#but the titles of season 1 were really good damn

[fastandcarlos]

Stuck With Me : ̗̀➛ Jack Doohan

summary: as jack signs his contract with alpine, you soon realise that actually you’re pretty happy to be stuck with him on the team for a little while longer

pairing: jack x f1academy!reader

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liked by olliebearman, pierregasly and 179,503 others

jackdoohan: always fun spending race weekend in the garage and learning, thank you as always alpine for having me, plenty learnt to take with me moving forwards 🏎️💙

27,052 comments

username1: I wish it was you we got to see in that car instead 😭

estebanocon: awesome to see you, good luck for the rest of the season ☺️

username2: buzzing to see you back in the garage again jack!!

liam.lawson: sweet talk them some more and you might just get a seat 😉

jackdoohan: @/liam.lawson saw right through me huh 😂

username3: wishing that alpine saw how talented you really are and signed you up 💔

ynusername: nice to see you, and maybe show you a thing or two too 😂

jackdoohan: @/ynusername I’m always learning from you 😊

username4: alpine are so damn lucky to have you 🥺

username5: not long until you’ll be behind the wheel jack 🤞🏻

pierregasly: thanks for all your help on the car this weekend!

username6: please make sure you’re at the rest of the races this year, you’re my favourite face on the screen

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by estebanocon, racerbia and 36,068 others

ynusername: another race, another win!! so proud to have got the win here in zandvoort and get plenty of momentum behind me moving forwards as we look to finish off the season strong 💪🏻🏆

4,947 comments

username7: you were amazing out there today 👏🏻

racerbia: can you save some race wins for the rest of us??? 😘

username8: so proud of you yn, controlled that race from start to finish!!

jackdoohan: who knew you were so talented 🤯

ynusername: @/jackdoohan my parents always believed in me thank you very much 😭

username9: formula 1 academy world title pending…⏳

pierregasly: good job out there, glad I got to watch you race again ☺️

username10: can’t believe I finally got to watch you race today, you were electric ⚡️

dorianepin: congrats yn, I’ll get ya next time 😂

username11: you never fail to make your fans so proud 🥺

olliebearman: that race was awesome, you gotta show me how you handled turn 2 like that for next year!!

ynusername: @/olliebearman gimme a time and date and I’m there 😂

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by liam.lawson, oscarpiastri and 58,401 others

jackdoohan: a week off means getting plenty of recovery in and getting back of the waves. amazing to spend it with my favourite person too 🫶🏻

7,052 comments

username12: I’m sorry since when were you a taken man???

oscarpiastri: I’m just going to pretend that middle photo doesn’t exist 😭

username13: you can’t just throw something like this at us jack wtf!

arthur_leclerc: I thought I was the only lover in your life 😭

jackdoohan: @/arthur_leclerc you’re my one true love, this is just a fling bby

username14: you mean to say our fictional relationship can’t come true now 😭

liam.lawson: there’s a whole chapter we seem to have missed out here my friend…

jackdoohan: @/liam.lawson I’ll fill you in at the paddock 😘

username15: have I ever told you how much I hate soft launchers!?

danielricciardo: proud of ya kiddo 😉😉

username16: I want to say congrats but inside my heart is breaking 💔

ynusername: that’s some pretty cool waves you’ve got yourself there 🏖️

jackdoohan: @/ynusername waves aren’t the only thing I’m riding this holiday 🙃

username17: not me more focused on how incredible that body looks in a swimsuit 😂

kimi.antonelli: are we just going to pretend that this middle photo doesn’t exist??

username18: as long as you’re happy jack, most of us fan girls are happy for you too 🥺

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by pierregasly, ynusername and 73,038 others

jackdoohan: such a proud day for me and my family to share that i have officially signed to drive with the alpine f1 team next year. thank you to my team, family and friends for constantly supporting me through the years 🏎️💙

16,968 comments

olliebearman: can’t wait to enter my rookie era with you 😘

jackdoohan: @/olliebearman wouldn’t have it any other way sweetie 😘

username19: there’s never been anyone more deserving of a contract than you!

pierregasly: can’t wait to drive alongside you next year - it’s gonna be awesome!!

username20: can’t wait to see you out on the grid next year 🤩

oscarpiastri: congratulations future formula 1 driver 🤝

username21: you and pierre are gonna be the dream team i can already tell 🤩

ynusername: congratulations ✨ can’t wait to have you officially as part of the team!

jackdoohan: @/ynusername guess you’re officially stuck with me now 😂

username22: can’t wait to be your biggest fan for all the races next year 🥹

username23: future world champion for sure!!!

danielricciardo: another aussie on the grid 🇦🇺🦘

username24: we’re all so proud of you jack, you’re gonna smash it 💪🏻

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by dorianepin, jackdoohan and 23,950 others

ynusername: end of the season and new adventures on their way. looking forward to the next four weeks with my favourite human being 🥺

7,403 comments

username25: wait since when has this been a thing!? 🤯

racerbia: really out here living your best life ain’t ya? 👑

username26: have i woken up from sort of dream to see this 🤔

jackdoohan: what sorta boyfriend would take you out on a zip line like that? 🤔

ynusername: @/jackdoohan definitely one cooler than you 💆🏻‍♀️

jackdoohan: @/ynusername good job I’ve got my own girlfriend to explore with then 🥺

username27: so glad to see you enjoying your break so good yn 🥺

username28: what is it with drivers and teasing us about their partners 😭

landonorris: since you won the championship you’ve really gone for that aesthetic blog look eh!? 👏🏻

username29: as impressive as that last photo is, my eyes can’t look away from the middle 👀

hausmann.tina: idk what your secrets are but I need to know them asap 😂

username30: favourite human…who is this favourite human you speak of???

pierregasly: please do not break a bone on holiday or alpine will lose their minds 😁

username31: all I want is to know who the lucky guy is…

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liked by pierregasly, oscarpiastri and 22,859 others

ynusername: starting off the season strong with pierre, whenever you fancy showing your face around here @/jackdoohan that would be lovely 😂

4,859 comments

username32: not jack already being thrown under the bus by his fellow drivers 😂

olliebearman: nothing like impressing the bosses on the first day jack 🤦🏻‍♂️

username33: anyone else think jack and yn seem to be suspiciously close to each other 🤔

pierregasly: at least I can rely on you to be on time yn 😂

ynusername: @/pierregasly 🫡🫡🫡

username34: why do I get the feeling pierre and yn are gonna gang up on jack this year 😂

kimi.antonelli: you get used to his poor time keeping I promise you yn ⏳

username35: it really is pick on the rookie season rn!

jackdoohan: some of us wanted to take the time to make sure we look presentable rather than like we just rolled out of bed ☺️

ynusername: @/jackdoohan that’s a harsh thing to say about pierre 😂

username36: I am OBSESSED with the interactions between these two!!!

username37: you know when someone pretends to be mean to distract from something…I wonder 🤔

estebanocon: sure you’re not missing me yet???

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by olliebearman, kimi.antonelli and 59,301 others

ynusername: i guess i can’t keep him a secret forever 🥺💞

12,067 comments

username38: how did no one actually figure this out 🤦🏻‍♀️

olliebearman: at least I don’t need to ask you how your summer break was anymore…

pierregasly: everyone please pray for me having to work alongside these two 🙏🏻

username39: okay but it’s undeniable that these two look incredible together

jackdoohan: I loved being your little secret, but I love being your boyfriend to the whole world more 💕

username40: I thought they hated each other, turns out they love each other 😂

dorianepin: breathing through the pain of knowing you didn’t tell me about this 💔

ynusername: @/dorianepin I’m sorry just didn’t want to risk anything 🥹

liam.lawson: thank god I don’t don’t have to keep my mouth shut anymore 🤐

username41: they really managed to fool us all…

oscarpiastri: wow you two did not hang around did you 😂

username42: imagine having to be the poor head of pr at alpine right now 😬

danielricciardo: ik I joked that f1 was good for the ladies jack but this isn’t what I expected 😂

jackdoohan: @/danielricciardo what can I say, when you know, you know 💞

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

liked by danielricciardo, landonorris and 97,402 others

jackdoohan: an f1 contract wasn’t the only prize I managed to bag myself last season ❤️🌊

24,958 comments

username43: not jack coming at us with the cheesiest caption known to man 😂

arthur_leclerc: I don’t even recognise you anymore 😂

ynusername: turns out you signing for alpine was a pretty cool moment for both of us 🥺

username44: damn he really is a man in love!

username45: already obsessed with this duo and what they’re gonna do on the track this year

pierregasly: fyi there’s a clause in your contract that bans pda in the paddock (definitely didn’t just make this up!)

username46: we need a ship name asap 🛳️

landonorris: the real question though is which prize was better? 😉

jackdoohan: @/landonorris you don’t even need to ask 💕💕

username47: how did none of the grid manage to figure this out!?

username48: this is certainly one way to make sure everyone knows your name 😂

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˗ˏˋ 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 ! ´ˎ˗

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

Hii !! From the smut prompts (stop rolling your eyes, I know Im predicatable!) could I request "Accidentally Sending Nudes", "Sexting" and... a secret third thing (the choice is yours, go hogwild) for Jason x Fat Fem Reader? I'm leaning more towards sub!reader but shes def a little shit about it :3

Thank you in advance if you write it !! 🌼

See, this is why it pays to send in a request with me, because even if I don't answer it right away, I keep requests in my inbox for months and come back to them later!!! (This is from December 2023)

(Also this request is just plain fun) (because Star knows exactly what buttons to push to get me lmao)

DC Titans Requests - OPEN

How would Jason react to you accidentally sending him a nude?

(Jason Todd x Fem!Thick!Reader)

Warnings: set specifically in the Titans!verse - set during season 3/mentions of season 3 plot points; spoilers for major plot points of Titans (including character deaths on the show); this is kind of enemies to lovers? (enemies to fwb, I guess); the reader uses she/her pronouns and has a vagina; the reader is described as being fat/plus sized; passing mentions of Gar x reader (I couldn't help myself); dubious consent - because of the nature of the trope, Jason sees the reader naked without her explicit consent, and he decides to keep the picture without her consent - but it does spark a consensual sexual relationship between them; passing mention of using nudes for blackmail (that does not happen); this isn't really proofread; (generally, I consider this post to be a fucking mess because it was written in Tumblr but I was still trying to have fun with it lmao.)

...

Jason is minding his own business when it happens.

(For once in life, he is fully, completely, minding his own business.)

He's back in Gotham and he hasn't seen you in months - and if asked, he would say that he hasn't thought about you. He doesn't have time to think about you because he's been too busy with this therapy bullshit, training, trying to get back his title of Robin. Trying to get back in the cape. (And trying to get back in Bruce's good graces.)

But that's not exactly true. He's thought about you a lot.

(Most of those times have been with his hand around his cock, but again - he won't admit that.)

There is an occasional time that you cross his mind and it's because he's wondering genuinely how you're doing - wondering if you're well, how your training is going, wondering if you're doing okay under the Dickhead's reign. But he can't ever pluck up the courage to text you and simply ask. Because that would be admitting that he cares, and that would make him look like a weak little prick.

And that's why he's so damn surprised when you text him first.

He hasn't heard from you since he left the Tower (well, since he stormed away from Donna's funeral in what you called a 'toddler fit' - something that ended in a rather vicious text argument between the two of you). In fact, the last thing in the text history between the two of you is you calling him a 'giant, petty, whiny baby who can't deal with his own emotions'.

(You had no clue what had happened between him and Rose, so that did inform a lot of your opinion on the matter.) (And that was probably the reason why Rose still had all of her teeth after you had seen her at the funeral.)

But all of that was aside from the point.

The point being - Jason found himself smiling when your contact name popped up on his phone.

He has you in his phone as 'Pretty Girl' - along with a contact picture of you sticking your tongue out at him in response to having his phone shoved in your face with the knowledge that he was taking a picture of you. (That tongue always makes him think certain things, so even though you intended for it to be some rude thing to ruin the picture, it makes it so much better for him.)

(1) new photo

That instantly catches Jason's attention.

Perhaps you were sending him a picture just to flip him off, or sending him a picture of a dumpster to ask him if it reminded him of home - a common joke you used to make when he still lived at the Tower.

Jason grabbed his phone and opened the message, expecting another tired joke, and-

Holy fuck.

The last thing he was expecting - your naked body. Your gorgeous naked body.

(He likely would have expected a nuclear blast or for the Joker to clean up his act and actually become a decent, sane citizen before he expected this to happen.)

Jason brought his phone closer to his face, making the picture full screen in order to examine it better - he needed to make sure that he wasn't hallucinating, or that this wasn't some weird dream. But fuck, he definitely wouldn't be able to dream up this.

You were so perfect - so fucking perfect in a way that was so very real.

The picture was a fucking stunning side profile of your body - rolling curves, lacy underwear that could clearly barely contain your impressive hips with sweet little stretch marks jutting out from the fabric (jagged little marks across the softness of your skin that made Jason want to act up) - soft fat for him to grab onto, and the perfect teardrop shape of your breast, now bared to his eye in a way that he had only dreamt of before. Something that he had stared at through the oversized tee shirts you wore to bed without a bra, just wondering what you looked like underneath.

And fuck, this was so much better than anything he could have dreamt up.

Jason's cock began to harden almost instantly, and laying in bed, he reached over to his nightstand for some lube, ready to milk that picture for all it was worth, when-

His phone buzzed again.

Pretty Girl: 'Delete that.'

Jason hadn't even considered that you had sent it to him by mistake. He had been far too busy enjoying to even consider the intention or the psychology behind it.

So, he took his hand off the waistband of his sweats and texted back the first thing that came to mind.

'No.'

(He didn't hear your annoyed growl on the other end, frustrated at his downright typical Jason behaviour.)

'It's not my fault you made a dumbass mistake. Besides, it's the least I get after all the nagging from you.'

Then, something else came to mind as the bubbles popped up, meaning you were busy formulating a reply - an annoyed one, no doubt.

'Who did you mean to send it to anyway? Who are you fucking whose name starts with J that's not me?'

(You hesitated.)

Pretty Girl: 'I didn't type in J.'

'???'

Pretty Girl: 'I typed in G. And it turns out the first contact that popped up was Giant Baby. That's you.'

Jason felt annoyed and insulted on all levels. The fact that you were going to Tiger Boy for dick instead of him, and the fact that you had used such a mocking contact name for him. But when he realised that such a pathetic string of events had caused him to accidentally see you naked, he couldn't be too upset.

'I'm still keeping the picture 😈'

Pretty Girl: 'You're such an asshole' Pretty Girl: ... Pretty Girl: 'You owe me one'

'Fine, I'll owe you one'

Jason shrugged it off, thinking he had won, until -

Pretty Girl: 'No, you owe me a cock.'

This made Jason's stomach jump. You couldn't possibly mean-?

Pretty Girl: ... Pretty Girl: 'You owe me a picture of your dick. You know - an eye for an eye type stuff.'

Jason wanted to ask questions - what did you plan to do with the picture? Should he shave his balls first? Did you want more than one?

But his cock got even harder at you asking for a picture, at you demanding to see his cock, and he couldn't properly think - he couldn't even reason that you might later blackmail him with the picture.

No, instead, he found himself ripping down his pants and turning on the bedside lamp for good lighting, pumping himself up to peak rigid hardness and grasping the base of his cock in hand. And then, without hesitation, he snapped a picture for you. He made sure to get his abs in the photo - a collection of his best assets, with his pants pulled down to mid-thigh, showing off his tight stomach, the deep V leading down to his dick, and his thick seven inch cock in hand surrounded by some well-kept dark pubic hair.

(He was proud of it - and that ego was one of the things that annoyed you most about him.)

He sent it without hesitation and then you began typing several times and stopped once again. Jason's stomach churned with nerves until -

Pretty Girl: 'Fuck you' Pretty Girl: 'I thought it would be smaller'

Jason had no clue how to respond to that, and he was busy racking his brain for some clever reply, when -

Oh. Oh fuck.

(1) new photo

You had sent him another picture. And this time it was definitely on purpose.

It was a view between the plump, beautiful thickness of your thighs - your hand was inside the pretty lace of those panties, and your fingers were visible working on your clit while your needy hole dripped wetness onto the fabric.

So you had liked what you had seen.

Pretty Girl: 'What would you do if you were here right now?'

Jason's brain short-circuited then. He thought of so many things - eating your pussy until you screamed, flipping you onto your stomach and fucking you until you begged him to stop, gripping onto those gorgeous thighs, pinning them to your chest and pounding into your cunt until you finally surrendered and said that you had liked him all along, fucking your smart little mouth to finally shut you up-

Pretty Girl: 'Come on, Jay. Don't disappoint me.'

Oh, he won't.

(Another thing Jason won't admit - he came back to the Tower just for you.)

...

DC Titans Masterlist

[court-jobi]

How'd You Know (I Needed This)

((banner by me! I don't own Horikoshi's (sleepy) characters/work))

Pairing: Aizawa x reader (American!Pro Hero fem!reader, set before the events of Season 1)

Words: 4.9K

Rating: T+

Warnings: Aizawa has feelings and doesn't know what to do with them, alcohol mentions, slow burn, he fell first she fell harder, the feeling is mutual TM

Summary:

Shouta Aizawa surrenders his capture weapon for the night in favor of humoring Hizashi, and is rewarded for his follow-through at his show. He wants to know you, more than he has from teaching the brats alongside you for the last few months. Wants to know the smile that reaches your eyes more intimately.

He’s happy he gets this balcony happy hour with you -out from all their eyes inside- to be able to water this sweet, small thing he feels towards you to fullness.

A/N: I've been WAITING for this one, turn it up!!! Aizawa my beloved, I've wanted to write you for so, so long and can only hope I can do you justice. The man just has such a gentle side and I just wanted to give him something nice and self-indulgent~

For my My Hero Academia Masterlist, check it out here!

Read on Ao3

Damn it, why was he thinking like this? He’s in public for goodness’ sakes, with only two sips of drink under his belt. Not two drinks- two sips of a drink.  So if that’s the case of his sobriety, why was he off in his own little headspace as if he were drunk?  

‘Put Your Hands Up Radio’ found its home recording studio attached to this lounge: a place Shouta Aizawa never frequented unless expressly invited- or when Eraserhead was needed to scout out trouble. Far too noisy, too chatty, and filled with too many grown adults losing their sensibilities for his liking. 

Through one round of begging or another, he’d been roped into joining some of the staff of UA to an evening out, in support of Present Mic. Naturally, Aizawa would go- as his presence would all but guarantee everyone else’s. Despite begrudging the plans that pushed himself out of his preferred rest mode, he kept true to his word for Hizashi’s sake.

Promise kept, and therefore, appears to have been rewarded. 

Once the show wrapped for the night, his best friend was over the moon at how things were turning into a party that Friday night. After a day of shrill, whinging teenagers he’d wrangled all week, this level of volume was honestly the last thing he needed. Yamada’s voice doubled the decibel of the entire room- and that’s without his quirk activated. He always managed to annoy Aizawa when he started fangirling about one duet matchup or another.

But truthfully? Every sound this tired hero registered around him fell to white noise while he looked at you…

Sweet Little Miss, you are; gracing the lounge with your presence. You’re a vision tonight. Insist with your lilting dip to your words they all call you by your first name, outside of school grounds and against what’s considered custom. No hero titles either, unless an emergency called for formalities- then you’d cave.

These Americans are too casual. Even down to these outfits. What’s this–  black turtleneck, necklace she won’t leave alone- moving it around her thumb like that, short skirt.. and those damn thigh highs and tights. How is it she’s driving that moped of hers, wearing something like this…

Everything on your person, down to the way you held yourself in perfect confidence and ease adorned you like a perfectly-styled pro hero. It couldn't be a more stark contrast to his tried and true wardrobe. Even this after-hours look sat perfectly around each bend and curve of you, as you listened to the group. 

You’re smiling, too. It’s subtle, but it reaches your eyes, which makes it all the more authentic.

A smile he shouldn’t want to keep all to himself. Curves he really should have no business noticing. Features that he’s actually surprised he’s labeling as ‘attractive’ in his mind because the last time he ever felt an ounce of attraction to anyone in that way, he’d barely been able to grow facial hair. 

Desire for a safe place to land his dizzying mind is driving his tired sights to look to you for relief again and again in the conversation– without you even saying a single word. 

The barely-touched drink in his hand is only a prop; something to make him blend into the scene and not something he’s actually tasting for pleasure… meaning, these are his thoughts. Nearly completely sober. Should be illegal. Just illegal-

"Yo Sho, you still with us, sleepyhead?" 

Yamada pulled him out of his thoughts. Disguising any flare of being put on the spot, Aizawa  flitted his absent gaze back to his blond friend–

"Be nice. He’s had a rough day and is a good enough sport by being here,” you chirped up catching Yamada’s pull for Aizawa to part from the fringes of your little gathering.

Now toward you? He’ll soften his edge. After all, with you sticking up for him with blind loyalty, he nearly felt guilty for spacing out and causing you to speak up in the first place.

���- yknow, I'm inclined to take a nap myself," you leaned forward to grab a few more calamari bites to tend to your seemingly insatiable appetite. Aizawa felt warm at the sweetness and straightened up at Yamada’s prodding.

From then on, he made sure to look in your direction more often when you spoke to help him pay attention. He still didn't say much, never did. But he liked the company well enough.

These nights were truly few and far between. Life as an in-demand hero left him jumping from role to role, daytime and midnight obligations. The routine split his waking hours and stretched them paper thin.  Now more than ever,  he typically shirked as much off time as he was offered. And yet, he had to remember to prioritize levity and breaks– and in this case, indulge his treasured friend’s interests and ‘take one for the team’. Good for morale, he reasoned, just this once. 

The occasion was also a way for you to integrate with the group in an informal setting– great for the transplant from the States. You’ve taken amicably to the group of alumni-turned-faculty at UA, though much still remained a mystery about you, presently being peeled back bit by bit through stories and slips of the tongue. There was only so much a dossier could truly reveal about a person- even one curated by S.W.O.R.D. to volunteer aid their Japanese counterparts in their hero work.

It couldn’t tell what kind of teacher you’d turned out to be. Even with no experience working with students, you tread the line between instilling team-centered outlooks and pushing their quirk’s limitations to their max benefit. A crafty, inventive counterpart to complement his blunt teaching style: better together, and even the principal agreed.

It couldn’t point out where your true ambitions lie or where your drive came from. There remained much to be explained as far as your hero status here in Japan– a red-tape nightmare Aizawa was still intrigued to learn about. So far, you’d shared some limitations about “immigration statuses are being vetted with a fine toothed comb, so they’re still trekking through the paperwork”, so your wings are essentially clipped down to a student’s provisional license. This doesn’t please you too much, but you’re driven as much as his finest students with the aire of a professional he’d love to see in full action.

It couldn’t explain the stillness you could dip into, that he only caught once or twice when you believe yourself alone. There’s a past was weighing your shoulders level and compliant in the eyes of the law… but an urge to push back and ‘play this out’  brought hypotheticals to your lips whenever you chatted about what hero life is like for him, and added a sparkle to the eye that he had yet to fully source.

It couldn’t give away the gentleness you hold behind a carefully guarded smile– even in this harsh hero world. Maybe it was that indomitable spirit that those foolhardy patriots overseas carried… or rather, maybe it was the way you fought against such a loud persona. So far, Aizawa has taken only a few notes, but each little mental post-it was cluttering up his headspace. You held a quiet love of tea, a comical passion for the oxford comma, and a mind to care for the little things in life– like the lizards you rescue in an inverted cup to take outside where they belong . 

Surely life must have treated you hard to elicit such softness. Something tenderized you to achieve the peace you carry around or else you’re wearing a damn good mask. No, he determines you had to have made a choice to continue on the path that’s brought you to the present– even to this table where you’re taking your fill of maki rolls while casting little caring glances his way. 

All smiles and calm surety, as he mills through his thoughts that are damn near obsessed with you.

An employee file could never record ‘heart’, anymore than it could expose anything you didn’t want to reveal.

The night progresses while Aizawa stews on these thoughts, and plenty of others… for the ones that drift to his co-teacher offer him more mental stimulation than that he finds in the club’s lights and music.

Yamada’s night of filling his social battery was made nearly perfect by the karaoke that just started. Several of the other teachers got preoccupied in round after round of song, so it left Aizawa with a moment's peace. 

Well, peace he was going to enjoy by laying back on the couch for a little shuteye–  when his gut jumped at the feeling of a hand trailing up his forearm to the elbow with a polite, companionable touch. 

Facing its owner, Aizawa caught your little smirk and nod towards the balcony. You didn't pull hard, yet he followed like a magnet out to the patio. 

From there, rather than stay by the door to listen in on their friends ‘releasing their inhibitions and feeling the rain on their skin’,  you took him to the right, where a matching lounge set positioned itself in a blind spot between the rooftop bar and the fire escape. 

"Thought you looked like you could benefit from some soundproofing~" you brushed your hair back over one shoulder to follow the breeze’s direction, and left an open spot next to you by the railing. 

Nightlife and neon didn’t hold magic for Eraserhead given as many nights as he’s spent perched on precarious heights, but through a newcomer’s eyes, he could see the appeal. This part of the city glowed at night from dusk to dawn, and you clearly loved looking out over it; Aizawa certainly didn't mind this view either. 

Your perception skills are spot on, and incredibly thoughtful as you’ve suggested some fresh air- for his sake. If he wasn’t drawn to you any of the other times he’s paid attention to the spastic moths a more romantic person might call ‘butterflies’ before…  this cements each and every one as valid. 

He likes you. He really likes you. 

Time passed with appreciative quiet until you spoke again, 

"The only thing is, you can't really see stars in the city... there’s too much light."

"The beaches have a nice view," Aizawa replied after some thought.

"Oh yeah?"

"Enough to stargaze properly,” he offered without much sentimentality. Right by the pier was the best spot he and his former classmates would go on the weekends, before their hero work took off.

"I'll have to remember to take a drive there. Y'know, sometime when I'm not in two-and-a-half-inch heels." you chuckled as you shuffled back to the rattan settee, sitting for a bit to stretch out your legs. "I don't know how Nemuri does it."

"Feet hurt already?" Aizawa snuck his hands from his pockets and came to the seat across from yours. “Night’s young.”

"Getting there,"  your laugh greeted him over, "But you know what they say, dress to impress and all that. Yamada really pitched some hype for this afterparty, so~"

Fashion was hardly something that ever swayed Aizawa’s decision-making. Utilitarian was the way to go for his wardrobe- then, as now. 

"If aesthetics are all that determine these pros’ attention, that’s horribly vain." 

You bristled in good humor, 

"He didn't mean it like that– I just meant, he said to look nice for fun instead of for work. Call it ‘girl code’ if you want. We know that means to– just– /doll up a bit/!"

Aizawa held back a snicker at how you still ran into difficulties finding the most apt Japanese equivalents in your (pretty decently executed) second language. English slang you reverted to in moments like these fell from your mouth with an odd drawl. Still couldn’t place the regional accent you carried, but it charmed Aizawa all the same. 

“//Doll up//?” he mimicked. 

"//I like dolling up//!"

Aizawa reached and pulled his glass to his lips, meant to look aloof but not hiding his interest altogether well. 

"You don’t need to put on airs to get people to notice you…" 

"Right, because the accent gives me away."

"No, it’s your-”

Finally, a coward’s streak flared deep in his belly to shut him up. A rare hesitation. Damn this. What the hell’s happening to me–

 “–nevermind."

"My what?" you’re fully  interested, knowing a secret when it's presented.

"Nothing important."

Thankfully you not-so-subtlety dropped it with a hummed ‘ok’, but kept a watchful eye for him in your peripherals. 

The pro hero mused. Better for him to be honest, right? 

Just choose your words carefully. You’ll have to look her in the eye after this, you know. 

Aizawa widened his seated stance so his knee barely breached your space. 

Your sights lifted to him while he put his best poker face on. It’s not really any different than what he’d give to a perfect stranger– the only difference here is he has to force it.

Shit shit shit you're in deep, Shouta.

"You're plenty noticeable as you are. Anyone who meets you can see that," Aizawa shared in his usual soft-spoken tone. "Give ‘em ten minutes, and you've got them wrapped around your finger. It’s a whole impression, not just the outer package. Doesn't matter if you're in a dress that costs a month’s paycheck or a black button down. You're welcoming, sincere..." 

He’s realizing he might be trailing off, but finding you listening with full attention led him on; no liquid courage required. 

"You're stunning from the inside out. Enough to get others to notice."

Aizawa heard your appreciation before he saw it, a hum preceding the a genteel smile. With the win of his walls coming down, he had to give an honest smirk back. It was only fair; you’d earned it just by being you. By your flattered look, you were touched– but your brain was still working beneath the surface, and soon showed by a fleeting expression that spit from him.

Then, you caught your bottom lip for a second, before daring to look in Aizawa’s eyes again. It’s a sneaky look– like he’d snuck a peek at a card he’d meant to hide.

"...You remember what I wore on my first day at UA."

It was half question, half amusement. So dear, but oh-so pointed.

Aizawa froze.

"Black button down. You noticed me, then?" you countered more, "And here I thought you didn't care about appearances~" 

"In professional circles, no. Personal… that's a different thing, entirely." 

He kept your  sights locked onto his, not unlike how he used his quirk in a challenge– only far softer and he could risk the occasional blink.

Even when you took his glass from his hand and placed it away on the table alongside yours, he still looked fondly after you, in fact tilting his head to the other side, studying the way one piece of your hair was caught by your neck. What he’d give to be familiar with you enough to ever-so-carefully brush it back, letting his touch send a wave of shivers across your skin and maybe even make you hum at the gesture. But he couldn’t trust himself to do it now, settling on stretching his arm around the back of the couch. Just an open move, letting you join him on the couch as close as you’d like.

Was he really doing this? He never has before, but this felt so natural. 

You smiled still– and as you sit, you’re leaning into it.  Well then. 

“What was I wearing, Aizawa?”

With free fingers, he risked some little brushes on your near shoulder, bringing a happy little eyebrow lift from you. He just took in your features in close quarters, settled in it, as he remembered that day:

Black button down, grey skirt. Biker boots -practical choice- and these damn tights.

Aizawa’s dazed in the head, but he knows he's listed it off aloud based on how your sights widen, impressed. 

"Hmmm, tights do it for ya?” you smiled, “I'm surprised you haven't jumped the darling Ms. Nemuri then."

"I know way too much about Kayama to ever consider her that way,”  Aizawa’s tempered hand twirled a finger along a blown-away section of hair, just absently enough. “You however, tease just enough." 

"Do I tease you?” you offer with a little depth, “I don't mean to."

It’s here he’s worry he’s stepping over a line- if it weren’t for the downright delicious look in your eye. You say it like you’re sorry for acting unprofessionally– but you’re urging him on, hardly apologetic for your sweet posturing.

"You may not mean it, but it's not unnoticed," 

He took second to swallow, and steps fully over it. 

"or unwelcome."

You’re pleased with this, but deflect with your trademarked humor- 

"Well now that’s saying something. You've seen me in my pjs, too- far from glamorous.  That didn't break the allure for you?"

Aizawa had to huff though his nose at that memory.

"I caught you at arguably your most real self, that first night you patched me up," His outstretched arm rubbed full circles onto your shoulder now, with the lightest touch. 

“Still have no clue why you chose me over Recovery Girl. For the harshest grader in school, that was a pretty dumb move.”

“You were closer than going to campus. It was the practical choice.”

“You didn't even know if I knew first aid.” 

“You do,” Aizawa smirked. “You're too nurturing to not have a knack for it.”

Your legs crossed over, deflecting both your words and refreshing your body movement. In doing so, you slid even closer- a move not lost on Aizawa. 

“Well, I'm still not happy about it. You needed more attending than I was able to pull off. Whatever you get into those nights,” you flitted a look to the underside of his arm that lays outstretched –where you know he sports a scar now- “It… looked like it hurt, ‘Zawa.”

Warm. Warm and cared form. Felt it then, feel it now. That's the life in his chest he gets when he’s around you. 

"Can't change the past, and I certainly wouldn't have changed that. Wouldn’t pass up seeing that sight of you for the world."

This connection, this dance, it all feels that it must be older than what it is, more rooted in a shared history than a short few months. 

Aizawa wants to ‘get’ you. Know the thoughts behind your eyes. Get you talking, even if it means he needs to give up his silent nights and muted text alerts so he can learn you.  He’s happy he gets this balcony happy hour with you, out from other’s eyes, to be able to water this sweet, small thing he feels towards you to fullness.

His eyes narrowed playfully, "Are you embarrassed right now?"

Out of this entire teasing exchange, that note seemed to surprise you and turned you shy.  Short of clapping a hand onto your cheek, you just darted your gaze away- can you be cuter if you tried?

“h-Yeah, a little!" –though you tried to snark your way out of it, "you were hurt before, and blubbery- but now that we’re y'know– awake, and talking... Pretty faces make me nervous."

Nervous? Pretty? Aizawa doesn’t like the sound of either of those.

Aizawa raised a brow and gave a look, a touch more serious.

"Hey," He tapped your chin still with his free hand, "if you want me to lay off, you say the word."

Blindly, you hold his hand from retreating away– "No. You're good, I promise."

He’s drowning in you leaning into the cool touch offered to you–

“ Heh, I–uh… I’m pretty sure ‘friends’ don’t talk about each other like this, though.”

He couldn't be a coward now– not with you melting on the spot and giving him an insane amount of hope.

“Maybe not,” Aizawa reasoned gently, “-not if they’re content to stay that way.” 

–then all of a sudden his heart soared at her next words:

"Well… I like this."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I like you, like this.” With your insistence for touch, you cupped his wrist in your own chill-tipped hand.

Hell yeah. 

Aizawa huffs another win in his foolish heart, but then watches as you keep talking–  you don’t break from your softness, but look reflective off to an absent point on his chest.

“It’s funny, y'know? Most jobs, you’d be lucky to find someone you would actually wanna talk to outside of board meetings and quarterly reports… but here in our line of work, you count on each other to save your lives.”

“That’s right.” Aizawa breathes.

“I uh.. never thought I’d be workin’ with kids- trying to keep them alive too. Teach them how to do the same. But I wouldn’t feel nearly as confident to do it, rise to the challenge, if it weren’t for you, ‘Zawa. You’re just as special. Inside and out.”

And when you look to his eyes again, fully awake and still sober, he swears he’ll say yes to any night Hizashi invites him to if it means he can have you this close. Things with you just feel lived-in. Companionable. He’s drawn to you in a way unlike others before you, because he didn’t believe he’s had the right, desire, or time to even entertain it. 

But everything’s different now. It just works, in his mind. He wants to spend his respites, his missions, everything- with you at his side, having his back. For however long you’d let him.

Touching your cheek, cursing the helmet you’d have to wear on the way home that would hide this angelic face from him once again– Aizawa curls towards you, barely tipping his head which screams ‘kiss her you ass’. You notice, and follow his lead almost halfway. 

“Yeah, I like you like this…” you sighed lightly, “--and I’d like us like this, too.” 

"Hm. Good."

...the door to the patio swinging open from around the corner startles you both. Present Mic doesn’t know his strength as he projects for the block to hear, swaggering about in his search.

You looked flustered sitting back up, but Aizawa was characteristically unphased at the sight of Hizashi finally rounding with a singsong cry of his name. 

Dammit.

"Hey kids, been looking for YOU, Miss America! There's some stateside artists on the karaoke lineup with your name on iiiiit- c’mon! I hyped you already to Nemuri– she didn't believe me that you sang with me for my English midterms!!"

"What?!” you blanched, “ Who said I was doing that?"

"I did!!” Yamada thumbed at his own brilliance, “ C’mon I'll do the first one with you!"

"First one– Dude, I don't need to be touting my Southern-ass self to a bunch of pros before I even make a name for myself here."

"This is HOW you'll do it! Come n’ wow them, break the ice- you’ll do amazing!" Yamada came to your side of the settee, tugging you up to your feet with little fight. "Tch, Sho, you're rubbing off on her, aren't you? Turning our sweet teach into a wallflower as we speak, huh?"

"She was doing me a favor- has an eye out for me when I needed an escape, unlike you." Aizawa droned, to your amusement.

"Yeah yeah fair enough. Now pleeeeeease, would you come inside?  It would be so much fun!"

From the way you’re freshening your jacket collar, you’re warmed from the neck up, caught between what just almost happened and the current situation Yamada is putting you in.

You look to Aizawa just like you did inside– a  glance, but it lingers longer than before. Like you are waiting to see what he thinks. If he’ll stay or go, should you leave. 

But Aizawa isn’t so selfish like before. He doesn’t feel it necessary to keep you to himself, because he sees your affection so clearly in your eyes now. He hosts butterflies in his stomach, yes, but they aren’t frantic and flitting about wondering what you may or may not think of him- chronically tired and a contrast to the breath of fresh air you are. You see him as a companion, too. Someone he might just get the chance to study, and learn, and adore in return.

No, he knows you like him as he is. Knows you’ll choose to meet him where he stands. He can share you, and will simply watch on as you stun him even more...

The Pro-Hero is desperate for some eyedrops in all this wind outside, but he would grin and bear it if you choose to deny Yamada’s pull on you. So instead, he merely leans forward to perch on his knees, with a hand on the lip of both your drinks. What Aizawa says in his non-answer left it open to what you wanted to do.  Stay or go, he’d follow suit.

Returning to the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed fellow teacher, you breathily gave in with your ‘ok’. 

"YEAAAAAUHHHH!"

"Damn peer pressure."

"You said yes," Aizawa smirked.

"Oh if she’s going, you're coming in too!" Hizashi was already whisking you away, and Aizawa rose on his own, following your knowing smile over your shoulder and matching it. 

With many forced karaoke and radio show nights, it’s Aizawa who braves the crowd and comes up behind you at one of Present Mic’s shows,  stepping in from the balcony where you wait by its door. He’s fresh off of work, sporting a new scar across his cheek courtesy of his day job, this time.. but you greet him with that familiar scrunch of the nose that he still finds adorable.

It’s rare he leaves campus nowadays, because he feels the stakes are higher than ever for him to remain vigilant. His students are his life, and as proud of them as he is, they are a constant effort of his mind and strength. Rest doesn’t come easy, and his rewards for a job (passably) done aren’t found in many places. 

One constant he has found helps, has been you. 

You, still alluring as ever, but who makes sure he doesn’t fixate on giving and giving of himself until he breaks– but to take his rests, reset, and even take a little jaunt over to these radio shows when he has staff coverage back at the dorms. Gives you two some time to get nostalgic, sentimental– or as close as he can get to those mushy spots in his heart about the club where he wrestled out his feelings for you for the first time.

He smooths a hand across your lower back now, when he joins you. He’s held onto your hands when they're cold, giving you whatever warmth he has. He knows each and every gap on your resume, partnered with you out on the streets, tag-teams in his classroom with this plucky 1-A Class he now leads, and is content to let you fill his thoughts when he wants to rest his eyes.

He doesn’t fight his affections now. Still would rather not simper in public too much because he’s quite averse to being the center of tabloids’ attentions, but stands by you all the same. 

"I'm surprised to not see you up there,” Aizawa greets, cool as ever. 

You lean on a hip, closer to him. 

"He's got his sets lined up today, didn't ask me-” You speak a little louder over the crowd, “I swear, your cockatoo still acts like I'm some gift from the heavens, just ‘cuz I can sing!"

"It's earned. You deserve every bit of it, and not just from Hizashi."

You turned over to him shyly, drawing his attention further– your tendencies to melt under his words encourages Aizawa to compliment you directly. Often. Whatever it is about his voice that you say you’re obsessed with, he still doesn’t understand– but he uses it to full advantage as he robs your drink from your hand,

"I happen to think you have a gorgeous voice," Aizawa speaks low to your ear. “You should sing at home more often.”

“Please. As if the kids would ever let me live it down.”

You refer -of course- to the twenty shared students between you, taking them all in stride since you’ve sufficiently bonded through fire alongside them. 

“That’s teaching for ya. Gotta push yourself beyond, plus ultra and all that.”

You chortle back in your throat, risking a kiss on his etched cheek to counter his snide remark, 

“You’re off the clock, ‘Zawa. No more hero talk, huh?” 

Aizawa cocks a brow, stealing a sip, “Sorry we can’t all turn it off like you, dear.”

The comment has you biting the inside of your mouth at the tease, and allows him a quick moment to press the glass’ condensation against his eye. 

“Want some air, hon?” you try again, softer than this atmosphere should allow.

Looking back at you -your hold on his elbow ready to guide him outside just like the first night- and Aizawa doesn’t need any more sips of the whiskey he holds.  

The retreat to ‘your couch’ is one he looks forward to any chance he gets. Bass boosted from the speakers inside becomes background noise that dulls his senses, doubled by the way you cozy up under his arm watching the skyline shift in light and color in comfortable silence. You trade roles with him: taking watch while he shuts his eyes for some restorative hydration. 

But before he gets too terribly relaxed by your weight settling his aching muscles to stillness, he registers a warm press to his mouth that he’s quick to chase after. That’s a satisfying thought, too: he doesn't have to imagine what it'd be like to kiss you anymore. 

[brucebocchi]

Spring 2024 anime, Pt. 2: Mixed bags and the gems

hey! i also post this on my ko-fi! this is very much a labor of love, so if you liked what i wrote consider throwing a few bucks my way! also you can find part 1 right here! thanks!

Yes, hello, I'm still here. Between work and AI: The Somnium Files -nirvanA Initiative-, I was struggling to find the time to get this out, but here we are! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go actually watch some anime again.

As always, the OP for each show is linked in the title. Watch them! There were some damn good ones this season.

Let's-a go:

Mixed Bags

Astro Note

I’m going to kick off this section by first stating that on the whole, I’m much higher on the anime in this section this season than I was last time: Nothing that I watched this season disappointed me nearly as much as Metallic Rouge or The Witch and the Beast, nor bored me to tears like The Unwanted Undead Adventurer. This truly is a collection of mixed bags; anime that I found enjoyable or interesting but still left me wanting in one way or another. “Good But Could Have Been Great” is too unwieldy anyway.

Astro Note was eye-catching from the jump: This is very clearly an homage to Rumiko Takahashi’s beloved romcom Maison Ikkoku, with character designs by Carole & Tuesday’s Eisaku Kubonouchi. The colors are soft and bright, everyone looks unique and has a wide variety of hilarious facial expressions, and the OP is a fun time right out of the gate. You come for the lovely visuals and Takahashi homage, and you stay for, uh, not much else.

Takumi, a down-on-his-luck young chef, answers a job posting at a boarding house that promises its residents breakfast every day. It turns out that Mira, the odd but beautiful new landlady, is a dogshit cook and tried to attract a new one with a plagiarized job posting. Takumi doesn’t really care because she’s, like, really pretty, so he takes the job and moves in. He’s soon beset by a cast of wacky characters that includes an enigmatic unemployed salaryman and his precocious son, an indie idol who looks like a hard-drinking Futaba Sakura in her downtime, a nosy neighbor, and a rich, handsome romantic rival. We’re already approaching Maison Ikkoku territory. 

Shortly after moving in, Takumi believes he overhears Mira saying that she’s a widow, which would firmly plant Astro Note’s flag right in Ikkoku’s turf, but it turns out that Mira is in fact an alien from the planet Wid, meaning she is of the Wido race (this is as good of a localization as you can ask for; in the original Japanese he heard “miboujin,” not knowing that she’s from the planet Mibou). So we’ve got some Urusei Yasura sprinkled in for good measure. Her adorable poodle, voiced by Junichi Suwabe (Sukuna himself!) is from the same planet and helping her find a MacGuffin, hidden by the previous owner, that would help her take over as queen. There’s also some blossoming romance!

The alien stuff made for an interesting wrinkle, and it went a long way toward characterizing Mira as an endearingly odd but curious woman, but it often played out in wacky hijinks caused by alien spies, which felt like a designated make-the-plot-happen button more often than not. It paid off splendidly in the last couple of episodes, and I loved how all of the flashbacks of Mira’s mother looked like grainy Showa-era space operas, but getting there took a lot of “oh no, chase that Thing!” sequences. I found myself tuning out on those until they finally became plot relevant.

The central romance was fine, if a little underbaked, but what kept me watching Astro Note was the smaller moments with the ensemble characters. There were moments with both Wakabayashi the salaryman and his son Ren that slapped the apathy right off my face, and a side plot with Takumi and a person from his past was incredibly sweet. I did also love the massive turn the plot took in the last couple episodes, to the point where I found myself almost wishing that the show up to that point was different.

And that’s Astro Note in a nutshell: A lot of good pieces mixed with some filler, weird pacing, and an overall uneven experience in a nice-looking package. A fun little distraction but nothing entirely memorable. If I can give this show one major positive, it’s that watching it finally convinced me to read Maison Ikkoku, and for that I will forever be grateful. Read Maison Ikkoku.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger

I keep running notes for everything I’m watching as the season rolls on, and sometimes I’ll indulge in other reviewers’ early takes and jot down some insights that might spark from hearing outside perspectives. During Gigguk’s opening remarks on Go! Go! Loser Ranger in his early Spring season roundup, I made a note that the easiest way to summarize this show for a western audience is “basically The Boys but with the Power Rangers instead of The Seven.” And then he said pretty much the exact same thing five seconds later. I just want the record to show that.

Indeed, this is a sentai series with some spice. 13 years ago, the invading forces of evil were soundly defeated by the Dragon Keepers, a real-life sentai squad. In the present day, the Dragon Keepers now sit atop a massive organization protecting earth, and also dominating the entertainment industry: Every week, they hold an exhibition match against the remaining rank-and-file footsoldiers, skull-faced shapeshifters known as Dusters. In order to keep their lives, the Dusters were forced to give up their freedom and serve as the farcical Putty Patrol for what is ultimately a pro wrestling show. Sick of being a jobber and effectively a slave, one of the Dusters, known simply as Fighter D, decides the best way to destroy the Dragon Keepers and free his brethren is to do so from within: He’ll morph into a human shape, join their Rangers program as a cadet, and personally slay each of the five Keepers.

Fighter D is quickly found out, though. One of the recruiters, the lovely but mercurial Yumeko, isn’t nearly as dumb as he thought, but she fortunately has the same aim and quickly puts him to work trying to steal the Keepers’ insanely powerful weapons, the Divine Artifacts. He’s also found by the Dragon Keepers and manages to escape, though badly wounded. He’s found in a cave by Yumeko’s hanger-on, the upstart Ranger cadet Hibiki, whose family was badly fragmented by an unknown monster. While he still believes in the Keepers and shares their ostensible goal of protecting humanity, he believes that there needs to be major changes and agrees to let D impersonate him to infiltrate the Rangers. He’s soon embroiled in a prolonged examination trial against higher-ranked Rangers that soon turns into a fight to the death, made only more deadly by the inclusion of a female Duster and the same monster that killed Hibiki’s parents and paralyzed his sister.

Yes, that’s a lot, and everything up until that last sentence was just in the first four episodes. I’ve said repeatedly that I’m willing to be patient with introductory seasons for action-oriented shonen series, because those do usually take a minute to start cooking, but the first season of Loser Ranger is bizarrely paced. The first four episodes were an intriguing introduction, but they might have served better as a movie to kick off the season, because the overwhelming majority of the remaining eight episodes were pretty much just a bunch of people fighting in a fucking parking garage. I was under the impression that the first season was going to be 24 or so episodes, for some reason, so I was willing to be patient with it.

Maybe I should've been patient enough to wait until the second season, because I found myself getting whiplash between fascination and utter boredom. I still don’t know if I even like this show. There are so many moving parts, and many of them are fascinating, but to get bombarded with them so early and so often, only to then keep most of them in the background in favor of way too many new characters fighting in, again, a goddamned parking garage, frustrates me in increasing measure the more I write about it. I really wanted to like this show more than I did.

The production values are seemingly all over the place too. The OP is another Tatsuya Kitani banger, the voice cast is deep and talented (especially for the English dub, holy hell), the puppet outros are a hoot, and the animation is mostly fine. I’m rarely one to complain about CGI in anime (the ED for this show is entirely 3DCG and it fucks), but a lot of it in Loser Ranger, especially as an obvious means of cheaping out on having to hand-draw and -animate the Dragon Keepers’ slightly-elaborate costumes, is baffling. You could make a generous case for it representing them as larger-than-life personalities, but in execution it’s just kind of uncanny. The show looks and sounds fine overall, but little things like that just take me out of it.

I’m going to withhold judgment until the second season, but for now I can’t say I’m too impressed by the debut. Maybe just watch the first four episodes and put a pin in it until season 2 drops.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night

I’m beginning to worry that Metallic Rouge’s catastrophic narrative failure may have permanently made me nervous about any original anime to follow. It’s an unfair comparison to make, especially considering it aired at the same time as the bombastically audacious Bang Brave Bang Bravern, which I consider one of the best of the year so far and even one of the better anime to air so far this decade. At the same time, though, the millisecond I start to suspect that an original anime is losing its footing, as soon as the one synapse fires that tells me that this show may not be able to stick the landing, I start to get cynical. The good news is that Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night isn’t even in the same time zone as Rouge’s disappointment. The bad news is that it still never fully lived up to what it could have been.

Right from the jump, this felt like Doga Kobo flexing in between seasons of Oshi no Ko with yet another gorgeous showbiz anime. The debut episode is one of the best I’ve seen in some time; an immaculately animated and brilliantly storyboarded mission statement showcasing the self-doubting illustrator Mahiru and the disgraced ex-idol Kano meeting and finding new inspiration in one another’s work (if you’ve been reading Beat & Motion, this may sound familiar, except they’re both high school girls). It was a masterclass in depicting powerful self-expression and the spark of a truly fateful encounter. What followed was also pretty good, but...

Mahiru and Kano band together (pun intended) to form the multimedia collective JELEE, also enlisting social-outcast musical prodigy (and Kano stan) Mei, and NEET VTuber Kiui along the way. We see a lot of the nitty-gritty of trying to get a new act off the ground, as well as the reality that any new artist or creator nowadays is, ultimately, at the mercy of the internet. It was a treat to watch these four all come together, as was seeing the emotional bonds they forge with one another while also navigating their own personal issues, but it frequently came at the expense of an actual plot. That sort of thing is fine, I do love me some good slice-of-life, but I feel like the show planned on something a bit grander. While we’re focused on so many of these really lovely moments of character growth and interpersonal drama, everything about JELEE’s ascent, y’know, the main plot, just kind of happens, and before you know it everything turns out okay and the season’s over. It really felt like the writers had a big plan but ended up just laying down the tracks while the train was already in motion.

As mentioned, I’m not nearly as down on the anime in the “Mixed Bags” section this season as I was three months ago, but just thinking about how the plot sagged around the middle and rushed towards its ending leaves me frustrated. Unlike JELEE itself, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night feels like less than the sum of its parts. This show feels like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle; what you can make out of the image is gorgeous, yet not only was it never completed, but someone clearly put a few of the pieces together wrong as well. There are plenty of themes in the story and character writing that could have blossomed into something amazing, like impostor syndrome, finding community and identity through fandom, young sapphic love, gender identity, and so many more, and it may have been possible to resolve at least a couple of these in 12 episodes, but Jellyfish seemed either incapable of or uninterested in actually getting there beyond a few vague overtures.

I know I sound harsh here and I didn’t mean for this review to be mostly complaints; I did very much like this show, but I wanted so badly to love it. And it probably isn’t entirely fair of me to grade this show based on what it could have been instead of what it is, but so much was plainly left on the table that I’m not really left with another choice. I still recommend it much more strongly than anything else I've put in the Mixed Bags section so far this year, but be forewarned that you may be let down. This is a pretty goddamn good anime that could’ve been pretty goddamn incredible, but it just couldn’t get there.

Mysterious Disappearances

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I know what I’m about. If a new series rotates around a protagonist who looks like that, I’ll at least give it an episode or two.

Sumireko is a former child-prodigy novelist, now in her late 20s working at a bookstore with the sharp-tongued Ren, as she continues to fail at getting published again. On the eve of her 28th birthday, Sumireko accidentally takes home a book that was droplifted in the store, and shortly after reading it aloud she finds herself reverted into the body of a child. Suddenly struck by inspiration once again, she disappears from work for the next week, furiously typing away at her next novel. Ren manages to find her and tells her that she’s under a curse: The book is an otherworldly object known as a Curiosity, and its power can be deadly to those who use it. Though Sumireko is desperate to hang on to her newly-regained youth, Ren manages to smooth-talk her into changing back and handing over the book. Now aware of an extradimensional threat to daily life, Sumireko teams up with Ren and his little sister Oto to track down and neutralize more Curiosities before they cause widespread havoc.

This series is alright, if questionable in a lot of areas. I recognize that I’m not entirely the target audience; while I love a good supernatural mystery, each of these Curiosities is rooted in East Asian mythology and contemporary urban legends, very few of which I was familiar with going in. To those on that side of the world (or to Westerners with that specific special interest), I’m sure it hits different, but I got lost on a couple of occasions. Mysterious Disappearances also runs into the same pacing issues that I found with The Witch and the Beast last season, where the plot structure is effectively episodic, but each mystery can last a few episodes at a time, so if you’re not particularly invested in the subject at hand, you’re SOL for another week or two.

This show also just plain doesn’t look very good. The animation is nothing impressive and there’s something off-putting about the overall look that I can’t quite put my finger on. It looks retro in ways that probably weren’t intentional, like a 20-year-old digipaint anime that was upscaled from 480p. The audio element is great, at least; the music, sound design, and cast are all fantastic (between her turn as Sumireko in this one and her supporting roles in Reincarnated as the 7th Prince and Kaiju No. 8, Fairouz Ai has put in great work this season), and that’s a good thing because this one isn’t a looker.

If you couldn’t already tell from how the main character looks, Mysterious Disappearances is undoubtedly horny as hell, but often distractingly so. I do have to praise Sumireko’s design to an extent; for a large-chested anime lady, she at least hews closer to how a tall woman with somewhat appropriately large breasts would actually be built and how her clothes would actually fit. She looks like a more realistically-proportioned Nami. There’s no shortage of anime characters with gigantic boobs, but few that make me actually go “oh, this woman definitely has back problems.” There are a lot of slow-tilting shots up female characters’ legs towards their chests to the point where I tuned the dialogue out because I couldn’t believe they just kept on doing it. I skimmed through the manga, and though there is far more semi-gratuitous nudity as compared to the anime, I still somehow found the latter much more distracting with its attempts at fanservice. I also don’t really care for how the “camera” looks at Oto and her middle school classmates either; I found myself just getting nervous whenever a scene focused on them.

For its problems, there’s at least a series of solid emotional cores here. Similar to Sumireko’s desire to regain her youthful creativity, the wielders-slash-victims of these Curiosities are largely vulnerable individuals who are trying to make the best of their lives in spite of past traumas like bullying, neglect, and disability. All serious issues, no doubt, and the story tries to handle them as well as possible, but once you see through the pattern of “awful thing is happening, we get to know the character, then we learn their tragic backstory and there’s a tearful resolution while we move closer to advancing the overall plot,” it can feel a little cloying in the long run. Not that those resolutions can’t be potent; I really liked the endings of the stories of the missing hairdresser and the rogue VTuber, but as a plot formula it can ring hollow.

Mysterious Disappearances is a fine if unspectacular series of supernatural mysteries with an okay overarching plot, and your mileage may vary depending on your existing knowledge of East Asian occult and superstition. It’s also not that fun to actually look at, even if you happen to be into tall redheads with huge racks. Uh, not that I would know.

The Gems

Girls Band Cry

When Bocchi the Rock! made its unexpectedly earth-shattering landfall a couple years ago, it was inundated with a deluge of comparisons to the previous landmark girls-in-a-band anime, K-On!. It felt a bit trite at the time, and feels even more so in retrospect; each show is its own thing and they both stand on their own merits. And now here’s my dumb ass, reviewing a new girls-in-a-band anime, desperately trying not to compare it to Bocchi.

It’s really not a fair comparison either way; the focus being on an all-girls rock band is really the only thing they have in common. Rather than Hitori “Bocchi” Gotoh, a perpetually-anxious recluse looking to join a band so she won’t have to get a real job after high school, we have Nina Iseri, who is… difficult. Nina has just moved to Tokyo after running away from home, but her train arrived too late for her to get her apartment key, and to make matters worse, her phone’s dead. While charging at a local coffee shop, she finds out that Momoka, the now-former frontwoman of her favorite band, is playing on a nearby street. After some ups and downs, they decide to form a band together, and butt heads more than a couple times.

Along the way, they recruit more members, each with their own issues: Subaru, the drummer, is struggling with the expectations placed on her by her grandmother to become an actress, Tomo, the keyboardist, is exacting and a little too opinionated to keep a steady role in a band, and Rupa, the bassist, is a soft-spoken foreigner who remains a cheerful enigma despite losing her parents. And Nina and Momoka are both flat-out stubborn in ways that do not mesh well with one another. There are a lot of yelling matches and many angry tears shed as the band Togenashi Togeari comes together: yes, the “Cry” in the title isn’t just for style points.

I will say that it’s refreshing that Girls Band Cry does not sugarcoat what an absolute pain in the ass Nina can be when she’s dug in: She ran away from home because she’s utterly convinced of her own righteousness, and it’s your damn problem if you think otherwise. She is avoidant and oppositional-defiant, and everyone else just has to deal with it. She may not pick her hills well, but by God will she die on them. Props for having a protagonist this openly messy and unpleasant. Plenty of musicians, or really anyone working in a group for that matter, can be abrasive and stubborn, and TogeToge’s growing pains are a necessary element of their development as a band. 

I know the bar isn’t very high for 3D computer-generated anime when it doesn’t come from Studio Orange, but this is easily one of the best-looking 3DCG anime I’ve ever seen. Between this and Trigun Stampede, I’m blown away at how expressive characters can be in CG, and how they react to what’s around them in real-time more consistently than you’d see in most 2D animation. Speaking of which, Girls Band Cry isn’t entirely in 3D; much of the OP as well as several flashbacks and background characters are hand-drawn, and they look so goddamn good that I’m almost left wondering what could’ve been. Not that I’m disappointed in the slightest; when the 3D animation hits, it REALLY hits in gorgeous synaesthetic waves that so perfectly depict an intersection of sound, light, and emotion. Hell, even the transition cards are huge eye catchers. Not everything looks brilliant all the time; the pets in particular are uncannily low-res and almost look like they got plucked out of KamiKatsu.

Of course, this is a band show, so the audio element has to be on point as well, and I’d say Girls Band Cry is up to snuff. The anime is part of a larger multimedia project, and the entire main cast consists of audition winners performing under mononyms, and they knock it out of the damn park; they’re pretty goddamn great for supposed newcomers. The music is a blast as well, not just in performance scenes but in the background as well. Togenashi Togeari already existed in the zeitgeist as a virtual band before this show went to air, so they already had a small discography out there before the show went to air and I’m looking forward to digging into it.

Infamously, this show isn’t particularly easy to watch. Not in the thematic sense, but literally: You cannot legally watch it in English anywhere in the West. Despite its popularity, Girls Band Cry was never picked up by any Anglosphere-based streaming platforms, for whatever reason, and the only official English subtitles out there are from an Indonesian streamer. So, much like the days of VHS trading and the early internet, we’re forced to rely on community translations. Far be it from me to encourage piracy (lol), but if you can find a good fansub, Girls Band Cry is very much worth your while. Pinkies up, motherfuckers.

Kaiju No. 8

I don’t watch Demon Slayer or My Hero Academia, so this was my designated Shonen Jump action show of the season, and it came with a ton of buzz: The way I see it, if I can pick up a volume of the manga at Target, the inevitable anime adaptation is gonna be a big deal. I’ve not read Kaiju No. 8 yet, but I’d say the anime lives up to a good amount of the hype.

Japan has had to handle a constant threat of kaiju for many decades now, and as a child the way-too-aptly-named Kafka Hibino made a promise to his best friend Mina that they would both grow up to lead the Japan Anti-Kaiju Defense Force in charge of eliminating the threat. A couple decades later, she’s a national hero as a captain in the Force, while Kafka is in the private sector at age 32, cleaning up the enormous corpses and viscera Mina and her division leave behind. He hasn’t given up on his dreams, by any stretch; Kafka has failed every single enlistment application he’s submitted since he came of age, but he just keeps on trying.

Kafka and his work kohai, the upstart JAKDF hopeful Reno, manage to survive a kaiju attack at the end of a shift with minor injuries, but when they’re in the hospital, a potato-sized flying kaiju shoves itself down Kafka’s throat, causing him to transform into a kaiju. Fortunately, he’s able to change back to his human form just in time to pass the first round of Defense Force exams, with Reno warning him not to let anyone in on his secret during practical exams.

Kafka is pathetically weak in his human form and is repeatedly shown up by the daughter of the Defense Force’s director general, the young hotshot Kikoru (Fairouz Ai once again), but he manages to save her life when a training exercise goes haywire and forces him to transform and share his secret with her. Reno and Kikoru get in, no problem, while Kafka manages to squeak in as a cadet. Of course, without exposing his little-big kaiju secret, Kafka can’t do much to help in terms of actual combat, but he does frequently act as an unofficial tactician in directing his squadmates on the battlefield and, in a very smart writing decision, applying his professional knowledge of kaiju anatomy to help them identify and target weaknesses. 

And from there we get a whole lot of early military training and bonding, and not just with Kafka, Reno, Kikoru, and their division’s vice-commander, the giggly Hoshina: There’s also, uh, Man-Bun! And Muscles! And Shark Teeth! And the Token Women! You know, those guys. Yeah, this is ostensibly an ensemble cast, as any good battle shonen should be, but I really didn’t get much from anyone outside the main few characters other than identifying features. I’m sure we’ll get more out of them in subsequent seasons but I have little to work off of right now.

The main three are great, though: Kafka definitely has shonen protag brain even at his age, but he’s still necessary representation for schlubby guys in their 30s who still have hopes and dreams (we exist and our stories matter), and for as serious and focused as Reno likes to think he is, he makes a great tsukkomi whenever Kafka starts acting up. Kikoru is already an icon as well; she’s basically Asuka Langley Sohryu for the zoomer generation. I feel a little weird about the fact that she’s literally half Kafka’s age and still acts kinda tsundere around him, but this is a shonen at the end of the day.

I have some small nagging issues with the story here and there, but nothing that outright ruins the show for me. Like plenty of others, I’m far more fascinated with the ins and outs of how Japanese society adapted to living with kaiju threats outside of just military preparation and response; Kafka’s initial job in kaiju cleanup was actually really neat and I’d have loved it just as much (and possibly more) if the series had just focused on that. I want some damn world building! I also am not crazy about the focus on the Defense Force’s powerscaling in the form of “Unleashed Combat Power,” but I also just plain don’t care about powerscaling to begin with. Wasn’t the entire point of power levels in Dragon Ball Z that it’s pointless to define someone’s fighting spirit by a number? Maybe they drop it later.

This show looks pretty darn good! Production IG clearly put its A-team on this one; the character animation is cartoonishly bouncy and expressive in ways we rarely see outside of Trigger productions, and the big-ass kaiju are all mercifully in outstanding 2D (though I wouldn’t complain about CG; the OP is entirely in 3D and looks exceptional). The silliness of the animation really came through in one of the funniest scenes in any anime I watched this season. Some of the textures can look a little distractingly muddy at times, but hey, these are big ugly monsters we’re looking at. Make those bastards ugly.

On a certain level, I can appreciate the effort put into this show to try to make it a crossover success; the manga is popular and kaiju films remain one of Japan’s greatest cultural exports. Streaming new episodes on the fetid corpse of Twitter was certainly a decision. I can also appreciate wanting to load up the soundtrack with popular Western artists; my problem is that they went with acts I actively avoid like YUNGBLUD (with writing by Imagine Dragons!) and OneRepublic. Suffice to say, I don’t care for the OP and ED on a musical level, but I know that I’m coming at this with a conscious bias. I’m sure they’re hits over in Japan, and for all I know there are music fans over there with the same tastes and disposition as me who think that some Japanese acts I learned about through anime like, say, Bump of Chicken or Queen Bee, are “coworker music” or whatever. I’ll live.

Kaiju No. 8, at the end of the day, is another battle shonen with guns and big monsters, but sometimes that’s all you need. I’ll be coming back for the next season.

Train to the End of the World

Spring 2024 was a banner season for girls anime. From the veteran director/writer duo that gave us cult hits like Squid Girl, Shirobako, and Prison School (and individual credits on a laundry list of classic and cult-favorite anime across the board) comes an original anime that’s not quite Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, nor Cute Girls Doing Amazing Things, but Cute Girls Being Fucking Weirdos in a Weird World.

7G technology has arrived in Japan and immediately wreaked unknowable chaos. Geography, flora, and fauna have all warped beyond recognition, and in the town of Agano, every human above a certain age has become a talking animal. Shizuru, a still-human high school girl, has been looking for her best friend Youka ever since they got in a fight two years ago and the latter ran off, just before the 7G cataclysm. She finds out that Youka has been spotted in Ikebukuro, and with the help of a babbling train conductor who managed to briefly turn lucid, learns to operate a two-car commuter train to get the hell out of dodge. Just before Shizuru leaves, train stocked with Agano’s famous goya melons, she’s joined by her classmates: The soft-spoken Nadeko, the temperamental bookworm Akira, and the rambunctious gyaru Reimi. Youka’s dog, Pochi, also joins for morale purposes. Along the way, they see just how warped Japan has become, with locals in the various towns ranging from mushroom people to zombies to Lilliputians to characters from their favorite anime, and more.

Try as I might, a summary does not do Train to the End of the World justice; this show is as offbeat as offbeat gets. It makes no bones about how flat-out weird it wants to get and actively revels in it. It’s not really interested in making the girls into a new generation of moe icons either; they are unabashed weirdos, in the ways that really only high school girls can be, and they handle the bizarre situations foisted upon them in similar fashion. They get into arguments about dumb shit, hurl insults at strangers, and occasionally just talk about poop. The writing in this series is fascinating, and it really shouldn’t come as a surprise coming from someone who also has script-writing credits for classics like Cowboy Bebop and Ranma ½ on her resume. The dialogue is punchy and comes at a breakneck pace in ways that you really only get in original anime like ODDTAXI.

Train to the End of the World is an incredible dichotomy unto itself because it clearly comes from a very literate way of thinking but has a blast being really goddamn stupid sometimes, in the best ways. It draws on a lot of inspirations of the epics of yore, gleefully cites the western literary canon, and ponders the future of the human race, and then has the girls negotiate their release from a Gulliver’s Travels situation by threatening to flood a park with urine. It is at once Homer and Homer Simpson. This show is funny in ways that are hard to articulate; comedy is so intrinsic to the show that it only has so many laugh-out-loud moments, but much more often I found myself shaking my head and remarking “this show is fucking hilarious.”

As a complete story, Train to the End of the World isn’t exactly generation-defining, but that’s perfectly fine. It’s an experience more than anything. It has really nice character moments and some heartwarming stuff in there, but I was mostly there for the weird shit. The ending was just okay, but I didn’t feel any poorer for having seen it; I’ll dive right into the cliche and say that it wasn’t about the destination but rather the journey. I had an absolute blast for the whole ride.

Now that I’ve made you read all of this, I’m going to go ahead and admit that I haven’t seen Squid Girl, Shirobako, or Prison School, but I kind of have to now, because I was bowled over by this show. This series revels in surrealism, so your mileage may vary, but it’s at the very least worth checking out. It may not have a lasting impact outside of some similar cult favoritism, but this was still my personal favorite new anime of the season.

Wind Breaker

A few weeks into the Spring season I felt like I was missing something. I gave Wind Breaker a shot and I realized about halfway into the first episode that what I was missing was just some dope-ass fisticuffs.

Haruka is a bit of a delinquent. His hair and eyes are heterochromic, and because he’s judged so harshly for his looks, he decided to lean into it and become the nogoodnik everyone thinks he is. He’s moved to a new town to join the local high school Furin, where he hears he’ll have to fight his way to the top, but as soon as he arrives in town he sees a young woman being harassed by a group of creeps. He takes them out on his own and in return receives a free lunch from the cafe she runs despite his protestations. After she teases him more than a little (his ass is NOT used to positive attention), the creeps return with more goons in tow, and Haruka is backed up by his new classmates. To his surprise, the locals shower the Furin boys with praise, and he then learns that Furin’s gang, Bofurin, exists solely to protect the town from outside threats. And Haruka thinks that is the coolest shit ever.

From there, Haruka gets to meet more of the Bofurin boys, and because of his standoffish personality, rebuffs their praises from the fight. Again, his ass is NOT used to positive attention. We get to learn the hierarchy of Bofurin, and it’s not exactly as Haruka expected: This is not a might-makes-right dogpile at all; it is a structured organization that protects its own and puts its community first. Soon enough, though, they happen upon one of their middle schoolers being hassled by a neighboring gang, and they organize a tournament on hostile ground to resolve their differences.

I am an absolute goddamn sucker for the “delinquent with a heart of gold” archetype, and Haruka is just a big ol’ tsundere from the opening minutes, so Wind Breaker hit like fucking catnip for me. For a show about gangs of delinquents, this could actually be a good example of positive masculinity if you look at it in a certain light. It’s very heavy-handed with the message that nobody can achieve greatness on their own and that surrounding yourself with the right people can change your life for the better. It’s not a rare theme in Japanese media by any means (it’s a central theme of the Persona series as well as another ultra-popular shonen series I’ve been reading in secret), but I really appreciate it being delivered through the lens of channeling brute strength and fighting prowess specifically to protect the vulnerable.  

At the end of the day, though, it’s really just about guys bein’ dudes.

The production values on this are phenomenal and I have to commend CloverWorks for turning in yet another banger. The cast is deep and plenty talented (there’s a lot of Jujutsu Kaisen in there, and it should surprise nobody that the goofy, silver-haired leader of Bofurin is voiced by Yuichi Nakamura). The animation, shot composition, fight choreography, and lighting effects are all absolutely gorgeous, and it’s clear that they see this as a potential franchise. At least, I would certainly hope so, because what we actually got from the first season left me a little hungry. The tournament arc was juicy, and it went a lot longer toward introducing the ensemble cast than the two other action shows I just talked about, but it lasted about an episode too long for a 13-episode season, and the ending came at an awkward time. I was left wanting, but what I want is a second season, so I guess it did its job.

The issues with pacing and the weirdly-timed ending meant that Wind Breaker was a bit of a fence case for me between this section and the last, but my memories of watching it are almost uniformly positive, so into The Gems it goes. This show rocks. Dudes rock.

[shaarlslec]

me and the devil

words: 4554

introduction/part 1 | part 2 | part 4 | part 5

warnings/notes: charles leclerc x reader, friends to enemies to lovers type of a thing, both of them being pricks, slight manipulation;

inspired by: Soap&Skin - Me And The Devil, The Neighborhood - Afraid, The Academic - Why Can’t We Be Friends?, lovelytheband - i like the way, The Wombats - Turn , Wallows - Pleaser

masterlist

“I came here because I–” Charles paused, backing two steps away from you. Fuck, even the idea of your bodies being departed just inches away drove Charles mad because he wanted for that space to not even exist in the first place, and yet he had to keep it cool around you – that what was he was advised, “Your war declaration impressed me.” 

Summer break came and gone with you two not even exchanging a single text. There was no room for that anymore. You were at war now. At least, that is how Charles has put it in the words of his newest interview for GQ during the summer break.  

“You have quite a tight gap between you and your teammate, and as far as everyone remembers it – that has not happened for you in the last two years. What changed within the team due to that? What has happened in between the two of you because as we all know it – you used to be Y/N mentor.” The interviewer dared to scoop; camera pointed to only Charles who was comfortably seating down nodding his head slowly as the words flooded the room. 

“Mentor is a huge word to use here.” Charles has confidently responded, eyes piercing the camera as if he was talking to you and not an entire audience, “Y/N is an extremely talented driver, and I had the chance to watch that closely since the beginning of her racing career – and I am grateful for that.” Your teammate spoke with tensed back and shoulders, “The team priorities remined the same as they were at the beginning of the season – that is to win another championship, and to answer all of your questions,” Charles then paused, shortly inhaling the heavy air in the room as if you were there to witness the words, “I and Y/N are at war, and we will do our best for our mutual feelings to not scrouge the team’s priorities.” He added, eyes titling down at his shoes for a while to take another breather before glaring up at the interviewer again, “Next question.” He ended, almost demanding. 

“He is a fucking child.” You muttered as you watched the interview next to your manager who basically forced you to watch the video, “How am I younger than him and yet the one to abstain herself from such comments?” You voiced with that burning aching feeling of your chest deepening as Charles’ heavy breaths stood as main remainders of the last time you saw each other back in the hotel room, “We are adults for God’s sake, not children playing Warzone.” 

An amused side-eye came from your manager whose phone went back into their back pockets for their hands to fully lock on their torso, “Can I say something, Y/N?” They asked, waiting patiently for you to nod, “Charles angers you – and that is good.” They added, “That is if you keep it professional.” 

Your eyes rolled, figuring out that you do really hate this phase. Does not sound like us, Charles’ voice reverberated in the back of your mind, “What if I do not?” You questioned, thinking about all the times in which you were almost ready to give up the whole professionalism into your being in front of him. 

“You have to deal with the consequences of trying to beat the one you lose your mind for inside and outside the track.” They uttered, both of you knowing damn well that means trouble for the career you fought so much to pave.  

“Enough about Charles.” You spoke, being the demanding one now, “Let me enjoy the last couple of days before I have to face him again, don’t mention him for this time being.” You added, and you could swear that you heard your manager saying “as if you don’t what that” underneath their breath.

You fought a paradox that was not only yours to bear, thoughtless of you to think that you were the only one tormented by the idea – Charles was too. Is just that Charles Leclerc had a different coping mechanism that you did. While you were trying to avoid anything online remotely linked to your teammate, Charles preferred to keep in-check your social media and to engage in every single conversation that you were mentioned in. No matter how cold and assertive he would have wanted to look when any questions about you was directed towards him, Charles enjoyed being put in such position. The Monegasque loved to be challenged, and what such thrill that you were the one to do it. You pushed him to strive for the better at the same time as you were alarming him. 

“Does she bother you that much?” Arthur asked his brother watching Leclerc scrolling through your Instagram before dinner, “That you have to watch her every step even if you are not competing?” The youngest Leclerc had inquired in almost silence as he was careful of the others gathered at the family dinner to not hear them speak, “Kinda stalk-ish, if you ask me.” He then mocked, eyebrows playfully twitching up. 

“Well, I did not ask you.” Charles replied as the phone was placed back in the pocket, “And yes, Y/N does bother me.” Your teammate declared, switching glare with his little brother who happened to be one of your closest friends within the sport. Yes, you had a thing for the Leclerc’s brothers. 

“Then, let me be the first one to tell you that she will drive you insane.” Arthur amplified with a sharp look towards his brother who was confusedly staring back at him, “I know you two well enough to figure out who will be the one to snap first.” Arthur mumbled, and then the conversation got interrupted by the arrival of the food and the fuss that created around the table. 

Charles weighted Arthur’s words. Arthur was quite right. Being that close in age with Arthur, you two grew up basically together through the junior leagues of F1. And yet, you were two steps ahead of the little Leclerc ever since the beginning. You got into F2, Arthur followed two years later despise the age gap and the relations the family had. You got into F1; Arthur struggled for another two years into F2 before making it into a midfield team alongside you who was already signed for Ferrari at that time. You were cunning, and both Leclerc were pretty much aware of that. 

Charles has watched you being ahead of his brother throughout the years, and yet Arthur never quite lost his mind over you as Charles did. Arthur had always kept it calm, and your friendship was never affected by who scored the most points or who was the best amongst the two of you – why was it different for Charles? 

Your teammate circulated around that question for the entirety of the dinner as everyone was trying to grab his attention with whatever question that ended up being answered by Arthur rather than Charles. He is stressed, don’t mind him. Arthur would say, trying to switch the focus from his brother to literally anything else. 

Yes, Charles was extremely stressed out, but not over whatever people at the table thought that evening. It was not about the following races or even about winning the championship anymore – it was all about you and the way in which you bothered him that seemed to be very much very different from the way in which you made Arthur behave towards you.  

Charles had enough time to pick his brains about this inquiry until the next time you saw each other (a couple of days down the road). You met him before practice for that weekend’s race due to your media duties. You two had to film a C2 challenge that consisted in who was the teammate that knew the other the best through answering questions about the other. You huffed as your colleagues showed you the question prompts. What were Charles’ favorite food, movie, ideal date, and celebrity crush. When did Charles won his first grand prix, what corner is his favorite out of the corners at Monza and so on. They also passed you a sheet with all the answers – and they did the same for Leclerc in other room. 

“I don’t need this.” You both spoke, pushing the answer sheets away, “Most of these are wrong, anyway.” Charles and you added, glaring over your PR team.

The filming set was simple. Two chairs standing one in front of the other in the Ferrari’s garage. It was supposed to be like that, no big fuss or huge thing. You needed to show the people that were watching you that you still get along, that what happened before the summer break has no impact on you whatsoever. Those were the instructions you both received before entering the garage, now seating one in front of the other with cards gripped in both of your hands, not daring to look at each other now. 

“Ok Charles, you can start.” Someone announced, and the cameras rolled. Charles begun with the introduction; eyes fixed on the camera before turning them on you. You almost flinched when Charles shifted his glare, and yet you knew that you needed to prove (to you mostly, and to him) that he was not moving you in any shape or form. Do not stand in my way. You gulped, the sweet tone that Charles was using was quite different from what he has portrayed back in the hotel room. 

“We are here to find how much we know about each other.” Charles intoned, leaning back into his chair as he was piercing you, “Do you feel confident that you can win this too?” He asked, and that was for the very first time when he was addressing you after three long weeks. 

You sustained the man’s glare, “How about we turn this into a speed-round?” You asked with an arched brow, “See whoever answers faster.” You teased, giving a side-eye to your managers and the team who was confused as for why you were changing the rules of the game but agreeing with your plead anyhow as soon as they heard an affirmative answer coming from Leclerc. 

“Sure, why not. Five questions per person, half a minute for answers.” Charles confidently spoke, and you could swear you were the only one to see his small smile turning into a nifty smirk with the intention of intimidation. 

Charles Leclerc was not intimating to you anymore as he was back in the days – it was the other way around now. You were the one who troubled him the most, and not vice-versa. 

“Favorite dish?” Charles inquired, knocking his knee with the edges of the cards, 

“Pasta, easy.” You immediately spoke as you slightly rolled your eyes, “But not anything that involves seafood in them, especially well-cocked shrimps.” You added, mimicking his pose as you relaxed your back in the chair as well. 

Charles nodded proudly, and he kept doing that as long as the questions were asked, and your answers never fail to impress him and everyone around. You knew him, oh you knew him too well.

“My turn.” You declared, leaving the cards to fall on your knees as you crossed your arms at your chest, “Favorite spot to hang out after a race?” You inquired, not starting as easy as he did with the questions about himself. 

“Trick question right from the start.” Charles laughed, “Depends on the city we are in – sometimes is some tiny hidden restaurants deep in the center of the city, and sometimes is up-hill somewhere.” He spoke, and you were not expecting him to remember all of that right from the start, “Also, when you are racing home – you always take the car and drive around the city for whole hours.” Charles replied, adding more to the answer perhaps for him to prove that he can beat you at this game as well or for you to know that he had as much attention as your stories at you had at his. 

You nodded, “Very good, Leclerc.” You breathed before getting into the next questions that Charles answered in the same fashion as you did his – some of them even better. 

The whole crew let you talk while your mangers were exchanging worried glances. That was the interaction of two people that are deeply interested in each other (the amount of effort you both put into remembering all those details about the other was insane). It was clear for them then, as it was for the whole team that you only pretend to despise each other. No person who hates the other could have known what their first childhood memory was or that they hate the taste of salted caramel cappuccinos. The game went on as a speed-round for a couple of minutes, until it was Charles’ turn again to ask you the questions. 

“What is your relationship with my brother?” Charles suddenly inquired, and all eyes widened in the room (that type of question was nowhere on the cards). 

Your eyes widened too, “Is this question about you or me?” You replied with a nervous laugh. 

“It implicates us both.” He answered back, glare as sharp as a knife and voice steady as if he was almost scolding you.

“It implicates me and Arthur.” You spoke, hearing the cameraman shutting the camera down with a click as the atmosphere thickened between you and Charles, “If you are that curious – you should ask your brother then. I am sure you are closer with him that you are with me.” You muttered, wondering if it was jealousy you sensed in the tone of your teammate or simply new-found curiosity. 

“You are the one in front of me now – I am asking you.” Charles fought back, but his intentions were cut shut by the Communications Manager. 

“Ok guys, enough content for today.” She spoke with a little amused smile on her face, being one of many wondering what your answer is if this conversation continues any further but knowing that a scoop into your personal life would not be the best way to promote your relationship to the public, “Go take five, you two have other interviews to attend before the practice.” 

“And for God’s sake,” Your manager interfered after a heavy breath, “Can you two behave for five whole minutes without attacking the other?” They asked, watching you already leaving your seat while Charles’ glare never budged from where you stood, “Y/N wait –” They rushed, following you out of the garage back into your motorhome. 

“Why are you getting so worked up for?” They questioned you once they breathless caught you from behind, you were quicker than any normal person not only when driving but when you were walking too, “It was just a silly question—” 

“Leclerc has no reason to be jealous.” You confessed, leaning your body on one of the walls, “Why does he act the way he does in front of other people too?” You inquired, temples pounding at the verges of your head, “Why does he care about my relationships with other drivers, have I ever asked him how well he gets along with other girls? No.” You vented; your manager perplexed shutting the door behind you two. 

Charles stood from his chair after you left the room, everyone in the room was eyeing him. He adjusted his voice by coughing twice, “I guess we need to film the outro for the video some other day.” Charles simply said to your Communication Manager. 

“There is no need, we will figure out something without you two in the same shoot.” She implied with furrowed brows, “But perhaps –” She paused, watching Leclerc position both of his hands at his hips, “Keep your cool in front of the cameras with Y/N, alright?” 

“What do mean? Have I said something wrong?” Charles inquired, looking around the room for someone to back him up. Yet, no one did so. 

“Not exactly Charles.” She answered, “But if looks could kill, you would have murdered Y/N right in front of us.” 

Charles’ gulped his words before he could say something, the realization kicked in. Arthur was right – you were driving him insane. The worst part of all that? That everybody around you two was seeing that, and yet Charles acted clueless. 

Focus was on the race on Sunday, after one successful qualifying session during which you got third place on the grid and Charles first. Yet, Charles had PU changes that pushed him five places back in the grid. You were ahead of him, and you were planning to keep it that way. No matter how much Charles managed to anger you outside the track, you had to take all of that and put in inside of it. 

You had a good start, pushing Max on P2 and now you were chasing Russell. As you were not seeing Charles’ car in your mirrors, you kept your calm for half of the race when you took the opportunity to pass Russell too in a tight corner – exactly how Leclerc has taught you before. 

It was a tough race for Charles, but a very good one for you. The minor PU changes seemed to not perform as well as the team expected on Charles’ car, so he struggled in P4 for most of the race.

It rarely happened for Charles not to be on the podium, and he needed that now more than ever for his own ego because your finish in P1 meant equality in points in the championship if he was not to pass Russell ahead of him. Xavi announced him that through the radio, while your race engineer spoke just these words to you: Y/N please abandon the fastest lap. 

And yet, Russell was unyielding in P3 pissed by Max passing him five laps before the checked flag and you were angered by your team’s message. Leclerc must be in P4 still, you thought. With an open distance and a considerable gap between you and Max, you pushed all the limits of your body and that car to disobey the team’s orders without saying anything back to them as a reply.

You took P1 and you took the fastest lap of the race too. One point ahead of Charles Leclerc in the championship, and oh how much would that upset sweet little Charles. 

The crowd was in awe for the second time in a row, and you were more than pleased to take the fourth trophy home for the season as well as you were thrilled to be asked how it feels to lead the championship for the first time through your F1 career before hopping on a well-deserved podium. 

“What do you think your teammate has to say to this swift in points?” The Sky interviewer asked, and you would have wished for your punch to knock that man right then and there. It was your time to shine, yours and yours alone. And yet, of course – they had to ask about him, cause how can someone take the spotlight from their dearest champ? 

You furrowed your eyebrows; the thought of Charles has not crossed your mind up until this stupid question. What managed to anger you now was not your teammate, but your foolish team orders. And yet, you had to give them what they wanted. Meaningless to say, you loved the chaos as much as Charles did especially during high rushes of adrenaline as now. 

“As he declared – we are at war, aren’t we?” You giggled, whipping the sweat off your forehead with a smirk sprinkled on your wet face, “All of us are here to win.” You added, saved by the bell of timing as Max was asked to replace you. 

Charles watched from the side, and within even his own surprise – a small smile split his face as the answer flew to the man’s ears.

Oh, the game is on.

Xavi went to apologize to Charles at the exact moment when the people in your team were hugging and congratulation you. 

“I don’t need apologies, Xavi.” Charles spoke, eyes watching your every move as you went up to the podium, “I need solutions.” The Monegasque then declared, leaving the spot next to Xavi who he left wordless to go and wait for you in front of your motorhome. A warning for you seemed to not be enough, therefore Charles has decided to step up his game seeing that you did that on your own. 

You were startled once you saw him at your door with his race suit half on and arms locked at his chest, “You again.” You almost sobbed beneath your gutted breath, “What do you want now?” You questioned, passing by him to open the door for him to follow you inside, another tantrum was not ideal to be witnessed by people passing, “You need to stop following me in such fashion – people might think that you are in love with me or something.” You teased, turning on your heel for now to watch him closely inches away from you as he stopped his steps right before your bodies could have tinged. 

Charles said nothing to your remark. You rolled your eyes at his silence, “It is just a joke, you don’t even know how to joke anymore?” You continued, undressing from your racing suit as he was watching. Putting it half down just as him, you placed both of your hands on your hips with an annoyed look on your face, “Have you come here just to stare?” You wondered, Charles’ silence weighting as seconds passed by. 

“I came here because I–” Charles paused, backing two steps away from you. Fuck, even the idea of your bodies being departed just inches away drove Charles mad because he wanted for that space to not even exist in the first place, and yet he had to keep it cool around you – that what was he was advised, “Your war declaration impressed me.” 

You huffed, “You are the one who did it first, Leclerc. Don’t pretend that I am the one who put us in such position.” 

“Oh, so you have been watching me.” He promptly replied, your eyes rolling again as the grin on Charles’ face extended.

“Don’t gloat.” You spoke despite all the cravings inside of you that commanded wiping that man’s smile with a slap or a lock of mouths, “You are the one who has been stalking me on social media.” You replied, an immediate reaction on Charles’ face in the form of a twitched eyebrow and a nervous chuckle. 

“I got my answer then.” Charles breathed, back now glued on one of your walls putting as much distance as he could in between the two of you, “You are that close with my brother so that he can rat me out to you.” He continued, one of his hands stretching the back of his neck.

Nervous, you made him nervous once again. You knew you would, and you were smart enough to figure out that the Leclerc brothers had been talking about you over the summer break for Arthur to send you a text saying What have you done to my brother that your name pops up first in his searches? 

“What was with that question, anyway?” You asked with your shoulders tensed up, being impossible to fully relax all your body underneath the man’s gaze even after the race’s rush of adrenaline wore off, “You know that I and Arthur are friends, he was the one who introduced you to me.” You recollected, flashes of your first talk with Leclerc flickering in the back of your mind: when he was sweet, kind and caring, and when your crush on him started. 

“I needed answers, Y/N.” Charles sighed, switching his weight from the back foot on the one standing closer to you as he made its way back into your space. Damn, Charles Leclerc was indecisive, “Why it is different for me than it is for Arthur when it comes to you.” He declared, hand up in the air now to touch your cheek. 

You were startled at first, of course you were. Three weeks ago, Charles seemed to you like he could not even stand the idea of you touching his hand, and now his was on you. And yet, you caved in as his hand cupped your already rosy cheeks. No matter how much you would have liked to resist, your body told the story. He pulled your head up, close to his mouth. Oh, so damn close.

“Maybe because you are different people, and I and Arthur always have known where we stand.” You spoke, watching the little reddened spots that were still on Leclerc’s face from wearing the helmet, “You and I?” You added, touching the reddish line with the tips of your fingers, “We have yet to find out.” You continued, getting up on the edges of your foot to match Leclerc’ energy and to make the distance in between your lips to slowly fade away, “Too bad that we will not find that very soon.” You added, lips almost caressing before you snatched away from Charles, leaving him all hot and sweaty in front of you, “I know what you are doing, Charles.” You warned, steps away from him now. 

“What am I doing?” Charles innocently and all confused spoke, arm hanging out around his body having none of you to touch anymore. 

“You are trying to find my weak spot.” You explained with almost watery eyes, “That is you.” You acknowledged after a short breath, “You made me not care about you in the same way as I did before two years ago when you decided to play the devil card.” You continued with what were full-blown lies told to Charles in the most convincing tone, “You are not going to make me go easy on you for the remining races by making me fall in love with you, again.” You demanded as your heart broke, “Dare to touch me again when you really mean it.” You intoned, “Or do not touch me at all.” 

Charles’ stare sharpened, “That is not what was I tryin—” 

“Get out.” You managed to speak, “I need to change.” You lied, all you needed was a moment of peace caused by the turbulences of your heart jumping back and forth just as Charles’ steps towards you. 

“Fine then.” Charles spoke, “If that is what you want.” He added, turning his back on you but not before throwing the following words behind his shoulder, “Just be aware that you are the one who is playing the devil card now – turning into me.” 

Your eyes remined fixed on Charles’ back until he was out of your sight. When Charles did so, giving one last look over the shoulder – Charles’ hand went to his heart first before balancing around his body. Yes, you figured out your teammate’s plan. Charles came to find you to suede you, and yet the impact of his throbbing heart hurting within his chest was something he was not expecting to feel. 

Charles needed another plan for him to not become the one who’s played by his own intentions, and yet what he saw inside your flaming eyes when your lips were so close to him aroused Charles’ entire body. Fuck, how could Charles had convinced you that part of him was really meaning it – that touching you was everything he needed, wanted, craved with or without his third title.   

[dianawinchester03]

Season 1, Episode 8 - Bugs

Series Masterlist

Third Person POV

Currently outside of a bar in Oklahoma. Sam is sitting on the bonnet of the Impala reading the news paper. The title, "Local Death a Medical Mystery". Whilst Y/N is on the car next to him, smoking a cigarette. Dean exits the bar laughing, holding up a wad of cash having just won it from hustling pool.

Sam and Y/N look over, Sam shakes his head and says "You know, we could get day jobs once in a while" He suggests. "Huntings our day job. And the pay is crap" Y/N snorts, taking a drag from her cigarette. "You're preaching to the choir girl but hustling pool? Credit card scams? It's not the most honest thing in the world guys" Sam says disapprovingly.

"Well, let's see" Dean starts, putting up his hands out to weigh the options. "Honest....fun and easy. It's no contest" He says sarcastically and Sam rolls his eyes chuckling. "Besides, we're good at it. It's what we were raised to do" Dean says. "Yeah, well, how we were raised was jacked" Y/N says ironically chuckling, dusting the ash from her bud on the ground.

"Right on man" Sam agrees, putting his hand up for a high-five, which she returns. "Yeah, says you two" Dean mutters counting the money, "We got a new gig or what?" Dean asks his brother. "Maybe" He says getting up from the impala and walks around to show Dean the papers as Y/N flicks her now burnt out cigarette to the side as Sam explains.

"Oasis Plains, Oklahoma. Not too far from here. A gas company employee. Dustin Burwash supposedly died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob." Sam says. "Huh?" Dean asks confused. "Human mad cow disease" Y/N indicates, getting up from the Impala herself and dusting her hands off.

"Mad cow...wasn't that in Oprah?" Dean asks. "You watch Oprah?" Sam asks him surprised and Dean looks down guiltily while Y/N laughs. "You get a car....and you get a car!" She exclaims, pointing to the air. "Everybody gets a carrr!" Sam adds, belting out in laughter as Dean grumbles embarrassed.

A grin slowly overtook his face when he looked at Y/N bubbling in a fit of laughter. Even if it was at him, she still looked damn cute smiling. "So this guy eats a bad burger. Why is it our kind of thing?" He goes back to the topic and they sober up from their laughing.

"Really though. Mad cow disease causes massive brain degeneration. It takes months, even years for the damage to appear. So how would it be our thing?" Y/N says, wiping some tears out of her eyes from her laughing. "This guy Dustin, sounds like his brain disintegrated in about an hour. Maybe less" Sam says.

"Okay, that's weird" Dean agrees and Y/N nods. "Yeah. Now it could be a disease. Or it could be something much nastier." Sam says. "Alright. Oklahoma!" Dean exclaims enthusiastically, going to the side of baby. "Man. Work work work. No time to spend my money" Dean says jokingly as he jumps in, while Sam and Y/N file in behind.

________________________________

Now outside of the Oklahoma Gas & Powell Co., the trio get out of Impala and approach a man. "Travis Weaver?" Sam asks the man. "Yeah, that's right" Travis confirms. "Are you the Travis who worked with Uncle Dusty?" Y/N asks sweetly. "Dustin never mentioned any nieces or nephews" Travis says suspiciously.

"This is actually my girlfriend" Dean pipes up, wrapping his arm around Y/N's shoulder, putting her closer. She cocks her eyebrows at him confused and he gives her a look that says 'follow my lead'. She smiles nodding, wrapping her arm around his side while Sam looks at the two of them with a slight smirk on his face.

"Well he sure mentioned you. He said you were the greatest" Y/N casually lies. "Oh, he did?" Travis smiles brightly. "Listen, we wanted to ask you, what exactly happened out there?" Dean asks. "I'm not sure. He fell in a sinkhole. I went to the truck to get some rope..and uh...by time I got back...." Travis explains, trailing off.

"What'd you see?" Y/N asks calmly. "Nothing. Just Dustin" Travis sighs, shaking his head. "No wounds or anything?" Sam asks. "Well, he was bleeding from his eyes and his ears, his nose. That's it" Travis says, partially disgusted. "So you think it could be this whole mad cow thing?" Dean asks.

"I don't know. That's what the doctors are saying" Travis shrugs. "But if it was, he would've acted strange beforehand like dementia, loss of motor control. You ever notice anything like that?" Sam asks and Travis shakes his head.

"Nah. No way. But then again if it wasn't some disease, what the hell was it?" He questions. "That's a good question" Dean says. "Can you tell us where this happened?" Y/N asks. "Yeah" Travis says and gives them the location.

________________________________

Sometime later they drive through the newly developing neighborhood, Oasis Plains Estates, where Dustin Burwash died mysteriously. Pulling up infront of the house where he fell in the sinkhole, they exit and walk towards it.

"Huh, what do you guys think?" Dean asks them as they approach the scene, the sink hole surrounded by caution tape. "I don't know, but if Travis was right, it happened pretty damn fast" Sam says as they dunk under the tape to get a closer look.

"So, what, some sort of creature chewed on his brain?" Dean asks, flashing his light into the whole and Y/N shakes her head. "No, there'd be an entry wound. Sounds like this thing worked from the inside" She states and they all stoop, peering at the hole which isn't too wide. "Looks like there's only room for one" Dean says, turning his light off and dunking back under the tape, away from the hole.

"You guys wanna flip a coin?" Dean asks, grabbing a rope to anchor them. "Dean, we have no idea what's down there" Sam says, looking over at him. "Alright, I'll go if you two are scared" Dean says. "Scared?" He adds teasingly and Y/N rolls her eyes. "Flip the damn coin" Sam says and Dean chuckles.

"Alright, call it in the air, chickens" Dean says and Sam catches the coin midair. "I'm going." Sam says determined. "I said I'd go" Dean says with a slight smirk on his face. "Oh for the love of god. I'll go!" She huffs, tired of their bickering. She grabs the rope and ties it around her waist. "You sure?" Dean asks concerned. "I'll be fine. Just don't drop me" She warns him. "Wouldn't dream of it" Dean smiles.

________________________________

After searching the sinkhole, Y/N found some dead beetles in the hole. Her and Sam are examining them while Dean drives. "So you found some beetles. In a hole in the ground. That's shocking, y/n/n" Dean says dryly, sarcasm dripping from his tone and she rolls her eyes. "She said there were no tunnels, no tracks. No evidence of any other kind of creature down there" Sam defends.

"You know, some beetles do eat meat. Usually it's dead meat but-" She explains but Dean cuts her off. "How many did you find down there?" He asks. "Ten" She answers. "It'd take a whole lot more than that to eat out some dudes brain" Dean says. "Well maybe there were more" Sam suggests.

"I don't know. Sounds like a stretch to me" Dean denies. "Well, we need more information on the area, the neighborhood. Whether something like this has ever happened before.." Y/N says and they notice Dean looking at a house decorated with balloons and a sign outside. "What?" Sam and Y/N ask in unison.

"I know a good place to start. I'm kinda hungry for a little barbecue, how bout you guys?" Dean says suggestively while Sam and Y/N look at him disapprovingly. "What? We can't talk to the locals?" Dean says feigning innocence. "And the free foods got nothing to do with it?" Y/N says dryly.

"Course not. I'm a professional" Dean denies failing to convince them. "Right" Sam remarks in the same tone as Y/N, flashing Dean his classic bitchface. "Ah whatever. I could eat" Y/N leans back as Dean pulls into an empty parking space in-front of the house hosting the barbecue.

"Atta girl" He smirks at her through the rearview mirror. Not missing the little blush overtaking her cheeks that she's trying to hide by looking out the window. Y/N bites her lips to stop the heat from rising in her face, hating the fact that a simple praise like that from Dean could make her heat up like a baked potato.

He smiles at her before they all exit the vehicle and walk up towards the house. Her heart jumps everytime he says that and she can't pinpoint why. Dean takes in the surroundings, feeling a bit uneasy. "Growing up in a place like this would freak me out" Dean says. "Why?" Y/N asks confused.

"The manicured lawns. 'How was your day, honey?'. I'd blow my brains out" Dean exaggerates. "There's nothing wrong with normal" Sam defends. "I'd take our families over normal anyday" Dean scoffs. "It doesn't seem that bad" Y/N shrugs and Dean looks at her surprised.

"You'd want this whole picket fence stuff?" He asks. "With the right person" She says honestly and he hides his little smile at the thought of Y/N in a minivan. "Nutcase" He snorts. "Asshat" She retorts, narrowing her eyes at him while Sam snickers.

Y/N couldn't help but wonder how it would be like to live a normal apple pie life. If she, Sam and Dean grew up together in Kansas rather than on the road. If their moms were still alive. Would they even be as close as they are right now? Would she be in school? What would she do as a career?

She's always loved music, her dad bought her a guitar for her 13th birthday, granted she hasn't played in a while but she knew if she picked up where she left off, she'd be fine.

Y/N knocks on the door and a middle aged man dressed formally answers. "Welcome" He says with a pleasant smile. "Is this the barbecue?" Dean smiles asking. "Yeah. Not the best weather but...I'm Larry Pike, the developer here" Larry introduces himself, putting his hand out to shake Deans, which he accepts.

"And you are...?" He asks. "Dean. This is Sam and Y/N" Dean answers, introducing the group as Larry takes Sam and Y/N's hands, shaking it. "Sam, Dean, Y/N. Good to meet you. So you three are interested in Oasis Plains?" He asks pleasantly as they nod and smile. "Yes, sir" Y/N says sweetly.

"Let me just say, we accept homeowners of any race, religion, color or...sexual orientation" Larry says and then Y/N realizes what he's getting at. Sam chuckles at this and Deans face drops. "They're brothers" Y/N clarifies holding back a laugh while Larry looks a bit embarrassed. "Yeah, we're actually the happy couple" Dean says, wrapping his arm around Y/N's shoulder, pulling her closer.

She smiles, going along with it and wraps her arm around his waist. Her heart starts beating quickly when his hands trail down her sides to the small of her back. "Sam is just here for the ride" She says clearing her throat. "Darn I apologize but great. Great. Come on in" Larry apologizes, welcoming them in.

Y/N lets go of Dean and walks in first, he slightly groans at the loss of contact but follows behind in. They all make way to the back yard. "You said you were the developer?" Sam asks Larry as they walk into the backyard, filled with people chatting, eating. The works at the barbecue.

"Eighteen months ago, I was walking this valley with my survey team. There was nothing here but scrub brush and squirrels" Larry begins to explain. "And you know what, we built such a nice place to live that I actually bought into it myself. This is our house" Larry gestures to the decorated backyard.

"We're the first family in Oasis Plains. This is my wife, Joanie" He introduces a middle ahead woman, who puts her hand out to shake Y/N. "Hi there" She says pleasantly. "Hi" Y/N says sweetly taking her hand and shaking it. She then shakes Sam and Deans hands. "Hi nice to meet you" She smiles at them.

"Sam, Dean and Y/N" Larry introduces the trio. "Sam" Sam says as he shakes Joanie's hand. "Pleasure" She says back. "Tell them how much you love the place, honey. And lie if you have to because I need to sell some houses." Larry jokes with his wife who smiles nodding. While the trio laughs.

"Boys and girl, if you'll excuse me" Larry politely excused himself before going back to greeting guests. "Don't let his salesman routine scare you. This really is a great place to live" Joanie reassures them. "Hi, I'm Lynda Bloome, head of sales" A brunette woman dressed in office attire introduces herself.

"Lynda was second to move in" Joanie says. "She's a very noisy neighbor though" She jokes before walking off and Lynda laughs, the trio chuckle at the response. "She's kidding, of course" Lynda assures them. "I take it you three are interested in becoming homeowners" Lynda smiles.

"Well- " Dean stutters. "Y-yeah, well-" Sam also stutters. "Well, let me just say, that we accept homeowners of any race, religion, color or...sexual orientation" Lynda says smiling, this time Sam's face drops and Dean chuckles. Y/N doesn't hide her laugh this round.

"Right. I'm gonna go talk to Larry. Okay honeys" Y/N says cheekily before smacking Sam and Deans asses firmly, giving them each a squeeze before sauntering away and swaying her hips. Dean looks at her stunned while Sam awkwardly clears his throat.

Y/N looks back to catch Dean staring and flashes him a quick wink. Deans heart leaps at the way she walks, swaying her hips. Not to mention the wink, he could've melted right there. Which made him wonder, did he have feelings for her? Sure, she's hot.

God she's beautiful but even if he did have feelings for her, she couldn't possibly feel the same way. He chooses to suppress them rather than bring them to light and screwup his friendship with her.

________________________________

"You got three choices: Carpet, Hardwood and Tile" Larry lists the options of flooring to Y/N as the walk down the stairs of his house. She notices a jar with some insects next to the lamp and vase at the bottom of the stairs onto of a table.

"Woah. Someone likes bugs" She jokes. "My son. He's into insects. He's very inquisitive" Larry says trying to sound enthusiastic but Y/N can sense the disapproval in his tone. "Hmm" She says before going back to the tour.

Meanwhile outside Sam and Dean are getting an earful about the house by Lynda. "Who can say no to a steam shower? I use mine everyday" Lynda says and Deans eyebrows quirk up at this. "Sounds great" Sam forces a smile but seems uninterested.

"Honestly I could do with a steam shower" Dean chuckles awkwardly making Sam side eye him. Sam notices near Lynda's hand that's resting in the picnic table next to her as she speaks, a spider is slowing crawling up to it. He nudges Dean who was checking out a blonde mom that was passing by, indicating him about the tarantula.

Deans face drops and he causally but abruptly ends the conversation, "Excuse me" He says with a tight smile, putting his hand on Lynda's shoulder "Uh okay" Lynda says awkwardly before walking away. Sam leans down on the table and scoops the spider up into his hand gently.

Dean remembers seeing a boy laughing when the spider was crawling up to Lynda's hand and points towards him. Sam nods and they make way towards the boy. "Is this yours?" Sam asks and the boy's face drops. "You gonna tell my dad?" The boy asks, taking his spider back from Sam's hand.

"I don't know. Who's your dad?" Dean asks a bit roughly and the boy chuckles ironically. "Yeah. Larry usually skips me in the family introductions" The boy says a bit irritated. "Ouch. The first name basis with the old man sounds pretty grim" Sam exclaims surprised.

"Well, I'm not exactly brochure material" The boy says, petting his spider. "You're preaching to the choir brother" Dean snorts. "Well, hang in there alright, it gets better" Sam assures the young boy. "When?" he asks. "Matthew" They hear Larry call out harshly.

Y/N is behind him, walking back to the group with a slightly confused look on her face. While Larry has a stern look on his. "I am so sorry about my son and his pet" Larry apologizes to them, putting emphasis on the for pet. "It's no bother" Sam assured him. "Excuse us" He excuses them and pulls Matthew to the house by his arm.

Y/N looks back at the father and son before walking towards the boys. "Remind you of somebody?" Sam asks Dean who looks at Larry lecturing Matthew rather harshly. He looks back at Sam confused. "Dad?" Sam adds. "Dad never treated us like that" Dean scoffs.

"Well, Dad never treated you like that. You were perfect. He was all over my case" Sam says and Dean doesn't answer. "You don't remember?" Sam asks a bit amused. "Maybe he had to raise his voice but sometimes you were out of line" Dean defends and Sam laughs but there's no humor in it.

"Right. Like when I said I'd rather play soccer than learn bow hunting" Sam says dryly. "Bowhunting is an important skill" Dean says matter of factly. "Okay let's not get into this now fellas. Don't make a scene" Y/N chimes in warningly after seeing the look of disbelief on Sam's face. She nods at him reassuringly and he smiles sadly.

She understands how difficult Sam's relationship was with his dad and he knew she could relate. They always had each other to lean on whenever shit hits the fan and they need to talk about their dads.

"Yeah. How was your tour?" Sam asks, smiling tightly. "Oh, it was excellent. I'm ready to buy" She says jokingly and the boys chuckle. "I think we're onto something. Looks like Dustin Burwash wasn't the first strange death here" Y/N informs them. "What happened?" Dean asks.

"About a year ago before they broke ground one of Larry's surveyors dropped dead on the while on the job" Y/N explains, looking back at Larry who's still lecturing Matthew. "Get this: a severe allergic reaction to bee stings" She adds. "More bugs" Sam and Dean say in unison. "More bugs" Y/N confirms.

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Later they're all in the Impala, Y/N in the drivers seat, Dean in shotgun reading a book and Sam lounging in the back. "You know I've heard of killer bees but killer beetles? What is it that can make different bugs attack" Dean questions.

"Well, haunting a sometimes include bug manifestations" Sam suggests. "But I didn't see any evidence of ghost activity" Dean says. "Yeah me neither" Y/N sighs. "Maybe they're being controlled somehow. You know? By something or someone" Dean suggests. "You mean like Willard?" Sam asks.

"Yeah. Bugs instead of rats" Dean shrugs. "There are cases of psychic connections between people and animals. Elemental, telepaths.." Y/N explains as she adjusts her hands on the steering wheel. "Yeah, the whole Timmy-Lassie thing" Sam says and something clicks on Deans head.

"Larry's kid. Bugs for pets" Dean says. "Matt?" Y/N asks and turns her head to them for a second. "He did try to scare the realtor with a tarantula" Sam says. "Think he's our Willard?" Dean asks. "I don't know" Y/N says and looks at Sam in the rearview mirror. "Anything's possible, I guess" Sam adds.

"Oh hey. Pull over here" Dean ushers Y/N to pull over to a vacant houses driveway. She obliges a bit confused. "What're we doing here?" Sam asks and Dean gets out of the passenger seat. "It's too late to talk to anybody else" He says and goes to open the garage door. Sam and Y/N look over horrified.

"We're gonna squat in an empty house?" Y/N asks bewildered while Sam shakes his head. "I wanna try the steam shower. Come on" Dean says smugly. She stares at him and he ushers again. "Come on Princess! Don't be a wuss" He teases and she shakes her head sighing.

"Your brother is gonna be the death of me" She grumbles quietly to Sam who snickers. Y/N reluctantly pulls into the garage and Sam sticks his hand out the window to lightly punch his brother in the stomach.

________________________________

"You ever coming out of there?!" Y/N yells through the bathroom door, knocking on it. "What!?" Dean responds over the shower. "Dean. A police call came in on the scanner" She informs him. "Hold on" He says annoyed. "Someone was found dead three blocks from here. Come on!" She orders and he opens the door with a smile on his face, a towel wrapped around his head and naked from torso up.

"This shower is awesome" Dean says excitedly and Y/N's eyes trail up his body slightly, her face grows a bit red but she covers it up with a roll of her eyes. "Come on" She groans and walks off, hiding the blush that's building up in her face.

Later they arrive to a house couple blocks away, where the paramedics were wheeling out a body on the stretcher and the place is swarming with police cars. They all exit the car with their umbrellas as it's raining, opening them to walk towards the house.

"Look, I don't know anything more right now. I'll have to call you back. Alright." Larry says into his phone before hanging up as the trio approach him. "Hello. You're back early" Larry says to them with a tight smile on his face. "Yeah. We just drove in, wanted to take another look at the neighborhood" Dean says casually.

"What's going on?" Y/N asks curiously and Larry sighs, looking back at the paramedics putting the gurney into the back of the ambulance. "You guys met Lynda Bloome at the barbecue?" He asks. "The realtor" Sam says with recognition. "Well, she uh...she passed away last night" He informs them sadly.

"What happened?" Dean asked in a concerned tone. "I'm still trying to find that out. I identified the body for the police" Larry says in a shaky voice, looking towards the house. "Look, I'm sorry. This isn't a good time" He apologizes to them and begins to walk off. "It's okay" Y/N says in a sympathetic tone.

"You fellas know what we have to do, right?" Y/N says to them and they nod. "Yeah. Get in that house" Sam says. "See if we got a bug problem" Dean adds.

They wait for the police to clear out and scale the wall of Lynda's house. They find an unlocked window and climb in, Sam closes it behind him. "This looks like the place" Dean says, gesturing to the ground infront of him that has the outline of a body with tape on it infront of the door to the bathroom.

He goes in and stoops to the ground, picking up the wet towel of the water soaked floor. Some bugs fall out of the towel and Y/N grimaces at it. "Spiders" She says and Dean nods. "From spider boy?" He assumes. "Matt. Maybe" Sam says.

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They later pull up to follow Matt's school bus to where it's dropping him off and Matt exits the bus. "Isn't his house that way?" Y/N asks pointing across the road. "Yep" Sam says. "So where's he going?" Dean asks as Matt walks down a path and they all exit the Impala to follow him.

They find Matt in a wooded area not too far from his house, picking up a praying mantis. "Hey Matt. Remember me?" Sam asks calmly and the young boy is surprised to see the three hunters. "What're you doing out here?" Matt asks them suspiciously. "Well, we wanna talk to you" Y/N says nicely with a small smile on her face.

"You're not here to buy a house, are you?" Matt says knowingly and his face changes. "Wait. You're not serial killers?" He asks shakily and they all snicker in laughter. "No, no. No. I think you're safe" Sam says humorously. "So, Matt...you sure know a lot about insects" Dean says.

"So?" Matt shrugs. "Did you hear what happened to Lynda, the realtor?" Y/N asks and Matt's face drops slightly. "I heard she died this morning" He says. "That's right. Spider bites." Dean says the last part lowly and Sam looks back at him like 'dude, seriously?'.

"Matt, you tried to scare her with a spider" Sam says and Matt seems a bit amused. "Wait. You think I had something to do with that?" He asks. "You tell us" Dean says with a serious look on his face. "That tarantula was a joke. Anyway, that wouldn't explain the bee attack or the gas company guy" Matt explains and Y/N's eyebrows quirk up.

"You know about those?" She asks. "There is something going on here. I don't know what but somethings happening with the insects. Let me show you something" Matt says and picks up his bag to lead them down the path. The three share a look and follow him down.

"So if you knew about all this bug stuff, why not tell you dad? Maybe he could clear everybody out" Sam asks curiously. "Believe me, I've tried but uh...Larry doesn't listen to me" Matt scoffs. "Why not?" Y/N asks. "Mostly? He's too disappointed in his freak son" Matt says and Sam huffs.

"I hear ya" Sam says. "I get it kid" Y/N adds. "You do?" Dean asks them surprised. They look back at him but don't answer. "Matt, how old are you?" Sam asks. "Sixteen" He answers. "Well don't sweat it, because in two years, something greats gonna happen" Sam assured him.

"What?" Matt asks. "College" Sam answers. "You'll be able to get out of that house and away from your dad" Sam says. "What kind of advice is that? Kid should stick with his family" Dean chimes in and Sam looks back at his brother in annoyance. Y/N notices the hostility and tries to ease the situation.

"How much further, Matt?" She asks nicely. "We're close" He says and begins to walk towards it. "Any fighting and I'm putting you two in a time out. Understood?" Y/N says firmly, to the boys warningly and they nod curtly before following begin Matt. "Are you gonna spank me too?" Dean whispers for only her to hear and she whips her head to him, surprised.

A wicked smirk on his face and she rolls her eyes. "Keep it up, I just might Winchester" She retorts scoffing and walks ahead of him. Deans eyes linger to her hips swaying a bit and his heart quickens. They walk a little further in and are greeted by the sound of many insects and bugs chirping, crawling and flying around.

"I've been keeping track of insect populations. It's uh, part of an AP Science class" Matt explains. "You two are like peas in a pod" Dean says to Sam. Y/N shoots him a warning glare and he puts his hands up in surrender chuckling. "What's been happening?" Y/N asks Matt. "A lot. I mean, from bees to earthworms, beetles...you name it. It's like they're congregating here" Matt explains.

"Why?" Dean asks. "I don't know" Matt says. "What's that?" Sam asks, pointing to the patch of area where it's brown, no grass growing. They all walk up towards it to see a bunch of earthworms and Dean presses his foot lightly against it, causing it to sink down. He picks up a stick and pushes it into the hole, digging around and tapping a bit lightly on something solid.

"There's something down there" He says, looking at Sam and Y/N. He puts the stick down and pushes his hand on. They resists the urge to gag as he does so. "Come on. Come on." He grunts, trying to pull whatever it is up. He grabs a hold of it and pulls it out. Revealing a human skull. He looks back at Sam and Y/N who has disgust etched on their faces.

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They all left Matt in the woods to do what he does and now ended up at a local university to do some research on what they found. They all exit the Impala, Sam coming out of the drivers seat after parking. Y/N takes the box out of the backseat with her and Sam throws his jacket onto to cover it.

"So a bunch of skeletons in an unmarked grave" Sam says as they walk towards the entrance. "Yeah, we'll maybe this is a haunting. Pissed off spirits...some unfinished business" Dean suggests. "Yeah, maybe" Y/N nods in agreement. "The question is, why bugs? And why now?" Sam asks rhetorically.

"That's two questions" Y/N says sarcastically and they chuckle. "Hey, so with that kid back there...how could you tell him to ditch his family like that?" Dean asks Sam. "Just, uh, I know what the kids going through.." Sam says. "How about telling him to respect his old man? How's that for advice?" Dean says a bit brashly.

"Dean come on" Y/N warns him and he sighs. "This isn't about his old man. You think I didn't respect Dad. That's what this is about" Sam says knowingly and Dean pauses, having been caught. "Let's forget it alright. Sorry I brought it up" He says, trying to change the subject. "I respected him. But no matter what I did. It was never good enough." Sam says frustrated.

"So what are you saying? Dad was disappointed in you?" Dean says. "Was?" Sam chuckles dryly. "Is. Always has been" Sam states. "Why would you think that?" Dean asks exasperated. "Because I didn't wanna bow hunt. Or hustle pool. Because I wanted to go to school and live my life. Which, in our whacked out families, made me the freak" Sam rants.

"Yeah, you were kind of like the blond chick from The Munsters" Dean cracks a joke and Y/N shakes her head. "Dean, you know what most dads are when their kids score a full ride? Proud" Sam whispers the last part. "Most dads don't toss their kids out of the house" Sam says hurt and Dean nods. "I remember that fight. In fact, I see to recall a few choice phrases coming out of your mouth" Dean says.

Sam nods, chuckling humorously. "You know, truth is, when we finally do find Dad and Mr. L/N , I don't even know if dads gonna wanna see me" Sam says with a sad smile on his face. Y/N felt a pang in her chest when he said that, wanting to tell him it's not true but also feeling like she doesn't have a place in this conversation, she puts her hand on his shoulder comfortingly and he gives her a sad smile before she drops her hand back.

"Sam, Dad was never disappointed in you. Never. He was scared" Dean assures his little brother. "What are you talking about?" Sam asks him confused. "He was afraid of what could've happened to you if he wasn't around. But even when you two weren't talking...he used to swing by Stanford whenever he could. Keep an eye on you. Make sure you were safe" Dean explains to Sam.

Sams face drops. "What?" He asks surprised. "Yeah" Dean nods. "Why didn't he tell me any of that?" Sam asks. "Well, it's a two way street, dude. You could have picked up the phone" Dean says and Sam swallows the lump in this throat, staring down sadly. Y/N notices the time on her watch, feeling a bit bad for having to interrupt them.

"I don't mean to interrupt your moment fellas. But we're gonna be late for our appointment" She says gently. "Yeah...let's go" Dean says, flashing her a small smile, he takes the box of stuff from her hand and walks to the entrance. "Sorry Y/N, we didn't mean to drag you into that" Sam apologizes sincerely.

"Hey hey, we're family" She says gently with a small smile in her face. Placing her hand back on his shoulder, "I of all people know that you two have got some stuff you need to work out. Don't apologize for anything ever. Im always here" She assures him and he smiles at her sadly.

"Thanks y/n/n" He says gratefully, giving her a hug, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. "Anytime Sammy" She says, wrapping her hands around his waist, patting his back. They let go of their hug and walk towards the entrance.

________________________________

"So you three are students?" Professor Reardon asks them, now in the lecture hall. "Yeah. Yeah. We're in your class. Anthro 101?" Sam says to the professor. "Oh, yeah" The professor responds as if he knew, which he didn't recognize them but went along with it. "So, what about those bones professor?" Dean asks.

"This is quite an interesting find you've made" Professor Reardon compliments. "I'd say they're 170 years old, give or take. The time frame and the geography heavily suggest Native American"  He tells them and Dean looks over at Sam and Y/N surprised.

"Were there any tribes or reservations on that land?" Sam asks confused. "Not according to the uh...historical record. But..the uh relocation of native peoples was quite common at that time" The professor explains. "Right. Well, are there any local legends? Oral histories about the area?" Y/N asks curiously.

"Well...you know, there's a Euchee tribe in Sapulpa. It's about 60 miles from here. Someone out there might know the truth" The professor tells them. "Alright" Dean nods smiling.

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They follow the professors advice and go to the Euchee Tribe's grounds in Supulpa. Approaching a man directs them where to part and they approach a cafe. Inside is the tribes leader, and elderly Native American man with long grey hair, sitting at a booth, playing solitaire.

"Joe White Tree?" Sam asks the man at the booth and he nods in confirmation. "We'd like to ask you a few questions, if that's all right sir" Y/N says sweetly, a pleasant smile on her face. "We're students from the university" Dean adds.

"No, you're not. You're lying" Joe calls Dean out on his lie, stunning the group. "Um...well truth is-" Dean stutters but Joe cuts him off. "You know who starts sentence with 'truth is'? Liars" Joe says bluntly, playing his card game. Dean looks over at Sam and Y/N, both suppressing their amusement.

Sam sighs "Have you heard of Oasis Plains?" He asks. "It's a housing development near the Atoka Valley" Y/N adds and Joe looks at them and back at Dean. "I like them" Joe says. "They're not liars" He adds bluntly making Dean slightly roll his eyes uncomfortably. Y/N chuckles a bit along with Sam while she places her hand on Deans shoulder comfortingly.

"I know the area" Joe tells them, nodding. "What can you tell us about the history up there?" Sam asks. "Why would you wanna know?" Joe asks curiously. "Something...Something bad is happening in Oasis Plains. We think it might have something to do with some old bones we found there..Native American bones" Y/N explains to him sadly.

Joe nods sadly, thinking a bit before telling them. "I'll tell you what my grandfather told me. What his grandfather told him. Two hundred years ago, a band of my ancestors lived in that valley. One day, the American cavalry came to relocate them." He begins to explain and the three share a look.

"They were resistant...the cavalry impatient. As my grandfather put it: 'On the night the moon and the sun share the sky as equals...the cavalry first raided our village. They murdered, raped. The next day, the cavalry came again. And the next and the next. And on the sixth night, the cavalry came one last time. And by the time the sun rose....every man, woman band child still in the village was dead' " Joe tells the story and the three begin to grow a bit uneasy. The story breaking all their hearts.

"They say on the sixth night...as the chief of the village lay dying...he whispered to the heavens...that nonwhite man would ever tarnish this land again. Nature would rise up and protect the valley. And it would bring as many days of misery and death to the white man as the cavalry brought upon his people" Joe finishes telling the story and something clicks in Y/N head.

"Insects" She says turning to the boys. Deans eyebrows quirk up. "Sounds like nature to me" He says. "Six days?" Dean asks Joe. "And in the night of the sixth day...none would survive" Joe says, going back to his card game.

They thank Joe for his time and exit the cafe. "When did the gas-company man die?" Sam asks. "Uh...let's see. We got here Tuesday, so Friday the 20th" Dean informs him as they walk to the Impala and once again, Y/N realizes something. "March 20th. That's the spring equinox" Y/N tells them.

"The night the sun and the moon share the sky as equals" Dean says and Sam huffs. "So every year about this time, anybody in Oasis Plains is in danger. Larry built his neighborhood on cursed land" Sam says ironically. "And on the sixth night, that's tonight" Y/N says. "If we don't do something, Larry's family will be dead by sunrise" Sam says as they go to their respective doors by the car.

"So how do we break the curse?" Y/N asks Dean. "You don't break a curse. You get out of its way. We gotta get those people out now" Dean says urgently, they all jump in Baby and make their way back to Oasis Plains in a hurry.

________________________________

Now rushing down the street in the Impala to Oasis Plains, Y/N is on the phone with Larry Pike, pretending to be from the gas company. "Yes, Mr. Pike. There's a mainline gas leak in your neighborhood" She says urgently into the phone. "God. Really? How big?" Larry asks worried.

"Well. It's fairly extensive. I don't wanna alarm you but we need your family out of the vicinity for at least 12 hours. Just to be safe" She lies. "And who is this again?" Larry asks suspiciously. "Tara Weaver. I work for the Oklahoma Gas and Power" She tells him.

"Uh-huh. The problem is, I know Tara. She's worked with us for a year. So who is this" Larry demands, catching onto her lie. "Uh..." She stutters, hanging up the phone and tossing it aside. Sam sighs in frustration. "Give me the phone" He tells her and she hands it to him.

Sam dials Matt's number into it. "Hello?" Matt answers. "Matt. It's Sam." He tells him. "Sam. My backyard's crawling with cockroaches" Matt says panicked. "Matt, just listen. You have to get your family out of that house right now. Okay?" Sam instructs him quickly. "What? Why?" Matt asks confused.

"Because something's coming" He tells him honestly, looking over at Dean and Y/N. "More bugs?" Matt asks. "Yeah. A lot more" Sam confirms. "My dad doesn't listen in the best of circumstances. What am I supposed to tell him?" Matt asks. "You gotta make him listen. Okay?" Sam instructs him causing Y/N and Dean rolls their eyes.

"Gimme the phone. Gimme the phone!" Y/N orders her best friend, leaning over the seat and snatching the phone from him. "Matt! Under no circumstances are you to tell him the truth. He'll just think you're nuts" Y/N says into the phone, her voice laced with authority. "But, he's my-" Matt goes to argue but Y/N cuts him off.

"Tell him you have a sharp pain in your right side and you gotta go to the hospital. Okay?" She tells him. "Yeah. Yeah, okay" Matt breaths out reluctantly and Y/N hangs the phone up. Dean looks over to his little brother disapprovingly. " 'Make him listen.' What are you thinking?" He retorts while Sam smirks, shaking his head.

________________________________

They park infront of the Pike residence to see the lights on and the cars still in the garage. "Dammit. They're still here" Y/N groans. "Come on" Dean says to them and they exit the Impala, walking up to the front door but Larry sees them from his window and comes out of the house.

"Get off my property before I call the cops!" He yells at them, pointing his finger towards them. "Mr. Pike. Listen-" Sam tries to reason but Matt cuts him off. "Dad, they're just trying to help" He tries to tell Larry. "Get in the house!" Larry commands his son. "Sorry. I told him the truth" Matt says apologetically.

"We had a plan, Matt. What happened to the plan?" Y/N grumbles. "Look. It's 12 am. They are coming any minute now. You need to get your family and go. Before it's too late" Sam warns Larry. "Wait no. You mean, before the biblical swarm" Larry says sarcastically.

"Larry, what do you think really happened to that realtor? Huh? And the gas company guy. You don't think something weirds going on around here?" Dean tells him. "Look. I don't know who you are, but you're crazy. You come near my boy or my family again, we're gonna have a problem" Larry threatens them.

"Well I hate to be a downer. But we got a problem now" Y/N says firmly. "Dad, they're right. We're in danger" Matt tries to warn his dad but he turns back to him angrily, "Matt, get inside! Now!" He yells at Matt loudly. "No! Why won't you listen to me!?" Matt screams back frustrated. "Because this is crazy! It doesn't make any sense!" Larry shouts angrily.

"Look, this land is cursed. People have died here! Now are you gonna really take that risk with your family!?" Sam yells at Larry, now irritated. "Wait" Dean says, they all hear the rumbling of the bugs. "You hear it?" Y/N asks Larry. "What the hell" Larry says confused and the bug zapper behind them on Larry's porch goes off continuously.

"Alright, it's time to go Larry. Get your wife. Yeah" Dean orders Larry and he runs up the porch. "Guys?" Matt draws their attention to the swarm of bugs flying towards them. "Oh my god" Larry says, stunned. "We'll never make it" Sam says. "Everybody in the house. Everybody in the house. Go!" Dean yells, and they all run into the house.

"Is there anyone else in the neighborhood?" Y/N asks as they close the door behind them. "No, it's just us" Larry tells him. "Honey, what's happening? What's that noise?" Larry's wife, Joanie, asks. "Call 911...Joanie!" He yells at her. "O-okay" She says panicked. "I need towels" Dean tells Larry urgently. "The closet" He says and goes to get them.

"We gotta lock this place up. Come on. Doors, windows, the fireplace, everything" Y/N tells Sam and Matt, running up the stairs to do as she said. "The phones are dead" Joanie tells Larry and Dean fearfully. "Must've chewed through the phone lines" Dean says as he lays towels down under the cracks of the door.

Suddenly the electricity goes out. "And the power lines..." Dean adds. "Maybe my cell.." Larry says, running to grab his phone. "No signal" He says. "You won't get one. They're blanketing the house" Dean tells him as the bugs cover the windows outsides, cluttering at the windows.

Sam and Y/N come back downstairs while Matt grabs onto his mom, clutching at her side. They watch as the bugs crawl on the windows. "What do we do now?" Larry asks them. "We try to outlast it" Y/N says lowly. "Hopefully, the curse will end at sunrise" Sam says.

"Hopefully?" Larry asks panicked. Dean goes into the kitchen to see the bugs cluttering at the kitchen window. He runs below the sink, hoping to find bug spray. He eventually finds it, popping the top off and goes back into the living room. "Bug spray?" Joanie asks bewildered. "Trust me" Dean says.

They hear a creaking sound coming from behind them. "What is that?" Matt asks. It sounded like it was coming from the fireplace. They inch closer and closer. "The flue" Y/N says. "Alright. I think we need to get everyone upstairs" Dean says and then a loud bang comes from the fireplace.

Bugs swarm from out of it by the thousands. Larry and his family scream in fear. Y/N grabs the canister of bug spray from Dean and pulls out her lighter. Flicking it open and spraying the bug spray into the flame, making a makeshift flame thrower. "Everybody upstairs! Now! Go go go!" She yells and they all begin running upstairs in panic and fear.

She uses the fire to clear a path so they can go upstairs quickly. They go up to the attic. Sam locks the door behind and Y/N uses the fire to shun most of the bugs out. "Oh god, what's that?" Joanie asks fearfully, seeing dust from the fall. Sam, Dean and Y/N move closer to see. "Something's eating through the wood" Y/N says. "Termites" Joanie says fearfully.

"Alright. Everybody get back. Get back!" Dean orders them. "Get back!" Larry tells his son and wife, shielding them with his body. "Matt!" Joanie calls out worriedly for her son. The wooden roof them breaks down a hole causing thousands of termites to fly in and swarm them. Y/N uses the bug spray and lighter to spray fire at them.

While Sam goes and get an old electric panel door and Dean grabs a long piece of wood. "Dean you got it?!" Sam asks Dean. "Yeah. Go, go, go!" Dean screams and Sam uses the panel door to block the hole while Dean uses the stick to hold it up. They hear another side of the roof breaking and Y/N sprays the bug spray into the lighter again to fire at them.

The Pikes are screaming as the big fly all about them. More of the wooden roof breaks and Y/N sprays it in all directions but the big are growing more and more. Suddenly they start to fly back outside, confusing everyone. The boys and Y/N walk slowly to the exposed roofing to see that the sun has risen meaning the curse has been lift.

________________________________

The next day, the trio pull up to the Pike Residence to see moving trucks outside. Getting out of the vehicle, Dean jokingly says "What? No goodbye?". Larry spots them, "Good timing. Another hour and we'd have been gone" Larry say, reaching out to shake Deans hand gratefully. "For good?" Y/N asks.

"Yeah. The development's been put on hold while the government investigates the bones you found. But I'm gonna make damn sure no one lives here again" Larry informs them, determined. "You don't seem too upset about it" Sam says. "Well, this has been the biggest financial disaster of my career but somehow.." Larry begins and looks back at Matt carrying a box and smiles looking back at the hunters

"...I really don't care" He tells them and they smile. Sam goes over to talk to Matt, to see him at the dumpster throwing away all his bug stuff. "What's this?" He asks surprised. "I don't know. They...kind of weird me out now" Matt says smiling and Sam chuckles. "Yeah, I should hope so" He says laughing.

Meanwhile Dean and Y/N are at the Impala leaning against it while Sam and Matt chat. Dean notices the look of despair on Y/N's face and nudges her a bit. She looks up at him with a tight smile, "You're doing great, you know that?" He assures her. "What?" She asks confused. "This job. You're doing great. I could only imagine how amazing you did on your own. Your dad is proud of you too" Dean assured her and she shakes her head.

"I appreciate that Dean. Even if I don't believe it" She smiles softly at him. "You better believe it princess" He smirks, nudging her again. "Shut up charming" She chuckles, nudging him back jokingly biting her lower lip to stop herself from smiling. Dean notices this and his eyes dart down to her lips. Y/N couldn't help but trail her eyes down to his.

"When we do find our dads...I just wanna give them a hug" Y/N says looking down. Dean sees her frown, his heart breaks seeing her so sad and he wraps his arm around her, pulling her into his shoulder. "Fuck I sound like a little bitch" She chuckles dryly. "No you don't. Hey look at me" He says gently and she looks up at him, her gaze filled with sorrow.

"You're great too, Winchester" She says sincerely clearing her throat, pulling her eyes away from his lips. He smiles at the compliment. "Not as great as me though" She adds cockily, flashing him a wink and he rolls his eyes in fake annoyance causing her to laugh more. "Shut up, Princess" He grumbles jokingly.

Sam walks back over after his conversation with Matt and leans next to Y/N on the Impala. Dean and Y/N only notice Sam when they feel the weight on Baby shift and let out of their side hug. "I wanna find our dads" He tells them. "Yeah me too" Dean says.

"Same here" Y/N adds. "Yeah, but I just...I wanna apologize to Dad" Sam says and Dean looks over at Sam. "For what?" He asks and Sam takes a deep breath. "All the things I said to him. He was just doing the best he can" Sam says and Y/N nods agreeing. "Me and you both" She says looking down.

"Don't worry guys, we'll find them. And you two will get to apologize" He says to them. "And then within five minutes Sam and Dad will be at each others throats" Dean adds making Sam and Y/N laugh. "Yeah probably" Sam says laughing. "You too Princess. I think I'm gonna need to get a crowbar to separate you and f/n from clawing at each other" Dean tells Y/N jokingly and she laughs hysterically.

"Bite me, charming" She counters laughing. The three share a lengthy laugh before sobering up. "Let's hit the road fellas" Y/N says. "Let's" Dean says and opens the back door for her, gesturing for her to get in. She dramatically gasps and he rolls his eyes. "My oh my. Such a gentleman. Are you gonna paint my nails next?" She jokes, wiggling her eyebrows and getting in.

"Sure. What color would you like? Bubblegum pink or lavender purple?" He retorts back sarcastically in a high voice, locking the door, a tinge of pink growing on his cheeks and Y/N and Sam laugh hysterically. Shaking his head. Stubborn asses. Sam thinks to himself. Sam gets in and Dean gets in the drivers seat and they're off.

________________________________

Authors Note:

I took forever with this one because I really really reallllyyyyy hate this episode. It creeps the shit out of me because of the bugs. So I hope you enjoy this cuz god was this different to write😭😭😭

Xoxo

[nalyra-dreaming]

Hello!!!!

What order do you think the titles go in and what key events are likely happening in that particular episode that reflects the title? IMBD has "Don't Be Afraid, Start the Tape" as episode one, but it's the only title noted so far.

Hmmm.

So. (Full disclosure, I talked about this with @virginiaisforvampires, and mostly align with her^^, though I lean into a bit of a different order^^).

I personally think we might start with:

Episode 1: What can the damned really say to the damned

Louis and Claudia, on their travels through Europe, encountering the revenants. Not much to say, they're both bitter, for different reasons. The revenants also do not have much to say, and what they encounter is bleakness, and despair. Also the more than... difficult situation in Dubai, because let's face it, Armand and Louis seem not to really have something left to say to each other either.

Episode 2: Don't be afraid, just start the tape

The Devil's Minion in the past. I'm not sure how they'll trigger it in present Dubai, but I believe Daniel will remember and things in Dubai will continue to heat up over the season, until it becomes truly "explosive".

Episode 3: Like the light by which God made the world before He made light

Claudia and Louis arriving in Paris, in the "City of Light". Armand was also called a "light in the dark" for Louis, so I think that is them arriving there, learning to live again, falling in love. The good times. Daniel and Armand were in Paris, too.

Episode 4: I want you more than anything in the world

Armand has fallen for Louis, which leads to things. I have theorized this title could also be used at a later time, and reused for someone else, but if they use it as in the book then here. Armand wanting Louis leads to... repercussions. Likely echoed with memories to Lestat here, too, since Armand and Lestat also share a very interesting relationship. And of course Armand falls for Daniel, too.

Episode 5: I could not prevent it

The trial. Claudia's and Madelein's death. The harrowing realization of not being able to do something about it. Daniel's realizations, too. Possibly flashback to Armand not being able to prevent his coven being upended by Lestat.

Episode 6: No pain

Louis torches the theater. Armand takes his pain. In the (more recent) past Daniel might become a drug user to numb the pain of Armand refusing to give him the dark gift. A lot of pain for Lestat. Tower, possibly.

Episode 7: Do you know what it means to be loved by death

Now this... I bet this will culminate in Louis' suicide attempt. And Daniel's realization who he actually loves. That he loves him like that, too. Maybe Louis visiting Lestat.

Episode 8: (this will be an eye-opener, I'm sure^^)

Whatever is needed to segue into s3. I DO hope they will not save the twists for the last minutes once more, I think this shift will need a bit more time. And so I personally hope that this will the episode where the last threads will be resolved and that shift treated properly.

So that is "my" order. What do you think? :)

All threaded through also Louis hallucinating Lestat, plus Armand telling of Lestat. I think that might mostly happen in episode 4.

[marlopawsome]

BRIDGERTON SEASON 3 SPOILER ‼️‼️

MY GOD CAN YOU FUCKING STOP CALL PEOPLE HOMOPHOBIC OR QUEERPHOBIC who are skeptical because of the genderswap of Michael??

1. The Writers made us doubt Francesca love for John with the kiss at the wedding and her „I forgot my name“ when meeting Michaela

In the books there is no doubt Fran and John love each other over the moon, they enjoy themselves emotional and physical

Michael falls first, not Francesca, Franny loves Michael as a friend and then with her overcoming her grief she starts to love him in a romantic way

Now we have a she’s married to John whom she clearly likes but we now doubt if it’s real love like Violet tried to convince her for 3 episodes and clearly she’s attracted to Michaela

So it’s not the Michaela is a woman it’s the whole do Fran really LOVE John or is it just mutual likeness? And why would they erase this love they had? They didn’t need to do that! They could have sticked to the book and let Fran fall in love with Michaela after John’s death

2. Michaels whole conflict was based of his GUILT taking EVERYTHING from John

Beginning from his titles and land, Michael never wanted that or the commitment coming with a title

We now had three seasons and Queen Charlotte with whole lot of conflict where WOMAN were on the brink of loosing everything because they could not inherit the title and lands

So after he inherits everything he really struggles to be around Fran, to be true to his feelings because he’s thinking „I am not taking the last thing John had from him!!“

How would that now go with a female Michaela?

As I said the SHOW showed us clearly no female could inherit land or titles

Damn it even was a crucial part in season 2 & 3 with the feaheringtons and changing that would made all the hardships Portia going through invalid

Also they could have just scrapped the Mondrichs/Lord Kent Plot altogether then

So again: it’s nothing to do with Fran should not love a woman BUT with the In-Universe Canon and how that can work out with one of Michael’s biggest inner conflicts? People are not AGAINST it they’re are just wondering how this could work out?

Edit: I see a Eloise and Michaela are going to get woman’s the right to inherit land and titles plot and Fran has a daughter of John but would loose everything and Michaela wants to save her (although Fran has always her family in London)

3. Francesca wants to be a mother more then everything

And yes, wlw couples struggle a lot with getting pregnant and getting kids too

But In the books Francesca struggles to concieve, and after John’s death she miscarried

We don’t have a lot of screentime for this kind of life and struggles, besides in Queen Charlotte, and it would be cruel to remove this

Francesca wants to be a mother so bad and although adoption is a way (but I wasn’t shown in 4 seasons so it would be strange to just pop up in Frans story) or sperm donor (which I don’t think Fran would be compatible for) again it clashes with what the show runners established in the In-Universe Canon.

Surely they can implement that now, it would have just been better to build that up! Not a sudden „it’s possible now“

So the genderchange brings two major plotquestions for the characters and the way the show did it invalidates Frans Love to John

ALSO! That feels so much like forced queerness! We love and want and need queer representation! But we deserve good story’s, nice build up and true feelings!!

In the end we have to wait how the show runners execute the plot now, and what they gonna do, how the actors work etc and can’t say if it will fail or not

But to be critical and question the decision because of how the show handled a lot of topics crucial for the John/Fran/Michael Plot does not make one homophobic or queerphobic.

[ouchpotatoex]

Cherik Musical Appreciation in X-Men '97

Listening to the X-Men 97 OST and feeling very normal about leitmotifs, particularly the ones used during scenes involving Magneto and Professor X. Apologies if I've used the wrong terms as I don't have musical training, I just listen to soundtracks a lot and I'm a sucker for recurring themes.

We're first introduced in "Magnus the Savior" (ep2) as Magneto tries so hard to honor Charles' request. Pay attention to the leitmotif around the 1:54 mark because it comes back through the series quite often. Bonus: Almost everyone refers to Erik as Magneto, even Erik himself. Charles has been referring to him as Magnus since around season 4 of TAS so we can interpret this title as coming from Charles and his wish for Magnus.

In Episode 5, "Remember it," there theme comes back very, very subtly when Magnus is talking about Charles to the Genoshan council. You really need to blast the volume to hear it.

In episode 6, "Galactic Peace" plays during Charles's chat with Gladiator and the theme comes in towards the 40 second mark, almost mournful as he's talking about Magnus. Later on during the classroom scene, the theme comes roaring back in "We Need You" as Charles talks about his family. The theme flows into a variation of the X-Men theme when he makes the decision to return to Earth.

In episode 9 ("Tolerance is Extinction Part 2") we get a dark and mournful variation when Magnus confronts Xavier about Genosha. It sounds almost sinister towards the end. I'm kind of sad it's not on the OST.

Episode 10 "Tolerance is Extinction Part 3" gives us 2 more variations. The first is when Charles hijacks Magnus' powers to save the planet. It's got this fantastic build up and features a choir and orchestra. Sadly, it's not on the OST for some reason. The second variation in this episode is "Rising Waters" which is equally bombastic when Magnus' mind is restored and he has his Big Damn Hero moment.

Tldr; the soundtrack is pretty good and adds even more subtext to these two. I really wish the sound mixing was more balanced so we could actually hear the music without blowing out our eardrums. In a sense, the original series did it better because its distinct themes were more prominent. I hope they eventually release the tracks that weren't included in the first release.

[cleabellanov]

Jet-Skiing through Identity: a deep dive into Mobius M. Mobius (part 5)🚤

The analyst is now going on missions, and he is doing such a great job. Plus, he's looking damn good doing it.

I think that in episode 2, "Breaking Brad" (one of my favs, like i really really love this one) , we get to see both extremes of Mobius as a character, which is great! We begin with his steady personality, looking for trouble to resolve it, not to cause it.

This is when we can see Mobius and Loki use that trust that they previously built, and working together. The comfort emanated in the scene where they're trying to fix that TemPad, for example, feels so good and natural specifically because it has background. (...and they're very, very good together. And Tom and Owen always knew what they were doing. Anyway, you get the point.)

Brad/ X-5 is a complicated person, and the others knew that when trying to get information out of him. Does that stop Mobius from trying to ease the atmosphere with one of his jokes? No: he's still running to the beat of a good heart, he can't help it. His way of being, this approach, is part of him, and we've seen that in season 1 as well.

The trigger is, however, pulled in him when Brad tells him he's a nowhere man. He usually endures things well, so what made him snap this time?

I think that hearing it out loud, AND put like that (f u brad), Mobius finally got hurt by the emotions he was trying so hard to suppress.

Distancing from that, and all the past he knows nothing about, he alienated from himself too, because they are essentialy part of him.

Saying "You're a nowhere man" to Mobius is similar to saying "What, like you did with your mother?" to Loki. It's a half truth that hurts especially because it was left in the darkness. Like someone flashing a lantern in your eyes after you've been wandering though a cavern.

We can see he uses denial too as a coping mechanism, in our most beloved scene: the pie room one. He doesn't admit it at first, but with Loki being Loki (and the person he cares the most about as well), he admits he's wrong: "Listen, that wasn't tactical. I lost it".

So it's not pride when he doesn't want to see his mistakes! it's a need to make everything perfect, for others more than for himself.

It's also no secret that Mobius finds comfort in food, especially pie. So having a sweet with Loki certainly calms him down.

Next, he tells Loki:

"The TVA is the only life I've ever known. I like it!"

and

"Something bad I can handle. What if it's something good?"

Does he really like his life there, or only the meaning of it?

I interpret him not wanting to look, not even now, for avoiding feeling guilty about leaving that behind. Maybe he even draws a parallel, and realizing that he has a life on the timeline it hits harder that so did all the people from the timelines he pruned

But also, he can't leave his mission! He can't leave Loki! Remember how in season 1 he told Ravonna that if he could go anywhere, anytime, he'd go to his place on the timeline? This changes now, when it's actually possible. A life he never known doesn't have a purpose for him. This one, though? This one definitely does.

One last thing thing I want to mention *for today* is how sweet Mobius is telling Loki that he's the God of Mischief. After years of this title being used negatively, Mobius says it as a compliment. He not only knows the comfort of touch (s2e1), but of words of affirmation too:

see you for the next part!! I underestimated how long this series of analysis would be :)), but only 2 more parts to go 💙

[bonnieisaway]

A really good detail in Scissor Seven that I think not only is really good for world building but also gives the viewer a bit of a hint as to when shit is going down is the way they introduce other assassins, targets, or people trying to kill Seven.

Honest to Christ, can anyone tell me the names of the underpants guy or the bdsm grandma woman. The answer is probably not. I don't think they even have official names but they've been reoccurring characters in the background since season 1. And I think it's really cool they don't have names that are really talked about! Chicken Island is not that small and I think it's a good detail that while Seven knows a lot of people, he doesn't know them all well but regardless they fill his daily life and he cares for them just as much for their mere presence alone. But also in the episodes where they were targets, it's a good detail that they're hardly really named, it's just like, "my son" or "that guy over there" because in the grander scheme of things they pose no threat and they're just some fucking guy.

But on the flip side of this: there is damn near a whole catalogue of characters who were introduced by a name or title and got like, ten seconds of screen time! The entire time Seven is getting chased:

I mean, none of these five say a fucking word and never are talked about again! But they all have such detailed and gorgeous designs and unique and powerful fighting styles that are distinctively theirs. Not a single other character wields the weapon Wusheng does, Single Blade is just fucking cool and I cannot believe they designed and made such a stellar fucking fighting style for a two minute long chase scene, Li Hua is just fucking gorgeous and I love the way she cooperates with the others, and we never see them again! But it's also such a good detail that we don't! We don't need to! Obviously, anyone with a weapon that Seven passes in this point of time is going to pose a danger to him. But for the viewer, there's a significant difference than going "Oh fuck, who's this guy?" and going "OH FUCK, BEHEADING WUSHENG??????" It takes it a step further to illustrate them as these powerful and terrifying threats, and it doesn't even list their rankings on the list, cause what does that fucking matter? Look at them! They're fucking terrifying! I am going to instantly assume a motherfucker named Nightcrawler is fairly high on the list!!

And it's such a good, stark contrast from the other characters I mentioned who were arguably about as powerful or outsmarted Seven at the time but they were justifiably just some fuckin guy that wasn't meant to be intimidating at first sight because it was meant to be a shock and a little funny they overpowered him. And even after they did overpower him they were still just some dude who's there and that's so cool and it's not only such good worldbuilding and detail but it blends the difference between what being powerful meant on Chicken Island and for the current Seven and what being powerful means in Xuanwu and for who Seven used to be. I mean, look at these fucking five! These are five out of every damn killer in the nation chasing him! Imagine what the fuck else is there!

And this dude is such a perfect balance between the two as well - I mean, he's still arguably a threat, but he's unnamed and his outfit isn't as flashy as the others, but he still holds this significance and weight the others didn't because he had a memory of Seven he described. He's still obviously terrified and not that powerful, yet a threat and important!! I just!! It is so cool the way they introduce characters and present them to us!! Aaaaaa!!!

[dianneking]

Loving You - Angsty Larissa/Reader Songfic

Summary: The night when Larissa faces off against Laurel is her wedding anniversary. Her wife is waiting for her, mulling over the hardships in their relationship. Angst. Hurt no comfort. 

Tags: Songfic, Angst, Hurt no comfort, regrets, relationship struggles, mentions of cheating and divorce, pov 2nd person, spoilers for end of season 1, implied character death/serious injury, one single swearword, it's just a big pile of sadness, really.

Wordcount: 1200w.

A/N Hi. Sorry about the heartbreak. You can blame this fic on @weemssapphic , who challenged me to write a angsty fic with no happy ending. I had this song in my head for a long time and I was biding my time for the right angsty moment for it - the song's in italian, but I've put the English translation of the lyrics in the fic, to allow you to better grasp the mood. As always, you can listen to it as you read, or ignore the song altogether. AO3 link in title, and here's the cover by Maneskin of the song, Amandoti.

Loving You (Reader/Larissa)

Loving you tires me out. 

You looked at the wax droplets, slowly making their way down the candles you had lit.

Drip, drip, drip, they incessantly marked the passing of time. You didn't stand up when the evening slowly turned to night, when the food grew cold and the candles slowly consumed themselves until they were nothing more than stubs. 

You didn't even care about the wax falling on the table cloth anymore, even if it had been the good one, the one for special occasions.

It drains me inside

You didn't care about a lot of things anymore. Things that used to fill your heart with joy and sunshine suddenly were just activities you did on a routine, without feeling anything anymore.

Something that’s almost like laughing while you cry.

Like cooking for her. It used to be so much fun, flittering through the kitchen, mindlessly humming to the tunes coming from the radio. Larissa sitting on her favorite stool at the island counter, sipping on a glass of red, telling you bits and pieces of her work day, the conversation light with banter and shared jokes.

Light with your love for each other. 

Loving you makes me tired

It hadn't been like that in a long time. She hadn't looked at you like that in a long time. 

Melancholic

Even when she didn't pull an all-nighter at Nevermore, she came home so late and so tired and wound up from the day, that she usually chose to sit on the couch and mindlessly stare at the fire dancing in the fireplace you always made sure to have lit for her.

What can you do about it, that’s life 

After getting one too many "Same as always, I don't want to talk about it", you had even stopped asking her how her day had gone. 

You didn't know what caused the crease between her eyebrows these days, and you didn't dare to try to kiss it away anymore. 

That’s my life. 

The last time you had tried, she had pulled away, an apologetic smile on her face that didn't reach her eyes. 

"I'm sorry, love. It's just… everything is a lot right now. Crowding me doesn't really help." 

You had pulled away, of course. Boundaries had always been important in your relationship, and you'd be damned before you pushed her when she was having such a hard time at work.

Love me once again

You had swallowed your heartbreak, because you didn't want to add to the burden on her shoulders - you had to be strong for her, right? And she already had so much to worry about, without you being needy on top of that. 

But seeing her recoil from your touch, a touch she used to crave, a touch that used to bring her relief from stress, not to pile more on her… It had opened a wound that had never fully healed again. 

Do it tenderly

You just wished, for once, that she'd look at you like she used to. To see the spark in those blue eyes when they found you from across the room. To see those lovely lips curl up in a slight smile almost on instinct upon meeting your own gaze. One part complicity, one part attraction, one part inside joke… All wrapped together by warm love. 

For one year, one month, one hour

Desperately 

"Do you think she's cheating on you?" 

The question from your best friend had not surprised you when the both of you had talked about it over coffee. 

You had been asking yourself the same thing, after all. Maybe someone at school had caught your wife's attention, maybe all the late nights were not due to work alone…

Love me once again

But no, you didn't think that was it. Larissa had always been a woman of principle, and didn't seem the type to let lust dictate her actions. 

Although that new addition to the staff, that redhead…Marilyn. You had seen the way her eyes sized up Larissa the few times you had gone to Nevermore since she'd become a teacher there. There was always a dark intensity to her gaze when she looked at your wife. 

Had it been want? You weren't sure you remembered it well. 

Do it tenderly

(You barely remembered the times when you'd go up to the school every day to have lunch with Larissa - they feel like a dream now. A happy, distant, unreal dream. That had been years before Marilyn ever stepped foot in Nevermore, back when your marriage was young and you were both in love) 

Just for one hour

Desperately. 

The last time you went there, to bring her some papers she had forgotten home, Larissa had been in a shouting match on the phone with Sheriff Galpin, and had not even acknowledged your presence. 

You had left the papers and went back home, your heart heavy.

Loving you comforts me 

You finally stood up from the table when the candles burned out. The house was dark, but you moved with the ease of someone so used to the space that even in the dark no stool was in your path, no corner jutted out too far. The darkness mirrored what you felt inside, and wrapped around you comfortably like an old friend.

In the sleepless nights

Mechanically you picked up all of the untouched food, trying without success not to let the traitorous tears trickle down your face. 

It hurt. 

It fucking hurt. 

Something that fills old burning affairs

Even with all of the difficulties you both had had of late, you didn't expect her to simply not show up for your anniversary dinner. And without having the decency to call or text you or let you know anything at all.

Loving you comforts me 

Had she forgotten? Had she been so overwhelmed with work that she had fallen asleep at her desk, as it had happened time and time again as of late? With no thoughts spared for her wife, waiting for her at home? 

It makes me happy

Maybe she had fallen asleep in another woman's arms. 

What can you do about it, that’s life 

That’s my life.

Or maybe she wanted to send you an even clearer message. Maybe it was her way to tell you that your marriage was done. Maybe in the morning she'd send divorce papers over instead of coming back herself. 

Love me once again

Do it tenderly

And you would sign them. Of course you would. Because you still loved her fiercely, painfully. And you'd never want to shackle her with your relationship. You didn't want her to grow to resent what you had, to resent you. 

You'd set her free if she asked you to. 

Just for one hour

Desperately 

Because you loved her still. With all of your heart. Desperately.

Loving you 

Is my life 

It was in that moment that the phone rang, and you picked up without even checking the caller ID, forgiveness already on your lips, because surely, she was going to apologise and tell you it was all a misunderstanding, surely this time you'll be able to talk to her and tell her how much you loved her and maybe maybe that would be enough… 

Love me once again

Do it tenderly

For one year, one month, one hour

Desperately. 

Love me once again

Do it tenderly

Just for one hour

Desperately. 

Loving you is my life

"Mrs. Weems? This is Dr. Miller, from Jericho hospital. It's about your wife."

.

Liked it? Here's my fanfiction masterlist to read more of my stuff!

[waitingtobelit]

Title: In Midnights, In Cups of Coffee Characters/Pairings: Evan Buckley/Tommy Kinard Rating: Teen for language. Genre: Angst, fluff, queer themes. Summary: Movie nights are mostly held at Tommy’s place for several reasons.

Mostly, though, Buck gravitates towards Tommy’s house more and more these days because Tommy’s house feels more like home. He loves cuddling with Tommy on the couch, the two of them sharing a couple of beers and some popcorn, and sometimes a blanket thrown over them. Honestly? Movie nights with Tommy might be Buck’s favorite place in the world.

--

Buck and Tommy watch Rent together and have a lot of feelings about it and each other.

Notes: Title comes from "Seasons of Love" from Rent.

This was written for bucktommy positivity week, prompt one: what they love most about each other and after I got inspired by listening to "Seasons of Love" and getting caught up in my Rent feelings! This could probably technically also apply to the hobbies and dates prompt but I have another fic I'm working on for that one. :3

There are spoilers for Rent overall and implied death of a character from Rent but nothing explicit.

For @bucktommypositivityweek prompt one: What they love most about each other.

In Midnights, In Cups of Coffee

Buck’s never been totally into musicals but he also hasn’t totally disliked them, either. Maddie used to play some Broadway soundtracks when she would drive him to school; she was really into Phantom of the Opera and something about some guy stealing a loaf of bread and miserable people, from what he remembers. He might have given her some good old fashioned Brotherly Teasing about her taste in music every now and then but he always preferred her taste in music to that of his parents, the most stale white bread of WASP easy listening that he’s fairly certain they play on an endless loop on Spotify in Hell. If Hell exists, that is.

There were other musicals, too; he memorized the lyrics to “Defying Gravity” unintentionally with how often Maddie played the Wicked soundtrack in the car. He may or may not have sometimes mumbled the lyrics to himself in the shower when he needed a moment to stop thinking about the weight of his parents looking right through him.

But overall, yeah, no. Buck’s never considered himself much of a musical person. Hen is the one who tells him about Rent after a particularly long and draining shift. She tells him that she thinks he’ll like it, and that he better text her immediately with all of his feelings after he watches the movie or listens to the soundtrack. (Hen insists he does both, and she also insists that he watch the live concert special that played on TV. But, also, he damn well better text her once he educates himself!)

So tonight, for movie night with Tommy, Buck suggests Rent as their movie of choice. Usually he’s happy to go along with whichever movie Tommy suggests, glad to continue his “cinematic education” as Tommy calls it. Tommy seems happy to go along with Buck’s suggestion; he nods and comments on how he always meant to get around to watching Rent himself but struggled and ultimately set it aside for later while he was still fighting his way out of the closet. (And this is one of Buck’s favorite things about Tommy; he’ll reveal himself through conversation, letting Buck get to know him on a deeper, more intimate level, without any expectation or pressure for Buck to reciprocate, although, of course, Buck always tries to do so, wanting to meet Tommy where he is.)

Movie nights are mostly held at Tommy’s place for several reasons: Tommy has the larger, more comfortable couch (Buck could seriously live in those cushions for days, if not years, and has fallen asleep easily in the middle of a movie on more than one occasion), Tommy has the actual collection of movies, both physical and otherwise, and Tommy has the better television. Mostly, though, Buck gravitates towards Tommy’s house more and more these days because Tommy’s house feels more like home. He loves cuddling with Tommy on the couch, the two of them sharing a couple of beers and some popcorn, and sometimes a blanket thrown over them. Honestly? Movie nights with Tommy might be Buck’s favorite place in the world.

Tonight, they have Tommy’s favorite craft beer, a local brewery that specializes in utilizing local ingredients and combining them into unique flavors that even Buck has to admit taste pretty damn amazing. Tommy is slowly but surely is weaning him off of his “frat boy” beers, talking about the benefits of craft beer every chance he gets. His enthusiasm for craft beer in the way he talks about ingredients with his hands and the way he shares all of the details about the history of all his favorite brands is as convincing as the taste of the beer itself, honestly. And Buck adores Tommy for it, so the fact that they have his favorite craft beer for a movie night in which Buck picks the movie? Means the world to Buck. And judging from the way Tommy’s eyes, so blue and so mesmerizing, linger on him, his face scrunched up in a smile? Buck likes to believe he isn’t the only one.

Buck cooks fried mac and cheese rolls for their movie snack; seeing his cooking efforts next to Tommy’s beer warms him like he’s just spent the day out in the August sun, trying to catch some waves with salt water clinging to his skin. He can’t keep from smiling at the sight; the way both the food and the drinks spell out home without words.

Tommy turns to him, leaning in close to press a soft, sweet kiss to his lips. “I think we’re in for our best movie night yet,” he says, looking like a Botticelli angel in the glow of the lamps on his side tables, his hair curly and free of product and his perfect mouth wide in a soft, tender smile. And he’s all Buck’s; Buck gets to have him all to himself. He leans in for another kiss, just because.

“I think you’re right,” Buck tells him, pulling back to settle into the couch. Tommy grabs his hand, intertwining their fingers together, as he settles himself and presses play on the movie.

Buck has chills from the opening scene and the opening song; a brightness like hope unfurls within his soul, fluttering upwards with each lyric sung and the beginning of the story unfolding. Just from the words alone, he feels seen. Tommy’s hand squeezes his; out of the corner of his eyes, he catches sight of the same kind of brightness in Tommy’s eyes.

Rent unfolds like a kaleidoscope; vivacious and full of soul, a cry of defiance and a love story – an utter act of the opposite of war. Buck finds himself unable to look away, greedily drinking in every song and every scene as though this story and these characters are the gold turning the cracks in his soul into art. He leans his head onto Tommy’s shoulder, wanting to soak up all of this with the man he loves. Tommy leans his head against Buck’s; Buck feels Tommy’s smile pressing into the side of his head the same way Mimi asks Roger to light her candle and the same way Angel and Collins promise to cover each other.

Buck sees himself in Maureen; he sees himself in Mimi. He seems himself in Roger and Mark, and he sees himself in Angel and Collins. He feels seen; free. This is community; this is love. You don’t find it son; you make it.

By the time “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)” comes around, Buck is a complete wreck; tears falling like heavy rain down his face as he shakes, the hand that isn’t clinging desperately to Tommy’s pressing against his own face as though he might be able to press his grief back into himself and swallow it down. Tommy’s tears land on his shirt just as his own land on Tommy’s. He holds onto Angel, Collins, and their love for one another the way he holds onto Tommy’s hands.

By the time the movie ends and the credits roll, Buck feels both hollowed out and also renewed; the glass half-empty but also half-full. His whole face feels raw; hell, his whole soul feels raw. He feels alive but also like he’s just risen from the dead after having his heart torn to shreds.

Silence lingers between them, charged and crackling, like embers about to turn even more incendiary. Buck is about to make an attempt to speak when Tommy speaks first.

“I can’t believe it took me so long to watch Rent,” Tommy admits, pulling back to meet Buck’s gaze directly. “I feel like I really could have used that movie when I was younger.” He speaks into words the exact feelings Buck finds himself wrestling with internally; he can’t help but turn to glance up at Tommy, agreement shining in his tear-stained eyes and equally tear-stained smile. He feels like a complete mess but Tommy, pressing a kiss into the top of his head, likes him anyway. He’s the luckiest man in the whole goddamned world.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I think I could have used that movie when I was younger, too.” Maybe he would have understood his bisexuality sooner; maybe he would’ve only felt a spark leading to a fireworks revelation (or fake mouth static by way of helicopter rescue) later on in life. But he wonders how his life would have turned out if his younger self learned that family can be people you choose; that creation is so much more potent than self-destruction. He wonders if maybe he could have saved himself some trouble and a few scars along the way.

Tommy squeezes Buck’s hand before bringing it up to his mouth to press a kiss against the back of it; Buck shivers in response. Tommy leans in and kisses him softly; Buck returns the kiss with a quiet gasp of relief. Tommy comforts him, sturdy and warm like a weighted blanket. (Also, he realizes, he owes Hen at least two rounds of wine and beer and a college essay worth of texts summing all of his big damn feelings about Rent.)

“Thank you for suggesting Rent for movie night,” Tommy tells him, earnest and soft. “Can I pay you back in a thousand sweet kisses?”

Buck laughs, tilting forward to press his forehead against Tommy’s. He squeezes their hands together again.

“Only if I can pay you back in five hundred twenty-five thousand and six hundred kisses myself.”

[brucebocchi]

Winter 2024 anime, Pt. 2: Mixed reactions, the bench, and the gems

hey y'all, this is also up on my ko-fi! it's free to read both here and there, but i'm struggling financially rn so i could appreciate if you'd throw a few bucks my way if you liked it! part 1 can be found here.

And we're back for part 2! Here's all the new stuff I finished this season, and one more I'll get back to later. As with before, these are sorted alphabetically within each category and are not ranked as of yet.

Also as before, the OP for each series is linked in the title. Check them all out if the header images aren't giving you the right feel for each show, but also check them out because most of them were actually pretty damn good this season.

[Solo Leveling OP voice] LET'S GET IT!

Mixed Bags:

Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!

Your standard, quasi-harem “easily flustered Regular Guy wins over hot girls just by being really nice” shonen romcom. I really don’t have much to say about this one other than if you’ve seen My Dress-Up Darling, you’ve basically seen this already. The only thing that really sets it apart is the setting.

Tsubasa (voiced by Nobunaga Shimazaki, in a FAR cry from his turn as Mahito in Jujutsu Kaisen) is a straight-laced Tokyoite whose family situation lands him in a small city in the frozen boonies of Hokkaido. While looking for the bus to his new house, he runs into a gyaru in the snowy wild, the underdressed, hilariously-proportioned Minami, and they hit it off. It turns out they go to the same school, there are other cute girls there who take a shine to him as well, it’s nothing new.

I ultimately don’t have much to say about Hokkaido Gals, but I do have a soft spot for series like this, and after reading ahead in the manga I felt obligated to see it through. This is all junk food, but it’s all stuff you’ve seen done better in other series. I also have a soft spot for gyaru in anime and manga, and while I do like Minami just fine, she isn’t Marin Kitagawa or Rumiko Manbagi. I don’t really have it in me to recommend this show to many, though, at least not until another season rolls around, if that ever happens. The manga genuinely does get a lot better as it goes on, but the really worthwhile stuff may not happen until a third season, and I just don’t see that happening. 

The manga has issues that the anime isn’t willing or able to solve, chief of which being the visuals. The art style of the manga is wildly inconsistent, and getting a mediocre animation team on this didn’t help matters at all. While the colors often pop nicely against the pretty, snowy backdrops, nobody looks all that great overall. The characters are recognizable, but they just plain don’t look great a lot of the time, nor do they look consistent from one cut to the next; I said that Minami’s proportions are hilarious, but just as hilarious is how wildly they vacillate from one scene to the next for the sake of trying to titillate the viewer.

My biggest takeaway from both the manga and anime was everything I learned about Hokkaido in the process, and if the series is taking subsidies from the island’s tourism bureau, then it’s a job well done. I want some goddamn jingisukan now. The OP is a great time, though. I’m shocked it took over a decade for us to get a proper “Uptown Funk” knockoff in an anime.

Metallic Rouge

I’ll be upfront in saying that this was my biggest disappointment of the season by far. This show had so much going for it, and what we got was… ugh.

There was an unbelievable amount of promise from the outset: This was Studio Bones’ commemorative 25th anniversary production, and coming from the studio that gave us all-timer adaptations like Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Mob Psycho 100, not to mention later works from Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe (including the Cowboy Bebop movie), you can’t fault anyone for having high expectations. It looked to be a fitting production as well: Watanabe’s influence shines through immediately in the gorgeous, lived-in cyberpunk off-world locales and racially diverse cast. Action takes the form of dope robo-tokusatsu transformation fisticuffs, and it’s entirely in 2D animation to boot. The first couple of episodes were killer, too; everything looked and sounded amazing, and there were just enough plot threads teased out that I just had to see how they’d unravel.

It brings me no joy, then, to say that Metallic Rouge collapses into a jumbled mess. I don’t even want to bother talking about what happens in the show because I don’t fucking care anymore. There are few media experiences more sobering than to have it dawn on you over a span of several weeks that “oh… this isn’t actually all that good, is it?” Episode after episode piles on with sloppy lore, weak worldbuilding, warring factions whose names you immediately forget, pointless double-crosses, and the most predictable twist you’ve ever seen. For a while I was willing to accept the fact that I didn’t know what was going on half the time and expected things to become clearer, but now I’m not entirely sure the writers knew either. The stakes apparently kept rising and everything just kept getting more claustrophobic. I’m glad it’s over, if only because if I had to hear “Clair de Lune” one more fucking time, I was going to go ballistic. 

There are several attempts at emotional beats, as the story is rife with tragedy and sacrifice, and every single one lands with a wet thud. Nobody gets enough time, motivation, or characterization for any of these things to feel like they actually matter, and that’s especially a shame because the finale might have been able to stick the landing if the previous episodes were less dense and better paced. Emphasis on “almost,” though, because just before the season ends, we get the absolute most pointless fakeout I’ve seen since The Rise of Skywalker, which is the lowest point of comparison you can make for any work of sci-fi.

This is especially frustrating because on paper, there is so much to like here. Rouge and Naomi are likable-enough deuteragonists with a fun dynamic, and they’d make easy yuri bait in a better show. The characters are all pretty and uniquely designed across the board, and the overall aesthetic, almost a pastiche of late-90’s anime futurism, is undeniable. The toku suit designs are neat and several of the action scenes are gorgeous. The score and soundtrack are outstanding (except for the aforementioned Debussy indulgence). I have few complaints about how the show looks and sounds; the style is great! All of my issues lie with the substance.

Metallic Rouge may have had all the ingredients, but it just needed more time to cook; whether that would have been by doubling the episode count or by more carefully planning the pacing and trimming some of the fat from the lore, I’m still not sure. Probably both. It probably needed better writers, too. Maybe it just isn’t as smart as it acts and there was no way to satisfyingly resolve the clumsy civil rights allegories that bring it uncomfortably close to the likes of Detroit: Become Human. So all of the above, I guess. I tend to adore stories that involve artificially-intelligent beings developing their own wills and emotions and learning to cut their own strings (the likes of Blade Runner, Nier Automata, even a couple of character arcs in the Persona series), but this ain’t it. I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just disappointed.

If there are two positives that will stick with me, though, they would be the absolute banger of an OP and, of course, Naomi Orthmann herself (pictured above, left). Outstanding character design. I’m mildly obsessed. She deserved a better show.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

This one isn’t even worth talking about, so here’s a brief synopsis, then I’ll add some commentary, and then we’ll all move on with our lives. 

Rentt, a beloved but mediocre adventurer in a fantasy town, gets lost in the mysterious labyrinth that all adventurers explore for personal gain, gets waxed by a dragon, and awakens as a shitty-looking CGI skeleton. He notices, though, that he’s able to level up better as a skeleton than he did as a human, and with the more monsters he defeats, the more he evolves into something closer to human. The rest isn’t really worth discussing.

If I’m being honest, I should’ve dropped this show much sooner. It looks kinda lousy most of the time, the plot (inasmuch as there even is one) is boring, character designs are forgettable (except for Rentt’s closest ally, Lorraine, holy hell) and it seems wholly uninterested in actually building its own setting. If it returns for a second season, I won’t be there, nor will I feel like I’m missing anything. Each episode felt like a chore to watch. I probably only saw it through because 1) I liked looking at Lorraine, I know what I’m about, and 2) I didn’t want to lump it in with the shows I did drop. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer isn’t as patently upsetting or frustrating as those three, but it just plain isn’t a very good show.

The Witch and the Beast

This show could have been so much more. I was drawn in by the gorgeous character designs and intriguing blend of Victorian gothic aesthetics and architecture with modern infrastructure, and very quickly disappointed by just about everything else. The first episode is an exceptional proof of concept, and almost everything that follows is an upsetting showcase of what could have been.

The story centers around Ashaf, a languid, chain-smoking agent of the governing church with a big-ass coffin strapped to his back, and his partner Guideau, a snarling hyena in a young woman’s body, as they investigate abuses of magic across the continent in search of nefarious witches. Guideau in particular has a bone to pick with witches, as the body they presently inhabit is the result of a witch’s curse, and they remain in furious pursuit of the one who cursed them. The curse can be temporarily undone by a kiss with a witch, allowing Guideau’s true body, a hulking brute confined to the coffin, to escape and wreak havoc. Meaning that on a few occasions we get a girl-on-girl kiss followed by a big dude wrecking shit. There’s also other investigations of serial killings, necromancy, and a cursed sword, and here’s hoping you like those, because the coffin breaks are few and far between.

This wasn’t great! By the third episode I had the sneaking suspicion that the animation talent on hand just wasn’t enough to support the aesthetic. While the character designs are exceptional, almost everyone looks awful in any shot that isn’t completely focused on them. This is especially true of Guideau, who looks so inconsistently off-model from one shot to the next that I’m still not entirely sure what they’re supposed to look like, and that’s kind of unforgivable when we’re talking about a main character. Everything looks too dim and too shiny at the same time, and action scenes look like shit more often than they look interesting. I can see so many flickers of something excellent (or at least really good-looking) in Witch and the Beast, and everything else that keeps those flickers from actually igniting makes it so much more frustrating to watch. Maybe just read the manga instead; the panels I've seen from it were uniformly gorgeous.

Actually, yeah, you should probably just read the manga, because for a season of anime, the pacing is atrocious too. It’s clearly trying to angle for a monster-of-the-week format, but each of these mini-arcs is a little too dense for a single episode, so multiple episodes are dedicated to these one-off curiosities, most of which do nothing to advance the plot or show off what the show does best. And if one of them isn’t particularly interesting, you’re saddled with it for the next two weeks like you've been stuck munching on a mealy apple. And I know you can only adapt so much in a 12-episode season, but the decision to end the season on a flashback arc and a lore dump was baffling. That’s not world-building, that’s lazy, and it made the show’s existing pacing issues feel that much more inane.

I feel like I was sold a false bill of goods. I can only imagine how the mangaka feels about this. Dull and uninspiring all around. What a waste.

The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic

Isekai, unassuming high school boy gains a unique power, impending war with the Demon Lord, yadda yadda yadda. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic isn’t anything new or special by any means, nor is it particularly well-animated or -paced, but at its best it’s silly and charming enough that it made a nice, brainless palate cleanser on Fridays.

Usato, your standard quiet high schooler, ends up walking home on a rainy evening with the popular, attractive student council president and VP, when an isekai portal happens. It turns out that it was just the seito-kai that was invited along for the ride (and President Suzune, as it turns out, is fucking psyched to get to be in an isekai), and Usato got caught along with them. When tested for magical aptitude, Suzune and VP Kazuki hit the jackpot with electric and light affinities, respectively, but things go awry when Usato’s reading turns up with healing magic. Terror strikes the palace as the intimidating dommy-mommy Captain Rose barges in to spirit Usato away from his new friends and into her squadron of goons to train him as a combat medic.

As character comedy goes, this one is actually pretty solid at times. Shogo Sakata is plenty of fun as the put-upon, lippy Usato (a much louder role than Chainsaw Man’s Aki Hayakawa), and Atsuko Tanaka (Major Kusanagi herself!) is a blast as the terrifying Rose, an uncompromising slave driver of a drill sergeant with a secret soft side. The dynamic between them is great, too; Usato is over Rose’s shit from the beginning and isn’t afraid to talk back to her, but before you know it, this transforms into friendly banter as Rose clearly takes a shine to Usato and knows he can handle any punishment she doles out. Suzune’s also a bunch of fun now that she’s broken away from having to be the competent, popular girl at school and gets to fully lean into being a complete dork.

Wrong Way also works decently as an isekai, because it makes an effort to stay rooted in high fantasy rather than fall back on JRPG mechanics, meaning there are no stat screens! It also avoids the trappings of wish-fulfillment isekai series by having Usato start out as a regular-ass guy; he’s not a Kirito type, just someone Rose sees as a rough gem in need of cutting. There are no cheat skills or OP weapons or anything, just a kid training every day to get stronger so he can protect the people close to him, and that’s the kind of anime protagonist you should want to be.

For better and for worse, I get serious mid-00s vibes from this one; watch the OP if you don’t believe me. Some of the colors pop uncannily in that early-digipaint-era way, and the animation is pretty middling; the most fluid animation we see is whenever Suzune is acting like a creep. Much like those mid-00s anime, though, Wrong Way may have benefited from being weekly (or twice as long) rather than seasonal. There’s a ton of planting with very little payoff, and it doesn’t feel like the actual scope of the story has even been addressed yet. We don’t even learn why the series has the name it does until someone literally says it aloud in the 11th episode. I may have to reevaluate this season after a possible second, if we ever get one, because this doesn’t stand too well on its own.

Of the anime in this “mixed bags” segment, I’d say I enjoyed Wrong Way the most, but it still had enough problems for me to keep it here. It’s not a particularly bad anime, but it’s not especially good either. I guess we can slot it into what Hazel refers to as “good mid.”

On Hold: 

Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! (three episodes watched)

Man, what a title. That was the main draw for this BL series, which on paper is basically a gay version of the Mel Gibson vehicle What Women Want. 

Adachi (a surname that will always make me laugh thanks to Persona 4), a gloomy salaryman, has hit the big 3-0 without getting any, and now he can somehow read anyone’s thoughts just by making physical contact with them. Just as he laments that this is his life now, he accidentally bumps into his handsome, popular coworker, Kurosawa, whom he learns has been harboring a massive crush on Adachi this whole time. Well dang, what now? Kurosawa’s a really nice, thoughtful dude, but Adachi’s never even thought about being with a man before! And isn’t there something wrong with already knowing this secret? How can he even go into the office and look Kurosawa in those big, handsome eyes… every single day…

What I’ve seen so far has been pretty solid, if not particularly well animated. The visuals are really my only gripe here; I just put it off for way too long and didn’t have it in me to finish it on time to actually get this thing written and published. Yaoi isn’t my forte, which feels like a shortcoming on my end as a fledgling bisexual, and I’ve already remarked on the solid LGBT representation this past season, so I do plan on hopping back on this one.

I gotta say, the co-leading voice actors put in serious work this season. Adachi is voiced by Chiaki Kobayashi, who continued his role as Stark in Frieren, returned to Mashle as Mash Burnedead, and contributed to Metallic Rouge’s cluttered cast as Noid. Kurosawa’s seiyuu, Ryota Suzuki (of whom I’ll always be a fan for his masterful turn as Yu Ishigami in Kaguya-sama), also held down leading roles in Bang Brave Bang Bravern and The Unwanted Undead Adventurer. They’ve been great in the few episodes of Cherry Magic! that I’ve seen so far, and they’ll be a huge part of what brings me back.

The Gems:

Bang Brave Bang Bravern

I feel like the mark of a perfectly audacious piece of media is in the moments where I find myself incredulously shouting “WHAT THE FUCK AM I WATCHING” at the screen, and Bravern made me do that at least once per episode. I have so many things to say about what makes this show great but all of it can be summed up as “it fucks so goddamn hard.”

A joint military exercise in Hawaii between Japanese and American mech pilots goes south as a sudden invasion by metalloid aliens portends certain doom for humanity. Just in the nick of time, though, a bombastic, autonomous mech named Bravern arrives from space and insists that ace pilot Isami Ao take his reins. Isami reluctantly agrees, and to his consternation, Bravern goes full tokusatsu on everyone’s asses, complete with fully-diegetic theme music, and keeps the threat at bay. With Bravern continuing to pester him to act as a pilot, Isami is forced to take up the mantle of a reluctant hero as everyone rallies around Bravern to save Earth. Tagging along is blond-haired, blue-eyed American pilot Lewis Smith, who gets to live out all of his Top Gun fantasies, right down to the latent homosexuality.

That last point isn’t a projection or anything: This show is legitimately gay as hell, and it rules. Bravern’s feelings towards Isami feel far more romantic than what you’d expect from a literal robot, and his description of how it felt to have Isami pilot him for the first time, as relayed to a grim-faced military council, is riddled with hilarious innuendo. Isami struggles not only with shouldering the burden of needing to be a hero to all of humanity, but also being beset on both sides by a loud, insistent mecha and a dewy-eyed gaijin, both of whom very well seem to want to get in his pants. Intricate rituals punctuate Isami and Lewis’ angsty relationship as these broad-shouldered, muscular men grow ever closer. It’s also worth reiterating that Isami is voiced by Ryota Suzuki, who also voiced Kurosawa in Cherry Magic!, and that may not have even been his gayest role this season. I’m not super well-versed in mecha as a genre, but I do know that there’s a lot of Warrior’s Bond-type stuff in these series, and Bravern lays it on thick. And hard.

This show looks killer, by the way. CGI implementation in 2D anime is still a touchy subject, but Bravern features some of the best I’ve ever seen. Simple cel-shading goes a long way to the point where, outside of some uncanny motion, Bravern himself feels perfectly blended into the hand-drawn animation. Mecha designs range from realistic military-style tech to otherworldly sentient robots, and battle sequences run the same gamut as the stakes rise. As goofy as all of the above may sound, it’s committed to being a grandiose, big-time mecha showcase.

This is as good as camp gets in anime; Bravern does for the mecha genre what Akiba Maid War did for yakuza film pastiche (I have also heard positive comparisons to Samurai Flamenco, which I’ll have to get on ASAP). It’s an excellent mecha show in its own right, and wildly hilarious to boot. Bravern himself is very genre-savvy and seemingly a bit of an otaku himself; he loves acting like a mecha hero, to everyone else’s chagrin. Several of the villains (also mechanical beings, voiced by an all-star seiyuu roster that includes Kenjiro Tsuda, the aforementioned Atsuko Tanaka, and Rie Kugimiya) are total dorks themselves. A CIA interrogator tries to waterboard a mecha at one point. Bravern is a deeply silly show, but its heart is planted as firmly on its sleeve as its tongue is in its cheek: For as wacky as it can get, the story still unfolds with a straight face and excellent emotional beats. 

This show also has the most unskippable ED of any anime since Chainsaw Man dropped a new one every week. I will not say what happens. You cannot predict what it is. Just watch it. One of the top YouTube comments on that video says “When I saw this ending after episode 2, I thought I was going crazy.” That’s a ringing endorsement.

Chained Soldier

On the heels of 100 Girlfriends completely rewiring my brain, I was raring for some more good old-fashioned anime trash. I was told that there would be plenty this season, but you can consult the “dropped” section to see how well that worked out for me. Chained Soldier came with some significant hype, and soon enough into the first episode I realized that I’d actually skimmed through this manga before (don’t ask why), so I was on board immediately. Now here’s some nice trashy fun.

The world is in peril thanks to creatures called Shuuki that can advance on our world via portals from another dimension. Women primarily lead the charge against these monsters, as this dimension produces a special fruit that can lend them (and not men) otherworldly powers to help them in the fight. Yuuki, a perfectly normal young man, ends up in grave danger as he stumbles into a portal, where he is saved by the beautiful Kyouka, a commander who is able to subjugate Shuuki at will and use them to fight others. In a bind, she asks Yuuki if she can subjugate him, which he agrees to by licking her finger and transforming into a monster himself, at her beck and call. Because of his utility in battle, Yuuki is enlisted into her squad of baddies (and also an 11-year-old), living in their home as a caretaker and answering directly to Kyouka as her “slave.”

I know. Hear me out.

I put “slave” in scare quotes because Chained Soldier fortunately isn’t going full Shield Hero on us; this arrangement has a give-and-take baked in. See, every time Yuuki completes his service, Kyouka (or whomever else takes advantage of this anomaly) is compelled to carry out whatever suitable “reward” springs from his unconscious, and this is where the ecchi kicks in. Sometimes it’s a kiss, and sometimes it’s something a little more; the reward corresponds to the length and intensity of Yuuki’s contributions to battle, so the heat can turn up in the form of, say, clothed face-sitting, a good scrubbing in the bath, or some nice, casual CBT. All of this is to say that “slave” is a bit of a buzzword here: It’s more of a dom/sub situationship with a lot of extra steps.

Yes, just about everything that isn’t an action setup is full-on harem trash, and Chained Soldier lays it on thick, right down to full-on nudity. Nothing about this show resembles high art, but I can’t help but admire such a high level of commitment to its aesthetic, including the sleaze. It fully commits to the bit and doesn’t even bother lampshading its own trashiness. Chained Soldier knows what it’s about, and I respect that. It also has the good sense not to sexualize the youngest girl, which is a point in its favor that I can’t award a couple other shows previously discussed.

And while this show is plenty fun, the action sequences often excellent, and the character designs usually delightful, there’s not actually a whole lot going on here. As I said with Mashle, I know that battle manga like this can take a minute to really get cooking, and as I said with Witch and the Beast, 12 episodes may not always be a sufficient runtime to adapt enough to break ground, but the debut season feels more like a proof of concept than anything else. That being said, Chained Soldier’s manga has a very effusive audience, and its praises don’t seem to entirely be about the boobs and butts, so I’ll wait patiently for the second season. I think it’s earned that much.

Delicious in Dungeon

This is the one I’m having the hardest time writing about because it so confidently and so completely speaks for itself that anything I could add would feel like scattering sawdust at the beach. Dungeon Meshi (I refuse to call it by its official English title) is a widely beloved manga among those who’ve read it, and for Studio Trigger to do an honest-to-goodness manga adaptation for the first time might as well be front page news among anime fans. 

The story follows Laios, the deeply weird human hero, as he delves back into a bizarre and mysterious dungeon to rescue his sister Falin from the belly of a dragon, along with his misfit party: The neurotic half-elven mage Marcille, the temperamental halfling rogue Chilchuck, and the dwarven warrior-slash-chef Senshi. The party is frequently low on supplies, so to survive the trip they’ll need to subsist on the most abundant resource in the dungeon: Monsters. Senshi’s aptitude in the kitchen helps ensure that everything is edible and sufficiently tasty, regardless of how nasty the monster it came from may have been. With monster obstructions out of the way and their bellies filled, our party delves deeper into the dungeon as the mysteries deepen in kind.

I love the character dynamics in this so goddamn much. Marcille and Chilchuck are frequently put off by the dubious monster food presented to them, but their consternation is worsened by the fact that Laios’ fascination with the monsters it came from annoys the shit out of them. I referred to him as “deeply weird,” but that doesn’t begin to describe his absolute galaxy brain, and I mean it as a term of endearment. Laios is deeply knowledgeable and curious about the fauna in the dungeon, and not just how they taste: He is vocally curious about how certain monster attacks may feel, sings along with siren songs, and even keeps a hardcover bestiary inside his breastplate. He’s one of those people you turn to if you have a question on a hyperspecific subject, but you have to be careful how you ask it or else you’re trapped for the next two hours. And I love him for it.

Even putting the comedy aside, there is a fascinating human element at play in Dungeon Meshi, and I can tell that that surface has barely even been scratched yet. Marcille is just as dogged in her pursuit of saving Falin as Laios is, maybe even moreso (remember what I keep saying about LGBT representation this season?). Chilchuck continues to convince himself that he’s only in the job for his own personal gain, but you can see that mask slipping. And I still wanna know what Senshi’s deal is. Even with the five major players I listed, there’s an increasingly deep roster surrounding them—showcasing a broad spectrum of races and ethnicities, both real and fantastical—each with their own histories and motivations, and I cannot wait to see how they play out and interact with one another. There seem to be much deeper themes at play here as well as we learn more about perceptions and grudges between differing races, oppositional magics, clashing ideologies, and the monetary incentives that drive both the dungeon’s exploration and its very existence. I’m here for it.

I’ve been holding off on reading the manga until the season is up in June (though I could crack any day), but I know a loving adaptation when I see one. Not that Trigger ever slacks off in the animation department, but they absolutely brought their A-game here. Everyone looks bouncy and cartoony in the way only Trigger can pull off while still looking as close as possible to Ryoko Kui’s source material (as far as I can tell). As with Frieren, the action sequences aren’t frequent, nor are they entirely what the show is about, but they look incredible every single time. And the food, of course, looks incredible, no matter how weird. This is practically a cooking anime and a fantasy dungeon anime at the same time, and both aspects are visually on point at all times.

I’m obviously speaking from my own bubble as one of the six people who still use Tumblr in 2024, but I rarely see new anime make a splash like this on social media every single week, and the ones that I do are usually the monster shonen hits like Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen. Dungeon Meshi deserves the exposure and success it’s attained, and I’m excited to see it continue. I’d easily slot this right up there with Bravern as one of the best new anime of the season.

A Sign of Affection

I’ve seen a hell of a lot of shonen slice-of-life romances in the past year and change, so a nice fluffy shoujo like this was an excellent palate cleanser. There were a hell of a lot of Big Action Setpieces and panicky teens and grim dungeon crawlers this season, and at the end of the week I wanted to unwind with a bunch of pretty twenty-somethings falling in love with each other.

The show centers on Yuki, a young woman living with congenital hearing loss, making do at a public college after growing up at a school for the deaf. Though she’s able to get by with LINE messages and lip reading, she’s unprepared when a foreigner asks for help, but she’s saved by a handsome and mysterious young man named Itsuomi. He’s able to help out, and takes an interest in her when he realizes his fellow undergrad is deaf, and Yuki takes an interest in kind because he’s really goddamn hot. It turns out that he’s a polyglot and an avid world-traveler, but sign language is not in his purview. This mutual interest sparks the concern of her childhood friend, Oushi, one of the few people in her life who already use sign language, who wants to be sure that nothing untoward is happening. And it isn’t, because this is just a really lovely, low-stakes romance story.

This is pure, unfiltered shoujo at its best. Yuki’s internal monologue is peppered with flowery prose, and everything and everyone looks soft and beautiful. Fashionable, doe-eyed women and pillowy-lipped ikemen abound (seriously, holy shit, the lips on these boys) as the scope widens and the main love interests’ friends explore their own possible love stories. Itsuomi is very much of the “mysterious boy” archetype you’ll find in romance stories in this demographic, but he’s not hiding any sort of dark past like you’d typically expect; he’s just an interesting guy who keeps his personal life close to the vest. He’s a self-appointed world citizen who loves learning about how people of all cultures live their lives, and in Yuki he sees someone within his home turf who happens to live in her own world entirely. And it’s easy to see his forward behavior with Yuki as infantilizing at first (Oushi sure does, and I’ll get back to him in a second), but as they grow closer Itsuomi quickly becomes much more considerate of her boundaries and learns to accommodate her as he studies sign language and gestures that help ensure her comfort. This is a story about Yuki’s horizons broadening just as much as it is about Itsuomi wanting to be let into Yuki’s narrow world, and that sort of synergy makes for some exceptional romance.

A Sign of Affection deserves some credit for refusing to shy away from Yuki’s disability and making a point of depicting her world as one that does little to accommodate her. Very few people in her daily life ever bothered to learn sign language, she relies on a friend to take notes during lectures, and work is hard to come by. It’s an honest depiction that makes an effort not to be exploitative, which is a breath of fresh air. Not only that, but there’s some interesting meta-commentary in there: The only major conflict in the story stems from Oushi’s jealousy, and his reservations about Itsuomi possibly “taking advantage of” Yuki almost feel like he believes that he’s the only one who knows what’s best for her just because he’s done the bare minimum to accommodate her. He thinks he’s coming from a good place, but he winds up accidentally infantilizing her in exactly the way he thinks Itsuomi might. That’s a particularly interesting bit of irony!

I’ve seen enough shonen-oriented romcoms where an unassuming Regular Guy gets flustered as a way-too-casual girl pushes his buttons (hell, I’ve already reviewed two of those this season), so it’s nice to see the formula flipped for a shoujo as Yuki and her best friend Rin blush and squee over Itsuomi and his coworker Kyouya, respectively. A Sign of Affection isn’t afraid to get a little silly with it, either; plenty of these moments are punctuated by characters’ faces going low-detail or full chibi, and they are cute as shit every single time.

This one was just cozy as hell. If you’re into this sort of thing, swaddle yourself in it and bask.

Solo Leveling

I let this one collect dust after the third episode and didn’t pick it back up until the season was almost up, and honestly, I was kinda dreading it: The trailers didn’t look too promising, the show was slow to start, and it looked like yet another derivative JRPG-style dungeon crawler that managed to get popular. Turns out, nah, this show actually kinda fucks and the web novel series and webtoon it’s based on are popular for a reason. The story is nothing special, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a perfectly serviceable turn-your-brain-off action spectacle with a bit more lying beneath the surface.

In a modern-day South Korea where portals to mysterious dungeons open up and threaten the populace, those who can brave the dungeons, known as hunters, are an invaluable human resource. Once someone is assigned a grade as a hunter, they have that grade for life, barring some rare occurrences. Sung Jinwoo is at the lowest rung on that ladder as an E-rank, incapable of improvement, assigned the epithet “the weakest hunter of all mankind.” He mostly shows up to portal raids as a warm body to fill a quota, and one such job goes haywire as most of the raid party, Jinwoo included, is brutally slaughtered in an arcane secondary dungeon within a portal. He somehow wakes up in a hospital, unharmed, and able to access a digital menu before his eyes that exhorts him to do the One Punch Man workout every day, lest he incur punishment. He gets hilariously chadly in the span of a few days in the hospital, including an inexplicable haircut, and finds access to dungeons only he can enter and levels up within this new system.

This one gets off to a slow start and may have benefited from a longer premiere like Oshi no Ko or Frieren, but once the table is fully set, Solo Leveling really starts to cook. Jinwoo’s titular leveling process is a blast from one fight to the next, and as he moves to work in the dungeons that other hunters can access, it turns out he’s been training with the weights on. He’s suddenly fighting way above his pay grade, and after staving off attacks from hunters taking advantage of portals for nefarious ends, he is recruited by an ambitious corporate scion to make some real coin and establish an independent association of hunters.

While it can feel like there’s a whole bunch of table-setting between portal sequences, it’s some smart worldbuilding on Solo Leveling’s end to establish how portal hunting became a central pillar of this society, and doubly so how political and capitalist interests can leave a wide berth for corruption and bad actors. If there’s money to be made in hunting, of course people will find ways to make even more at the expense of others, both at the corporate and individual levels. There’s a lot of talk in there about “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” and that… makes me nervous.

Those are terms that can be used to justify immoral actions in the name of money, sure, but Jinwoo also uses them to justify his own process. To what end is he constantly improving himself? Sure, he's doing what he can to provide for his younger sister and their ailing mother, but I see less and less humanity in him as this goes on. There are constant hints at something far more sinister at play than just a dude getting stronger for himself, not the least of which being “the system,” the UI that implores him to keep taking on these “quests.” Something, or someone, seems to be guiding him. Whenever another hunter turns on Jinwoo, of course his self-defense instincts kick in, but system pop-ups instruct him to defeat X number of hostiles like it’s a normal video game scenario. There’s something eerily depersonalized about these encounters, despite them being full-on mortal combat, that gives me serious Ender’s Game vibes. Consider me intrigued.

I’d heard that the Solo Leveling manhwa’s main draw was its visuals, and though I had my doubts early on, I'm sold now. This is a pretty solid presentation! Hiroyuki Sawano turned in yet another banger soundtrack to punctuate all the action setpieces, helping to stitch together a fairly complete tapestry. Said setpieces are exhilarating and almost impressively bloody, and while the animation is nothing impressive in the day-to-day, it goes absolutely batshit when the gloves come off. Movement is inhumanly fluid and the visuals can go into the same loose, psychedelic territories we’ve seen in the likes of Mob Psycho and the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen. If this is the new meta for shonen action, I’m not complaining.

By all rights, this is a pretty decent show, but if I’m being honest, this one just hasn’t stuck with me much. And that’s fine! Sometimes I just wanna see some nutty action stuff and move on with my day. Solo Leveling hits that spot perfectly, and I'll be right back there when it returns for its next season.

‘Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess

I was surprised to learn that the gag manga this is based on, with such a seemingly simple premise, has been running for well over 200 chapters and counting. As the anime progressed, I was far more pleasantly surprised to learn that it actually works.

In a standard anime fantasy world where the forces of good are fighting the demonic Hellhorde, an unnamed warrior princess and her talking enchanted sword are taken prisoner and subjected to torture as they’re squeezed for intel. Said “torture,” as the title’s scare quotes would suggest, is mildly unconventional, as the demon baddie inquisitor, aptly named Torture Tortura, attempts to ply the princess by presenting her with tantalizingly delicious-looking food that she can only partake in if she coughs up some info. Naturally, the princess caves every single time, but her intel is often inane and useless, so the “torture” continues. It’s not all food, though: The princess is soon held out of arm’s reach of adorable baby animals by a gyaru beastgirl, pampered into submission by a spa-loving giantess, and is faced with a tsundere vampire faildaughter, who… tries. 

And you’d think that would be it; the joke wears thin and you move onto something else. Before you realize it, though, something’s changed: The princess and her captors are quickly becoming friends. The premise almost feels perfunctory: These inquisitors are actual people just doing their jobs, and whatever happens after the princess’ myriad confessions is fair game. There’s no malice or animosity, even during the “torture” sessions themselves: Everyone will have a blast and grow closer as friends, and then the princess will voluntarily go back to her bedless cell. It’s like Sam and Ralph after they clock out, except they’re almost always off the clock. Everyone is genuinely looking out for each other in all directions, and the only thing that keeps the torture going is the need for a status quo to return to, even as it grows more elastic. If anything, Time for "Torture" is a good example of committing to the bit without having to necessarily rely on it.

The real irony in all of this is that it becomes increasingly apparent that the princess is having her needs met in captivity far better than she ever did back home. In her proud proclamations about how she’ll never cave to the temptations before her (shortly before she does just that), the princess often talks about her upbringing and her time as the head of an imperial legion, but these stories often betray her lack of friendship or any of the little things that make life worth living. Her life as royalty was one of isolation and deprivation, to the point where she finds more freedom and fulfillment as a prisoner. She truly lives in a society.

Hellholm, on the other hand, has a surprisingly healthy approach to things like work-life balance, food, and leisure, and its most valuable prisoner is no exception. The Hell-Lord himself is a surprising exemplar of this; for as much as he looks and talks like your standard terrifying JRPG demon king, he’s a surprisingly good dude! He looks after his family, employees, and even the captive princess as if they are all one and the same; he exhibits strong principles and an aversion to conflict, sees to his employees' needs and wants alike, and is a supportive, loving father to his unbelievably precious little daughter (who also serves as a “torturer,” to the princess’ delight). He’s also a big time anime dork, and even bonds with a knight attempting to rescue the princess over their shared otakudom before sending him off peacefully. As “villains” go, he’s top tier.

Time for "Torture" is nothing groundbreaking by any stretch, but it’s a cute, silly time and it plays with anime fantasy tropes in the same way a six-month-old German shepherd “plays” with a cheap stuffed toy. How long the premise holds up is entirely up to you, but I had a lot of fun with it. I have no idea how this ended up being one of the better shows this season, but I guess it just scratched the right itch for me.

[xthelastknownsurvivorx]

Writing Patterns

List the first sentence of your last 10 AO3 works.

(I’ve also seen the “and the last sentence” variant, so I went ahead and did that.)

Thanks for the tag @bbcphile and your patience with me getting to it! Everything here is red, white, and royal blue stuff for mostly the same ship, though I think 2024 will see some other fandoms as well

Doesn't He Know (I've had Him Memorized for So Long) — one shot

first: "Get in, loser, I have coffee."

last: "Yeah, I'm sure."

Every Time My Heart Swings Back to You — 16 chapters

first: "Gabriel of Cleremont, former knight of Lord Beringar's house. Accused and convicted of attempted sodomy with His Royal Highness Prince James."

last: Maybe fate had a hand in leading them to each other, but this is Alex's choice. And it feels pretty damn good.

Not a Day I Don't Miss (Those Rude Interruptions) — one shot

first:

Alex, Had to go early for a family matter. Left with the PPOs. Didn't want to wake you. Thank you for everything. X

last: And all Henry is left with, for the rest of his life, is the feel of Alex's name on his lips.

Red, White, and Royal Switcheroo — one shot

first: "There are a lot of things worth over thinking, believe me. But this isn't one of them."

last: i meant to ask - star wars and luke huh? i've always been more of a han solo guy

SNL | Season 45 Episode 2 | HRH Prince Henry & FSOTUS Alex Claremont-Diaz — 4 chapters

first: TITLE: Categate Cold Open

last: Maybe his trip to London in a few months won't be so bad after all

Burn (They're Watching Us/I Hope That They) — lyric rewrite

first: I cherished each email you wrote me

last: I hope the world burns

Some Element of Mystery — 2 chapters (5+1 things)

first: Alex is having an existential crisis. Has been having an existential crisis for the past two hours.

last: Honestly, maybe Alex should have led with that all along.

Satisfied (Never Have Been, Never Will Be) — lyric rewrite

first: "All right, all right, that's what I'm talking about!"

last: He will never be satisfied, I will never be satisfied

The Frustrating, Intoxicating, Complicated Sum of Him — one shot

first: "Your Highness, we have arrived."

last: "No," Alex says as he shuts the door behind him, "I wouldn't."

Weird That It Happened Twice — one shot

first: "Do I really have to go through with this stupid tradition? There's so much more good I could be doing, actual people I could be pardoning instead of two modern day raptors."

last: But before he goes, he glares at Cornbread and Stuffing and says, "If it were up to me, ya'll would not be getting pardoned tomorrow."

--

Patterns:

For opening lines, I like to drop the reader immediately into the scene. Most of the time I seem to use dialogue to achieve this, but sometimes I'll borrow a line from the original piece of media.

My endings are a little less consistent. I might end on the main character musing on something that happened or central theme to the story. Or I could also be a bit more open and end on some sort of dialogue that's hopeful and hints at what might come afterwards. Other times, I just write the ending that comes the most naturally to me and feels like the appropriate conclusion.

I feel like it's been a while since is went around, so feel free to ignore if you've already done this @happiness-of-the-pursuit @14carrotghoul @affectionatelyrs @cactusdragon517 @suseagull04 and open tag as always

[i-got-the-feels]

Every Month of 2023

I adore this because it's a great way to see your journey as an artist you had throughout the year.

Thank you @smileytharn for the tag

I tag @smittenskitten @moonlightsdream @moonkhao @celestial-sapphicss @snimeat @alienwlw @alexshenry @jimmysea @laurenkmyers @forcebook @forursmiles @dingyuxi @dengswei @tinnchan @sparklyeyedhimbo @spicyvampire @raypakorn @pranink @pranpats @natahjikio @seawherethesunsets and whoever wants to do this :)

JANUARY

cinematography shots set of episode 7 of never let me go- here. Not even surprised that was a beautifully shot show

FEBRUARY

For gays, it's a never let me go set of episode Titles and for the lesbians it's a set with poem I wrote for Sam's love for Mon

Gays Lesbians

MARCH

I am whipped for her. No susprises this edit of this show is here.

Glory Part 2

APRIL

Charlotte and Engfa's rainbow photoshoot

Among shows, I am so glad both the midnight museum sets I cried making over were well liked. 1) the set of midnight museum with stories of artifacts in it 2) tarot cards set

MAY

This good bad mother set gif set

For graphics, this boss and babe one. I am so happy because the damn quote and scene had melted my heart

JUNE

I cannot choose between these two

First most interacted with set is the pisaeng one

Second most interacted with set is this bad buddy one

JULY

I am so fucking proud of this set. Really glad this connected with people- it is a set of kawi realising his love for pisaeng

AUGUST

Bad Buddy x RWRB set no body is surprised

Gonna include 2 more sets I adore

This beautiful conclusion to kawi and pisaeng's journey

Another Bad Buddy x RWRB set that had absolutely no business flopping like this

SEPTEMBER

I am going to have 2 categories for september. 1 being english speaking gays, the other being thai speaking gays

for english speaking gays its season 1 and season 2 episode titles from hannibal

for thai speaking gays, both sets are from only friends. one being ray's heartbreak over mew and this personal favorite set of mine - only friends couple dynamics as book covers it is my baby WITH only friends couples as taylor swift songs - this was a bitch Yo edit okay? . I am proud of these sets

OCTOBER

She can always get it.

Kareena Kapoor in Masaba

November

This scene was so comforting, I can't even. I am so glad this set was liked by yall.

Ray and sand getting together

December

Going to categorize this into korean and thai, because my demon and last twilight took over my brain this month

For Last Twilight, this one with Day and his journey and how Mork has supported him. Their first meeting . And how they see each other

For, My Demon, this set I made half asleep when episode 6 aired. Followed by the one I worked on the longest because the dialogue of this scene of what would she do if the world were ending and finally the role they play in each others life

Also special shout to my edit on namjoohyuk as the unhinged vigilate - baby you are beautiful, its just that 4 people on here watched the show