#but it's funnier to think about it happening like this

[livewiregoth]

I dunno why I find it funny that Constantine manages to get Danny to be like "Ok so I'm a bogus exorcist but I'm not bogus at doing my job"

Be kind of funny if after all this time eventually working with Danny, trying to get him to do shit properly, Danny helping as a repairman, Constantine thinking this guy is a normal guy with suspiciously strong abilities is the King of the Infinity Realm/the Ghost King. Like this guy that he maybe sees as a friend at times despite being annoyed of him that he has been convinced is a normal guy that's parents led to him learning to be a repairman & some how can be an exorcist even when half assing shit(well I guess fully messing it up) is the fucking king of the ghosts. Probably makes sense in some way due to the times they had to deal with some really bad demons like the time that made him finally confront Danny but still it's something he wouldn't have expected.

Even funnier(to me) is how he possibly finds out. Maybe there's a time were he just decides to ask the ghosts why Danny's power makes them leave despite not doing the exorcist shit right. Some are likely scared of his energy/aura(a part of me imagines this for ghosts that don't know yet/are newer), some say cryptic shit & some eventually finally admit who Danny is. Or maybe another way Constantine could find out would be on occasion the ghosts comment on Danny that make the blond realize there's more to his now coworker than he thought, probably brushes it off since he knows Danny can be a bit weird & as far as he knows oblivious even if strong but then someone eventually spills what's going on or says enough to figure it out.

Or some other thing leads to learning Danny is the ghost king, who knows.

I dunno I just think it'd be funny if Constantine thanks to something going on eventually learns the guy that went from some stupid bogus exorcist he hired as a joke that was good at his job to someone he sees as a coworker is actually the ghost king trying to make a living in the world of the living

Probably has some feelings about this(this guy he kind of grew close to lied(why are you surprised you knew he lied about the bogus shit), why is he going around as a human, why is trying to make a living when he's a king with duties in the Infinity Realm) but it's going to be interesting when he finally thinks things over, puts his thoughts together & what he does with this info afterwords.

Does he confront Danny or for once just lets things be? Maybe he lets whatever take its course & Danny eventually has a moment were he has to confess for some reason. There's a lot of scenarios that could happen, the options are infinite.

I'm likely thinking too much again

Another dpxdc prompt (sorry it’s been so long)

So Danny, now grown up and the ghost king, is looking for a job. However bc of his responsibilities as king a normal job won’t do. He would need to be able to make his own hours and such. He tried to be a freelance repair/electrical guy (thx mum and dad for those skills) but it never made that much money.

Then one day, prompted by a joke comment from Tucker about going back to ghost fights, he has a great idea!!

That’s how ‘Spook exterminator’ is born!! (He wanted to call it ghost busters but that was trademarked)

He essentially becomes an exorcist for higher and is very good at it. See what he didn’t know before this is that the ghost his use to, realm ghost, are actually the strongest type of ghost and as the king of them he is the strongest of them. This essentially means he has a ‘top predator’ vibe that sends most non realm ghost running before he even steps into the building. All he has to do then is call upon his inter theatre kid and put on a good show before leaving with a full wallet.

It’s not like he’s scamming them or anything. He is getting rid of the ghost! He just likes putting a little flare to it! Plus it gives him better tips.

Anyway cutting over to Constantine who, drunk out of his mind, thinks it would be hilarious to higher some bogus exorcist he saw a flier for and take them to the most haunted house he knowns just to see what happens.

He was definitely not expecting every ghost to hightail it out of there before the guy even step foot in the door. For a second he thought that maybe he was wrong about the guy being bogus and that maybe he was actually an very skilled exorcist but then he proceeded to do the most fake ritual he had ever fucking seen. The guy couldn’t even speak Latin!!

Needless to say John was very confused

[goodolddumbbanana]

Would it be funnier if sun wanted nexus to come back and getting him back to square one instead because he wants it so badly? Him searching everywhere for nexus ragged old corpse body and bringing him back with no memories to try and fix his mistakes but he still has the voices of nexus and calls him a “dumbass are you stupid?” ����🤣

It would be really angst. Like, even if we do not count on the possibility of Nexus finding out the truth or remembering his past.

Sun is still haunted by his guilt, his sin. He will never escape the one still inside his head.

The doubt he feels, that all things will end up just like that again, the history will repeat itself, and Nexus will go evil, Sun will have to kill him.

I can imagine Sun trying to hide it, hiding the fact he still suffers but it will blow up right on his face.

Imagine Sun still has some hallucinations about Nexus, and sometimes it intertwines with his alive Nexus.

Hate and love have the same meaning, and Sun couldn't know if what he heard was love or hatred.

Moon definitely thinks it is not healthy at all l, and tries to snap Sun out of it. But like, if Sun has a chance to save Nexus without hurting others, I don't think he will let Moon's words inside his ears.

It has a lot of potential angst if Sun tries to revive Nexus and I would cry if it actually happens in the show.

[nexusvcrti]

apropos of nothing, thinking about how landon is allergic to avocado and josie is allergic to seaweed and they decided to go get sushi of all things for their date

[ineffably-human]

So here's my problem.

And it's not about Nandermo, not exactly anyway. Because I didn't expect Nandermo to become textual until the very end, if at all. The show kept making it clear that they liked their ambiguity to keep the relationship on the razor's edge, and Paul Simms made it clearer and clearer that for some reason (put a pin in this) he just couldn't see their connection as a sexual one.

But I frankly don't care about that, because if anything is canon in this show it's that the vampires will eventually fuck everything, and Nandor canonically fucks his other friends. More importantly, their connection was always the emotional core of both characters. And Paul always did say he saw their relationship as a romance, if a strange and non-sexual one.

So I figured we'd maybe get Nandor confessing that Guillermo meant a lot to him (and immediately walking it back a little), or Guillermo confessing how lost he feels without his vampire dream and Nandor offering him a place. Maybe an ambiguous, could-just-be-queerplatonic-partners 'I love you'. Maybe just the hug they kept teasing for three or four seasons and never got. We got like...half of two of those, in episode 10, so I guess that's a wobbly semi-fulfilled thing by my definition of it.

But it's not the Nandermo of it all. It's the Guillermo of it all. And how this final episode seemed to almost mock Guillermo's place at the emotional core of the show.

And the Guillermo of it all is why we never got the Nandermo of it all.

Shadows has vampires doing absurd-ass things, but every character also has things they want and feel, and there are various amounts of emotional ink spilled about it. The show has found space, sometimes very poignant space, to take that seriously in between the piss and sex jokes. The vampires change very slowly and in spirals, they repeat a lot of their old issues that stem back even to their mortal lives. But they always try.

And things do change in the vampire house; that is not the same household from the first season. Every single character, right down to the Baron and the Guide and Derek, are in different and better places than they were before the show began. They've made progress in their individual desires, and a lot of that is due to the improved connections they have with each other, connections we've watched them foster. A lot of the time it's because they're talked about as a found family, something Guillermo started and Guillermo believed before any of the rest of them did.

---

So where is Guillermo this season? Our human point of view, our dynamic character, the character who has a dream and wants something more than any of the others? Whose dream drives the storyline of the entire show?

Guillermo has chosen to be human, and he thinks he can't be part of the household if he's not a vampire. We watch Guillermo try to throw himself back into the human world trying to make up for lost time - to the point that he forgets the person he called his best friend, the people he called his family, in a way I think we never fully resolve. He thinks he's thriving, and he doesn't even seem upset about leaving the others behind.

We watch him revert (and that's fine, people revert sometimes) to the same waiting lapdog he was when we started the series. We watch him realize that and he says no. Nandor stands up for him, and feels better and more fulfilled in doing so, and that's a great capstone for Nandor and Nandor's own tendency for selfishness. And that's excellent. Episode 10 was a great start for all the ground they had to cover.

Nandor offers for Guillermo to be his partner in crime. His sidekick, but Guillermo expressed that desire back in season one so it's not an insult inherently. But here's the problem. Here's the part of Guillermo that has frankly always been a problem, because I thought it's something the show was eventually going to cover respectfully, and instead it was always part of the joke.

---

Guillermo is someone who made a decision sixteen years ago as part of a very young man's desire, to be respected and have cool powers, to live forever, to see the world. (He somehow thought being a vampire, and only a vampire, could get him those things but that's a rant for another time.)

That young man has grown up. He's in his mid-thirties, he has a body count. We've watched him at various times be empathetic, clever, cunning, and brave. Also extremely sexy in bodyguard gear. (And for some reason, the show keeps wanting us to forget that for a season he was extremely competent and badass and sexy pretty much all the time, and he seemed thrilled to be in that role, and he didn't even care about being a vampire if he could protect Nandor in that way and be regarded as 'part of the team'.)

Then Nandor dresses him in a stupid cowboy costume, and gives him a sidekick name ending in 'Kid', which he seems less than thrilled about. They all still talk about him the entire episode as if he's a disobedient child. The vampires speculate if Guillermo is having a fling with the crew, but no - Guillermo's had one boyfriend, who we saw him hug once and nothing more. Despite living in a house for fifteen years that is openly raunchy and shameless, he seems like a character designed to be both desexed and humiliated, and they never expand on the reason why.

(And if Guillermo were ace it'd be amazing, hell it's my headcanon at this point, but I don't think that's what they're going for. I think the show just desexualizes Guilermo. As a matter of praxis. For some reason.)

And the show has done this more and more to Guillermo in the later seasons. Nandor says he could steal original!Freddie easily from Guillermo if he wanted to. The vampires laugh at the thought of him being a vampire - "a little bat pooping everywhere," and Guillermo's time as a vampire has him basically feeling no different in his sexuality or, after a very brief moment, his confidence. Even Nandor's big climactic moment in Episode 10 has him saying that just because Guillermo isn't as cool or hot or interesting or strong as Jordan (or Nandor) doesn't mean Guillermo deserves to be treated poorly.

Look, I don't know if it's because Harvey Guillen is babyfaced, or because he's fat, or because he carries a different energy to his masculinity. Or because it's great to talk about gay sex and being horny, but writing a gay relationship is just too hard. Or some fun combination of all those things.

But I keep thinking about everyone freaking out when Nandor swooped into the collapsed floorboards to save Guillermo in season 4, and everyone freaked out and swooned. And Paul Simms expressed that as "[Nandor] has to save his little buddy."

Guillermo is a grown-ass man, with a desire to feel powerful and special and accepted, who Nandor sees as his little buddy. (Who everyone in the house sees as their little buddy, and it's nice he's part of the family, but...) After every emotional beat that makes them seem like equals with a special connection, he reverts to the less-cool sidekick who makes Nandor feel special and important. And Guillermo's prior devotion to Nandor - not to vampirism, not to a job or promotion, to Nandor - changes to other things, but Nandor never figures out why that hurts him so much. And for some reason the deepest bond of the series just isn't sexual, the showrunner just can't see it that way, in a house where everyone's fucking but not you Guillermo.

We're at the end of the story, and that's our punchline.

---

And we don't end on one of the points where Guillermo is asserting himself as someone who deserves to be taken seriously, and given the things he wants - and the show has had plenty of those moments, all of which seem to be building and evolving his relationships over the years.

We end on Guillermo being told that suddenly, the documentary is packing up without any fanfare or clarity on what they were looking for in the first place. We get Guillermo stumbling for clarity on what it all meant, what the point was for him and what his life is going to be now. We're told over and over again the documentary (and Guillermo, and the viewers) needs a satisfying capstone, needs emotional closure.

And the vampires tell him to shut up. And they tell him this has all happened before, and none of it is special to them. ("No human is special," Nandor said several episodes ago, and never went back on it.) And they tell him to do a little dance for their amusement, and Colin recites some pithy lines. And every attempt to take a moment to care about Guillermo's journey, or the core of his character and what he needs, is turned into a joke for him and for us.

Guillermo's looking for a point to it all, for some kind of fulfillment, and there wasn't one. And everyone is satisfied in that but him. And even if there were times Guillermo got the chance to be respected, to have cool powers (which he kept, but the vampires keep forgetting them), to live forever (he will die and leave Nandor someday!), to see the world - none of these things are going to come to him now.

It would make absolute, complete, and devastating sense for Guillermo to feel he's outgrown them and to leave. Nandor doesn't even seem upset enough to try and stop him. We never really get a clear reason about why he decides to stay.

I mean, it's for friendship or something, with a line about how they can still be close but he needs 'his own thing'. But in six seasons, over and over and over, we've been driven back to the idea that the most emotional part of this story is Guillermo's desire to become accepted in this family, and the effect he has on Nandor. That Guillermo needs this home and he consistently makes Nandor softer, kinder, less selfish and more fulfilled when they're together.

But those parts of their relationship, the love story parts, don't matter. Guillermo is going to find 'his own thing' when it's been clear how entrenched in this world he is (right down to his DNA), but Nandor will drag him back into shenanigans anyway, probably keeping Guillermo from whatever 'his own thing' is.

And Guillermo will always be Nandor's sidekick, his little buddy, never to be taken seriously. And one day, Guillermo will die, and he'll be someone they all forget. And for some reason, he'll be just fine with that, because he belongs with them but will never really be in a better position.

And he'll be satisfied with that. For some reason. But I won't.

[forthegothicheroine]

You folks seem to be biting, so here goes.

Checkmate Lincolnites is a webseries about debunking pro-Confederate "Lost Cause" pseudohistory. The first episode started off as youtuber (and horror filmmaker) Andrew Rakich making fun of obnoxious commenters on his history videos, but later episodes became more involved and in-depth. At this point, the characters of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb solidified, a pair of homoerotic frenemies who are either military history buffs or actual Union and Confederate soldiers, depending on what's funnier for a given joke. Importantly, while Johnny Reb still reads objectively (and often comically) wrong arguments from the comment section, he's supposed to be the kind of person who was taught a bunch of lies which he's invested in due to his pride, but who knows slavery is wrong and doesn't want to think of himself as racist.

And then at the end, the series turns into what Billy Yank calls "a Sam Raimi movie." Andrew Rakich is, remember, a horror filmmaker whose favorite movie is Ravenous.

The dark horror comedy finale is where the overt folk horror stuff comes in which initially prompted me to make this post. Dark magic brings an army of the undead crawling out of their graves to try to reestablish their old ways, and the heroes gain an uncomfortable ally in The Witchfinder General of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (that's his name), who would be a villain in any other folk horror movie but just in this one specific case happens to be right about there being demons and necromancy afoot. (He's far less evil than Vincent Price's Witchfinder General, but has killed a lot of innocent people and communes with a bloodthirsty supernatural being who claims to be Jesus but sure doesn't seem like it.)

But if we want to get philosophical about folk horror, it's rooted in the series from the very premise. Johnny Reb stands in for people who were brought up with pro-Confederate beliefs by their communities, and as Billy Yank points out in the episode "Is Civil War History Being Rewritten?", those communities were founded along pretty straightforwardly cultish lines. Learning about the catechisms written and taught by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans or Daughter of the Confederacy, recited at annual celebrations, at least one of which calls upon "the god of Jeff Davis" is seriously chilling. If folk horror draws upon fears of the Bad Old Ways, then look no damn further.

As Billy Yank finally explodes at Johnny:

"You think I'm the bad guy? No! I'm coddling you, like the big fucking baby you are, trying to gently COAX you into the 21st century before the people behind me fucking DRAG you there! People think you are a FUCKING JOKE, Johnny! You've been discredited time and again, your monuments are coming down, your staunchest advocates are doddering old fools and pretty soon, they're gonna be in the fuckinig ground!"

What would it take to break someone out of that kind of old time religion? His very ancestral heroes appearing before him as grotesque monsters to gloat that everything bad he's heard about them is true? Or would even that not be enough?

In true horror fashion, Johnny can only see the truth once it's too late.

(But thankfully, going by the comments saying these videos broke people out of the Lost Cause beliefs they'd been taught, it wasn't too late for everyone.)

I wonder if I can convincingly argue that the Checkmate Lincolnites series is folk horror.

[thethunderthedragonfruit]

need-to-know basis

when chromedome backed up brainstorm's lie about being forged was he being a true bestie or did he genuinely not know. this haunts me

[crabsnpersimmons]

exam 5 for me... tomorrow!

honestly have been feeling really nervous for this exam since my classmates have either failed it or just barely passed. and i had less time to study this time around because i rushed to book the exam.

so i drew this little encouragement early cuz i need the reminder that no matter what happens tomorrow, i did what i could and i didn't compromise on my boundaries—and that is its own victory.

and i hope that you'll be reminded to celebrate your own big and small victories too!

"You are nervous and that's okay! You did your best! You set boundaries! You took breaks! We're so proud of you, Starlight! Whatever happens, we'll always be here, cheering you on!"

[lbhslefttiddie]

youve heard of sex flowers get ready for the flower that makes you into a celestial shoujo herione complete with particle effects you cannot turn the fuck off and creates a wifebeam so powerful it can incapacitate and maim and keeps making you burst into tears and fall on your ass which makes the wifebeam More Powerful and you also cannot turn this off either. and is also still, sort of, a sex flower

from one of my favorite fanfictions, Celestial Afterglow by elanor_pam, a fic that defies description in the best possible way

[revvethasmythh]

Thinking about returning to the Lighthouse after picking up the weekly groceries and how it's gotta be like, "oop, excuse me, Lucanis! I am here to restock your Bedroom, don't mind me." Like, the concept of the Panty-Bedroom(TM) is killing me currently. Imagine getting hungry in the middle of the night only there is A Man in the pantry standing between you and Midnight Cheese Snack? Imagine being the Man whose bedroom is the communal food pantry for eight weirdoes in the Fade? What levels of insane must your life have reached for you to be either of the people in this scenario

[astyrra]

animorphs is fun from a "how could characters from other series deal with this" perspective because taking out the primary big bad (visser 3) is... not very helpful, actually?

like, visser 3 sucks at his job. he is terrible at leading a stealth operation, kills his subordinates when he's upset, and refuses to consider any possibilities other than what he's already decided is true. like, to be clear, none of this stops him from being a powerful antagonist - he has a whole military, and the animorphs are teenagers. it's just that if he was killed or otherwise removed from power, his replacement would be worse

[kyouka-supremacy]

(˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

[deoidesign]

Someone killed my boss last night and he sent me this I'm so fired

god I can't wait to make this comic.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I'm sorry, but when we read from the torah this week, it's just... I'm sorry, it was hilarious in a way. Imagine being a slave and entrusted with Everything then being in PRISON and then entrusted with All The Prisoners (You Are Also A Prisoner). Obviously, it would always have turned out that this would happen to joseph but I'm just imagining how that would have played out

[askblueandviolet]

Who’s the cat-person & dog-person between you two?

Also.. *slowly shoves coffee pudding in front of you* :3

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[suffarustuffaru]

hi i made a tier list of how homophobic rezero characters are

hello in the spirit of valentine's day and the very welcoming community here on rezero tumblr i decided to make this with the help of my lovely mutuals.

[mozzarellamint]

real old man yaoi heads know whats up (alt below the cut)