#by normal I mean absolutely unhinged and bonkers about

[deviousdevilx]

House saw this man and decided he'll be so normal about him. First act of normalcy was to pay his bail because out of hundreds at the medical conference this pretty boy with expressive brown eyes was the most interesting out of the bunch

[nevertheless-moving]

binged dungeon meshi anime + manga after numerous tumblr posts and leg injury. thoughts based on fandom > manga> anime ride:

[SPOILERS FOR MANGA]

senshi pantyshot fanservice much appreciated but... should really be more lingering and inexplicably glistening if its gonna match up to fanservice in other animes

no yeah TOTALLY get why toshiro just said fuck it and went home after... all that. days of no food. blase dark magic/you were too late reveal. long repressed slapfight that he probably felt equally guilty and angry about. girl he loved appeared as GIANT MONSTER and BRUTALLY killed HIS FAMILY.

girl he loved STOPPED TO PULL HER TITS OUT midway through BRUTALLY KILLING HIS FAMILY.

i'd go home too

also , Maricelle, all the love in the world, but i get why everyone was mad about the dark magic. i mean it looked bad. WE know that thistle interfered but the situation looked BAD ngl maricelle i would not want you healing me either after falin appearance.

feel like changeling maricelle should have been half half-foot/half-dwarf or something like that. would have been fun half-elf reveal to party. actually bothers me that she wasn't? the more i think about it. i mean itzumi was still cat/kobold.

incredibly belated but looking back at changeling episode...is senshi shirtless the whole time???

okay nevermind did some extensive research and i'm fairly sure he wasn't

also thinking back about senshi — he absolutely knew what he was doing with setting off the traps and pissing chilchuck off...my man was living here for decades.

kabru/laois is both more and less textually present than i would have thought based on fandom.

like on one hand they barely interact. on the other hand they barely interact and Kabru is VERY much obsessed . they have ONE (1) conversation. much hilarity has been observed about that dialogue so i digress

and there is ZERO new information between that interaction and kabru planning on putting the man on a THRONE. at some unclear point his career goal becomes having his lips at this man's ear and a dagger at his neck ???

i cannot stress this enough: he invests SO EARLY in king Laios. willing to sacrifice his life for this to be realized. goal oriented. unhinged. good for him.

you could say it's just him being practical and choosing the best option based on available information but incredibly relevant new information becomes available and Kabru is STILL locked in

i'm crying over kabru 'compressing' mithran's backstory. sure as a meta framing device fine. but in universe? BONKERS. narrative critiquing clinically depressed man's tragic backstory. Super normal move.

so much nuance and different perspectives on fantasy interracial marriages and adoptions and its SO SO GOOD.

gnawing on the walls kinda worldbuilding seriously

so thistle was a teenager when this all started. that's what i'm getting. that's... man there's a lot of layers of tragedy.

wait so if elves and half-foots look ambiguously young do tallmen look ambiguously old?? wrinkly gangly old old wrinkly fuckers??? or burning the candle at both ends terrible looking tall child???

hey i'm starting to think that the monster who controls all monsters... might not be a good guy

'Delgal' holding thistle at the end ... i'm not crying. you're crying.

impossible to say if laois won the final battle on purpose or not

genuinely no idea

11/10 no notes about that fact

[bu-blegh-ost]

EP. 114 spoilers

Okay, guys, I have an insane theory. An absolutely bonkers unhinged one and I'm absolutely sure it's getting debunked by the info we'll get from ep. 115 fucking immediately, but let me have this, entertain the madness I'm about to spew from my lips.

"Praise the Solar Mother" means that Faye Ferin is not only conscious and aware of the prophecy, she BELIEVES it. The question is, which version of it, right? Well, she was warned abt Black Sea beforehand and this allowed her to get the upper hand in expanding Navy's influence, but not only that, she says "the day it spreads is coming and we'll be ready" And which prophecy speaks of it? "the seal remains locked by a key of divinity, its release, in time, an inevitability"

The real one.

She fucking knows that the Black Sea is about to spread soon and wants to either use it in some way or be the one to control the world after the calamity. And here comes my absolutely deranged idea.

"The Machine is stable. My son is stable"

What if the machine is an artificial Leviathan and the son is Jayson Ferin. Picture this madness. See into my crazy gay-ass mind.

What if Faye Ferin wants to control the world by making Jayson Ferin into a new Chosen one. She is constructing an artificial Leviathan, but why? To somehow connect Jayson to it and make him "a Sea god's last egg". We SAW the Leviathan bones, the Navy is strong enough to kill real Leviathans, they don't need them as weapons, they have things stronger than them! So what if they need one to literally trick fate? Jayson is literally raised like Gillion. Only under his mother's influence, controlled by her agenda, her vision of justice. She makes him consider Drey and Jay as traitors, feeds his hatered, feeds him her own perception of reality to use him for her gains. His almost ethereal sun-angel form. Where does his power come from? Was he modified? I fully believe he is not replaced by Black ops. She doesn't need to do that. She had full control over his way of thinking ever since he was born simply bc she is his mother. She enjoys that control. She is confident that Jayson won't break from her grasp.

And now see this. Jayson just so happens to come for a visit to the Undersea, not so long ago. Could the Elders be replaced as Black ops at this point? They very much could. Why would the real Elders banish Gillion if they believed he was the Chosen One? Why not imprison him, keep him in their own control? Well, cause they were Navy clones, possibly. And Navy wanted Gill out of the picture.

The important meeting in the Undersea arranged by Elders (impostors?) a while back. Suspiciously high amount of Triton torture victims in the stronghold. "You abandoned us". What if they are taking over Undersea from the inside? What if fake Elders spread propaganda, saying that Gill was not in fact banished but that he abandoned his people willingly? So maybe they are willing to appoint a new Chosen, Jayson?

Why would Edyn want to help them with all that? "I just want you to be able to come back home again"

If Jayson is a new Chosen, then Gillion doesn't have to be. If Gillion becomes a regular person Edyn can take him home, they can live a normal life and if the world has to burn because of it, so be it. Gillion will be free. That's all Edyn cares abt.

Let me know if I fully lost my mind please.

[merionettes]

part 1 of how rubicon got written is here. this is part 2, aka the essay about etc.

the thing about the storyboarding/drafting process that there is no way to describe is how totally obsessed i was for the duration. afterwards i tweeted something like, this is the closest i've ever experienced to demonic possession. i would get up, write all day—like, all day—and go to bed. turn off the lights. then i would just lie wide awake in the dark with lines and scenes and dialogue scrolling through my head until i gave in and opened my notes app. i could not turn it off even if i wanted to. and i didn't want to, i was riding that streak as far as it would take me. because i couldn't look down, right? i could sense what i was attempting to do and anything other than total tunnel vision full speed ahead eyes on the prize would mean i had to acknowledge it.

(context of what made this possible: i was unemployed at the time.)

for the first ~50k or so i was afraid that at any minute i could falter. when i got to the nationals meltdown, that was when i knew i could do it. like, no matter what happened after that, i had the willpower and the chops and i knew where i was going. even if the streak died.

but it didn't. i wrote 100k in a little under 4 weeks. i've never experienced anything like that in my creative life. 

—then obviously i had to get a new job and come back down to earth and it took 21 months to get from there to posting the epilogue. still. i will probably be chasing that high for the rest of my life. that was the part that like… made the rest of it possible. no matter how difficult or frustrating it was. that generated the roadmap. 

i've talked about this before in comments but i had insanely strong opinions about what was "right" and what wasn't. sylvain's narrative voice was a huge part of that. it's inextricable from the content; it shaped the story; it is the story. for the first couple months it also made me an unhinged stylistic tyrant. if there was one single unnecessary word that struck me as inorganic, as existing solely to make the sentence more digestible or to convey information beyond the fourth wall, it had to go. i could not rest until it did. 

once again: this is not generally the relationship i have with writing. lol. it's the demonic possession talking. this is why you have a ton of sentence fragments and stylistic tics and a refusal to let one single shred of information into the text that did not strike me as something sylvain would plausibly think or acknowledge he was thinking. and like, yeah. probably it didn't always make for the smoothest reading experience or the most satisfying narrative development. i'm dead certain there are people who picked this fic up and the bumps drove them out of their mind until they threw in the towel. i just didn't care. 

part of that was a reaction to my own old style—you know, the discomfort of shedding old skin. i'd look at those early scene attempts and see all the habits and crutches i'd been trying to move away from over the last two years and double down on The Voice. but part of it… i would get early feedback that wasn't at all wrong, like "what if [clarifying narration]," "what if [more interaction]," and i'd just think, but that's not true. in exactly those words! which is crazy.

(this is why it was fortunate this was fanfiction i was writing for free, i didn't have to compromise my bonkers experience any more than i wanted to.)

to be clear this feeling didn't last two years. i was eventually able to edit like a normal person. it did last probably longer than ideal. and the point when i was no longer running on unleaded creative adrenaline was when i started to really struggle with the middle of the story. i had to make choices as a writer, instead of relying on the purity of my divine vision or whatever, and i second-guessed myself a lot. it was much easier to feel that absolute bone-deep certainty of Right and Wrong, True and False. and the thought of fucking up when i'd gotten so far was unbearable—like, being so close to making the thing in my head reality and then dropping the ball and breaking the suspension of disbelief.

distance also made it possible to perceive what i was doing and be like, jesus mer what the fuck are you doing. why are you devoting so much of your time to a hobby, why are you investing so much of your life in something you will never be able to truly share, why are you living in a hole with no one else in it. why are you putting yourself through the wringer to get it down "right." why does it matter if it's as good as it can be. why do you care. why is this worth it.

i assume this was pretty obvious before this post, but if not it must be now. this story isn't really about figure skating. for me it's about writing; who knows what it's about for you. i didn't sit down and think, great, felix will be a metaphor. that's just how it happens. 

the experience of writing a novel for the first time: i'm saying this with my whole chest because at one point i wouldn't have, aloud. but what's the point in calling it anything else? i know exactly how much i invested in this. i'm the only one who can know. that's sort of the point. 

here's a giant collage of the inside of my head. i made it for myself and i take it very seriously. not exactly groundbreaking to say this is the ultimate exercise in solipsism. when you're doing that—what greater gift is there than to have someone else meet you in exactly the same place. any writer would kill for the kind of responses this story has gotten, and i don't mean praise. i mean the close reads, the free response essays, the total and complete validation that this thing inside your head that only you can see is real, actually. when i say thank you, it's not for liking it or praising it—it's for taking it seriously. i loved this thing. i still love this thing. thank you for taking it seriously.

[warmesthello]

DNDADS S2E30 Thoughts (spoilers warning)

The way that the intro was about Hermie and yet they still forgot about him...it is what it is for us Hermie-enjoyers I suppose. But also, I'm glad that Anthony is still adding some weight to the fact that they're forgetting him. He deserves to get a little pissed at the fact that they never remember his existence (though as a DM Anthony could also give Hermie some agency and have him interact with scenes without having to be acknowledged by the party, especially since he has just kinda become part of the group).

Somewhat of a Gothcleats slay with Link breaking the pick out of love, hoping that Scary could rejoin them and be on their side. The bathroom scene was also bonkers, I think I just have a soft spot for whenever Matt and Beth do scenes together because they can get so unhinged so quickly, especially playing as teens.

Beth is truly making Scary both terrible and sympathetic in such a teen girl way. Scary is attention-seeking and mean and I think she even knows she's wrong (at least a little bit) but it's all just because she wants to be acknowledged as her own person. Her scene with Willy was so chilling because it's the first real time we've seen him treat her like he treated Ron. I know most people recognized that Willy was manipulating her, but him yelling at her and telling her that he thought she was smarter and overall pulling the disappointed dad act just for Scary to turn around and double down her devotion and try to prove that she can be smarter and better...whew that was rough. I have even more thoughts about why Scary will look up to Willy but not Terry Jr. but I will save that for its own post.

I think Link is hilarious and blunt when it comes to his interactions with everyone but DAMN I wish someone would lay off of Normal for once. Like, Nicky just told him that not only is he not the "chosen one" but his family didn't even really want him and Link still comes in for the kill telling him to calm down about his family not wanting him...I'm sorry, what??? Normal has every right to be super fucking depressed and angry right now and yet he never embraces it. Every act he takes is to protect his friends and family (AND THE WORLD) and I would argue that despite his little ego break in Pride he still is the most selfless of the kids because he acts without caring how others treat him 90% of the time as long as they let him stay by their side and he STILL gets shit for having any moments of frustration or selfishness. At this point, I am waiting for him to have his rightful arc by himself (or with Hermie if he remembers to bring him along) where he gets to embrace the Doodler and show it the love it lacked (and maybe in turn get some sick ass powers or just be embraced back and be supported in his own goals for once).

Taylor bonding with Nicky was so sweet. I'm glad that they actually took a moment to show that Nicky cares about Taylor and Taylor, given the chance, would absolutely love to spend time with his super cool dad. The saddest part of S1 trial arc was seeing how alone Nicky felt and how much he kept from Glenn because he didn't feel like he could be vulnerable and it's nice to know that Nicky is trying to connect and be there for his son. EVEN THOUGH ANTHONY FUCKING CUT HIM IN HALF AFTER THAT.

I have so many more thoughts but I really have to stop it here or it'll never end

[aries-tornado]

When I lived in Wisconsin I was not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by my then fiance. Even when he'd go away for long hitches to the oil or solar fields, he'd buy a month or two worth of groceries for me, my daughter, and when we had them, our dogs.

I was not even allowed to go outside with the dogs to play with them, not even to clean up their poo. That was a job my fiance tasked to my then 4-5 year old daughter. Which, in a "normal" house hold is fine, at least I think. Especially with a parent helping and encouraging. But he was gone a lot in the winters and the ground would freeze. She'd struggle and my anxiety of having to shout to her from the cracked open door on how to make the task easier destroyed me the first time or two. Bless her, she listened so fuckjng well. But, after the second time, I told her to make a "big girl pinky promise" that I'd do it, but she had to tell "daddy" she was the one doing this task.

Any sane person would, rightfully, ask "but if your abuser was 2 states away, how would he even know if you went outside?" and it's a good question.

I was (looking back) so far into Stockholm Syndrome. My reality was so warped, and I lived not in *a* world, but his world. I felt like every neighbor was on his side, or his bank roll. Or, even though he would talk so badly of these neighbors, would calculate a way to make buddy buddy enough that if I was spotted outside, they'd feel comfortable to approach me and then text him. Like "hey, just saw your old lady doing yard work and finally introduced myself, nice gal!" And I add "finally" to that fake text scenario because, even living there 4 or 5 years, I NEVER met the left most male neighbor. My fiance would have beers with him sometimes on a weekly basis, over at his house, then come back drunk and accuse me of fucking the guy. Gun to my head, a line up to 5 men, I could not tell you who this man is. And our right most neighbor, I had seen once or twice, but only because he was an older man, who literally sold my fiance the house.

All that to say, I'd wait til midnight, 1am. I'd dress head to toe covered. Think black sweats, boots, a black hoodie, hood up and drawstrings pulled tight. I'd have to boil water, to throw on the ground, to melt the ice, to pick up the dog poop. I mean, whatever. It's not a big deal, but at the same time? Bonkers.

But whatever.

What I did in my spare time, in this jail cell of a home, is a complicated answer. But what I'm reminded of today, tonight actually, is when I was at my lowest mentally. Probably the last year, maybe 2 years. Time is a fickle bitch and it's kinda pointless to try to hammer down time frames from the past.

I taught myself how to lucid dream. And yes!! That is absolutely something you can teach yourself! It can be quite fun, and I had a LOT of time to nail it down. Before I got BAD bad, I'd have fun and fly around my childhood hometown. Visit places I remember fondly. But this isn't about those times.

Sleeping became an escape from my reality. And before anything else, let me just say YouTube and music were my biggest "awake" escapes. So when I tell you I'd dream about Pewdiepie just hanging out with me on my birthday, you can laugh. It's parasocial and weird. But who else could my subconscious conjure up?

Usually I'd go to sleep and let the dreams form on their own, and slowly take the wheel to turn it into something happy. Pewdiepie (Felix) and his now wife Marzia, were commonly good friends. Mac Miller, or someone resembling him, was a common "partner". I remember what felt like a year within my dream, of just living a "normal" life with "Mac". Having an apartment in NYC, going to the flea market together. Laying on the couch cuddling. Watching a TV show giggling, and looking up to see him not watching the show, but me, before kissing my forehead and telling me how cute I was. The funny thing was, truly, there was never any sex. Just happiness. Feeling lover.

It was lovely, and unhinged, to be able to even take an hour nap and feel transported far away. To a life where my fiance never existed. Even when my waking brain thought everything was, or would be okay...my sleeping brain knew I deserved unconditional love. And that this relationship was not okay.

Tricky thing is sometimes I'd wake up feeling better. But other times I'd wake up mad. Mad that it wasn't real. It's not like I actually expected to be wisked away by Mac Miller. Lol. I just wanted that kind of love. The life where I could walk outside with my head up, go places alone and be trusted. Not spend an hour covering up a black eye with a pound of makeup before resigning to be "that douche" that wore sunglasses inside.

But, happy or not afterwards? I miss that. Because that "superpower" of at least semi-lucid dreaming?

It's gone.

How many years has it been? 5, maybe six since I stepped foot, my daughters hand in mine, out of my exes truck, onto pavement, luggage in hand at the bus stop to "freedom".

And here I am, writing this, after a very long, no good, very bad, teeth clinching day off of work. My lucid dreams are now all nightmares. Night terrors. (Can you call it a night terror if it happens during a daytime nap? Huh..)

It felt like I had 10 long dreams today, but they all had the same tone. Me, in a situation, where I needed help. One of the dreams was about when my ex, but based on the IRL time we went to visit his brother and Mom in Las Vegas. He had herion connections there, and he bought us some. And we were both strung out of our minds for the maybe week we were there.

For clarity, I'll include this dream and my commentary of it in brackets...

[[But in this dream, I ran away in the middle of the night. Dropped like that little pin on Google Earth street view into the heart of the city. It was a mash-up of my real experience of being homeless in Albuquerque, as well. My mission was to stay "well" enough to make it to this rehab center that "I knew" would help me. Why I knew? Idk man, its a fuckin dream. I was constantly hiding in alleys, and junkie houses, only able to shoot up enough to be "okay" enough to continue running from the cops. (Now that I type this out - maybe the cops in my dream represented my ex. But who knows. I don't get too into dream interpretation). Anyway, long and frustrating situation after situation later, I made it to the rehab. I collapsed on the floor in front of what was a group session of already admitted patients. The staff helped me until they got my driver's license.

"You're 20" the nurse said to me blunty. "We only take minors, 13-19." I absolutely lost it, screaming and crying "BUT TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY, I JUST TURNED 20!! PLEASE!!! I NEED FUCKING HELP!"

The room was quiet and the other teenaged patients took up for me. Kinda saying "cmon, she's just barely 20, I'm sure you can bend the rules," etc.

I begged until I was drooling at the mouth before the nurses and doctors shook their heads in disappointment, "if only you'd have come a day sooner..."

I was kicked back to the streets, to which I knew I was a lost cause, and continued the cat and mouse chase that is homelessness & drug use.]]

Sleep used to be an escape. Peace. Sometimes just silly nonsense that dreams can be. But now, I just want to dream nothing. I wish I could train my brain to just shut the fuck up for a few minutes, a few hours, for fucks sake.

I woke up from this dream, and the many others, feeling like my world was spinning. Anxiety, clinched teeth, taking time to truly wake up and tell myself where I truly was. And this happens, a lot.

My mind is not a safe space to be. It is scary. It's a scary place to be alone in.

[roxannepolice]

The old plotting and the old genius, that dark old genius is still there and instantly knows what to do.

What, competence? In the fandom's Master? Jail on RTD!

There's something brilliantly circus-like about what he does. You know, he gets the American President […] and he gets him up there addressing the world and obliterates him. This is the ultimate cliffhanger because he's facing his arch nemesis, this guy who is every bit as clever as he is, and every bit as charismatic, actually.

What, how dare, not pathetic meow meow?????

It was an inevitability that he had to come back, because you do need a ying to the Doctor's yang. You do need to feel that… I mean, the Daleks are one particular type of threat. The Cybermen are a different type of threat. The Master kind of is the Doctor's equal.

Watch out, David, you might imply the Master actually has, like, mindspace for anything else than the Doctor.

He is unhinged. And it's quite unusual to have an evil genius that's just unhinged, that is just bonkers.

How did he become so barking mad in the first place? You know, why is he the absolute antithesis of all that is good and all that's normal in the universe?

Oh, a meta may come from this.

John Simm: It's all evident on the page when you read the scripts. It's quite clear what he wants.

David Tennant: He's going to build a new Time Lord empire. He's going to rule the whole universe. He's going to be High President of everything if he gets his way. He's unstoppable, and he can floor the Doctor. He can render the Doctor incapacitated with one flick of his laser screwdriver.

Nonononono you both got wrong. He just wants to be luvved :(

In case this wasn't clear I'm not a big fan of framing the Master purely through their relationship with the Doctor. No. That's the usual approach to a likeable villain that the fandom (and let's be real, the writers lately) are drowning in. Going the opposite route was arguably my favourite part of RTD's writing of the Master :>

Watching s3 confidential and let me just say

FINALLY SOME GOOD FUCKING MASTER TAKES

[eugeniedanglars]

BEYOND obsessed with this house in fort worth, texas i mean

okay pretty normal, let’s look at the interior photos—

WHAT THE FUCK

here we see the first example of a pattern that will recur throughout the house, which is that once your eyes adjust to the bonkers dictator chic marble-and-gilded-everything, you notice some pretty egregiously shoddy workmanship. look at how that baseboard intersects with the outlet. look at how the marble... uh, thing on the wall (i was gonna call it a fireplace but it’s not a fireplace, i have no idea what that is) has gaps and weird angles wherever two pieces meet. it’s like they’re trying to recreate versailles on an ikea budget

i... don’t hate the kitchen. i mean, obviously it’s ugly and #toomuch and there was zero effort made to match the very modern appliances and sink to the cabinets, but still, i’m a sucker for a pass-through and a big sink with a window above it.

this ceiling Fucks but the wrinkly, uneven curtains and terrible caulking around the faux-column in the middle anti-Fuck

why did we suddenly completely switch aesthetics. why is there an old TV set into the wall at floor level. why is there a tiny set of doors next to it. why does the fireplace look like an asset ripped from the original dark souls. i feel a sinister presence sucking at my soul the longer i look at this photo

i feel like whoever designed this monstrosity started with the dining room and then once they’d finished it realized they’d blown half their budget on just this one room. it’s so overdecorated that the gaudiness feels intentional, like it’s a statement rather than a side effect of genuine tastelessness. i can applaud that.

here we have the antithesis of the dining room. i don’t know what this room is supposed to be but i hate it. i’m pretty sure everything in this photo literally came from ikea. there is a lack of commitment here and it is rancid

ladies, gentlemen, distinguished colleagues, we have now hit the cornerstone of any great tacky real estate listing: the heart-shaped bathtub! this one gets bonus points for being next to a gilded mirror and surrounded by bright red damask wallpaper. as a bathtub i’d give it a 1/10 because those angles look incredibly uncomfortable, but as a place to shoot my lover through the heart while wearing a gauzy fur-trimmed bathrobe before fleeing with our ill-gotten fortune i’d give it a solid 11/10

here we are with the lack of commitment again. this literally looks like the kitchen in my college dorm but with a weird fringey lamp and some curtains that are absolutely too long for their windows

again, the mix of styles here is just killing me. half damask wallpaper and carved wall panels, half normal-ass bathroom? really? isn’t there anything truly unhinged left in this house? anything truly opulent, decadent, off the chain, extravagant, gaudy—

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT BAY BEE!!! THAT’S MORE THE FUCK LIKE IT!!! COMMIT! TO! THE! BIT! GO BIG OR GO HOME! IF YOU’RE GONNA STICK A CEILING DOME IN THE FOYER OF YOUR SUBURBAN TEXAS HOUSE IT HAD BETTER BE TWELVE FEET IN DIAMETER AND PAINTED WITH DOZENS OF FLOWERS OR ELSE WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE??

and finally, to close out the show, a reminder that this entire acid trip of a real estate listing took place in an ordinary, modern single-story house in texas, one with a backyard and utility boxes on the exterior walls and neighbors who may be blissfully unaware that they live mere feet from a yawning pit of madness.

i love tacky real estate listings.

[littlespoonevan]

okay but can we just go back to the shooting for a sec and the ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BONKERS « i think it would’ve been better for him if it was me who got shot » line because, buck. buck, buddy, pal, OF COURSE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER. i mean?? literally ANYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET would have been a better target than the kid’s SOLE REMAINING PARENT, WHY ARE WE EVEN DISCUSSING THIS. except. exCEPT. Eddie Diaz, absolute legend, hears this and instead of reacting like a normal person goes and say ahah joke’s on you, you are ALSO my kid’s dad, BY LAW, it’s in my WILL and i did this a year ago and am only telling you now and IT’S TOTALLY NOT WEIRD, nope, allll normal here. like. what the fuck. what the fuck was that.

askjdfhdjkh anon, you are so right it's all absolutely unhinged behaviour how did any of this happen?????? how were casual viewers supposed to watch that and go yes this is an entirely normal and platonic thing to happen of course??????? until they talk about it again i'm honestly gonna be half-convinced it was a group fever dream

[jupitermelichios]

So I decided to try watching Riverdale, and I have... thoughts. And also the words ‘holy homoeroticism batman’ written several times in increasingly large letters.

I started on season 2, because everything i read suggested that was when the show went off the rails, and i am here exclusively for the batshit weirdness. but it’s fine, because the show decided to fill me in on what i missed during the two consecutive 'previously on' sequences. was one not enough? was there an ad break between them? did they think people would forget what show they were watching if there wasn’t a little break and a logo splash halfway through?

we open on archie rushing his dad into the worlds most empty emergency room. there’s no one, no patients, no doctors, not even a receptionist, just a big empty room, right until the extras smell the blood of a protagonist and all converge. i assume they’re just desperate for something to do, working in the world’s least used hospital.

does snake pliskin exist in this universe? betty makes a reference that doesn’t really make any sense otherwise and given what i know about where the show goes eventually, it feels like a very real possibility. is this the escape from new york universe?

jingle jangle. they called the drug jingle jangle. honestly no criticism, amazing job everyone on the writing team, keep it up!

“dropping vintage bon-mot like vintage bon-bons” is a hell of a line that only works if you have no idea how bon-mot is said (and no idea what one does with a bon-bon. why are you dropping your candy on the floor veronica). fortunately neither the writers or the actress delivering it do, so it’s fine.

getting into the shower with someone without asking is a risky proposition. You have to be really sure they want it. there’s normal ‘i thought you were into it but you’re not’ awkwardness, and then there’s ‘i thought you were into it but you’re not and also i’m standing here wet and naked now’ awkwardness.

how many gangs are opperating in riverdale? I count three so far. riverdale is not that big, is it?

Actually for real, how big is riverdale? I have absolutely no idea. it’s a local small town with exactly one place to eat but it supports two highschools and three gangs. do we know where riverdale is, and is it anywhere near smallville?

cheryl sure knows how to dress for maximum drama. in general i’m basically neutral on the costumes, but everything cheryl has worn has been a Look and i am here for it. sexy runway victorian ghost aesthetic, yes, amazing, no criticisms.

define hood, because i’m not sure you know what it means. that’s a mask. i get that the comics character is called the black hood, but the costume team could have put him in a hood, why was their solution ‘ski mask but no one in town will admit it’s a ski mask’

half the high school is in this fucking hospital to support archie’s dad, good thing there’s zero other patients or staff or it would be getting crazy crowded

what riots, pop? you can’t just drop in ‘someone threw a brick through our window during the riots’ with no further explanation. what fucking riots?!

wise old spiritual black man, but he's just some dude is a take honestly. does he have some kind of special knowledge or divine connection? nope, he’s just a dude who likes being extremely cryptic in service of absolutely nothing

is cheryl magic? does she think she's magic? what does she think the kiss of life is?  i was under the impression that magic wasn’t going to be real in this show for another season or two, but cheryl apparently does not agree!

the problem with every actor playing a kid in this show being in their mid twenties (insert KennieJD ‘brooding hot 25 year old teenager’ jingle) is that then they show a music teacher kissing a student and i have absolutely no context for how creepy it’s supposed to be. like, she’s twenty, he’s twenty, we’re not in a school setting, I have no idea how i’m supposed to be reacting. he might be an adult who’s decided to take up piano, or she might be a straight up paedophile, and i have literally no idea which. am i supposed to be sad she’s dead?

headmaster is weirdly supportive of his students becoming armed vigilantes. i feel like every teacher i’ve ever had would have had more questions than that.

as the grandchild of a silversmith, i have to say, veronica polishing the silver cutlery as one of her chores is a weirdly believable detail for a show this unhinged. that was one of my chores as a teenager, and still is when i stay with my mum for more than a couple of days. pros of your grandad knowing how to silver-plate: pretty. cons: absolutely everything that stood still long enough eventually got silver plated and it all needs polishing.

Love that everyone still has archie comics names. the mob lawyer is called penny peabody. amazing.

maybe it's the fact that i'm in my 30s but archie's dad is the only attractive person on this show

ebony dark'ness dementia raven way would be very disappointed by how milktoast the goths in this show are. try harder, CW wardrobe department.

oh man, the lighting team absolutely went off for this show, and i kind of love that it's in service of absolutely nothing

holy homoeroticism batman

i’m in this weird place where objectively bonkers things have happened, but not as much or in the way that i want them to, and i can’t decide if it’s worth sticking with it to get to the later more bonkers seasons.

on an unrelated note though, this is the creative team i would choose for a nailbiter adaptation. the weird lighting and colour pallettes, the time displaced americana vibe, honestly even some of the writing, exactly what i would want from a nailbiter tv show.

[bnha-mha-imagines]

Okay, get this: a new lov member who’s really awkward and shy. Everyone thinks she’s just a normal gal but it turns out she’s absolutely out of her mind? /sigh/ I don’t even know anymore 😔 rip. I’m so bad at requesting it should be my new party trick. Anyways, I hope you have a good day and I love your writing!!

Ahh thank you! :) I’m not sure if you wanted this to be cute or disturbing so I went with the latter because nothing I’ve posted so far is dark themed (all my stuff is like, fluff haha)! :0 Let’s get some well rounded writing up in here! 

New LOV member who’s secretly insane

Warnings: DARK THEMES that include but are not limited to: Blood, dead animals, disturbing images, cannibalism, death, hearing voices, sadism/masochism, violence, mentions of self-harm etc. etc. You get the picture. 

^^^Don’t read if you’re sensitive to similar topics. I went ham on this, yall. 

Disclaimer: The reader depicted in this is chronically insane and is an extreme case. This is in no way a depiction of a person with a mental disorder. I don’t want to spread any misinformation, most people with mental disorders are lovely people and are not crazy/dangerous in anyway

Under the cut vvv

Tomura Shigaraki:

Look, he wasn’t a fan of the whole awkward-shy act, but hey, you were pretty hot and you had a quirk that the League definitely needed

So he let you in, figuring he’d just need to have that timid attitude of yours whipped out of you

But OH. It didn’t take long for him to realize you were completely bonkers. 

Dabi was giving you shit like he did everyone, and all it took was a poor comment on his part for your usually pleasant expression to contort into one of malice and...joy? The way your face darkened and your eyes swirled with an unhinged gleam… 

Maybe you’d be more interesting than he initially thought~ plus, seeing you threaten Dabi was definitely some brownie points in Tomura’s book

At times it gets frustrating because you can get out of hand, and he honestly couldn’t even handle the League WITHOUT another crazy added in the mix

But you were powerful and an important addition to the team, so you were stuck with this sorry lot whether you liked it or not

Kurogiri:

He was a little surprised, but pleasantly so, when Tomura recruited you for the League. You were actually...rather normal compared to the rest of the bunch, but he was far from complaining!

You were also modest and well-mannered, and Kurogiri especially admired that. The rest of the League was full of squabbling hotheads, so you were a breath of fresh air!

At the bar, he’d talk a lot with you seeing as you were one of the calmer villains, but overtime he noticed that certain comments would raise a few red flags. 

One day you bring in the mangled body of a cat and...oh. 

The way you casually set it on the bar counter and grin at Kurogiri happily while you ask for a kiddy cocktail… all the while your hands were still soaked in its blood.

Tomura’s decision made a bit more sense now. You were completely off your rocker! He treats you pretty much the same as before, but is usually the one who has to reel you in when you start to show your crazy too much. 

Dabi:

When you first joined the League, he couldn’t believe it. Was Tomura fucking stupid? How could a shy, pretty thing like you possibly fit in with the baddest villain organization?

Needless to say, he was kind of an asshole to you. He’d make rude comments, blatantly say you didn’t belong here, condescendingly give you names like “princess” 

For the most part you would bear it all with a grin, and though he didn’t exactly understand you reaction, he would scoff and roll his eyes. “Weirdo”

One day he happens to strike a particularly strong chord with you, and suddenly you’ve shoved him against a wall, hands wrapped around his throat

You choking him wasn’t what off put him. It was the demented look in your eyes and the lopsided grin overwhelming your face. You were practically begging him to insult you again.

“It feels soooo good when you call me names!” you giggle, fingers squeezing into his neck. “Maybe you can choke me next?!” Your eyes were excited at the sadistic thought. 

He shoves you off rather easily after he gets over his initial surprise, rubbing his neck. “Crazy bitch…”

The fact that he didn’t ignite your crazy ass on the spot means you’d gained his respect, if in the slightest. Clearly you’re a better fit to be a villain than he thought. He still picks on you, but significantly less.

Himiko Toga:

She was excited to have another girl! She flocked straight to you and grabbed your sleeve right away!

“Aiiya! You’re so cute, look at you!” She poked your cheeks and you got a little flustered under the attention. She thinks you’re so shy and adorable!!!!

She makes it her mission to become your bestest best friend! But she can’t help but get a little excited from time to time.

“(Y/n), you’re too cute! Please, can I cut you up!? Just a few slices here and there! You’d look ten times cuter if I do!” And she’s grinning.

Her grin completely falters, however, when you agree. “W-What?” she didn’t expect it at all! She was used to getting brushed off.

But no...the crazed look in your eye at the mention of spilled blood… you were practically dripping with insanity. 

Kurogiri stopped the both of you before you both had the chance to completely slice each other up, but from that moment on your were pretty much conjoined at the hip.

Crazy cuties flock together

Spinner:

When a cute, shy thing like yourself joined the League, he was a total flustered mess! You were absolutely adorable!

Like Kurogiri, you were a breath of fresh air, a nice change of pace to the usually colorful bunch that he got to hang around with.

You were nice to him, and he always gets embarrassed when you compliment him! So naturally he assumes that you’re the sweetheart of the bunch! 

You’re talking, and finally Spinner outright asks you, “How’d you even get roped into villainy?” because it blows his mind such a normie like you are in the League

And, very casually and chipper, you describe how you murdered your family in cold blood. They hadn’t even done anything to upset you. You just wanted to. 

“O-Oh.” He honestly didn’t know what to say...but he didn’t really get a chance to speak as you suddenly pull a necklace out from under your shirt. It was a strange looking thing, a shriveled black lump on a string. 

“Look! I even carry a piece of them around with me!” His eyes widen, and you just giggle and tuck the petrified piece of corpse jewelry back into your shirt. 

Twice:

Needless to say, Twice had some mixed feelings about you when you first joined the League.

“What the hell is such a prude bitch doing in the League?” “Aww how cute! Finally a fresh face! Happy to meet you!” 

He’s honestly probably the first to realize you’re absolutely batshit because he’s always half doubting your sincerity

Let’s just say he isn’t surprised when you’re on a mission and you start gnawing and eating at a fresh corpse on the ground

“Wow, that’s fucking bad ass” “Ew!!! That’s disgusting, what the fuck!” 

And hearing his voices go back and forth, you just look up, blood smeared across your face, a strange gleam in your eye and you grin!

“Hahaha! Twice, you always say the funniest things!!!”

After the mission he tries to avoid you as much as he can. Though your quirk and tenacity was something the League definitely benefited from, that didn’t mean he wanted to be anywhere near you after the shit he saw that night

You were fucking wild

Mr. Compress

After Shigaraki let you into the League, he was pretty interested in you. You seemed pretty average and you acted like a timid civilian, so what kind of quirk did you have? Surely something must have caught Tomura’s eye that he wasn’t seeing.

So he, being the man of charisma and mystery that he was, made it his secret motive to find out what you were hiding. 

He took it upon himself to show you around the hideout as your own personal guide. Not that you were complaining! Compress is so flashy and entertaining that you were actually enjoying your time with him.

Not gonna lie, he was acting a little too charming and over-confident with you, trying to get you to slip up and spill a secret

And spill you did! Though not intentionally. It sort of all happened at once. Compress was moving ahead of you and all of a sudden he was thrown back against the wall.

He hits it with a grunt and slides down to the floor, looking up at you with a stunned expression. What the fuck did he do to merit that?!

But you weren’t even looking at him. No, you were whispering under your breath, staring at the ceiling and grinning like a madman. 

“You’re right! That was fun!” you spoke to the empty room, pausing a moment before letting out a loud, crazy laugh. “You always were good at jokes!” 

Slowly he rose and moved away from the room where you stood conversing with your imaginary voices. 

Telekinesis was a pretty powerful quirk! Though it seemed your perks also came with some hefty flaws… very interesting!

Magne: 

Magne was so excited to have another girl in the League! She loved Toga, of course, but at times Magne found her to be a bit...much 

So when you first arrived, seemingly normal, she was so ecstatic! She wanted to do all sorts of girl things with you that she couldn’t really do often in the boy-dominated League

You were so cute and timid, she couldn’t help but want to have a girl’s sleepover with you and Toga!

Your true colors started to show, however, during the middle of a truth or dare game. Magne had asked you what your favorite crime to commit was, expecting something calmer like robbery or identity theft 

Color her surprised when your face contorts into the craziest, most terrifying look as you narrate a violent murder and proceed to grab a pillow and rip it to shreds with your hands as a ‘demonstration’. 

Cute AND violently psycho. She can roll with that.

[horrorlad]

Horrorlad Reviews: The Dentist (1996)

Or at least, like, talks about it a bunch. 

Boy was I overthinking my first real Horror Lad post! It was going to be Grave Encounters, but that will have to wait, because I got insomnia and decided to rewatch a movie I hadn’t seen seen since I was 14, which wound up being the perfect opportunity to write out a post!

Let’s talk about The Dentist!

So, The Dentist is a 1996 movie starring Corbin Bernsen. It was directed by Brian Yuzna (one of the producers of Re-Animator, he also directed the 1989 body horror film Society which I haven’t seen, though a cursory image search tells me I need to add to my watch list immediately).

Anyway, The Dentist is about a teethsman who catches his wife giving some other guy a BJ and gets so grossed out about it that he has a nervous breakdown about, uh, how dirty mouths are, I guess? He loses his absolute shit (though he didn’t seem to have it all that together to begin with; this guy’s Jack Torrance is way more Kubrick than King), and we the audience get to tag along for all the wacky fun.

Full disclosure: I can’t give an unbiased review of this movie. I watched it several times in high school, then completely forgot about it for ten years, until tonight. There’s too much nostalgia wrapped up in it.

That said, upon rewatching it, I am in LOVE with the structure of it as a film. You know how, some movies, you can tell that the people behind the scenes are having a blast? This is one of those movies. The structure of the shots vary wildly, and I suspect that there was not one tripod or stabilizer on that set. The makeup and effects are fun, every actor has an opportunity to shine at least once, and the pacing is totally bonkers. I will note, however, that for a slasher movie the confirmed death count is pretty low, AND most of the murders are less dentistry-related than you might expect. Still, it’s a good time, and right now it’s available to watch for free (with commercials) on Tubi, which is pretty sweet!

Read on for the content warnings and spoilers. In the meantime, I give The Dentist 3.5 tanks of nitrous oxide (use with caution).

Content warnings and plot synopsis below the cut.

Content Warnings

Also, I don’t really know what to classify this one as, but there is a lot of “ick” factor to this movie — rotting teeth, sludge, etc. If you’re easily squicked out by that sort of stuff, I’d proceed with caution.

Dental torture (and how!) – it’s basically the whole movie, folks.

Sexual assault – multiple instances, including a character having their head forced down while giving oral sex (in a daydream), and another character being assaulted while on nitrous oxide.

Spousal abuse (physical and emotional) – again, there’s a lot of this.

Child abuse – A young child has their gums stabbed by the dentist.

Animal abuse – a dog is shot offscreen.

--------------------------------------

Okay, spoiler time!

Whoo boy, here we go!

I have no idea why I watched this movie so much as a teen. Probably because it was free on FearNet (remember FearNet?) and I would watch just about anything.

Watching it as an adult, my first thought is… man this is weirdly paced. My second thought is that there’s a lot more non-dental-related murders than I would have expected, but we’ll come back to that.

So, our hero(?) is a dentist, and we meet him at the beginning of a framing device, miming dentistry and offering to tell us about his story. The bulk of the movie is then a flashback about how he got to where he is, interspersed with his monologuing or whatever. We meet him and his wife (who are a straight couple in a movie and thus required to completely hate one another) on their anniversary, a fact which becomes clear while he’s in the middle of throwing a fit about his laundry.

Pictured: a totally hinged man. Nothing unhinged going on here, no sir.

At any rate, he gets all suspicious after an interaction with the pool guy, and catches his wife having an affair with the guy. He continues framing-device-monologuing about decay and the world being filthy and all that, daydreams about assaulting his wife and murdering the pool boy, etc. He follows the pool guy to the neighbor’s house, acts all weird, shoots a dog — your basic Tuesday.

Eventually, he winds up at the office, starts hallucinating, assaults a couple of patients, and finally calls an early end to the day (self care is important). We get this delightful (in a heavy-handed sort of way) scene that keeps cutting back and forth between him setting out spooky dental tools and his wife getting dressed for the big anniversary surprise he’s has planned, and that’s when things really start to go haywire.

Okay.

So like.

I get that he’s a dentist.

I get that he’s a dentist whose whole shtick is having the themed exam rooms (though why we have aaaalll these rooms for a bunch of hygienists and one dentist is a little beyond me).

But you mean to tell me that this dude’s special anniversary surprise for his wife was to show her his new, opera-themed dental exam room?

“Oh, honey… you really, really shouldn’t have…”

Like, I know he’s settled on a revenge plot by this point, but I still definitely believe that this guy was legitimately planning the entire time to show his wife his fancy new dental suite as an anniversary surprise. Not to be that guy, but no wonder she was having an affair.

Honestly though, I love this scene. I love the camera PoV shots as he shows off the dental suite, I love the excessive gesturing with his left hand. I love how the scene starts off with his point-of-view of her, and then transitions into her point-of-view of him, cut with those big beautiful teeth-yanking shots. It’s ridiculous.

And then, they get home, he has some monologuing about the pool, etc.

Next scene, it’s the next day, some cops come to ask questions about the murdered dog, his wife is out back on a pool chair with her giant sunhat covering her face (the way normal, totally-not-drugged people hang out by the pool) while the pool guy does his pool guy stuff. Eventually the cops leave, yadda yadda yadda, the pool guy scoops the wife’s tongue out of the pool, he sees how fucked up she is, the dentist murders the shit out of him. It’s beautiful.

Don’t you love it when you finish your to-do list first thing in the morning?

The end.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Somehow, there’s still almost half a movie left.

This movie starts with this dude fighting with his wife, catching his wife cheating with the pool guy, hallucinating his wife’s nasty mouth on everyone, etc. You’d think that, with his wife tortured all to shit and the pool guy dead, the movie would have wrapped up.

I mentioned before that the pacing of the movie is weird, which it is. I mean, he has his “oop guess I’m evil now” scene on his way to work the next day, which basically means that just over half of this movie is the origin story. It could be longer, with the big climactic nonsense taking up the last quarter or so. It could be shorter, with him freaking out about his wife, losing his shit, and having a proper dental rampage. Instead, The Dentist flies in the face of conventional story structure.

But this man is a busy man. He’s a dentist, damn it.

He has to get back to work!

Things are happening fast now, let’s get condensed.

We go back to work, he pulls some malpractice shit on that lady whose dog he shot yesterday, then strangles Jessica-the-hygienist (I think that’s her job) when she calls him on it. Later, a man from the IRS comes in and uses the dentist’s shady tax junk to get free dental work which is, uh, inadvisable. IRS man, Marvin Goldblum, starts talking about our dentist’s wife (and about how unhinged shiksas are in bed, in case we somehow we didn’t piece together that he’s an awful Jewish caricature), and I’m sure the rest of his appointment goes totally normally.

Get a guy who looks at you like this.

Meanwhile, the cops are definitely onto him regarding the murder of that dog (after all, murdering dogs is THEIR turf). They go to his house, where he left the body of the pool guy he murdered just laying around outside for anyone to find (which they do). Then they go upstairs and find his wife, who is alive but so fucked up.

Back at the office, Karen-the-other-hygienist, looking for her coworker who got murdered earlier, stumbles upon the very fucked up IRS dude. We get to listen to the dentist give a little monologue about how grossed out he is that his wife put some dude’s “dirty, rotten… in her mouth!” before he injects air into a vein in Karen-the-other-hygienist’s neck to kill her.

Next up, this girl who has been waiting for two days to get her braces off gets called back. She’s adorable and chipper, so this, of course, can only go well. When’s the last time you had your dentist pull a gun on you?

Our scrappy youngster runs off, and he gives chase (we find that Mr. Goldblum’s jaw elongation procedure is going well by the way), before eventually letting her go after she promises to take very, very good care of her teeth.

After all, he’s got his next job to get to.

Let’s go teach dental students the importance of pulling out everyone’s teeth!

Yeeep, he’s a teacher! And after he shoots one of his students while hallucinating, the cops show up, resulting in the slowest chase scene any movie has ever had (I mean the dude is literally just briskly walking down the hall and he still gets away from them). Anyway, the dentist winds up in an auditorium where a woman is practicing her opera singing. The dentist is entranced by this (we know he loves opera from that scene with his wife earlier) and reaches out to the singer, but he hallucinates his wife’s hecked up face on her and drops to his knees, presumably to have the rest of his nervous breakdown. The cops… uh… well, they just kinda stand around looking disapprovingly at him while he sits on the floor. And that’s… that’s it, I guess?

“Nah, let him rest, he’s had a big day.” 

 In our final scene, we have some orderlies at his new mental institution drag him down for his regular appointment, where his wife (who I guess is a dentist now) starts drilling at his teeth. This may or may not be a hallucination. It probably doesn’t matter.

Wow. That certainly was a film.

Alright, so, I’ve been typing up my thoughts as I watch, and I think I’ve figured out what I like about this movie, that had me coming back to it over and over as a youngster. There are some movies that just look fun to film, and this is one of them. A number of the shots are really charming, for lack of a better word. There’s the anniversary scene with his wife I mentioned before, but so many others — this movie plays around with point of view, extreme close-ups, some very fun effects used to indicate the hallucinations… there’s even a sideways shot of one of the cops coming down the stairs. I seem to have a real fondness for that sort-of manic, anything-goes approach to filming. Related side note: is there a single steady shot on this whole film? I’m beginning to doubt it.

Corbin Bernsen does a great job. I mean, all the actors do, really, but he is something else. Like, I can’t think offhand of many actors who could successfully take the character “dentist in bad marriage has a nervous breakdown because his wife gives someone else a blow job and it grosses him out; goes on torturemurder spree” without overacting to the point of distraction. “What are you talking about, this dude’s hammier than Easter dinner,” you say. Now, I get the urge here, but I have to disagree; Bernsen plays a fantastic Emasculated White Guy Throwing A Fit.

That picture I posted up there, after the bit about the laundry argument? A dude who makes that face over the idea of wearing the wrong cuff links to work is at most twelve seconds away from completely losing his shit at any given moment. And the dude’s anniversary surprise for his wife was to show off his new, opera-themed dental exam room; none of this behavior seems too off the wall for that character. Granted, I haven’t seen the sequel yet, and the image searches do suggest that our dear dentist is about to use his well-cared-for teeth to chew the hell out of some scenery in The Dentist 2, but in this movie? I’m just saying it’s not an unbelievable portrayal.

Disgruntled white dudes aside, the rest of the cast seems to have a fun time too. Shout out to the receptionist literally sobbing over what a great dentist this guy is (stunning work). If nothing else, stop by for wee baby Mark Ruffalo before he was famous. It’s adorable.

LOOK AT HIM.

ALL THAT SAID, I have to state again how surprised I am by the sheer number of not-dental-related murders! Like, by my count, this guy commits a hefty amount of malpractice, but for a guy on a torturemurder spree, he sure does seem to keep his torture and his murder fairly separate. Let’s tally it:

I’m tired, let’s wrap this up. The Dentist is a fun movie about a dude who loses his shit, does some dental torture, does some murder, does ZERO dental torturemurders, and then just kinda tuckers himself out and sits down. It’s a big silly mess, and I love it.

Tortures: six

The kid at the beginning, the lady he sexually assaults (it counts), his wife (not dead), that lady whose dog he shot, Marvin the IRS guy (alive when last we see him), and the person at the dental school near the end.

Murders: three people, one dog.

The dog (shot), the pool guy (knifed), Jessica-the-hygienist (strangled), Karen-the-other-hygienist (air injected into artery), and that’s… it..? He does shoot that person at the dental school, but it doesn’t appear to be a fatal wound, and Marvin the IRS guy was alive when we saw him last.

Torturemurders: HECKIN’ ZERO.

Zero! None of the tortures are murdered, and nobody he murders is tortured! What the heck kind of slasher dentist doesn’t even kill people via dentistry? No wonder everyone looks down on him at the end.

Alright, first post written. I’m going to bed.

[junker-town]

The Astros and Dodgers broke the game of baseball into a million pieces

Game 5 of the 2017 World Series was baseball. Unless it was another sport entirely.

HOUSTON — Words fail. Analogies go limp. A common refrain for a game like Game 5 of the 2017 World Series is that baseball is drunk. Baseball is not drunk. Drunk people don’t fall up the stairs, through a window, and explode upon contact with the moon. This is not a movie. Movies have plots, logical progressions from A to B. This is not an avant-garde movie, either, where the director was trying to be weird. Both the Dodgers and Astros really, really, really wanted to be normal, and they absolutely could not.

Game 2 of the 2017 World Series forced me to break out the hyperbole stick, and angry readers wrested it from my hands and beat me with it. It was somewhat deserved. But the hyperbole stick is in control now. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t at least partially grounded in the truth. It was Michael Bay directing a movie based on Snoopy’s novel. A door slammed! A maid screamed! Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! The two teams rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves! A left and a right! A left! Another left and right! An uppercut to the jaw! And there were explosions, explosions, explosions the whole time.

No, seriously, there were explosions.

When you hit the HR ball so hard it explodes on impact http://pic.twitter.com/DDDtJANBaw

— That Dude (@cjzer0) October 30, 2017

I would like you to consider two truths, both equally valid. The first one is that this is the best baseball has to offer. It was lead change after lead change. It was the absence of hope followed by redemption, several dozen times, on both sides. This was a Rocky movie, where the on-screen boxing didn’t resemble real boxing, but nobody cared because it was so damned compelling. There were homers when you expected them and homers when you didn’t expect them.

(Just kidding. You expected all of the homers, and they still made you laugh.)

The second truth is this: That was unbelievably awful baseball. I have here in my hand a list of 205 stupid, dumb, irredeemable parts of this game. It was unthinkable calamity all around. Think about all of these dumb, awful baseball things:

The strike zone

The hanging sliders

The pitchers who couldn’t pitch

The strike zone

When Marwin Gonzalez attacked a fly ball like an infielder playing the outfielder

When Dave Roberts used his cleanup hitter to bunt

The game was well over five hours, and if you watch it again, I promise you that there are several extremely boring parts

Too many dingers

Slippery balls

George Springer diving for a ball he had no chance to catch

The strike zone

More than 400 pitches thrown

Joc Pederson watching as a ball caromed off the left-field wall, as curious as all of us

Clayton Kershaw walking everybody without missing bats after being spotted a four-run lead

There were five different half-innings in which a team scored three runs or more, which means there was a lot of screwing up on both sides

The Crawford Boxes, looming, 178 feet away from home plate, with unhinged jaws

Dallas Keuchel missing low and high and left and right

The strike zone

The completely un-baseball feel of the game. This was Poochie the baseball game, and it died on the way back to its home planet

And yet it was the absolute best baseball game. And the absolute worst baseball game. But also the best! When you mix the two of them together, it becomes a best-worst slurry that looks like this:

Everyone in the stands was pensive or angry or barfing or all of the above. Walking back and forth on the club level in the top of the ninth inning, I saw grown men throwing whatever was in their hands and grown women screaming unholy curses into the blackened void. After the bottom of the 10th, half the crowd vanished in the departure and the other half milled around in white clothes, smoking a lot and wondering what it all meant.

Fossil records indicate that the Dodgers were leading 4-0 at one point in Game 5, and Clayton Kershaw was pitching. After the Dodgers scored early runs, it was obvious that he was going to mow through the Astros, one right after the other, taking the Dodgers back home with a commanding 3-2 series lead. He threw 12 pitches in the first inning, and it was almost disappointing. When he allowed a leadoff single to Evan Gattis in the third inning, he rebooted and immediately got a double play.

That’s almost the best part about this game: It was so completely normal and predictable at one point. The Dodgers pounced on Dallas Keuchel, whose command failed him against a team that is incapable of chasing garbage outside of the strike zone. There was an early lead, and one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball was in a groove. It was going to be a dull, predictable game for the rest of the night. It was a boring prequel to Game 6, nothing more.

It was the Yuli Gurriel home run that initially caused the bananas to rain down from the heavens. Here was the player who shouldn’t rightfully be in the lineup but for collectively bargained bureaucracy, hitting a limp slider that probably had something to do with the weird, empirically different baseballs. It was both of the controversies du jour over the weekend, shot through the Large Hadron Collider and exploding into a multiverse of takes.

That was 48 years ago. We’ve all learned a lot since then.

After that three-run homer, there was, let’s see, a Cody Bellinger three-run homer, a Jose Altuve three-run homer, a triple, a homer, a double, a homer, a double, a homer, a homer, a two-out, two-strike single to tie the game, and a two-out single to win the game. In between all of that, there were walks and blown calls and singles and balls that caught far too much of the plate.

This was the grand ol’ game of baseball molting its exoskeleton and becoming something unrecognizable. Are the baseballs juiced? Or slick? Did the grind grind grind of relievers in the hook-happy postseason catch up to both teams? Does the season-long attention paid to pitch counts affect the stamina of pitchers trying to slog through an extra month of high-adrenaline baseball? Is this just how baseball is now, a cavalcade of unfathomably strong super-athletes waiting for mistakes that will inevitably come because pitchers have reached the upper limits of what the human body will allow?

It’s yes to all of the above, unless it’s no to all of them. Hell, I don’t know. You don’t either. It’s just different. We’ll get used to it just in time for everything to change again.

Game 5 was a wonderland of thinking, “What if this guy hits a home run right now?” and being instantly validated. I thought that exact sentence three different times tonight (Gurriel, Altuve, McCann) and was rewarded with what I was thinking, like the kid from the Twilight Zone episode. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing. I’m okay with going a month or two without having three moments like that. The rarity of the old way allowed for a more refined appreciation.

On the other hand, look at all those balls sailing into the night. George Springer’s ball exploded when it left the atmosphere. Gurriel’s nearly tore a hole through the wall behind the Crawford Boxes. Even the ones that just sailed out, like Correa’s and Puig’s, were majestic in their own ways. Sure, it took a slippery baseball and a short porch, but there was still the anticipation when the ball was in the air, a collective intake of breath, that was absolutely delightful.

Baseball is broken, baseball is redeemed, baseball is the best, baseball is the worst. It took more than five hours for the Dodgers and Astros to play Game 5, and it felt like 100 hours of baseball was packed into it. At some point, there was a shirtless dude in American flag shorts being led off the field in handcuffs, doing a little dance and getting cheered by the crowd. That was this game. Stupid, boorish, unwelcome, but also very much appreciated for its dumbness and willingness to go to jail.

The 2017 World Series is five games old. It’s already set several records, including the most home runs in a World Series, which is bonkers, considering there’s still a game or two to go.

I figured Game 2 was the wildest game we would see for months. It didn’t even take a week for baseball to get sillier and dumber. The Astros are a win away from their first ever championship, and the Dodgers are still two home wins away from their first in nearly 30 years. I’ve counted both of them out at several points during this World Series.

PredictioN: Game 6 will feature a pterodactyl. I’m not saying if it’s live or dead or reanimated. Just that it will feature a pterodactyl. I’d complain, but that would bring some normalcy to what has been the wildest back-and-forth World Series we can possibly imagine. Finally, a pterodactyl, I’ll say. It’s about time we have something that’s easy to understand.