic connection to such a common “pest” species is sort of a derogatory assignment on the part of the Order/the town, as he’s seen as a heretic troublemaker (CULTS HATE HIM!! LOCAL MAN STEALS MESSIAH AND THWARTS FATE WITH ONE COOL TRICK!)

JAMES SUNDERLAND | CORVUS CORAX (Common Raven)

Ravens are like the most symbolic corvid, every gothic poet/novelist/artist and their grandma used them to represent death, grief and malaise, and James’s story is nothing if not filled with all three of those things. I mean, come on:    “By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—    Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,    It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”            Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.” -Edgar Allen Poe, u know where it’s from.

Also in college, I got very interested in the myth “Raven Steals the Sun”, which has a number of different variations (it’s a story shared across multiple First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, there’s no one clear origin-- you can read about a couple of versions here!) but most involve the titular Raven delivering the Sun to the world after stealing or freeing it from a dark place where it was kept. Depending on the version, Raven's motives can either be purely selfish or more benevolent, and sometimes starts the story as a pure white bird who is stained black with soot in the act of taking the Sun. The duality of Raven’s intentions as well as the theme of light/warmth being hidden in darkness until it’s brought out felt fitting for a character whose motivations are complex and left a little ambiguous in canon (James grapples with whether his own act was purely selfish or one of love/mercy) AND someone who is naturally warm and caring but slipped behind a cold, dark wall of depression and self-isolation. The theme of being permanently marked/transformed by an act, whether for good or for bad, felt fitting too.

(Obligatory Disclaimer That My (Very White) Personal Interpretation Should Not Remotely Be Considered An Authentic Take On The Myth And Is Not Intended To Be Appropriation. For fic purposes the story would only have come up as an interesting symbolic parallel/running motif among many others, not a Literal Connection. James is a clueless white dude and Silent Hill doesn’t even take place on the west coast.)

“BUT WAIT! Doesn’t stealing the sun from a malevolent party and freeing it sound sort of like Harry rescuing Alessa/Cheryl/Heather??” Yes, this was going to be a source of in-character confusion and a surprise twist when it turns out they got their birds mixed up. Blah blah nothing is as it seems and destiny is mutable.

One time while I was walking on a foggy beach I got followed around by an enormous raven who was just sort of waddle-hopping after me looking forlorn and scruffy and the experience stuck with me and now all these years later my enormous galaxy brain is just like “That was Big James Energy”.

Wow that was long, I’m sorry.

HENRY TOWNSHEND | CORVUS FRUGILEGUS (Rook)

The most obvious symbolism is probably the chess piece with the same name-- that felt fitting for Henry since he’s probably the protagonist who has to do the most strategizing. Between his limited inventory and his progressively-more-cursed apartment and escorting Eileen and his five billion trips across multiple fractured Otherworlds, my poor guy has a lot to mentally keep track of. In the fic, he was going to wind up being the one to keep track of all the weird complicated bullshit items and rituals they had to complete to get through the Otherworld.

The rook chess piece also resembles a castle, and unlike the other protagonists whose stories progress in a linear fashion, Henry operates from/returns to his home base shitty cursed apartment.

BUT ONTO THE BIRD the rook is a corvid like the crow and the raven, and shares their pest/death omen status in popular culture. Just appropriate for SH protags in general since they keep getting in the way of the cult’s business and also misfortune follows them.

In the SH3 Crematorium Puzzle (I’ll talk more about that in Heather’s section), there is a poem:    "The black Rook is the praying sort    Who hears the gods in the skies    His whispered petitions go on without end    And glassy and dim are his eyes" Obviously this does NOT describe Henry as a person, but it IS eerily reminiscent of the title that was thrust upon him: Receiver. Maybe if Walter’s plans had succeeded, this is how Henry would have ended up.

There is also an old belief that if rooks abandon an established “rookery” (place where they regularly roost), it’s a sign of calamity to follow. If Henry the Certified Homebody (tm) bursts out of the apartment complex and goes staggering down the street, you should get out of that apartment complex.

HEATHER MASON | AGELAIUS PHOENICEUS (Red-Winged Blackbird)

Oh boy this one’s probably the weirdest but here we go.

The first obvious thing is that unlike the other three, the red-winged blackbird is not actually a corvid (it’s from the Icteridae family, not the Corvidae family). In-universe, this was supposed to represent Heather being inherently different from the rest (like... she basically is an iteration of the Silent Hill deity), even if she seems to be a normal human. Harry’s act of stealing her from the Order and changing her appearance/name to hide her was going to be depicted as “dousing Her in black ink, but [the ink] not able to fully conceal Her radiance”. The red and gold shoulders of the blackbird visually symbolize her “””true nature””” peeking out.

I also associate her specifically with the MALE red-winged blackbird (the female looks completely different, hooray sexual dimorphism) because gender is a fuck and Heather understandably has some really intense and complicated issues with womanhood/femininity. One of my favorite aspects of her as a character is how she blurs the line between masculine and feminine, especially since she’s been through so much... extremely gendered violence, to put it lightly. Heather Mason says FUCK YOUR GENDER BINARY.

As a fun side-note, Heather is also represented (or appears to be, ymmv) by a bird in canon! The SH3 Crematorium puzzle (on hard mode) features a series of poems each about birds, and each one represents a character if you squint. Heather seems to be referenced in this one:     "The Wren, with pure heart as yet unrefined     Makes us laugh with his feeble lip-smacking     But still we all know he shall never grow old     And he knows not how much he is lacking." Heather’s role as a brash, foolhardy youth who talks tough to cope is pretty blatantly summed up in there, as is the fact that she’s... functionally immortal and keeps fucking reincarnating. The wren, a plucky little bird, is perfect for her. The part of the main riddle that references the wren is also... ominously on the nose, given Heather’s backstory:     "Burn the one who knows no death     Pure, adored by those above     No prayers within, just simple love.”

YET ANOTHER CREMATORIUM POEM could be construed as representing the town’s God (or the spiritual force of the land, w/e), damaged/corrupted/turned malevolent by All The Bullshit:     "The Kite, hot, crazy, and panting mad     Sweet shackles that tease and excite     Death itself would drive him wild     Red blood that turns milky white"  Heather is a pure-hearted protagonist in one sense, but there’s plenty of not-so-subtle hints to a bloodlust and desire for violence just waiting to break free (ESPECIALLY when Heather does certain things that could be considered taking on the role of God). So to me the Kite is what happens when Heather gets sick of being nice and decides to go apeshit.

“BUT WAIT what does this have to do with the red-winged blackbird?” The inherent trinity of Heather’s character (Alessa/Cheryl/Heather, the Mother of God/Daughter of God/God Herself) deserves a bird trinity too. I’M GREEDY, I WANT *ALL* THE BIRD METAPHORS!

Red-winged blackbirds are bold little shits who will straight up harass birds of prey. Kind of like Heather does to God.

The fact that “phoeniceus” was part of the scientific name was a VERY delightful coincidence-- but I’m not complaining about how satisfying I found it that my Bird Choice (tm) inadvertently connects her to the concept of the phoenix, poster child of pyrogenesis.

That was even longer than James’, I’m so sorry.

SO THAT’S THE META BEHIND THOSE CHOICES FOR THE FOUR MAIN CHARACTERS. If you’re still interested after all that BS, I can write up another (probably much shorter) post for the other characters. Thanks for the ask!

[elliepassmore]

Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed review

4/5 stars

Recommended for people who like: history, societal collapse, Guns, Germs, and Steel If anyone wants to read my oh-so-cheery review of Guns, Germs, and Steel you can find it here. I have admittedly not read the entire thing, I only had to read part of Collapse for a class and based on my previous encounter with Diamond elected not to read the rest of it. This book wasn't quite as bad as Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is kind of shocking when you consider that GGS has been updated within the past decade and this book has not. For one, Diamond does not prattle on about farming for nearly as long as he does in GGS. That is to say, he keeps the farming bits to sections within each chapter instead of dedicating the first 11 chapters of the damn book to it. I also did not get the same kind of "well that feels racist, but I can't say whether it actually is or not" feeling from Collapse that I did GGS, so that was a relief (and potentially also caused by my not reading the whole book, who knows). Though, to be fair, he is suggesting that societies ‘choose’ to fail...as if anyone wittingly does that. So those were definite improvements in my opinion. Despite these bright spots, Diamond continues to make rather specious claims and talk a lot without saying very much. He has a very repetitive and redundant writing style, which I'm not a particular fan of, and it rears its head here much like it did in GGS. I really don't think he needs to repeat his four main points about each society's collapse within five pages. It's a lot. He also just spends a lot of time 'talking' and takes way too long to get to the point. Some of these chapters are 40 pages long when they easily could've been 15-20. Further, I am absolutely baffled as to why he spent so much time on the Greenland Norse collapse. Three chapters? Really?! I only had to read Chapter 8: Greenland's End, which...seems to be the only relevant chapter of the three as it is the only one that actually focuses on collapse. The other two chapters (which helpfully have little bullet point summaries) discuss Vikings in general and Vikings in Iceland and probably involve a lot about farming, hunting, and domesticity. Chapter 8 wasn't actually that bad, he didn't obsess too much over farming, but I'm also reading Middleton's book on collapse and can say that Diamond definitely overlooked some stuff in jumping to conclusions/interpreting the evidence. In terms of irrelevant chapters, I am also baffled as to why Montana was included. I'm sorry, did I miss something and skip the part of US/World History where Montana had its own bustling and independent civilization that collapsed? Part of what might be happening here, and I am 100% theorizing, is that Diamond is neither a historian nor an anthropologist and got massively confused at the difference between 'society' and 'culture' (or, really, subculture) since they can be used rather interchangeably when speaking colloquially. Like, we get you're friends with farmers in Montana, but 'farmers in Montana' are a subculture of a larger culture within a larger society. They are not within themselves a society. If he was going to try and push any US state as its own society I would've been more willing to accept Hawaii or Texas...or maybe Alaska, but HI and TX at least have/had their own independence movements, so it would make more sense to use one of those. But he has farmer friends in Montana, so we got a chapter on Montana instead. This ended up turning into a lot of complaining, but I did like this book infinitely more than I liked GGS and wrote far fewer angry notes on post-its or in the margins. Overall I think Diamond could do to have a harsher editor who knows when to tell him to cut back, but Collapse is a pretty good overview in environmental determinist causes of collapse.

[justauthoring]

Who I Once Was [J.P.]

Prompt: imagine living w Jesse in Alaska, like, the two of you get a cabin out in the middle a nowhere, and Skinny Pete and Badger swing by once in a while for dinner, you and Jesse get a dog-

This prompt was posted by @daffodils-in-ink. She didn’t request it and didn’t ask me to write it but, gurl, I got you.

Please don’t plagiarize my work! Word Count: 1,866

Starting fresh.

It’s what you needed. It’s what Jesse needed.

Sure, you weren’t a criminal. You weren’t being hunted down by the police. You could’ve gone on with your life and it would’ve been fine. But, then again, it wouldn’t have been. Because a life without Jesse wasn’t a life worth living. You’d learned that when he went missing for months and you’d been left wondering where he was, if he was okay, if he was alive...

Jesse wouldn’t tell you everything. Bits and pieces and then again, most of that had been what you learned from the news -- all of what you learned was nothing short of heart-breaking and terrifying. To know that Jesse had gone through all of that, endured all of that, broke your heart. And the worst part is he had done it alone with no one but his captors feeding him human company.

When you saw Jesse, the stories you’d heard on television because reality. He looked... broken. He barely even let you touch him, flinched when you stepped towards him and if it hadn’t been for Skinny Pete, you probably wouldn’t have even known where he was. You would’ve known he was on the run, but you never would’ve seen him. Skinny Pete, against Jesse’s words but for the sake of the both of you, had called to let you know.

It was risky, but Pete had known how badly you’d been looking for him. And even Jesse wasn’t completely himself, he’d known how much Jesse cared for you.

Then, Jesse had gone missing again. You’d fought to go with him, but he wouldn’t let you. He refused to put you in danger as well, Skinny Pete and Badger already risking enough; more than he was comfortable with.

It was a surprise to you when he showed up at your door, asking you if you wanted to start a new life with him.

Without hesitation, you had said yes. Because you more than wanted to, you were ready to.

And that’s how you found yourself here, in Alaska. Jesse had chosen the place, you’re not sure why, but, it was a change of scenery you didn’t all that mind. Plus, the sight of Jesse Pinkman in a white turtle neck sweater was certainly a sight to behold. So, Alaska and it’s cold was good enough for you.

Resting your hand leisurely on Jesse’s which rest loosely next to him, you pull his eyes on yours briefly. You smile up at him, all bright eyed and warmly because you were exactly where you wanted to be. Even if it wasn’t your home, per-say, in a lot of ways, it was. Because Jesse was your home. He has been for a long while. 

You squeeze his hand and he responds with a squeeze of his own.

-

Pulling at the sleeves of your sweater, you shiver slightly.

“You cold?”

Blinking through the darkness of the night, you peer at Jesse who lays next to you, the both of you huddled under the blankets; blankets being plural. Because not only did you have your duvet, but two fuzzy blankets because it did tend to get a little cold at night. Like tonight. It just seemed, however, three blankets and sweats weren’t enough to keep you warm tonight.

Humming slightly, you nod your head.

Jesse shifts slightly, sliding his arm underneath you which causes you to pause. Then, as his curls his hand around your left hip, he pulls you close, flush against himself. You gasp slightly at the movement, your head instinctively falling into the crook of his neck before you pull back, blinking up at him. “Jesse?”

“It’s okay,” he whispers softly.

You frowned, unsure. It’s only been a month or so since the two of you started your new life in Alaska, and while Jesse’s definitely gotten better, he was still hesitant.

You two slept in the same bed, but he liked to keep his distance. Jesse said it was because he didn’t want to wake up in a panic and hurt you, given that he still had frequent nightmares. But you also knew it was because he was still unfamiliar with a comforting touch. He wasn’t that he didn’t trust you, he did, he just couldn’t forget all that he’d gone through.

You’ve been patient. You didn’t mind waiting until he was ready.

“Are you sure?” You question after a moment, still frowning. “I mean, you don’t have to. I’m just cold and--”

“Y/N?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s okay.”

Shoulders easing, you hesitantly raise your hand, letting it fall against his chest. He doesn’t flinch from your touch, and instead, he pulls you closer, his grip on your waist tightening as the two of you huddled together for warm but also, because of how much you’ve missed each others touches. You might be fine with waiting, you might have patience; but there was no denying it, you missed Jesse’s touch.

Interrupting the silence, you feel Jesse’s forehead fall against your own. You turn your head slightly and this time, it’s him burying his head into the crook of your neck, inhaling the familiar scent of you.

“I’ve missed this,” he whispers, barely audible.

Smiling softly, you inhale deeply. “Me too.”

-

“Ooh, look at you! Look at you! You’re just the cutest. Yes, you are. Yes, you are, cutie!”

You hear a faint laugh, prompting you to turn your head over your shoulder, meeting Jesse’s eyes from where he sits at your dinner table. His eyes are already on your own, eyes crinkled with warmth, a fond look in his eyes.

“What?” You laugh slightly, feeling your cheeks warm. “He’s cute!”

“You haven’t been able to stop talking about how cute he is since we got him.”

Setting your new German Shepard puppy onto your kitchen floor, you teasingly stalk over to Jesse, sitting next to him at the dinner table. However, the moment you sit down, you just turn to glance down at the puppy as it clumsily races around the floor, a stuffed animal in it’s mouth as he runs with his tail wagging. “He’s just so cute.”

“I still can’t believe you convince me to get a dog, yo.”

Rolling your eyes, you scoff at Jesse; “you love him just as much as I do.”

Jesse doesn’t reply right away, causing you to turn and look at him. His eyes are on the puppy, smiling softly, his bottom lip in-between his teeth as he nods. “Yeah,” he mumbles quietly, “yeah, I do.”

You smile, happy that Jesse’s happy. Of course, you’re happy about your new puppy but mainly, just that Jesse’s... in peace. That he’s been clean for months now, that he’s slowly recovering from the torture he’d endured. That, while that part of his life will probably never leave him, he’s getting better. And he’s starting to believe he deserves a better life.

And most of all, that he doesn’t think he needs to fight to survive anymore. There’s no more danger lurking around the corner.

He’s just... living in peace.

“We still have to name him.”

Blinking, you’re pulled out of your thoughts by Jesse. Shrugging, you let your eyes fall back on the puppy; “any ideas?”

Without hesitation, Jesse says; “Mike.”

“Mike?”

He nods. “Mike.” Then, he turns to you, “that okay?”

You don’t know who Mike is, but clearly, he’s someone important to Jesse. Or, had been, given that that’s no longer his life.

You just don’t know how right you are.

“Yeah,” you smile, “Mike’s a good name.”

-

“Well, thanks for having us again, Y/N-- Or, shit, I mean--”

Laughing slightly, you shake your head at Skinny Peter; “it’s fine, Pete. It’s just us out here.”

Badger pauses, “no one’s around?”

Glancing around, you shrug; “no. We’re way out here, and if i’m being honest, I still refer to Jesse as well, Jesse. It’s only when we go out to town that we have to be more careful.”

“Oh.”

You laugh at the expressions on your face, shaking your head as you step back from the door. “I’ll fetch Jesse. Make yourselves at comfortable.”

You move towards your bedroom, idly listening to the banter that Badger and Skinny Pete start, softly laughing. It was the first time they’ve seen your new place, or new crib as they referred to it as. And it had taken months to set up. It was dangerous, that’s for sure. Skinny Pete and Badger were directly linked Jesse and his tie to his old life, but, it’s been deem safe enough for them to visit every once in a while.

At least.

Turning the knob, you step into your bedroom, finding Jesse just sat on the bed, staring at nothing before him.

Shutting the door softly behind yourself, you frown; “you okay?”

Jesse blinks up at you, as if having just realized you were there. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” you assure with a short nod. “Pete and Badger are here, by the way. I assume by the noise, they’re playing with Mike.”

Jesse nods, but doesn’t move to get up.

“Jesse?”

He just frowns, glancing down at his hands which he nervously fumbles with. With a deeper frown, you step forward, falling next to him on your bed, your shoulder softly bumping against his own. “What’s up?”

Jesse shrugs; “i’m just... nervous.”

“It’s just Pete and Badger.”

“That’s why i’m nervous.”

Furrowing your brows, you shake your head; “but--”

“The last time I saw Pete, he told me I was his hero.” Jesse admits, finally turning to look at you and properly meet your gaze. You blink at the expression in his eyes; he looks terrified. “I mean, what if they hate who I am now? Like i’m not... into any of that shit and I just feel like--”

Setting your hand over Jesse’s, you gently interrupt him; “they won’t hate you, Jesse.” You assure, shaking your head firmly. “If anything, they’ll be proud. They saw the news, they saw what happened to you. It makes sense that you wanted a new life, a fresh start. That you didn’t want to be involved in any of that anymore. They’re proud of you, Jesse.”

His lips part, just staring at you.

“I’m proud of you.”

Then, he eases. Your words finally registering in him, Jesse lets a small smile fall onto his lips, resting his forehead against your own. 

The two of you stay like that for a minute, before a loud thud interrupts the moment.

Jesse pulls back, staring at the door past your shoulder, letting out a faint chuckle. “I better see what they just broke.” He laughs, to which you nod, letting him slip from your gasp as he stands up, moving towards the door. Then, just before he pulls it open and steps out, he turns back to you; “I love you, you know that?”

And you just smile, all bright and warm; “I love you too.”

He steps out the next second, heading down the hall before his voice calls out; “what’s up, bitches!”

Your eyes watch his retreating figure, letting out a laugh.

Jesse was finally starting to become himself again.

-

Let me know what you thought?

[nancypullen]

Where Is Home?

We talk about retirement a lot.  A LOT.  The mister wants out of the south because he hates the hot, sticky weather.  I want out of the south for a variety of different reasons.  He tears up when he thinks about leaving this house.  I get excited thinking of a house with better storage, maybe even a walk-in closet and a big pantry.  He loves the idea of townhouse living and all of the freedom it provides.  I love the idea of half a football field between me and a neighbor.  I wouldn’t mind being snug against a neighbor if we were in a walkable little town and I could have a white picket fence.  As we age into our golden years I want to be on city water and city sewer.  I do not want to be ninety when the well runs dry or the septic system has a fit.  Nope. No, thank you.  We have discussed towns from Maine to Arizona and are constantly trading articles about property taxes and real estate markets.  Night after night I search Zillow, Realtor, Trulia (oh, those handy dandy crime maps!) and so on.  I’ll send Mickey a house in Maryland to admire and mention that it’s just two hours from the world’s cutest grandgirl.  He responds that he loves it.  Then I send him a townhouse near Tucson and he says the same thing.  I’m getting nowhere with this guy. Side note: Yes, I know Arizona gets very hot, but it is not humid. HUGE difference. Also, Arizona has two enormous positives - we could escape allergies and my hair would behave.   If you had my hair you’d know that’s more important than the property taxes.  Two major negatives would be that it’s too far from family and I can’t imagine never experiencing another autumn. I’m happily willing to give the townhouse idea serious consideration.   I know that Mickey would love to never weed eat and edge another yard.  Remember the good old days when no one did that?  My main issue with townhouses is that they all tend to be multiple stories - sometimes three floors.  Wherever we retire, that’s where we’re going to die.  I don’t want to be unable to navigate my own home when I’m old.  Same reason I refuse to have a basement laundry, I don’t want to drag baskets of clothes up and down basement stairs when I’m a little old lady.  You know damn well a cat would trip me and Mickey wouldn’t miss me until he got hungry.  Of all the chores I’d be willing to expire while doing, laundry is not in the top three. We’re not lottery winners so our options are limited.  When we sell this house we’ll make a tasty profit that will allow us to find a comfortable home - nothing fancy, but we won’t be in a box under bridge.  I can make any home pretty, but the bones have to be good.  I’m more concerned with structure and mechanics.  Who needs a beautiful house with a bad roof or an hvac system on its last leg?   The region definitely determines what you get for your money.  For the same price you can have this sort of square footage in the south (complete with inground pool)...

or you can opt for proximity to Portland, Maine and get this.

The second house is new construction, but it’s itty bitty, has well water and septic, and is missing the all-important garage that we’d need up north.  This is a struggle, people.  We just want a nice little house in a nice little town, hopefully one that will meet our needs as we get older. Other items on our wish list?  Small town living with easy access to a larger city and a decent international airport.  Part of my hunt includes exploring each town’s library website (a vibrant, busy library says a lot about a place) as well as their Facebook page.  Looking past the mouthy keyboard warriors that lurk on every page, you can still get a good idea of the town’s vibe.  Let’s see - fair property taxes, decent cost of living, small town feel, good airport, seasons...sounds like we should stay put and just endure long, sticky summers, right?  Ugh, no.  Our reasons for wanting to relocate are so much more than just the summers.  Soooo, months and months of searching keep leading me to one state that ticks all of our boxes and then some.  Minnesota.  A myriad of cute towns surround Minneapolis and St. Paul, all with easy access to the fabulous airport.  I’m crazy about New Ulm (I love a town with lots of festivals) and I wouldn’t be heartbroken to live in Mankato, Owatonna, or a number of others.  Real estate is affordable, taxes are fair (and are used wisely!), all four seasons are present and accounted for, and quality of life seems really good - from healthcare to education to crime, they seem to have a handle on it.

and you knew there was a but, right?  We could happily move there knowing that we’d be close to at least one of our kids.  Matt lives in Minneapolis and the thought of having him nearby warms my heart.  But he’s weighing the pros and cons of an opportunity that would take him to the east coast and more likely to far flung parts of the world. It’s quite possible that he’d be gone in a flash and we’d be in Minnesota, once again far from family. Right now we’re a day’s drive from everyone except Matt. Truly, we could do it in a day but it would be a miserable thirteen to fourteen hours. I have scoured Maryland and settled on a little place called Ocean Pines.  It’s okay, a bit further than I’d like to be from airports, etc -  it’s between two to two and a half hours to Baltimore, D.C. or Philadelphia’s.  That also means it’s just two hours from my favorite little girl. That would be HEAVEN.  But who retires to one of the most expensive states to live in?  Would it make our golden years miserable?  Who wants to pinch pennies when you should be enjoying life?  HELP!!  Where is home?  I left Alaska more than twenty years ago, the mister was a Florida boy -  we don’t want to live in either place.  I love the prairie,  he loves the mountains.  At one point we were looking at real estate on Prince Edward Island  (affordable and gorgeous!) but Canada doesn’t want us. Seriously, we filled out the online immigration form.  We wouldn’t be able to live there year round  and I can’t imagine having to go squat across the border for a couple of months every year once we’re old and rickety.   There are pros and cons to every place we’ve looked.  No spot is perfect and we have to decide what we can and can’t live without.  If someone could just plop this house down next to my grandbaby I’ll shut up about this forever.

Imagine that house surrounded by hydrangeas in the summer.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask - just a little pink house near some people I love.  Some snow would be nice now and then. What a lovely dream. This boring blog post has been brought to you courtesy of my latest level of boredom.  It was either this or go dust the bedrooms, so you had to pay the price for my laziness.   My plan for this evening is to watch the Golden Globes and through that maybe find something interesting to watch.  We’re approaching the first anniversary of when we locked down here on the Pullen spread and we’ve run out of shows to binge.  Remember how naïve we all were when we thought we’d watch Tiger King and then lockdown would be over?  At least we’re headed in the right direction now.  That’s something.  I’m thrilled that my mother is fully vaccinated and so is Dr. Matt.  A handful of my dear friends are also protected now.  I’ve lost some friends to this horrible virus, including the husband of a dear Rat Patrol member.  Our little group now includes a widow for the first time. There’s been so much heartbreak over the last year.  I’m ready for it to stop. Okay - what a crazy, rambling post.  I think I’ll go dust.  It’s probably more productive.  If you’re still here, you deserve a cookie.  Treat yourself!  If you happen to know of the perfect town (I really just want to live in Stars Hollow) send me a message!  I’ll put my dust rag down and check it out! Sending out lots of love on this drippy Saturday. Stay safe, stay well, stay sane. XOXO - Nancy

[aion-rsa]

The Incredible Hulk’s Diminished Legacy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Love it or hate it, one of the things that makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe work is the long term synergy. With Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, over a decade of movies came together to pull off one of the most entertaining spectacles of our time. It’s a universe that, for the most part, feels consistent and it builds on itself as each movie feels like an essential cog in a larger machine.

Some cogs are bigger than the others, though, and when it comes to “the others,” one can’t help but notice that 2008’s Incredible Hulk is something of a black sheep in the Marvel movie roster. These days, they’re just starting to dust it off as a property with the return of Tim Roth’s Abomination in She-Hulk and William Hurt’s General Ross’ gradually increasing role in the universe itself (he’ll appear in Black Widow and possibly other projects soon enough).

Now, there are plenty of reasons why Incredible Hulk is the green-skinned stepchild of the MCU. It made the least amount of money (about $42 million less than Captain America: The First Avenger, which was the second worst showing), the lead actor was recast afterwards, and its status as a Universal co-production meant that it would be the only movie in the first three Marvel phases that would not get its own sequel, no matter how popular Hulk was in the Avengers movies and Thor: Ragnarok.

It’s not like the MCU acted like Incredible Hulk never happened, but the creators definitely had a tendency to shove it into the corner and be somewhat vague about its existence. It became easier as the MCU became rich with more and more properties, but early on, it was very much the rage-filled elephant in the room.

The Hulk Design

There were a couple of ads for Avengers: Endgame that included shots from all the previous MCU movies in chronological order. For one, when it came to Incredible Hulk, all it had to show for it was Hulk’s fist bursting through the wall. In another, they just used shots from later movies and hoped nobody would notice. That’s because CGI or not, Ed Norton’s Hulk and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk were two very different beasts. Not only did they roughly resemble their actors, but Norton’s Hulk was more of a giant, angry bodybuilder with green skin while Ruffalo’s came off as more Cro-Magnon, like a shaved gorilla.

It means that while they could talk about Hulk’s exploits, they could never really show any flashbacks, as it would just look awkward. Similarly, Incredible Hulk filmed a cut opening where Banner tried to shoot himself, but the Hulk wouldn’t allow it. While it was a bit too extreme to show, Banner at least got to talk about it happening in Avengers.

The Effect on the World of the MCU

When you look at the events of Incredible Hulk, it keeps things focused on the characters and not the world at large. Sure, it would have been bigger news if the Abomination defeated the Hulk and went on an even bigger rampage, but that problem was nipped in the bud. If you’re a citizen of Marvel Earth, all there is to know is that some soda has been recalled and there was a monster fight in Harlem.

In the movies themselves, the only time the Harlem fight is brought up is in the background of Iron Man 2, where Nick Fury’s map signals it as a place of interest.

With the exception of the Hulk straight-up existing, the most lip service his movie got early on was the scene in Captain America: The First Avenger where Steve gave blood for further study. They needed something to give Emil Blonsky down the line and turn him into an angry Ninja Turtle.

Speaking of…

Whatever Happened to the Abomination?

Of Marvel’s Phase 1 villains, one died, a couple vanished confusingly into space only to come back later, and three were taken into custody. Ending up in custody means you’ll be back soon enough because prisons usually can’t hold the type of enemies who can throw down with the Avengers. Usually.

In other words, it’s pretty damn impressive that the Abomination has been kept off the grid since the Hulk choked him out in Harlem. She-Hulk will be his first real appearance since then, but his name has been on the tongue of Phil Coulson on Agents of SHIELD a few times.

The scene of Tony Stark appearing at the end of Incredible Hulk to confront General Ross is something that came off as a big deal at the time, but afterwards didn’t make too much sense. Piggybacking off the Iron Man post-credits scene, Stark was seemingly trying to recruit the Hulk into the Avengers. That didn’t exactly jibe with what they were going for afterwards, so they released a short film to make sense out of everything.

The Consultant featured Agent Coulson and Agent Sitwell discussing the unfortunate decision by the World Security Council to demand the Abomination join the team. After all, Blonsky is a decorated veteran and the Harlem incident could easily be blamed on Banner. Fury wasn’t in a position to refuse the Council, so the only hope was that General Ross – the guy in charge of Blonsky’s captivity – turned them down. And so, they sent Tony Stark. That final scene in Incredible Hulk was reframed as Tony Stark obnoxiously asking for the keys to Abomination for the Avengers and Ross being so annoyed by his antics that he straight-up refused.

Afterwards, Abomination was namedropped a couple of times in Agents of SHIELD, which is par for the course considering early Agents of SHIELD was about reminding us about stuff that happened in the movies and saying, “We’re part of all that!” According to the show, Abomination was kept in a special prison in Alaska that only a select few know about. There was an episode where SHIELD’s main prison lost power and one of the writers realized that they probably needed to note that Abomination wasn’t going to be an issue in this situation.

But hey, at least he finished his story. The Leader on the other hand…

Samuel Sterns and the Fate of the Leader

At the time, it was the right play. Tim Blake Nelson played the kind of surprise villain you’d find in your average CGI animated Disney movie. As Mr. Blue, he existed as Bruce Banner’s potential salvation, only to be revealed to be kind of over-the-line and sinister in terms of his gamma experiments. After turning Blonsky into the Abomination, Sterns was knocked to the floor and a sample of Banner’s irradiated blood dripped into the open wound on his head. Sterns seemed especially jazzed with a crazed expression as his head started throbbing and increasing in size.

And then…nothing! Not even a mention in a different movie or Agents of SHIELD. That’s what happens when you set up a villain for a sequel and then have legal reasons keeping you from making that sequel. That said, there is a follow-up to what the hell happened with Sterns.

Back in 2012, a prequel comic was released to coincide with the first Avengers movie. The Avengers Prelude: Fury’s Big Week showed that the events of Iron Man 2, Thor, and Incredible Hulk all happened over the course of a few days. We got to see those storylines from the perspective of SHIELD, especially a very overwhelmed and fatigued Nick Fury. That makes sense for the stuff with Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 as well as Mjolnir and the Destroyer in Thor, but what of Incredible Hulk?

As shown in this story, Black Widow was in the background of its events, keeping an eye on everything and realizing that she was way in over her head. She played clean-up on the Sterns situation by coming across his giant, mutated head in the aftermath. Sterns was quick to figure out her homeland from traces of her accent and thought to bribe her in some way, but she stonewalled him with a couple of bullets to the legs.

A year later, Sterns was shown floating in a tank, unconscious, as various SHIELD scientists studied him.

Will we ever see the Leader pop up in the MCU? I can’t imagine Tim Blake Nelson is too busy to appear on She-Hulk at some point.

Betty Ross

Bruce Banner’s old flame is now nothing but a footnote. Considering Banner moved on to another relationship and then another planet, there was never a reason to reintroduce Betty. The only nods to her were Tony Stark naming his Hulkbuster armor “Veronica” (get it?) and the Russo Brothers saying in an interview that Betty was one of those turned to dust by Thanos.

Maybe one day we’ll see Red She-Hulk. Don’t hold your breath, though.

Thunderbolt Ross

General Thaddeus Ross does the heavy lifting for keeping Incredible Hulk relevant. The guy came back for Captain America: Civil War, a movie that didn’t even have the Hulk in it! But it did give him the Henry Gyrich role in a time when Gyrich was probably off-limits since he was considered part of the X-Men corner of Marvel (he already had a very minor role in the first X-Men movie). A familiar face, Ross got to be the government liaison type who spoke with logic, but came off as an antagonistic killjoy.

Right or wrong, Ross’ insistence that the Avengers sign with the Sokovia Accords ruined the team in the face of Thanos’ rampage against the cosmos. He still got to show his respects as Tony Stark’s funeral at the end of Endgame.

Yet, that’s not the last we’ll see of him. In Black Widow, Ross is shown in the trailers. We don’t know his role quite yet, but there’s a lot of fan speculation that Ross might tie into the next roster of the Avengers. Maybe a team that’s government sanctioned and controlled. Maybe a team that’s an awful lot like the Thunderbolts.

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It does seem that as the MCU reaches further and further outward, it looks back more and more on the events of Incredible Hulk. Then again, I doubt we’ll be seeing Ty Burrell’s Leonard Samson turn into a gamma-irradiated psychiatrist with long, luxurious hair any time soon.

The post The Incredible Hulk’s Diminished Legacy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/38YGDRp

[villanevest]

You’re Mine [pt.1] - villanelle’s perspective in 2x08

okay so i've seen a lot of freaking out post-finale and i want to say: it's all alright. yes, it was a pretty shocking ending, but honestly, i think it was really good for the characters, and for the show. before anybody yells at me for saying that, i'm going to be explaining myself in three posts. in this post, we're going to be looking at villanelle’s perspective on the events of the episode, and next post, we’ll look at eve's, and this will hopefully make their actions a little clearer, and villaneve's future seem less uncertain. in another post, i'll explain why these kinds of tough, dramatic choices are important for the overall health of the show.

let the deep dive begin. VILLANELLE’s thoughts and feelings in the finale villanelle's first really significant scene this episode is the aaron-villanelle-eve showdown at breakfast. remember that last night was villanelle and aaron's conversation about being voids (2x07), and now that she's seen the murder tape, villanelle really feels like she's got a clean read on aaron -- enough to predict and manipulate him, as she would anyone else. seeing raymond's picture tells her it's time to get out, so she essentially invites eve in to supervise the end of the operation. villanelle has the power -- she's seen aaron's kill technique and clearly decided she can beat him, if it comes to a struggle -- and she's comfortable with the confrontation.

and then aaron offers for her to come work for him. crucially, he frames it as, "you'll never be bored again [with me]". we know for villanelle, boredom is her great vice -- she falls into it easily, it controls her, and she's trying desperately to escape it. aaron's offer in undeniably tempting -- we've seen all through 2x07 the luxury on offer -- but it's when he says "all of it" that villanelle makes up her mind. 

because eve would hate her if she went with aaron, and it can't be "all of it" if "everything" doesn't include eve. here, she decides that eve, on her own, makes villanelle feel more alive/less bored than any material object or orchestrated murder aaron can provide. that's why she turns to eve -- she's saying, look what i'll give up for you.

i dont think she'd necessarily have killed aaron if he hadn't asked her to hurt eve. he might've been a good option to keep on the backburner in case eve ever gave her the green light. but he's a threat, so she gets rid of him. eve freaks out, and villanelle tries to comfort her, as best as she knows how. 

"it's okay", "i'll take care of it", reassuring physical contact. she's probably a bit smug too because now she's killed two people in front of eve, and eve's only upset because of their operation, not because of the murder; for villanelle, this is another indication that violence is not a problem to eve.

i think after this, though, villanelle becomes a bit worried that eve feels like she doesn't have control, which she knows is something eve needs (see: 2x06, when eve was micromanaging the mission). we’ll get back to this. villanelle tries to keep the keel level -- she skirts around the picture of raymond, not wanting to pile on, and slaps eve to start her out of her tailspin. from villanelle's perspective, the morning has probably not been ideal, but it's running fairly smoothly. so villanelle makes her first overture, both because it's what she's wanted this whole time (since konstantin said, "if anything happens, you and eve are on your own"), and because she thinks it'll stop eve from running in to danger.

once she realises eve is serious about it mattering, she stops protesting, and starts helping. and then she runs into konstantin, the second most important person in the world to her, and in her mind, he betrays her. she tells him that she and eve are the same. this is particularly notable at this juncture, because he has just picked his family over villanelle; this comment is partly a bite-back -- villanelle believes she will be eve's first choice, even if she wasn’t his.

then we have the hotel fight with raymond, which again, only really begins once he threatens eve.

unrelated, but i believe raymond's claim "i'm a real somebody" may prove vital in season 3. is he perhaps a high-ranking member of the twelve who likes to indulge in a little recreational axe murder? if yes, then eve may have real problems on that front later.

when raymond is strangling her, villanelle is definitely in a bad way. i dont think, at that point, she has the strength or cognizance to reach for the gun. then eve hits raymond with an axe, and villanelle gets a second to breathe. this is where we get a callback to her saying, "you wanted to save me. and you did." if villanelle is concerned eve feels a lack of control, then this is a chance to return it to her. her encouraging eve to kill raymond is motivated by more than just practicality. firstly, villanelle needs to prove herself right to konstantin -- after he's shaken her faith, she needs absolute unwavering certainty that she and eve are the same. secondly, it binds them, just like the stabbing did in season one. thirdly, villanelle finds a liberation and excitement and power in killing, and she wants to give eve a chance to feel that. finally, and least significantly, i think villanelle probably just found the idea of eve killing someone hot and wanted to watch.

eve starts going into shock again, so villanelle gets her away from the sensory input -- takes off her bloodied shirt and directs her quickly from the scene. she's very gentle and physical in this moment, both because she wants to take care of eve and make sure she feels safe, and because she feels closer to eve than ever before. "like us". 

villanelle holds onto eve as they move through rome. she has already turned down one chance (with konstantin's car) to run away without eve, and she's definitely not losing her, especially now. in the tunnels, she lets eve smash through the wall alone, because she can tell she needs a way to get out her excess energy and deal with the overload of sensation. 

but the gravity of eve's response is more than villanelle expected. she thought eve would probably panic a little, and then right herself. even though they're both on the psychopathy spectrum, villanelle (in addition to being further along that spectrum) was raised with very little moral framework, whereas eve has spent the last forty years assimilated to society and ideas of good/bad, and these are integral to her sense of self.

but eve says "yeah", she is okay, and villanelle kind of assumes that things are alright, after this beat of catharsis. eve is taking a bit longer to process, but that's fine. maybe villanelle can take her mind off it, right? so she starts with talking about dinner, and then pitches her big idea: alaska. 

villanelle has probably been entertaining the abstract idea of "alaska" for a while. she has either watched or help eve lose tethers to her old life (e.g. niko), and villanelle wants a way to make their new connection permanent. she doesn't want eve to vanish like anna did. she picks alaska itself because of the snow globe, which as i said in another post, makes her think that eve's been there before, and liked it enough to buy a souvenir. also, it's in america, so eve would feel like she was on home turf. villanelle clearly prefers europe, but i think alaska has a faraway allure, and she's prepared to compromise.

she reminds eve that they could be normal as another way of allaying her worries post-murder. she's saying, not everything has to change, don't stress, you don't have to kill all the time. we can have half my life and half yours.

and then eve sees the gun. villanelle knows that not shooting raymond was manipulative, otherwise she wouldn't try and distract eve from the fact she had a weapon all along. then she defends, "you had it under control" -- like i mentioned before, she’s trying to return power to eve, remind her of her agency, assure that she's not spiralling.

in this situation, villanelle sees herself like the babysitter who has lied to the child about holding on to the back of the bike to get them to ride without training wheels -- it's for their own good, to teach them their own capabilities. it made me think this:

and then:

this really cemented for me that villanelle saw raymond's death as almost a gift to eve, a way to give her something she'd been missing, that villanelle was SURE she'd, if not necessarily immediately enjoy, then find valuable and help her understand herself. which is why she says she's proud -- she thinks eve has had a personal growth moment. she tells eve, "you made us safe", which mirrors, "you wanted to save me and you did". the "we can look after ourselves now" not only affirms their similarities, but is villanelle's way of saying, you can hold your own, you're in control, which she thinks eve needs to hear. but eve replies that she's going home, leaving. the exact thing villanelle wanted NOT to happen. it's a rejection of what villanelle sees as a big shared experience for them (raymond's death), and of "alaska", which translates to a rejection of villanelle herself. then we have this:

which i think shows a lot of villanelle's character development this season. she's clearly feeling a lot here, but primarily hurt (eve doesn't want her) and fear (eve will leave; she's not enough). konstantin just abandoned her too, by her measure, so villanelle's already more emotionally unstable than she's been. BUT. she takes a breath, and she tries to reopen lines of communication. 

when eve says villanelle wants her to be a mess, i think that upsets villanelle quite a bit, because we've been shown that eve is most exciting and attractive to her when she has agency and power, and also because from villanelle's perspective, she's spent half the time trying to STOP eve from becoming a mess. she's held her and reassured her. villanelle wants to steady her again. villanelle does believe that eve wanted this: wanted to kill raymond, maybe wanted alaska, certainly wanted villanelle. part of what makes villanelle so fun for us to watch is her short-sightedness and impatience, but here all that means is that she hasn't got the long-term empathy to see how this might be utterly rearranging eve's worldview. as we'll talk about in eve's post, eve has actually recovered remarkably well (villanelle's efforts to return her sense of control have worked, and she begins to dominate this exchange, and feel confident again), but she's experiencing A LOT of cognitive dissonance (she's a killer / doesn't think of herself as a killer), and she turns that into anger, and projects that anger onto villanelle. a perfectly justified trauma response. villanelle genuinely doesn't understand why eve is having such a strong reaction to this. it'd be like if you thought your friend would really like chocolate, so you left some on the table for them, and then they got mad at you for making them break their diet, which you'd thought they were never actually serious about. no, that's not at all what it's like in actuality, but it's essentially how villanelle is reading this. "you love me." "no." again, villanelle tries one last way of reaching out, and putting herself on the line to prove to eve how serious she is -- "i love you."

but eve tells her she doesn't, that she doesn't know what love is. and that really angers villanelle, because after so long doubting herself, knowing she's a psychopath and wondering how authentic her emotional experience is, she FINALLY got closure last night, with aaron. as we discussed in my post about that, she now believes what she feels is real, and so it's especially crushing to have it questioned by eve. but in this heated, stressful exchange, when she feels rejected after everything (especially considering how attached she probably was to "alaska"), she retreats to the relatively emotionless security of the "i / it". 

villanelle's sense of entitlement comes screaming through here. from her point of view, she's done so much for eve. just hours earlier at breakfast, she chose eve over aaron's offer of everything else money can buy. she had the alaska plan. she supported eve when she wanted to go back into the death-trap hotel and get the recordings. villanelle is SURE she's done EVERYTHING right. she's played the game perfectly and is somehow still losing. she's not used to losing, to failing, to not having what she wants. villanelle is addicted to instant gratification (she wants something, she gets it asap), and eve has been the only exception. she worked for her. but the extra time and effort is suddenly for nothing. 

and so villanelle does the only thing she can think of, and she moves eve from the category of "special"/"wanted"/"important" to "not special"/"not wanted"/"not important". it's literally emotional triage. yes, villanelle feels things more than aaron, more than most psychopaths, but what she still does have is an ability to mute those feelings, if not entirely, then by quite a lot. so she shoots eve. the logic probably is that if eve isn't around, then villanelle can reconstruct the narrative -- there's nobody else eve's with instead of her, because eve's gone; eve would probably have come back by now if she could, etc. but she doesn't commit entirely, because she doesn't aim to kill. instead, she chooses to replicate how eve stabbed her, because it's something eve "think[s] about all the time". this becomes a don't forget me. it's a think about this, too. is it also an expression of anger? absolutely. villanelle's default is destruction. eve hurt her. she wants to hurt eve. it's a childish tit-for-tat equation. villanelle externalises her feelings, because she can't reckon with them when they're all inside. if she's hungry or annoyed or bored then someone's going to know about it. and here, there is her instinct, and the gun is already in her hand. 

she fires.

will villanelle regret this? will she rationalise it? will she stay angry at eve or reconsider? i'll get into that in my write-up about narrative choices for the show. i've also posted another one of these about eve, and how eve's thinking and feeling (check #villanevest writes). i'm a fan of both eve and villanelle, and i think they were acting in ways that made sense to them. i get that we want them to be happy, but i think it's ignoring a lot of context to blame one or the other of them. remember, killing eve is a show about dangerous and irrational people doing dangerous and irrational things.

[wordsfromthesol]

Out of Place (5/6)

Author: @wordsfromthesol Pairing: Dick Grayson x Reader Summary: Meeting Dick, and the rest of the batboys.  You’re confused, since you are nowhere near Bludhaven or Gotham. Some tragedies, some battles, etc. Happy ending because I’m a sap. Warnings: Language, blood, rape Word Count: 2.0k A/N: I’m almost finished with the story and hope to post the rest soon.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 6

You opened your eyes, and everything was black. You screamed for Dick, but no sound came. Frantic, you looked around until you saw light. Rushing towards it, you see yourself. Well a much younger you, standing next to your dad. It was Christmas, and the day he gave you the necklace. You were only five at the time, but he began explaining what it was.

Y/N. You are the light of my life, my sunshine. This will protect you throughout your journey of life. It will also, be a source of great harm. People will try to take it, but you must never give it up. You would not be alive, and neither would this earth, if you ever take the necklace off. I can’t tell you exactly what it is but know that Dr. Fate entrusted me with it. Now, I am entrusting you. Too many people are after me, my time may be up soon.

You awoke in another unfamiliar place. Though, this time, you were not afraid. It was dark, except the small glass room you were in. You were attached to more machines than you cared to count, and finally dressed in proper clothes…not the swim suit you had donned during your capture. You grasped at your neck, the necklace still there. Your head began to clear, and you noticed the pressure against your hand; leaning up as much as you dare, there he was. Richard Grayson, asleep against the bed. You gave his hand a light squeeze and laid back. He immediately shot up.

“Y/N?”

Eyes still closed, “I’m here Dickiebird.”

They had you in a medically induced coma for two weeks, in order to allow your body to heal. While you were stuck in your own head, you figured something out. The necklace, your dad gave you the necklace. You always wore it. That had to mean something. To Dick’s surprise, you asked for Tim next.

“Tim, right. That’s the other one?”

“Uhm, yeah…he was there. Why?”

“Get him for me sweetheart?”

Dick rose slowly and soon came back with Tim and Jason in tow.

“Wow, asking for my replacement, and not me? That hurts.”

“Jaybird” you smiled softly. Turning towards Tim, you usher him closer. The boys both exchange confused glances. You reach up and take off the necklace and place it in Tim’s hand. “Find out for me.” And again, you were out.

“Well, what was it? Why did she want you?” Jason questioned his younger brother, slightly hurt that his best friend asked for his brother instead of him.

“I…I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.” Tim held up the necklace to both of the boys. “Any thoughts?” They were just as confused as he was.

Tim scoured the internet and every database he could think of. Finally, information on a similar piece surfaced. “Magic…” He immediately rang Zatanna. There within minutes, she glanced at the piece and immediate shock hit her.

“Where did you get that?! Who did you take it off of?! I need answers now Drake!”

“Damn, what the hell is it?”

“Now.”

Tim points to the med bay. “I didn’t take it, she gave it to me.”

“No no no no no…” Zatanna snatches the piece and raced over to Y/N, securing it back around your neck. “Why, why would she take it off? Doesn’t she know?” Zatanna held her face in her hands. “Read me in. Now.”

Tim called the boys to the cave and they explained everything.

“It is an amulet of Eshu. The proclaimed wearer is offered safety from death, but if they take it off…well they could be lost on one of the 256 paths to the underworld. And even if they find their way there, they must then challenge Eshu. If they lose, they set the god of death and chaos free. My hope is, since she gifted it…and it only briefly disconnected from her, she has not been set on her path. I need M’gann.”

The Martian soon entered the cave, as Bruce and Damian walked downstairs.

“When did we send out invitations to the cave?” Damian scoffed as he stalked to the corner.

“What’s the news?” Bruce knew this escalated quickly, for so many parties to be involved. The situation was explained, and a plan formed. The combined powers of M’gann and Zatanna should allow them into Y/N’s mind and make sure she has not begun her path to the underworld. Dick was insistent that his consciousness be brought along.

Zatanna and M’gann worked together and suddenly…darkness. It enveloped the trio as their bodies fell to the floor.

“Where are we? Why can’t we see anything?” Dick questioned the girls, wondering if this spell even worked.

“I’m guessing this is what her mind looks like. It’s being lost on the pathways to Eshu.” Zatanna’s fears had been confirmed. “We have to find her, quickly”

“Look! A light!” Dick began to rush to it, before even waiting on his ride back to his own body.

“M’gann, do you see a light? Can you sense where Dick went?”

“Nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. We can only wait and hope that Dick is enough to pull her out. Her mind, someone has tampered with it. Only Dick was permitted in.”

Dick looked back, and the girls were gone. Guess he was on his own. He couldn’t lose her, he just got her back. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Dick followed the light, and it was revealed to be a memory. The same memory Y/N recalled, that fateful Christmas Day when she received the necklace.  He followed the young Y/N, and another memory surfaced.

Y/N was sitting on her bed, crying. She was a bit older now, Dick guessed about 8.

Why, why do we have to move dad! I don’t want to! Alaska is cold, and all my friends are here. I DON’T WANT TO GO!

Y/N, it is important we leave this place. It is no longer safe for you. For…anyone.

He glanced down at the necklace and quickly walked out.

Dick noticed tears forming in her dad’s eyes. Almost like he never wanted to give her the necklace in the first place. There was definitely more to the story, more than her dad was letting on. Again, the young Y/N took him through to another memory. Y/N was about 14 in this one.

Let go of me!

Dick cringed, he hated that he could do nothing. He just had to sit back and watch the events unfold.

I said let go! I don’t have anything to give you! Money? Is that what you want? Newsflash, I’m a child! I don’t HAVE any.

Money is that all you think has value, girl? Pathetic. The man grabbed her by the hair and threw Y/N on the ground. I want that. He pointed at the necklace.

Yeah, well you can’t have it. Y/N spit at his shoes.

Dick had to chuckle at that, guess she was always stubborn and snarky.

And just like that, the sound of a gunshot reverberates through the memory and everything goes black. A few seconds passed and the light returns. Y/N is still in the same alley, intact, with blood soaking her shirt. She didn’t know what to do except run. Y/N ran home, but afraid to go in looking like this, she climbed through her bedroom window and took off the shirt. There was so much blood everywhere, and a bullet wound still dripping blood from her abdomen. Panicked, she searched everywhere for a needle…and some fishing line.

Dick stood staring at the memory in shock. She should’ve been dead. She said she didn’t even know that fishing line would work.

A knock on her bedroom door interrupted his thoughts.

Y/N! You’ve been missing for days! Her mother ran in and embraced her child. Her father and sister quickly followed. Where have you been? Your father wouldn’t even let us call the police!

Y/M/N, there is a reason for that. One which I now must discuss with our daughter, in private. Y/N’s mother and sister quickly left the bedroom. Tell me.

Well…I…I don’t know. Someone was trying to rob me. When I had nothing to give them, well they wanted my necklace. Then all I know is there was darkness and then I woke up, covered in blood.

So, you don’t remember anything? Your time on the pathways to Eshu.

I don’t even know what that is dad.

You’re not ready. I knew you weren’t ready. I’m so sorry my sunshine. He calls out for Dr. Fate. Appearing almost instantly, he murmurs an enchantment and is gone as quickly as he came. Her father looked back at her. You got off on the wrong bus stop, Y/N. You were lost, but finally found your way home three days later. He turned and walked through the door. Y/N’s mother and sister came bounding in.

Y/N! What happened! How could you leave me here alone with mom and dad!

I got off on the wrong bus stop. I was lost, but I finally found my way home three days later. Y/N shook her head back and forth and crawled into bed.

Dick found the young Y/N tugging at his sleeve for the next trip down memory lane. But his mind, it was still in shock. How could her father do such a thing? Had Y/N relived these memories as he was doing?

Last stop. The young Y/N said just before she disappeared.

College, this was where Y/N went to college. Dick remembered the diplomas hanging on your wall. He was always so proud.

Michelle, I don’t want to be here anymore. This party is so not fun. Can’t we just go get wine drunk and watch a romcom?

Y/N this is a once in a lifetime party! We can’t leave now…that’d be like…a crime or something.

Fine. I’m going to find a drink that’s not disgusting. Y/N wandered through the party and finally found a passable drink. Or so she thought. Soon she was completely out of her mind, loosing clothes left and right. A sock there…her top on the counter. Dick didn’t know if he could bear to watch what was going to happen, but soon a sign of relief came as the drunken girl he loved so dearly wandered up the stairs and found herself a bed. She even locked the door, he was so proud. Until he noticed the memory wasn’t ending. Soon two guys knocked down the door.

Fuck man why did someone lock my damn door. He glanced at the helpless girl on the bed. Dude, she’s out.

Imagine what we could do. I’ve always wanted to try the handcuff thing.

You go for it. I’m going to find an open bed. As the man walked out, he screamed back to his friend, handcuffs are in the bottom right drawer!

Dick didn’t want to watch, but it seemed like every time he closed his eyes the memory stopped. Just to restart once they were open again.

The man fastened her wrists to the bedposts, just as she was starting to stir.

Fuck. Dick thought, he didn’t want her to wake up. He didn’t want her to have to remember any of this. He cringed through the rest of the horrid memory, his fists balling up…urging to punch something, or someone. Yet, all he could do it watch the love of his life struggle and cry against the assailant. The man finally passed out and you watched Y/N dislocate her thumb against the bedpost and pull her wrist through. She did the same with the other wrist. Finally, the memory faded to black. Dick saw Y/N, his Y/N sitting on the floor.

“Y/N! It’s me! Sweetheart, I’m here. I’m never leaving you, I’m here!” Dick raced towards her. He found her bloodied and battered, just as he had so many weeks ago in Ra’s al Ghul’s personal torture chamber. He bent down and held her close. “I’m never leaving you. We are in all of this together.”

“Good. I don’t want to remember this. Any of it, I only want you.” You sobbed into his chest.

“And you have me.”

[maidenxfmight]

all we do is hide away

Tagging: @ofcosmicwonder, @cfvalors, & Kara When: One week post-siege Where: Sanctuary What: Lar and Donna remind Kara she needs to come home Warnings: None.

"Is there anything with which I can assist you, Lady Zor-El?" Kara looked up at the small Kelex hovering eagerly at her feet. Her back was pressed against the bottom of her control panel, feet stretched out in front of her. The small fortress was stunning. Crystals jutting in each direction, red light reflecting off clear walls dancing with the movement of the ocean around her. It should be wonderful. It was a little piece of home.

It felt so empty, though. Her chest felt hollow, her eyes dry. She hadn't slept since she'd woken up with Alex beside her, since she'd heard Donna was alive, but not okay. Since she'd listened for Lar's heartbeat and heard nothing.

Sanctuary was beautiful. Kelex was a faithful companion. Kara didn't deserve any of it.

"No, Kelex, thank you." She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin between them. Sanctuary blurred and she shut the rest of the world out. This was home now, right? She'd given up everything for it, after all. It was funny how in her clarity, she remembered even crystals from Krypton were just crystals without her friends and family there to make them mean something.

"Set the entry phrase to Stardust, dim ambient light."

"As you wish." The lights dimmed, and she buried her head.

The thought of Sanctuary  had been floating in the back of Lar's mind for the better part of a week. It was a nagging feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that knew that's where she was but rather than think about that, rather than say it and watch the Donna's eyes light up only to be wrong he had busied himself with fussing over her to the point where she had taken to just throwing objects at him rather than be asked if she felt okay, if the lighting was irritating her eyes, if her pillow was fluffed correctly, if there was a glare on the television, Donna you should really drink more water, hydration is important--

He was even driving himself a bit off the wall. And, if he was being completely honest with himself even learning a new idiom didn't fill him with the same swell of accomplishment and joy without Kara's excited nod at its proper usage.

He missed her, had begun missing her the second their apartment door had clicked shut softly behind him and hadn't stopped since.

And Donna felt the same way, sending him everywhere from New Zealand to Alaska to listen for their missing roommate's heartbeat. But he had passed over the Atlantic and he just knew.

But the thought of Sanctuary could have never compared to the reality of it. His eyes widened as he took in the glittering crystals. He could do it. She would know he was there as soon as he left the water that surrounded him. Press his hand to the wall and beg her to let him in, if not for his sake than for Donna's.

Maybe explain himself. Apologize that he wasn't there when she needed him most.

But he couldn't bring himself too. He turned, his eyes squeezing shut as he jettisoned himself out of the water and into the sky, his cape fluttering wetly behind him as he flew as fast as he could toward the apartment.

He crashed into the apartment, so surprised by the shut window that he rolled sloppily across the floor, the smell of the ocean lingering though the flight had long since dried. 

"I know where she is," He said, breathless as his head rolled to glance up at Donna, "you feel okay enough for a swim?"

They were lost without her. Donna could see it in Lar's glances toward the window when he thought she wasn't looking or how he would make just a little bit too much of Donna's favorite dish because they were both so used to cooking for three. Missing Kara hurt more than any wound ever could and Donna couldn't do a damn thing except sit propped up in bed or try to stiffly walk around the apartment when Lar was off flying to find some evidence that Kara still existed in this universe. She had to. Kara had to still be here. Because Donna swore that some part of her would know if she wasn't.

A crash startled Donna and she stumbled out of bed, reaching for her sword that hung on the wall but stopping when she saw Lar's disheveled figure sprawled across the living room floor. "Did -- did you just break our...?" The question died on her lips as soon as he spoke. Gods forgive her, but nothing else mattered when he mentioned her. It didn't matter that she could hardly sleep without rolling over and waking up to a flare of pain. Somehow, she knew that just wrapping her arms around Kara would make a world of difference. "It doesn't matter how I feel. We're leaving. Now."

LAR: He was up in a flash, brushing off the shards of broken glass that clung to his suit as he marched toward Donna with a single-minded focus. She was still weak, regardless of what she said, and a swim to the bottom of the ocean was no easy feat, even for the likes of them. The last thing he needed was for her to pass out halfway down.

"Sorry, Donna." He muttered, hauling her into a bridal carry he knew she would argue against and flying out of the apartment with a boom. It was times like this that he said a silent prayer of thanks to Brainy for developing the flight rings, wherever he may be.

But there wasn't time to think about that now, not when he could practically taste the salt of the ocean as they flew. He came to a sudden stop, his eyes squinting as he tried not to jostle Donna. "It's right below us, she has to be in there. I saw it and, well it's definitely Kryptonian."

He looked up at the sun, the warmth of it slowing his heartbeat to a steady crawl as he took a deep breath, floated a little higher and then torpedoed himself into the water with a mighty splash, his arms tightening around the Amazonian in an attempt to get her to stop squirming.

It was beautiful, really. No less breathtaking a sight this time as it had been but thirty minutes before. If anything it looked like it had grown in the short amount of time he had been gone, the crystals somehow more imposing than they had been, the light bouncing off of them more brilliant than it had looked through the filter of murky deep sea water. He hadn't dared breech the barrier of water last time but now he squeezed his eyes shut and stepped forward, his eyes shooting open as he entered the serene space. It felt untouched and precious because of it.

"Here," he whispered, allowing her to slip from his arms as his eyes darted around wildly. Finally they focused on the structure, his jaw tightening before he stepped forward to slide his palm against the crystals.

He glanced back at Donna briefly before turning to press his forehead against the cool surface, his voice soft as he whispered a prayer. He needed to steady himself somehow, calm the rapid beat of his heart. "Kara," he said, "please."

Donna frowned, not sure what he was apologizing for until her legs were being swept from underneath her and she let out a yelp of surprise. She opened her mouth again to protest but they were suddenly zooming away. (Great Hera, if only she'd realized how disorienting such an experience was... she would have never teased Roy about his reaction to being flown when they were younger.)

"Lar Gand, if you don't let me go right now--" The threat died on her lips as the water rushed up to meet them and Donna became occupied with the sudden business of holding her breath.

The moment they broke the water barrier, Donna coughed, gasping for breath for a moment as she got her footing. She hated feeling this weak, but nothing could keep her from being here, and Lar was a wise man to not argue otherwise. Not if here was where Kara was. And it was. Her senses were dulled from her injuries, but even then, her heart knew, as if she could somehow sense the very essence of Kara embedded into the crystal structure around them. In another time, Donna would have paused and appreciated the beauty of the space. It was something so foreign to anything she had seen before on Earth, yet there was a beauty and serenity about it. But, the second that Lar uttered Kara's name, a determination possessed her.

She slammed her palm against the crystal wall. "Kara Zor-El Danvers, if you don't let us in, then I swear by the gods that not even Hades himself will be able to stop me from breaking through this wall to--" Donna's voice cracked and her vision blurred. Her hand swiped at her face and she recognized that tears had mixed with the saltwater of the Atlantic. "Kara, please." She echoed Lar's earlier plea. "Please, come home."

KARA: "New entry, Lar Gand, Donna Troy."

Kara's head lifted from her knees and her breath caught in her chest. She heard the quiet breach of the water barrier followed by the quick thump of heartbeats before the robotic voice even triggered the arrival, before the sputtering and the yelling on the other side of a wall of crystals. She would've known them without Sanctuary's help. She would know them anywhere.

Her fingers curled into her palms and for a moment she considered keeping the wall between them. Donna shouldn't have made the trip, and Lar...how could either of them stand to be there? Where in there hearts had there been room for them to still offer her home?

But they were there, and there was a crack to their voices that pulled Kara's heart to the floor. They were there, and she loved them so much, and there was hope. There was always hope. She stood and made her way a few feet from where the crystals would lower, where she knew she'd see two of the most important people in her life. "Sanctuary, lower entry one."

The crystals separating Kara from Donna and Lar sank into the ground with a quiet hiss, and for the first time in a week she spotted her friends. They were sea-damp and ruffled with red-rimmed eyes. Tired with hearts racing and...Kara could hear the rapid-fire of Lar's heart; she could trace the lines of fractures in Donna's ribs, where the skin had charred from the heat of her anger.

"Your ribs, I–" A sob lodged itself in her throat, one had lifting to cover quivering lips. Her eyes filled and spilled over; there weren't words or actions strong enough to fix this. She'd destroyed her home in searching for one. Everything in her wanted to step forward, to wrap the both of them up and never let go again. To whisper 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' until the bruises were gone. But for the first time she didn't know if they'd want that, and she wrapped her free arm around herself instead. "I'm so sorry, I'm–oh Rao."

There was a rumble and then a hiss and Lar's eyes shot open as the crystal seemed to sink into the ocean floor. His jaw dropped, his soft "wow" swallowed by the rapid fire beat if his heart at the sight of Kara, shoulders dropped and eyes glassy...

She had been crying, that much was obvious, and there was a small indent on her cheek that, even in all this, he couldn't help but find heartbreakingly endearing. It looked like she had gathered her knees to her chest and buried her face there and a large part of him wanted to do nothing but pull her into his arms and whisper that it would be okay because now they were all together.

But a small part of him could only hear the echo of her words the last time they had spoken. He couldn't stop hearing the crumple of paper as her hand pressed solidly against his chest.

It had been so simple, once upon a time, when he was just another face in the park and she was just a girl wearing a familiar crest.

They had been strangers, and then friends, and then family and then he had woken up one day and his eyes fluttered open to meet a blue that was both impossibly deep and impossibly clear and for the first time in his life he felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

He had imagined what it would be like to see her again. Spent a majority of his nights over the last week staring at the speckled ceiling in their living room, squeezing his eyes shut and hoping, praying, that she would just be there when he opened them.

He blinked slowly, his eyes never leaving hers as they filled, and then overflowed with tears.

He hated it. He hated that circumstance had made her soft heart hard and her warmth cold, even for a weekend. Hated that she even had a concept of self-loathing. He hated Magneto and he hated himself for not realizing that something had been deeply, terribly wrong. Then her arm snaked it's way to wrap around her body and it so much looked like she was trying desperately to keep herself together and something in him snapped. He rushed toward her in a burst of speed he didn't know he could produce, his cape slapping wetly against his calves as he wrapped his arms around her.

He shushed her, "I'm sorry I'm wet." He laughed softly, pressing a kiss to the top of her head absentmindedly before realizing what he had done. He stepped back with a shaky smile, his hands clasping respectfully behind his back, "Thank Rao you're alright. We were so..." he shook his head, "fucking terrified. I couldn't hear you anywhere and you didn't come home. Donna's sent me just about everywhere on the planet."

Donna Troy stood at a loss for words. Seeing Kara like this, surrounded by the soft unearthly glow of a crystal sanctuary in the bottom of the Atlantic, hit her in a way that she hadn't expected. A sadness weighed so evident on Kara's shoulders that Donna wanted nothing more than to lift the burden and take it upon herself. How long had it been sitting there without Donna noticing? How much longer would Kara have endured in silence if the truth hadn't been forced out of her? They used to tell each other everything, but somewhere that had changed. Not somewhere. Some-when. The Dark Angel. That's when this had all started for Donna. A thousand lifetimes of tragedy and Donna had thought that if she slowly shut Kara out then somehow that tragedy wouldn't touch her best friend. Instead, it had come back tenfold.

Lar was the first to move and all too soon he was pulling back. Donna was done holding back.

She pushed past him, tugging at his hand as she did so that she could somehow be connected to both of them at once as she flung herself into Kara, almost collapsing into her as she wrapped an arm tightly around Kara's neck, her other hand still lingering in Lar's. "Don't ever leave us like that again." There was no threat in her words. Donna was so tired of fighting now. Her head tucked in the crook of Kara's neck and the faint sound of Kara's heart beating in her chest. Lar's calloused artist's hand holding onto her own. This was all she needed to be home.

KARA: She didn't have a right, but the moment Lar wrapped her up she leaned into him, tilting into the press of his lips on the crown of her head. It was warm and safe and familiar and gone, just as soon as it came. Kara felt the absence like each empty room of Sanctuary.

She only had a moment to feel cold in his absence before Donna took his place, one arm held tight around her neck while the other anchored Lar to the both of them. Kara could feel her heartbeat against her chest and the heat of her breath as she pushed her face into her neck. It felt so much more like home than the towering crystals of Sanctuary had in a week, like something slid back into place with the three of them sharing the same space once more.

"I won't." She pressed close to Donna, the arm she had wrapped herself wrapping around her friend instead. If Donna meant disappearing for a week to the bottom of the ocean, or the days that had come before that, when everything about herself had shifted and twisted into something ugly, Kara didn't know. Both held true. Kara had left long before she'd pressed a crystal into ocean sand; perhaps she'd been leaving before red kryptonite burned through her veins. "I won't, I promise."

The words fell out quiet and choked, her fingers wrapping into the damp fabric of Donna's shirt. She hoped both of them could hear it. She wanted to tug Lar close as well, and remember exactly what home was supposed to feel like. But the distance between the three of them may be bridged by apologies and understandings, but it wouldn't be closed until they talked. Until everything that had spilled out in the three days Kara had completely lost herself was addressed. Kara wondered if the distance could ever be fully closed. If Lar stepping away was a precursor to the weeks to come, and Donna only held tight in the moment.

She pulled in a breath and pressed closer. For now, she had them, and that was enough. "I'm sorry I forgot what home was."

[artificialqueens]

Colors Burst (Adore-Centric) - Candy Cane

A/N: sooooo this is the first fic for this fandom that im posting yay :D no, i am not used to this so i really hope none of my characterizations are awful dfdsfddfs anyways, this is 100% completely just self-indulgent do not mind me. i really hope you enjoy!! <3

It starts as a headache just something sitting in the back of her head, making her have to work a little harder for every word, every thought, every movement. Adore isn’t bothered by it, sometimes it ebbs away enough for her to think it’s gone completely, and sometimes it comes back strong enough to keep her down for an hour or so. Adore just takes a couple painkillers and moves on with her life.

It’s been a week now, though. The headache is persistent, and she hasn’t been getting enough sleep, and sometimes it makes her so dizzy or nauseous she can’t eat. She knows she can’t ignore it much longer, because her friends and her roommates are starting to notice and she really doesn’t think it’s that important.

When Courtney brings home dinner for everyone, and Adore can’t get out out of bed because of this stupid fucking headache, she almost feels broken. A week of sleepless nights and zero productivity fueled by a pain she doesn’t know the cause of and simply can’t control. It’s hell.

Courtney comes looking for her, of course. The bedroom door being opened sends in a wave of light from the hallway that makes Adore groan with another spike of pain. Adore brings the blanket up over her eyes to block the light out, and she tries not to feel bad when she hears Courtney’s little worried gasp.

She listens to Courtney come over to her bedside, then the blonde rubs a comforting hand along Adore’s shoulder, and whispers, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Adore rolls over and opens her eyes in a squint in order to look at her without making the headache worse. Her long-time friends looks as pretty and put together as she always does, and it feels good to know that at least someone’s doing well.

“My head…” Adore groans, and melts into the feeling of Courtney’s long fingers rubbing gently against her scalp.

“Oh dear…” Courtney frowns, “I’ll get you some water and panadol, maybe some food will help too.”

Adore just groans again and pushes her face into her pillow.

“Not hungry,” Adore mutters, but it’s so muffled she knows Courtney probably can’t understand her.

“What was that?” Courtney asks, sweet as ever. Adore hates being right sometimes.

She pulls her head back up and says again, “‘m not hungry!” and then promptly face plants back into her pillow.

Courtney rolls her eyes, “Well you have to eat, and an empty stomach doesn’t usually help a headache. Have you eaten anything today?”

Adore shrugs her shoulders, knowing that Courtney wouldn’t count a questionably old pack of skittles as real food. “Adore,” Courtney admonishes her, sounding almost exactly like someone’s mom.

“Hey, you guys good?” Katya says, and Adore realizes that now the whole fucking house is gonna be aware she’s acting like a baby. Again.

“Yeah, Adore just has a headache,” Courtney replies, and Adore buries her head deeper into her pillow.

“Oh, is that what’s been bugging her lately?”

“What do you mean?” And Coutney sounds concerned enough for Adore to feel a sense of guilt rising up within her.

Adore knows they’re talking about her, but she’s in so much pain she doesn’t even care. She just tunes it out. If they decide to kick her out for being whiney she’ll just go pout to Alaska and hope it garners enough sympathy for her to stay with her until she finds a new place. Maybe she can move into Bianca’s spare bedroom, or she’ll live on the streets singing for coins until she gets spontaneously found by a producer and lives in hotel rooms going on tour for the next three years-

“Adore?” Katya says gently, almost conspiratorially.

The younger turns her face over, and opens her eyes just enough to find herself practically nose to nose with the Russian.

“Uhhh… hi?” Adore whispers, knowing she should be used to this by now, even if she really isn’t.

“Hi,” Katya grins, big and goofy and it makes Adore feel a little better.

They stare at each other for a solid five seconds, Katya grinning and Adore knowing she probably looks like a stunned goldfish, and then Katya breaks out into a wheezing laughter that gets Adore smiling too.

“You’re so crazy,” Adore giggles.

Katya nods along with her, “Yes I am, but that’s not news.” Adore opens her mouth to say something silly, but winces when another shot of pain reverberates through her skull, and instead she whimpers out, “Fuck.”

Katya makes a sympathetic, worried sound that stresses Adore more. She hates worrying people. She hates coming off as a burden, as someone who needs to be constantly taken care of. Adore’s scared that that’s all she does.

“Oh, hon…” Katya grimaces, “Courtney should be back with something here in a second, okay?”

Adore nods, but pulls the blanket back over her face unhappily.  Katya chuckles, and reaches around so she can lightly scratch her long, manicured nails along Adore’s scalp. They sit like that for a couple minutes, and even though it isn’t making Adore want to fall asleep, it’s still really nice. It’s nice to know her friends care so much even though she’s a hyperactive toddler (as Bianca likes to say).

“Okay, I’ve got just the thing,” Courtney says as she walks back in, all brisk steps and unshakable confidence. Adore will never not be amazed by her.

Two painkillers and a cup of warm lemon ginger tea later, Adore’s able to sit up and have a lamp on in her room. Katya and Courtney teased and joked with each other the whole time, and Adore was grateful for it. For everything.

She’s sitting in her bed, listening to those two crazies be absolutely perfect when they all hear a very sarcastic shout from the kitchen of, “I’m home! Thanks for the welcome party!”

…Causing all three of the other girls to break into uproarious laughter. Not a second later, Trixie, very clearly unamused, is leaning against Adore’s door frame, blonde hair tied up in a neat bun, lips pretty and pink, just like always. Consistency, normalcy, feels so good to Adore.

“Hi honey, how was work?” Katya asks with the world’s cheekiest smile, making Trixie roll her eyes.

“Ha ha,” Trixia says blandly.

The woman then straightens up and goes to give each of them a hug. Adore’s last, but she does notice that the one arm embrace lingers. She doesn’t mind.

“Bad day?” Trixie frowns.

“She’s got a headache,” Courtney says, squeezing Adore’s hand.

“Still?”

And oh shit Adore forgot she mentioned it to her earlier this week. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She doesn’t look up from the bottom of her empty tea cup, and wishes not for the first time she was invisible. Why does he have roommates again? She’s a loner, a lone wolf, an outcast, she does better alone. Fucking rent is definitely too high in this town.

“‘Still!?’” Katya and Courtney repeat in perfect fucking unison.

Three pairs of eyes turn to her, and Adore once again wishes she could just disappear.

Adore pouts and rolls the tea spoon between her fingers just so she has something to do with her anxious hands, “It’s two separate headaches. I think, maybe… I dunno!”

“Oh, honey, no…” Trixie sighs.

“Have you been getting enough sleep? Food? Water?” Courtney asks rapidly, her brow creasing in a way that alone serves to make Adore worse.

“Look, I’m fine! I’m not dying,” Adore says, trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of her voice, “Can we please go eat now? I’m starving.”

It must’ve been that last little bit of her usual self that got Courtney her roommates to concede, even if just begrudgingly.

Adore can’t deny how good it feels to sit around the kitchen with her friends, as if nothing was ever wrong, as if she isn’t incredibly pathetic sometimes. She loves watching Katya pretend to throw a noodle across the room at Trixie, she loves listening to Courtney babble on about her day, she loves Trixie’s excited laughter at every joke. It’s so… perfect.

Adore grins and laughs along with them, her headache ebbing away for now. She knows eventually she’ll have to face mother-henning and concern, no matter how awful it makes her feel. So for now Adore holds onto this moment, because it’s a really good fucking moment.

[neirawrites]

I was a Twihard in high school. Then I was a Twilight hater. In  2018, I decided to reread the first book, to see for myself on which side I belonged. I wrote my thoughts as I read, in multiple parts, but on my main blog, so I thought I might share them on my writeblr too, because I kinda had fun with it. 

Enjoy my many, many notes

Pages 0-50

I’m actually kinda into it. Yeah, there are a many issues every article on editing tells you to fix (filter words, -ing verbs and things like that), but i feel it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.

Bella isn’t that bad of a protagonist. Nothing too spectacular, but she’s fine. She is depressed, self sacrificing and hides her feelings, but also a lot more self aware than i though she would be(like when she notices mike, my son, likes her). She’s a typical teenage girl, the introverted type, way into reading. there’s nothing wrong with that.

I don’t know why i remember Edward being a draco in leather pants,but he’s also fine for now. mysterious and handsome and a bit weird. The first real conversation they have, he’s polite and nice and charming. I expected him to be a dick for like 150 pages at least.

Pages 50-100

I’m still really into it.

Yeah,Edward kinda ghosts her/gaslights her after the whole van incident, but with the benefit of hindsight,i kinda get it. It’s a wonder he didn’t pick up his entire family and moved to Alaska again. I also get her mood during that time and I've been there so i feel ya,Bella,it’s not your fault.

And yeah, Bella gets invited to the dance by three different guys and it’s all kinds of fan fic-y, but the fact she turns them down furthers my belief she’s wake up married to Edward in like a few years and realize she would rather be with Rosalie (a solid choice, might i add).

Edward’s really pushy, especially when it comes to the scene after she faints. like, let her go, you jerk, she can drive herself, but he’s more weird than he’s a jerk and i think that was intentional.

A big surprise was the line “what if i’m not the hero, what if i’m the bad guy?” which isn’t this super cheesy, extra dramatic sentence but a jokey joke told with a laugh. actually, that whole conversation in the cafeteria where she tries to guess what he is is gold and don’t try to tell me otherwise.

I’m reading her interests in him as less of a romantic thing, and more of frustration at his behavior,like she would still be fascinated by him if he wasn’t so hot because he’s just so weird (but being hot is definitely a plus).

Plot? What plot?

Still, while the flaws are there, i’m still enjoying it very much.

Pages 100-150

Is Stephanie Meyer into anime? Cuz she wrote a harem light novel,that’s what she did and that’s how i’ll read it from now on and have more fun doing it. (Might make a post elaborating on this further).

All this to say that we got to Jacob. Not gonna lie, I kinda forgot about him.  He seems like a nice kid and i’m glad Bella has some positive interaction. Team jacoj 4 life (jk,man,i was team jasper in high school which is in retrospect very weird of me). I know he becomes a friend-zoned dudebro later, but for now, he’s fine.

Meyer, lady, you’re winning me over as a half hearted defender of your work, but why are the girls so bitchy? Yeah,i know, bitchy girls exist in real life, especially in high schools,but girls are our friends and we need more positive female on female interactions. Just my personal preference, I guess.

Things are getting interesting. Bella’s dreaming weird dreams (just fyi, not a big fan of dream scenes in general), she’s googling like crazy  and we’re going to Port Angeles.

I never felt she has any sort of affection for Angela or Jessica who seem really nice and have done nothing wrong. Like loosen up Bella, give them a chance. I know, depression makes you into a bitch sometimes, but it would warm me up to her character if she was a little more affectionate with people around her.

That whole scene where she almost gets at best beaten up and mugged and at worst raped and killed is… not my favorite part of the whole thing. I get what Meyer needed to do, to have her be saved by Edward, but there must have been a better way to go about it. What do I know? I’m the queen of forced plot contrivances. I do like their conversation at the restaurant (again, why do we hate the female waitress, Steph?). I don’t know why, I expected Edward to be mad at Bella for what happened to her and he seems genuinely concerned and his anger feels… human. Some of his actions, however, do not.

He stalked her which is weird and creepy and I hate it. Don’t stalk people, Edward. most of us don’t like it. you’re lucky Bella’s a weirdo.

150-200

I kinda love how ok she’s with the whole vampire thing. she’s just “well, this kid i barely know told me a scary story, so i guess the guy from school is a vampire. it be like that sometimes.” my first assumption would be it’s all an elaborate prank to make fun of me (i have some deep seeded trust issues origins of which remain unknown). and he’s waaay to quick to confirm her suspicions. I think there’s an explanation in the part of midnight sun that got leaked, but that was like a century ago.

I would criticize her for being ride or die with Edward so fast, falling in love with him so quickly, but i exchanged like 5 sentences with a cute girl last night and a part of is ready to propose based on the artiness of her instagam, so who the eff am i to judge?

and i get why he’s fascinated with her. she’s the only one he can’t read.

why? i don’t think that question ever gets a good enough answer, but it’s a fictional story about a girl falling in love with a sparky vampire. i’m not here for complex science or detailed explanations.

he seems waaay too protective of her. She’s a big girl, Ed, she can take care of herself. It’s actually kinda annoying. i dislike how he treats like a child a lot of the time. he seems pretty condescending. also, if he broke her car, i’m taking back everything nice i said about him.

ok, let me finally address bella’s biggest character flaw, her clumsiness. i mean, i get why she has it but Meyer goes a bit too hard on it. i’m clumsy, i really am, full of bruises, always bumping into things, but Bella can’t walk 20 meters without tripping. i guess i’m just glad she becomes a vampire in the book four, otherwise the book five would have been about her struggles when she’s diagnosed with a stage four inoperable brain tumor that’s been mesing with her sense of balance and the whole things turns into a weird version of the fault in our starts.

if i were writing it i would focus on her trust issues and being unable to form real bonds with other people as her main flaw, maybe even use it to try and justify the whole thing with the mind Edward can’t read. Like, she’s too different in a way that makes her unable to connect even on a basic level, like that one Blue whale that sings at a different frequency than all the others. Idk,i write pulpy sci fi. but it’s easy to be a general after the battle.

we got to the two infamous lines:

how are you? 17. how long have you been 17?  is another line that’s more jokey than i though it would be, but also the most realistic piece of dialogue in this book. i would so ask the same thing.

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, this paragraph has been memed to death. Second, there was a part of me-and I didn’t know how potent that part might be-that would know every word of it till the day i died. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in like with it.

200-300

Not gonna lie, the whole part where he goes around asking her questions he is legitimately interested in knowing the answers to is at the same time my kinkiest fantasy and my deepest fear. like, yaaas, daddy, get to know me on the personal level and don’t be turn off by the fact i’m a tabula rasa.

We got to the infamous meadow scene and Bella is sooo horny on main for that vampire stake it’s actually kinda funny. She gets so effing into it she faints. I fucking love this girl. Go get that adonis dick, Bella, you deserve it.

I don’t mind vampires sparkle.i mean,it’s lame and fanfic-y but in Bosnia we have the lampires so vampires are creatures with a high dose of plasticity. i don’t know why that was like the worst thing anyone has ever done to the vampires. They are kinda too strong and could use a real weakness tho.  

So the lion fell in love with the lamb is kind of another joke. Also, this is the skin of a killer is sadly just in the movie.

I do have the feeling he likes the project that he sees in Bella more than the real girl,but ok. Also stop nagging her. He watches her sleep. What a creep. I don’t know why, but the fact that he’s a vampire who doesn’t have to sleep makes it kinda less creepy for me. I don’t know why.

But “if i could dream at all i would be about you,” is the kind of ultracheese i can get behind. they are both such teenagers and i kinda looooove it.

Also non of the boys were her type is such a lesbian excuse. I feel ya Bella, i feel ya. I hope you discover your gayness after the end of breaking dawn.

We meet the cullens and every single one of them has a backstory like 528 times more interesting than Edward. i need novels about them, all of them ffs. it would be so cool. but, one of my favorite oc’s Errien Lark gets like 30 lines in the whole book so i can only be as harsh on Meyer as on myself (which is to say a lot. neither of us deserve these characters, honestly)

This book would have been more interesting if Bella fell in love in any other cullen. Like, Bella and Alice, Bella and jasper (Bella and Jasper and Alice. Sorry, i’m into solving love triangles with ot3s).Bella and Rosalie, Calilise, Esme, even Emmett, who i remember  as mike of the vampires, but it’s been a decade.

300 pages in and plot is yet to happen, but it’s ok. we have the vampire baseball next.

the last part.

get your hot takes! hot takes right here

I kinda like billy. He seems like a nice guy. Also billy/charlie as my new otp.

“The beautiful one,the godlike one.” Bella, you are such a teen.

The less fucks she has about him being an all powerful ancient creature of the night who can murder her in a heartbeat, the funnier it is. She is just soo casual about it. Comedy gold, i tell ya. i mean, this is actually part of the narrative, Edward comments on it, meyer knows what she wrote.

Ed,maybe is you stopped saying she smells good, you would be better at not thinking about her as food. Mind over matter. Just a thought. Maybe i misjudged his virgin ass. Maybe ed the incel actually fell in love with her. Or at least what he thinks is love since they’ve been dating for like two days (look who’s talking?the girl who reads any sign of affection as a statement of love and then gets disappointed).

“Emmett could never be compared to a gazelle”. That’s sexist steph. Emmett, honey, you are as gracious as you want to be.

Also a big yaaaas on the whole concept of vampire baseball. we needed more of it.

Plot! Plot! Plot! Plot! Plot!

We have encountered plot. Only 320 pages in. three bad vampires came into town.

Story time: when i was in high school, all like 20 of us in out class were really, really into twilight (dudes included). we quoted it all the time but the height of comedy happened when someone brought their friend from another school to out class and someone else was like “you brought a snack” and a meme was born to be quoted endlessly for months. it was actually kinda fun. and probably very annoying for anyone who wasn’t into twilight.

Also, any development? Backstory? Motivations other than for the hell of it for out boi James and his ginger girlfriend? come on, it wouldn’t even be that hard. Also, some foreshadowing? There was like one line before. This is a legitimate criticism. it’s kinda shitty writing and a wasted opportunity.

Edward is being a dick again. I get he’s scared but her dad could die. Or maybe they’ll trun him into a vampire too (charlie/Edward? Think about it). But they all call him out on it which is nice. Bella’s plan isn’t bad, but “let me go charlie” is the straight up coldest thing i have read in a long time. it’s supposed to be, this isn’t criticism, just stating the obvious. But she showed like an inclining of love for her dad who has been nothing but nice all this time. Yeeey, she’s not a robot.

“It was the best idea. Of course it was mine” . Yaas, queen, you’re not that much of a doormat;  take that credit.

i would do something to foreshadow the ballet studio thing in the first half of the book. at least, have Bella or Charlie looking at pictures from her recital, just to intricate it to the plot a bit more.

Ok, now i remember why i was team jasper. He is so effing nice. And he would be awesome for my depression. Neira/Alice/jasper, i ship it.

i’m kinda digging the explanations of how vampires work and the whole venom thing. They are still op af and need to be nerfed, but i wanna be one.

Of course, he used the mom. She’s like the only person bella actually cares about. She falls for it. i would probably fall too, but i’m dumb.

the fact that james hunted Alice is a nice and a very much needed twist. it did catch me of guard. i would be more mad he’s a bad guy monologing, but i can only introduce stones to my own glass houses.

Bella’s now more into the idea of being a vampire than into Edward and i’m living for it. she’s going to use him for his venom and a baby and run off with rosalie.

“and how many times did she fall our of a window?” (yes, that is a Sherlock reference in the year 2018 of our lord. maybe i should do that for my next project. should i wait a few more years?)

her mom is not worried enough, honestly. my mom would be freaking out. but my mom has anxiety issues, so idk… (i couldn’t get her smooth hairless legs, or her blue eyes but i got that gene. thanks, i guess) .

“And i have a couple of girlfriends” now that’s a novel i want to read but i guess i’ll have to write the lesbian twilight myself.

“I want to be superman too”. yeeees, finally, kristen steward in the role of superman casting of the century. you would all watch it and love it, and you know it.

Charlie doesn’t deserve this shit. when will he retire with his husband billy in their cabin where they can fish all day.

“Do you want me to bolt the door so you can massacre the unsuspecting townsfolk?“ Are we sure she hasn’t been a vampire from day one?

Jacob is a sweetie (for now) just putting that out there.

Edward is kinda being unreasonable. being a vampire in your universe isn’t that bad.

Aaaaw, and that’s a wrap.

i actually kinda digged it. it’s nothing special, but i read these last 150 pages in one sitting. my main issues are writing oriented. very little foreshadowing, many filter words and things like that, but i guess if you aren’t that into writing, you might not even notice more of that.

it’s not the death of literature, it’s not the worst love story ever told. it’s just a silly and mostly harmless wish fulfillment novel.

edward can be a controlling and condescending prick but he gets called out on it very often. it’s not like meyer is completely oblivious to what she’s writing. and even tho he’s 100, i guess they are all mostly stuck mentally at the age when they were turned. or at least that’s how it seems to me. bella is kind of a bitch to everyone who’s not a vampire and she’s never called out on it, there’s a glimpse of change in the epilogue, but i don’t think meyer really considered it a character flaw. which is a shame, as it could have made for an interesting character. all the vampires have stories i would rather read about, as i said before, but what can ya do? that’s what’s fanfics are for.

i may write more of cohesive thought on it when it settles in my brain, but first, i need to watch the movie. i have a hypothesis i need to test.

but i don’t regret doing this. it was kinda fun and now i’m no longer ashamed of my twihard phrase. i could have done worse, as far as teen phases go.

Someone should like write a fanfic, but Edward is not a vampire, but a rich guy. And he’s into some hard core spanky business. And they should take all the problematic elements and just crank them up to 11. And add a looot of sex. I bet they could make millions.

Tho, honestly, how can you read twilight and not make bella the kinky dom? you fundamentally misunderstood the story. for shame

[carry-the-sky]

there is the road,

and there is the story of where the road goes—

(or: jesse finds his way. tw for brief descriptions of ptsd-related nightmares.)

.

+ one day after.

Haines is—different. You sure as hell aren’t in the ABQ anymore. There’s like, no people here, for one thing, and that makes you nervous. You’re a strange face, a newcomer. People will notice, right? They’ll notice, and then—

But you make it to the grocery store just fine. You push your cart around, pay for your food the same as everyone else, and no one looks twice at you. Then you’re driving back through town, past a post office and a bank and at least three different seafood restaurants, which, hell yes. The classiest seafood place you’ve been to is Red Lobster, and only then because their biscuits tasted fucking phenomenal when you were high. Skinny had once convinced Badger to bribe the waitress for the recipe, which went about as terribly as you thought it would. Later, Skinny looked it up and found out you could just buy the mix at the store.

God, you miss them.

It hurts more to try not to think about them, so you let yourself. All the way out of town, you think about Badger hitchhiking up from the Mexico border, Skinny taking heat from the police, covering for you. You think about the last words you said to each of them, and how you wish you would’ve said more.

The turn comes up faster than you’re expecting. Asphalt gives way to mud and snow pack, and you shift the Toyota into four-wheel drive. The street doesn’t even have a real name—Road S.7, reads the battered sign at the turn-off—and you can’t help but feel a swell of gratitude towards Ed. Quiet, he’d promised, and he definitely delivered.

Your house is the only one on this street. It’s an a-frame, like the ones your parents always talked about building. They wanted a place up north, somewhere like Wyoming or Montana where they could take you and Jake skiing, or whatever it is normal families do. Maybe that’s what they would’ve done with the extra cash from selling your Aunt Ginny’s house.

You put the Toyota in park, open the back hatch, and grab a bag of groceries in each hand. The snow here is still fresh, and it crunches under your boot when you take a tentative step.

Start over. Start fresh. Put things right.

No. Sorry, kid. That’s the one thing you can never do.

Maybe, maybe not. You take another step forward anyways.

.

+ one week after.

The a-frame is nice. You’re not sure what you were expecting, but the place is fully-furnished, down to the shower curtain in the bathroom, and the living room windows face south, so it’s warm and light most of the day. It’s the last type of place you ever saw yourself living, but it’s yours. It’s safe.

This morning’s routine is the same as the last few have been—coffee, breakfast, get a fire going in the wood-burning stove. There’s a deer outside the window, and you watch her for a moment while you sip the rest of your coffee. She lifts her head to look at you, the length of her statue-still—and then she’s turning away to resume foraging. You aren’t a threat.

You have more money than you know what to do with, but you still give the job classifieds a once-over. The thought of hanging around the a-frame day after day makes your palms itch—you want to stay busy, stay doing, so you circle a few part-time stints, places you’re reasonably sure won’t laugh you and your lack of a resume out the door.

No flashbacks today, when you finally make it to the shower.

This life you’re carving out is a work in progress, but that’s okay. You’re building it from scratch, sanding it down and filing away the jagged edges. It’s gonna take some time, and you’re okay with that. You’re okay.

.

There’s a dog curled up on the porch when you open your front door. Definitely a mutt, some kind of lab mix maybe. No collar. You ease the door shut as quietly as you can, but it stirs at the noise and lifts its head.

“Hey, bud,” you say, squatting and reaching a hand out.

The dog takes a tentative sniff in your direction, so you shift closer. It’s the wrong move. The dog scrabbles to its feet and tears off into the trees before you can blink.

“Yo!” you shout, but it’s gone.

You make a mental note to grab some kibble when you’re in town.

.

The first three jobs on your list are a bust. One of them has been filled already, another wants at least a year of previous experience, and the lady at the last place takes one look at your ink, plasters a fake smile on her face, and tells you she’ll be in touch.

“Bitch,” you growl under your breath as soon as you’re back in your car. Your fingers itch for a cigarette, and you dig around in your pocket before remembering that you don’t have any, that you’d purposefully avoided buying any at the store. Fresh start, and all that.

You tip your head back to rest against the seat. For the first time since getting here, it starts to sink in just how alone you are. It has to be this way, you know that. It’s like your life’s been split cleanly in half—everything before Alaska, and everything after. You can’t go back, and you can’t fit the pieces together again. You get it.

Doesn’t mean it’s not gonna suck, sometimes.

You pick up some dog food on your way home—a bag with words like “natural”  and “grain-free,” because why the hell not—and you’re almost out of town when a sign by the road catches your eye.

Morley’s Custom Woodworking, 2 miles south on 3rd Ave

When you get to 3rd, you turn automatically, like you know exactly where you’re going. It’s your foot pumping the gas, your hands on the steering wheel, but you can’t shake the feeling that you’re being pulled towards something.

Fuck off, universe, you think, but you keep driving.

Morley’s sits where the road dead-ends. You duck inside, and the first thing that hits you is the smell, all pine-y and sweet. There’s a table and a couple chairs sitting by the entrance, and you run a hand over the closest one. Smooth as glass.

“How can I help you?”

You turn. There’s a guy walking towards you who looks like a lumberjack poster boy—big and tall, full-grown beard, arms like tree stumps. He’s older, maybe Mike’s age.

“Uh,” you say stupidly. “Yeah, hey, man, I was just—I was in the, y’know, the area, and I just wanted to see if you maybe needed help with, I don’t know, stocking inventory or cleaning up, or whatever—”

The guy’s looking at you like he’s trying not to laugh, and honestly you can’t blame him. You sound like a rambling moron.

“You know what, I’m just gonna—” you gesture towards the front door.

“You new in town?” the guy says, looking thoroughly amused.

Shit. It’s that obvious.

“Yeah, been here about a week.”

The guy appraises you. His eyes are soft and kind, which kinda flies in the face of the whole lumberjack thing, but, hey, no judgment here.  

“Got any woodworking experience?” he asks.

Sure, if making half a dozen boxes for a vo-tech class in high school counts.

“Not exactly,” you say. “But—I’m a fast learner, and I’m good with my hands. In a totally non-pervy way,” you quickly clarify, “which you probably didn’t need to know, but it’s always good to, y’know—” you trail off and heave a sigh. “Okay, how badly am I screwing this up?”

The guy quirks a smile. “Depends on if you’re gonna keep talking or not.”

You’re laughing before you can think better of it, and the guy’s chuckling too, and then he’s saying, “I’ve got a workshop this Saturday. Why don’t you come by? We’ll see what you got.”

You’re not sure if it’s the universe making the decision or if it’s you, but you don’t really care. Either way, it’s another step forward, and you’re gonna take it.

.

+ one month after.

You still have nightmares. Sometimes you’re in the cage, and sometimes you’re on top of it, and they’re pressing you down, pressing your face against the bars.

“Open your eyes, Jesse,” someone—Todd?—is saying. “Open your eyes and look.”

Sometimes, you fight back. You strangle Todd with your handcuffs, the metal digging into his neck. You beat the shit out of Jack, or one of his other inbred thugs (you never bothered to learn their names). You shoot yourself in the head.

Sometimes, it’s Walt holding you down instead of Todd.

You’re not sure when, if ever, the dreams will stop, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is that they’re all gone and you’re still here. Whatever that means, you’re still here. You’re still fighting.

It’s a small comfort, but it’s something.

.

It’s taken you a couple weeks, but the dog is starting to warm up to you.

You’ve started calling it Skinny, and yeah, you tell yourself it’s because the poor thing really is skin and bones, and no other reason. It still sits a comfortable distance away from you whenever you’re outside, but it’s stopped bolting every  time you make a movement that’s faster than not moving at all. You don’t know shit about dogs, but you know enough not to try approaching it again. Just let it be, let it see that you’re here and you mean no harm.

You keep a handful of dog food with you when you’re outside, just in case.

You’re stacking cords of firewood in the shed out back when the dog comes up to you, right up to you, tail wagging tentatively.

“Hey, there,” you say, but as soon as you stick a hand out, the dog growls.

“Okay.” You fish around in your back pocket. “You don’t know me, I get it. I totally get it. But maybe this—” you proffer the hand with the kibble— “will change your mind.”

You’re careful not to make eye contact as it sniffs your hand. Then it’s crunching the food up, tongue licking your palm enthusiastically as it searches for more where that came from.

“Right on, my kind of guy. Or, uh—” you duck your head and quickly scan the dog’s underside— “girl, I guess. Sorry about that.”

It’s another few weeks before Skinny will let you pet her, and one more after that before you can coax her into your car to take her to the vet. She’s not micro-chipped, and no one’s reported a missing dog, so they give her a routine series of shots and tell you it’s okay to take her home.

You’re not sure if this is a good idea—can you really even take care of yourself?—but it feels right. She’s like you, lost and alone. Maybe this is what both of you need.

.

You rent out a space at Morley’s after hours to work on the projects he gives you. Small things, at first, like cabinet drawers and birdhouses. During the week, you take orders and receive shipments and assist him with the larger custom pieces he’s working on. It’s hard work, but it’s good. You like working with your hands, making things instead of breaking them apart.

You think a lot about that box you made. You wish you would’ve actually given it to your mom. She would’ve been proud of it, of you.

You wish—

.

+ one year after.

“...and I’m gonna gently, gently tap, following the angles in the mountain. Always follow your angles.”

“Follow the angles,” you echo, bringing your brush up to the canvas. “Hell yeah, I can follow the angles.”

You must be pressing down too hard, because the colors are starting to smear together. If you’re being honest, most of this painting is a mess, but the mountains actually look halfway decent. You’re starting to get the hang of those.

“...and then just beat the devil out of it.”

“That’s my favorite part,” you tell Skinny, who’s watching you with mild curiosity.  

Netflix freezes for a moment, the percentage ticking upwards slowly as the episode renders, but you’re not concerned. That happens pretty frequently. You take advantage of the pause to clean your brush beat-the-devil style, which startles Skinny. Her claws clack against the wood floor as she scrambles away from you.

The rest of the painting is relatively painless—you mix the phthalo green with your purple instead of phthalo blue, but hey, happy accident. You’re getting used to accepting those.

Skinny re-emerges, eyeing you warily. You laugh and stoop to ruffle her ears.

“Sorry I scared you,” you say. “But, hey, it’s part of the process, yeah? Can’t jerk around with the process. Especially not Bob’s.”

Skinny just licks your hand in response.

.

You finish your first major piece at work, a two-leaf, red oak dining table. You’re almost a little sad when the couple who ordered it come to pick it up, but it would just sit in the shop otherwise. And you’d never live it down if you admitted it to Morley, who likened selling the first piece of furniture he ever built to sending a kid off to college.

“It’s beautiful,” the couple tells you. “Even better than we imagined. Thank you.”

You do your best to ignore all the knowing looks Morley shoots in your direction for the rest of the day.

.

You write to Badger and Skinny (the human) on a semi-regular basis. The letters are pretty general—you try to avoid any details that might give away where you are—but you tell them about the wood shop, and Skinny (the dog). Once, you accidentally write your return address on the envelope. You briefly consider sending it anyways. They’d come, they’d absolutely come if they knew where you were, and you’d be selfish enough to let them.

You’d be lying if you said you didn’t miss them, but it’s gotten better. You picture them playing GTA on Badger’s Playstation, or smoking a bowl, and it hurts a little less. They’re safe and they’re happy, and your loneliness is a small price to pay for that.

You’re, like, my hero and shit.

They have no idea it’s actually the other way around.

.

You watch the Northern Lights from your porch, a mug of hot tea in your hands and Skinny’s head resting on your knee. You think, this must be what heaven is like.

.

“So, where should we go?”

Skinny looks at you like she’d like nothing better than to murder you, but you figure that probably has more to do with the car than you. She’s quivering in the backseat, and you haven’t even turned the key in the ignition yet.

“C’mon, don’t look at me like that. You love car rides.”

Skinny whines and paws at the door.

“Okay, maybe love’s a strong word, but you love the mountains right? And the only way to get to the mountains is to ride in the car, so. We cool?”

Soon you’re on the highway. The back windows are rolled down, and Skinny’s sticking her head gleefully out the passenger side, all thoughts of murder gone from her head. You think you both might be happiest when you’re driving like this, wind in your hair and your ears, nothing but open road stretched ahead.

You don’t know where you’re going, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll find your way.

[beatriceeagle]

I think my TV meta ask reported an error so I'm going to repeat my questions, feel free to ignore any of them! 1) I love Looking for Alaska the book, and whilst I'm not worried about the TV show as an adaptation, I am worried about it being good... should I watch it? 2) Are you excited for Bojack Season 6? 3) How do you feel about Agents of Shield as a TV show that's constantly changing? I'll never forget their pivot in season 1! 4) SPORTS NIGHT! Why do I love Dan Rydell so much?

I don’t think I could love a meta ask more unless it included Farscape. This is phenomenal.

1

The highlight is that the Looking for Alaska adaptation is good and you should watch it. To get deeper, without getting spoilery, I’ve heard a lot of people say that it improves upon the book, which I don’t exactly agree with. What Looking for Alaska is is a very smart adaptation.

Basically, Looking for Alaska, the book, pulls off a thematic trick using its limited point of view. Miles spends the first two-thirds of the book wildly idealizing Alaska, and often very much in the dark about the exact specifics of her relationship with Jake, but also with Takumi and even the Colonel. Then when the turn comes, that becomes the point: Miles might have loved Alaska, but the Alaska in his head was never the real Alaska, and that means that he can never really understand what happened.

We spend a lot of time hearing Miles’ very precocious, pretentious narration, and also Alaska’s precocious, pretentious dialogue, and a lot of that has seeped into the culture as being the book, as if there’s no deconstruction happening. But there is! Miles is a little bit self-deluding, and Alaska is almost always putting on a front, and neither of their words can ever be fully trusted. This is a book about a guy who never really knew a girl.

The writers of the series, I think, wisely realized that that dynamic was going to be incredibly difficult to replicate on-screen. No matter what they did, viewers were going to get an objective look at Alaska, and the time constraints of television (ironically, the fact that they had to fill out more time) meant that they would have to go outside of Miles’ perspective. So they ditched that idea entirely, and instead dedicated themselves to expanding wherever they possibly could. We get so much more Alaska than the book gives us. She is more real than she possibly could have been in the pages, because we get to see her, not Miles’ view of her. But we also get much, much more of the Colonel, more of Sara, more of Takumi and Lara, more of the Eagle and the Old Man. And it’s wonderful! Some of the show’s most incredible scenes are between characters who are neither Miles nor Alaska.

But it does undercut the theme, somewhat. (Especially when combined with some other adaptation decisions that I won’t get into, because they are spoilery.) Looking for Alaska, the series, gives up some thematic impact in favor of a great deal of character richness, and it’s absolutely the right call for the series, given its format, and given the context in which it was released. But it was a trade, and I think it should be acknowledged.

(The other thing the show does that I think is necessary from an adaptation standpoint, but makes for a kind of weird viewing experience, is that it adds a whole plotline to the middle of the series that doesn’t exist in the book. I do think that this was necessary, because there’s not a lot of structure to the middle of Looking for Alaska, and while that’s fine for a book, a series needs a plot with some kind of forward momentum to hang itself on. But the problem is that the inevitable arc of the book means that this new plotline has nowhere to go, and it ends up just sort of fizzling out, once the book plot takes over.)

Anyway: Looking for Alaska. Very good show, very good music, exceptional performance from Denny Love. Definitely check it out if you loved the book.

2

I am very excited for BoJack season 6! I’m just waiting to watch it with my sister. I have hope that, since this is a planned final season, it’ll give the writers space to move the characters forward, and actually give people like Diane some measure of peace, and people like BoJack some measure of atonement.

3

I think that being the kind of show that was a different show every season was the smartest choice that Agents of SHIELD ever made. (The least smartest choice that Agents of SHIELD ever made was “Fitz and Simmons can never be together for more than six episodes at a time,” even if it has led to several individually successful story arcs.) It makes the show infinitely adaptable, so for instance, if they kill off their lead character thinking that the show is ending, and then suddenly get renewed for two (!!!) more seasons, it’s very easy for them to bring the actor back without walking back the story they’ve told; the show is capable of going to almost any place or time, and pulling on almost any trope of sci-fi or fantasy.

It also makes the show really interesting. One of the problems with season one of Agents of SHIELD was that the MCU is this giant world, full of lots of different settings and genres, and in comparison, AoS felt bland. The genre it was taking on (sci-fi procedural) isn’t inherently boring, but it wasn’t a particularly fresh take on the idea, and the visual trappings of the setting were incredibly sterile. But post-Hydra reveal—and especially post-season four—AoS is like the MCU in a microcosm. It can be anything! It can do a season in the future, a season in space, a season in a computer simulation. It can do pulpy action and messy comedy and gorgeous, lyrical sci-fi.

And also, it manages to do something that’s incredibly difficult (even The Good Place didn’t quite manage to get the hang of it until literally just this last episode) which is to rewrite the characters’ realities over and over without losing track of their character progressions. So, for instance, Fitz has been regular Fitz, and then he’s had his entire reality rewritten by the Framework and become the Doctor, and then he married Jemma and died, and then we reset to cryo!Fitz. And throughout all of that, the show has always been very clear about where the current Fitz is emotionally, and how all of the past and alternate versions of him affect his mental state—but also how he is distinct from any past or alternate versions of himself. And they do this while carrying on actual physical trauma from season 2; if you pay attention, Fitz still briefly loses words when he gets stressed. (As someone who takes a medication that makes me forget words easily, this is my ACTUAL FAVORITE THING on television.) The end result is that you actually know more about Fitz from seeing his reality rewritten so many times—and he still has a coherent character arc.

Of course the downside of this constant shifting is that sometimes AoS will find something that really works for it, and then leave it behind. Like, over the course of seasons three to six, they built up a lot of texture and a deep bench of characters to the space setting, and I would probably say, at this point, that Space AoS is my favorite version of AoS. But the latter half of season six ditched that setting almost entirely, and it’s not clear to what extent we’ll be going back there at all for season seven. Similarly, Fitz’s character arc remains coherent, but I’m not sure the current version of it is my favorite version of it.

But at the end of the day, I think that’s a fair trade for a show that’ll change Daisy’s name halfway through and stick with it, you know?

4

Well, I don’t know why you love Dan Rydell, but after putting a great deal of thought into this over many years, I can tell you why I love Dan Rydell: He is, setting aside some baseline Sorkin patronization, a legitimately great guy, going through a legitimately tough time.

Like, in the grand scheme of things, there are a lot of people who have it a lot worse than Dan Rydell, but one of the cool things about Sports Night is that the narrative is genuinely engaged with that fact: It’s aware of Dan’s privilege, and it makes Dan aware of his privilege, in a way that future Sorkin properties never really manage to do. Think of “The Apology”: “No rich white guy ever got anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks.” Think of Bobbi Bernstein, a woman who Dan calls crazy until she proves that she was right. Think of “The Quality of Mercy at 29K,” an episode that’s basically all about turning Dan’s privilege inside out.

What makes Dan likeable is that the show is aware of his privilege, it points his privilege out to him, and he learns. When Isaac calls him out, he’s immediately contrite. When he sees someone in need in his office, he overcomes his immediate reaction and tries to help. And when he realizes his error with Bobbi, he grants her an immediate, complete, and sincere apology.

The thing is, Dan wants so desperately to be a good guy, and it’s just really hard not to like someone who is trying so hard. He’s incredibly good to his friends, and honestly, I think the turning point is “Mary Pat Shelby.” You give Dan and Natalie’s scene in “Mary Pat Shelby” to a halfway decent actor, and how do you not come out of that scene loving Dan? This incredibly unselfish, incredibly well-pitched moment where, while everyone else is freaking out and trying to get something out of Natalie, Dan just says, “No, I’m not going to tell you what to do, I’m just going to tell you that I am behind you a million percent.” How do you not love that person?

But the other thing is that Josh Charles is not a halfway decent actor, Josh Charles is a phenomenal actor, so actually the turning point isn’t “Mary Pat Shelby.” It’s the speech in “The Apology.” The speech in “The Apology” isn’t  Sorkin’s best writing—“high as a paper kite” is a choice—and honestly, that scene is a lot to ask any actor to take on. Performed competently, it would be kind of embarrassing.

Charles fucking impales himself on that monologue. He leaves blood and guts on the anchor desk. And he somehow does it without overacting? It is a very subtle, precisely-balanced act of self-dismemberment.

What I’m saying is that right from the very beginning, Dan opens himself up to the viewer, and we see all his vulnerabilities, all the ugly, painful pieces of him that make him. And because Charles is a really, really good actor, it’s all very believable, and it’s all very magnetic—you’re drawn to it. And he does it all while being so likeable, and so good.

So of course people love Dan Rydell. He’s generous, he learns and apologizes, he tries incredibly hard, he’s got level 25 charisma, and he’s an open book of emotion—not to the people in his life, but to the viewer.

(Hey, while you’re here, have a link to an amazing Dan Rydell vid!)

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine! (Yes, I still have a migraine.)