#because he's generally good with tech for a gen x guy

[not-my-circuss]

I called my dad asking for his help signing in to Amazon Prime bc I got booted off my ex-boyfriend's and didn't want to ask him but holy shit I think reading Dune would have been a way better use of my evening.

Told him that I know his login info, but my TV is not giving me that option, so I would send him the instructions. Hung up, texted him this

He responds:

He calls me again. He is confused about why I can't login. I explain very patiently to him that on my TV, I am not given the option to sign in using username and password at all, I am only given a code to enter or a QR code to scan. I tell him I need him to follow the instructions. A few minutes of silence goes by.

"Yeah, I dunno kiddo, I'm looking-"

"What are you looking at?"

"Amazon dot com!"

"Slash mytv?"

"...no, prime memberships-"

"Holy fucking shit [dad's first name]"

"What?!"

"We've been on the phone for 5 whole minutes and Ive explained it to you several times"

By now, the code has refreshed itself twice already.

"I need you to go in your little url browser box thing to Amazon dot com slash mytv" I tell him. Silence for a few minutes.

"Yeah, I'm not getting any texts or emails or anything-"

"Right, you don't have to, because /I/ have the code. Remember? So did you go to that address I said?"

" ...no."

"Jesus fucking christ"

He reiterates that he doesn't know why I'm unable to login.

"Because you're being obtuse!! That's why!" I sputter, completely flabbergasted by this entire interaction.

"You know what," I say finally, taking a breath "let's just do this another time. I don't have to watch Fallout TONIGHT. It's fine. Let's just do it later"

"Okay, so what's the code?" He asks. I tell him. Some silence. "Yeah, you're just gonna have to forget about it tonight"

"Okay great, talk to you later, loveyoubye"

[kindheart525]

Now for the long-awaited Glep x Marge horde! Ever since I first started working on this next gen as a serious project, I knew these two would have a whole horde of kids because of how madly in love I think they are. Glep has that raw bad boy edge and Marge is smoking hot so of course they have a big family to prove how much time they’ve spent loving each other if you catch my drift. They may have seven whole kids, but they’re just as youthful and energized as ever, which is far more than what can be said about Pim and his four kids. To outsiders, Glep looks like he’s fooling around on an iPad all day, but he’s somehow managing to give each of his kids proper attention AND keep Marge relaxed and satisfied. He’s got to be warping time itself to do all of that because I don’t know how you can have time for a full-time job AND seven kids AND a stable marriage without it wearing on you. Who knows how Glep does it.

As for the kids themselves, from right to left we have:

Blep inherited her mom’s supermodel looks but has an aesthetic all her own, going for a goth look that makes her look almost otherworldly combined with her unnaturally green skin. This combined with her speaking exclusively in her dad’s Wingon tongue leads people to make a lot of assumptions about her, that she’s weird or even scary, but the truth is that she’s very nice and sociable. She sometimes joins Kip and Dottie as a third to their trio, as aside from their common interests, both girls can relate to having assumptions made about them based on their looks.

Suzy, to many, looks like a hairball sliding around on the ground, but she would feel utterly insulted if you described her that way. She has her dad’s body and her mom’s luscious locks, though most don’t know where the hair ends and body begins. Despite her face being completely concealed, she’s so eloquent in her speech and mannerisms that you could completely forget that she’s basically a pile of hair as you become entranced in a conversation with her. She’s a classy lady and every unusual part of her only adds to her allure.

Gola is a model at some high-end agency, with an unbreakable confidence and an insatiable need to make sure the whole world knows how sharp her style is. She is quite sassy but can also be kind of dumb, arguing until she’s blue in the face to defend a claim that is flat out wrong just so she can have the satisfaction of being right. She’s also picked up a lot of her speech patterns from her dad’s friend Allan, so catch her comically mispronouncing a lot of words as well.

Chad is a pretty normal guy. As engaged in meme culture as any of his generation and especially as a child of the tech savvy Glep, so sometimes the family will be hit with a “skill issue” or “had to do it to em.” He likes to act like he doesn’t care what people think of him and will often lounge around in socks and sandals when not cosplaying as a meme. Sarcasm and jokes get a good laugh out of him but not when they’re at his expense, like when his siblings compare him to Stuart Little because of his abnormally short, less-than-two-foot stature. 

Giorno is a total gym rat, who cannot get through a single day without going through his elaborate full-body routine. He lives off of whey smoothies and many speculate lots of steroids, but he won’t confirm or deny that. School and work hardly matter to him as long as there’s gym. Workout stuff aside he has a sharp sense of humor and can engage in some good witty banter, especially with his best friend, favorite workout buddy, and love interest, Ell Pimling.

Eep, in contrast to her more eloquent and self-assured twin Suzy, is a shy little thing whose personality is as small as her stature. She is super sweet and loving with the people and critters she trusts most, and almost everyone she meets finds her very likable. This agreeability is something she finds joy in, but she has a hard time speaking up for herself when she wants something or disagrees. Her “speaking” sounds more like a squeaky dog toy than actual speech, but just like everyone can understand Glep’s Wingon tongue, she is perfectly clear to everyone when she does express herself.

Glorp is the least imposing critter you will ever meet. He is practically a background character. Every time he opens his mouth one of his siblings, parents, or peers starts speaking, so nobody knows what his voice sounds like or what his personality is. He doesn’t put up any fuss as he walks or slithers around with his noodly body, so everyone assumes he is perfectly content with the way things are. Nobody has asked him but he would probably agree based on his facial expression. 

[tartrazeen]

I want them to make an Incredibles 3.

And I want it to be some kind of Boomer vs Gen X dynamic, where Bob and Helen keep trying to insist on the best ways of handling villains but Violet and Dash have new tech, new methods, even new suits. Maybe they figured out capes.

~d e t a c h a b l e ~

I want the family drama angle back. I want the parents to have adult children that they're still treating like kids, and I want the kids to write off their parents as stuck in the old ways. There's a story Bob and Helen keep trying to tell where they did something really cool to save the day, and they can't quite remember it 'cause it was so long ago, but trust me it was really cool and would've beat any two-bit villain that's running around these days. "sure dad let's get you back to bed."

I want the villain to be a blast from the past with all their methods and tricks - totally new unless you remember how they did this stuff 'back then'. But before the parents get too proud of knocking their unappreciative kids down a peg, they get sideswiped a brand-new tactic that only Violet and Dash have being hearing rumours about. The kids (and they're like 30 btw, fuck jackjack, nobody likes jackjack) get a move on using the I N T E R N E T to chat with their network ("faceless strangers who could be villains themselves," Bob and Helen say) from across the world, rather than just the local in-the-knows at the old bar 'everyone' goes to ("used to go to 🙄") so they could catch up on what was happening.

The bar of old-timers is where they hear this villain's name. The internet's where they find the patterns leading to the villain's target. And this all builds up to being...

... the parents' old, geriatric foe, who they thought died years ago. Exactly who the parents thought it was, 'cause they asked their friends at the bar. Suck on that, children.

Except - nope, it's not just the old guy. It's a family business now. The villain's got kids too, and unlike the Incredibles' liitle in-fighting, they've encouraged each other to respect their elders' wisdom and the youth's new world. We get a montage of these folks struggling to respect each other's perspective across their generational divide, learning to see their villain-parents and villain-kids as people, and finally putting aside their differences to appreciate each other as a 'product of their time' - and working together to be the biggest, baddest Crime Family of all time.

And now, they're going to the Incredibles.

Except nope. They all get side-swiped by an incredible mix of old tricks with modern spins, in a completely unparalleled use of 1337 script kiddy y2k h4xx0r shit.

Because the true villain isn't the geriatric elder or the grown-up Gen X squad. It's the villains' grandkid, who's been pushed in front of a screen or told to go play with their fancy gadgets every time we cut away to the villains' side of the story in the montage. This kid, who was literally left to their own devices, who we might have even seen as the neighbourhood kid always wandering around for attention before getting sucked into their phone, spent that time learning and learning and learned until got so bored of being ignored over their family's antics that they're shutting it all down. They listened to every war story and grew up with this tech while it was hitting the mainstream, so not only do they know every trick that the villains and the heroes will try, but they can use that tech to counter every predictable move someone tries to pull or any new move that - surprise! - isn't actually that new anymore.

So finally everyone's trapped. This kid, who's been raised on screens and so bored of being ignored, is about to put an end to the story for good.

Just for all of this kid's gizmos to stop working and for shit to start exploding and frying.

Turns out Jackjack was at college or some shit, and he's in touch with a whole bunch of friends who have younger siblings who love the new techy stuff, and who have parents and grandparents with old but new-to-me stories. Jackjack's online with a bunch of them and they're all mashing ideas together. They start hijacking the kid's remaining screens to send so many stupid pop culture references that get the message across crystal clear.

Bob and Helen get a call over some sort of speaker and it's this hero that moved across the world that they fell out of touch with. Well, with the magic of the interwebz, this old friend jogs their memory on that story Bob and Helen could never seem to remember, and they spring into action to set that up.

So the old people's stuff mixed with the Gen X stuff combine to collectively put this whippersnapper in their place. Even if the tech's newer than they were used to and it's a surprise to this kid that heroes and villains would ever team up like this, it's still the same Good versus Evil story it's always been.

Obviously the kid's only going to go to jail, but the way they got so floored by how everyone was working together, there's a clear inspiration left for them to find something really new under the sun. They're going to save the stories that all of Jackjack's random-ass friends were sharing, and they'll find the last one that's yet to happen. "Maybe when you're older kid." Har har har. And while everyone's looking forward to what the future holds, there's still always something to be said about the classics. 💖

Hire me, Disney, this hits every stupid beat in your formula.

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 28: My So-Called Life 1x03

This is a weird episode to watch in 2023, in many ways... It's the guns-in-schools ep but it aired in 1994, before Columbine, before mass shootings were common news, and so it's really not about that fear, even though it can be easy to forget that, watching it now. This is the fear that there could be guns in schools, that violence could be seeping into schools, that schools are not inherently safe places. It's not a fear that a person with malicious intent might enter a school, heavily armed, with the specific purpose of inflicting as much as pain as possible.

And that makes it much sadder for me. Where is this energy now, this outrage now? I know it's still here but it's just burdened with so much loss and so much exhaustion and this fatalistic attitude... This is like a letter from an era of early alarm bells and it's like no one listened and now we have this. There was a while when I watched the ending and thought 'oh this doesn't hit as hard now, because, duh,' but this time I felt like it actually was worse. Yeah, I am heartbroken that kids have to go through a metal detector to enter a SCHOOL. A SCHOOL. I don't want to be desensitized to that.

At the same time, tying the presence of weapons to... really this whole under-world of the school that adult don't see or understand was very clever and gutsy too, I think. The parents get mad and yell but they seem mostly inept, even when they truly are trying their best. The Principal cares about the school's reputation. The Boomer teacher cares about the principle and rhetoric of the thing. And all the time, Angela is going through this crisis of reputation--not life and death of course, but hurtful to her, and an example of how a situation can snowball out of control completely by accident, in this wild adolescent world with no brakes on it--and, more importantly and more critically, Rickie is being bullied and hurt and, guns or no guns, he doesn't feel safe.

This is such a good episode for Rickie. I don't just mean because he gets to become more three dimensional or because he has those stand out moments like his speech in Social Studies or his conversation with Angela in the car, but because in the previous two episodes, he was the 'gay sidekick' character, or veering into that territory, and here in episode 3 it's made clear: he's a multi-faceted character like everyone else. His longing for a normal life like Angela's, his desire that people see him as scary and dangerous, his actual relationship to the person who brought in the gun (just another hint of how different his situation is from hers), and yes, that school is a dangerous place for him--and so is home--all of this is part of him just as much as his humor or his style. And Rickie's so smart, man. I always thought the speech in the classroom was his real thoughts on self-defense, but I see now that it's not: as he tells Angela, he doesn't know how to shoot a gun, an he thought it was dumb for his cousin to bring it to school. But he's using the narrative to his own advantage, in a way not dissimilar to how Rayanne does, but more adroitly. Someone out here is dangerous--and it's me.

This is such a Gen X episode in many ways, one of the times MSCL shows its era in ways other than clothes or tech. Angela wanting to be cursed to live in dangerous times... really comes with new irony, post-9/11, or in the covid-era.

Jordan continues to have a definite crush on Angela, and also to reveal himself as just generally a pretty nice guy? Like, again, seeing this from his POV, he tries to use the rumor as a segue with her, sees she's not into it, thinks about it a lot, decides he's freaked her out, and tries to fix it. Something about "I'll say we hardly know each other, which is, of course, true," just reeks of something Angela would say.

I know Amber's speech about Rayanne was trying to establish Rayanne's platonic girl crush on Angela but like... Rayanne has a regular ol' crush on Angela. "She's in love with Angela, she wants to be Angela!" is a line that is really in the show. At the same time, I think this ep shows again Rayanne's maturity level: she's gossiping with her mom, showing her Jordan's picture in the yearbook, talking all the time about Angela... I've always been close to my mom too, but there's an unfiltered quality about Rayanne that just strikes me as...unformed. I also think we see her being a pretty good actress (with the counselor) but at the same time, I think her disinterest in the gun threat or the gossip threat is genuine. She's in full protection mode of bot Rickie and Angela, but she's not scared.

Hmmmmm I am fading fast. No idea if any of that made sense, but I gotta take a shower and get some sleep! I think I'm sufficiently over my bug that I can no longer make excuses for myself re: not doing stuff. Time to get rested.

[paradisetemporarilymisplaced]

So I was being a basic bitch the other day and listening to my true crime podcasts when it occurred to me just how suspicious Nile’s “death” would look to everyone not in the Guard, leading me to a train of thought that, 2200 words later, absolutely got away from me but I can’t let go so I’m inflicting it on all of you!

To set the stage, we know the movie takes place over approximately a week. Here’s what happens to Nile from the military’s point of view:

She dies is very seriously injured

She heals without a scratch

Just before she’s supposed to be shipped out to Germany, she vanishes, leaving two men concussed (and presumably reporting being knocked out by a woman with short hair wearing civilian clothes)

She goes AWOL for several days

They get word from the CIA that she is to be reported killed in action (details unclear)

So, at the beginning of this very weird week, the USMC has to tell Nile’s family of her death critical injury. What her family was told depends on how long she was dead – a Google search tells me that family will be notified in person within 8 hours of a soldier’s death, but we don’t know how long her first death lasted. For an injury, however, they’d get a phone call to notify them and the unit would arrange for them to visit as soon as the soldier is transferred out of a combat zone. Like I remember when I was in high school, a guy from my church who was a Marine was really seriously injured in a helicopter crash in Iraq and from what I could tell, his parents were told immediately and were flown out to Germany to see him, so it stands to reason that Nile’s family would have been informed relatively quickly after her throat was slashed, one way or another.

And then, she goes AWOL. Her family would be notified while the USMC tried to figure out where she went, not least because the military would want to know if she’s contacted them. (And it’s possible that her family may have been on the way to Germany to see her since we know that’s where she was supposed to go!) So for several days:

Nile’s mom and brother have no idea where she is

They know she was seriously injured and most certainly should not have been moving around on her own

They can’t get a hold of her

The military can’t tell them anything

And the next thing they know for sure is that she was “killed in action.” After being injured and vanishing into thin air. And they presumably cannot produce her body or any concrete evidence of her death. In any case, something sketchy is going on, so they’re like. SMELLS LIKE A MILITARY COVERUP.

In a surprise to probably no one, there is a well-documented legacy of mysterious US military deaths, particularly of women of color (TW for sexual assault in these links). The cases of LaVena Johnson and Vanessa Guillenin particular have made national news because of their families’ persistence in seeking justice. Likewise, Nile is a Black woman, and her mom and brother are most certainly hypercognizant of (a) state violence against Black people and (b) these high-profile cases of suspicious military deaths. So her family are seriously side-eyeing the situation, knowing that (a) the military has a serious incentive (and a documented history) of covering up things that make them look bad and (b) nothing about Nile’s disappearance and supposed death are adding up.

And Andy’s right. Nile does come from warriors. And you know who else does? Her brother.

Don’t get me wrong. Nile’s mom would absolutely not back down. She’d know something was up and want to get to the bottom of it. But based on what I know about Gen X parents (mine), they’re not the most technologically savvy. Like they can use the internet, but they didn’t grow up with it the way we young millennials and Gen Z did. So Nile’s brother takes the lead. And what do zillennials do best?

Social media.

Nile’s brother starts going hard on any site he can, trying to get the word out to see if anyone knows what happened to his sister. He starts a Reddit thread. He starts a Facebook group. He reaches out to the media and true crime bloggers and podcasters à la Sarah Turney, getting loud and being a general nuisance in hopes of getting some answers. He gets his friends and Nile’s friends involved. Maybe eventually Dizzy, Jay, and others from Nile’s unit hear about it and reach out, telling him what they saw and how weird it all was. He’s drumming up interest, and soon “Nile Freeman” becomes a household name (at least among the true crime fans).

Copley is, of course, trying his best, but at this point there is just so much that it’s impossible for him to scrub everything. Sure, he can erase new footage of Nile and the Guard, but what can he do about Reddit threads and podcast episodes that are speculating something weird has happened? Maybe he could hack the sites and shut those things down, but honestly, that’s the last thing he’d want to do, because that only adds weight to the theory that Nile’s disappearance is a military coverup. So eventually he has to tell Andy what’s going on.

Andy, obviously, does not take the news well. However, she is also completely computer illiterate, because that’s Booker’s job and he’s the only one who ever bothered to learn what the internet is in any meaningful way. (She probably calls Booker for advice, and for the record, I think Booker would have no qualms about shutting down conspiracy threads, tinhats be damned, but Copley is too concerned about the consequences. He’s ex-CIA for crying out loud, he knows how it’ll look if they scrub every mention of Nile’s name from the internet.) Maybe she confers with Joe and Nicky but, let’s be honest, they’d be equally unhelpful. So at this point, she knows they have to bring in Nile.

But the thing about Nile is that she, too, knows how to use the internet (duh). Aside from her being a young millennial/digital native, we know from the cave scene where she’s giving Booker suggestions on how to track Copley that she clearly is even more computer savvy than the average person. And for that reason she almost definitely took over the day-to-day tech stuff after Booker’s exile. So I think it would be foolish to expect her to be unaware of what’s happening. She’s not contacting her family or posting on the message boards or anything, but she knows what’s up. So Copley and the team probably sit her down to “break the news,” but we know the girl does not have a poker face (see: literally shooting herself in the foot and not being able to play it cool whatsoever) and cracks immediately, telling them she’s seen everything about her case – she’s not interacting with any of it, she certainly didn’t instigate anything, but she knows. (And she is so goddamn proud of her brother.)

At this point, I’d like to pause and consider Nile’s role in the overall narrative of this movie. She’s set up as a foil to Andy, obviously, but she’s also a foil to Booker. Booker, who, like Andy, is a serious pessimist, but who, unlike Andy, still has very fresh memories and trauma associated with being the new kid, which have destroyed him. In his mind (and Andy’s), if Nile communicates with her family, she’ll become just like him in a century or two – bitter, alone, and stuck with her grief and memories of watching her family die and knowing they died resenting her. It’s a small sample size, but this is the only experience they have to go off of.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

There’s been a lot of discussion of TOG being a fundamentally queer movie – a group of people brought together because of something inherent about themselves that is different, that must be hidden, that causes others to hate, fear, and reject them. Booker’s backstory is the archetypal traumatic “coming out” story – his family learns who he is, hate him for it, and attempt to cast him out of their lives. He’s stuck with his trauma, his pain, his loss, and it consumes him.

But what if Nile’s family would be the opposite? What if her “coming out” to them as immortal is met with acceptance, love, celebration? What if her family is just overjoyed to have her back, and they don’t care what the circumstances are? I'm reminded of this incredible post from @shitty-old-guard-deaths a while back, where Nile’s mother hits Booker with a frying pan because “my baby let me believe she was dead for FIVE YEARS based on your bad advice???” (which may or may not have inspired this whole tangent). Nile takes the advice of someone who did the same thing she wants to do because she doesn’t want to risk her family’s rejection. She wants the good memories with her family and is afraid that showing them her true self will bring her unbearable pain, forever replacing those memories. But, with high risk comes high reward.

Anyway. Nile and the team are trying to come up with a plan for how to handle this whole thing, but she’s not really participating because she’s too afraid to hope. Until finally, quickly, so she doesn’t lose her nerve, she suggests she reach out to them, knowing that, realistically, that’s the only solution before things snowball even further out of control. The team is shocked, but realize that she has a point. They decide that Copley should actually be the first point of contact, posing as a US government official to talk with them and test the waters.

So Copley goes to Nile’s family’s house to talk with her mom and brother. They’re probably distrustful and apprehensive, but nonetheless secretly ecstatic that their work has paid off. They talk and review all of the information that they’ve collected, including testimonials from the people on Nile’s base and recent sightings (along with photos) of Nile (with the same three people) over the last few years that people have sent them but they haven’t posted publicly. At this point, Copley’s like, yeah this is about to blow up, we gotta put our cards on the table. He convinces them to come with him to some safe house/black site/whatever he can get that is technologically impenetrable (I’m picturing them in like, an interrogation room at a police station kind of deal), takes their phones, locks the doors, and brings in Nile.

What follows is the most delightful reunion scene of all time, bringing Joe, Nicky, and even Andy to tears as they watch and listen from outside the room. With Copley’s help, Nile tells her mom and brother about her immortality and what’s been going on since she died (within reason, of course), and they are thrilled. They don’t understand why (because no one does) but they don’t question it and they see it as a gift from God – she’s been resurrected, she will live, and she has a purpose. Her mother and brother are so happy to see her again and are willing to agree with pretty much anything to stay in her life as long as they can.

So. They set up some complicated agreement (they bring in the other three for support/intimidation as needed) setting the terms of their relationship. They swear Nile’s family to secrecy, maybe bringing up the lab to show how high the stakes are, and they readily agree. They come up with some cover story for Nile’s brother to share on the message boards (maybe that the government has opened an investigation but because it’s an open case he has to shut it all down? Tells people to direct their tips somewhere else? Something to that effect). There’s still speculation, of course, but without Nile’s brother at the helm providing the energy, the hype dies down as news stories are wont to do without any movement. And Nile’s family goes to work for the team. The experience has taught them that Copley can’t possibly do everything himself, especially when it comes to social media, so Nile’s brother takes the lead on the day-to-day tracking/social media while Copley and her mom focus on finding jobs and scrubbing their traces afterward.

So there you have it: Nile gets to integrate her biological family into her found family and spend the rest of their lives with them as it should be, Copley gets some badly needed help managing the reality of social media, the team finally has a positive narrative surrounding outsiders Knowing About Them AND about interacting with people from their previous life, and the audience gets the happy ending to this very lovely and very queer story to counteract the pain associated with Booker’s family.

Plus, you know, I’m a sucker for both a good government conspiracy theory and for Nile getting every good thing she deserves.

[every-marveler-ever]

Love in Fanfiction

Prompt: Coffee Shop AU for @peterparkerbingo Round One (🕷️) and AU: Coffee Shop for @starkbucksbingo Round Two (☕)

Collaborator Name: Marveler, Card Number: 217, Square Filled: B4 AU: Coffee Shop Ship/Main Pairing(s): Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes, Rating: General, Major Tags & Triggers: Sweet fluff! Word Count: 510

Summary: Assumed novel writer, by Peter, and coffeeshop owner it’s like a love made in fanfiction.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Tony Stark

A/N: I loved this, so much that THIS is what I wrote! I love it. happy reading!

“You should get with him,” “I should not!” “Take it from a gen z your eyes are sparkling.” “Get back to work Parker,” “yes Mr Stark.”

Tony Stark owns a coffee shop, he employees college students because who else has the same strive for science that he does than those from Columbia Tech. But he owns a coffee shop because that’s what fuels him when he does his science binges.

Peter Parker took the job because he needed the money (and the free coffee he gets is always a bonus).

And he feels a part of a community at Industries because Tony Stark has platonic love for all his employees.

“Your employees are quite chatty.”

Tony Stark turns back to the coffee shop counter that he’s supposed to be working on, the guy in question is standing there, with dark brown long hair and stunning brown eyes that turn Black in the wrong light. Dammit Parker’s right.

“I like my workspace like that it’s much more organic,” Parker comes up behind him leaning his face on his shoulder a steaming pot of coffee in his hand “it’s because he loves us.” Tony rolls his eyes “Yeah, that too.”

Bucky, as his constant receipt tells Tony, smiles at them both “I think it’s good, healthy.”

If that smile doesn’t make Tony weep to his knees he doesn’t know what will. Through Peter Parker’s eye’s he knows that Bucky is perfect for Tony Stark, assumed novel writer, by Peter, and coffeeshop owner it’s like a love made in fanfiction.

“I’m glad you do, it scares some people,” “it doesn’t scare me, it invites me,” that response from Bucky makes it all better, the way Tony runs his job, the horrible comments others make about him running an inclusive coffee shop.

Tony pops his shoulder moving peter’s head away “get back to work Pete, and boil a fresh brew of coffee.”

“On it boss,” Peter Parker is very happy to get back to work watching from a side view as his boss and favourite customer communicate.

“What can I get for you?” Tony smiles at Bucky across the counter leaning into the computer ready to type. “A white chocolate mocha,” Tony’s eyebrows pop upon request “never took you for a white chocolate kind of guy,” “I’m not.” This only makes Tony more confused but knowing that Bucky is buying for someone else, “I know that you like it though so it’s for you.”

Tony just nods writing down the order going over his head what bucky had just said. Bucky speaks up again “you really should listen to your employees, you should get with him.”

Somehow Peter has knocked Tony to lean over the counter closer to Bucky, the space is small behind the counter, in his defence.

“Yeah maybe I will,” Tony responds “what about Friday then?”

“Friday, sure, enjoy you’re Mocha.”

Bucky leaves the doorbell signalling he’s gone.

“Mocha?” Tony finishes confused watching Bucky leave, quite happily.

Masterlist / Peter Parker Round One Masterpost / Stark Bucks Round Two Masterpost

[sunfishsiestalah]

Modern!AU Perbell/Bellseus (Bell x Perseus) ideas

NOTE: This AU idea doesn't reflect the author's political leaning, and the AU is not meant to be taken seriously, so please refrain from making quick assumptions about the author. The concept in this AU is purely just for fluff + comedy purposes, and truly has no hidden agenda whatsoever. The author's sole intention in this AU is to capture the wackiness of the political fandom in social media spaces, especially on Twitter. Please, be civil and kind to others, and have a good day to everyone 

Ok instead of your usual coffee shop, flower shop or tattoo shop AU, how about a social media!AU, but make it a little bit political. Not only there's age gap relationship, but there's also clout gap relationship for extra humor 😀 Also I made this fluffy AU because I'm trying to future-proof myself to cope with Perseus' inevitable death in a few years if Cold War 2 eventually becomes confirmed sdgfgshdsjsk

More under the cut, buckle up fellas because it's a looooong one 

Perseus 👤

👤 Is a very famous, left-leaning political commentator, media host and bestselling author 

👤 Is also a retired military general, so his current career choice as an outspoken public figure really ruffled some feathers in the government's top branches, because he's collected quite a bit of dirt on a lot of them during his time in the service 😈

👤 Also has his own podcast and YouTube channel 

👤 Initial Twitter follower count: 800,000+ followers (verified of course)

👤 But his follower count jumped to 950K+ in two weeks after he went on Twitch (through Bell's suggestion) and played video games with other famous streamers and some politicians for charity streams (think casual multiplayer games like Among Us or Fall Guys etc.)

👤 It jumped to 50K+ more in ten days after Bell took a picture of him wearing cat ears and posted it in his account

👤 His tweets always go viral (30K+ likes) at least twice a month

👤 His recent activities really made his peers question his credibility, but he doesn't mind it that much because he's all in it for the clout glad that because of him, more people especially the youth are becoming more aware of the importance of gaining political knowledge, and how it could benefit them, the environment and the future generations 

👤 One day, he decided to shave his mustache because he felt like it, and after that (again, a suggestion by Bell) he posted a picture of his clean-shaven face on Twitter, as a heads-up for his fans before he had to go live on a morning talk show in a few days (if it wasn't for the mustache, he actually has Paul Rudd syndrome where he doesn't look a day above mid 40s, when in reality he's approaching 60 in a couple of years)

👤 Turns out, that post went super viral (thanks to the thirsty side of Twitter) and the day he went to the interview on the live talk show it became the most-watched episode in the show's 25+ years of history 😂 (that episode also becomes viral on YouTube, raking in a million views in three days)

👤 Bell actually predicted this outcome all along, and genuinely enjoyed reading, from their couch, all the thousands of people's live thirst-tweets on Perseus while he was on air (there's a looot of tweets asking Perseus to make an OnlyFans account)😳

👤 Now before all of this happened, almost a quarter of Perseus' fanbase was already consisted of thirsty people, but the sudden influx of followers caused the thirsty ratio to go up to 75%, beating the percentage of followers who are genuine fans of his commentaries 😂

👤 Perseus on live TV: *Destroys his debate opponent with facts and logics™*

👤 Perseus back at home, crying on Bell's lap: He called me a mean name on live tv….😢😭😭😭😭

👤 Final Twitter follower count: 1.6 million followers 🤣 (still verified)

👤 Silently prided himself as being ~not like the other boomers~ because of his ease and knowhow with current tech devices, almost better than your average millennial or Gen Z (Bell really likes and appreciates this part of him because they don't have to explain to him what VPN is and how important it is to use it)

 ------------------

Perseus in his home office: *sets up the camera, lighting and PC by himself for the Twitch stream*

Bell: Oh hey, do you need help with installing OBS and Steam?

Perseus: *gives Bell a stink eye*😒

Bell: Sorry, no disrespect. I forgot that you're not a ~regular boomer~ 😏

 ------------------

Bell 🔔

🔔 PhD graduate in information security

🔔 Works as a senior consultant in a tech company 

🔔 Met Perseus on their campus when they were doing their PhD studies (he was a guest speaker for a university event at that time) and they became close acquaintance in no time

🔔 Has no other social media accounts except for Twitter (Bell's friends forced them to make one)

🔔 But they have always been a lurker without an account in multiple social media platforms for a very long time(for the memes and keeping up to date)

🔔 Initial Twitter follower count: 141 followers

🔔 Mostly tweets and retweets about infosec, cybersecurity and tech stuff (with occasional memes and cat pics)

🔔 Perseus really insisted on Bell using his platform as a means for them to give awareness about tech and cybersecurity to the public, especially about the increasing amount of e-waste in the environment 

🔔 Bell doesn't like talking that much, but continues on anyway because they're passionate about the cause

🔔 And so, they became a semi-regular guest on Perseus' bi-monthly podcast show, as a professional giving insights and opinions on the tech and information industry 

🔔 Bell has become such a familiar face and voice in the show that some of the viewers and listeners started shipping them and Perseus 😗 (Perseus staring intensely while making 🥺 eyes at Bell everytime they talk doesn't really help them either, they're both on camera and on YouTube live so everyone can see their faces )

🔔 Everytime Bell makes an appearance, their Twitter follower count steadily increase about 1.5K per podcast episode

🔔 But on one fateful episode, an additional guest at that time inquired what's really going on between both of them, and Perseus accidentally blurted out their relationship and also Bell's pet name, much to Bell's dismay (they both have been involved for a while but Bell would like to keep it private)

🔔 Since that episode, Bell's Twitter followers exploded from 15K to almost 30K in a couple of days, but most of that are actually hate-follows from Perseus' more "passionate" fans 😰

🔔 After that, Bell had to permanently close their Twitter DM's after getting few dozen death threats and a ton of hateful messages in the inbox

🔔 Bell doesn't really care about the haters but it's getting kinda annoying when Bell posts something about infosec-related, there's always gonna be a couple of thinly-veiled insults in the replies for no particular reason at all 😅

🔔 Bell, to Perseus: Hey check out this random message I got in my DMs, it says here "I don't know what your actual gender is, but I definitely fucking know that your pronouns are bitch/whore" and I'm like okay??? That's a really funny insult, actually.... 🤔

🔔 They really thought about abandoning or deleting the account, but decided against it because of that account and the podcast, Bell has gotten in touch and made friends with other industry professionals, so they wouldn't let it all go to waste (also their account just got verified recently so heyyoo)

🔔 Final Twitter follower count: 33,000+ followers (verified)

🔔 One time, Bell accidentally retweeted a sick meme on Perseus' Twitter account, while using his phone to browse the platform. But his fans really liked it because they were like ~omg he retweeted a meme, that's so relatable omg what a cool boomer~ so yeah 🤫

Extras: (Don't worry they're all paid very well)👍

👥 Rudnik as Perseus' personal assistant, he handles all the appointments/interviews and other PA stuff 

☣ Stitch as the tech guy,he handles all the tech equipments (camera, audio, lighting, editing etc.)

🐍 Naga also handles the tech stuff, but he's primarily the comment/chat moderator, although he lets the horniest and thirstiest comments through sometimes for laughs

A/N: Feel free to change Bell's entire personality or everything on them here because this is just an interpretation of my own Bell. Heck, change the ships, concepts and all the characters in here as well if you feel like it, but don't forget to tag me because I would like to see your take on it too✌ it's free real estate 🏡

[daisybeewrites]

Sorry, I’m Married

word count?: 3.5k

warnings: canon-typical violence, i don’t describe it graphically tho, just a minor skirmish. happy ending :)

requested? no

ship: dousy/daisy johnson x daniel sousa & dad!coulson

hey guys! i wrote this on a whim after hanging out in a dousy group. i was inspired by the chat at the end of the fic. as always, thank you for reading!! and drink some water ;) fic under the cut!

Neon lights reflected off rough concrete walls as Daisy’s combat boots walked down the steps to the underground club. Light up signs glowed and glittery heels flashed as crowds of people surged and stepped on the technicolour dance floor. The sequins of her dress reflected spotlights that roved the entry area. There were booths with cushy red banquettes lining the walls near the bar, giving college girls a place to rest their feet and hotshot businessmen a table to sip beer. Currently, the club was full, young men and women crowding the bar and dance floor. Decades night, Daisy deduced, as most of the inhabitants were wearing flashy dresses or denim bell bottoms. Deke would’ve loved this, she thought. I wonder how Deke is doing…

Daisy’s mind drifted as the light up jukebox in the corner switched songs. She didn’t spot the target anywhere, so she pushed in a quarter, chose her favourite 80s hit, and watched as the jukebox queued her song. The vibrations of the speakers were reverberating through her, pumping her adrenaline up. Good, more energy for a fight if I need it. 

Three leather stools were open at the bar—one by itself, and two side by side. She nodded at the bartender and sat in the single empty seat. Her comms crackled in her right ear, reminding her of why she was here in the first place. 

“Dais, can you hear me?” She located where Coulson was speaking across the room, sitting in a wooden booth near the side exit. He casually leaned back and sipped his drink. 

“Loud and clear,” Daisy mumbled. 

“New intel from HQ just came in. The weapons the target is dealing? Alien tech.”

“Great, she said sarcastically,” said Daisy, clearly annoyed. 

Coulson laughed. “On your 3.” 

Daisy rested her elbow forward on the bartop, scanning the selection of alcohols as a premise to look down the row of people to her right. She noticed two young lads dressed in all black suits, carrying briefcases. There was no way these guys were in charge of the illegal operation. Well, at least they won’t be a problem if it comes down to a fight, she thought.

As Daisy’s eyes roamed the club, she locked eyes with a muscular, bodyguard-type with a small, raised scar over his eye. She smiled then turned around. She recognized the uniform he was wearing as standard bouncer garb, but his side-piece was not. CF380, Princetown standard issue. Daisy signaled his presence to Coulson. 

“These guys? Again?” 

Princetown was a group of rich, privileged sons of international diplomats and of heads of large corporations. They slipped through the FBI’s fingers like sand. Now, they had alien tech. No diplomatic immunity would allow them to get out of an arrest now. 

Coulson nodded behind her. She subtly turned her head and glanced in that direction. Wearing an overly expensive silk suit and holding a glass of champagne, stood Luca Casagrande. Son of the Italian Minister of foreign affairs. Notorious for his parties, wealth, and lack of self-control. He winked at a blonde waitress who slipped him a piece of paper, which was very obviously not a bill. Daisy rolled her eyes. Criminals these days are so stupid, she thought. 

Coulson bit back a laugh at Daisy’s reaction. “Alright, Daisy, you’re up.”

“Remind me again why I was chosen for this part of the mission?” she murmured while sipping her drink to hide her words.

“Because, you’re good at it.” Coulson went quiet for a second then added, “And I'm not Casagrande’s type.”

Daisy flashed her eyes in Coulson’s direction, frustrated. She mentally went over the calming exercises May taught her. Deep breath, exhale. Let’s do this.

Daisy slid off the barstool, and approached Casagrande slowly. He only looked her direction when she sidled up next to him. 

“Hey, sweetheart. What’s a beautiful girl like you doing out here all by yourself?” A smooth, accented voice inquired.

Daisy bottled up a sarcastic remark and stocked it on the shelf for later use. Only Daniel is allowed to call her sweetheart. 

“Well, I was hoping,” she blinked up at him, batting her eyelashes. “to find some product. Heard you had all the good stuff. I'm lucky I even caught you here, considering your reputation.”

“Geez. Laying it on a little thick aren’t we?” Coulson couldn’t help it. The snort Daisy covered up as a cough was too hilarious.

Luca smiled. It was charming, but unsettling. “Oh? And what reputation would that be?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Daisy countered. She looked around before continuing, “Look, I've got pressure on me to deliver. I’d appreciate it if we talked business before pleasure.”

 “Hard to get.” Luca’s eyes sparkled. “Alright. Let’s talk business.”

He leaned over the bar and signaled the bartender to bring him two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. Once a glass was in his hand, he gestured to Daisy’s. “You don’t drink?”

“Not when I'm on the clock. My employers frown upon it.” 

Casagrande nodded. “I see. So, what type of product were you looking for?”

“Anything I can sell. Uncle Sam called and said they need a next gen advantage for soldiers. Weapons, maybe?” She ran a finger down the lapel of his suit. “They pay generously.”

“You work for the US military.”

“We have a... mutual understanding.” Daisy flashed a brilliant smile. It was kind of fun playing an undercover persona. 

Luca studied her face. “I don’t get details?”

Daisy scoffed, “Of course not. Son of a foreign diplomat, it’s a risk the US can’t take. If other countries found out��”

“Yes, I understand," He responded carefully. 

“And I understand that you also do some dirty business with governments.”

A menacing half-smile rose on his face. “Only the beautiful ones.”

Looking up into his eyes, Daisy felt the same disgust that had been worn by everyone at the mission briefing. Au contraire, Luca seemed to find Daisy extremely attractive. 

“Why don’t we—”

“No.” Daisy internally cringed, but on the outside she seemed relaxed and blasé. She risked a glance at Coulson, to see his reaction. His entire body was rigid. She didn’t blame him. Hearing some douchebag proposition your daughter...yulgh. She wished Daniel was here to watch her back, too... this guy was getting under her skin. Everything about Casagrande pushed her buttons. 

“No?”

“No,” Daisy affirmed, tilting her head. “Business first. We can talk about any other deals after.” 

“But there is a possibility?” He cheekily remarked. 

Not a chance in hell, Daisy thought. “Maybe. But for now, I need to move product ASAP.”

Luca mulled thos over and sipped the burning whiskey. “I may have some contacts that could help you. In return, what will you give me?”

Though the question was innocent, his intentions were obvious. That was exactly what she wanted. 

“Depends on how good the product is.” She stepped a little closer “It’s a little crowded in here, don’t ya think?”

He pushed off the bar, inches from her. He smelled like overly expensive cologne, and not the good kind. “I'm meeting some business associates out back in a few minutes. We’ll make a deal after that.”

“Would they happen to have anything I could—”

“Sorry, sweetheart, I do business privately.”

Daisy faked a sweet smile and resisted the urge to punch him. 

Luca took two steps toward the back door, then turned around and strutted back. He tilted his head towards her. “A good luck ki—?”

BRing. BRing. Bzzzzz. 

Best. Timing. Ever. Daisy shot Luca an apologetic look before picking up. 

“Hello? Oh, Dad! One sec.” Daisy took the phone off her ear, and whispered to Luca, “It’s my Dad. He’s in the hospital. Doesn’t know what my real job is.”

She brought the phone back up to her ear as Luca irritatedly glanced around. 

“Dad? Yeah... No, I'm fine, how are you feeling?... That’s great, Dad.” She winked at Luca and held up a finger. Daisy was glad he didn’t notice Coulson over her shoulder, also on the phone. 

“I'm with some friends…” Luca raised his eyebrows. “Luca Casagrande... He does business with my marketing firm.”

Daisy waved Luca away after noticing him checking his Rolex twice in ten seconds. He nodded and headed out back. She made sure he was out of earshot before alerting Coulson.

“Coulson, he’s headed out.”

“Yup, QJ-6 is on the way. I’ll stay to watch his lackeys.”

Daisy gave the bartender a tip and walked towards the back door, grabbing her gauntlets from behind the bar. He dipped his chin and continued wiping down the counter.

As she walked into the chilly night air, Daisy was greeted with silence. Droplets of water dripped onto the leather of her boots from the rooftop. The concrete crunched in the darkness of the alley. Light from the streetlamps was scarce, melding shadowy corners with the dim alleyway.. Daisy could hear faint music through the brick walls of the club. A smirk formed on her face as her pick from the jukebox played. Walking towards the street, she checked behind the moldy trash bins for a sign that Casagrande was hiding. The opening guitar grew louder as the safety of a gun clicked off behind her. 

“So,” Daisy raised her hands up. It was a trap. “what happened to your business associates?”

Luca chuckled behind her. 

“You’re not stupid. You can figure it out.”

Daisy slowly turned around to face him. 

“You bluffed to see if I would follow you.” She wasn’t surprised. She had counted on this. “You’re a decent liar.”

“So are you.” Luca lowered the gun a bit. “Who are you? CIA?”

“That’s classified.” 

Luca laughed, haphazardly slinging the pistol to the side in a grand gesture. “Of course it is.”

“I wasn’t lying when I said that the government and I have a mutual understanding.”

“But that isn’t the whole truth, is it?” 

Daisy smirked. “Of course not.”

Technically, this was true. Her status as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent was protected knowledge, no one but people inside her agency and a handful high-ranking world intelligence officers were aware.

Daisy decided he might as well know who she was. He was going to be locked up in a max-security cell pretty soon, anyway.

He fell against the wall as Daisy hit him with a small quake, just enough to get her point across. His expression was one of pure shock.

“You- Y- You’re…”

“Mar—”

“Daisy, what’s going on?” Coulson must have felt the vibrations. She didn’t think she had hit Luca that hard. Daisy could hear the quinjet approaching, the comforting vibrations of the engine helping to calm her nerves. She stepped toward Luca.

“You have two options: come peacefully with me, or I call the cavalry to take you in by force.”

Luca stayed on the ground, silent. He reminded Daisy of a pouting toddler. 

This toddler had a few tricks up his sleeve. 

Coulson’s voice came through her ear. “Daisy, do you ha—”

Daisy’s blood ran cold as she received static from the other line.

“Coulson? Coulson?!”

Wide brown eyes turned to watch Casagrande’s smirk grow. 

“Problem?" He said smugly. 

Daisy quickly knocked him out with the mini-ICER she kept inside her boot and ran back inside. Opening the solid metal door to the inside of the club, she registered the panicked screams from the main room. As she hurtled through the plain hallway towards the crowds, she wished she had a way to tell the backup team that they were flying into trouble. He must’ve known we’d be here. How did he know we’d be here? 

The walls were a blur as the confusion and fear from the civilians in the club became palpable. The door squeaked on its hinges as Daisy threw it open. She didn’t see Coulson anywhere. Actually, she couldn’t see anything at all. An EMP. Cool. Fun. Alright. That’s fine. 

It’s all fine.

Wandering the crowds, Daisy tried to find a way to contact the team. Surely they had a landline in here? 

The bartender pulled her aside as she passed him. He silently pointed to the jukebox. It was the only thing still on and functioning. Of course, Daisy didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before! 

She walked to the jukebox and searched the sides for a dial, a button, something... Aha! She unlatched the panel and bent down to dial Piper’s number. She pressed the call button while her vision grew blurry. Her eyelids drooped. A sluggish head turn towards the dance floor gave a view of unconscious bodies asleep next to each other. Daisy tried to stand, to walk to the nearest victim of the sleeping gas. A burning zap that seemed to travel through her veins rendered her unconscious. I have to find Coulson…

Daisy knew she probably shouldn’t have left Casagrande in the alley by himself. She was playing right into his hand.

Coulson was more important.

Coulson. What would he do?

Daisy slowly tried to open her eyes. She felt like she had a hangover. The light was dim, the floor beneath her cold as ice. Her hearing slowly came back as she took in her surroundings. A pair of black dress shoes blurred into her frame of vision. 

“Hey, you’re awake.” Coulson’s voice flooded her with relief.

“What happened? Where…?”

Coulson helped her sit up against a rough stone wall. “I have no clue. Best guess? An Italian castle.”

Daisy was suddenly very awake. “We’re in Italy?”

“Hey, I said best guess.” Coulson pointed his fingers to the ceiling. “I heard footsteps up there earlier.”

Daisy just nodded. Last time she was in Italy, she had a hell of a lot better time. For starters, no one zapped her with— wait, what was she hit with?

“What was that weapon I was hit with? It felt like it was melting my insides.” The thought scared her. The only other time she had felt that type of pain was when... she didn’t like to think about it. 

“You know the alien tech that Casagrande was running?” Daisy nodded. “Yeah, it was that.”

A loud groan solidified Daisy’s frustration. Her eyes closed while she tried to concentrate. She tried to feel any vibrations near her, to soak up anything that could signal where they were. Instead of feeling the vibrations of a mountain or a plane, she felt footsteps. Coming closer, closer... Daisy opened her eyes. 

Luca entered the chilly cell through the thick steel door. She would have quaked him back about a hundred feet if it weren’t for Coulson’s hand on her arm. 

“You two seem comfortable. Can I get you a drink? Water? Coffee?” His smile was smug and irritating.

Coulson replied before Daisy could. “No, we’re good thanks. How about instead, you give us some answers. Starting with: where are we, and who’s your source?” His voice got harder and colder as he went on. Luca acted unfazed. 

“No. You are insurance. You have physical evidence of my illegal trades. I was going to leave you on the curb, but then this guy,” Luca pointed over his shoulder at a soldier then slapped the short lad on the back. Daisy recognized him as one the short lads with briefcases at the bar. “This guy had to go and shoot you with the Widow’s Bite!”

Coulson's eyes grew wide in recognition. Daisy could connect the dots herself.

“You stole Black Widow’s weapons?” They said in unison. Coulson and Daisy looked at each other and fell silent. By Daisy’s profile, if they kept acting surprised and in awe, he would keep giving them answers. 

“Yes, I did. Amazing right?” Luca stared off into the distance. “Last month I hired a thief to get into the Avenger’s Compound. She got a copy of Stark’s old hard drive, picked up some old relics, modified them with alien metal stolen from Hydra. But every time I tried to open it, it would corrupt my servers. I took the damn thing to every hacker I knew, now they all want to kill me because I crashed their servers. Some of them used to be part of the Rising Tide, when they were still young and hotheaded. They told me about a hacker named Skye. She disappeared, never heard from again. She has no information on her. She has no records. Not even in the top intelligence departments of America. She doesn’t exist.

“But Daisy Johnson does. Daisy Johnson, a hacker who rose in Skye’s place. Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“And you need us to get to her,” Coulson finished. “I hate to burst your bubble, but we’re expendable. You’re better off throwing us in the ocean than you are waiting for her to come.”

Luca seemed to be seriously considering this. Then he nodded. You’re right, I need to up the ante. Raise the stakes a little.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder as he turned on heel and swaggered down the hallway. “Bring them.”

Two soldiers came in to get Daisy and Coulson. They reached down to grab Daisy, and she swiftly brought her head forward to hit theirs. Stunned, the soldier took a step back, giving Daisy time to stand up before she gave a hard kick to his stomach. The other soldier was similarly impaired, having taken a startlingly strong punch to the jaw from Coulson. The crack! of the bone echoed off the stone walls. Daisy quaked them against the wall for good measure, realizing they hadn’t taken her gauntlets. Coulson was waiting by the door. 

“Let’s go.” 

They ran through the halls, following where they thought Casagrande might have gone, stopping in several rooms on the way to hide from Casagrande’s soldiers. They ran into him at the front of what was, indeed, a stone castle. He stood on the uneven steps gazing out at rolling hills and cottony clouds hung high above a choppy lake. The wind blew hard, just enough to make you wish for a sweater from someone warm and comforting. It was all quite picturesque. 

Except for the criminal standing in front of them. 

“Congrats, you escaped! I’m so glad.” Luca smiled and opened up his arms. 

“Somehow this guy still sounds smug. We just escaped from his prison and this guy still thinks he’s won.” Coulson turned to Daisy. 

Daisy shook her head and shouted, “Hey, Luca! The fight’s not finished yet!”

“Really, sweetheart? Because it looks to m—”

He was interrupted by a violent quake in his direction. She strided over to where he was struggling to get up. 

“It looks like what? I can’t hear you.” Daisy rested her hands on her hips. 

“It looks as if you are lost. Even if you escape, you have no way to get home,” he wheezed. 

Daisy rolled her eyes. Coulson walked up behind her, squatting down beside Luca and using a hand on his shoulder to keep him in place. 

“We’re resourceful. And while we were hiding from guards in some of your fancy tech rooms, we found an old sat phone. They’re easy enough to use, all we had to do was phone a friend and tell them exactly where we are,” Coulson explained. 

“Ah, but you don’t know where we are, sweetheart.” His rebuttal was pointed at Daisy. She decided it was her turn to prove him wrong. 

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. You counted on us not being able to crack your hard drive’s encryption and get past your feeble firewalls. That took less than five minutes. The only remotely hard part about hacking you to find our coordinates was trying to read everything in Italian.” Daisy laughed. 

Luca tried the wiggle away from them. “If you have my hard drive, then you know there isn’t anything of importance on there.”

As she pulled a pair of handcuffs out of her boot, Daisy exchanged a look with Coulson. 

“You’re right, there isn’t anything of value on that hard drive,” she said. “There are about 100 other files I downloaded from your personal computer that do have important intel, though.” 

Coulson pulled a face and sucked in a breath. “Yikes.”

“So, I guess if you’re arresting me, there isn’t any chance we could ever do business, if you know what I mean?”

Daisy mentally pulled that bottle off the shelf and dusted off her sarcastic remark. 

“Sorry, I’m married.”

Daisy locked the cuffs into place and stood Casagrande up. Two quinjets touched down thirty minutes later, one with a team of agents to search the castle, and one to take Daisy and Coulson home. Agent Piper met Daisy on the ramp of QJ-6, something metallic and glittery in her hand. 

“Thanks for holding onto it.” Daisy hugged Piper before taking her ring back. 

“No problem. Wouldn’t want this rock to get lost in the field!” she laughed. 

Daisy slipped the smooth metal on her finger and sagged into the jump seat next to Coulson. She rested her head on his shoulder, softly gazing at her hand. 

“I can’t wait to be home with Daniel.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: heeeey! this fic was inspired by @starkmaiden ‘s post in a dousy group i’m in. thank you!! if you have a request, question for me, or want to be added to my taglist go visit my ask box! i love each and every one of you :)

[drkoestersmithrpg]

AUG DONE YAY!!!  I’ll Post Tuesday Probably

“Don’t worry about it kid. Just ignore him.  He’ll get over you and we can all get back to normal.”

War Machine’s advice was not in the least bit helpful for the youngest Avenger on the compound who had become, and rightly so, more than a little alarmed by Mr. Stark’s behavior.

It seemed like ever since the Avengers had encountered real aliens from space, the so-called Guardians of the Galaxy, and learned about various planets, each with their own threats, and the threat of some Over-Alien that was setting out on a mission to massacre half of the universe, well, Tony had gotten weird.  

(Or maybe Tony had always been weird and Peter had never noticed before?)

No, actually, many Avengers had noticed it too.  Tony’s inappropriate humor had always been a feature, not a bug, but recently it had been dialed up to 11.  11? Try 69.   It wasn’t just that he was calling Peter “Underoos” again.  It was more.  Innuendos when people asked for facts.  Dirty jokes when people asked for opinions.  Double-entendres about the must mundane topics, to the point where no one could even ask ‘where are we going for dinner?’  

And all of them, every single one of them, seemed to be of the homosexual variety.

To the point that Peter was beginning to fear that his hero, his idol and his fantasy-mentor (and his real life mentor for years now) was actually a homophobe.

“A homophobe?  THE Tony Stark??  Nah kid, Tony is an unabashed Trisexual.  He’ll try anything….and he never made any bones about it….”

Both of them winced, both of them turned to look even though they knew Tony wasn’t in the room.  You couldn’t say the word ‘bones’ around Tony anymore, or any vaguely sexual word, including the word ‘it.’  That’s how bad it had gotten.

“Wait…..wait……are you saying….Tony is Bi?”  Peter asked, trying to look surprised.  Trying not to look overeager.  Trying not to look like a kid who had actually recently gotten some information and was desperate to confirm it.  Trying not to look like he had cornered Rhodey in an empty conference room just to ask this question.

“No,” said Rhodey.

Peter’s shoulders sagged.

“He’s a hedonist. Don’t worry about it kid.  Just ignore him.  He’ll get over you and we can all get back to normal,” Rhodey said dismissively, walking away, leaving Peter red-faced and gaping.

“Over me?”

“Over me??”

“When was I under him?”

    * * * *

 There were many theories about Tony’s new behavior, but Peter couldn’t find any that agreed with Rhodey….that it had something to do with him.

Fury blamed the Avengers state-of-readiness for over a year that resulted in absolutely nothing, no visit from the Ultimate Badguy bent on destroying half of Earth.  Stress made people cranky, seemed to be his theory, and Tony’s new tourette syndrome was just a symptom of that stress.

Bruce (not a common feature around the compound for the last year but very good for information when he was around) pointed out that Tony didn’t like crowds unless they were cheering for him.  “He doesn’t actually work well with others, he forces himself to work with others, thus all the grants and outsourcing, but it’s a lot of effort.  If he can’t got for 3 minutes without making a dirty joke, maybe he just needs to go back into hiding for a while.  We’re all hermits, after a fashion.”  Peter hoped desperately that wasn’t true (he didn’t WANT Tony to go into hiding) but he certainly took Bruce’s perspective seriously. He knew a lot about Tony.  And a lot about hermits.  

Black Widow would probably have the best explanation for Tony’s odd behavior.  Analyzing human behavior was her job.  But Nat wasn’t talking.

So Peter soldiered on. He was the only Avenger who went to training and attended meetings in full costume, mask on at all times.  The story was it was to protect his secret identity.  The truth was, the mask covered all facial expressions.  Tony’s obscenities, no matter how constant, still took him by surprise.  Under the mask, no one could see him blush.

Because truth be told, so many of those inappropriate jokes seemed to be aimed at him.

Most Avengers seemed to agree that the new Rated R version of Tony Stark corresponded with the visit from the storied Guardians of the Galaxy.

But in Peter’s mind, it also seemed to start the same day he turned 20 years old, and bragged, in Tony’s hearing, that he had celebrated with a special party in Boystown.

He had done it very much on purpose – it had been part of his plan.  

Only the results were not….good.  Almost overnight Tony was x y and z. [every bad guy needed a good fucking, every x ato to they y, every complaint from Peter indicated he needed to get laid.  Tony had always joked about everything, but now the jokes were not only gay-related, they were downright hostile. Peter had never heard the word ‘faggot’ on the Avenger’s compound before (the entire compound, Avengers and military alike, knew Caps’ “Language” rule) and he heard it out of Tony’s mouth that very night.  It was Peter’s birthday dinner in one of the compound’s dining rooms where Tony had asked for a ‘real drink for me, not some faggoty ass waterdawon drink.  We’ll save that for Pete.”  

(That was the day Peter realized his life would be better if he just kept the mask on at all times.)

Finally, after a great deal of soul-searching about his Get Tony Stark Into Bed plan and weather or not he even to be in the same room with that man, he cornered Nat and Rhodey (the two people he considered the best informed) and demanded answers.

“Kid…you’re smart. Don’t  let him rile you up.”  That was Rhodey, who seemed a little hostile himself.  He clearly did not want to be having this conversation.  

“But that’s what I don’t get….why is this about me?”

Rhodey and Nat exchanged a look.

Then Nat looked at him, and seemed to make a decision.

“Parker, you announced you were gay, sexually active and legally of age all in the same sentence.”

Peter wished, for a moment, he still had his mask on.  Apparently he hadn’t been as subtle that night as he had thought.

“So….wait…..are you saying this is him….flirting with …..me?”

Nat shrugged.  “Little girls get their ponytails pulled by boys who have crushes on them every day.  They learned to live with it.”

“No they don’t” Peter countered.  “My friend MJ had her hair pulled by a boy in 3rd grade who said he like liked her and he got sent to counseling.”

Rhodey rolled his eyes and said murmured something about Millennials.

“Gen Z,” Peter pointed out, raising a hand.

“Exactly – Gen X jokes are going to sound wrong to Gen Z ears…..”

“Wrong?  Half of what comes out of his mouth could be considered sexual harassment in 50 states!”

“Parker!”  That was Rhodey again.  “I’ve seen these hyperfixations before.  They go away.  Aren’t you supposed to be intelligent?  Be intelligent.  DON’T fall for him, DON’T let him talk you into bed.  Just wait for it to pass over.”

“Let him….talk me into……”

“Kid, don’t do it.”  That was Nat.  “If Pepper Potts couldn’t tame that mess no one can.”

Nat gave a nod to Rhodey, who took it as a cue to exit, leaving the two of them alone together.

“Look,” she said gently. “No one will tell you to your face, but we’re all looking forward to when you leave for school again.  Tony will tone it down after you leave.  And if you stay away long enough, he’ll just get over you.  

“I can see what you’re thinking, Peter, and you don’t want to do this.  Tony has always been a comedian.  This is just a new routine.  You think if you let him talk you into bed, this will get any easier for you? You’re Gen Z, you talk about your feelings.  Tony just talks in one-liners.  

“It’s hard work dating a comedian, kid.

“It can’t end well.”

  * * * *

Tired of walking around with a mask on daily, and lonely for his friends (who knew the difference between flirting and Hostile Work Environment) Peter took Nat’s advice and left early. Back in New York he spent his weeks before the semester began researching the psychology of humor, and the sociological limitations of being gay in the 80’s.  It was eye-opening.  Also appalling.  

But the psychology of humor was very interesting – Peter read that when a group, any group, laughed together, the individuals would indistinctly glance at the person they felt connected with. The article suggested reading room to ‘learn who is secretly sleeping together’ but in general the article dealt with office culture and social hierarchies.  Still, the tidbit was confusing.  

Every time the group laughed together, Tony always seemed to be glancing at him.

But the longer he spent away from Tony the more the offensive jokes faded in his memory and the more he remembered just how bad his crush on the man had become (and exactly how far he was into his detailed plan to get into Tony’s pants.)  

He wasn’t expecting to actually run into the actual man in New York any time soon, but within a week he did.   The Avenger Parties at Stark Tower seemed to becoming more frequent, it seemed to Peter.  At least this was the 2nd one in 2 months. Peter wondered vaguely if it was a ploy to make him hang with the Avengers with his face showing – he was invited to attended these things in suit as “Mr. Stark’s intern.”  

Walking into the party he felt, very suddenly, unarmed (more specifically, unarmored.)  He had relied so much on his mask to hide his face whenever Tony was inappropriate.

That’s why he silently determined to just avoid Tony altogether.

 Chapter 2

  Tony stiffed at the sight of Peter holding a glass of wine.  It didn’t matter how many times he reminded himself (or Peter) that Peter was now of age.  It still struck him as wrong.

But not as wrong as Bruce’s arm around Peter’s shoulders.

He had already passed them once, talking a mile-a-minute with Bruce and Dr. Cho about the tech behind the cradle.   He couldn’t begrudge Bruce and Peter their shop talk (although the double twinges of jealousy took him by complete surprise.  He and Bruce had been so long ago, it seems.)  

Mostly, he was just irritated that the kid seemed to be avoiding him.

But now – oh this definitely was not right.  

He couldn’t be caught staring, so he made his rounds, taking in furtive glances at the two across the room. He must have been mistaken about the arm, Peter and Bruce and some other tech guys were just talking now, and it looked perfectly normal.

Then he lost sight of them.

Then he caught them again, standing by the window alone.  

They weren’t talking shop, that was certain.  Bruce had his arm on Peter’s back, was leaning over, was speaking directly into his ear.  Acceptable in a crowded room, but they were far away enough from the crowd to make Tony see red.

Especially when Peter grinned, ducked his head, then turned and said something into Bruce’s ear.

What Bruce said next made Peter laugh and cover his face, and that’s when Nat appeared in front of him and said “Don’t be jealous.  

“They’re talking about you.”

She turned her head to ignore his gape.  She pretended to scan the room as she spoke.  “Not that I care, Tony, but if you really want to hook up with a Gen Z you are going to have to clean up your act.  Reinstate Steve’s “language” rule.  Poor kid thinks you’re a homophobe.

“What…..me?”

He respected Nat’s intelligence, so when she looked at him that way, he took it seriously.

“New generation, Tony. They don’t care what you DID 20 years ago, all they care about is what you’re doing now, and what you’re doing now is recycling gay jokes from the 80’s.  He honestly thought you were mad at him.

“Just…go…flirt with him like a normal person.  Take him on date.  He’s into you – he’s quizzed everyone who knows you about your sex life.”

   * * * * *

 Peter left the party grinning from ear to ear.

Even though he never actually spoke to Tony that night.  The man disappeared from his own party, but no one thought that was particularly unusual. Nat, at least, seemed to think that way. She gave him a warning look when he asked after the man, but when she spoke, she was gentle.

“Consider the perils of dating a comedian, Peter.”

“Yeah you told me that.”

“The Millennials way is to exchange facts about emotions.  Comedians just exchange one-liners.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Peter said, but he couldn’t help but smile.

He went downstairs to the car Tony had waiting for him, smiling all the way.

He had found out a LOT from Bruce that night, information he needed, information he intended to use.

But that wasn’t the best part.

“Consider the perils of dating a comedian” he said to himself as he raced down the stairwell to the garage.

The litany of inappropriate humor wasn’t an attack or a slight, it was a sign of interest.  He could identify the intent, while simply ignoring the actual language.  He didn’t have to speak Tony’s language, he just had to understand it.

“Consider the perils of dating a comedian” he whispered to himself when Tony’s driver took him home.

“Consider the perils of dating a comedian” he murmured to himself as he lay on his bed in his dormroom that night.

He went to bed with a smile on his face.

Because all he could think was…

………… “I’ve got a chance to date Tony Stark.”

[tessatechaitea]

Wonder Twins #7

I didn't realize the Wonder Twins were Gen X.

Oh yeah! Zan had just saved the world by stopping a plot that was going to save the world.

I just realized I hadn't scanned the cover yet and as I did, I noticed the Wonder Twins fist/star emblem marks a striking resemblance to a goat.se riff. Zan and Jayna get taken off of monitor duty at the Hall of Justice now that they've stopped the League of Annoyance. You'd think that doing a good job would get you a promotion but those of use who have always done spectacularly good jobs know better. While everybody else works down to the lowest common denominator (because who wants to do more work than the next guy?! A fool, that's who!), good workers just put on blinders and do the job they were hired for until the time they're being paid for is up. Sure, that sounds like I'm describing a sucker who's been completely manipulated by the man! But I'm also describing a person who fulfills their end of whatever bargain they've agreed to! So when I say Zan and Jayna wind up giving tours at the Hall of Justice because they were too good at catching criminals, you'll understand why I went into the previous digression. Maybe? I don't know. Have you seen what state the U.S. is in?! Why are you picking apart my writing style?! Mark Russell takes a few pages to shit all over hockey fans and now I hate Mark Russell with a burning passion. Even though I'd hardly call myself a hockey fan. I mean, I loved NHL '93 (unless it was '92 (or maybe '94?)) and I loved going to San Jose Sharks games when I was still living in the Bay Area (plus my friend worked equipment for the Sharks and would get us free tickets). But it's not like I follow it much anymore. I just like the feeling of being angry at somebody for writing a satirical critique of sports fans rioting because they're so happy that their team won. Although why would I be angry when I've never done that nor think Russell's wrong in his pointed and humorous critique?! Oh, who cares why! Being angry is just more fun! Oh shit! I finally understand people's attraction to Fox News! I just watched a YouTube clip of somebody's Jeremy Roenick highlights from NHL '94 set to the song "More Than a Feeling" and it was pretty awesome. Also, that was definitely the one we played nonstop back in 1993 and 94 and maybe even into 95. Roenick unstoppable down with the puck while Sharks players lay splayed out on their back all across the ice. To stop the riot, Superman calls in Repulso! He's a guy whose super power is super stink and he's kept in a locked room with a bare table and a microwave and nobody wants to be his friend because he smells like a garbage dumb that vomited on top of the diarrhea it shit out while standing on its head so the stanky muck ran down his body absorbing all of his body odor and then somebody cut up a durian and tossed it in the mix.

Superman is a dick. Get this guy some friends with no sense of smell. Or at the very least, an Xbox Gold account.

After the hockey riots, some "the end of the world" riots take place because Zan and Jayna screw up something or other. Basically what that means is that Repulso gets to be let out of his airtight containment unit again! He's a pretty optimistic guy for being sealed away by Superman (which is just Superman's way! Is somebody a problem? No problem! Put them in the Phantom Zone!). He's so happy and not bitter about his living arrangements that I feel like Zan and Jayna had better figure out a way to give him a better life before this issue ends. Because if Mark Russell fails this character he created before this issue is over and I have to face reality after snot crying about a fictional person, I'm going to be pretty upset when I continue to buy Mark Russell comic books because what other choice do I have? Am I going to stop reading DC's best written comic books because Mark Russell betrayed poor Repulso? Of course not! What am I? A person with integrity?! Repulso winds up getting his ass beat by rioters as Repulso's handlers flee the chaotic "end of the world" downtown riot scene. Luckily the Wonder Twins are headed downtown to save his life and maybe become his friend or something? Please? After Zan and Jayna save Repulso, Jayna goes to Superman to tell him everything sucks. He gives her a big speech about how being a hero is lonely work because you don't always get to fuck the hot chick at your secret identity's workplace and also fuck an Amazon warrior while also getting to fuck anybody at all whose initials are "L.L." and also have a best friend who is the coolest guy in the world with a butler who makes the best pancakes. Sometimes you're a fat jerk who smells who even Superman won't fucking give the time of day because Superman has this speech about how being a hero is lonely and that's a good thing so you should embrace your loneliness because who wants to put up with your super stink, fatty?

Jayna is a way better hero than Superman. At least in this comic book that's all about her and not Superman so of course she's going to outshine him!

Oh yeah, the ant in the above picture is Jayna. It can't smell. Wonder Twins #7 Rating: A+. I should probably be less cynical when reading Mark Russell comic books because he's as earnest and serious as he can be while also providing lots of jokes. He takes writing seriously because what else is there? If your message isn't going to matter, why bother? (is his philosophy. I think. It's not my philosophy! I don't think? Maybe it is! I just write things that matter in a much different way than Mark Russell writes things that matter.) I should probably read Superman's speech and be inspired by the idea that you don't do good because you want adulation; you do good because it's the right thing to do, even if the entire world thinks you're an asshole for doing it. Even if all of the other superheroes think you're a stinky fuck and only keep you around to use as a tool to oppress and manipulate the masses without having to use logic and reason on them (because, let's face it, the people doing terrible things don't understand logic and reason. Or they're do but they're just selfish and greedy so nothing is going to reach them anyway (which maybe is part of Superman's message?)), you're still a hero at the end of the day. You can still be proud of your stinky self. And even if the life is lonely, you should remain positive and upbeat because Superman really doesn't want to be reminded that you exist every time you complain about the lack of reasonable living conditions. Being a hero is a state of mind, says the guy who also looks great and is invulnerable and has the best wife and a cool son and doesn't have to fear death! So inspiring!

[scope-dogg]

Expelled from Paradise: Final Thoughts

When the first SRW T PV rolled in, this was the one entry that puzzled me a bit - while all the other long overdue returnees and new entrants were all well known to me one way or another, this is one I’d barely heard of - I’d seen one review video on youtube years before that delivered a verdict of “it’s okay”, and I barely even remembered that. However, interviews with SRW T’s production staff revealed that this one was actually pretty heavily requested in Japan. I couldn’t really get my head around that, this being a 100% 3D-CG anime movie starring a main character in a ridiculous outfit that had her entire ass hanging out and made her look like an xbox gijinka to boot. However, now that I’ve actually seen it I think I understand now - this is a 2014 movie by Gen Urubuchi, a guy who’s had a fairly chequered history with a couple of duds like the recent disappointing netflix godzilla trilogy and the lukewarmly-received mecha anime Aldnoah Zero, but has also knocked it out of the park with other works like Fate Zero and most notably Puella Magi Madoka Magika. I think this one should count amongst his successes, as it elevates itself above its apparent flaws and delivers a story that’s thrilling and interesting in equal measure.

The plot setup is that in the future, a catastrophe known as the Nano Hazard has left the Earth in ruins. To escape the desolation of the ruined Earth, most of humanity now lives on in the form of digitised consciousnesses called Personalities, hosted in a giant server called Deva in orbit above Earth. There, people are free to live in virtual luxury, while the few humans who decided to remain on the surface eke out whatever living they can in the ruins of the old world. However, a hacker known as Frontier Setter has begun breaching Deva’s security to deliver messages about an alleged space travel plan to Deva’s confused citizens. While nobody knows his true identity, Deva’s Central Security council won’t tolerate Frontier Setter’s intrusion, fearing that his true intentions are malign, and in response send their agent Angela Balzac to Earth in a cloned physical body in order to identify and neutralise the threat. There, she rendezvouses with Dingo, a gun for hire who knows the lay of the land on Earth, and sets out on a mission to track down the threat to Deva’s safety.

It’s quite an interesting premise right out of the gate - the concept of digitised personalities isn’t exactly new to sci-fi but I think it was captured in a fairly novel way here. Seeing as it’s a short movie at around an hour and three quarters, it’s difficult to talk about the plot without spoiling it too much, but I thought it was pretty well paced and had its fair share of interesting ideas. My initial impression before watching was that it was a fanservice movie meant for the lowest common denominator, but it had some surprisingly intelligent things to say, even waxing philosophic at points. I’m not saying that it’s a deep galaxy brain story either, but it’s definitely not dumb schlock. Of course, however, the whole reason it’s in SRW T is because of its action and it doesn’t disappoint with that either - while mecha aren’t super prominent until the last half hour or so, that last half-hour is a thrilling rollercoaster ride featuring some really impressively realised mecha combat. In short, whether you like your sci-fi stories loud and exciting or a little more slow-paced and pensive, you’ll probably find something you like in here.

I thought the movie’s characters were pretty good too. While Angela’s outfit is a lot to get past, I thought she was a well-realised protagonist with an equally well-realised character arc, mostly centred around her struggling to come to grips with life in a physical body on Earth having existed purely as data up until that point. A lot of that comes across her interactions with Dingo, who I thought was a really great character - he’s a cocksure and clever rogue who’s out to make a quick buck first and foremost, which is a personality that clashes with Angela’s more by-the-books, results-driven approach in entertaining ways. The real stand-out, however, turned out to be Frontier Setter, for reasons that would be spoilery to go into.

As far as presentation goes, it’d be very understandable for you to see that this is 100% 3D, for both human characters and mecha, and assume instantly that this would look like shit. 99% of the time you’d be absolutely right. However, not this time - clearly this movie’s budget was enough for the 3D CG work to actually look good - and not just passable either, I mean really good. There are times it looks rough, most notably in the movie’s opening scene. However, the rest of the time you can barely even tell that it’s been done solely with computers. It’s backed up by solid visual design - while I do have to once again point out that Angela’s outfit is a glaring exception to the rule (seriously, the lead character designer deserves a slap for it) it’s otherwise superb. Whether it’s the cyberspace inside Deva, or the strangely beautiful desolation of Earth, the environments are really well realised. The real star of the show is the mecha combat however, with the high-tech New Arhan exosuit leading the way. The battles at the end of the movie look fantastic, with superbly choreographed action scenes featuring some of the genre’s trademark flourishes and just a highly mobile, high-intensity, carnage-filled approach in general. It turns the movie’s final act into a huge thrill ride. When Demo D reviewed this movie on youtube, he said that he “felt the hype.” I concur completely.

Overall, I’d strongly encourage anybody who hasn’t seen it to check it out - while there are aspects to it that would be red flags elsewhere, I’d still urge everybody to give it a chance. Perhaps the fact that it was just a short movie with snazzy visuals has me slightly hoodwinked, but out of everything I’ve watched so far for the first time in preparation for SRW T, this is probably my favourite, beating out Rayearth by a whisker - something I really wasn’t anticipating.

As for SRW T, I do think that they’ll have to use some creative license to make it work in the larger plot - I think certain events will have to go down very differently, and they’ll also probably have to push the story past the point where it ends in the movie. However, I’m still looking forward to its contribution to the story - I think the presence of some of its plot aspects will make the world of SRW T a lot more interesting, plus I think there’s room for them to intermesh with a variety of the other stories that’ll be around, from Gun X Sword to Votoms, or even Might Gaine and Gaogaigar. I definitely think from a gameplay perspective the inclusion was warranted, as the New Arhan is going to have a variety of strong and exciting attacks it’ll be able to pull off.

And with that out of the way, there’s only one series left to watch (well, two if you count the OVA) and that’s Aura Battler Dunbine. I’ve heard mixed things about it and don’t really know what to expect, but I’ll be finding out next.

[jmkitsune]

I love star wars and this post WILL contain many spoilers to the sagas. I’ll try my best to limit them but many will have to be discussed. As they pertain to The Last Jedi. I apologize now, if you wish to avoid them- dip now. It will be a trap :D

those who know me would probably say I breathe star wars more than air sometimes...well in times that I go off about it, they probably think if star wars was not to exist I’d simply blink out...maybe let’s not find out please.

However with the new sequels a LOT of my friends had, to my surprise, kept on me about wanting to talk about the Last Jedi. I hadn’t seen it by the time they all had due to different reasons so they all were desperately saying how badly they wanted me to see it. They “needed to talk about it with me” some said, others simply were hella curious with my “love for the series, how did it hold up in MY point of view”

This is a new feeling, being the token star wars fan in my group is normal but this idea of my love for it being something that meant friends who normally aren’t into it or would just LET me talk about it then move on was now replaced with “Hey...TALK ABOUT IT WITH US”

Mind you...this post is like scratching the sruface so it’s not gonna encompass allll my thoughts, that’d take WAY WAY too long so yeah.... strap in I’m calculating the jump to “holy fuck JM is a nerd”

I say this- all of this is over the time of me watching all that I can about star wars, reading all the material I’ve read and accepting the OLD CANON is gone, it’s legends now. The NEW CANON is what it is, I love both equally and accept that Legends is that- LEGEND, what gets recycled will be, the rest...well won’t be.

Alrighty so- I remember being 16 or 17 and hearing that Lucas viewed the OT and Prequels as Poetry, he wanted there to be Rhyme scheme in the movies, which you can see in this video (this one includes new trilogy and Rogue one) 

see, when I learned that, I wasn’t smart as I am now in terms of writing/story telling. I was just some high schooler who wanted to write something LIKE STAR WARS and be able to create that feeling that Lucas gave me everytime I saw those opening crawls, heard a lightsaber ignite, the sound of an X-wing opening it’s s-foils, hearing Luke say “I’m a Jedi, like my father before me.” etc

Now that I’m older, have experience more in writing, experience in critiquing and not simply LOVING for the sake of loving without having a critical eye I see where flaws are in the movies. Every story has flaws. DEAL WITH IT. What I started to see what this poetry finally. I mean this in a different way than people might expect me to mean. I finally understood why certain scenes were shot the way they were, it wasn’t “oh hey that looks familiar, its a coincidence.” no it was intentional. It was meant as a callback/throwback/etc, it’s done to inspire this feeling of “Hey, in a galaxy far away- didn’t something like this happen?” it evokes the feeling that whatever scene it reminds you of evoked.

When Luke loses his hand, you feel the same feeling as when Anakin loses part of his arm. When you see Star Killer base for the first time, it’s meant to draw the same momentary feeling you got when you FIRST see the death star. Not a “oh another super weapon” but “oh. My. Gods...that is huge.” cause remember the preivew for Rogue One? The star destroyer coming out of the shadow of the Death Star, that looked big as a ship right? Then the camera pans out and you see the dish being installed and then see the SAME STAR DESTROYER LOOKING TINY...the scale was done perfectly. It created a reaction in us. A feeling of being small, insignificant next to that technological terror, right?

Now discussing why I loved Episode 8 (even with it’s flaws) I draw heavily on this poetry in star wars.

Star wars is supposed to be poetic, each stanza (trilogy) mirroring but differing from the one before it. (the following three things will be generalized and brief but I’ll expand as Igo, don’t worry.)

Prequels- a gilded age, corruption abound, Jedi in their prime, undermined by a single Sith who was RIGHT THERE, heavy tech vs nature esque war (clones of biologically human vs droids) and the fall of a young man who was given too much responsibility too young and in his attempt to save those he loved, destroyed all he had thought he'd love in his childhood due to seeing that the Jedi (his heroes) were not really what he imagined they'd be (he saw holy warriors of GOODNESS) only to find, closed minded arrogant corupt and well frankly inept council of monks who turn on their own code when it meant "destroying the sith"

Original Trilogy- gritty war for good vs evil, the evil so...sterile, white and male vs a rag tag/dirty femine lead rebellion, technological terror's vs natural force powers, a father being redeemed by his son who refused to only see the bad like others did, and that bringing of balance. Anakin had destroyed the Jedi Order in his original fall, leaving only Two Jedi (Yoda/Obi wan) and when they died it left 2 sith vs Luke, and in the end to save Luke- he destroyed the last two Sith- Palpatine and himself- allowing only balance. Luke someone who was neither Jedi/Sith, he was...a Jedi LIKE his father who sought balance

New Trilogy- complacency has lead to not only corruption again but the return of said sterile white male dominated evil threatening the peace of a more nurturing New Republic, the heroes of old brittle and fallen from grace due to the weight of what they did in their past being HEAVY and the new gen "meeting their heroes" only to realize, heroes are simply people that made hard choices and do the right thing, making them now heroes to many to come

notice how some things from the prequels made it to the OT? The New trilogy? And some things in the OT happened also in the first and third trilogies? There is not an ABAB rhyme scheme, its more free verse but there is still a scheme in there. It happens subtly and in ways that flow naturally (Even if they are intentionally constructed rhymes)

Now we come to the “villains” each trilogy gave us, let’s see the rhymes there.

Prequels-

Darth Maul-

the Rage, the unbridled hatred for the Jedi. His arrival signified the Jedi’s flawed sight. His combat with Qui Gon and Obi Wan challenged many things, it challenged the viewers in light of “we didn’t know bad Jedi could do this?! (he was the first to carry a double sided saber) he was so acrobatic, he was young he was GOOD with a saber. He made TWO JEDI work their hardest to beat, and only lost after that LONG drawn out conflict. Notice also how he existed. He WAS the Phantom (A sith assassin) HE WAS the menace (he was harassing Qui Gon on Tattooine, then again on Naboo.) Maul also was the indicative of what the Jedi feared most. The return of the Sith. It meant there was one more in the universe. The Rule of Two is introduced. One Master. One Apprentice.

Darth Sidious/Palpatine-

The chess master, the villain in plain sight, the father figure to our hero, the man who if you forget is the villain, sometimes would be believable as a good guy. Guys I grew up with the OT from my earliest memories. I knew it was “Emperor Palpatine” but I also remember in 99, 2001 and 2003 until the scenes happened obviously that Senator/Chancellor Palpatine was NOT the Emperor. I could not connect it because Prequel Palpatine (until scenes happen) WAS A GOOD GUY, he wanted to bring peace and prosperity to the REPUBLIC. HE LOVED DEMOCRACY. Like Obi Wan says in Ep 3 to Padme “we were tricked by a lie. A lie by the sith, a lie that convinced us that our enemy was not right where we were.” Palpatine IS A VILLAIN because he convinces you he didn’t exist. He was the devil who tricked humanity into thinking wasn’t real. But you knew he was...but couldn’t prove.

Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus-

Political villain. He wasn’t bad for evil’s sake (he didn’t have sith eyes like Maul/Sidious) he was a man who was broken by the flaws in the Jedi Council. He lost his padawan (Qui Gon) and that mourning turned into bitter resentment, he saw through the problems the Jedi Order ignored in themselves, found a teacher in Sidious who promised to give him the chance to wipe the slate clean. His political villainy come from good intentions paving the way to hell.

General Grevious-

The Proxy villain. He is literally there to take the heat. He isn’t “human” he is more machine than living creature. He hates the Jedi and you can see that he is a proto vader of sorts. His breathing is broken, his lacking in “organic traits” and hatred for everything is rhyming in Vader’s soon to come, but it rhymes in a foreboding way. Especially when Anakin says to him “General Grevious, you’re shorter than I expected” he wasn’t meant to be taken lightly but yet we take him lightly because we ALL know (even those who watch the prequels first) that something DARKER does exist. Grevious- though scary and not someone you wanna fight one on one, you know isn’t the worst monster in the galaxy. He’s just an angry bitter cyborg who steals lightsbaers. He’ll get what he deserves soon enough, the monster will be slain by the brave knight.

ORIGINAL TRILOGY VILLAIN

Darth FREAKING Vader-

Ok like guys

you need to understand. As before stated, when I was a wee little JM, I would spend A LOT (like I’m guessing daily) watching star wars as early as Kindergarten, imagine for a moment a tiny little JM cross legged on his bed, bouncing as the opening crawl comes, begging his mom to READ the crawl for him (every time cause dammit mom does it best) then stay when scenes had subtitles (Mostly Return of the Jedi but still) Star Wars to me...was like the story of knights or cowboys to other kids. Luke Skywalker was my goals, Han solo was the guy I hoped I could be cool as, and Leia was like AMAZING in terms of “hey girls are as cool if not cooler than guys!”

BUT VADER, Darth Vader’s first appearance to me was terrifying. We had just watched these humans all nervously watch a door, hearing these weird, alien, mechanical sounds creaking over their ship, the tension SO REAL to everyone, something bad is going to happen. Not because of a war but something else is going to come down on them. Those sounds are a clue, something not human is coming for them. THEN THE EXPLOSION AND GUN FIGHT HAPPENS! Soldiers are fighting, Storm troopers pushing in and taking out Rebels. Rebel soldiers running, screaming, trying to fight back, it’s assured that if you were in that hall you weren’t going home. BUT as a kid I BELIEVED they had a chance! They had to, they were the good guys, no bad guy could overwhelm the underdog….unitl BUM BUH DUM… imitates Vader’s breathing THAT MAN WALKED IN...he wasn’t a man though. He was a force, of evil, his breathing was labored but somehow terrifying, his face was a metal mask that inspired the look of something from nightmares, his cape billowed like smoke out of the darkest places, and his movements were deliberate, his actions cold and harsh. HE LOOKED OFFENDED that some of his storm troopers died on the floor. Like their death was an INSULT to his very existence, what would he do to his enemies when he found them?

This villain was one you FEARED, but not only that but when you learn from Obi Wan that he killed Luke’s father, you hate him. You want Luke or Obi Wan to beat him. You want this villain to suffer for what he did, he hunted down Jedi. He killed Luke’s father, he helped the Empire become what it is now. Vader became a target for your hate because that is what Vader IS. Darth Vader is hate incarnate. You learn in the Expanded universe (canon and legends) that Vader hates everything. But one thing more than others. HIMSELF. He hates who he was. What he is. What he has done. What he will do. Vader is walking hatred and that carries him, that sustains him. That is why he survived what created him. Hatred. We are meant to hate that. Because it makes for things later to be as powerful as they are. The twist reveals. The possibility of redemption. Everything HINGES on our hatred, fear and disgust with him.

Now if you’ll notice I’ve spent A LOT of time explaining Vader’s type of villain. Want to know why? Because like Vader, Star wars is very good at rhyming things. Notice though (cause its a carry over from Prequel to OT) Palpatine is not listed twice, he didn’t need to be. He is the same villain in both trilogies, he is the core theme rhymed. The anti-thesis to the goodness trying to combat evil in Stanzas 1 and 2. He is the core threat that both trilogies face and succumb to then revive to defeat.

Palpatine caused the corruption in Stanza 1, Palpatine orchestrated the political villain’s birth by unleashing the rage villain onto Qui Gon/Obi Wan. Palpatine is the force that pushes things from A to B he doesn’t need much depth in terms of rhyming him. Nothing CAN rhyme him. Like no villain before or after can Rhyme Vader truly. Only build up to him or try to recreate him….which means we walk cautiously into the 30 year gap that is the New Trilgoy.

30 years after Vader’s redemption, Palpatine’s death, Luke’s successful battle against the sith, the Empire’s fall...we meet our New Villains.

The First Order.

New Trilogy

Supreme Leader Snoke-

A villain we wanted to be more, we want him to be something that he isn’t because well we had been spoiled by previous villains. WE, those who lived through both previous trilogies, have gone through the rodeo before. We know there are TRUE villains out there, we have seen the DARKEST that the Sith could throw at us. However with Snoke we tilted our head and were curious. Was he better than Palpatine? Was Sidious NOT the worst out there? It seemed possible. He had his Knights of Ren, the First Order/Remnants of the Old Empire at his disposal. More than that- he had groomed his apprentice. Kylo Ren. Notice this isn’t a DARTH (the official title of each Sith Lord) This villain obviously harolded from the dark side, he wished to hunt and slay all the new Jedi Luke had groomed, yet he wasn’t a Sith...so what. Was. He?

We learned...exactly what we learned. Snoke was Snoke. His fate, his character, everything. WE LEARNED it in Last Jedi. I am not saying we wont get more from the EU (books/tv series/games/etc) but the movie gave us what was relevant to the trilogy/the movie poetry. Snoke was rhyming Sidious in one way- the schemer. He truly thought he had planned it all, he felt confident in his victory that he savored it while it hadn’t fully ripened. Picture if you could the scenes from Guardians of the Galaxy 2, the three scenes involving Nebula and that fruit she wanted to eat.

It wasn’t ripe the first time- Star Killer Base It wasn’t ripe the second time- Kylo got his ASS KICKED by Rey

It wasn’t ripe the third time- he presumed to know how Kylo would remain his servant always. Right up til he was skewered because of his arrogance. His plan wasn’t ripe, yet he bit into it to enjoy it’s predicted sweet victory taste.

Snoke is the villain who in his time believed that being only on his home stretch mile, could gloat that he run the race. He is the Hare teasing the tortoise. He is the cheater who tips his hand right before the other player reveals the royal flush they’re not holding and bluffing their way to hopeful victory.

Now. Kylo/Ben.

Ok. This is going to be a test for me cause honestly I had hopes for Ben/Kylo yes you’re getting both names here there is a reason

When The Force Awakens FIRST preview dropped and we saw Kylo spinning his saber towards Finn. I had one hope. ONE HOPE. This was that Kylo was a double agent. I hoped that Kylo being Han and Leia’s son (we knew before going in cause it was revealed) was tricking Snoke, playing the dark side user into believing he DID win Ben over. He fooled the evil master mind with Luke’s help. Faking the destruction of the Jedi Temple, his Knights of Ren undercover with him, a strike team sent in to infiltrate the First Order from within, giving Snoke his Kylo Ren as a Trojan horse. I NEEDED THIS. I needed to see that Luke was able to craft a team similar to the one who saved Han in Jedi.

Force Awakens Ended and well Kylo isn’t a double….at least not yet. He tried to teach Rey, and he didn’t want to kill Han. At least not in the Force’s eyes. The novelization said so, in killing Han he got weaker, a sith gets STRONGER in that type of event, yet Ben/Kylo weakens. It’s obvious the boy didn’t want to do it. I hoped with this confirmation it was canon that Ben was still in there. Not because I wanted this shitty man to be redeemed. He wasn’t Anakin. He didn’t deserve it. I wanted him to see his failings and CHOOSE to come back. More so I wanted to see that Han’s death was an intentional sacrifice for a greater good. I wanted Han to have given himself to save his son’s remaining spark of good,  I NEEDED THAT. I needed to see a father who was primarily absent in his son’s life make that decision as a last ditch effort to assure his son that he knew the good in him was there, that the good in him was going to be what he is. Not the dark, bad, villain we saw in Kylo. It was a personal need.

Fast forward to Last Jedi. Here we go, Ben/Kylo was seen in previews as torn, breaking his mask that he fashioned after his grandfather’s mask. We see hesitation in his attacking of Leia’s ship in his TIE SILENCER, we see a moment of indecision, Kylo was wavering, Ben was surfacing.  The scar looking mechanical- rhyming with Anakin and Luke- an injury leaving them with a mechanical healing method.  It rhymed. Each Skywalker man now carried an injury that left them inching closer to “more machine than man” in a story that has HEAVILY been “Nature vs Technology”

Kylo/Ben however doesn’t reveal some secret double agent scheme.

No Ben/Kylo in a moment being REAL reveals his memory of events. Luke tried to kill him. He defended himself and made his choice. He saw his uncle willing to kill him for reasons mostly obvious, others probably still unknown to Ben/Kylo. His revelation also shows that he carries grudges from long in the past. He didn’t want to kill Han, but he carried the hatred of his father and mother’s failed relationship with him. We see that Ben chose to be Kylo Ren. It wasn’t Snoke puppeting him. At least not entirely, he used strings to show him what he could be. Ben however cut the strings and picked up the mask, the cape, the mantal and bled the crystal in his saber to make that thing red himself.

To Quote Obi Wan- 

I walked out of that movie hearing it over and over because of Kylo’s accusations of Luke failing him and making him what he was. Yes Luke failed BEN. Luke in a moment of humanity, a moment of being an older, experienced, and tired hero...saw a potential threat and in his moment of humanity actually weighed the options of killing the threat of living with it- trying to temper it and extinguish it without succumbing to murder of his beloved nephew. Ben did not care. Ben- like the Jedi and the Sith, only saw in absolute. He saw Luke THINK about it, and decided that Luke made up his mind. Ben chose to be Kylo Ren, he could have stayed and talked to Luke, discussed what happened, reached an understanding and grew as uncle/nephew or teacher/student. No. He chose the quick and easy path, like a true dark sider does.

Ben Solo did die that night. Kylo Ren didn’t kill him though. Kylo Ren took up his face and wore him, as an insult to Luke, Leia and Han. Kylo Ren wore the face of Ben Solo to try and seduce Rey into joining him. Kylo Ren wore Ben Solo’s fractured and conflicted face when he tricked Snoke into believing he was a puppet so when the time came- unlike his grandfather (in his mind) before him, he could seize power. And finish what he started.

Kylo Ren wears Ben Solo’s face the way some Vlad the Impaler left the heads of his enemies on spikes to intimidate and psychologically destroy his enemies. Ben Solo’s visage and memory is used as a weapon by Kylo Ren to wrench Han’s heart and force him on that catwalk, in hopes of bringing his boy home. As a constant reminder of Luke’s moment in humanity as a Jedi in fearing what might come and causing it anyway, and then the following years of doubt, guilt and pain over the possibility of creating the villain that threatened the galaxy, killed his best friend and chased down his twin sister in hopes of slaughtering her and all she stood for. Kylo wore the mask of Ben Solo as a weapon to give Rey this idea of hope to save him and used it so that when it failed, in her moment of grief for her failure, he could seduce and turn her.

Like we saw- Kylo Ren failed. He failed to turn Rey multiple times. Not because oh she’s a good guy, she won’t turn. But because Kylo Ren can’t invoke a sense of loyalty. He wears the face of a boy who is dead. Kylo Ren is the monster under your bed who wears the face of your stuffed animal then rips you under it to eat you. We know you’re not the good guy you pretend to be. Rey didn’t believe he was bad, she knew it was a possibility but she- had hope- Kylo Ren doesn’t understand this.

In Harry Potter, Harry tells Voldermort that because he never knows love/friendship- Harry pities that dark lord. In Star Wars, Kylo Ren doesn’t know loyalty. He doesn’t know compassion.

He knows greed and fear.

He feared the light, he feared the sentiment that Anakin Skywalker held for his son slaying Vader for good. He craved the power Snoke dangled and held. He feared that if he remained like Luke’s Jedi were- he’d never taste what he felt belonged to him by right. He and Hux share this sense of entitlement due to lineage/bloodlines. It’s interesting when viewed from the point of view- he came from EVERYTHING and gave it up for what he thought was better.

The son of a Senator/War hero, a smugler/war general, nephew to the GREAT JEDI LUKE SKYWALKER and THE GRANDSON of the CHOSEN ONE Anakin Skywalker. This was not enough for him.

Rey – coming from nothing didn’t want any of those things. She didn’t care if she was something or anything. She just wanted to know who she was. She was originally a spec of sand on Jakku now she walked with Han Solo- the famous Smuggler (oh and the War General I guess?) she met Princess- Now General LEIA ORGANA, the woman who fought the Empire, who saved Han from Jabba (then slayed him) the woman who never quit. Plus she was to become the student of the mythical, legend- Luke. Fucking Skywalker.

She didn’t even feel worthy but accepted it because as she met each one- she learned they were people. They were not Gods, they were flawed like her, they made mistakes, they made choices they didn’t like, all because at the time, it was the best thing they could do. They were trying, they were hopeful, and they were good people.

Ben Solo knew these things- he was Luke’s heir to the Jedi Order he built. He learned from his Uncle without complaint until the end, he was the son of these two amazing people of the Rebellion. Then he learned of his grandfather’s identity...everything changed. He felt lied to. Which is true, but this is where Kylo Ren tasted life and needed more.

Kylo rhymes a villain from the old EU in my opinion. Well a few.

Darth Scion

Darth Traya

Darth Nilhus

See like Scion- Kylo is fueled by pain. Scion was physical pain, but Kylo is emotional pain. He strives to push himself into the most emotionally conflicted states. Sometimes physical too. He kept hitting his bowcaster wound in TFA, he surrounded himself with the images of his grandfather and sought guidance from his spirit while in his room and when we saw him attacking Leia’s fleet- he couldn’t pull the trigger to hit the bridge killing his mother. Kylo Ren is a dark sider who thrives when conflicted because it fuels his rash decisions and rage over indecisiveness

he reminds me of Darth Traya because of two quotes that remind of Kylo

“It’s such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it.” - Kylo was born from darkness growing Ben over time. He fell quietly then when he admitted his fall that night in his cabin with Luke- it was far more terrible than we expected. It was a dark dark night for all involved.

Second quote is -

“Know that there was once a Darth Traya. And that she cast aside that role, was exiled, and found a new purpose. But there must always be a Darth Traya, one that holds the knowledge of betrayal. Who has been betrayed in their heart, and will betray in turn.”

This reminds me because look at Kylo/Ben’s history- he felt betrayed in his life and in turn he simply betrays all those around him that he feels slighted by. He instead of healing and growing from betrayal, simply festers his pain and lashes out in betrayal back.

Darth Nilhus though is simply- both men crave an insatiable craving. Power doesn’t do it, prestige doesn’t satisfy, nothing does, nothing can. A dark dark undefinable hole exist in them both and calls to be filled and attempts to fill it always satiate for a small time before the rage demands more.

Alright so I’ve spent A LOT of time talking about the whole character rhyming and that tangent made this longer than it should be, so now I come to the fact that I started- why I loved Last Jedi.

deep inhale

ok ready?

yeah...Leia said it right- Hope.

That’s it. This movie was one event after another of things destroying your sense of hope.

Poe lost all those pilots/bombers in his plan to destroy the Dreadnought.

Leia was losing hope as each of her ships were being picked off by the Supremacy that tracked them through hyperspace.

Luke had lost all hope before this movie and Rey was losing her hope in turn because of his hopeless state.

Finn and Rose were losing hope in so much

1- Rose lost hope in Finn once she saw him trying to run

2- Finn lost hope in DJ once the shoe dropped.

3- Both lost hope in the plan once it was revealed to be impossible to succeed due to their betrayal

4- Seeing the Ram preparing to destroy their hiding base- Rose lost hope until Finn’s daring thing.

Rey’s hopeful attempt at saving Kylo/Ben, it was looking so good til the last second and that hurt the most, the team up WAS THAT HOPE REVIVED like it sparked a sense of “they’re brutally fighting for their lives like Sith, but elegantly together in everything like Jedi, this is THEM bringing balance, they are saving the Galaxy, Ben Solo is back…..or so we thought.

Like every time our heroes did something it backfired, blew up, failed, or simply didn’t go how they wanted.

But in the end- after all that

we got hope back

1- Rey saves the Resistence with Chewie and escapes Crait.

2- Luke saves them by buying time and giving himself in a LEGENDARY act of challenging the ENTIRE first order by himself and simply brushing it off like it’s no biggie.

3- Kylo FAILS in his first act of Supreme Leader in destroying his enemies and has to live with the fact that it was all his own fault.

Hope was revived in the fact that for all those losses, one after another, we learned something. Yoda said it. Failure is the greatest teacher and teachers can hope for their students to take what is taught and become MORE than their predecessors.

Luke passed on what he learned. He learned from his failings, he learned from Yoda, Obi Wan, etc. He passed it all along with the teachings of the original Jedi to Rey (not even REMOTELY close to all that being intentional) and she is now going to be more than him. As Luke was more than Yoda/Obi Wan (who believed Vader had to die, and Anakin was beyond gone.)

Rey is hope. She is that ray of light in the darkness. Leia knew to trust in her because after everything, Luke reminded her- they’ve survived worse and came back strong. Rey can do that with the next gen.

THE BOY AT THE END is proof. Rose gave him the ring, he is the exploited poor masses personified. He is the fans who see these movies, and hear the morals and see the heroes and emulate them. He is those of us who see the sky at night and dream of doing the right thing. He dreams of being that next legend. He knows he isn’t legendary but, if Luke Skywalker can, why not him? If Leia could? Why can’t his friend?

The boy at the end- force pulling the broom is the message of the Last Jedi.

Luke was the Last Jedi for so long, he passed on what he learned and because of that now, a new Jedi will Rise. Rey, along any and all those she inspires to combat the forces of people like Kylo Ren. The man who could have been what Rey is, but because he walked into a dark shadow and let it engulf him, the strength of the dark he drank from rose to meet him- Rey.

He now commands the First Order, his hate fueling his obsession to claim everything.

Rey- feeling lost has everything she needs- to find those who need her to lead them in resistance and rebel, the spark was ignited to light a fire, that WILL burn the first order down. The fire is Kylo Ren, his anger is going to burn everything around him and leave him alone while Rey is there, leading the triumphant return of justice and good to the Galaxy.

In FF Advent Children, Rufus Shinra makes a comment “If that cycle is the very truth of life, then history, too, will inevitably repeat itself. So go on; bring your Jenova's and your Sephiroth's. It won't matter. We'll do as life dictates and stop you every single time.”

This is star wars

it is history repeating itself. But every time someone does what the force dictates. Raises up, and stops it. EVERY. TIME.

The Force is the rhyme in the universe’s poem here. The force let’s the bad rise, the bad grows, destroying, claiming and leaving ruin in it’s wake. Because the darker the night, the brighter the dawn of the next day, when the sun returns, warmth fills the sky and clears the shadows to bring peace and life back to the galaxy.

This wasn’t alll intentionally drawn by the creators obviously but this is what a STAR WARS lover like me drew. This is the surface of what this movie and all the previous ones did for me.

It- like other mediums, some mentioned in this long essay- inspired hope. Hope that even when the worst nightmare claims me, planting my feet firm and igniting my lightsaber to fight back can be done, but its not the main thing I need to do. My main responsibility in face of despair, terrible things and true evil. Is not fight that which comes in hopes of destroying all that I hate in it. No. My job. My mission is to always remember to protect all that I love so it my flourish when the bad passes.

Star Wars teaches us to ensure that we don’t need to win by wiping out things, we simply need to make sure that which threatens us doesn’t consume that makes us good and turns us as putrid and evil as them.

[neuroticfishbish]

Everyone I know is broken-hearted

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Tumblr more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urban person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very best lunches ever. Facebook is surface; Tumblr is subtext, and judging by what I’ve seen, the subtext is aching sadness. I’m not immune to this. I don’t remember ever feeling this miserable and depressed in my life, this sense of futility that makes you wish you’d simply go numb and not care anymore. I think a lot about killing myself these days. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it and this isn’t a cry for help. But I wake up and think: fuck, more of this? Really? How much more? And is it really worth it? In my case, much of it stems from my childhood experiences and the collapse of the many relationships I had. But that’s not really the cause I think that those relationships were bulwarks, charms against the dark I’ve felt growing in this world for a long time now. When I was in love, the world outside didn’t matter so much. But without it, there is nothing keeping the wolf from the door. It's not to say I do not have good or kind people in my life, because I do. More than I deserve. It always used to be like this. Life sucked when I was young and I was unhappy then too. But there was always the sense that it was just a temporary thing, that if I stuck it out eventually the world was going to get better — become awesome, in fact. But here I am, and things aren't getting better I'm just getting older. I became an adolescent at the time Music was ushering in a decade of “slacker” ideology, as the pundits liked to put it. But the reality is that I didn’t know a whole lot of actual slackers in the until my early 20's I did know a lot of people who found themselves disillusioned with the materialism of the 1990s and what we saw as the failed rhetoric of the Sixties generation, who were all about peace and love right until the time they put on suits and ties and figured out how to divide up the world. I knew a lot of people who weren’t very interested in that path. The joke, of course, is that every generation kills the thing they love. The hippies became yuppies; Gen X talked a lot about the revolution, and then went and got themselves some venture capital and started laying into place the oversaturated, paranoid world we live in now. A lot of them tried to tell themselves they were still punk as fuck, but it’s hard to morally reconcile the thing where you listen to Fugazi on the way to your job where you help find new ways to trick people into giving up their data to advertisers. Most people don’t even bother. They just compartmentalize. And then the World Trade Center went down. And all of a sudden calling yourself an “anticapitalist terrorist” was no longer a cool posture to psych yourself up for protest. It became something you might go to jail for — or worse, to one of the Black Camps on some shithole island somewhere. Corporate capitalism became conflated somehow with patriotism. And the idea that the things you own end up defining you became quaint, as ridiculous spoken aloud as “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In fact, it became a positive: if you bought the right laptop, the right smartphone, the right backpack, exciting strangers would want to have sex with you! It’s no wonder that Gen X began seeking the largely mythological stability of their forebearers; to stop fucking around and eating mushrooms at the Rage Against The Machine show, and to try and root yourself. Get a decent car — something you can pass off as utilitarian — and a solid career. Put your babies in Black Flag onesies, but make sure their stroller is more high tech than anything mankind ever took to the Moon, because that wolf is always at the door. And buy yourself a house, because property is always valuable. Even if you don’t have the credit, because there’s this thing called a “subprime mortgage” you can get now! But the world changed again. And kept changing. So now you’ve got this degree that’s worth fuck-all, a house that’s worth more as scrap lumber than as a substantial investment, and you’re either going to lose your job or have to do the work of two people, because there’s a recession on. Except they keep saying the recession ended, so why are you still working twice as hard for the same amount of money? We started two wars, only one of them even marginally justifiable, and thousands and thousands of people died. Some of them were Americans, most of them weren’t. The world hated us again. It’s psychically oppressive to realize you’re the bad guy. Of course, for a lot of the world, America had always been the bad guy…but we didn’t really know that before, because we didn’t have the Internet in our pocket, to be pulled out at every lunch break and before the meal came and when the episode of Scrubs on TV dragged a little, and before bed. We were encouraged to immerse ourselves in the endless flow of information, to become better informed, because knowing more about the world made us better people. And maybe it did, but it also made us haunted people. Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I clicked on a video in my Tumblr feed that showed mutilated children being dragged from the streets of Gaza. And I started sobbing — just sobbing, sitting there in my bed with the covers around my waist, saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” over and over to the empty room. Dead children, torn to bits. And then it was time for…what? Get up, eat my cereal, go about my day? Every day? So you’re haunted, and you’re outraged, and you go on Twitter and you go on Facebook and you change your avatar or your profile picture to a slogan somebody thoughtfully made for you, so that you can show the world that you’re watching, that you care, that it matters. But if you’re at all observant, you begin to realize after a while that it doesn’t matter; that your opinion matters for very little in the world. You voted for Obama, because Obama was about hope and change; except he seems to be mostly about hope and change for rich people, and not about hope at all for the people who are killed by American drones or who are locked away without trial in American internment camps or who are prosecuted because they stand up and tell the truth about their employers. There does seem to be a lot of hope and change in Fort Meade and Langley, though, where the NSA and CIA are given more and more leeway to spy on everyone in the world, including American citizens, not for what they’ve done but what they might do. And the rest of the world? They keep making more dead children. They slaughter each other in the streets of Baghdad and Libya and Gaza and Tel Aviv; they slaughter each other in the hills of Syria; and, increasingly, they slaughter each other in American schools and movie theaters and college campuses. And when you speak up about that — when you write to your Congressperson to say that you believe in, say, stricter control on the purchase of assault weapons, or limiting the rights of corporations to do astonishing environmental damage, or not sending billions of dollars to the kind of people who think it’s funny to launch missiles filled with flechette rounds into the middle of schools where children huddle together — you’re told that, no, you’re the fascist: that people have the right to defend themselves and make money, and that those rights trump your right to not be killed by some fucking lunatic when you’re waiting in line at Chipotle to grab a chicken burrito, and your right to not be able to light your tapwater on fire with a Zippo because of the chemicals in it, or not to end up in a grainy YouTube video while some demented religious fanatic hacks your head off with a rusty bayonet because your country — not you, but who’s counting — is the Great Satan. And the music sucks. Dear God, the music sucks. Witless, vapid bullshit that makes the worst airheaded wannabe profundities of the grunge era look like the collected works of Thomas Locke. Half the songs on the radio aren’t anything more than a looped 808 beat and some dude grunting and occasionally talking about how he likes to fuck bitches in the ass. The other half are grown-ass adults singing about their stunted, adolescent romantic ideals and playing a goddamn washtub while dressed like extras from The Waltons. The music sucks. The movies suck — I mean, they didn’t suck the first time they came out, in the 1980s, but the remakes and gritty reboots and decades-past-their-sell-by-date sequels suck. Indiana Jones is awesome, but nobody needs to see a geriatric Harrison Ford, lured out of retirement by the promise of building another mansion onto his mansion, running around with fucking Shia LeBeouf in the jungle. And besides, we’re all media experts now; we can spot the merchandising nods from the trailer all the way to the final credits. There’s no magic left. It’s just another company figuring out a way to suck the very last molecules of profit out of the things we cherish, because that’s what corporations do. Everything is branded. Even people. People are “personal brands”, despite the fact that, by and large, you can’t figure out what most of them are actually even good for. They just exist to be snarky and post selfies and demand that you buy something, anything, with their picture on it. You actually know who Kim Kardashian is. In an ideal world, you’d be as unaware of her existence as you are of the names of the Chinese kids who made the futurephone or featherweight laptop you’re almost certainly reading this on. In an ideal world, Kim Kardashian would have spent her life getting sport-fucked anonymously by hip-hop stars in some Bel Air mansion, ran a salon, and either died of a coke overdose or Botox poisoning. There is no reason that her face and her life and her tits and her deathless thoughts needed to be foisted upon the world outside of the 90210 ZIP code. Except that somebody figured out that you could make money off showing people the car accident in slow motion, that people would watch that. Sure they will. People love to watch stupid people do stupid things. It makes them feel less stupid. And the Internet. We built this thing — and was part of the generation who took to the new medium like water and have made the majority of our adult lives creating it, to a greater or lesser degree — because we believed it would make things better for everyone. We believed it would give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless, bring us all together, help us to understand and empathize and share with one another. We believed it could tear down the walls. And in a lot of ways it has. But in just as many ways, it has driven us all insane. There’s an old story — I have no idea if it’s true — about monkeys who had the pleasure centers of their brains wired up to a button. Push it, Mr. Monkey, and you have an orgasm. And the monkeys did. They pushed the button and they pushed the button, until they forgot about eating and they forgot about drinking and sleeping and simply fell down and died. What do you do when you first wake up? What do you do as soon as you get into work? After work? Before bed? Hell, some of us wake up in the night and check our feeds, terrified that we’ve missed out on something. We do it because we are given that reward, that stimulus that tells us oooh, a new shiny! It’s the fourteenth Guardians Of The Galaxy trailer, with 200% more Rocket Raccoon! Some fucking null node in Portland made a portrait of every single character from Adventure Time out of bacon and Legos! And, maybe most poisonous, maybe most soul-crushing: somebody said something I don’t like that makes me feel frightened and threatened! It’s time to put on my superhero costume and forward unto battle! Except it doesn’t matter. Because you’re not really changing anybody’s mind. How often does that little skirmish end with anybody changing their mind at all, even a little bit? Or does it just end with one of you invariably either blocking the other or saying something like “You know what, I’m going to stop now, because this is getting out of hand.” Getting out of hand? Everything they told you about how to live in the world when you were a kid is a lie. Education doesn’t matter, not even on paper. Being ethical doesn’t matter. Being a good person doesn’t matter. What matters now is that you’re endlessly capable of the hustle, of bringing in that long green, of being entertaining to enough people that somebody will want to give you money or fuck you or fund your startup. We’re all sharks now; if we stop swimming for just a little too long, we die. We lose followers. We’re lame. We’re not worth funding, or fucking. Because all that matters is the endless churn, the endless parade, the endless cycle of buying and trying to sell and being bought and sold by people who tell you that they’re your friends, man, not like those others. Microsoft is evil and Google is not evil, except when they are, but that’s not really important, and if you decide that maybe you’re tired of being reduced to nothing more than a potential lead for a sales pitch, like something out of a fucking David Mamet play, then you’re a hater and irrelevant and a Luddite. And besides, what would you do with yourself if you weren’t checking Facebook or playing Candy Crush Saga or watching some teenage dumbass smash his genitals on the side of a pool on YouTube? What the fuck would you even do, bro? The comedian Bill Hicks used to do a bit where he invited the advertisers and marketers in his audience to kill themselves. He imagined them turning it into an ad campaign: “Oh, the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a good dollar, Bill’s smart to do that.” He laid out the futility of trying to escape: “I’m just caught in a fucking web,” he’d say. And that’s where we are. You, me, we’re trapped, between being nothing more than consumers, every aspect of our lives quantified and turned into demographic data, or being fucking Amish cavemen drifting into increasing irrelevancy. Because it really does feel like there’s no middle ground anymore, doesn’t it? There’s no way to stay an active, informed citizen of the world without some motherfucker figuring out a way to squirm into your life to try and get a dollar out of you. Only fools expect something for free, and only bigger fools believe they’re anything other than a consumable or a consumer. We didn’t get the William Gibson future where you can live like a stainless steel rat in the walls between the corporate enclaves, tearing at the system from within with your anarchy and your superior knowledge of Unix command lines. Now it’s just pissed off teenagers who blame you because their lives are going to suck a cock and billionaire thugs trying to sell you headphones and handbags, all to a soundtrack of some waterhead muttering “Bubble butt, bubble bubble bubble butt” over and over while a shite beat thumps in the background. I know a lot of people who privately long for an apocalypse of some kind, a breakdown of the ancient Western code, because then they’d either be dead or free. How fucking horrifying is that? But nobody pulls that trigger, because now we’ve all seen what apocalypses look like. We saw Manhattan in 2001 and New Orleans in 2005 and Thailand in 2004 and the Middle East pretty much any given day. Nobody wants to hate, because we’re pummeled with hate every day, by people who are too fucking stupid to understand that the world has passed them by as much as it’s passed by the dude in the Soundgarden t-shirt who still drives around singing along to “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” on his way to his dead-end job. The best lack all conviction, and the people who are full of passionate intensity? Fuck them. We’re all sick of their shit anyway. And that’s where we are, and is it any goddamn wonder at all that the most profitable drugs sold in America for like a decade running have been antipsychotics? The world seems psychotic. I feel like I need to figure this out, like figuring all of this out and finding new ways to live has become the most important thing I could possibly do, not just for myself and the people I love but for the entire human race. I don’t mean me alone — I’m far too self-loathing to have a messiah complex — but I feel like, for me, this is the best use of my time. Because the world is making me crazy and sad and wanting to just put a gun in my mouth, and it’s doing the same thing to a lot of people who shouldn’t have to feel this way. I don’t believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark. I don’t mean in any hateful or exclusionary way, of course. But I think like minds need to pull together and pool our resources and rage against the dying of the light. And I do think rage is a component that’s necessary here: a final fundamental fed-up-ness with the bullshit and an unwillingness to give any more ground to the things that are doing us in. To stop being reasonable. To stop being well-behaved. Not to hate those who are hurting us with their greed and psychopathic self-interest, but to simply stop letting them do it. The best way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to make them irrelevant. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know some truth that I can reveal to everyone. All I can do is hurt, and try to stop hurting, and try to help other people stop hurting. Maybe that’s all any of us can do. But isn’t that something worth devoting yourself to, more than building another retarded app that just puts more nonsense and bullshit into the world? Just finding people to love, and healing each other? I think it is. Until I know more, I’ll just keep holding on. I won’t put the gun in my mouth. Because all of this sadness is worth it if there’s still hope. And I want to still have hope so badly. I still want to believe, in myself, and in you.

[d-s-winchester]

Boston General

(gif credit to the creator)

Part One - Born For This

Master List

Pairing: Misha x Reader Word Count: 2,090 Warnings: language, medical stuff A/N: Here’s the first part of my new Doctor!Misha AU. I’m only posting this part to gauge reactions to see what everyone thinks. I will be waiting to post the next part until I have a few more parts written. Credit to @iwantthedean for all the help with the medical stuff! Title comes from Born For This by Paramore. If you’d like to be tagged let me know! Hope you guys like it! Anyway, feedback for this is crucial! :)

The alarm clock on your bedside table had been going off for over five minutes but you continued to ignore it. In truth you’d been awake for more than an hour, just staring at your ceiling, filled with both nervousness and excitement about your first day of work. It was a miracle you’d gotten any sleep at all the night before, let alone enough to have been awake for an hour already.

You glanced over at your alarm clock and noticed the time. With a sigh you climbed out of bed, knowing you couldn’t lie there any longer or you’d be late, and made your way to the bathroom to shower. Once you were clean you changed into jeans and a t-shirt, knowing you’d be donning your scrubs in the locker room once you reached the hospital, and fashioned your hair into a ponytail before applying some light makeup.

After you were sure you looked presentable enough to go to work you made your way out to your car and headed to the hospital. You parked in the employee parking lot and took a deep breath before making your way through the front doors of Boston General. Your body was practically buzzing with excitement as you watched the hustle and bustle of the hospital happening around you.

With a smile on your face you showed the nurse at the front desk your ID and asked her where the interns’ locker room was. She gave you the directions and you followed them easily. You found your assigned locker quickly and started to change into your scrubs as some of the other interns filed in.

As you pulled your scrub top over your head you heard one of the other interns say something about wondering who the resident you would be with was and you couldn’t help but smile.

“Selene?” you asked turning to face her.

When she saw you her face broke out into a grin. You’d gone through all of med school with Selene and even though you knew she’d been accepted into this intern program she’d been accepted into a few others and you weren’t sure she was going to choose this one.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” you exclaimed, pulling her into a hug even though you knew she wasn’t all that fond of them.

However, because it was you, she wrapped her arms around your torso and hugged you fiercely.

“Well, I weighed out my options and even though the other hospitals were great, they didn’t have you,” she laughed pulling away from you.

You smiled broadly at her as she finished changing into her scrubs.

“Don’t even say it,” she laughed.

“It’s cause I’m your person,” you grinned, “even if you don’t want to admit it.”

“Oh, I’ll admit it,” she smiled, “because I know I’m yours, but that doesn’t mean I need to flaunt it.”

Their conversation was cut short by their resident walking into the locker room. The entire room fell silent as the short brunette stood in front of them, a clipboard in her hand.

“Hello interns,” she smiled, “I’m Dr. Genevieve Padalecki and I am your resident and for the next year you will report to me at the beginning of each shift. Call me Dr. Padalecki. Do not call me Genevieve while we are within the four walls of this hospital. The only other time you can call me Genevieve is if it is accompanied by my last name over a page, otherwise my husband -- one of the attendings in oncology -- will come running and you do not want to waste his time.”

She paused, waiting for all of us to process what she said. Once we all nodded, ensuring we understood her, she continued.

“Good,” she said, “now that that’s all cleared up, we’re going to go through roll call to make sure you all turned up and didn’t chicken out before going on rounds.”

Everyone sat in silence as they waited for their names to be called. Once she was sure everyone was accounted for she instructed them to follow her. Genevieve lead the group on their rounds and finally ended up in the Pediatrics ward. You had always had an interest in peds and being here, seeing all the children who needed help, seemed to only fuel your interest.

Dr. Padalecki lead the group to one of the beds where a young boy was lying against the pillows, wincing and groaning occasionally, while his parents were seated in chairs on the opposite side of the room. Genevieve presented the chart to one of the other interns and asked everyone to review the patient’s symptoms as the chart made its way through the group.

Once both you and Selene looked at the chart it was like something clicked. With everything that was wrong with the patient it was almost obvious what was wrong with him. Selene handed the chart back to Genevieve and she took it before turning to the group of interns.

“Now that you have all had the chance to look over the chart,” she said, “to rule out low acuity illness, what kind of a test would you recommend for Robbie?”

“Ultrasound,” both you and Selene said in unison, not bothering to raise your hands like everyone else.

A smile spread across Genevieve’s lips as she looked at the two of you. Your quick response was impressive to her and she had a feeling the two of you would be her standout interns.

“And why is that Dr. Y/L/N, Dr. Hill?” she asked.

“Because it can easily be done bedside for the comfort of the child,” you answered promptly.

“Exactly,” she smiled.

Genevieve’s focus shifted from her interns to someone else walking into the room. All of the interns turned to look at the door to see who entered the room. Your eyes went wide when you saw the doctor strolling toward the bed. His crisp white lab coat clung to his broad shoulders. He was tall with dark hair and, from what you could see from the small glimpse you’d got, bright blue eyes.

“How’s Robbie doing?” he asked Genevieve, ignoring the group of interns.

“Same as yesterday,” Genevieve replied handing him the chart, “but it’s looking like he’s going to need his surgery today. His fever is spiking.”

The doctor nodded as he perused the chart.

“Dr. Collins,” Genevieve cleared her throat, “these are your interns.”

He looked at the group in front of him and it was like he was noticing them for the first time. He seemed to regard each of them in turn and you may have imagined it, but it seemed like he lingered on you longer than the rest.

“Any of them ready to scrub in for surgery?” he asked.

“It’s their first day,” Genevieve said tentatively.

“And?” he questioned, “I scrubbed in on a surgery my first day.”

Genevieve seemed to consider this as Dr. Collins made his way to the patient’s bedside. He smiled at him and talked to him in hushed tones, trying his best to comfort the child who was both scared and in pain.

Genevieve lead the group of interns into the hallway as Dr. Collins finished up with the patient. Genevieve knew that she had to make a decision about which interns would scrub in before Dr. Collins was finished.

“Pick my interns?” Dr. Collins said as he exited the room.

“It’s not that simple, Misha,” she argued.

“Except it is, Gen,” he pointed out.

“Fine,” she groaned, “Y/L/N and Hill.”

She gestured to the two of you and he nodded.

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

“I have a feeling they’re going to be my best ones,” she smiled.

You tried not to let that go to your head as she looked at both you and Selene. Misha just nodded at Genevieve.

“Good enough for me,” he said, “call in for an OR. I want to get this surgery done as quickly as possible. No need for Robbie to be in pain any longer.”

Genevieve agreed that she would do just that and you watched as Dr. Misha Collins walked off.

A few hours later, once an OR was free, you were standing next to Selene scrubbing down your hands and arms, ready to scrub in for this surgery. You were both nervous and excited. Scrubbing in on a surgery your first day was almost unheard of but you had been chosen by some miracle of God and you were going to roll with it.

Once your gloves and mask were on you followed Selene into the operating room. As excited as you were, seeing the young boy lying on the table had your nerves all over the place. Your excitement was replaced with pure terror and you were doing everything you could to calm yourself down and keep your composure.

It was a simple appendectomy, sure, but if you didn’t keep your cool and do exactly what was needed the child could very well die. You looked at Selene as you took your place next to Dr. Collins at the operating table and from the look in her eye, her mouth covered up by the surgical mask, you knew she was smiling at you. She was trying to reassure you that everything would be fine and you willed yourself to believe her.

The anesthesiologist placed the mask on Robbie’s face and asked him to take a deep breath. He asked him to count down from ten and in mere seconds the child was out like a light. Dr. Collins asked the nurse for a scalpel and made the incision. The surgery had started, whether you were ready for it or not.

“Suction,” Dr. Collins requested.

Before you knew it, he was into the lower left quadrant, and it was time to clamp off and remove the appendix.

“Dr. Y/L/N,” Dr. Collins said. “I'd like you to take over, and we will let Dr. Hill close.”

You thanked him for the opportunity and moved into position. You took the clamp from the surgical tech -- and promptly froze as you looked into the patient’s abdomen. You suddenly had no idea what an appendix looked like.

“Dr. Y/L/N,” Dr. Collins said, “any reason you’re taking so long?”

You didn’t have an answer for him. You were completely frozen, staring at Robbie’s open abdomen like it was the first time you’d ever seen something like that.

“Dr. Y/L/N,” he prompted, “What are you doing?”

It became apparent to Misha that you had no idea what you were doing and he instantly told you to move, to let Selene take over. You waited for Selene to grasp the clamp and once you were sure she had it under control you moved out of the way. In a few minutes the appendix was removed and he was being closed up.

The nurses wheeled him out of the OR as you and the rest of the doctors discarded your gloves and masks into the biohazard bin.

“What the hell happened to you in there?” Dr. Collins shouted, practically cornering you.

“I...I…” you stammered.

“You what?” he asked, his voice rising, “you just decided it was time to relax, to let your mind wander?”

“N--no,” you said, forcing yourself to hold back your tears.

He was in your face now, his blue eyes almost the color of sapphires with how angry he was.

“Then what the hell happened?!” he shouted.

“I...I froze,” you said, amazed you’d actually admitted it.

“Damn right you did,” he said, “and if it were any other circumstance the patient could have died! If it weren’t for Dr. Hill being there to save your ass who knows what would have happened. I could be going to have a very different conversation with Robbie’s parents. Now get the hell out of my OR!”

You nodded and stormed out of the room only letting your tears fall once you reached the locker room. You were thankful, to say the least, that the end of that surgery was the end of your shift. All you needed in that moment was a stiff drink and then your bed. You changed out of your scrubs, back into your clothes, and after grabbing your purse and keys made your way to the bar down the street from the hospital. You were more than ready to drink all the memories of your first day at work away.

[dissertation-preparation]

DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN

Millennials are challenging the traditional notion of work. As they become the largest fraction of the U.S. & U.K. workforce, more and more businesses are struggling with the demands and work ethics of Gen Y employees. If you are struggling to understand their needs and find ways to engage with them, here are eight reasons why you might be failing and think of the whole generation as lazy and non-work driven, while the reality is quite the opposite.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/work/8-reasons-millennials-seem-lazy-work.html

Want to create good habits that stick or break a bad one? That’s the question I answer in today’s video. We can form good habits by simply performing the task each day and placing a big red X on a calendar. 

This is also known as the “don’t break the chain” technique and I go over the psychological reasons it works. I also go over how long it takes to form a habit (avg: 66 days). This trick can help you find success in developing any habit such as waking up early, exercising, or reading. This technique is widely (and falsely) attributed to Jerry Seinfeld.  I learned mid-production that Seinfeld did not invent this technique, apologies in advance. Nonetheless, it's still a good technique! 

This video goes well on the topic of “Millennials”  The 21st century has posted a new question for Millennials. Are we the laziest and most self-absorbed generation?

Lazy or Smart? 

This video made me smile! A Millennial showing his father all the clever innovative thing’s that he does to help him get through the day. Traditionalist (oldies) would see this guy as being lazy and quite inefficient, however, this advert perfectly rips apart the stereotype that all us (youngen’s) are lazy.  I will be looking into this a lot more. This idea of other generations looking down on us Millennials is actually wrong. 

Jerry Seinfield talking about how younger generation’s do not break enough, some say we are lazy, where some would say we are overworked and pushed to the limit. 

Amber Fehrenbacher, chief marketing officer of SuretyBonds, says it this way: "With answers to any possible question in the palm of their hand, in most situations, Millennials tend to take the fastest route. That's not laziness. That's problem-solving."

Mobile and collaborative technologies have enabled work to be streamlined, automated, and outsourced. If more can get done in less time today, then why are we still defining work ethic by time input and tenure? Today's work ethic should be defined by outputs and problem-solving ability.

A very different "work ethic" is needed for swinging a hammer that is needed for machine coding. After all, it's entirely likely that the GE Millennial will create more output writing code for countless machines in one hour than his "grandpappy" would have to swing a single hammer for an entire week. No disrespect--that's just the new reality of work.

"[Millennials] can code and develop apps and algorithms that will change the world. It is time to get over their shortcomings, and get down to 21st-century business," says the CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting, Eliot Burdett.

Accomplishing more work in less time, then leveraging that additional time to solve complex problems, spend time with family, or pursue a side venture is the new calling card of a 21st-century hard worker.

The "poor work ethic" label should now be reserved for those who refuse to retool and relearn for the 21st century of work.

Reasons Millennials Seem Lazy at Work

1. They no longer value the traditional workplace rules

Strict dress code? Fines for being late for 10 minutes? Meetings for the sake of meetings? Millennials no longer deem such things important and often fail to compile with out-dated rules. They will not work for a company where certain things are done because “it’s always been done that way.” This generation has often been called the generation of tinkerers and shortcut-takers. They don’t want to get things done “just because.” They want to get tasks done in the most efficient, least time-consuming way possible and squeeze out the max results.

Next time you think a 20-something employee is just being lazy, have a closer look at his productivity time. He might just have written a simple code to do copy-pasting for him and now enjoys longer lunches while the job is still being done by itself.

2. Work is not everything millennials want in life. 

They would like to have time for their friends, family, hobbies, and other small pleasures and pastimes. They work to live, not live to work. That’s why the concept of lifestyle business gained so much popularity in the last decade among these folks. Millennials want to combine their passion with profit and work long hours on projects they feel passionate about, rather than helping someone else reach their profit benchmark.

In fact, think about this the next time you are nagging a millennial about why they don’t get a real job and how they should stop wasting their time shooting makeup videos or hunting for stuff around flea markets to sell it on Ebay or Etsy: These young and extremely successful entrepreneurs built their business around their lifestyle:

3. Yes, millennials have been bashed as “the entitled generation” too many times. 

Yet the reason for this is that millennials are not seeking a life-long career to pay the bills. They want a job with a purpose and to do something meaningful in life. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, six out of 10 respondents said a sense of purpose was the main reason why they chose to work for a certain company.

On the other hand, most companies don’t provide their young employees with the desired setting as 28 percent of respondents from the same survey admitted they feel that their current employer is making full use of their skills.

If you want to keep your millennial workforce content and productive, your company should focus on empowering workers and explaining to them why they should care, stressing how each team member contributes to the overall success, and praise more individual efforts rather than team accomplishments or managers only.

4. A millennial job seeker is armed with technology and the Internet.

 They can get to know all the tiny details about your company, including reviews from former and current employers, before committing to the job. They no longer want just a desk, fixed-working hours, pension plan, and annual bonuses like other generations did.

They are more attracted by intangible benefits like a friendly work culture, a lack of micromanagement and bureaucracy, sabbaticals, and more, along with some more palpable perks like a cool office space, permission to bring pets to work, or wellness benefits. There are numerous low-cost perks a company can offer employees to keep them content, loyal, and motivated, other than lucrative salary.

5. They are used to being flexible and doing things on the go

Millennials are used to answering emails, making calls, and solving problems on the go. That’s why they don’t feel the need to be anchored to their desk during traditional work hours. Why should anyone spend eight hours in front of the desk when they are already done with their daily plan and can answer a few late emails from the nearby coffee shop?

 They just don’t get why people get paid for simply showing up unless the job requires their physical presence.This generation does not want to repeat the mistakes of their parents who spent over 60 hours per week at work; instead, they want it all — a successful career and the life outside the cubicle. 

Being tech savvy, they have the ability to set up their office anywhere and work at their own flexible hours, while accomplishing even more compared to their peers stuck in the office.

6. They are autonomous

Most of them learned to type and use Google earlier than they started writing properly. Millennials know how and where to find the information they need and often take advantage of free online learning tools out there to gain lacking skills. Besides, they grew up hearing stories about 20-something tech entrepreneurs launching their multi-billion companies from a dorm. These stories help ambitious millennial workers feel like they have the ability to be successful too.

Young executives today don’t want to be micromanaged and preached to; they want to be actively involved in the decision-making process and don’t get why their voice doesn’t count. If your company seeks innovation and the urge to progress and develop further, let them speak and act. Allowing even the most junior person on the team to share an idea about the product can bring huge positive impact.

7. They want transparency

Millennial workers don’t merely nod and do as they are told by the manager unless they see and understand the logic behind the decision. They don’t want to waste their time on things reasoned with “I’m the boss, I know better”. They want to know the “why” behind most important decisions made. .”

 They want to know why important are decisions made. They may not always agree with them, but they’ll appreciate the candidness.

8. They want to learn from experience

Most millennials are rather ambitious and won’t be satisfied with working as a middle manager for the rest of their days. They crave new knowledge and first-hand experience. They are focused on personal growth, and unlike older generations, they don’t think their education is done the day they have graduated from college. In fact, they are often life-long learners. 

They opt for courses and training based on real-life experience, rather than pursuing another degree, certification, or diploma to hang in their office.

Allow your Gen Y workforce to spend time on mastering new skills, watching courses, or listening to podcasts. In fact, encourage them and set up a tuition-reimbursement fund, occasionally invite speakers to your office, and send your employees to training sessions and workshops.

[jdnevins-blog]

Generation Y and Z don’t exist because Gen-X never did

The intersect of Demographics and Tech –  "GENERATION-BRIDGER" To all my fellow social advertisers and anyone else who uses or discusses demographics; if you don’t get this straight, you’re going to miss something significant. It’s only just now occurred to me that Douglas Coupland’s book “Generation-X” (published 1991) pre-dates David Foot’s Book, “Boom, Bust, Echo” (1996). I had the good fortune of reading Foot before I even knew Generation-X existed, which I suppose is what armed me to recognize it as the piece of shit it is (sorry Coupland). In Coupland’s defense, the advantages Foot predicted for my generation (the baby-busters, because we are a small cohort and therefore have less peer competition), have only proven advantages to me now in my 40’s. I imagine it will be a short-lived opportunity, given our collective preoccupation with the millennials / echo-boomers. So, to some extent, Coupland’s designation (Gen-X) had merit. However, the Gen-X label and the cohort it projected its doom over has only confused discussions about demographic data, and worse, is standing in the way of a more meaningful insight. To fully understand what I’m about to explain, first have a look at the following table I put together in Excel based on Foot’s and other collected data (hint: it’s the overlaps that bug me):

  I should quickly point out that Foot’s dates are based on Canadian stats, and that there will be slight variances between national groups, depending on when WWII ended for a given country, and thus when the baby making started booming. This explains the year-out-of-sync for what Google defines as millennials compared to Foot’s Echo Boom. Now have a look at these two statements and see how the overlapping Gen-X green line has confused the lines between cohorts. Statistics Canada does not recognize a traditional Millennials cohort and instead has Generation Z directly follow what it designates as Children of Baby boomers (born 1972–1992). Randstad Canada describes Generation Z as those born between 1995–2014. If you didn’t realize the Y and Z terms stem from that one book (Generation-X), let me summarize it very quickly. Because the baby-boomers are such a large cohort, lived through years of peace and prosperity, and had parents who saved and sacrificed everything for them because they’d experienced war and understood how fragile civil society is… the earliest Boomer generation (the grey line before the green line starts) had a huge advantage, and those at the tail-end (and for a long time after / the green line) were basically screwed because all the jobs, opportunities and money had been sucked up by the mob ahead of them. As a result, many were bitter, lazy and cynical. While this may have been a prevalent sentiment for a time among those at that tail-end of the baby boom (indeed I recall the influence of those young adults while I was still a teen), at best, Gen-X ends where the baby-bust starts and they actually are just a small sub-cohort of the boomers. Consider how old I was when this book describing my generation came out: 17. Of course, I was lazy and cynical. I was a teenager. By the time I was 22, reading “Boom, Bust, Echo”… well, you can understand why I preferred Foot’s empirical description of my generation over Coupland’s judgemental one. Who wants to be considered bitter, lazy and cynical?

Playing ball in the driveway - late 70's And explain to me why today a guy like Gary V., someone very close in age to me, successful, with very similar values and attitudes, is “peacocking around” (his words, not mine), preaching “hustle” to stadiums full of Millennials? Because he’s a Buster, or as I prefer to call it a “Generation-Bridger”. And I believe “Bridgers” like Gary V.  are in a unique position to understand a few things neither the boomers nor millennials do. For the boomers, let me explain the swagger, because I imagine for some of you, these calm, seemingly non-competitive, “I’ve reached such a level of success, now I just want to teach you my secrets” videos are starting to get annoying. As much as Gary V. is inspiring millennials (which he is), he’s also owning them (and me) by smartly investing in data on a huge multi-generational cohort that has spending power. I’ve never met the guy, but I can tell you Gary V. has a huge pixel (sorry, that’s an inside joke many may not fully understand, but I couldn’t resist). The Millennials are just starting to hit the wall of reality their parents tried so hard to shelter them from. I commend Gary V. for awakening what may prove to be a sleeper-cell of productivity and enterprise. Their advantage is time. Mine is experience. And that experience is in a sweet-spot between understanding life with and without modern technology, something many boomers and millennials struggle with for different reasons, and another one of my reasons for the “Generation-Bridger” label (yes, I realize this won’t catch on). Getting back to Gen-XYZ, my point is simply that Generation-X (the book) projects a long, dour, and ubiquitous shadow over a generational cohort, and its entrance into common parlance has confused a lot of discussions about demographic targeting. It was fiction really, loosely derived from a more nuanced demographic reality. As much as current events and trends can be useful data-points, understanding significant events will produce more accurate date separators and more meaningful insights. Let me give you an example, which is why I put myself and my parents on this chart. You see how my parents were born one year before the baby-boom starts? Let me explain (mostly for millennials) what most of my fellow busters and boomers already know. You see, while the baby-boomers were being hippies, launching their significant movements (feminism, civil rights, the sexual revolution etc.), my pre-boomer parent’s generation had already grown-up, moved off-campus and were starting families of their own. I would argue that the majority of them still hold on to the traditional values of their parent’s generation. As you would expect, growing up, roughly half my peers had pre-boomer parents and half had post-boomer parents. Collectively we all learned the difference and what to expect when we visited each other’s homes depending on whether our parents were hippies in the 60’s (again bringing me to “Generation-Bridger”). It’s a fault-line that continues to permeate and divide within generational groupings. There are MANY correlations between that single event (the end of WWII), that continue to reflect themselves culturally. In other words, as much as I may be in a small cohort of Baby-Busters, that cohort can be subdivided by that single parental generation distinction. So, a peer who had hippy parents may parent their kids differently than I with pre-boomer parents. It may even explain why I have an issue with these blurred distinctions in the first place, just as I do other new political labels which we won’t discuss here. My point is simply this: The Baby-Bust generation is in a unique position and there is much value in understanding their particular insights. They are better described as “Generation-Bridgers”. As “Bridgers” they’re young enough to have grown up with technology and are typically comfortable adapting as it changes. And they have insights into the two generations that preceded them closely- the Boomers, and the Pre-Boomers because as a cohort, they were raised in some cases by parents from the earlier generation, and in some cases the latter one.  Through their own friends, they had immediate exposure to both parental modes.  This experience makes it easier for them to relate and interact with other demographic groupings than subsequent cohorts. If you’re interested, I recommend you read “Boom, Bust, Echo”. It’s a tool; a lens through which you can analyze cohort attitudes and how they correlate with significant sociological events and attitudes. If you don’t care, can we at least drop the X, Y, Z labels? References: https://www.muttart.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Demographics-%E2%80%93-Discovering-our-Destiny-Jim-Campbell-1998-.pdf, Wikipedia, Google

Read the full article