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callmearcturus · 3 days ago

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@ghostbird-7 linked me to the GQ write-up about Christopher McQuarrie and I'm reeling. I'm losing my entire fucking mind.

I've felt an admiration and kinship for McQ's philosophy on creating art for years now and the specific way he does it, his journey from artist-first to the guy who is parachuted in to save movies from themselves to a tradesman and the back to an artist, the focus on methodology. I'm going to expire.

this one fucking bit:

McQuarrie began to notice patterns. Mistakes that were made, over and over again. Studios soon recognized this particular talent. Once, McQuarrie told me, in his capacity as a movie ER doctor, he was parachuted in on two separate films in distress, on which two totally different filmmakers both had an Apocalypse Now poster in their office. “And I said, ‘Let me tell you how to make Apocalypse Now. Let me help you because it’s so simple. First, make The Godfather, then make The Conversation, then make The Godfather Part II. Then take all of your personal capital and all of your professional capital and gamble that and your marriage and the life of your leading man and your sanity on a movie about a war that nobody wants to remember. And then spend years shooting it and put it in cinemas and no one will come and it will take decades before people recognize what it is. That’s how you make Apocalypse. Now let me tell you something: You’re not making Apocalypse Now.’ ”

because its so simple MCQUARRIE YOU MASSIVE BITCH. /fans face

ENTIRE ARTICLE UNDER THE CUT bc man that fucking paywall is a bitch to get around

When it comes time to start a new Mission: Impossible movie, the first thing that happens is Tom Cruise, the star of the franchise, and Christopher McQuarrie, its longtime writer-director, sit down together and they ask each other: What do you want to do? The answer is inevitably: something difficult and dangerous.

Years ago, when Cruise and McQuarrie were beginning to sketch out the plot of 2018’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout, Cruise proposed a helicopter chase: his character in the films, Ethan Hunt, pursuing a bad guy, played by Henry Cavill, while both of them were aloft. As a rule, in Mission: Impossible, stunts are real: meaning they are performed by the actual actors involved, at least when possible, and when they are being done by Tom Cruise, that means all the time. “He’s the only actor in the world who is actually going to do everything,” Fraser Taggart, the series’s director of photography, told me.

In the Mission: Impossible franchise alone, Cruise has climbed the shiny glass sides of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building; hung from the side of an A400 military transport plane as it took off; and ridden an actual motorcycle off the edge of an actual Norwegian cliff. He has a commercial pilot license. He is one of 36 people in history to be named an honorary US naval aviator. He can parachute and BASE jump and free dive. But one issue with this particular idea for Fallout was that Cruise, at the time, was not trained as a helicopter pilot. So Cruise and McQuarrie made inquiries, and they were told that at eight hours a day, seven days a week, it would take three months to get Cruise up to speed. Cruise asked: What about the other 16 hours in a day? A month and a half later, he was ready to fly.

The second problem with the idea was that it was so perilous that most countries wouldn’t allow Mission: Impossible to try it within their borders. This is the next conversation McQuarrie and Cruise have. “You’ve got to figure out: Where in the world are we going to shoot this?” McQuarrie said recently. “Well, we’re going to go (a) where Bond isn’t. And (b) where Fast and Furious isn’t. And (c) where Mission has never been. That Venn diagram says: Here’s where you’re shooting. Provided the State Department even allows you to go there.”

With the helicopters, McQuarrie and Cruise tried India first, but “when we told them what we were going to do,” McQuarrie said, “they were like, That’s not happening here.” Finally, they found a friendly government in New Zealand, which said, according to McQuarrie: “Shoot it away from population, and just know if you fly in this glacier and anything happens, there’s no one that can come and get you. You’ll be there forever. They’re going to fly over it and drop a plaque.”

With the location secured, McQuarrie and Cruise got to work. In the sequence they’d planned, Hunt is pursuing a turncoat named Walker, played by Cavill, who is holding the detonator to two nuclear bombs. To film the chase, McQuarrie and his cameraman followed Cruise in a second helicopter. Once in the air, the production followed a strict fuel countdown, meaning they only had so much time in the sky, but the shot was tricky to get right. McQuarrie, over the radio, would give Cruise direction: left pedal, right pedal, until Cruise had flown himself into the frame. “Tom is lining up the helicopter in a camera he can’t see,” McQuarrie recalled. “And I said, ‘That’s your mark. Maintain it.’ The reason it’s always in the frame is because Tom Cruise is both flying the helicopter, looking over his shoulder so the camera can see him, and acting. He’s doing all of that at the same time.”

Simon Pegg, who plays Benji Dunn, a member of the IMF, or Impossible Mission Force, in the series, told me he often feels “a sense of quiet dread” when the production is away attempting one of these sequences. For this one, Pegg said, “I remember when we said goodbye and Tom was going off to do all this stuff with Henry, I said, ‘See you in London. Or maybe not.’ ”

McQuarrie and Cruise have now been working together for nearly two decades, beginning with 2008’s Valkyrie, which McQuarrie wrote and produced, and Cruise starred in. Their partnership has become one of the most productive and lucrative in Hollywood history. And at its center is Mission, as everyone involved calls it—a franchise unlike any other. Based on the TV series from the 1960s, the basic ingredients are almost camp: Each time out, Ethan needs a mission, which will be relayed via a self-destructing device. At some point, someone will wear a latex mask of a face that is not their own. The plots will be baroque; the exposition will come in 40-foot waves.

And yet in its sheer scale, its locations, its dedication to practical effects, and most of all its star, Mission is unmatched. Since McQuarrie came aboard—first as an uncredited screenwriter on the 2011 Mission: Impossible installment Ghost Protocol—the series has also distinguished itself as the rare action franchise about, for lack of a better word, adults. One unofficial rule of Mission is that Ethan Hunt can’t want to do any of the insane things he has to do (ride a motorcycle off a cliff, hang off the side of a plane in midair, etc.), because what normal, mature person would? The primary emotions Hunt seems to feel are guilt, grief, and fear. Just like the rest of us.

To these movies, McQuarrie brings a unique and singular skill set: screenwriter (he won an Oscar, at age 26, for the second Hollywood film he ever wrote, The Usual Suspects), producer, star-handler, director, fixer, stuntman. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who worked with McQuarrie on Top Gun: Maverick, told me: “When you look at the town, there are maybe 10 really gifted writers, and maybe 10 really gifted directors, that you can rely on to make something that the audience is going to love.”

McQuarrie is on both lists. And though he tries not to talk about it much, he is also on a third list, as the guy you call when your movie, or your script, isn’t working but the train has left the station and the film is already in production. Sometimes he is credited for this work—as on Edge of Tomorrow or Top Gun: Maverick—and sometimes, as on World War Z, or Rogue One, he is not, which suits him fine.

For the one sequence in Fallout with the helicopters—a scene that would ultimately run around 12 minutes in the film—they shot about 80 hours of footage, Mission’s editor, Eddie Hamilton, told me. Eighty hours. While director and actor hovered in the air. In a canyon where if something went wrong, there would be no escape. “If you want to know why I’m working for Tom for 18 years and other people aren’t,” McQuarrie said, “lots of directors will do that once. They don’t ever want to fucking do that again.”

One day recently, McQuarrie was at home in London, where he lives in a two-story apartment near Hyde Park, racing to finish the latest and possibly last installment of the franchise, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. (McQuarrie and Cruise both remain coy about whether this is, in fact, the final Mission film.) It was a warm, quiet Saturday, and McQuarrie and Hamilton, his editor, were ensconced in an editing bay on the second floor of the apartment, working through the latest version of the iconic This message will self-destruct brief that more or less begins each Mission movie.

McQuarrie, who is called McQ by his friends, has an emphatic gray sweep of hair, clear-framed glasses, and the distinct and easily legible features of an iPhone emoji. He gestured at the scene on the monitors in front of him and Hamilton. “It’s a giant exposition dump,” he said. “And it’s always excruciating because information is the death of emotion.” Mission movies tend to be dense with plot that even the films’ creators don’t expect the viewer to fully retain. “I’m acutely aware of what I think you are and are not listening to,” McQuarrie told me. “I actually don’t rely on you to pay full attention. I kind of rely on you to drift in and out and get key things.”

McQuarrie began as a screenwriter: worshipful and intensely protective of the words on the page. But in time, and “as I started to understand my job as a director more, I started to understand, you got to let go of the word,” he said. Mission is made for massive global audiences. “Tom and I are talking all the time about the fact that every word you write is a word someone has to read in some part of the world. And that when they’re reading the subtitles, they’re actually not seeing the image. So my images have to tell the story and the words become music.”

McQuarrie had Hamilton cue up the sequence from the beginning and play it for me. “Good evening, Ethan,” intoned Angela Bassett, who plays the president of the United States in the film. Cruise silently watched a monitor as Bassett laid out his character’s history, where Hunt was now, and the stakes of his latest mission. Montages of destruction, nuclear warheads, scenes from past Missions played on the screen. “We’re motivating cuts based on specific words,” McQuarrie explained. “So even if you’ve tuned out, when you hear sacrifice, you might tune in for key words.”

The studio, Paramount, had recently screened Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning for a test audience in Paramus, New Jersey, a location chosen as a literal and cultural midpoint between London and Los Angeles. McQuarrie—unlike many directors, who fear getting feedback that might lead to the studio mandating changes to their film—loves a test screening. “Filmmakers are terrified,” he said, “and rightly so, because not all filmmakers have control of their movie.” But Cruise, who is also the lead producer on the Mission: Impossible franchise, has final cut. So they welcome the information, which they are then able to respond to as they see fit. In this case, audiences had been slightly confused by the mission brief, and so McQuarrie and Hamilton were trying to slow it down and leave them with the desired impression.

After McQuarrie played the sequence once for me, he turned and asked: “What did you take from what you just watched?”

I stammered out what I understood: “Artificial intelligence is trying to use nuclear stockpiles to destroy—”

McQuarrie gently cut me off. “Thanks. That’s all I need you to retain.”

Hamilton cued the scene again and they began going frame by frame, trying to make sure that the images were doing what they could not rely on the words to do. At one point, on a close-up of Cruise, McQuarrie asked Hamilton to pause the scene. “I don’t feel like he’s listening,” McQuarrie said, studying Cruise’s face. “I feel like he’s drifting.”

Hamilton, on another monitor, called up more footage from the scene. “So here now we enter the library of Tom Cruise’s reactions,” McQuarrie said. When this was originally shot, McQuarrie said, Cruise was listening to something else entirely. “It was completely different,” he said. “What we’ll do is, the camera will just drift and Tom will just interact with the camera. And he’ll give you this library of options because he knows full well it’s probably all going to get rewritten.”

Mission scripts are notorious for changing. “Tom likes to feel the film evolve, rather than have a set script and a schedule locked in,” Pegg told me. “It’s a very meta experience,” Erik Jendresen, who cowrote the last two, said. “Because as the screenwriter, me and Tom and Chris, we’re like the IMF team. We’re working under a ticking clock. The stakes couldn’t be any higher. And you’re needing to pivot constantly.” McQuarrie is sensitive to the impression this can leave. “We are not making it up as we go along,” he said. “But we are constantly pushing ourselves to make it better, to make it more immersive, more resonant, more engaging. We don’t trust that just because somebody says these lines on a piece of paper that you’re going to feel those things.”

But a lot can change in the pursuit of a feeling. One of the first things McQuarrie did when he joined the franchise, mid-production, on Ghost Protocol, was rewrite the entire backstory of a character named William Brandt, played by Jeremy Renner. The actor, who had already shot many of his scenes, was initially furious, according to McQuarrie. “Renner was saying, ‘I’m going to free-fall.’ He said to me, ‘But wait, I’ve been playing this whole other character.’ And I said, ‘But I watched all your dailies and all the emotions are the same. What motivated you in that scene doesn’t matter. The emotions you’re communicating are what matters.’ ”

Actors get used to it, McQuarrie said, but the learning curve can be harsh. “Once you start to see the results—Vanessa Kirby on Fallout, Rebecca Ferguson on Rogue Nation, they were all new to the process, and they were all in some way quite understandably destabilized,” McQuarrie said. “But then they see the beginning, middle, and an end. So when they come back for another movie, by the time Vanessa came back for Dead Reckoning, everything changed one day; we had an idea, we rewrote the scene that morning, and I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you’ve got this big thing now.’ And she goes, ‘It’s Mission. I totally get it.’ ” Hayley Atwell, who joined the franchise on Dead Reckoning, told me that the “ever-changing, ever-expanding challenges” of doing things this way used the same muscles that she’d built, not in other movies, but in live theater.

Because of the constantly evolving nature of the Mission scripts, they usually shoot exposition in places they can return to—and not, for instance, on the top of a mountain. “Anytime you have big information scenes, anytime you have exposition, plot, you put them in small rooms, cars, phone booth, you put ’em into a place that you can easily repeat and go back to,” McQuarrie said, “because you’re always going to be changing the plot to accommodate the emotion, rather than the other way around.”

In the edit bay at McQuarrie’s home, Cruise’s face filled the screen in mid close-up, eyes darting, brow furrowing, head bobbing. Cruise is famous on Mission sets for knowing exactly where the frame is: He can indicate the top and bottom of a shot from 30 feet away. “See these very subtle movements he gives,” McQuarrie said. “He’s not doing a big thing. He knows the focal length of that lens and how much it picks up.” When a new actor joins the Mission: Impossible franchise, one of the first things McQuarrie does is sit them down and talk to them about lenses. “Now, when I’m directing Hayley Atwell,” McQuarrie said, “I don’t say, ‘I want your character to feel this, that, and the other thing.’ I point to the lens and say: ‘It’s a 75-millimeter.’ ”

Hamilton and McQuarrie started the scene again from the top. A few minutes later, McQuarrie’s phone rang and the letters TC appeared on the screen. “I’ll be back,” he said.

Before Mission: Impossible, before Tom Cruise, before he won a screenwriting Oscar at 26, McQuarrie was a security guard at a movie theater. “That was my film school,” he said. “I spent four years watching the audience. They were my focus group.” McQuarrie grew up in New Jersey and went to high school with the actor Ethan Hawke, the director Bryan Singer, and the musician James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem. Because of this, a career in the arts never seemed all that far-fetched. “Bryan was always making movies. James was always making music. When Ethan got cast in Explorers, I was 14, Bryan was 16. James was 12. That made it real—that made it something that could happen. And frankly, it was more real to me than going to college.”

It was Singer who gave McQuarrie his first break in Hollywood when he commissioned McQuarrie to write what would become Singer’s first film, Public Access, in 1993. At the time, McQuarrie, who never did go to college, was doing odd jobs. Public Access screened at the Sundance Film Festival, and won a prize there, but the film never found a distributor. Then McQuarrie came back to Singer with an idea of his own, for a movie called The Usual Suspects, a film told primarily through the interrogation of a small-time criminal named Verbal Kint, played by Kevin Spacey, whose increasingly convoluted tale turns out to be—unbeknownst to his interrogator and the audience—an elaborate fiction.

McQuarrie wrote the first draft of The Usual Suspects in two weeks. The movie has an unorthodox structure; the film opens on the ending of the B-plot, about a group of criminals who are forced together to do a job, and then basically plays in reverse to hide the ending of the A-plot, the true identity of Verbal Kint, which is revealed in the film’s final frames. The end is the beginning is the end. “Suspects is pure structure, pure dialogue,” McQuarrie said. “It’s pure screenplay. Suspects is the rare example of a screenplay that is both readable and shootable. It’s also a script everyone in Hollywood passed on. Everyone. And it’s quite a fluke that the movie ever got made.”

There is an aphorism McQuarrie is fond of: “Writing is pushing a boulder up a mountain. Directing is running down the mountain with the boulder rolling after you.” In the decade after winning the best original screenplay Oscar for The Usual Suspects, he did a lot of pushing. “I thought the Oscar represented power that I could now make something that I wanted to make,” McQuarrie told me. “That wasn’t true. What it meant was I could get paid more money to write the movies they wanted. Nobody wanted my movies.”

McQuarrie had big ambitions and scripts of his own. But what he was actually doing was either joining ailing productions to help fix their scripts, or working in studio development, meaning he was being brought in to come up with ideas and treatments for projects conceived of by executives at various studios and production companies. In practice, very little of it ever saw the light of day. “I spent 10 years writing movies that were never going to get made,” McQuarrie said, “to finance the development of my scripts, which no one would ever make.”

In 2000, frustrated with his inability to make something of his own, McQuarrie wrote another crime film, The Way of the Gun, with plans to direct it, with Ryan Phillipe and Suspects actor Benicio Del Toro as his two leads. The Way of the Gun—about two bumbling criminals who abduct a surrogate mother and hold her and her unborn child for ransom—was deliberately antagonistic: It broke all the rules that McQuarrie had been forced to follow about sympathetic characters, about plot development, and about taking care of the audience, and when it came out, audiences summarily rejected it. “I directed an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar movie that I didn’t want to make,” McQuarrie said. “But it was my only opportunity. And I made it with both middle fingers extended, and the movie didn’t work, and the business said, ‘Thanks very much, that was your shot.’ And I was in director jail, and that’s where I remained for 12 years.”

While in director jail, McQuarrie worked on many movies, and was fired off of many movies. Screenwriting is a brutal business. “Writers, consciously or unconsciously, we are held in contempt,” McQuarrie said. “The movie can’t happen without us, but we are not why a movie happens. We’re not stars, we’re not directors. We’re the nerd at the party and we have the car. You’re not getting home without us. That breeds a kind of resentment.” McQuarrie even went so far as to quit the business at one point. But he was also developing a reputation as a troubleshooter and a fixer. (McQuarrie was once asked to write a script about the making of the Transcontinental Railroad, but for cheap, meaning, somehow, it would need to be shot inside, without showing all that much of the actual railroad—“And I figured out how to do it.”) McQuarrie, Pegg told me, “thrives with a problem. I think McQ loves a crisis more than he loves a blank page.”

What McQuarrie saw during his years in the wilderness were men and women—screenwriters, directors, producers—under duress, making unwise decisions, particularly on movies on the scale of Mission: Impossible. “A lot of these big tentpole movies,” McQuarrie told me, “how they work is you take a director who’s only made smaller films but has had success, and somebody does the math that says, ‘Hey, that person made a $5 million movie that made $50 million, now let’s give them $200 and they’ll make a billion.’ That’s actually not how it works. Because that person is leaping from an independent mindset into a massive commercial mindset without having had any education of the kind of movie they have to make at that number.”

(ARC NOTE: jesus fucking christ)

What McQuarrie would try to do instead was identify whatever the filmmaker had done that was unique to the genre or the franchise they were working on. Something that was their signature. And he would say, “ ‘That’s your stamp. Now you’ve got to make a billion dollars. Come with me if you want to live.’ And in both cases the directors did not listen. And in both cases the films were taken away from them. Other filmmakers came in and finished those films.” McQuarrie didn’t blame the directors. He blamed the system. “The problem is that they were given an opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” McQuarrie said, “before anybody sat down and educated them and said, ‘Listen, before you do this, here’s the reality of making movies like this. Are you sure you want to do it?’ And that’s what doesn’t happen. There’s not a system that educates those people.’ ”

McQuarrie knows this because he was one of those people. What changed that fact—and what got McQuarrie out of director jail and development hell—was Tom Cruise. McQuarrie and Cruise met in 2006, as Cruise was circling the lead role in Valkyrie, a movie about the failed assassination of Hitler that McQuarrie had written with the hope of being able to direct it. But Hollywood can be unforgiving. Singer, McQuarrie’s old classmate and collaborator, was also interested in directing the film, and so Singer—a more proven and financially successful filmmaker—became the director instead. (Singer has been accused of sexual assault in multiple lawsuits that were either settled or dismissed, and has maintained his innocence. He hasn’t directed a film since 2018. “My relationship with Bryan is pretty complex,” McQuarrie told me.) Cruise, according to McQuarrie, had two stipulations regarding Valkyrie. The first was that they spend more money on the film. “He said, ‘Guys, you’re blowing up the 10th Panzer division in the first 10 minutes of your movie; you need more money.’ And I said, ‘What’s the compromise?’ And Tom said, ‘There is no compromise. We’re making this movie. We’re going to make it for the widest audience possible. We’re going to make the most emotional version of this movie that we can.’ ”

The second stipulation was that McQuarrie, whom Cruise was growing to like and trust, join Valkyrie as a producer—a job he’d never done before. McQuarrie said yes anyway. “I went to work every day fully expecting to be fired,” he told me. He and Cruise are still working together 18 years later. “And it’s very important to point out that in between The Usual Suspects in ’95 and Valkyrie in 2006, a stack of movies this high, projects that I was called into rewrite, movies that never got made, not one piece of wisdom or applicable knowledge ever came from anyone in any of those meetings, ever,” McQuarrie said. “The truth of the matter is, other than what I brought to storytelling when I wrote The Usual Suspects, everything I learned about movies I learned by making movies with Tom.”

After Valkyrie, McQuarrie’s career was reborn. Suddenly, he was being brought on to write or help fix movies that were actually being produced: Edge of Tomorrow, World War Z, The Tourist, Rogue One, Top Gun: Maverick. In 2012, he directed Cruise in Jack Reacher; three years later, on the heels of doing the uncredited rewrite on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, McQuarrie became the director of 2015’s Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, after Cruise called the head of the studio and said that’s who he wanted in the chair.

Jerry Bruckheimer told me the secret to McQuarrie’s success in the latter half of his career was simple: “It’s because he loves it. He loves entertaining audiences. He loves big movies. You’ve got to love it. You bring in certain writers who want to write a big movie but don’t really care about it, you know, or understand what it is. They’re guessing.” McQuarrie is not guessing.

In London, over dinner, I asked McQuarrie to walk me through the making of a single stunt in the newest Mission: Impossible film. In Final Reckoning there is a sequence in which Cruise hangs from the side of a biplane, before leaping onto a second biplane, all in midair. An image from this scene is on the poster; pieces of it are in the film’s trailer. (This is the core of the Mission appeal: The thing the filmmakers care about most is the thing audiences care about most too. The movie is the marketing; the marketing is the movie.) The practice of going out onto the wing of a flying airplane is called wing walking, and that is who Cruise went to first: some wing walkers. “They said, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” McQuarrie told me. “And Tom said, ‘I want to be between the wings of the plane holding on to the tension wires, and I want to be in zero G between the wings.’ And wing walkers who do this for living said, ‘That will never happen. You can never do that.’ And Tom said, ‘All right, well, thank you very much for your time.’ ” And he and McQuarrie went and found some different wing walkers.

During the reporting of this article, I heard stories like this a lot. (Okay, one more: During the shooting of Fallout, McQuarrie told me, Cruise broke his ankle. “A doctor, a sports specialist, said to Tom, ‘It will be six months before you can walk. It’ll be nine months before you can run, if you ever run again.’ And Tom’s response was, ‘I don’t have time for that. I’ve got six weeks.’ And six weeks later, he was climbing Pulpit Rock on a shattered talus bone.”) If you’re wondering what Cruise has to say about all this, so was I. In time, I was invited to ask him a few questions via email. What makes Mission: Impossible…Mission: Impossible?, I wrote to him. Is it the process? The protagonist? The controlled chaos of the production? The stunts? The locations? The scale? “Dear Zach,” Cruise wrote back. “I don’t quite know how to answer this. Maybe it is all of these things and more.”

Mary Boulding, Mission’s first assistant director, told me Cruise has a saying on set: “Don’t be careful. Be competent.” So what the production did next, for the biplane sequence, was start building the stunt, piece by piece. They started with: Just get Cruise out on the wing. How far out could he get? How many G’s could he take once he was out there? “Now there’s a moment,” McQuarrie said, “where Tom’s laying across a cable and the plane goes into positive G’s, which means your whole body is being forced earthward. He’s laying on top of a cable, which means his organs are being pushed past either side of the cable. And if you go too far, the cable’s just going to cut you in half.”

It was at this point that I asked McQuarrie where his heart and mind typically were while shooting sequences like this one. During the A400 stunt, years ago, McQuarrie would sometimes black out from the stress as they waited to attempt it, he said. “If you want the summary, you’re the frog in the pan of water,” he told me. “You don’t realize the water’s boiling until you’re in it and it’s boiling. At which point you better figure out how to survive in boiling water or somebody’s going to be eating your legs and you develop a very thick skin.”

They decided to shoot the biplane sequence in South Africa, just after the rainy season there, because the land would be abundantly green. That also meant it was cold. “If the temperature changes two degrees Celsius, Tom will be hypothermic after 12 minutes on the wing,” McQuarrie said. Cruise had no radio in his ear. So he and McQuarrie, who shot the sequence from a helicopter that hovered so close to the plane that McQuarrie could read Cruise’s airspeed in the cockpit, devised a set of hand signals. “The wind is hitting him not only at the speed that the plane is flying but the wind coming off the propeller. It’s hitting him at well over a hundred-plus miles an hour.” At that speed, air is actually hard to breathe. “There were times when Tom would have to lay down on the wing to rest between takes,” McQuarrie said. “You can’t tell if he’s conscious or not. And unless Tom pats the top of his head”—their hand signal for stop —“it’s like, keep rolling.”

Cruise’s plane was also flying frighteningly low, McQuarrie said. “A plane flying at altitude, safely, is the most boring thing imaginable. You watch Top Gun: Maverick, the reason why we’re flying in that canyon, the reason why Star Wars flies in that canyon—planes are only cool when they’re flying low. No matter how fast they’re flying. Now in Top Gun, they were flying, at times, 50, 60 feet off the deck. When you’re in a biplane that can’t go Mach 2, you’ve got to go lower. The margin of error is zero. The power on these planes, they’re at full throttle, which means if there’s a downdraft or a thermal, there is no more oomph to get up. You go down and that’s it. I’m directly behind it. He goes down, I go down. Our crew goes down.”

In this way, over the years, McQuarrie has become kind of a stuntman too. Where Cruise goes, McQuarrie goes. Even in midair. “There is not enough room in this article for me to fully communicate and give justice to all of the things that Christopher McQuarrie is, does, and has done,” Cruise told me.

Despite the danger, McQuarrie seems to love the chaos of the life he’s fallen into. The bad luck, the broken bones, the close calls. “It’s weird how the content of these things mirrors the making of them,” Jendresen, the screenwriter, told me. McQuarrie encouraged me to rewatch the last scene of Mission: Impossible—Fallout, which they’d shot on film. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, after his helicopter ordeal, awakens to find all his friends around his hospital bed. His whole body is in pain. “Don’t make me laugh,” he says, and then there is a flash of light, and the screen goes dark. Cue the Mission theme.

But that flash was not planned, McQuarrie told me. What you’re seeing is the most basic accident you can see on a film set. “There is nothing more Mission,” McQuarrie said, grinning, “than the camera rolling out of film on the last shot.”

(((THANK YOU ZACK BARON FOR THE BEST FUCKING PROFILE EVER HOLY SHIT))

#mcq #mission impossible #i want to defeat him and take his power #talking about writing

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dresh-rx · 2 days ago

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The problem i always had with people saying Lloyd is 23 or something in dragons rising BUT mentally he's like 18

Or in Controversallized, he's 18 but mentally 16 or whatever,

Is that MENTAL AGE IS NOT LINEAR GUYS

I feel like people miss this and maturity as a concept.

Longer rant below

It was true at the beginning when he got aged up that he was ~8-10mentally and ~14physically, and for a while it was linear maybe, but mental age is more complex than a thing that follows your birthdays, take examples from real life.

A child under pressure, responsibility and a role they have to be forced to fill, with the addition of trauma will mature differently and faster.

Just like when a kid is stripped away from their family in real life, maybe due to war, abuse or financial reasons, the kid must learn the skills of older ages to manipulate their sourroundings to help them survive. That's forced maturity and a childhood lost.

People could be well in their 30s and have an 18yo more mature than them, its all about the conditions of growing up, and what hardships they had to adapt to.

Also, think about this: What does it even mean to be a specific age mentally? How does a mentally 23 yo differ from a mentally 18 yo person? Its very relative...

We can maybe see Lloyd act more unmature and childish than the others in pre oni trilogy seasons, but ultimately always trying to seem wiser than he actually was because then it was true that he got aged up, and his mental age didn't follow up for a while, but still maturity was expected of him. However i feel like that gradually fades away as we go further, and i firmly believe that his mental age has caught up to his physical a long time ago.

Even if tomorrow's tea never happened, he'd be more mature than his age due to the experiences he's lived through.

Also, mental age is NOT linear to behavioural skills.

The tomorrow's tea left effects on his social skills and behaviour, only because in addition to a fucked up early childhood, he literally skipped the late childhood development stages, arguably the most important one for learning social cues and learning to build connections, in addition to immediately being put into a situation of great responsibility, forcing him to learn all the skipped skills afterwards. And this arguably wasn't because he got aged up, it was the events he got put into. We can also see this in real life with people who were forced to grow up too fast.

If you were to make conversation with an adult who lacks certain aspects of social skills due to reasons, you wouldn't say they are unmature. You'd probably think they are maybe autistic, but not unmature.

And developmental holes are probably the source of many of his issues later on, like trust issues (on both ends, (w Pythor, Harumi, Akita, Garmadon post res), the inability to properly express empathy (DR s3pt1 when reacting to Arin's parent's death), or isolation in crisis (DR, Controversallized, Oni trilogy, Splinter in the Blind Man's Eye,...), and many others.

But these are NOT tied to maturity.

It's simply the effects (and mental health problems) due to one's development.

I'm not gonna go into the psychological aspect of the opposite, when people return to their childhood preferences/behavioural patterns after adulthood because they miss what they didn't have, because that is a different topic.

That being said people can still act younger in times, but thats normal, even healthy, and i'm all for preserving youthfullness. Heck i literally work in a club/bar but will play minecraft and build ninjago sets afterwards. If i see a cool bug i will pick it up and show it around, but that doesn't mean i won't be reliable at work or solve that differential equation for uni projects. Maturity is also the ability to act according to situation.

So... Now that i diverged this much

I don't believe that, and at the very least in dragons rising, that his mental age would be younger than his actual physical self. I believe after all the ninja went through, they long are all more mature than what an average person would be at their age.

And i hope to see that more highlighted in DR with Sora and Arin, (maybe even Wyfy). Sora was forced to mature a bit more than Arin was growing up, and that is apparent among them, with Arin acting like a typical ~15yo, while sora acts more young adult like. But I'm sure the pre ninja Arin and the Arin we'll get after s3 will be very different. Not because the passing of time, but the mental maturity he gained due to experiences (not necessarily positive ones).

But change my mind i guess

Welp, thx for reading my ramble, here is a potato

#ninjago #lego ninjago #ninjago dragons rising #ninjago lloyd #ninjago rant

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objectivelyimpermanent · 2 days ago

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Valyrian kinship terms, Targaryen incest, and non-patrilineal inheritance

So, there are between 4-6 kinship systems depending on how you count. The six are below, but they can be reclassified as 1) lineal kinship (Inuit), 2) generational kinship (Hawaiian), 3) descriptive kinship (Sudanese), and 4) bifurcate merging kinship, which has three types: bilateral (Iroquois), patrilineal (Omaha), and matrilineal (Crow).

If you count as 6 kinship systems.

The English language uses the lineal (Inuit) kinship system. David J. Peterson, who created the Valyrian conlang, chose to use the bilateral bifurcate merging (Iroquois) kinship system for High Valyrian, which has less discriminatory terms than the lineal kinship system.

The lineal kinship system focuses heavily on whether someone is or is not part of the nuclear family. Members of the nuclear family have distinct words based on generation and gender (mother, father, brother, sister). However, there are less specific terms for those outside the nuclear family: the female siblings of one's parents all have a single term (aunt), the male siblings of one's parents all have a single term (uncle), and one's uncles' and aunts' children all have a single term that doesn't discriminate by gender (cousin).

Bilateral bifurcate merging kinship is different in that there is a single term for one's father and all his male siblings, a single term for one's mother and her female siblings, and then a term each for the siblings of cross-sex of one's parents. Similarly, the children of the same-sex siblings of one's parents (parallel cousins) are referred to with the same term as one's brothers and sisters (dependent on gender); however the children of the cross-sex siblings of one's parents (cross-cousins) all have a different single term that doesn't discriminate by gender.

High Valyrian follows the bilateral bifurcate merging kinship but additionally discriminates by relative age for most relatives, as shown below.

High Valyrian kinship terms (bilateral bifurcate merging with a relative age modification)

What does this say about Valyrian culture?

Some people have argued that this is meant as a manifestation of a commonplace practice of incest in Valyrian culture. However, it's actually the opposite.

I would like to quibble a little here about the term "incest." To be clear, whilst some cultures practice types of cousin marriage, they wouldn't consider it "incest." All humans are related to some degree, and biological incest is not a hard line, but rather a probability curve that maps the likelihood of recessive genetic disorders and mutation. "Incest" is the cultural term that draws that hard line: it is the intermarriage of relatives too close to be culturally permissible. It's more accurate to say that the question isn't whether or not the Valyrians practiced incest but what level of genetic relationship they considered to be incest.

So, whilst it's correct to say that Targaryens practiced incest according to Westerosi cultural principles (and the principles of the modern West), it is only correct to say that Targaryens practiced incest if the level of intermarriage that they allowed was not culturally permissible in Valyria. Since the Targaryens immigrated to Westeros, it becomes a moot point, but when talking about pre-Doom cultural practices, a little investigation is required.

Firstly, Word of God1:

[https://www.historyofwesteros.com/george-rr-martin-in-conversation-how-interviews-grrm/] Excerpt:

Ashaya: Let’s ask about a couple questions about Valyrians that I have here… did Valyrians from non dragon riding families practice incest as well*? And did Valyrians other than Targaryens have dragon dreams, if you can answer either of those?*

George: No, I don’t think they particularly would*. I haven’t really thought about that.*

Ashaya: Okay. Fair enough.

George: I reserve my right to change my mind, but no, I don’t think. There was a specific reason for the incest which was to uh, you know, I mean, obviously they don’t have… these are medieval people and ancient people.

They don’t know about DNA or genes or any of that stuff, but they have some rough concept of it in which they attribute to the blood. This guy has blue eyes and his children have blue eyes, but if he marries someone with brown eyes, now all the kids have brown eyes, why is that?

They have some things, so… we can control dragons, we don’t wanna lose that ability, not everybody can do that. So we better keep it in the family, so to speak*, or at least with the other dragon riding families. Now there was, I haven’t gone much into it, but* there was another very powerful group in Valyria who were not necessarily the dragon riders. And those were the people who practiced blood magic. And which, you know, there’s some overlap in the Venn diagram with the dragon riders, but not necessarily complete overlap. And then there were just the regular people. There were a lot of slaves cuz it was a slave society. There were a lot of poor people. I think of ancient Rome or something like that. I don’t know that they would have any reason to to practice incest.

Here, GRRM states that it's unlikely incest was the common practice in Valyria: incest was used as a form of privileged consolidation of power in a society where certain powerful families practiced blood magic and particularly where a family's blood magic allowed them to control dragons. So, incest was less a Valyrian practice than a dragon-riding or perhaps Targaryen practice, and the level of intermarriage they practiced was likely closer than was permissible in Valyria.

Secondly, the choice of kinship systems supports that nuclear family intermarriage wasn't a commonplace Valyrian practice. There's been studies of kinship systems and the prevalence of incest and it's been found that the less discriminatory the kinship terms, the more distantly related one had to be to be a permissible marriage partner. So a generational (Hawaiian) kinship system is more likely to prohibit all types of cousin marriage, whilst a bifurcate merging kinship system is more likely to permit cross-cousin marriage of some types, depending on whether its bilateral, patrilineal, or matrilineal. [Source: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/202655238/Full_text_PDF_final_published_version_.pdf ]

Generally, the terms that are rendered in the diagram above for the bifurcate merging kinship systems (Iroquois, Crow, and Omaha) as "brother" or "sister" tend not to be permitted as marriage partners. This would imply in fact that some permissible Westerosi marriages (such as Tywin Lannister and Joanna Lannister, whose fathers were brothers, making them parallel first cousins) would be considered incest in Valyria.

So whilst the use of a bifurcate merging kinship system in High Valyrian implies the Targaryen practice of nuclear family intermarriage was not common, it does imply something else: the inheritance system may not have been patrilineal. Amongst the three types of bifurcate merging kinship systems, the bilateral system used for High Valyria implies that matrilineal and patrilineal relatives were considered equally or ambiguously important.

The patrilineal bifurcate merging (Omaha) kinship system places more importance on the patrilinear relatives, whilst the matrilinear relatives have less specific terms that distinguish largely on gender and not on generation: this is why one's mother's brother and his son have the same single term and why one's mother's brother's daughter uses the same term as the mother and her sister; the terms mean something closer to "male matrilinear relative" and "female matrilinear relative" as opposed to the more specific separate "cousin" term used for the children of one's father's sister. The matrilineal bifurcate merging (Crow) kinship system is the mirror image of this. The specific terms would be necessary for when it's important to distinguish relation, for example during legal disputes such as inheritance.

That the High Valyrian bilateral bifurcate merging system does not have this lopsidedness implies that whether the relative is patrilineal or matrilineal, an equal amount of specificity is required. This may imply that inheritance could pass through either the male line or the female line of inheritance.

#house of the dragon #fire and blood #targaryens #targaryen incest #kinship systems #kinship terms #high valyrian #crossposted #a song of ice and fire #asoiaf #game of thrones

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unhakies · 2 days ago

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spotify crush . l. riwoo

04. setup

wc; 964

it’s been days since beomgyu said he was going to start his little “plan.”

you forgot about it pretty quickly. which, in hindsight, was a terrible move. classic you. you should know by now that if beomgyu says he has a plan, it’s not a casual suggestion. it’s a warning.

so when he texted you yesterday with a casual: “cafe study date tomorrow at 4?’ you didn’t question it.

you should have.

but now? now you’re standing in the middle of a mildly packed café, scanning for his mop of brown hair, when you hear it:

“name! we’re over here!” we? your stomach stutters. you turn.

there he is. waving like an idiot. grinning like he just won a bet you didn’t know you were part of. you walk over, weaving through chairs and conversations, and—

your brain short-circuits.

there are three boys at the table. one is beomgyu, looking far too proud of himself. one gives you a shy little nod. and the third?

the third is lee sanghyuk. riwoo. the person you've been ranting to beomgyu, yunjin and moka about,

from the secret instagram lurking you swore you weren’t doing.

your heart drops to your ass.

you blink.

beomgyu’s grin goes full cartoon villain. “hi, name!” he says in a sing-song tone. you level him with a look. “hi, beomgyu.”

You sit down in the only open chair, directly next to riwoo. the air is suddenly ten degrees warmer. you’re hyper-aware of the way your arm nearly brushes his. Of the soft citrus smell of his cologne.

“meet my new friends,” beomgyu says, as if he didn’t just throw you into a live-action fanfiction as he pushed a drink towards you.

the boy across from you smiles politely.

“hi, name. i’m park sungho.”

you bow your head. “nice to meet you.” then,

“hi, name. i’m lee sanghyuk, but you can call me riwoo. it’s so nice to meet you.” his voice is soft but warm. there’s a dimple when he smiles.

before you can even process words, beomgyu butts in:

“hey— why does she get to call you riwoo?”

riwoo turns to him immediately.

“because you were mean to me like, twenty seconds ago!” beomgyu gasps. “the past is in the past! live in the present!”

you roll your eyes and scoff. “don’t mind beomgyu, he’s always mean to people, plus, im obviously the better one." you boast.

beomgyu kicks you under the table.

you jerk your leg back, trying not to laugh.

riwoo chuckles beside you, his voice low and close, and you think your stomach just did a front flip. you look at riwoo. he looks at you.

you look away first, focusing way too hard on the iced americano in front of you.

your fingers are twitchy. Your heart is drumming out a new beat. one that doesn’t belong to any playlist.

not yet, anyway.

you keep your eyes trained on your drink like it’s the most fascinating object on earth. you can feel riwoo glance at you.

“i’m gonna go get a muffin,” beomgyu says loudly, standing so fast his chair screeches. “sungho, wanna come?”

sungho blinks.

“i—uh. yeah?”

the two of them abandon ship, leaving you and riwoo alone at the table. your leg starts bouncing under the table. nerves or caffeine, you can’t tell, but its probably the first one.

you and riwoo sit in a brief silence, the kind that isn’t awkward exactly. you shift in your seat, glance at him, and feel the corners of your mouth twitch into a nervous smile.

thankfully, he speaks first.

“so… are you actually here to study? or were you also tricked into this setup?”

you laugh.

“something like that. he said it was a ‘study session,’ but I’m starting to think that was code for something.”

“same. sungho told me to ‘look normal’ and beomgyu gave me a 15-minute ted talk about how not to make things weird.”

you laugh under your breath. “how on brand for beomgyu.”

“he also said you were a ‘very cool, very normal person,’ which felt oddly specific.”

you scoff.

“i don’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed.”

“both, probably.”

the silence returns for a second, but it feels easier now. he taps his fingers against his cup.

“you’re in music, right?”

you nod.

“yeah, we share some classes right?”

“i think so. composition major, but I also take a few gen eds in your department. i think i’ve seen you around campus before.”

your eyes flick to him.

“you have?”

he shrugs. casual. “might’ve been the library. or maybe the café by the quad. i remember your headphones.” he points to your neck.

you blink, hands touching your headphones that laid comfortably on your neck

“what about them?”

“they’re bright blue. kinda hard to miss.”

you look down, lips twitching into a smile.

“okay, fair.”

another pause. but this one is almost comfortable.

“so,” he says, “what class are you pretending to study for today?”

you glance at your bag, where your notes are untouched.

“media theory. though, i haven’t opened the textbook in like, three weeks.”

Riwoo nodded in understanding, “mr. Kims classes are always a drag.” you shook your head quickly in agreeance. “exactly! His tasks are always so hard too.” you sigh, finally having someone to share your pain with.

“well, if you need any help, let me know. We're in the same class after all.” he said casually, writing his number on a ripped piece of paper. Smooth.

you open your mouth to say something, and that’s when beomgyu slams two muffins on the table and drops into his seat like the devil himself.

“so, what’d I miss?” he grins.

you glare. riwoo sighs dramatically.

sungho just quietly bites his muffin like he’s been held hostage.

previous main next

taglist; @melooooosusupp @yomsterz @sh0dor1 @phloam05 @lvlyhiyyih @tsanho @renjunba3 @8makes1atom @banez @bambisnc @prodkwh @raccooniniii @crazykimkeverose

#unhakies #boynextdoor #boynextdoor x reader #bnd smau #boynextdoor smau #kpop smau #smau #bnd riwoo #boynextdoor riwoo #riwoo x reader

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alarajrogers · 1 day ago

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Nuclear war is worse than being forced to flee another country for fear of persecution, but do we go around saying people aren't allowed to complain about being forced to seek asylum because at least no one dropped a nuke on them?

Saying "I am oppressed and this is how and I have a term I want to use for my oppression" is not the same as saying "I am the most oppressed special-est person" or "I am more oppressed than other people in this conversation." I keep seeing, over and over, people claiming that trans men using "transandrophobia" means that they are claiming trans women have privilege over them. Uh... no. That is not what it means, what it implies, or what they're saying. They are saying cis people have privilege over them, and that the specific nature of their oppression is gendered.

I also feel like one of the reasons the left is failing, worldwide, is the refusal to acknowledge any aspect in which men, specifically, are oppressed, as men. We see the draft, police violence, the carceral state, the shorter life span of men, and we just go la la la men have privilege over women. Yes, they do, but there are areas in which the same patriarchy that grants them those privileges harms them specifically.

80% of murder victims are men

There are far, far fewer domestic violence shelters for men in proportion to the population of men who suffer from DV, a ratio that's been estimated to be from 12%-25% as many as women who suffer DV

They can legally be forced to go fight and die or kill in a war

Vastly more likely to be killed or brutalized by cops even when they are white than women of the same race are

And let's not even get into the emotional damage that being socialized to believe you can't show any emotions but anger and lust does to people.

Does any of this mean they don't have privilege over women? No, in most areas, men have privilege over women, and most of the areas where they suffer are directly the result of patriarchy privileging men in most regards. If men are the violence class, the people who are somewhat entitled to be violent to others to get what they want, then logically men are seen as more violent, more valuable as soldiers, more dangerous to society, and less likely to be victims... which is why they can be drafted, there are few DV shelters for men, they are often killed or assaulted by cops, and no one really pays attention to how likely it is that men will be murdered by a stranger as a gendered thing. Like, yeah, of course men will murder each other, that's acceptable and understood, the thing we need to worry about is violence against women. Well, it's not wrong to try to stop violence against women, but I don't see a lot trying to address the societal roots of why men are so much more likely to be murdered.

And all of these things being true does not state or even imply that this is the fault of women. The left has a hard time dealing with the concept that individuals of a class can suffer for the actions of their class as a whole. The concept that individual men suffer because of patriarchy, which men as a class invented and perpetrate (though lots of women collaborate), is not a thing leftist thought is well equipped to handle.

Back to transandrophobia. Trans men saying "we suffer in ways trans women don't, that are specific to our maleness", is not saying "we suffer worse than trans women" or "trans women are oppressing us." It in fact says nothing about trans women. It says "we, trans men, are oppressed by society for being trans men." Last I checked, trans women don't run society and only the most extreme TERFs think they do.

It really takes enormous arrogance to hear people say "We are suffering because of society" and assume they are saying "We are suffering because of you" or "We are suffering worse than you." I am allowed to complain about my breast cancer even though it didn't metastasize and kill me. If someone punches you in the face, you have the right to object to that even though other people have been murdered. The idea of the binary being the only lens for any oppression, and that gendered oppression is always a matter of the oppressor gender causing the suffering of the oppressed gender, is absolute bullshit, and particularly trans people should want to get rid of it, considering the degree to which cis women oppress trans women!

I get that the MRAs kinda poisoned the well with the attitude "men suffer and it's because of women" -- which is why they have not been materially able to do one single thing to improve the lives of men, because they mistakenly (or maliciously) attribute male suffering under patriarchy to being caused by women. But since when do we let our opponents dictate the terms by which we analyze anything? Get over the knee-jerk reaction that all men who complain about suffering under patriarchy (or kyriarchy) are blaming women for it, and stop talking over people who are talking about their own suffering to tell them that they are not in fact suffering, because that is exactly the tactic oppressors use.

The thing that annoys me about "transandrophobia" as a discussion point is that there is a rich history of marginalized men discussing how the expectations and role of manhood are shaped by their marginalization, what people expect from them as men, what parts of "manhood" they're denied access to... So why would we need to rely on the argument that men have it worse than women or even the rhetoric that trans men will essentially never be "real" men and that's why we're discriminated against

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ingravinoveritas · 2 days ago

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Speaking as a trans uk person who grew up under section 28 and is just a few years younger than David, that reaction on the Assembly last night is the most ‘I think in another time, I wouldn’t have been entirely cis’ response I’ve ever seen. I’ve got a couple of friends of similar age and similar ‘I’m cis because I wasn’t able to be anything else’ mindset and just… I hope he’s happy, and I hope his loved ones give him the support around this whatever he decides and feels.

Oh, Anon. I'm sorry, I am so behind in answering Anons and trying to catch up now. But I saw this message when you sent it in and first of all, big hugs to you (if you are okay with that).

Secondly, though, I can't thank you enough for writing in and sharing this, as being a contemporary of David's and trans, your perspective is absolutely invaluable and carries so much weight. I am a non-trans, non-UK person, but I had a similar reaction to what David said on The Assembly, and from the DMs I've gotten and conversations that have happened since it aired, it seems others have, too.

I have more thoughts on this related to what was said on the episode of David's podcast that Georgia hosted, so I am going to try and save a lot of those thoughts for another post in response to the numerous Anons I have gotten about that. But for me, what stands out are two particular things.

One is that this is now the second time that David has specifically mentioned his experiences with Section 28 and homophobia growing up while also getting choked up/emotional about it. In this instance, he was specifically asked what made him start supporting the trans community...and this is what he said. He did not at all mention his nonbinary child--which of course doesn't mean that Wilf isn't part of the reason--but what David goes to directly in his answer is homophobia and Section 28.

What makes this so significant is that he spoke of it not as someone who saw it from the outside, but who had experienced it from within--something I also noticed in his podcast interview with Russell T. Davies, where RTD talks about discovering he was gay and the process of navigating his sexuality and David essentially "fills in the blanks" as RTD is talking, as if he'd gone through it himself.

Seeing David get so emotional--where it wells up in you and fills your chest and something in the core of you tightens automatically no matter how hard you try to stop it--is something I felt like I recognized. Something that comes from a place of trauma, where you don't just remember a certain event or incident, but relive everything you felt when it was happening. And it breaks my heart to think that he has been through things like that and may still be dealing with them now.

I think your comment about "in another time" echoes into this, because that's been another recurring theme in these conversations. It's this idea that David seems to have that his children and the younger generation on the whole can be whoever they want to be...but he can't. As if somehow it's too late for him to change, to be who he wants to be.

In David's recent appearance on Lorraine, she gushed over how much she loves David and Michael together and how people think they are married, and ends by saying, "In another world." That she (and so many others) can plainly see what's between them and that in another world, Michael and David would be together.

We all only get this one life. This one shot at being here, at being alive long enough to find what makes us happy and hold on like hell to it.

...So why not in this time? Why not in this world?

You're never too old to figure out who you are, or to embrace it. To realize that safety is not the same thing as happiness. To let go of being afraid, to finally come out of survival mode and have the chance to just live in the world.

Shouldn't David get to have that same chance?

A few weeks ago, I noticed some fans on Twitter/X talking about TERF/GCs "accusing" David of being trans. These fans immediately leapt to David's defense: "What? People actually think David is trans?" and "No way! David is NOT trans." And while well-meaning, these responses pained me because of the underlying implication that being trans is something that needs to be "defended against" in the first place.

Because it’s not.

Because it shouldn't be.

Because the correct and only answer to "Why do people think David is trans?" is, "If David is trans (or nonbinary, or genderfluid), why would it matter?"

So thank you again for this, Anon. I hope people will really take in the words you've said and understand why you are saying them. And I hope, as you do, that David is truly, genuinely happy with whatever he feels and decides, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

#anonymous #reply post #david tennant #soft scottish hipster gigolo #the assembly #LGBTQ #let people be who they are #because life is too damn short not to #i hope david knows that he is lovely #and deserves good things #and should not have to resign himself to being who everyone else thinks he should be #because whatever has been happening lately is downright painful to witness #grateful to you Anon for sharing this important perspective #thoughts #discourse #gif by me

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batneko · 10 hours ago

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How about instead of soulmates we do a Red String Of Fate AU? I'm specifically thinking of bowuigi but I've got some ideas for a setting that could work with any pairing.

In this universe most people have two or three Red Strings. The Fate they indicate can be romantic, platonic, or even negative. Immediate family doesn't typically have a string because they're for people you will have a fate with, not people you've known your whole life. This is a bit of a shame for the bros, because the strings can be pretty useful. You can follow them to find each other and send emotions through them. You can also sever the strings, although this is intensely painful and physically draining, especially for the person doing the severing.

Mario has ten strings, one on each finger, which is incredibly rare. Luigi always felt just a little bit inadequate, even though his four are still above average. Bowser has three, one for Peach, which she severed after his 2nd kidnapping, and one for each bro. He severed the one with Mario himself after he learned Mario and Peach were together, but he couldn't bring himself to snip the last one and have everyone know he'd lost every single one of his bonds.

Luigi considered severing it out of spite, but after seeing how much pain Mario was in he couldn't do it. Yet more proof of his cowardice, Luigi thinks. (Mario would never wish ANY pain on his little bro and Peach has already lived through her own severing. Both of them would say not to if he asked).

So they just sort of exist in this unspoken standoff for a while, until one day Luigi ends up lost and overwhelmed by enemies. He can't escape and he can't reach anyone, but he still has his strings. Bowser is the only person he can think of who might find him in time. It's a long shot, but…

Luigi sends fear and despair through his string to Bowser until Bowser decides to track him down just to get it to STOP. Luigi is so grateful to be rescued that Bowser almost (almost) forgets to be mad. He tells Luigi never to do that again and Luigi agrees. They part ways both thinking that's that.

But then a new villain pops up and Bowser is pressed into service, his body being controlled against his will. The Mario bros and their friends don't question Bowser working with a fellow baddie, he's done it before, but Bowser manages to send rage and helplessness through his string to Luigi. Luigi convinces the others something is up, and they rescue Bowser instead of fighting him. He joins up for the rest of the adventure, and only at the end does he mutter "thanks" to Luigi as he's leaving. It's more than Luigi was expecting!

Not long later, Luigi is having a bad night and sends sadness through the string. A couple minutes later his phone rings, and Luigi answers to hear Bowser snapping, "What?" "I'm sad." "I got that, why are you bothering ME about it?" "Because you already think I'm pathetic." "I don't think you're pathetic, greenie," Bowser says. "Because you don't think about me at all?" "…………………yep."

Luigi calls when he's feeling depressed a couple more times, then Bowser starts calling whenever he wants to complain about something and nobody's convenient to listen to him rant, using the same excuse that "You already think I'm an asshole." Pretty soon they're talking almost every day.

Luigi never does find out how Bowser got his number that first time…

They don't tell anybody about this. It's not like it's a SECRET, it just doesn't come up in conversation… And maybe they make sure of that.

Eventually they develop a habit of sending a flash of emotion whenever they're thinking of each other. Usually positive, but sometimes melancholy. The first time they're on opposite sides after they've become friends, Bowser keeps sending anger until Luigi sends anger right back. He seems impressed.

Luigi was surprised to learn (though he never tells Bowser this) that Bowser feels ALL his emotions just as strongly as he does anger. Joy, pride, even sorrow. He's almost pure, in that way. Bowser's happiness feels so good that Luigi wants to make him happy.

Not that he can tell him that either…

(it gets spicy from here)

Eventually, their habit of sending emotions whenever they think of each other backfires. Luigi is… alone, one evening, and on autopilot he sends Bowser exactly what he's feeling about him at that moment. He's so caught up he almost doesn't realize what he's done.

Until a few minutes after he's finished, when he gets a surge of desire in return just as strong as the one he sent.

(He has no idea how badly Bowser was freaking out on the other end. Was it an accident? Luigi couldn't- No way! Right? But if it was an accident he'd call, right? Okay wait it out…)

It turns into a kind of ritual. One will send out a brief flash of desire, and then wait for a reply. It can be a long time, hours, but once they're both sure they're alone, well… Sharing feelings can be very useful. It's like having phone sex, without the need for phones.

They don't talk about it. Not once, not even over the actual phone. The next time they see each other in person is awkward, but they've already been pretending they're not friends, adding another secret is no big deal.

Things don't escalate until the first time Luigi has to acknowledge it. He's on an adventure with his brother and even if he could get a few minutes alone, he's too tired and stressed to enjoy anything. So after a couple nights of ignoring Bowser's "messages," Luigi sneaks off to call him. "I can't, I really can't right now." "But you want to," Bowser says. "I can't." "I'll wait," Bowser says. "You don't have to?" "Nah. It's no good without you anymore." Which is a big admission considering this is the first time they've acknowledged it at all. "You call me the minute you get home." "Okay," Luigi says, breathlessly. How's he supposed to pretend to be normal NOW?

But he does what he said, and calls Bowser as soon as he's home. Bowser confirms that he's alone, and tells him to wait twenty minutes. Somehow, Luigi is still surprised when Bowser shows up at his door.

They don't even make it to the bedroom.

Once he can think again, Luigi is stunned by how EAGER Bowser was. Sure, they'd been doing that little ritual of theirs for a while, but he never thought Bowser would want to take it further. Luigi's always been the one who reached out first.

…Luigi's always been the one who reached out first.

He's the one who asked for help. He's the one who opened up emotionally. He's the one who admitted (albeit by accident) that he was attracted to Bowser.

Has Bowser, all this time, just been following Luigi's lead?

He only has one string left. Maybe a part of him - maybe a lot of him - thought that if he pushed it he'd lose that last one too.

Luigi really wants to ask, but Mario stops by in the morning and it's not exactly easy to hide an overnight guest four times your size. Mario can tell someone stayed over.

Mario leaves, teasing him a little about wanting to know who's upstairs, and Luigi is left torn between talking to Bowser about Feelings and Relationships, and trying to brainstorm a believable lie for his brother.

In the end he does neither and lets Bowser pull him back into bed.

#crossposted from bluesky #bowuigi #luigi #bowser #super mario bros #luwser #bowigi #green shell #red string of fate #soulmates #kinda

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soulsty · 2 days ago

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Reading Houseki No Kuni as someone who struggles with low-empathy:

I’ve seen an occasional joke about how the gems in hnk are incapable of human empathy, and it’s very true, especially when you get to chapter 96. I think that’s a large reason why people don’t like a lot of the gems by the time they finish the story, because they don’t seem to experience much empathy for Phos. (Most of them at least, Euclase definitely does to a degree, but they’re the only one that stands out to me.)

I understand why this makes people upset with them. Phos is collectively all of the fandom’s baby, we all love them, so it’s sometimes hard to like other characters if they have no empathy or remorse towards a character that we love so deeply, and for many, connect with.

However, I could not, and can never see myself in that position as someone who struggles with low-empathy. My whole life, I always told myself why and how I need to seem like I'm empathetic towards the things people are going through, and it's not that I don’t care, it’s just that my brain doesn’t naturally produce that empathy towards people, and I have actively noticed that when I get too exhausted to force empathy, I feel much colder towards things, and it sucks. I want to feel things for people very deeply, I love my friends with all my heart, and I genuinely feel terrible about feeling apathetic towards the things they experience.

So reading Houseki No Kuni, as someone who experiences this on a daily basis, one of the lines that stood out to me, so, so, deeply:

“No, and that’s what’s bothering me.”

The context of the line doesn't necessarily speak to what I'm talking about here, since it's more about how Cinnabar feels like they should want Phos by their side, and feels guilty for being happy without them. But that very specific line in a vacuum is exactly it. I don’t, and that’s what’s wrong. I feel like I should, but I just don’t. It's the conversation I've had with myself so many times "do you feel empathy towards this?" "no, and I feel terrible that I can't."

And the fact that Jade agrees, and a few other gems probably would, makes it so impossible for me to hold these things against them. It feels so human to me, despite many people seeing it as decisively inhuman.

Also, Cinnabar shifting away from how they feel, to making that connection to the windy day, the only time Cinnabar had the heart to tell Phos to slow down and take care of themselves, hits me deeply. There’s something so palpable to me about not being emotionally present enough to feel a certain way, and instead relating it to a time when your emotions did feel raw, and real. I've experienced this several times.

Also, benefit of the doubt for the gem lunarians, we don't know when within the 10,000 years chapter 96 takes place. They could've spent months, or even years feeling very compassionately for Phos, and simply moved on by now, we have no idea.

I love all the gems and I love chapter 96, thank you for reading my perspective, maybe this will give you a different viewpoint on some of the gems! Or maybe not! I’m not telling you how to feel about anything! Your opinions were valid as they are, and I understand them, the lack of empathy frustrates me too, believe me lmao

#houseki no kuni #land of the lustrous #hnk #phosphophyllite #hnk phos #cinnabar #hnk cinnabar #hnk jade #hnk gems #i am the one who knacks #hopefully this is concise enough. I'm bad about talking about my emotions lol #this was spurred by someone explaining very calmly and validly why they didnt like Cinnabar and Cinnabar's apathy was one of the reasons #and that sent me into my like... third violating realization about why I feel such a connection to Cinnabar #finally admitting I struggle with this! fuck it we ball I guess! thanks Cinnarini!

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mashupofmylife · 9 months ago

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Unholy and inappropriate studio conversation gave us so many gems this week:

-fish Jesus

-cannibal Jesus

-zombie Jesus

-gluten free Jesus

And as an observant Catholic, I can't help but completely love the fact that we couldn't have timed this conversation more perfectly with this weekend's gospel reading!

#glass studio #flameworking #lampworking #conversations you can only have with specific people #it was actually a really interesting discussion #but prompted by a different discussion #about how we're inappropriate and need to watch our language when other people are around the studio #actually catholic

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idiopath-fic-smile · 21 hours ago

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(I write at least 250 words on the topic of your choice each time my musical audio drama kickstarter hits another 10%. We've actually reached 100% so thank you so much! That said, if we hit 115% we'll have the funds to buy some mics so that we can cast actors who don't have a good sound setup; the Kickstarter is very much still going until 11 am ET this Saturday. I currently owe three pieces, including this one, and hopefully I will owe a fourth, so if you've got prompts, let 'em fly!)

The corners of Enjolras's lips flickered upwards for a moment, which Grantaire caught because he was watching Enjolras's mouth a normal and reasonable amount.

"You don't know what I am," Enjolras said at last.

Grantaire took a drag on his cigarette. "Hopefully not the triangles thing, because I'd still kinda want to hook up with you and I don't want to hurt myself on the corners."

It was so bold, Grantaire almost took it back. He imagined sucking back in the words, along with the cloud of smoke trailing his exhale. There had to be a limit to how obvious he could be without making Enjolras book it out of there. But Enjolras seemed to barely react to that part. Instead, he frowned.

"I suppose that explains why you were willing to be alone with me," said Enjolras, almost to himself.

"Yeah?" said Grantaire, who was rapidly losing purchase on this conversation, and was about to forfeit even more of a grip because Enjolras flashed his teeth just then.

His teeth, which included a set of unusually long and sharp canines.

"Oh," Grantaire said, "You're a vampire."

Everything clicked into place then. The seriousness, the quick movements, the man-out-of-time method of flirting. Grantaire had assumed Enjolras had arrived at the party without a costume, but clearly this was not the case. Enjolras, apparently, was cosplaying a creature of the night with an almost mindbending degree of versimilitude.

Did Grantaire have the self-respect not to jump into bed with some kind of rabid Anne Rice fanboy? He took in another lungful of tobacco smoke, mullling this over. Breathed out, still mulling.

Grantaire had met people this intense about their hobbies before, but Enjolras seemed otherwise like a decent enough guy, and on some level, Grantaire could appreciate that much commitment to a bit. The funniest thing Grantaire could think to do was to go along with it, and in the absence of another North Star, he ventured onto the swampy territory of a "yes-and."

"Well," said Grantaire, "I once drunkenly hooked up with the head of the campus young Republicans, so in comparison, what's another bloodsucker, you know?"

Enjolras blinked. It was a slow blink, like a cat, and also like a cat, there was something slightly predatory in the motion. Grantaire would've been weirded out if he hadn't just learned that it was all part of an elaborate, like, Nosferatau kayfabe.

"In my defense, I didn't realize he was a Republican until the next morning," Grantaire added into the silence, "when I could actually see what books he had on his nightstand. I'd been like, 'yay, he's literate!' but turns out there's worse things." He shuddered. So much Jordan Peterson…

"You truly don't mind?" said Enjolras slowly.

"Wait," said Grantaire, "you're not a Republican, too, are you? Eponine would never let me live it down. Uh, quick, what's your stance on—" He plucked an issue from the air. "—unions?"

"Man's only hope is to organize and fight," Enjolras said gravely.

"Right on," said Grantaire, relief sweeping through his nervous system in a giddy wave. "Solidarity forever and all—" He broke off because Enjolras was staring at him. Or specifically, at his neck.

You really had to hand it to the guy: he was dedicated to his weird play-pretend.

"Let me guess," Grantaire said, "you're hungry."

If you are still taking Halloween fic requests:

Member of a monster-themed novelty band Grantaire x Actual Vampire Enjolras

oh HELL YEAHHHHHH

i'd apologize for the ensuing silliness but you can probably gather that is a hallmark of the fledgling "monster-themed novelty band x actual literal monster" genre. this is part one; i may write more tomorrow

“Grantaire,” Joly panted, “come quick, it’s a party emergency!”

Grantaire, who might as well have lived inside a glass case labeled BREAK IN CASE OF PARTY EMERGENCY, flipped himself right side up from where he’d been about to attempt a keg stand, and nodded solemnly, clapping his hands together. The blood rushed back to his head in a giddy wave.

“What do you need?” he asked.

Joly nodded at Bossuet to explain as the three of them barreled down the hallway.

“Here’s the thing,” said Bossuet, “we hired a band tonight, but the lead singer got way too high and now he thinks he needs to liberate all the notes from his guitar.”

Grantaire cocked his head to one side. “Does that explain why someone’s spent the past hour loudly and determinedly playing scales?”

“I don’t pretend to understand the inebriate’s mind!” Joly shouted, gesticulating wildly. The effect was slightly undercut by the bottle of gin in his hand.

“Point is,” said Bossuet, still walking at an almost-run, “we already rounded up Eponine and Bahorel. We need you guys to take the stage and salvage what’s left of tonight. C’mon, Bahorel says your sound is really getting there.”

“We’re not a band,” Grantaire insisted. “We’re a support group that keeps getting noise violations. We’ve never even played a gig.” He knew he probably sounded whiny but it had been a long week. His minimum possible math requirement was kicking his ass. “Besides, I had plans for tonight. I was gonna get laid.” Or at least, he was going to do his damnedest. Believe in yourself. Manifest your dreams. No I in team.

Bossuet simultaneously peered at Grantaire and pulled him through a door. “Is that why you’re dressed as…god, I don’t know, what do you call all this?”

“I thought he was an Animorph,” announced Joly. “Like, at a midpoint in the transformation to some kind of hairy animal.”

Grantaire coughed.

“Sorry,” said Joly easily. “A Sexy Mid-Transformation Animorph.”

“Shit, take in some culture once in a while, this is embarrassing,” said Grantaire. He gestured at the wolf ears on his headband, the fur glued to the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, the canine nose he’d drawn over his own with Eponine’s eyeliner pencil, the strategically ripped shirt and jeans. “I’m a Sexy Wolfman,” he said. “Obviously.”

He and Eponine, who had watched Ginger Snaps every day for the past month, had agreed to go as a pair of werewolves, but then Eponine had abandoned their pack of two to go make out with Cosette, which he really should’ve seen coming. He couldn’t even hold it against her; Eponine had been “casually” memorizing Cosette’s general weekly schedule for the past couple of semesters, when she wasn’t watching Cosette moony-eyed from the other side of the Quad. It was all probably very cute.

“Well, Wolfman,” said Bossuet, nudging Grantaire in the direction of the makeshift stage, where Bahorel was taking a seat behind the drums and Eponine was—reluctantly, by the look of it—re-tuning her borrowed bass. “You three have about thirty seconds to think of a band name.”

Grantaire picked up the electric guitar and raised his eyebrows at Eponine, whose lupine makeup was now marred by bright red lip marks, like something from a cartoon. Her own lips were smeared crimson, which was to be expected, but.

“She stopped to kiss you multiple times on the cheek?” he muttered.

“Shut up,” said Eponine, visibly blushing. “How’s your quest for a meaningless hookup?”

Grantaire let out a long breath. “Not even the furries are biting,” he admitted as Eponine snickered.

“Band names, people,” said Bahorel. He adjusted a cymbal. “I don’t have all night.”

“Hello,” Grantaire intoned into the microphone. “We are Not Even the Furries Are Biting! This first song—”

“Gonna kill you and make it look like an accident,” Eponine crooned low in his ear. “The embarrassing kind. Toilet-related.”

The thing was, in their capacity as a very loud sort-of group therapy session, with October 31st on the horizon, they had actually been talking about the appeal of wolves as a metaphor for the parts of oneself that felt wild or lonely or unlovable. To that effect, they’d been toying with a couple songs.

Maybe, thought Grantaire, this would not be a complete and total clusterfuck.

They played “I was a Teenage Werewolf” by The Cramps. They played “I’m The Wolf Man” by Round Robin. They played “Werewolf” by The Frantics. Any time he, Bahorel, or Eponine ran into a snag—a fumbled note, a missed beat, a patch that wasn’t perfectly memorized—Grantaire attempted to cover for them by throwing back his head and wailing, as if he was losing more and more of his grip on his humanity.

They were just finishing the first verse of The Black Keys’ “Howling for You” when Grantaire saw him: a tall, handsome stranger lingering at the back edge of the room, with intense eyes and an even more intense air of stone-cold sobriety. He wasn’t smiling, wasn’t frowning, just—looking. Disapprovingly? Apathetically? Saddled with a bad case of heartburn? It was hard to tell.

The chorus started up, and Grantaire sang along with Eponine and Bahorel:

“Da da da da da, da da da da da da—”

Grantaire grinned as more and more of the crowd joined in—pulled along less by the band’s general prowess or charisma and more by a drunk college student’s inherent love of an easy earworm, but Grantaire wasn’t splitting hairs at this point.

“Da da da da da, da da da da da—”

A sea of bobbing, singing partygoers, and there on the fringes, Offensively Sober Guy stood perfectly still, watching Grantaire so intently that Grantaire almost forgot the words to the refrain.

Or rather, the word.

Or rather, the single repeating syllable.

To Offensively Sober’s left, two guys attempted to clink their beer bottles together and somehow lost their balance, careening into him. He maintained his impeccable posture as if they weren’t even in the room, never breaking his stare. It was honestly a little creepy.

For reasons Grantaire would later not be able to fully reconstruct, he decided the funniest thing to do would be to wink and smirk and generally pretend like Sober was really, really into him.

#everyone leaves alive #what big teeth #member of a monster themed novelty band x actual literal monster

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fictionadventurer · 10 months ago

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I think I have accidentally become very protective of the story of Snow White.

#listening to the disney animation podcast about some early features #made the mistake of listening to the snow white one involving a conversation with someone who deems herself a feminist #and hoo boy #they were fairer than i expected #but also LET ME AT 'EM!#do you have no appreciation for innocence?#for love?#there is no film nowadays that would value housework as a worthwhile skill the way this one does #and that shouldn't be the only thing women can do #but a lot of women do it!#also this film doesn't need to be commenting on all of society #sometimes you're just telling this one specific story #idk i guess writing my own version of snow white #who is almost comically pure and innocent #makes me appreciate her a lot more and get mad at people who don't #when i have time i need to write a better rant

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pinkfey · 6 months ago

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remember how in dao there were always like multiple flirty options u could just spring on ur love interest and it wasn't something that was brushed past it would stop a conversation dead in its tracks to have a cute secondary flirty offshoot with small variations dependent on the flirty option u initially chose with a unique course correction to get back on topic after...... yeah.

#sorry i'm about to be a hater #romance in datv is like. a vaguely flirty line met by an even vaguer response that has no impact on the conversation #in the beginning at least #only once your relationship is like 6 or 7 does it get a little more receptive #and the whole time it's like okay i completed a main quest. time to talk to the love interest. okay i did another main quest. time to talk #to the love interest. BC YOU CAN'T TALK TO THEM OUTSIDE OF DESIGNATED CUTSCENES. U CAN'T HAVE RANDOM CONVERSATIONS #A LA HAVE YOU EVER LICKED A LAMPPOST IN WINTER!!! THAT IS SO LAME!!!!!!!! SO COOKIE CUT!!!!!!!!!#there's so few references to your relationship at all really. the romance cutscenes could be removed and u would never know they're in love #the romance doesn't exist outside of designated cutscenes. you can't choose to randomly flirt you must wait for The Cutscenes because #there's only one way to romance everybody. even dai was better with this imo even though the formula is similar #partly bc u can get to know everyone outside of exclusive cutscenes?? you can just approach them at anytime and get to know them?? and find #a chance to flirt?? and there's teeny tiny special romance-specific moments carved out. like the dance after halamshiral for example #and again people TALK about your romance. it's present in the narrative #bioware is so known for their romances but they dropped the ball hard here and i'm sooooooooo disappointed #and actually?? companions barely ever interject during main quests too?? or quests at all?? just as a side note #companions should be voicing their OPINIONSSSSS when i make choices????#davrin should have had so much to say during weisshaupt cutscenes. like what the fuck was that #and why wasn't there a one-on-one conversation discussing his mortality with him beforehand?? would have liked to see that??#relationship growth in this game is purely waiting for the next milestone and it feels so stale and lackluster and upsetting and ugh #the fact that giving your companions gifts strictly results in approval gain and one measly thank you is indicative of everything wrong #anyways.txt #jasmine plays datv #da4 spoilers

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pokemonblack3white3 · 2 days ago

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HI OMG

Okay first getting this out of the way: I LOVE when people use my ideas literally anybody is free to take them and do whatever the fuck they want with them. I don't care how far it diverged from my original vision if you want Drayton as part of this family instead of being an aloof jackass or give her a redemption arc EEL FREE. If you want Drayton as Ingo's kid instead of Andrea's or to use any of your other headcanons for this family instead of mine GO CRAZY!!!! Tear the Canon I have created to shreds until it is UNRECOGNIZABLE!!!! Like yeah I'm pretty attached to some ideas for this au but if you want to veer all the way back to Drayton and Sylas being the heroes of truths and ideals I'd love to see how far you can take this. I've always been of the opinion that the best part of fandom is collaborating and sharing and expanding on ideas, regardless of if that's through dissecting canon or extreme fanonization to the point of complete bastardization. Like I'm so serious if anybody EVER wants to take my headcanons or aus and do their own thing with them go right the hell ahead. I mean like obviously don't repost my fics or art but I think y'all get what I mean. You guys can copy my homework just change it up a bit so the teacher can't tell.

I am DEEPLY invested in this unforgivably problematic toxic yaoi thing you've got going on here you had me hooked as soon as you mentioned Drayden on a leash (but those conversations are probably better saved for incredibly private channels with friends who already know the way I am lmao). In a more appropriate tone for discussion here I love exploring different kinds of relationships and how they impact dynamics and individual characters, it's why I try and make every au version of a character as different as I can to really spice things up (ie: Grey au Dietes making amends with her family and finding her own path, Blast to the Past au Drayton fulfilling the expectations of his family but only completely absent of their influence, currently unnamed Bad End au Drayton desperately rejecting her family and becoming a workaholic). Ghetsis is a little harder to do stuff like that with and still keep him in-character or interesting at all, but finding new characters to play off him is always so !!!!!!!!!!!! to me. Drayden isn't one I've considered before but it genuinely makes so much sense to hold them up next to each other.

So clarifying something in my canon of the au so far (plans may change but. For now), Iris and the resistance finally stage a full-scale attack against Team Plasma because Amarys tips them off that Sylas is alive, as well as filling them in on some important stuff about the base so they could actually get inside and have a fighting chance. This is all full ensemble attack so every member of the resistance and then some (Lacey, Drayton, Kieran) are here. Epic final battle stuff. Lacey is here because fuck Team Plasma, and Drayton and Kieran are here because they desperately need to get out of Unova after an incident I won't get super into right now (it sees like it may direactly interfere with an idea you've brought up and I very much want to see where this is going without me playing referee too much, but the long and short of it is that Drayton killed a member of Team Plasma) and Iris was the only one who could help them. She said she would but only if she could borrow Pecharunt's power for their raid. Anyways this is when the hero of ideals Iris and hero of truth Amarys thing happens but again do what you will with that. I believe that's what you were wondering about earlier?? Sorry if I misread what was unclear.

I think if I've got anything to add it's definitely from the angle of some of the characters you haven't discussed here. Specifically Amarys, Keys (my OC, adopted son of one of the Shadow Triad who I'm officially folding into this au), and Sora ( @purgatory-is-life 's OC I'll tag them in case xe wants to add on), since those three would be closest to Drayden.

So Amarys is having an internal struggle with being a part of Team Plasma, and Sylas helps push her over the edge to betray them. Drayden would ABSOLUTELY play a ton into this in this sidebar au, especially as Amarys would probably be one of the few people Drayden is ever really consistently around. Even then, though, Amarys probably has even less access to him than Sylas, with Ghetsis being so protective over his prize. It has to kill Drayden to see Amarys grow up in this environment, especially with how close in age she is to Drayton. Amarys tries to show kindness to him in her own stilted way, and as an expert in showing kindness in somewhat awkward, unconventional ways, Drayden understands. If Drayden makes it through to the other side, Amarys feels guilty as hell about the part she played in what happened to Drayden. She would stumble around him so much.

Sora is a Hisuian Zoroark pretending to be human, a fact that only Colress knows (and like maybe Ghetsis but Amarys definitely doesn't). Sora and Amarys are siblings of a sort, and Sora hangs off Amarys like a leech because she's the only person they feel halfway safe around. I'll wait to see if Void has any input on this, but I can only imagine how terrified Sora would feel seeing Drayden's treatment, thinking how that could happen to it if Colress ever got bored of him or Sora ever let down his illusion.

As for Keys, being taken out of an abusive situation by one of the Shadow Triad when he was young, he has an undying and obsessive loyalty to them, the same that they hold for Ghetsis. Keys genuinely considers Team Plasma his family and would do anything for them. He does have a moral compass, but he's become very adept at slapping a sticky note over the needle whenever he needs to "protect his family". He is FAR less remorseful than Amarys or Sora about all this bullshit, and though he thinks Drayden's treatment is in incredibly poor taste, if Ghetsis wants a war prize to show off that's his right as their leader. He feels bad for the guy and won't cause him harm if he doesn't have to, but of the three he's definitely the worst with Drayden and a very genuine obstacle to Drayden or even Sylas getting the hell out of there (Keys also considers Amarys and Sylas family, but dad's orders come first . He ABSOLUTELY draws the line at hurting either of them but he's got no qualms with restraining them and/or putting them in timeout). He's pretty similar in age to Amarys here, maybe a year or two older.

Anyways those are a few of my thoughts! Hope I added something interesting to the discussion (:

I love sidebar AUs.. one that’s been plaguing me is the idea of a sidebar AU of the Bad End AU where Drayden actually lives

Could you imagine the angst

Realizing Drayton has become a snitch, completely removing herself from any association with family

Realizing Sylas has joined Team Plasma on false promises and lies, losing a decent amount of sanity and pressed under their thumbs

Confronting either of them and missing the recognition of the family he once knew. His own grandkids gone. He himself is too weak to march up to Ghetsis and break his spine for what he’s done.

Getting reports that Sylas just paces and talks to himself. Not getting any feedback on Drayton whatsoever.

Drayden is a family man. Taking his family from him is worse than taking his life, the worst form of torture you could place upon him. Ghetsis relishes in it.

#LONG post under that read more of which the target audience is like 4 people beware #Also TW for like literally every kind of abuse imaginable turned up to 100 #Super fave #Oc sharing #Pokemon oc

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