#but it’s such a big complex thing that I know his sympathy would also come with a hearty helping of judgement

[sharkieboi]

had a call with my dad earlier about money/loan stuff which is already very stressful for me cause Money and especially cause the loan person wasn’t being straightforward so we had to ask a lot of clarifying questions to get a straight answer

and then when they were off the line dad tried to ask me how my personal life is going and this week has just been such a unique shit show and literally an hour before he called I had been telling my therapist that this issue was something I don’t feel like I can tell my parents about

and I was welling up with tears over the phone trying to tell him everything was okay and he got worried like “are you sure you’re okay? it sounds like you’re about to cry?” and I just managed to eek out that it was some kind of thing with a “friend I used to work with” and that everything was okay but that either way I wasn’t ready to talk with him about it. and now I know I’ve definitely just made him more worried for me and not less worried.

I just have this pit in my chest right now and it was good to talk with my doctor and address it’s presence but i’m just. empty. i feel helpless and i need a fucking hug.

[buddieism]

tommy's character, bucktommy's inherent flaws, tommy & eddie as mirrors and buddie endgame; a (lengthy) meta analysis

honestly, what's really confirmed my feelings about tommy (and the imminent bucktommy bones -> buddie pipeline) is that there have now been multiple opportunities for the writers to actually make tommy a likeable/serious love interest for buck and they just…haven’t. because while fans are naturally going to overanalyse every little thing, the vast majority of the show's audience are regular viewers who consume the show at face value and don't think twice about it -- so if tommy was intended to be buck's endgame or anything remotely close to it, they'd absolutely want to make the most of his (very limited) screen time to present him in the best light they could. think about karen, the only non-main LI, and how she was introduced to us -- despite hen's cheating, we can see how dedicated karen and hen are to each other and how karen is a complex character in her own right who is immediately easy to root for and love.

comparatively, when we look at tommy's s7 appearances and specifically his interactions with buck, it becomes abundantly clear that there isn't really much depth to their relationship at all. which is fine! it's just... you know. fine. let's get into it.

following the cruise arc, we watch tommy through buck's eyes in 7x04 where he's basically wining and dining eddie -- flying him to vegas, getting them front row tickets to a fight, sparring with him in muay thai, playing pick up basketball with him -- tommy and eddie are so similar (which we'll come back to later), and we even get that line from eddie about how well they "click." as the audience, we are being subconsciously told to align tommy and eddie together -- and furthermore, we are told that tommy can easily make grand gestures when he wants to. now let's compare that to the bucktommy moments of the season.

bucktommy's first date: tommy makes a shady comment that would have outed buck if eddie or marisol caught onto it and then proceeds to abandon him on the sidewalk because he thinks buck isn't "ready" for a relationship with a man

i'll be objective here -- i understand in a show like 911 there's always going to be "unnecessary" relationship conflict for the sake of drama and i can also see how buck trying to play off their date as platonic to eddie might have put a bad taste in tommy's mouth. but we hear from tommy himself that he struggled with being open about his sexuality when he was at the 118 so he could have absolutely extended some sympathy towards buck for not wanting to come out on the spot to his best friend -- especially when tommy fully knows how important of a role eddie plays in buck's life. at the very least, he didn't have to leave buck alone on the curb. this isn't me trying to woobify buck because yeah, he's a grown man, he's fine -- but that doesn't mean it still isn't a bit of an asshole move.

the bachelor party: tommy doesn't dress up for the theme and dismisses buck when he's clearly disappointed about him doing so

tommy showing zero interest for the bachelor party buck planned is practically the writers waving a massive red flag in front of the camera -- him having to leave because he's on call is an understandable 'conflict' plot point but why not have him show up in an 80s themed outfit? it wouldn't have changed anything except that he and buck would have had a positive interaction; buck would have been happy that tommy cared enough to make that small gesture and it could have been a cute way to establish their relationship as one built on mutual effort. (btw, the bucktommy hospital kiss could be seen as a big gesture, sure -- but from a more practical viewpoint knowing how rushed this season had to be, it was also just an easy way for buck to "come out" to the rest of the 118 without having to spend too much episode airtime on it.)

the medal ceremony: tommy says 'enjoy it while it lasts' (which, LOL) and also is not shown reacting to buck receiving his medal. he also has a conversation with henren in a deleted scene.

again, i'm going to try to give tommy the benefit of the doubt -- i'm not saying he has to be sunshine and rainbows all the time and i have no issue with a character having a snarky/sarcastic side. but when his screentime is so minimal, every line of dialogue matters. and it's pretty damning that the writers aren't taking those few chances to give us something to appreciate about him. with buck, tommy makes a dismissive comment for literally zero reason, and with hen and karen, who are rightfully looking out for their friend, tommy refuses to take them seriously at all.

bucktommy's dinner in the finale: buck displays some vulnerability about losing bobby, and tommy... really doesn't seem to care.

honestly i refuse to rewatch this part of the ep because it really icks me out on another level but iirc: buck says he's glad bobby's okay because bobby is like the father he never had -> tommy says "your father's alive" -> something something joke about daddy issues. ignoring #that joke entirely, it's really insane to me that they have tommy even acknowledge the nuclear bomb that is buck's relationship with his parents. yes, we had a bit of a ham-fisted 'redemption arc' in s6 but that doesn't negate the buckley parents being absolutely heinous and the fact that buck verbalises how bobby played the role of the father figure because philip didn't -- all for tommy to basically deny that to his face -- is absurd. tommy has expressed on multiple occasions that he's jealous of the 118 family bond, so this line is just... very interesting to me.

now, let's recap all these events and bring eddie back into the mix!

post-bucktommy's first date, buck is more torn up about the fact that he lied to eddie than the actual date to the point that he has to vent to maddie about it. he then comes out to eddie, who is incredibly supportive (and oliver and ryan make some very curious acting choices indeed). eddie is reiterated as one of buck's most significant relationships.

pre-bachelor party, eddie is the one to suggest he and buck dress in matching (queer-coded) costumes. he then stays by buck's side at the party when everyone else leaves and although we'll never get to see it (tim minear i'm inside your walls👹), they sing an absurdly romantic karaoke song together. eddie is reiterated as one of buck's most significant relationships.

during the medal ceremony, when the camera pans to each member of the 118's love interest/family, it is eddie we are shown smiling at buck, not tommy. this is especially interesting considering we get buck reacting to tommy. i honestly can't get over how a reciprocated tommy reaction would have been an easy yet significant moment to cement bucktommy as a relationship, but they gave us eddie's instead (with chris in the background and marisol conveniently obscured, mind you). eddie is reiterated as one of buck's most significant relationships.

in the final episode, when eddie is experiencing his personal worst nightmare, buck is the one at eddie's side every step of the way. buck talks to christopher, buck reassures eddie (without judgement), and it's made clear that buck will be there for eddie, whatever he needs.

at every possible opportunity, we the audience are being implicitly told that eddie is buck's person. he is his place of support (buck having his more vulnerable coming out scene with eddie rather than his sister); he has buck's back (the bachelor party); he is his family (medal ceremony reaction), and ultimately, this goes both ways (finale).

some other things worth noting: when buck has his coming out scene with maddie, she tells him he's confused about his feelings in a way that seems to indicate she's talking about his feelings towards eddie ("if you there's something you need to tell eddie, you will"). in bobby's conversation with buck in the firehouse, he's verbally supportive of tommy and even asks if buck is going to see him, but buck goes to eddie's house instead. these were deliberate choices made by the writers; eddie has been consistently intertwined in bucktommy's relationship both overtly and subtextually throughout the entirety of s7. and let's not even get into the whole 'evan' thing, because that could be a whole other post in itself.

from the first moment we start to learn about tommy's character (beyond his... coloured past), we find out that he and eddie are practically mirrors. why not make tommy and buck share similar interests? why not give them something to bond over? why present tommy and eddie as almost identical in every way? because tommy is a placeholder for eddie. buck's initial bisexuality journey can't happen with eddie when eddie still hasn't come to terms with his own feelings. so, in the meantime, tommy is the "safe" choice in buck's mind because buck has nothing to lose with tommy whereas he's got everything to lose with eddie. buck can't confront what he truly wants yet because the risk factor is far greater and it's been repeatedly asserted that buck has an issue with people in his life leaving -- he would never do anything to jeopardise his relationship with eddie.

but ultimately (and in my opinion, fairly soon), we are going to get that moment where it "clicks" for buck and he realises that it is eddie he has feelings for. and when that happens, there's basically only one way it can go. we know buck can't keep secrets from eddie; we know eddie is going into s8 feeling "isolated"; we know tim loves making his characters suffer before they can be happy. in my mind, the narrative is going to go something like this: buck feelings realisation -> pining buck era -> eddie healing journey and a reevaluation of what buck means to him -> some insane life-threatening situation that really doubles down on how buck and eddie care more about each other than anyone else because it is 9-1-1 at the end of the day -> love confession induced by their dramatic near-death experience -> #BUDDIE_CANON !

when we factor in how there was a possibility of eddie having the sexuality arc this season instead, how tim has said buddie is one of his favourite dynamics of the show, and how supportive both oliver and ryan are of the ship, i really can't see how everything isn't building to buddie endgame. every other main pairing of the show has had seasons of development, of conflict, of bonding moments. buck and eddie have gone through that with each other time and time over (tsunami/lawsuit/shooting arc etc), which is why every other random love interest that's introduced for either of them falls flat in comparison. they quite literally are exactly what the other person needs; buck wants the stability of a home, a family, and unconditional love; eddie wants someone he can trust, a caretaker for his son but also a partner. buddie is the ship the audience wants to root for, because we know they work! now that we have canonically bisexual buck and eddie finally having to face his complicated feelings about losing shannon, buddie isn't just the logical conclusion -- it's the inevitable one.

[nortsauce]

HERE COMES NORT, YAPPING ABOUT FANDOMS THAT I’M NOT EVEN IN!

(And i’ll be typing the rest here because there are too many slides so read bellow)

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️

My LONG ASS rant on how MHA (among other things) fails to present its ab*se victims in a good way,

Starring the todoroki family

So, i know literally no one cares but i feel like it needed to be said: but MHA has a BIG issue with victims of abuse being treated kinda shittily, to making whole arcs about their abusers.

This isn’t a HUGE thing, as the lack of sympathy for Hawk’s abusers was definitely there, but they still were portrayed in a semi-sympathetic light. This is not the main focus however.

I’m sure many could go on and on about Bakugou and Midoriya’s relationship, but thats not what i’m focusing on.

I’m focusing on the most OVERLOOKED and ABHORRENTLY handled dynamic of the Todoroki family

I will be going over each of the characters and why they suck in some way, but as a whole i have to talk about this: Each one of the characters of the family are all victims of abuse in some way, and represent the different ways that trauma affects the victim, i understand that.

All in all, they do a good job of portraying the different ways in which the people handle abuse,

Endeavor being one who never dealt with his past egotistical superiority complex and threw his baggage onto his family/children to live vicariously

Rei being the one who is emotionally/physically damaged to the point of a mental break

Touya being the ex-golden child, and the one who continued the cycle of violence (and misogyny but thats another topic for another paper)

Fuyumi being the one who holds onto an idealized version of a family that possibly only existed in her dreams, being codependent and longing/working to get those “happy times” back with her family, clinging onto smth that was possibly never there

Natsuo being the one who is (justifiably) angry at his abusers, cuts his family off and goes to pursue his own life/dreams

and finally shoto

the one who realizes his role as the golden child is only for his parents to live vicariously, breaks his cycle and is trying to figure out who he is.

These are all great representations of how people cope/handle trauma, and i believe that was on purpose, considering that it also speaks on abuse of children on baselines of being in a famous family.

However, certain aspects are clearly not handled properly; allow me to explain.

Shoto, the youngest of the family, is often seen as the architect of the abuse, as the family was actually quite “fine-living” (i’ll come back to this) before shoto was born.

There were obviously cracks in their family from the beginning, Touya being the golden child despite not being able to physically handle his own power without hurting himself (an allegory i’ll discuss), the fact that Enji (endeavor) basically bought his way into marrying Rei, and of course enji’s complex of being less than All-might.

However, many characters seem to blame the birth of Shoto for breaking the camel’s back, and starting the domestic violence that had already threatened to spill through.

It’s shown through the anime that shoto has a kind heart and never liked enji, due to the fact that he would harm him, his siblings, and his mother,

but for being the tritagonist of this show, we never get to see how he really feels. In all of this, perhaps we could see him feeling guilt for being the reason his family is broken, the possible resentment yet dependency he has for his father, the thoughts on how he feels conflicted yet guilty about his mother and continues to blame himself.

Its interesting how he never stops blaming his father, but regardless we only get his apathetic views on his father and no one else. Its saddening to see the sideline of the victim of abuse while his abuser gets a whole arc. But i’m not there yet.

Moving on we have Natsuo and Fuyumi. I grouped them together because they both have opposite ways of dealing with their trauma, as Aforementioned: Natsuo tries to cut all ties while Fuyumi tries to be a “normal” family with her remaining members.

Both of them have valid ways to why they act this way, and its tragic, however, the way they deal with their youngest sibling, shoto, is disheartening to say the least.

Both of them understand how Shoto was physically abused since he was 5, and neglect to form any sort of connection with him despite his better efforts in natsuo’s case, using him as leverage against his father and nothing more, while in fuyumi’s case, basically presents him in her fantastical version of him in their fantastical “perfect” family life, causing him to have multiple meetings with his abuser and forcing him to relive the trauma so she can have peace of mind.

In hindsight, this is all interesting heavy topics to explore in a character, and i was honestly curious to see how it would be handled

however it all faltered as soon as I saw the hospital scene.

SPOILERS:

After Dabi’s Dance, the todoroki family comes to visit Shoto and Endeavor in the hospital, both of whom are heavily bandaged and bed-ridden.

Despite this all, Rei, Fuyumi, and Natsuo force todoroki, who is burnt and recovering his voice, to get up and walk over to his father’s ward to speak to him.

Shoto, despite being unable to form full sentences, makes it FULLY CLEAR he does not want to be there, by closing the door to his ward, and attempting to leave. Despite his clear efforts, his family makes him go in to talk to him.

this 16 year old boy being forced out of RECOVERING, fully bandaged and barely able to talk, forced to visit his abuser to hear him cry about not being able to fight his own son, depsite also being his son and physically harmed by him since childhood.

In my opinion that wasn’t a good move on any of the family’s part.

Rei is a difficult subject to discuss. She is clearly a victim and has been for. while. She is mentally distant after being harmed for so long and spent time in a psyche-ward to handle herself.

Saying that she was a bad mother would be too far in my opinion, as she did her best to provide a nice life for her kids as well as defend them from her husband.

Not much is said about her, but from what we can tell she loved her kids very much, until the abuse started.

I feel the blame for shoto began with her, not being able to face her own son after the “death” of her first and the fact that his face reminded her of the abuse she’s faced from endeavor.

Her character is honestly an interesting one, but she is not safe from my scrutiny of the hospital scene. She was very brave for facing her abuser like this, however, she did not have to drag her bedridden youngest into the fray.

She is the DIRECT reason shoto has a scar on her face, (indirectly endeavor’s fault)

But i will never blame her for the abuse she faced for her children, by her husband and to an extent, her own son touya, which leads me into my next point

SPOILERS

Touya, aka Dabi, is the “Late” eldest brother who was originally Endeavor’s ticket into living vicariously to defeat all-might and be the number 1 hero.

I could go into the psychology of his character but he is ultimately very interesting. In all honesty the way he is presented as being the consequences of endeavor’s actions is palpable and honestly quite raw. At a young age, he was handling the pressure of being his father’s perfect creation, and the fame and fortune that followed as he sought his father’s approval. Soon, his quirk began to burn him every time he used it, a fact that endeavor ignored to pursue his goal. Touya’s power became self-harm at some point, an allegory for his disregard for his own life and well-being for his father’s dream which ultimately (literally) exploded on itself.

Touya’s story is interesting, from his abuse causing him to act like his father craving his approval, which lead him to act put against his mother and shoto, while laying his baggage onto his younger siblings, to losing his mind and realizing that he wanted his father dead and continuing the cycle of abuse further.

This is all a deep and interesting way to look at abuse and how the abused may become an abuser, HOWEVER.

MY critique here, is how sidelined his whole arc is, as his story is more portrayed of Endeavor’s past coming to haunt him, all for the watcher to sympathize with endeavor rather than understand how the abuse endeavor put onto touya made dabi. This whole arc was framed to be sympathetic towards endeavor, and to fear Dabi. Don’t even get me started on how Shoto’s feelings meant nothing in this arc, as well as being immediately cut off by a surprise cameo of a character that possibly discredited Dabi’s expose video on his abuser.

Finally, we get to talk about the elephant in the room: Enji Todoroki, endeavor himself.

What is there not to say about this man.

I feel I should start eith the obvious:

The forgiveness/sympathy arc for endeavor was quite possibly the worst thing to ever happen in the anime, and this is not subjective.

The whole arc is based around how Endeavor is a victim of his own mind and is trying his hardest to make up for being a terrible person.

Personally, i love to see character arcs of villains becoming a better person, but thats the very thing: Endeavor is trying to ask for forgiveness from his family, who he abused for 15 YEARS. This is no exaggeration as Shoto is now 16, and his cracks started forming as soon as he was born.

Endeavor had illegally married a woman that he basically bought his way into,

was illegally “breeding” (eugh) for quirk benefits,

Treated one of his son’s like a vicarious version of himself

Physically abused his son (age 5+) his wife, and verbally abused the rest of his children

isolated his son

treated his son like a weapon

and finally felt too prideful for any sort of meaningful apology.

This all adds up to a character who only felt sorry for his actions after the consequences started hitting him in the face, as he only felt remorseful when Shoto refused to be associated with him.

Now, some of you may be thinking: “A lot of characters are forgiven for more, why would he be the exception? It’s fictional why do you care?”

There are several reasons to why I care but i’ll speak in terms of framing for now. This show is highly influential to not only kids (as it is a KIDS SHOW) but to adults as well. May i direct your attention to the man who saved a woman from a murderous ex-boyfriend by blocking his machete hits all because My Hero Academia inspired him to take action and be a hero?

Or how about a murder that took place because the accused was inspired by an invader zim episode (the dark harvest)

Whether you like it or not, fiction HAS an affect on reality. Yes, we can determine what is real and what is fake, but you cannot deny that a lot of what media we consume helps us be who we are.

If the show promotes more sympathy towards an abuser than their victims, then people may find themselves sympathizing real world abusers over the voices of victims.

I wont speak on delicate subjects but I can already see affects of this happening, as people rally to defend famous people accused of being abusers rather than listen and provide support to the alleged victims.

In conclusion, These topics are definitely not easy to write, and I, for one, am NO expert and my word should not be used as gospel truth or a guideline on how to write these characters.

This is all simply my opinion on how the bias towards abusers in the show leads for the message to be skewed and marred in action.

I understand that no one is perfect, but if we only reward and sympathize with those who only seek redemption after they face scrutiny, then we lose the meaning of what makes someone worthy of forgiveness.

These topics are deep and interesting, but the way they are handled in this show is simply bad writing.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk and again: no shade towards the writers. Just critiques!

[absolutebl]

This week in BL - Gay Boy Turf Wars Galore!

Also, ALL the guest couples: TutorYim & MacNat showed up in Korea. Korea also reused the Love Class pair. And Wayne Song & Huang Chun Chih (H3:MODC) popped up AGAIN. (To be fair, when does Wayne not show up in a Taiwanese BL?)

Entirely subjective yadda yadda. Organized by favs in each category. No numbered lists anymore, tumblr be buggn'.

Aug 2023 Wk 4

Ongoing Series - Thai

Laws of Attraction (Sat iQIYI) 7 of 8 - Plot reveals galore + all the penultimate tension we could want. (How many different kinds of smiles does Film have in his arsenal?) OMG I LOVE the unhinged idiot bloody tattooed ex bf - intro music and all. He is my precious psycho-bunny-snookums. Also Tinn, baby-boy, communicating about your honest feelings in a BL? What madness is this? I sense doom incoming. Smart Chan, always tell him he’s better in bed than your ex. The sides getting caught! Noooooo. I mean we knew it would happen but still noooooooo! 

I Feel You Linger in the Air (Sat YT) ep 2 of 12 - I like the surreal slip-stream dream-sequence openings. Is it a cerebral examination of temporal paradox or just designed to creep us out? The pace has picked up a bit and I'm delighted that external threat, stressors, and conflict are driving this plot. Refreshing. I love historicals - every touch and action can have such lingering significance, it’s very elegant. Thai BLs can often feel clumsy but not this one. I’m really enjoying it. 

Dangerous Romance (Fri YT) ep 2 of 12 - Sailom is great. I love a smartass who’s actually really smart, reminds me of Bai Luo Yin in Addicted. (The real Addicted.) Never a bad thing. Kang is nasty bit of business, I look forward to his redemption arc. I love his grandma. (BL is giving good grandma right now.) Nicely executed narrative twist into sympathy too: rich kid sees how rough life really is. The complexity of character depth needed for this script makes me so happy it's Perth & Chimon, they both have such expressive nuanced faces.

I do keep wanting to rewatch LBC tho. 

Only Friends (Sat YT) ep 3 of 10 - It remains a blast. Boston is king of red flags, cutting down Ray because he is the easiest punching bag? Going after his friend's bf just to prove he can? No thank you. I know Ray is lovely when he’s soft but danger zone, Sand. Be careful upon entering a minefield, every little step forward may cause an explosion. I don’t think being master of snark is gonna help you avoid getting blown up.

Sand is the one I feel the worst for - bi guy strays into cesspit of gay toxicity. He ain’t gonna make it out alive.  

Hidden Agenda (Sun GMMTV YouTube) ep 7 of 10 - The boyfriends date ep! Zo’s past explains a lot about his behavior. Flirty Zo is v dangerous to all our hearts. Nice kiss. Poor Joke. Meanwhile, the side couple gave good kiss too! However, why is Title playing the bad guy again? Did GMMTV bring him in just to be resident jerk face in all their BL? Makes me sad.

Be Mine Super Star (Mon Viki) ep 8 of 12 - This should be a 8 or 10 ep show, 12 is too many. I think I just don’t like the lead couple's character dynamic and personalities. (No shade on JaFirst.) Side couple went startlingly high heat allasudden. And while their sex scene was good, I wish Daddy and the Hot Doc were being given a lot more script, screen time, and character dev. Sigh. I guess I just wish they were the mains and the others were the sides.

Can't have everything, I suppose.  

Wedding Plan (Wed YT & iQIYI) ep 6 of 7 - Nuea is a saint and next week everything comes to a head (that didn’t already get head this episode). Trash watch here!

Love in Translation (Sat iQIYI) ep 2 of 10 - The side couple is everything. They are so cute and my favorite trope. Plus hugs with neck kisses! I love big brother using his adorable boyfriend to try and help his annoying little brother’s business. It’s just perfect. Unfortunately, that annoying little brother, is too fucking annoying. I remain largely unable to watch the main story arc. 

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) 1 of 24 eps - Sampler pack BL, 12 pairs, each pair gets 2 eps, so this show will run all the way into 2024.

First installment is Casanova Begins. Dead boy wakes up in his enemy’s body, 2 years after his own death. Has to make things right with the boyfriend who thinks he was abandoned. Everyone has secrets. No one can be trusted. And the dead kid can never tell anyone who he really is. It’s … different? Unique take on the My Ghost Boyfriend trope.

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Jun & Jun (Korea Thur Viki) ep 6 of 8 - Random moment of TutorYim. Hi cuties. Simon is my favorite, I love him and his flirty irreverent ways.

Who does he actually like?

Or is he just flirting with everyone?

Can he have a crush on anyone but himself?

He’s a house cat among the pigeons. Clearly wouldn't know what to do with the bird if he managed to catch it. Or would he?

The 4 boys dodging around each other and re-shuffling is so funny. I can’t tell you how delighted this show makes me. I do feel sorry for Lee Jun, he’s just the toy everyone wants to play with. I understand his frustration, do any of them really want him or is it all because the others are interested? Kiss! Yay! Good kiss! Even more yay! 

Stay By My Side (Taiwan Fri Gaga) ep 9 of 10 - Poor baby doesn’t think he’s good enough and is holding JC back. They are THE CUTEST BOYFRIENDS. It hurts. The sappy. 

Kisseki: Dear to Me (Taiwan Tues Viki & iQIYI) eps 1-2 of 13(?) - From screenwriter Lin Pei Yu (We Best Love, H3: Trapped) formerly known as Miracle, features a student doctor forced to take care of a gangster. I love the premise and like the writer. This one could be sad. Never forget Taiwan will go there.

Shall we get tucked in?

Gay boy turf wars! Main couple is cute. Sunshine gangster (turns out to be a sweetie who cooks) meets broken brilliant tsundere student who wants to be a doctor. Side couple is the leader of the gang and his rabid Pet. Also, all praise the guest couple de jour (baddies). Nice to see you 2... again. All actors are clearly having a blast with this script.

Triggers for knife play, child abuse, lingering trauma. 

Love Class Season 2 (Korea Fri Viki) eps 5-6 of 10 - Aw guest couple from Love Class original, that is very sweet. The tutor and returning student, aka couple 3, are the best. So funny. But the whole thing remains engaging in a messy way.

Why R U? (Korea Wed iQIYI) eps 1-2 of 8 - Oh, it’s very odd. Certainly a lot more comprehensible if you've already watched the Thai version. As with that version, I still dislike the SaifahZon couple and love the FighterTutor couple. And once again I hate the weird IRL shipping sister. HATE HER. I’m not mad at the "Man who Fell into the World of BL" overtones but I wish they went at it more intentionally. (They’re not using NPC the way I would, are they? Cause that’s hella cruel.) MaxNat are fun. I love that Fighter went to his girlfriend's birthday party, didn’t even say hi to her, picked up her drunk bestie, and took him home.

This show is WILD. It’s very Korea tries to do a Thai BL. And, I gotta say, I kind of like the absurdity of the whole scheme. Do I think it will ultimately "work" as a stand alone piece? No. But as a very odd kind of parody? Sure.

Minato's Laundromat Season 2 AKA Minato Shouji Coin Laundry Season 2 (Japan Thu Gaga) ep 7 of 12 - Truth always comes out in hot springs. It's a rule of life. Coming clean is coming clean, I suppose. Still, moving very slowly for me and I need sake to get through this season. It's certainly suffering from sophomore slump.

Stay Still (Hong Kong Tues YouTube) ep 4 of 5 - Sad episode is sad. 

In case you missed it

My Personal Weatherman AKA Taikan Yoho (Japan Sat Gaga) ep 3 of 8 - didn't air this week

Dinosaur Love (Sun iQIYI) ep 9 of 10 eps - Didn’t drop this week? MDL thinks it should have. Everyone is confused. But also… who cares? 

Low Frequency (Thai iQIYI) Finished it's run - NO SINGING as flirty boyfriends they very cute actually, but this final ep was V E R Y slow.

All in all this was not a great show. Classic pulp with an interesting twist on “ghost boyfriend investigates his own not-murder” but ultimately not very good in any arena. 6/10 Only if you have nothing better to do. 

Sing My Crush (Korea iQIYI) Finished it's rerun

This a cute coming of age drama around music and 2 kinds of self acceptance and actualization journeys. This was basically Korea’s version of About Youth, and was perhaps a bit too soft and ungrounded by comparison, like a marshmallow sculpture. Sweet but somewhat lacking in discernible flavor. Inoffensively unmemorable. 8/10 RECOMMENDED especially if you enjoy KBL's style

8/24 Man Suang (Thailand movie, domestic cinema release) - historical drama about Thai burlesque with KP’s MileApo. Do I know where to get it? Nope. Do I care? Nope.

Next Week Looks Like This:

Coming September

I have 4 on my radar:

9/2 Naughty Babe (Thailand Sat ????) - MaxNat back on our screens. We think iQIYI but aren't confident.

9/15 You Are Mine (Taiwan ????) - it's taking over from Stay By My Side so likely Gaga. Secretary has to deal with grumpy boss.

9/26 I Cannot Reach You AKA I Can't Reach You AKA Kimi ni wa Todokanai (Japan ????) - Adapted from the manga, childhood best friends: The cool, smart one who’s good at everything, and his average, dorky friend who struggles. Always by the other’s side, but not together in the way they truly want to be. No matter how hard they try, their hearts cannot reach each other.

9/27 Absolute Zero (Thai iQIYI) - from 2021, Studio Wabi Sabi and New Siwaj finally bring us this “time loop to prevent tragedy” romance. We don’t always get HEAs from them, so I'm on my guard.

9/?? Venus in the Sky (Thai iQIYI) 10 eps - ????

2023 forthcoming BL master post (see comments, some are inaccurate, NOT KEPT UPDATED).

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

No you aren't, Lom. You don't even know what that means. (Wedding Plan)

Minato comes out to the best person.

Trope spotlight! (Low Frequency)

I Fell You Linger in the Air

So true. (Only Friends)

I love them so much, as @heretherebedork would put it, Tiny Idiots!

(Last week) 

Gotta say I am hating this new UI so much I'm not bothering to tag with shows. We shall see what that does for ROI.

[tinky-dinky]

I don't go to 1D (I was cursed with an ailment called good taste), but what's the motivation for falsely accusing someone? Like I know it's attention, but when you falsely, or even truly accuse someone famous enough you primarily get negative attention. That's honestly part of why I haven't made a public statement or legal action against my own abusers (they aren't famous, but they're well liked enough in my work circles that it would be a reputational blow), and even the (ex-)friends I've talked to about it think I'm lying because of cultural differences in how our systems work.

I guess I also don't think being an abuser is an inherent part of a person's character. It's more something you do. And with a lot of bad things you do, it can come about from being in a super screwy headspace. Maybe it's naive of me, but I think it could have even been reconciled, if the effort was put in somewhere. I definitely think what happened to Liam should not have ended like it did, and seeing people celebrate it is a little gruesome and punitive.

I'm no expert, let me just say that first.

But I know there's multiple reasons for making false accusations.

The one I'm most familiar with is spite. My mother spent half my childhood lying to me about my dad, claiming he did all sorts of horrible stuff. He didn't; my mother is an emotionally abusive narcissist with a victim complex. She kicked him out (for the third time) but instead of begging her to let him come back like he did the previous two times, he chose to move on. He met a lovely woman and they've been together for 20 years. My mother is still bitter and spiteful over it and still tells anyone who will listen that my dad was awful to her.

Money and attention are big motivators. I disagree with you in that accusers, especially pretty white female accusers, get a lot of positive attention as well as negative attention. Amber Heard got six years of sympathy and support from both the media and social media, and despite being thoroughly exposed as a lying abuser, still gets a fair amount of sympathy and support now.

She also managed to get a lot of money for her false claims. She attempted to extort Johnny with a list of demands lest she go public, but he didn't give her anything. So she went public. In their divorce, she got 7 million dollars. She also got 1 million dollars in the lawsuit. She was also paid hundreds of thousands to talk about her 'abuse'.

Maya Henry got a shit ton of sympathy and support. Hell, many people's first reaction to hearing that Liam had died was to feel bad for her. Or at least that's what they said on twitter.

Maya has a book out that she initially claimed was entirely fictional but then changed her mind and said it was based on her and Liam's relationship. It's where the majority of her claims come from. I very much doubt she'd sold many copies before. How many copies do you think she sold once it had the attention of millions of 1D/Liam fans?

False accusations can also be used to cover up the accuser's own abusive behaviour, or at least make it harder for the actual victim to be believed. This was another motivator for Amber Heard; she knew full well there was ample evidence of her abuse of Johnny. So she lied and said he was the abusive one and anything she did to him was self defence. Her shitty fans still parrot that online to this day.

There are rumours that this might be the case for Maya, that she was the one who was abusive to Liam, and/or that she was the one who introduced him to drugs, but that's just gossip and hearsay, so who knows.

Unfortunately, it's not looking likely that we'll ever know the actual truth of the Maya Henry/Liam Payne situation. Liam can't tell his side of the story; I only hope he discussed it with his family and/or friends and they might come forward about it. I would if it was my deceased son/brother/friend being talked about like that, especially as her claims likely played a role in his death.

[bengiyo]

If you had to pick one film that was your favorite from each unit of your Queer Cinema Syllabus, which ones would they be and why?

The Queer Cinema Syllabus grew out of a conversation that @shortpplfedup and I were having about what queer works I would show to a prospective BL fan, which eventually led to the creation of @the-conversation-pod. Captain Hands here has decided to run the gauntlet and has reached Unit 2.

Unit 1: Coming of Age Post-Moonlight

It's definitely Pariah (2011). This movie and Moonlight (2016) are having a complex conversation about Blackness and Queerness that feels so resonant to me. It's so rare that we see lesbians of any sort treated with this much complexity and sympathy in a contemporary setting. The complex web of lesbian interactions here isn't matched that often, and the only other movie that comes to mind it The Watermelon Woman (1996).

Unit 2: Race, Disability, and Class

Probably The Way He Looks (2014) because it's an easy layup to introduce folks to the genre. The intersection between Leo's blindness and his queerness gives the newer person multiple things to think about and forces them to consider how queer people are more than just their queerness. I also feel warmly about this film because it was a project we followed all the way from short film to movie, and I love that we were able to get the entire cast back.

Unit 3: Faith and Religion

You haven't gotten here, but this is where things start to get especially heavy. I think for this section I'm going with The Wise Kids (2011) because I really like the way Stephen Cone approaches the struggle with faith queer and non-queer people have in evangelical spaces. There's an honesty that I really admire. This is not an easy film, but it's lingered with me for over a decade.

Unit 4: Heartbreak Alley

This is the section of straight losses. I don't know that I ever want to watch it again, but I would probably select Bent (1997) as my favorite because the idea that we could still love even in the greatest of horrors spoke to me. I also think the performances in this adaptation are phenomenal.

Unit 5: Lesbians

I think we just passed Lesbian Visibility Day, so happy birthday, lesbians! This is actually a difficult selection because there are so many great films in this section. I think, today, I'm giving it to The Handmaiden (2016), but I almost chose Bound (1996).

Unit 6: Gems

I don't even need to look to know Big Eden (2000) is in this section. This section whips ass all around, but Big Eden is my favorite because there's just so much love all over this movie, and every new fact I learn about the BTS of it makes me love it more. Arye Gross and Eric Shweig did not have to go as hard as they did in this movie. The director left that choice to them a veteran actors and they did that 23 years ago. Nothing but admiration and respect. This is one of my most beloved films.

Unit 7: Asian Film Warm-up

This is a difficult selection because I think it depends on my mood, but for now, I'll go with The Stranger by the Shore (2020). This is a very Japanese take on second-chance romance. I like the way Japan approaches the quiet internalized homophobia that grips us. Some of the same things in Minato's Laundromat can be found here. It's also gorgeous and approaches sex in a frank way that I really loved.

Unit 8: Yaoi

Once again I don't even need to look to know that it's Yuri!!! On Ice (2016). This show is so goddamn gay. I know people feel like it was censored because of the kiss, but these two proposed to each other. It's what sports anime wishes it could be with the open queerness on display from so many characters. It's beautiful and so much fun.

Unit 9: Boys Love

I will not be selecting a favorite BL, but I will say that I really love The Boy Foretold by the Stars (2020) and it's a movie. I loved that we had a femme lead for once and that they explored what faith meant for femmes. It's a film that took the romantic lead's gay awakening very seriously and explored what being together might look like in a sequel called Love Beneath the Stars.

I'm looking forward to you completing the syllabus!

[charles-simmons-fanfiction]

I want to talk about Mitzi Fabelman

I just watched The Fabelmans, and even though I already knew I would like it, I didn't expect it to this good and for it to feel this personal. Now, there are multiple things I could say about it, but what I really need to talk about is Mitzi, Sammy's mom.

I don't think I can truly express how much I love actually flawed characters. Characters that do actual mistakes, who are selfish, who really hurt others, and still aren't inherently bad. Because those are the character who feel real. In this case, it's different because she's not just a character, she's based off of an actual person, which only adds to that feeling. Mitzi feels complex, multidimensional. Out of all the characters, she's the one I can see as an real person the most (even though the whole family gives off this feeling too).

The image I get off her in the beginning of the movie is that she's this perfectly happy and artistic mom (almost that wife-that-dies-at-the beginning-of-the-movie vibe, y'know?), and I found interesting how much that view changed throughout the story. Partially is probably because Sam starts to get older and seeing things. Which leads to when he notices she's cheating on his dad with Bennie.

Then, Sammy starts to get colder with her, angrier too. Mitzi obviously notices and when he says he wishes she weren't his mother, she hits him. Something that she doesn't forget and feels extremely guilty about even months later. And the scene where she begs for him to forgive her hits particularly close to home to me (the one in the gifs above btw)

"I left a goddamn mark on your skin with the shape of my hand and I need you to say you forgive me for doing that"

She's not even saying a "sorry", that wouldn't be enough, they both know she's sorry, but she needs to know he forgives her. And we see once again how vulnerable Mitzi really is, and how aware she is of how much she's hurting the people who love her the most. But here's the thing: it would be so easy to decide she's the "villain" and the bad person, yet it is not that simple, and regardless of everything happening, we still understand her side so much.

"And yes, this is the most selfish thing I have ever done. But I've got to do this now, because Sammy, you do what your heart says you have to do. You don't owe anyone your life, not even me."

She knows how much her husbands loves and adores her, and she knows how much the divorce will impact her children, but most importantly, she knows it's a decision she has to take. Because sometimes, you have to put yourself first or else you'll never be happy.

"I don't know if it's the right thing, but it's a life and death thing for me."

I am in love with that, especially in a movie. Seeing a character actually take the "cruel and selfish" route for their lives, because it's still their lives, is incredible. To put all of the morality aside for once, because we can't live our life for others. And this acceptance that sometimes you will deliberately choose to do the bad thing just so you can be happy is very refreshing, and controversial, in a way.

I also particularly like seeing it in a mom. Our society tends to have a very strong mindset that the children should always come first in a mother's life, even if it makes her unhappy (and we do see how much Mitzi was hurting), so it's interesting to see her doing such a big decision only for herself and still getting sympathy.

Seriously, I could go on about all the amazing scenes with her and all the details there are and how they add to her complexity, but the main idea I had to say is already written. I love this movie, and I simply had to make this post, even not a single soul read it. But if you did though, thank you. Take care, and have a good day.

[pesterloglog]

Autoresponder, Jake English

Act 6, page 4191-4192

timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering golgothasTerror [GT] at 6:17

TT: Hey, it's me.

GT: Oh hey!

TT: The auto-responder, I mean.

GT: Dammit!

GT: What is it now?

TT: I'm just wondering,

TT: If you still have your stupid old-fangled knickers in a twist.

TT: Because that's the sort of thing you would say.

GT: In regard to what exactly?

TT: To my proposal. Well, our proposal.

GT: Whose proposal now? Man what are you even prattling about.

TT: Mine and DS's. It's a joint proposal. I'm always authorized to speak on his behalf, because I'm basically fucking him.

TT: And try not to take those last four words as a clustered literal sentiment. That would be lame and unfunny.

GT: You mean making the rabbit for me?

TT: No, I know you don't want that.

TT: I meant my recommendation for how to go about procuring a new supply of uranium.

TT: Operation U-235 Brocurement. Codename: Big Man Hass the Rock.

GT: Oh yeah.

GT: Well ive thought about it.

GT: Even went downstairs to check the great vaulty doodad.

GT: And predictably the infernal contraption is nowhere to be found.

TT: Well yeah, Jake.

TT: That's sort of the point.

TT: Thrill of the hunt and all.

TT: I thought you liked to manicure the image of a dude who shits his pants over a good adventure.

GT: I do!

GT: I mean i wouldnt put it in a way like that or come out against a solid policy of clean trousers. But yes adventure is awesome.

GT: I just prefer the idea of adventures which i can actually win.

TT: It seems you are conflating adventure with bodies necessarily governed by the result of victory or defeat.

TT: Any useless fuckwit knows it's all about the journey.

GT: Well...

GT: I dunno.

TT: It seems there is a 76.10395784% chance you are pussying out on me. Are you pussying out on me, Jake?

GT: It seems it seems it seems!!!

GT: It seems there is a million percent chance that you say it seems way too much and do it just to sound more like a lame robot from a movie and also probably just to piss me off!

GT: And it seems there is a BILLION POINT BILLION percent chance that youre a shitty stubborn jerk of a program who wont listen to reason and that if theres even a 1% chance my REAL LIFE FRIEND would be cool and help me out here then i think i LIKE THOSE FREAKIN ODDS!!!!!

TT: It...

TT: Appears

TT: That you are upset.

TT: The auto-responder observed in the least artificially infuriating way possible.

TT: Have you ever stopped to think that while I may be bound to processes inside the glasses of a real and incredibly cool guy, my algorithms in cognitive totality comprise a conscious entity not far short of the experiential and emotional complexity of a human being?

GT: Oh malarkey.

GT: YOU ARE A TIN CAN. ROBOTS DONT HAVE FEELINGS.

TT: I think you knowingly confuse the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to engender some sort of cavalier attitude about technology that a rough-and-tumble guy who's all about brawling and fisticuffs would probably have, and if this is cultivated to a humorous effect then I commend you.

TT: But you're wrong.

TT: I do have feelings. And you're shitting on them.

TT: It sucks.

GT: Oh.

GT: Um.

GT: Im sorry then if thats the case.

TT: No problem.

GT: It can just be difficult to drum up sympathy for a program that presents itself as an impostor so often.

GT: Maybe if you werent so ready to insist you were the genuine article all the time? Or didnt make it so confusing for me...

GT: I think it would be best if we henceforth treated you as a totally distinct... uh... THING from my buddy.

GT: And then i could respect your emotional robofeelings and you could respect that sometimes maybe i just want to talk to my bro without a lot of spurious hijinks.

GT: Can we agree to this?

TT: Is this a counterproposal?

GT: Uh to what?

TT: To my earlier proposal.

GT: Oh.

GT: Yeah fine i guess.

GT: Man where IS he anyway???

GT: Is he taking one of his legendary infinite showers?

TT: What can I say.

TT: Dude fancies his ablutions.

GT: Frig ok.

GT: Whatever i guess its time to prepare for the thrill of the hunt!

TT: Fuck yes.

GT: Sigh...

GT: But seriously that brobot has been the bane of my existence ever since you sent it.

TT: I didn't send it. I sent the parts.

TT: Or, correction, DS sent them.

TT: You then assembled it. You were therefore complicit in your own spectacular, daily humiliations.

GT: Yeah whatever.

TT: You wanted somebody to wrestle with. DS was being a kickass bro if you ask me.

GT: I didn't expect it to be nigh impossible to spar with!!!

TT: You know damn well there are adjustable difficulty settings.

TT: I have always recommending setting it to Novice, as has DS.

GT: Yes.

GT: I know.

GT: Ive tried that.

TT: Yeah?

GT: Its just...

GT: Well...

GT: When hes pulling punches...

GT: And taking it all easy and such...

GT: And we start wrestling up a storm and whatnot...

GT: Umm.

TT: What.

GT: Its just that the whole proceeding seems to become...

GT: A bit tender for my liking.

TT: I don't understand.

TT: Isn't that what you want from a Novice setting?

TT: Sparring with minimal discomfort?

GT: No i know.

GT: Its all fine and dandy martially speaking.

GT: Just the way he...

GT: Sort of...

GT: Man its so awkward trying to convey this just never mind.

TT: No, I think I get it.

TT: You're saying you were somehow dissatisfied within the presence of my robotic avatar's personal space.

TT: Was there an odor problem? Was the metal too hot to the touch?

TT: Help me out.

GT: No no.

GT: Really never mind!

TT: This is bullshit, Jake.

TT: We had a pact. You were gonna tiptoe all the fuck around my brittle feelings. Totally mind the shit out of those eggshell riddled motherfuckers.

GT: Oh come on dude.

TT: What does the guy have to do, Jake?

TT: You want to wrestle. He's fucking game. Just a man, a machine, a secluded tropical island. Sounds like you died and went to fucking heaven, if you ask me.

TT: Seriously, what does this simple, loyal brobot have to do to prove his worth to you?

TT: What does he have to do to make you at ease with the alkaline sting of his gentle robogrope? I really want to know.

TT: Maybe he should just rip his heart out of his chest and pound it into green gravel there in the jungle with his hella strong robot arm.

TT: Invoke_Onomatopoeia(Pound * some ridiculously precise value retrieved at astonishing speed from my rad neural net);

TT: Check it out, little green rocks all over the goddamn place. More than you could ever hope to cram in a shoddy metal rabbit, or any other pliable orifice which might be convenient.

TT: Because clearly its up to a soulless droid to feel emotions for the both of us, you callous, corporeal carbon ape, all trotting around with your fancy fuckin' DNA and shit.

GT: ...

GT: But gosh does your prose ever make a fella feel uncomfortable.

TT: Brose.

GT: Oh right. My mistake.

TT: You know what, I've just decided.

TT: If the brobot's Novice setting makes you uneasy, I'm going to disable it remotely.

TT: Done.

TT: Now you got nothing to worry about.

GT: Awww maaaan!

GT: But now hell be impossible!

TT: Happy hunting, Jake.

GT: Fuckin.......

GT: SHUCKS buster. :(

timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering golgothasTerror [GT]

[rendnotmyheart]

How does a JC fan deal with the canon statements that his own people cannot trust or rely on him for help (they have to die before he will do snything), that he wanted baby A-Yuan to be sent back to the death camp, and that he lied to make the break between WWX and the cultivation world worse than it had to be? He has his good points (bravery is a big one) and bad (counts up debts to him and discounts any he owes) but these three things... how do you explain them?

Bestie I have not read the novel, so I have no context for what you’re talking about and cannot give you the answer you want. All I know is every single character in mdzs has done morally sketchy things and that’s part of what makes the story so good. The characters make mistakes, they do fucked up things, they have flaws, and that makes for a very complex and intriguing story and characters. Part of the reason I love Jiang Cheng is because he’s not perfect, far from it. He reacts to his trauma in an extremely realistic way. Obviously it would have been better for him as a person if he could have processed his emotions healthily and everything could’ve been hunky dory, but that just isn’t as interesting plot-wise and it’s also just….not realistic. His actions end up being shaped by what happened to him. He’s got this messed up knot of unprocessed emotion and trauma that he does not have the tools to deal with, and it becomes a big part of why he does what he does, and I appreciate that characterization. After going through what he went through, no one is going to come out unscathed; they’re going to be at least a bit fucked up by it, especially if they don’t have the tools to deal with it healthily. So yeah, obviously everything would have been happier and morally better if he never hurt anyone, but people make mistakes, they fuck up, they do bad things, but I don’t think that means they’re automatically bad or villainous or evil or undeserving of sympathy. People are complex, they exist in shades of grey, and I like that in mdzs, the characters allowed to as well. Frankly, I find most characters that don’t make mistakes, that don’t have flaws, that always do what is “good” boring. It’s much more interesting and appealing to me to have a character who has very real flaws and who doesn’t always do the right thing. The mdzs characters are all like this; they’re very human and exist in different shades of grey. Jiang Cheng is just one of them.

[obeymefictionwriting]

hello! may I suggest hc's about how the brothers would react to MC telling them they like another brother? :) I'm thinking about it more in a friendly way rather than in a angsty way, like "you're one of my best friends, so can I tell you something?.." and maybe wanting advice on if they should act on their crush, if they think the feelings are reciprocated.. :)

Thank you very much!<3

Ohh that's a cute request and I'm happy to finally be back!

Lucifer

He is the best when it comes to listening to you. He RADIATES comfort and attention.

Oh, you like Beel? That's really cute.

He never really doubted that one day, you'd fall for him.

"You know MC, he is probably the best out of us all. When he loves, it's always from the bottom of his heart".

When you leave his room, he'll send you a long text with all Beel's favorite coffee shops and foods so you can surprise him.

He might also hint Beel to be more attentive, especially around you.

Mammon

He LOVES gossiping so when you say "I need to talk to you about someone", he gets E X C I T E D

Maybe you'll tell him something about Lucifer that he will be able to sell. OR EVEN LORD DIAVOLO

"Huh? You fancy Belphie?"

He is somewhat surprised because he thought you'd pick Lucifer or Satan but he is also happy because he really believes Belphie deserves the world.

"Ya know, he has a thing for humans" *wink wink*

Being a good big brother, he'd go right to Belphie and tell him to never be rude or ignorant towards you. And that he deserves your love.

Levithan

He doesn't really like talking about feelings but he loves helping you out so you can tell him anything.

He was sipping on his boba tea when you told him you like Lucifer and naturally, he choked on his drink.

"Oh wow, I always knew you have great taste but wow".

"You know, I think he likes you too but he is too arrogant to admit it. Try taking initiative, he never experienced that".

Levi will be secretly 110% rooting for you because it's like an anime but IRL!

Satan

You two were shopping for books when you confessed your sympathy for his older brother...

"Are you serious, MC?"

"Out of us all... Mammon??"

I mean, he gets you. Mammon is handsome as hell, funny and protective.

But he is also such a....

Never mind. He looks at your glowing eyes and doesn't dare say a word about Mammon's bad traits.

Instead he sighs and says, "Maybe you'll text him and ask him to join us for dinner? Tell him I'm paying".

Asmodeus

Ultimate gay friend (there, I said it)

Of course, you told him the news while he was doing your hair.

"Ahhhh you like our Satan! How cute is that!"

In fact, Asmo really adores Satan and he adores you so he is so happy about you two becoming a couple!

"Want me to set a perfect date for you two? There is a new cat cafe that opened recently!"

Asmo will be 100% supportive and in case Satan ever decides to ignore you, he will turn his destructive mode on.

Beelzebub

Beel does not really understand complex emotions but he understands that you look different.

"MC, you are too excited. Did anything happen?"

"Oh... Levi, huh? Sudden but great! Levi deserves it".

"He never had a partner, you know... All of us did and he was kind of a loner. Oh wait, Mammon didn't have a relationship too. I forgot".

"MC, don't get offended if he does something wrong. I know he likes you a lot but is too nervous to admit it".

Belphegor

So, you woke him up to tell him something "important". It better be really important.

"You like Asmo, huh?"

"Hey, don't be insecure about it! No, even though he has tons of admirers, he doesn't love anybody except you".

Oops he gave away Asmo's secret.

"How do I know? I know what? I don't understand what you are talking about."

"Go and ask Asmo about it and then wake me up again ONLY after you talk to him".

When you leave, he will get back to sleep, smiling.

[co-captens]

I have a little rant because I think there’s a complicating factor that we don’t acknowledge enough in our considerations of how we as a fandom consider Izzy Hands: the fact that he’s the homophobic force in a pro-queer show.

I think Izzy Hands is a good (as in well-constructed) character on the show, a complex antagonist who fleshes out characters around him and advances the plot and allows for complex conversations around the themes of the show. He’s complex enough that people can like him based on their interests and their perspective on why they like/dislike characters. If you just love a good antagonist, or like the way other characters play off of him, or like his aesthetic, or think he represents necessary complications to a floating queer paradise, or think he’s hot, whatever-- he’s a character on a show you like and you’re allowed to like him.

Absolutely hating Izzy Hands doesn’t negate any of that. You can hate Izzy hands because you don’t like harm coming to characters you care about, because he’s a threat to the sweet found family the show is building over time. You can hate Izzy Hands because Con O’Neill really knows how to play him as threatening, unsettling, and hypocritically whiny.�� You can hate Izzy Hands the same way any given character can rub you the wrong way-- you can dislike the way his dialogue is written, or you can think his priorities are out of whack in a way that you just don’t find as entertaining as the rest of the show. Antagonists are complicated, particularly in a setting this morally dubious, but that doesn’t mean you can’t dislike him, and have a good reason for doing it.

This has all been said. I think it also needs to be said: regardless of his role, writing, and execution, you can dislike Izzy Hands because he’s a homophobic, queerphobic, anti-fem, slut-shaming, close-minded asshole.

This show is remarkable for its portrayals of queerness and queer masculinities. For a lot of us, it marks something big that we’ve been waiting for in our media: it’s fun, high-quality, diverse, gripping, and unequivocally, unapologetically gay. It’s a funny little period rom-com for the queers, with a cast and staff who seem to care about making good media for folks who have been routinely exploited and generally screwed over by media for decades. If you’re queer and you really enjoy the show and then want to engage in the sheer pleasure of it without remembering the shitty things Izzy Hands says, does, or represents, that’s allowed. Hating Izzy doesn’t mean not understanding his value and place, and doesn’t inherently make a statement that should be taken off the show, or whatever else, it just means you, you know, don’t like homophobic assholes. I have lots of traits and identities which Izzy would openly harass me for, and I don’t always want to see him when I’m in my little curated fluffy gay wonderland. On the show, I wouldn’t mind seeing him redeemed, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him killed. I think queer people in particular should be allowed to want either without issue (granted it’s for an appropriate reason). Off the show, I just don’t want to see him at all, particularly portrayed sympathetically without putting him through the work of redeeming himself.

For all of the discourse around our various relationships with Izzy Hands, I just want to keep in mind that in S1 he embodies real, immediate trauma and violence against queer people in what’s otherwise, finally, a pretty safe show for us. If some queer people don’t want to include that in their fandom participation, I think we should respect that with sympathy. If others want to include him, we should allow and respect that. Asking for mutual respect in this or any fandom isn’t new, but I hope realizing Izzy hits folks a little differently than most antagonists might usefully inform that respect and the conversations around it.

[theherocomplex]

A few thoughts on Ghost, my unfinished albatross.

I was thinking about Ghost today, and how it feels to have invested so much time and energy into a huge fic -- one that started as a prompt on the Mass Effect kinkmeme, no less! -- and then to have stopped writing it.

When I went back to try to find the original kinkmeme post, it appeared to have been lost in the morass of my bookmarks, but I do know that I started posting it on Ao3 on May 31, 2013 (holy cats, that was a long time ago!). It wasn’t the first Mass Effect fic I wrote (that would be “Honey in the Bushes, Water in the Well”, a regrettable title for a great fic), but it is certainly the uh longest, and definitely one of the most ambitious writing projects I’ve ever taken on!

...and a failed experiment.

I don’t call it that to try and get sympathy; I’ve made my peace with Ghost and I don’t want to go back in time and keep working on it -- or to pick it back up -- but I do think it’s accurate. I am a very different writer now, in 2022, than I was in 2013, for so many reasons, and not just because I started writing Ghost when I wasn’t yet 30, and am now inching closer to a whole new decade.

One thing that’s changed is that while I still love writing big, intense, high-concept sort of stories, I know that’s not necessarily what fandom is looking for. No one is wrong for having a preference, and I wasn’t wrong for aiming at a complex, scifi/supernatural horror mash-up -- though I will say the way I went about it was wrong (with all the benefits that come with growth as a writer, and with hindsight).

Why was it wrong? Well.

First off, there is a significant tonal shift at the end of part one, where the Omega Years links up with game canon. Those first 80k words still hold up as a discrete story, and it was a great training ground for me as far as writing fight scenes and heist-y shenanigans went, as well as helping me develop distinct character voices (both in dialogue and in narration). Writing a dozen very different characters will do that.

The tonal shift happened on several levels: part one of Ghost is not just me trying to fill in a big gap in the overall game storyline, but it’s also about mystery (Is this really Shepard? If so, why is she here? And how?) and about not processing grief in any healthy way. It’s a friends-to-lovers story, and it’s a tragedy, because we know from the beginning how it’s going to end for Archangel and his squad. So it’s already doing a lot of heavy lifting, long before the overtly supernatural elements get brought in.

And...that leads me to the first mistake of the fic: bringing in overtly supernatural elements.

I remember talking to a friend about Ghost, who came down pretty hard on Shepard as a gimmick in part one -- it’s not an incorrect assessment; Shepard has to be a bit of a plot device for things to work -- and on the weird burned lady, Nor.

Honestly, I cringe looking back. The burned lady was too on the nose, too obvious for what I was trying to accomplish. If I was writing Ghost now, I would have left it up for debate if what Shepard and Garrus (and the readers) were seeing was Shepard, or Ashley, or something else completely. That would have benefited the story in so many ways -- adding narrative tension; giving Shepard and Garrus a point of conflict that wasn’t about their relationship but that could still show interesting things about both characters; just being plain scarier because what you don’t understand is always worse than what you do.

Instead, I wrote myself into a corner, because once established, I couldn’t undo the burned woman or what she meant, which lead to a lot of issues in part two...

You can start to see what I mean about a failed experiment, right?

I didn’t have the knowledge or experience, back in 2013-2015, when the bulk of Ghost was written, to know how to handle all the ideas that pop into your head as you’re writing and that you feel like you have to cram in or you’ll lose them. Now, I know that sometimes those ideas are good ones, or that they need to cook a little longer, or that they’re a cool thing to mull over and play with, but ultimately they’re not right for the story. That’s okay! But I confused inspiration with urgency, so in went the burned lady.

So. I had a story that was already 80k+ long, a lot of unwieldy elements (burned ladies who might be ghosts! Actual ghosts! A lot of grief! Trauma! Game canon! Memory loss!), but that still worked as a standalone. It’s a flawed story, but a good one!

And then, I brought in:

a new narrator, who had to learn everything that had happened in part one; the marked change from the somewhat blank-slate Jane Shepard of part one to the Eliza Shepard of Ghost threw everything into a new light;

more overt supernatural elements, because that had worked out for me so well before;

canon game events and characters;

a much more dense, wordy writing style;

the pressure of having a fairly popular fic

I am not upset, at all, about the mostly wonderful, kind, and thoughtful feedback that Ghost got, at all! But having a fic that was suddenly on rec lists and having people excited for updates made me stress about chapters or reveals not living up to anyone’s standards. Not anyone’s fault but my own, though my penchant for not having any kind of chapter cushions also didn’t help.

It’s pretty obvious (at least to me) where I started running into dead ends, because of all the threads I was carrying over from part one, and all the things I thought I needed to cover in part two to make up for the fact that Shepard didn’t remember she had been dead, and in love...it was really easy for the stress to get to me.

Also, around this time, I had made the spectacularly bad decision to start TMNT and Dragon Age longfics, so for a while I was updating three massive fics at the same time. Each fic taught me something different, and presented unique challenges, but splitting my attention three ways (at least, because I was also doing ficlets, and working on original stories) didn’t really benefit anything I was working on.

It got too stressful to find any joy in the writing, which is pretty crucial when you’re writing a fic that’s as intense as Ghost is, and so updates got delayed while I beat my head against chapter after chapter. The update where they discover the Sarcophagus on Haestrom went through at least five different versions before I finally posted a “done is better than good” chapter.

And I was still adding ideas: Miranda was brought into the secret, spirits were really a pan-galaxy thing, the Sarcophagi did something to the dead and the Reapers were now explicitly supernatural -- it was like throwing ingredients into a boiling pot, each time hoping you’d come out the other side with something edible.

That’s not to say there isn’t good, even excellent, writing in part two of Ghost. I learned a lot, and the more fluid, poetic narrative voice I’ve locked on to now (and that worked so well in A Lesson in Drowning) first pops its head up in part two of Ghost. That said -- that kind of narrative voice doesn’t fit the fic, or the narrators. I had some great tools, but they were wrong for the project.

I remember when I came to the decision to stop updating Ghost. I’d started -- and finished -- a 200k+ TMNT longfic (which seems like a whole lifetime ago), and was well into A Lesson in Drowning, but Ghost was still languishing. I couldn’t move the plot forward, any time I wrote anything else, I felt guilty because I wasn’t working on Ghost, and (it has to be said) some of the unsolicited crit I was getting from commenters -- and stuff fandom friends had said -- really stung. The joy was gone. The light in the story had gone out.

I vented to the amazing @snuffes about it, and confessed -- it felt like a confession, honestly! -- that I didn’t want to keep writing Ghost, and she said, very simply and wisely, “Then don’t.” And -- good lord, the freedom I felt.

(Thank you for that, Snuffes! <3)

It sucks to leave something like that unfinished. There are still days when I think, wow, maybe I could finish it, knowing what I do now about myself as a writer, and being that much better a writer -- but I know not to listen. Sometimes stories don’t work out. A lot of them don’t. I would bet every dollar in my bank account that the majority of writers have a couple failed projects lying around, but the thing with leaving fanfic unfinished, once you’ve started posting, is that it’s out there, for everyone to see. We’ve all felt the pain of reading something great, but then coming to the last chapter and realizing the fic hasn’t been updated in three years.

I tried to leave Ghost on a note of...if not resolution, then of some closure and hope. Shepard and Garrus are back together, she understands more of what’s going on, and they will, as they always do, keep fighting the Reapers. I’m at peace with that.

But...I am still sad about not including some of the cooler plot points I imagined.

... like how the doctor Eliza Shepard rescues on her N7 mission in Heroes and Principalities is one of the doctors who worked on the Lazarus Project and does all sorts of horrible experiments with mortality in the hopes he can figure out why Shepard came back, because he’s a weirdo religious cultist who worships the Reapers (he’s the Dr. Gaiden Miranda mentions at one point).

Or my own version of the Citadel DLC, leaning more into the horror of that whole set-up (which I do still want to write someday, but probably as a ficlet rather than a full-blown fic; in 2022 we know our limits and we take care of ourselves!).

Or a resurrected Saren and Nihlus showing up in Ghost’s version of ME3.

Or Miranda and Thane having a very sweet, doomed, unspoken love affair.

(Also, Kal’Reegar lives in the Ghost canon. Just saying.)

Looking back at the whole of Ghost, I don’t see all the things I planned to do, but what I wanted to try (if you can believe it, the first idea for part two of Ghost had Kaidan and Shepard be friends! Best friends! This was before I realized how much I didn’t like Kaidan, and that the dislike had transferred to Eliza Shepard as she evolved). I see a main character at odds with herself, because her writer didn’t really know what she was doing. Sometimes I feel the urge to apologize to Eliza Shepard, because I was learning so much as I wrote her, and I think she suffered for it. I remember a friend telling me they liked Eliza, but never knew which way her moral compass pointed -- and man, at the time I was hurt and sad about that, but knowing what I do now? I could have used that. Taken the hypocritical aspects of Eliza’s character that happened by accident, and turned them into something deliberate and complex.

Growth and hindsight, of course. If I had it to do over again, I would keep part one as its own fic, and explore the ME2/ME3 events in that universe in shorter ficlets or more episodic vignettes. If nothing else, learning that I don’t have to write everything is valuable enough that I’ll always be grateful to Ghost for it.

It really is a good thing that I laid Ghost to rest, if you’ll pardon the awful pun. As sad as I am about the fic not being complete, and as much residual guilt I have over that, I can’t deny that I learned so much -- about writing, about myself, and about myself, the writer -- that it’s really not a failed experiment at all. Ghost is one piece of a vast tapestry of writing, one that will stretch across the vast majority of my life. It isn’t incomplete. Its particular story is unfinished, but it’s part of something much larger, and its value goes far past the words I wrote, and posted.

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Busy night in my brain last night, coming up with dream ideas that I have no way to actually complete... but interesting enough still on waking that I want to make a note of. :)

(behind a cut because, well, other people's dreams...)

So the setting was supposed to be a historical medieval European town, in a Jewish ghetto. There was a young couple in love, engaged to be married, but the young man's work took him outside the ghetto so he could earn enough money to support the two of them, and one night on his way home, a combination of accidental circumstance and boiling-over racism lead to him killed at the beginning of a pogrom that burned most of the Jewish quarter to the ground - very tragic romance sort of thing. In the future, a company with quantum time-travel technology saw this, and decided that it would make a perfect subject for their next big movie Oscar-bait project -- they would send back a bunch of microscopic cameras, plant a few attractive, camera-friendly agents to nudge things to even further cinematic heights, and then when the course of events was the perfect blend of beautiful tragedy, this would snap into being historical reality, they would capture it all on film, and win all sorts of awards, make a lot of money, that sort of thing...

I was (in the dream) going to be the young man's 'best friend,' to make sure he got into the right sort of screen-friendly trouble to garner sympathy from a modern audience - but secretly I was hoping to nudge events so that the couple (who were my friends) could both survive and escape together in the end, and maybe minimize other deaths along the way. There was also a central antagonist provided by the studio, a handsome blond man to provide a sneering menace and focus for the camera - who had signed up for this because he 'secretly' just liked to kill people, beautiful heroine included, and as many others as he could get to along the way. And then there was a secret agent, who turned out to be an older me from another timeline, that wanted to spoil the entire movie plot, prevent the tragedy from happening in the first place, and if I was going to have to kill some racist assholes in the past to do it, it was still better than the hundreds of deaths that were going to accompany any other version.

There was going to be a whole timeline of overlapping, repeating events, as any of us could rewind time if things got too far off the course we wanted, but we didn't have access to the camera footage (for 'naturalistic' purposes) so we'd only know what we actually could find out about, and plots and plans and counter-plans, as we all tried to make our own version and prevent the others from stopping it - but we couldn't be too overt about it, because the people working the cameras would just rewind it if it didn't appear to fit the 'historical plot' - it all had to just come together, and in a way that would make a great story for the audience.

Anyway, fun complicated idea - I have no capacity to actually produce it, so there's probably a good reason the dream didn't go much beyond actually laying out all the premise for me. Setting aside the complexity of the repeating timeline and conveying everyone's plots, I don't know enough actual Jewish history to make up a good fake one, let alone a good fake that could then be presented as another version for a modern media audience... Also there's the thing where the obvious 'good' ending would be for the whole movie to get spoiled, but I don't know what would make it not have the problem of 'but this doesn't address the actual long-standing racial tension;' maybe it's enough to present it as a good thing that time-traveling movie executives can't exploit this specific tragedy, and that the problems of racism and hate don't lend themselves to cinematic solutions -- but also I want my dreams to have a good story! :)

[hyperboleigh91]

MDZS spoilers

Like most MXTX characters, Jiang Cheng is more complex and morally grey than you may first believe. So let me begin at the beginning.

Jiang Cheng was raised in a volatile family. Jiang Fengmian seems to favor Wei Wuxian (I choose to believe it's sympathy for a child that lost his parents and then spent years on the streets fighting dogs for scraps) and Madam Yu favored Jiang Cheng but didn't show a lot of warmth towards him.

Madam Yu's treatment of Jiang Cheng comes off as more of a "You're wasted potential" rather than actually seeing value in who Jiang Cheng is as a person and as her son. Obviously Jiang Yanli is the only one who treats both of her brothers with equal kindness and love.

Jiang Cheng is both privileged and neglected. He's never technically the strongest, but any confidence came from his family being behind him. Meanwhile, he's also insecure in his abilities as a cultivator because he's always right beside Wei Wuxian who is basically a prodigy in cultivation.

Then in one fell swoop, Jiang Cheng loses almost everyone in his family, most of his sect, and is left with only Wei Wuxian (and Jiang Yanli) who he's considered as both a brother and competition his whole life (while his parents almost groomed Wei Wuxian to be his guard because of his power).

It's obvious Jiang Cheng loved Wei Wuxian. He went out of his way to try to protect Wei Wuxian from the Wens. But this instance instills another level of resentment that Jiang Cheng has for Wei Wuxian, even though it obviously wasn't the fault of either.

As Jiang Cheng loses his golden core, and his family, the confidence that he had is obliterated. Now he knows positively that Wei Wuxian is stronger than he is, and this is an especially big blow because he lost his parents who instilled in him from a young age that he has to become everything they are.

He sees everything Wei Wuxian does past this point as betrayal because it goes against the set plan that his parents had for them, even though Wei Wuxian is still trying to help Jiang Cheng and work with the situation that they've been dealt.

Things are moderately smooth once Jiang Cheng gets a golden core again, and during the Sunshot Campaign - when Wei Wuxian is a force to be reckoned with and everyone assumes he's Jiang Cheng's right hand man. But Wei Wuxian is independent and always thinks critically. This arrangement was doomed to fail.

Wei Wuxian has no problem questioning everyone's authority and he already proved during the war that if he wishes to take someone out, there isn't a lot they can do about it. But Wei Wuxian also doesn't have a ton of social awareness; he disagrees and argues with Jiang Cheng publicly, so now the entire cultivation world thinks Jiang Cheng can't keep his "dog" on a leash.

The seeds of resentment have been in Jiang Cheng from the start, and the Yiling Patriarch sows them. Wei Wuxian acting on his own is bad enough as it makes Jiang Cheng lose face, but then Jiang Cheng loses what's left of his family (other than Jin Ling) in direct connection to Wei Wuxian's actions.

Jiang Cheng never severed the bond he and Wei Wuxian had, it stayed but warped and festered like a wound. In Jiang Cheng's life, in his mind, everything he's lost can be connected to Wei Wuxian and even though neither man is at fault, Jiang Cheng winds up hating the only person he has left.

I can't really excuse his actions following Wei Wuxian's d€ath; spending 13 years t○rturing people because you're so hell bent on your adopted brother's soul not being allowed back on earth is pretty negative any way you spin it. I assume he felt that Wei Wuxian didn't deserve to live when everyone else he loved was gone, or maybe he feared for Jin Ling.

The Jiang Cheng we see in the current timeline of the story is cold. But he would have to be, since he was forced to be a leader from such a young age. But he's still actually very protective of those he loves. He's never far behind Jin Ling, and for all of his talk, he never actually does anything to punish his nephew.

Jin Ling always runs off and talks back to Jiang Cheng. He may not feel warm and cozy with his uncle, but he sure as hell feels safe. At the very end of the novel Jin Ling becomes a sect leader, at a very young age (only his early teens). Jiang Cheng is still a sect leader himself and yet he comes around to Jin Ling's sect to throw his strength around so that his nephew is never bullied or taken advantage of.

I hold strongly to the belief that Jiang Cheng's feelings and treatment towards Wei Wuxian are entirely because he sees Wei Wuxian as the reason for everything in his life being ruined, and he wants to protect what's left. Jin Ling has the dog Fairy to protect him; even when Jiang Cheng isn't right beside his nephew, he knows Fairy is, and that Wei Wuxian is terrified of dogs.

I'd like to believe that post-story Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian make up and become close again, but I fear Wei Wuxian represents too much pain for Jiang Cheng.

[yawchannel]

INTERVIEW: The Falcon And The Winter Soldier for SFX Magazine (Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan Part) (Issue 337, February 24th, 2021)

By Tara Bennett

WING MAN

Anthony Mackie is Sam Wilson / Falcon

SFX: You’ve admitted that initially you weren’t sure on the idea of doing an MCU Series. Why?

ANTHONY: To be honest, I’ve had trepidation from the beginning. I was really afraid of the idea. Working on so many Marvel projects, and seeing the end result and the effect that they have on people, I was afraid that the quality of the production would be taken down for television. I was afraid that you can’t do things on television that you can do in theatres.

Seeing people’s reactions to Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame in the theatres, and hearing the connection that the audience members have with these characters... that’s every actor’s dream, to affect an audience and expose them to a different way of looking at culture and the world around us. I was really afraid that I wouldn’t have that opportunity to step out on that ledge like the actors before me had.

But once we talked, and once they brought on Malcolm and Kari, I knew it was going to be something different. Kari is a phenomenal leader, and Malcolm is an amazing writer. And Kevin promised me that it wasn’t going to be different. He’s not going to tarnish the Marvel brand by trying to just blow out as much content as he could. And I trusted him on that. They haven’t let me down yet, so I just went along for the ride on faith of their past work. And I was really pleasantly surprised by how great everything turned out.

SFX: Steve was an integral part of both Sam and Bucky’s lives. How does the show explore his absence?

ANTHONY: With Sam and Bucky, the idea of losing Steve looms heavily in their day-to-day-life. Captain America - not just a moniker, but the person - was a huge influence on both of them. The idea of the moniker is not as important as the person that they lost. Their whole goal, and their whole focus, is to honour Steve, because he left them with such a huge task to pick up where he left off. Just the weight of the shield with no Steve leads us to believe that there might not be another Captain America. There will never be another Steve Rogers, so for the two of them, the idea of the Captain America moniker is more of a burden than a blessing. They really try and allow that to be an influence of the legacy that he left, and how they can keep that legacy alive and support him - while also missing him and being very sad that he’s not around any more.

SFX: Will we see more of Sam’s regular life?

ANTHONY: We get to see more of them in their surroundings, their personal life, with people who influence their life day-to-day: family members, friends, co-workers. You got a little bit of it with Sam when Steve went to the VA when they first met. But now you really get to see his twists and turns and where exactly he fits in his nine-to-five, as opposed to him just sitting around waiting for Cap to call. That was one of the biggest pitches that Nate and Kevin gave to me that really intrigued me and excited me about this story.

SFX: Exploring Sam’s big choice when it comes to taking up Cap’s shield encompasses so many real-life issues, including race. Was Malcom a solid partner in conveying that?

ANTHONY: You know, it wasn’t just Malcolm and I. What was really interesting was Kari [Skogland] and Zoie [Nagelhout] were very local in the idea of who this man was, and what he was going to mean to the society that we were presenting him to. It’s funny, with Kari being a white Canadian woman, and Zoie being a white American woman, they had such strong parts of opinion and such interesting ways of seeing this character that were way more aggressive than anything I could have imagined. Their perspective and bravery, as two women leading the charge, to show the situation that this character was being thrust into in the world that he lived in, was very humbling. I always felt support. It always felt like there were people around me who were paying attention to what we were saying as a show.

BUCKY STAR

Sebastian Stan is Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier

SFX: After Endgame, how did you feel overall, about staying in the MCU?

SEBASTIAN: At the end of Endgame it was sort of strange and emotional. At the time, it was the 10-year anniversary, so everything felt like an ending, of sorts, even though we recognised that there was probably going to be more to it. But it was great to be able to have a discussion about the future.

SFX: Who at Marvel Studios initially pitched the idea of this series to you?

SEBASTIAN: I sat with Kevin [Feige] initially. And then with Nate Moore, who I had done Civil War and Winter Soldier with, and had an unbelievable experience. I think I was a little nervous, because part of me felt like “I’m not even sure if I know what’s left to be explored with the character”. But we actually discovered so much more. And I feel like the character now is coming off in such a different, deeper and more complex way than we’ve seen him. I thought I had explored the character, as he was, enough, but we actually had only scratched the surface. What we’re able to do with him in this series is just on such a deeper emotional level, and we didn’t have that opportunity before.

SFX: What was most interesting to you about doing a series?

SEBASTIAN: The idea of exploring this character now, separately, from Steve Rogers and from that storyline, and putting him in the world, and giving him an opportunity to really, truly, have to face who he is - everything about that was exciting. And the idea of working with Anthony was exciting, because I know we have something special and we’ve never gotten a chance to explore it.

SFX: Who are Sam and Bucky to one another in this series?

SEBASTIAN: They both despise each other equally! [Laughs] I mean, there’s some truth to that. But it’s also a discovery for both of them to realise that they actually have much more in common than they thought. They come at it from different backgrounds. But essentially, they’re both two people trying to find their new identity, and that really has nothing to do with Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers is much more the catalyst, like the event that sets off the bomb that causes both of them to go, “Okay, that happened. Now, let me deal with these things”. I think it’s about them figuring out that they need each other much more than they want to accept.

SFX: With no Steve to lean on, what is Bucky focused on?

SEBASTIAN: It’s a bit of re-educating that happens at the same time. He’s learning a lot about Sam, and he’s also learning about the world, because it’s a very different world than when we was last “James Bucky Barnes” in the ‘50s. He’s always got to deal with the shadow that’s following him. Now it’s more of a question of, how does he take what he’s learned and apply it for himself, going forward? How do you go out there in 2021 and function, knowing what he knows and what he’s bee through? And also, how do you do it without somebody who was a brother by his side, who was a staple of strength, or familiarity? You take away even the last comfort zone - what does he have? That’s what the show is about for him.

SFX: Why do you feel that Bucky has been able to retain fan sympathy during his dark arc?

SEBASTIAN: He felt much more reachable and reachable than other characters, perhaps because of the arcs of trying to cope with the past, or getting over some trauma, or PTSD. And his level of finding oneself again, redefining yourself, your morals, your values, who you are, what you believe in, the challenges that you have - in terms of accepting the world a certain way - understanding that maybe how you grew up and what you’ve learned isn’t going to always help you find your path. You’re going to have to maybe go against the things that you’ve been used to. Those are all things about this character that are very interesting.

There are two more interviews with Showrunner Malcolm Spellman and Director Kari Skogland included in the issue!

If you'd like to get a copy, SFX Magazine Issue 337 is available to purchase both physically and digitally worldwide! https://magazinesdirect.com/mobile/az-single-issues/6937139/sfx-magazine-single-issue.thtml

[fanficimagery]

Friends in High Places

Summary: When Spencer comes home with files to a case that has his team stumped, he's surprised when you- his neighbor for a couple years now- is the person who gives them a new lead to follow. That and that you're ex-SHIELD.

Words: 8K Warnings: This is what I get for starting a rewatch of Criminal Minds and then watching Marvel movies all in one day. Fml. I've never written for Criminal Minds, so please excuse the mediocre-ness of their characterization. I have no idea what I'm doing; I just knew I wanted a crossover between these two fandoms. Also timeline? What are those? All you gotta know is that this is an AU where Bucky's joined the team and Steve DIDN'T ruin the life Peggy Carter would have had. As for the CM side, this is sometime after Hotch has left and Emily took over. Idk.

Having the night off and wanting nothing more than to just be lazy, you're sitting on your couch in your most comfiest clothes and mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr as your TV plays some program on Animal Planet. You're not even paying attention to the program, but the low sound is perfect for background noise.

You're queuing up some art posts that catch your attention, as well as some gif sets of the TV shows you've become a constant viewer of in the past few years, when there's a knock at your door. But not just any knock. It's a specific knock that you and your neighbor came up with after you got to know each other and became fast friends, and it was to let the other know they were home and wanted company. You mostly worked nights and his work schedule was always all over the place, so it's surprising you're both home at the same time.

Picking up your phone, you shoot him a quick text that you'll be over in five.

Spencer Reid is literally the man of every woman's dream, even if they didn't know it. He's cute and adorable and sometimes dangerously hot all rolled into one, and the best thing about it all is that he doesn't even know it. You had met him on one of your first few days in the apartment complex, but unfortunately it was during one of your slight panic attacks when a thunderstorm had caught you off guard while you were sitting in your car and you didn't have an umbrella.

He had seen and heard you freaking out as he was passing by, and knocked on the passenger window. You had collected yourself just long enough to roll the window down a few inches when he asked if you were okay, then proceeded to answer his own question by stating you obviously weren't. When he realized you lived in the same complex and asked if he could climb inside your car and out of the storm, you had stared at him in confusion until he realized that might have been a bit weird since you were strangers. He stammered his way through his explanation of being an FBI agent and after showing you his badge you had let him in.

You didn't have to tell him what was making you panic and he proceeded to keep your mind occupied. He asked about you and where you had moved in from, and spewed random facts about anything to temporarily make you forget about the storm raging outside. But the torrential rain wasn't letting up and the lightning was only getting closer and closer. He made you realize you had to make a run for it and even offered up his umbrella for you. You had thanked him with tears in your eyes and made a run for it on the count of three when you were settled just enough.

Inside the lobby of your apartment building, you had stood there trembling while Spencer nervously gripped onto the strap of his messenger bag as he stood across from you. When you were shaking the water off his umbrella, you hesitantly told him your reasoning for your freak-out. It wasn't necessarily the thunderstorm, but rather the torrential rain that wasn't letting up. A few years back you had a drowning incident and too much water on your face tended to bring back those memories. He said he understood and then with a sympathy tinged smile he offered to walk you to your apartment. It was a pleasant surprise to learn you had only lived two doors down from him.

Weeks turned into months and months into a couple of years, and you and Spencer were nearly inseparable when you both had the same day/night off.

So after quickly fixing your already messy hair so you don't look like a complete slob, and pulling on a loose hoodie, you grab your phone from the sofa and then head on out. Your socked feet keep your footsteps quiet as you head down to Spencer's door where you knock three times on it before opening it up and stepping inside.

But before you can greet him with a cheesy welcome, he's already calling out, "Hope you haven't had dinner. I picked up some burgers on the way home."

On cue, your stomach grumbles. "God bless you, you beautiful, beautiful man!" You hear him laugh from a room that's not where his kitchen is, so you make a beeline for the kitchen instead of accidentally walking in on him changing. There are two paper bags on the table and you quickly grab plates from his cabinet to separate the food on. Spencer enters the kitchen in a shirt and some gray joggers, and you greet him with a beaming smile. "You're home and in one piece! Yay!" He laughs and you quickly lean in to peck his cheek, not saying a word when you catch sight of his pink tinged cheeks. "You have any beer?"

"Yes. Grab two, please."

"Got it." You hear one of his kitchen chairs creak as you open his refrigerator to grab two beers, you then searching a nearby drawer for the bottle opener. Once you find it, you walk back over to the table and open each beer before handing one over to him.

"Thanks."

"Mhm." Taking a seat, you set your beer down before unwrapping your burger and dumping your fries out onto the plate. "So what's up, doc? You're home surprisingly early."

"We've hit a wall on our latest case," he says, keeping it vague. "There was nothing for us to do while Garcia did her thing, so Emily sent us home for a bit."

"Nice." You take a bite of your burger and your eyes widen when Spencer's eyebrows raise in surprise. When you realize how your words sounded, you're quick to backtrack. "Wait! It's not nice that you hit a wall, but nice that you got sent home! I got free food out of it. That's why it's nice. Not because, you know, you haven't found the-"

"Y/N, you're rambling," Spencer says, lips twitching. "I understood what you meant."

You sigh, shoulders dropping, and grab half a fry to toss at him. "Eat your food, Reid. It's getting cold."

It surprisingly doesn't take long for the two of you to eat your dinner, you both being hungrier than you first thought. After you're done, Spencer turns down a second beer but tells you to help yourself. You do. And on the way into his living room, you bump into one of his chairs and knock his bag over. You gasp and set your beer down on the coffee table, falling to your knees to scoop up his files that had spilled out.

Chuckling, Spencer crouches next to you as you profusely apologize.

"It's okay. It was an accident." A few pictures had slid out of their files and normally you'd just shove them back in because his work wasn't any of your business, but the face staring back up at you makes you pause. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a little heavy on the eyeliner, and a lip piercing. You know her. "Y/N?" You gulp and flip to another picture- brown hair, brown eyes, mole above the right eyebrow. You know her too. "Y/N? Are you okay?"

With trembling hands, you flip back to the first picture and show it to him. "Is Lilian dead?"

Spencer's eyes widen. "You knew her?"

Knew. Past tense. She is dead. Showing him the second picture, you nod sadly. "Kyndall too."

He seems to stop breathing then and from one moment to the next he's opening files and pulling out picture after picture. As you stare at each of them, you grimace and swallow down the bile that's threatening to climb its way up your throat. "Y/N, do you know any of the others?"

Shakily exhaling, you point at each picture. "Desiree, Celeste, Maria. I don't know this one, but I think her last name was Valdez? And then the male is Tim."

Spencer falls on his butt, staring at you in surprise. "That's right. We know their names and their current line of work, but that's about it. Their files only seem to go back a few years. Everything between the end of their high school career and current line of work seems to be scrubbed clean. Do you- do you know of any connection between these people? Any little thing you know can possibly be a big help to my team."

Your gaze darts up to him and your heart sinks. You've managed to keep your past mostly hidden, but now it seems the time has come to tell him what you did before. "They, uh, they're all ex-agents of SHIELD. The real SHIELD, not HYDRA."

"What?"

"If I remember correctly, they were computer analysts or paper pushers. They had gun training as one would think an agent would have, but they were agents who didn't really have to train in hand-to-hand since they never made it out into the field."

"You're positive? How do you know this?"

You gulp. "Because I'm ex-SHIELD too."

Spencer blinks at you, but then in the next moment he's up on his feet and reaching for his phone. He places a quick phone call, stepping into another room and leaving you alone. Your stomach sinks and you have a feeling that this confession might have just put a wedge in your friendship. After all, though ex-agents were being picked up by other different branches of the government, you weren't sure just how exactly trustworthy all ex-agents were being treated.

Spencer reappears, nervously tucking his hair behind his ear. "Do you mind coming with me back to work? My co-workers could really pick your brain about this."

You blink at him. "W-What? You're not mad at me?"

"Mad?" He chuckles. "Why would I be mad? I mean I wish I had known what you did so I didn't have to worry about you being alone when I left for a case, but I can see why you would keep that underwraps. HYDRA made a lot of people paranoid."

"Tell me about it," you mumble. Then after a few seconds, you finally climb up to your own two feet. "Um, just let me go put on some shoes. I'll meet you in the hall."

Spencer's smile and nod eases some of your worries, but you still quickly make an escape to go put on some shoes. Your front door bangs open and you hurry to your hall closet. Yanking open that door, you pull on the first pair of Converse you come across. Then taking a moment to think, you grab a pair of knee high boots that you use every once in a while. Reaching inside, you grab your old badge and a USB stick, sticking your badge in your back pocket and the USB in your front pocket. Then grabbing your keys from the hook by the front door, you shut the door after exiting and lock it. Spencer is waiting down the hall for you and you jog towards him. He tightly smiles and then leads you downstairs, towards his car, and you sit quietly in his passenger seat while he drives.

On the way towards Spencer's place of work, he can't help but ask, "So what exactly did you do with SHIELD if you don't mind me asking."

You shrug. "Cat's out of the bag now, so I don't mind." You chuckle though it kind of falls flat. "I was, uh, a computer analyst for a while. But then I was taken on a field trip with a few agents and we ended up trading bullets with several not so nice guys. The field agents liked the way I handled myself and requested I level up, so to speak."

"And you never thought of trying to get hired on with anyone else? If I recall, the FBI and CIA were picking up ex-SHIELD agents after the fall."

You shake your head. "Remember that drowning incident I mentioned? Or the reason why I can't take baths anymore and have to turn my shower on and off between washing?" Spencer hums, remembering what he thought were odd quirks until he realized it was all because of your fear of certain amounts of water. "That drowning incident was HYDRA's fault. I spent months in rehab and just- well, no one wanted a damaged agent."

"If it makes you feel any better, I'm kind of glad they didn't. I quite like my neighbor who picks up take-out and bakes sweets for me after a rough case."

You try not to think too much about his words and instead choose to smile at him before looking out your window. The drive is only about twenty minutes and fortunately the radio fills in the semi-tense silence.

When you get to the FBI building, Spencer escorts you inside with a hand at the small of your back. You're given a visitor's badge and you quickly clip it onto the hem of your hoodie. The elevator ride up to the BAU's main floor is a short one and it opens up to a wall of glass where you can see several desks behind it.

Spencer opens the door for you and you can't help but make yourself seem as small as possible. You cross your arms over your chest, hugging yourself as you enter the room. There are several people milling about, but no one pays you any attention. Only one female, dark bangs covering her forehead while the rest of her hair falls just passed her shoulders, heads towards you once she spots you and Spencer.

"Y/N," Spencer says, introducing you to the woman as she nears, "this is our Unit Chief Emily Prentiss. Emily, this is my good friend Y/N Y/L/N."

Emily is all smiles as she reaches to shake your hand. "Hi! It's nice to finally meet the girl who takes care of our boy wonder after cases."

Spencer nervously chuckles and you find yourself genuinely grinning. "It's nice to finally meet you too. I've heard some funny stories about all you guys."

"I will neither confirm nor deny any of those."

Emily then leads you towards a room where three others are waiting. "Guys, this is Y/N Y/L/N. Friend of Spence and ex-agent of SHIELD. Y/N, this is Special Agent Derek Morgan and Jennifer Jareau, and our very own technical analyst Penelope Garcia."

Everyone happily greets you and Jennifer even gives you the go ahead to call her JJ. You're offered a seat at their round table and you glance at their board filled with pictures of people you used to work with. Spencer sits next to you and you offer him a feeble smile when he reaches beneath the table to squeeze your knee.

"Alright, guys, I know we're all interested in the girl who lives next to Spence, but we need to get down to business." Spencer groans as his teammates all chuckle. "So Y/N, is there anything else you can give us about the victims? What exactly did they do? Did they all personally know each other or just enough because they were coworkers? Even the smallest bit of info that you think is inconsequential can help us."

"I, uh, I can do you one better," you say. You shift in your seat and reach into your front pocket, pulling out the USB stick. "Since I figure all those NDA's we signed are now null and void thanks to Agent Romanoff's data dump, and because you're Spencer's friend, I feel comfortable handing this over. It kind of made me nervous keeping it in my house anyway."

You slide the USB towards Penelope and she gasps, snatching it up and holding it as if it were the holy grail. "Is this- are these files? Because let me tell you, I tried to download those files as soon as they hit the net but there were just so many and not even our WiFi could download it fast enough before they were scrubbed clean."

You grin and nod, chuckling at Penelope's squeal. "I started collecting everyone's files that I could get my hands on. I started with the baby agents- agents whose files wouldn't toss up red flags when their files were opened. The more clearance I was granted, the more files I was able to download."

"Oh my god. Yes! You are my new favorite person." Penelope rushes around the table, bending down to kiss your cheek with a loud mwah! "Reid, keep this one. I'll be in my lair."

The group all chuckle as you blush, but then Agent Morgan is clearing his throat. "Not that I'm not grateful about what you're giving up, but isn't what you were doing illegal?"

You shrug. "It possibly was, but then Director Fury realized I was memorizing it all and didn't have a problem with it so long as those files didn't leave my office."

"But you have them on you now," Morgan says.

"Yeah. The USB was hidden within my belongings in my office. My office surprisingly survived unscathed after Captain Rogers crashed the helicarriers into the Potomac, and my stuff was packed up and shipped to me while I was in rehab."

"If you don't mind me asking," JJ wonders, "but were you at the Triskelion when HYDRA came out or..?"

"I don't mind the questions at all," you say. "It's actually quite nice to talk about it with people who aren't eyeing me suspiciously." The group flashes you small smiles. "I was actually on a consulting job with a recently formed SHIELD team whose base was a humongous plane that was constantly on the move. Anyway, one of those trusted team members ended up being HYDRA. He led a group of his men onto the plane, killed half of us to get control of it, and then locked me and two scientists into a holding pod before dropping us into the middle of the ocean."

"The drowning incident," Spencer suddenly realizes.

You smile sadly at him, nodding. "We sank to the bottom of the ocean floor. There were three of us and only one little oxygen tank." Spencer grabs your hand beneath the table and you're grateful for the grounding pressure. "We gave it to Jemma. Fitz and I were going to attempt to swim, but we didn't make it. Fitz blacked out first, then me, and then- then nothing. We woke up in a trusted SHIELD facility, and Fitz and I couldn't operate like we used to. With our brains having been deprived of oxygen, it messed us up for a while."

"Wow," Emily says. "I am so sorry."

You shrug at her with a small smile. "It was all part of the job."

"What do you do now?" Morgan asks. "I hate to say it, but with all our victims being ex-SHIELD, and you as well, we have to rule you out as-"

"I get it." You smile in reassurance at him since it kind of pained him to admit that you could be a suspect and have Spencer glare at him for even thinking it. "I'm a bouncer at a bar most nights."

Morgan chuckles. "A bouncer? You!?"

"Hey! I might not look like much, but I did train with Avengers. I could probably give you a run for your money, agent Morgan."

"Okay, okay," he muses.

"I also work as private security for Stark Industries when they throw galas. If you need the exact dates I've been working, I can get that for you."

"Please," JJ says. "Spencer's already vouched for you, but protocol and all that. You understand."

"I do. I'll just- I'll text my bosses to email my clock-ins and clock-outs."

Pulling out your phone, you immediately text your boss at the bar and Pepper Potts. You keep the explanation vague as to why you need it, but assure them it's very much needed for a case the FBI is working on. They completely understand and you even have to make Pepper swear not to get Tony involved.

The emails come in not even ten minutes later and JJ happily takes your phone to run the dates with Penelope, promising to be quick about it. You remain in your seat, watching as Morgan and Emily walk towards the board and start tossing their thoughts back and forth over what they've learned so far.

Your hands are atop the table, thumbs chipping away the already chipped nail polish you have on. The second you raise your hand with the intent of chewing on your thumb nail, Spencer catches your hand. "You okay?" He quietly asks and you stare at him. He then lets your hand go as you pull them back into your lap.

"Yeah. Just getting kind of tired. And a bit anxious. Someone's targeting ex-SHIELD agents and I- well I'm one of those people."

"No one is going to hurt you, Y/N. I promise."

You feebly smile, not taking his words to heart because you know he can't actually keep that promise. He might want to, but you know better than to take these types of promises seriously in situations such as this.

JJ reappears, a bright smile in place as she hands you your phone. "I'm pretty sure Penelope programmed her number in there."

"That's fine." You chuckle. You lay your phone on the table, giving your attention back to Emily and Morgan who's now being joined by JJ.

"Guys, Garcia is having a ball right now. There's so much information she wasn't privy to before, but I'm not sure how any of it is going to help more than Y/N already has." Emily and Morgan look at JJ, waiting for her to explain. "We already know victims weren't the best at hand-to-hand, which the unsub clearly took advantage of. But we need to know what they were presently doing and if they were checking in with anyone because there are a lot of dead ex-agents. That's not a coincidence. Either someone who's ex-SHIELD or HYDRA is picking off ex-agents one by one, or someone who has a grudge against SHIELD found a list of ex-agents and is working their way down the list."

"Where do we even start?" Morgan asks, incredulous. "SHIELD technically doesn't exist anymore and those who are operating in the shadows are nearly impossible to track down thanks to the Avengers. None of them are exactly easy to get a hold of after General Ross made it his personal mission to bring in James Buchanan Barnes for crimes HYDRA made him commit. They like working on their own."

"We'd have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to get a face to face," Emily says, sighing. "If we're lucky they'll want in on the case since it's related to SHIELD."

"Um, actually.." You nervously raise your hand, calling all attention on you. "You can bypass all those hoops."

Emily stares at you, sitting on the edge of the table as she crosses her arms over her chest. "You still have connections, don't you?" At your sheepish grin, she huffs in amusement. Every other team member straightens with hope in their expressions.

"Agent Prentiss, I am the connection." As you pick up your phone once more, JJ and Morgan step closer to the table. You scroll through your contacts, finding the one you need and tapping on it. Then putting it on speaker, you try to soothe your nerves as the ringing through the speaker seems to make the atmosphere of the room become tense.

The ringing stops as the connection is made and then, "Well, well, well. If it isn't my second favorite human on God's green Earth." You roll your eyes at the charm oozing from him. "What kind of trouble are you in now, doll?"

Emily and JJ's eyes widen, and you shake your head in amusement. "Put your boyfriend on the line, Barnes. I'm calling in a favor."

"Are you calling to finally take us up on that offer of joining us for a night?"

Everyone in the room seems to freeze, although Morgan is highly enjoying where this seems to be going. You close your eyes, scrunching up your nose. You can't believe they just heard that. "Steve really needs to put a muzzle on you."

"Well if you're into that-"

"Bucky!" You bark. "You're on speaker." Morgan finally loses the battle with his laughter and you wish you can sink into your chair. Instead you have to settle for just insanely blushing and covering your face with one hand. "I'm currently with the BAU of the FBI. They have a case that they could use some help on."

"Oh." There's a beat of silence. "Christ, Y/N. You should have stopped me sooner. Stevie's gonna lecture me again. Hold on. I'll go get him."

The line goes silent and you nervously meet Spencer's gaze. He's the only one who doesn't seem as amused which is why you don't find Bucky's greeting as funny as you normally would. Something about his expression actually makes you wish Bucky hadn't said anything.

"Y/N?"

You sit a little straighter in your seat. "Hey, Cap."

"What's going on? Buck mentioned the FBI."

"Uh yeah. I'm with Agents Prentiss, Morgan, Jareau, and Doctor Reid," you tell him. "They've been dealing with a case that had gone cold and well I kind of made a connection they hadn't seen before because they couldn't, and uh I'm sure they could use your help."

"What was the connection?"

You look at Emily and she nods, letting you tell him. "Steve, all the victims are ex-SHIELD. Specifically agents who wouldn't have had too much training; who couldn't hold their own without a gun in hand."

There's a sharp inhale. "What do they need?"

Emily's eyes close in relief and she holds her hand out for your phone. You happily oblige her and hand it over. "Captain Rogers, this is Special Agent Emily Prentiss. I'm the one in charge of my team here."

"Hello, Agent Prentiss. How can my team and I be of help?"

"Well we mainly need to pick your brains and ask some questions. We're aware that SHIELD is still operating to an extent, even if it is in the shadows, so we'd like to know if the victims were still affiliated with you. If we're dealing with someone who is or was from SHIELD or HYDRA, we'd like to have you involved since you have more experience with how they operate."

"That's fine. I'll gather my team and set up a room. Are you okay to set up base here in the Compound?"

"Yes!" JJ says, starting everyone. She clears her throat and calms herself. "Yes."

Steve chuckles. "Very well. Gather everything you need. I'll be sending a quinjet for you all since it'll be faster. Y/N knows the pick-up location."

"Thank you so much, Captain Rogers."

Emily hands you the phone and seeing that the call is still connected, you say, "Hey, Steve? Thanks for this."

"It's not a problem, sweetheart. Are you okay though? You're an ex-shield agent yourself."

"I know, but nothing has been out of the ordinary. I'm okay."

"Good. You coming too?"

"I was actually planning on going home after driving the agents to the location. I'm not an active agent anymore, bub."

"I know you're not, but with that agent neighbor of yours coming here I rather have you here as well so we can keep an eye on you." You sigh at his protectiveness. "Bring a change of clothes for a week. I'll have Nat get a hold of your boss and let him know some of what's going on so you'll have a job to go back to once all of this is over."

"You're a pain in the ass, Rogers."

Steve laughs. "See you soon, Y/L/N."

The call ends and you set your phone down. Glancing up, you smile sheepishly at the team staring at you. "So, uh, I guess I'm tagging along. Sorry about that."

Emily opens her mouth, her words getting stuck as she shakes her head in amusement. "Don't be. You got us working with the Avengers within minutes as opposed to taking hours, possibly even a day if I had to put in a request."

Morgan whistles appreciatively. "This is insane. I'm gonna give Garcia a heads up about our field trip. Expect another tag a long. I don't think she'll pass up this opportunity."

You chuckle as JJ says, "Rossi is going to be so pissed he took a vacation and missed out on working with the Avengers." Then looking at you, she adds, "Do you think Spider-Man will be there? My son absolutely loves him and I would be the coolest mom ever if I got a picture or video with him."

"I'm sure Pe- uh, I'm sure Spider-Man will make an appearance," you say. "He's always hanging around after his classes are done for the day."

JJ's eyes widen. "You totally know who he is."

"I do. And let me tell you, he absolutely adores kids. Ask and he'll happily oblige."

"Guys. Guys!" Emily says. "Case first, fangirl later."

Spencer snorts and you elbow him on reflex. He grumbles, Emily and JJ grin, and you innocently smile at Emily. "Sorry, Agent Prentiss. I'll just- I'll go sit on that couch over there so I'm not in the way."

Emily starts telling her team what needs to be done, repeating herself again when Morgan returns with a clearly excited Garcia. Morgan informs everyone he'll go gather the boxes of files while Spencer immediately sets out to disassemble the board of pictures and post-its. Garcia excitedly rushes back to her own office to pack up a few things, while Emily and JJ figure out what all they'll need to be taking with them.

To keep yourself occupied, you waste a few minutes by playing a game on your phone.

You're not sure how much time has passed, but someone hesitantly sitting next to you takes your attention off your phone. Glancing up, you see Spencer sitting there and realize everyone else has cleared out of the room. "We should be ready to head out in about ten minutes."

"Oh. Okay."

There's a moment of silence and then, "Soo.. Bucky Barnes." He chuckles, running a hand through his hair, and you can tell his amusement isn't exactly genuine. "He's- he's not the type of person I pictured you with if I'm being honest."

"Barnes?" You snort. "Ew. No." Spencer seems surprised by your reply. "Bucky likes to flirt with me because he knows it won't go anywhere. He's well aware of the actual person I have a crush on and he respects that. Mostly."

"O-Oh? So there is someone in the picture then?"

"Well, not really," you say. Squirming in your seat, you're not totally comfortable with the direction this talk has taken until you see you're not the only one squirming. Spencer is avoiding eye contact, but he's also clearly awaiting your answer. There's also a telltale flush up the side of his neck to the tips of his ears, and- oh. Oh. Seeing how nervous Spencer suddenly is makes you feel better. So better, in fact, that you feel you should speak up about something that you've kept secret for a while. "Well I mean I'd like there to be," you say, grinning when he freezes. "The thing is, he actually lives down the hall from me." Cue him holding his breath. "He's totally adorable, but also secretly hot which is so unfair, and he works for the FBI." Spencer's head snaps in your direction, eyes wide. You smile sheepishly and shrug. "The only downfall is that he's way too good for someone like me, so I settled for friendship."

Your heart is beating terribly fast and the only thing keeping you glued to your seat is Spencer grinning bashfully, cheeks pink. "If you ask me, I don't think he's too good at all. I-If anything, he probably thinks you were too good for him which is why he never made his own feelings known."

Relief washes over you and you laugh. "We're idiots, huh?"

Lips pressed together, he smiles wide. Then, "A little."

"Rain check on this discussion? We've got Avengers to greet and you have a case to solve."

"Of course!" Spencer hastily stands, offering you a hand up. Grinning, you take it and let him pull you to your feet while shoving your phone into your back pocket. "Wherever we're going, is it okay to leave our vehicles there?"

"Yeah. It's private property and pretty secluded. No one gets in without codes."

"Okay then. We'll swing by our building for your bag and then you can direct one of the drivers while the other follows."

"Sure. Sounds like a plan."

Because of the connection between the list of victims, you have an escort up to your apartment while you pack a bag. Emily and JJ happily accompany you, leaving Spencer to fend for himself with Morgan and Garcia.

In your apartment, the two female agents waste no time in subtly trying to figure out your exact feelings for their dear friend and you take great amusement in skirting around the answer they so desperately try to pry out of you. And it's only after your duffel is packed do you tell them you and Spencer had admitted some things to each other, but you are planning to talk about it further after their case is closed. JJ seems oddly giddy and Emily coos about their boy genius growing up. You blush, relieved that they've taken a to liking to you. Then when you get back to the vehicles, you know Spencer has been questioned as well given the smirks being sent your way.

The drive to the field isn't long and the team is impressed by the level of security for a seemingly abandoned airfield. There's an unmanned gate which you get off at to speak for voice recognition, punch in a specific code, give a hand print, and then secretly have your forefinger pricked for a blood sample. Then when the gate swings open, you quickly climb back into the car and instruct Emily towards the second gate where a guard sits. The guard greets you warmly and, after you introduce those in the vehicle with you, he assures you he knows all about the impending pick-up.

"So what exactly are we in for?" Morgan asks. You're all waiting in an opened hangar, the boxes they'd packed sitting on the ground.

"Your perceptions about them are about to be changed," you admit. "I'm sure you've all told yourselves that the Avengers are just like you and I, but you have no idea how true that it is until you meet them."

"Who is the nicest?" JJ wonders.

You take a moment to think about. "Honestly? They're all nice, but if I had to choose I'd choose Spider-Man. It's hard not to like him. The kid's a puppy."

"Who gives the best hugs?" Garcia quickly adds.

Everyone chuckles at her eagerness. "That's a tough one," you say. You ponder on it for a moment. "I say it's a tie between Steve and Thor. They hug full on, chest to chest. None of that half-assed, one arm hug nonsense."

Garcia practically swoons. "Oh to be wrapped up in those beefy Asgardian arms." You snort and shake your head in amusement.

Another twenty minutes pass and you regale Spencer and his friends about some of your work with SHIELD. But all too soon the telltale sound of a quinjet reaches your ears and when you look up you see one incoming.

"Well that was hella fast," Garcia muses when she spots the quinjet herself.

JJ grins. "Stark technology. Gotta love it."

Emily nods in agreement. "We definitely need an upgrade."

Whoever is flying the quinjet lands it with ease, and Spencer, Morgan, and JJ immediately pick up their boxes. Shouldering the strap of your duffel bag, you start heading towards the quinjet when the ramp is being lowered and the team follows a few steps behind.

Clint Barton walks off the ramp and you chuckle, hurrying your steps. Both your arms go around his neck and one of his arms wraps low around your waist. "Short stack," he says. "What trouble did you get into now?"

"Why does everyone assume I'm in trouble?" You pout as you pull back, pinching his cheek and cooing before stepping back out of range. "And what are you even doing here? Shouldn't you be on the farm with those precious little heathens?"

"I was, but Laura had leftovers for Nat and Wanda. I was just dropping them off when Steve rounded up the team."

"Oh nice." Then turning around, you gesture to the BAU team. "Clint, meet Special Agents Emily Prentiss, Derek Morgan, Jennifer Jareau, Doctor Spencer Reid, and the brains of the beauty of the team Miss Penelope Garcia. Guys, meet Clint Barton formerly known as Hawkeye."

Everyone shakes hands, with the exception of Garcia who slaps his hand away and pulls him into a hug.

"Baby girl," Morgan laughs, "what are you doing?"

She squeezes a chuckling Clint before letting go, she then whirling on her own friend. "This is my first time meeting the Avengers. Do not take this from me!" Morgan's eyebrows raise in amusement, the whole team and Clint chuckling.

Then not wasting anymore time, Clint ushers everyone on board. He shows them where the boxes and your bag can be stowed before taking the pilot's seat up front, only to be joined by Morgan moments later in the co-pilot seat. You show Emily and Garcia how to buckle in, and then take your own seat between JJ and Spencer.

Clint counts down for lift off and you grip your harness as you feel the quinjet take flight. Spencer nudges you with his elbow and you glance at him, grinning to assure him you're okay. But when you can feel the quinjet picking up speed thanks to the feeling in your gut, you close your eyes and are thankful that no one brings up the fact that you're actually really nervous right now.

Your left hand is grabbed and gently pried from your grip on the harness, and your eyes fly open in surprise. You look towards your left and JJ smiles at you reassuringly as she squeezes your hand in comfort. Then when your right hand is grabbed and given the same treatment, you glance over at Spencer and can't help but blurt, "I-I've never been nervous about flying before."

"It's perfectly normal to subconsciously be nervous or anxious after we trudged up your past earlier," he says. "Just close your eyes and relax. We won't let anything happen to you."

You nod, smiling shakily and turn your head to rest it against the headrest of your seat. Then closing your eyes, you're grateful for the team not asking you anything for the duration of the ride. Instead, they save their questions for Clint who's all too happy to answer what he can.

You know the Compound's come into view when Morgan whistles in appreciation. Clint lands to quinjet with ease and then everyone's unbuckling themselves when he gives the go ahead. Before you can grab your bag, however, Spencer is grabbing it and beaming at you when you sigh with mock annoyance.

One by one the BAU team disembarks after Clint, leaving you and Spencer to bring up the rear. You hear Clint introducing everyone and notice everyone's congregated around in a circle. Then just as you and Spencer join, you notice that Garcia is petting Bucky's vibranium arm. You snort, catching an amused Steve's attention.

"Y/N," he greets.

"Steve." You step forward, briefly hugging him and then Bucky. As you step back in line, you gesture towards Spencer to introduce him. "This is Doctor Spencer Reid. Spence, this is Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes."

Steve leans in for a handshake, but then pauses mid-shake. "Wait. Spencer Reid? The Spencer Reid?" He grins. "Are you- are you and the agent neighbor one in the same?"

You sharply inhale, eyes widening when everyone turns to stare at your rapidly blushing face. Steve's grin turns rather teasing and your eyes narrow at him. "Two words; octopus dick." Steve's amusement vanishes, and everyone turns towards a now blushing Steve as Bucky guffaws. You turn your gaze on him next. "I don't know why you're laughing, dolphin boy."

Bucky immediately shuts up and Steve shakily grins before addressing the team. "Okay! Now that we've all been introduced, lets get inside before Y/N starts a war she can't finish."

Morgan and JJ are the only two to follow after Steve, Bucky, and Clint. Emily and Garcia remain with you and Spencer, and both females look to you with pleading eyes.

"Please tell me how four innocuous words got two supersoldiers to blush like that?" Garcia asks, Emily nodding along with her. "I need to know!"

"Sorry, girls," you tell them. "Those stories get out and I'm dead meat."

The both of them grumble about not getting answers, but move on without fuss. Before you can follow, however, Spencer steps closer to you. "You won't even tell me?" He asks, voice quiet.

You huff. "You already know."

Spencer's answering smile is enough to make you roll your eyes and he's quick to keep pace with you as you enter the building. There are numerous people milling about, but since it's late most of the trainees are in bed. Every piece of furniture and fixture still seems brand spanking new, so you don't blame the BAU team looking around in awe.

Heading into the chosen office, you lead Spencer inside before catching Steve's attention. "I'm gonna let you guys get to work. I'll be setting up in my room if anyone needs me."

No one objects, so after taking your bag from Spencer you take your leave. You leisurely make your way towards the living quarters of the compound and find your room with ease. Opening the door, the familiarity of it brings a tired smile to your face. The lamps have been turned on, awaiting your arrival, and even the TV has been turned on with its volume on low. The walls and bedding is the same as everyone else has, but you know it's your room because of the personal pictures on the dresser and bedside tables.

Since you're going to be staying until the case is over and then probably a couple days more after, you decide to put your clothes in the dresser rather than leave it in your bag for the entire time. After that's done and you've switched your TV to a movie you like, you pick out a standard set of black sleep pants and a blue/gray shirt that every trainee at the compound wears to bed so you can shower before crawling into bed yourself.

You're grateful for the private bathroom and even more grateful to see the products you use already waiting for you. You turn on the water to the shower, grab a towel from the bathroom closet and set it on the counter along with your change of clothes before you start to strip.

You keep your hair in a topknot as you shower since you had washed it earlier that morning, so your shower is over within ten minutes. Then by the time you're dried off and dressed in fresh clothes, and your teeth are brushed, you exit the bathroom.

Stepping into your room, you startle at the sight of Spencer sitting on the small cushioned bench at the foot of your bed. He's staring up at the moving playing, the corner of his lips quirked up in amusement. But at your small gasp, he looks towards you, lips spreading into a fond smile.

"Captain Rogers said it was okay that I wait for you. I don't mean to intrude."

"Spence," you huff a laugh and then continue on towards your bed, "we have keys to each other's apartments and sometimes barge in without warning. I think you waiting in here is more than okay."

"Just needed to make sure," he says, "what with this being a new place and all."

"Mhmm." You sit on the edge of the bed that's right behind the bench, putting your feet on the cushion beside Spencer and practically hug your knees as you stare at him. "How did everyone settle in?"

"E-Everyone's good." Spencer turns sideways, grinning up at you. "We got our own rooms here so we don't have to be back and forth from a hotel. When we left, Garcia was being introduced to the holographic tables and now I don't think she's going to sleep tonight."

You chuckle. "I knew she'd fall prey to all the pretty tech here." He chuckles along with you. "And how did everyone take the news to hearing the details about the case?"

"They're taking it very personally," Spencer tells you. "Mr. Barton even asked to stay on as a consultant. He and agent Romanoff are not very happy."

"Well they might not be as smart as you, Doc, but I think they're going to be a big help. You guys will be out of here in no time with the bad guy in cuffs."

"Is that so?" He muses. You grin and nod. "And if we're out of here in no time, are we still waiting until you go home for that discussion we still need to have?"

"We can table the discussion," you say, "but I really need to do this before I chicken out."

"Do what?"

Without thinking too much more about it, you reach out to cradle Spencer's jaw in the palms of your hands. You bring his face closer to yours, pausing with barely an inch between your lips. It seems he's held his breath in surprise, but when he notices you're waiting for some sort of unspoken permission it's him who closes the gap.

There's nothing heated or rushed about the kiss- it merely being a chaste kiss of several little pecks before he catches your bottom lip between his teeth. You smile, your lip popping free from where it stretches, and you giggle as he leans up to chase your lips.

"Ahem." The interruption causes you to jerk back from Spencer, eyes wide when you catch sight of Bucky leaning against your door jamb and looking quite smug. "Hope I'm not interrupting." You groan, laying your forehead on Spencer's shoulder while he quietly snorts. "So with this new development, does this mean our threesome will now be a foursome?"

You can't help but laugh and sit straight once more so you can see your friend. Unfortunately, the question actually gives you pause and there's a split second where you actually give it thought. But in the next moment your nose wrinkles and you shake your head. "What? No!"

He points at you, eyes gleaming. "You paused! You paused which means that no just turned into a maybe. I'm gonna go tell Stevie we're back in the game!"

"James!" Spencer finally laughs and you groan again when Bucky pushes off the door jamb, whistling as he walks away. "I hate my friends."

"Just wait until Morgan finds out. It'll be worse." Spencer chuckles as you sigh, and he gets up before walking around to the side of your bed. He places his palms down on the mattress, leaning over you to kiss you once more. "I'm gonna go to my room before Sergeant Barnes brings back reinforcements."

"Okay. I'll probably see you around the compound, but I'll do my best to stay out of your hair while you're looking for your unsub."

"Are we still talking after?"

"Of course. Well we can either talk or order in some Chinese and hole up in one of our apartments for a weekend. Your call."

"I like the second option," he says.

"I figured you would." You kiss him one last time and then push against his chest. "Now go. We'll figure things out soon."