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senkusphone · 11 months ago

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Dr. Stone chapter 3D trivia post

Hello, um. I hope yall had a pleasant solstice celebration of your choice- I've been pondering whether what we just saw merits a triva post, but let's try to squeeze some for the sake of completion, shall we?

Check out also my trivia posts for chapters 1D and 2D.

They're the same picture.

It took me way too long to notice what was off in this cover, it seems to be nothing but an aesthetic choice. Other than these off colors, this specific suika melon design first appeared during the Treasure island arc, right after Ryusui punted her off the Perseus.

To directly quote what I wrote at one time on the wiki:

Too bad, the ship Chelsea shows up in is not the Perseus D. Monkey from chapter 214 (which itself is a One Piece reference, as Boichi is a big fan).

Interesting that we get a nearly identical shot, instead of Kohaku standing behind her, it's Ruri and Matsukaze.

This posture done my Matsukaze is called Namaste (with other names such as Namaskar), which is used both as a greeting and as an indication of reverence all over the southern parts of Asia, along with other similar gestures. I know this is familiar to many myself included but I had never looked into the deeper details until now.

Figurines showing this pose have been excavated from the Indus valley civilization dating to between 2700 and 2100 BCE, making this piece of cultural heritage at least 7800 years old by the time of this panel.

Xeno has clearly had his hand in the architecture of the Japan side of the KoS, with some new constructions resembling his own Evil Disneyland back home.

Hold back yer tears

Kaseki has lived well. It's hard to tell how old he is now, he lived longer than the timeline's consistency thats for sure, I blame time travel.

At the time Taiju got wed, he was around 70 years old.

Kaseki and Chrome go back way further than the KoS, the fanbook tells us that Kaseki helped Chrome build his shed when he was just a boy.

Feel your heart a bit shakey? hang on there, we now get to talk about whyman's sorrow, and a small observation that I've made

Whyman can have emotions, the circuits that process that can be switched on and off, but the fact that a message can, or needs to be "left" for themselves, as well as his farewell for all eternity, has an interesting implication: once switched off, whyman loses the recollection of any experience they had in the meantime. These circuits allow whyman to feel, and also to then forget. This is useful, as emotions help them survive, but forgetting prevents the emotional baggage from growing infinitely over a virtually immortal life.

"If we remembered every single parting person, it would only be a few generations before the sorrow would pile up to the point it became unbearable. Maybe it is a blessing to forget. Forgetting allows us to get even. Forget sorrows as new ones replace them. Life can go on, if tragically. No accumulating loss that would one day make everyone struggle to survive and eventually pass on; though that last thing does also sound very much like today."

(10B points to the ~2 people who know where this quote is from, I digress)

So that's cool, and heartbreaking, but so what, does it connect to anything we've seen before?

Well...

In ch. 232 we see that Whyman does not know what created them.

How could that be, if they can remember things over deep time?

Maybe it is that Whyman chose to forget their creators, and everything they felt about them. Beings that they may even have loved in the deep deep past, and could not cope with yearning for.

The blonde, bangs & ponytail lineage.

The village graveyard. Last time we saw it, Byakuya's gravestone was opened to reveal the glass record.

A lot of recognizable headstones are still up now, some appear to have moved.

Other headstones might be gone or be different... The one with four dots that was there originally can't be seen in this new shot but it can be seen later in the chapter.

Also, I hate to break this to you, but there's more headstones now than there were before.

I counted 45 in the original shot, 50 in the new one, not including any that Chelsea and Senku may be covering. Granted this is likely just an oversight.

(I should mention that in order for them to match bottom to bottom, the top image is flipped horizontally).

(omg look at the babiesss)

What Xeno is telling Chrome is that if whyman went and altered their own past, then what they are seeing currently is the result of that, since whatever changes they made, are in the past after all.

They already happened and they are part of the timeline that leads them to where they are now.

Assuming they actually found Byakuya (or a petrified time traveler) means that either whyman created some sort of causal loop that is self sustaining (ie, the ramifications of the changes in the past include whyman going back to do them in the first place), or more in line with the many worlds hypothesis, that going back to the past and changing it creates a new parallel timeline where the repercussions of that happen, with no effect in the first one.

In the latter case it means the timeline we see now was altered by the whyman from a parallel universe.

The stone axe is a bit dissonant with where they are, technologically speaking, yes? Thing is, that's the one Senku took to the moon with him.

He's had it since chapter 1.

A few people I've seen mystified about this structure they unearthed at the cementery:

This is a collapsed building just like the structures that the Tsukasa empire occupied.

(shoutout to that guy about to die in the back)

Interestingly, this means that Ishigami Village is established on top of a once urban area.

I am always pumped for any extra bits of village lore I can get.

Did Suika's handwriting trigger your AI generated image senses? it did for me.

We were bamboozled again. If it ends up happening it's gonna be like the tale of the wolf. The moment we stop taking it seriously, Inagaki is gonna smack us across the head with it.

We were actually preparing for the poop on a stick to hit the f.a.a.n on discord. What do I make about the ending? I don't know, I got no big analysis this time around but I believe it's very likely we'll see more at some point.

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rottingskunk · 2 years ago

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A Questionable Sandman head cannon!

Tw: Mentions of cannibalism, Descriptive text of gore and violence (i do not condone cannibalism irl please do not see this post as a way of me agreeing with that concept)

This is the perfect time to write about something i will regret in the future! But this will be entertaining so might as well, 2am me is none the wiser. Few days ago stumbled upon the songs:

Man eater by Nelly Furtado & Cannibal by Kesha

And that got me thinking “what if Lucifer Morningstar was a cannibal, a beast of indescribable hunger” This sounds very ooc most likely i digress. I thought of their innate desire to feel in control and above those who choose to fight them. My brain is very incoherent rn jdkcdk. Heres a pathetic ficlet shit bc i can!

Lucifer’s feast:

Many beings whether immortal or not always wondered what would Lucifer Morningstar eat. Would they eat meat similar to humans? Or was it as intangible as the mortals sufferage in their dominion. The answers were none of the above for they craved something even more brutal, human flesh, the flesh of their own kin.

They say that Lucifer chooses their prey among disobedient mortals that arrived to their dominion. The rumors spread that Lightbringer rips out their heart last but will end up intensines first and rip up the body with their sharp claws. Eating up eyes was similar to eating candy stolen from children.(Cori probs wants some too🧍‍♂️) Not even their own demon citizens are safe from their feral hunger.

Ripping apart bodies felt as easy as tearing paper. The satisfying crack and shred of their feeble bodies was never tiring to hear repeatedly. It was animalistic outright a lowbrow thing to do. Lucifer did not care for such culture and will eat as they please. A human’s brain was as tasty as venision whislt demons brains tasted of lamb. It was an illegal practice even for hell’s practice but as their ruler they can be excluded from the law. Hypocritical yes but Lucifer cant help but think of biting off the coarse rough skin of demons once it no longer pleases them.

Demons they like the most get to be eaten repeatedly. For the rest of eternity. Demons have regenerative properties but its not as powerful as being immortal they can still withstand long lasting injuries. For Lucifer’s case they use whatever they can to keep their favorite prey alive.

More deranged hcs bc im in a silly goof mood!!

-maybe using spines as scarves or backing on the back of their outfits (imagine-JUST IMAGINE )

-maybe blood for nailpolish, would be funny if it can work that way

-Chorozon did not survive after the battle between Lucifer vs Morpheus lets be real☠️

(Ironic how im not a fan of gore or heavy implications of it but i still wrote this, its ass atm but yea) BONUS GIF OF BBYGORL CORINTHIAN BEING A SLUT YEAAA!!!☠️(also there was no lucifer Morningstar gifs so offended)

#the sandman #lucifer morningstar #lucifer sandman #ficlet #headcannons #I am so sorry in advance🧍‍♂️#lightbringer #sandman #lucifer morningstar fic #neil gaiman PLS DO NOT SEE THIS #he better not be lurking this will be so awkward #but also maybe #FJFSK🤡🤡#fanaticrottingskunk

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fatedwithmbc · 2 years ago

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It’s Only Been 7 Days:

Apparently, my last post was 7 days ago. It feels much longer than that. I don’t even remember what I last wrote about. That is likely contributing to the feeling that it’s been such a long time. Anyway, I digress…

Let’s get the MBC out of the way:

My lung inflammation (pleurisy) has improved significantly! I can take deeper breaths, I can move more freely. However, sneezing fits seem to re-aggravate things.

I have started my 2nd cycle of Kisqali; I’m on week 2. One left until my off week.

I should be happier about some of my tumors shrinking, but I am left with weird “IDGAF” feelings.

My medical marijuana card was approved and mailed to me. I have since visited a dispensary. This shit is going to be a lot of trial and error. The gummies I was taking prior to my card approval were pure THC. Apparently, this provides a different type of “high” than a product called a 1:1. A 1:1 is one part THC and one part CBD. The idea being the CBD will counteract some of the THC effects. Therefore, when I am taking these tinctures, it feels like nothing is happening, because I am used to the “high” from the THC-only product. While I’ve felt like nothing is happening, I’ve had a few problems with oversleeping because the effects of the 1:1 are keeping me asleep. I called and spoke to a “guide” (for lack of better wording) to advise how I should proceed with the tinctures. I should take them much sooner than I do now (currently, 10pm or later) and take them well before I start my bedtime routine (as early as 8pm).

I have an oncology appointment on Friday. I am interested in what my doctor will have to say after reviewing the scans from my ER visit and if there will be any changes to my treatment.

My surgery is 18 days away and I feel like I have a list as long as the Great Wall of China of things to do before then. I am also nervous. I don’t want anything to go wrong during the procedure. I feel like I am putting a heavy burden on my sister-in-law that day and I know my health has been causing her some anxiety already. It will be ok. It HAS to be.

It’s Friday I’m in [LIKE]:

I was able to see “E” on Friday. <insert silly, smiley face here> I didn’t think that we’d manage a visit as he traveled to his parents’ for his birthday this weekend. The short story is Friday was nice and low-key. I even had gifts awaiting me (stickers for my medical book (incredibly thoughtful and funny)). We watched episodes of “I am a Stalker” and “Nailed It!” and had Chinese food for dinner. The dog is still very uncertain of my presence, but snuggles next to me at bedtime. I mustn’t be that terrible if the dog sleeps next to me. The best part of the visit was finally having our FIRST kiss. Gosh, I’m such a girl sometimes.

Things are progressing well for us and I’m hesitant to disrupt the relationship and the dynamic with the inevitable “what-are-we” conversation. So, I’m skipping it. I just want to be happy. Why disrupt the positive nature of our situation to “define the relationship”? I’m not ready to do that yet. I’m not ready to let go if the outcome isn’t what I want it to be. However, conversations about holiday gift-giving (I already got the dog a Christmas present and I think I am more excited about it than he will be), constant communication, and being called “Sunshine”, make me think I’m being too pessimistic for my own good.

I likely won’t see “E” until December now. Thanksgiving and distance make it difficult for us to try to plan seeing each other this week. But, distance makes the heart grow fonder. Or so “they” say.

Random Ramblings:

Figuring out MM would be great.

I bought a weighted blanket, but need to wash it and shit before I can use it.

I also got Bailey a Christmas present - hers is pretty great too!

I started Christmas shopping (obviously); and have of course bought myself something each time I purchased something. (Shrugs Shoulders).

I had my Tarot Cards read. It was an interesting experience. I might get my palm read next.

I’m still scared.

El Fin.

Notifications: @kcco265 , @guardgirl101 , @lb4d

#fated with mbc #confessions of a cancer patient #metastatic breast cancer #stage iv deserves more

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crimsonophelia · 4 years ago

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hi! could i request for an imagine involving childe and a gn reader? the reader is childe’s longtime childhood friend who’s more or less been in love with him since they were young—and they document the extent of their feelings in a diary (complete with embarrassingly detailed paragraphs planning out theirs and childe’s wedding, gushing over every little thing about him, incidents where they felt petty and jealous over childe showing interest in someone else, etc etc.) that they accidentally end up mailing to childe in liyue thinking it was the book they bought him as a gift.

when they realize the mix-up, they try to make a run for the post office to stop it from being sent to him, but it’s no use—it’s already been shipped out and sent off. how childe ends up responding, doing, or reacting is completely up to you! (i apologize if this request was a little long aha; i hope you have a wonderful day!)

featuring: childe x gn!reader

warnings: none

published: april 22 2021

form: imagine

a/n: thank you for requesting!! this is so cute~~ i love wholesome, bashful childe www

you couldn’t believe it. oh my god, you were such a huge, fucking idiot. how could you have gotten the letters mixed up with the bank documents??? the whole point of keeping your ridiculously embarrassing letters to tartaglia separate from the rest of your documents was just so something like THIS could never happen!

the eleventh fatui harbinger had requested a few copies of official documents from northland bank to help zhongli with some funeral parlor legal paperwork, and you happily obliged, jumping at the opportunity to be of help to the boy you’ve admired for so long.

but for some reason, you were feeling particularly airheaded today. the night before, you had written yet another “letter” to tartaglia in your diary, much like the countless other sheets of paper clipped together, filled with endless words of yearning that will never be read by their intended recipient. you wrote:

“my dearest ajax,

i hope life as a harbinger is going well. i quite miss when we were back in snezhnaya as children, but i suppose i should thank celestia that fate brought us back together in liyue. i still cant help but to miss you each and every day, though. it feels like its been so long since we last got together and talked. i remember last time we had an actual conversation was at wangshu inn— was it three, no, four months ago? i cant quite recall. you looked so lovely, as usual. your smile never fails to make me laugh, especially with that one crooked tooth. i still love to bully you about that, you know. hopefully we can meet again soon, sincerely. im tired of being just friends, tartaglia. not when you look at me like that, and not when you always love to put your arm around my shoulder and pull me in to you every time we meet. i dont know how you feel about me—sometimes it appears as if you might feel the same, though i can never be sure. but i digress. life is rather lonely without you, and yet i manage to get by, somehow.

always yours,

[y/n]”

you tucked the letter amidst the stack of all the others, confident that they would never see the light of day. but somehow, somehow, your foolish, sleep-deprived brain mixed the letters in between the documents from the bank, and now tartaglia would know everything. all your foolish musings over the years, fawning over his rogueish charm like a child, yearning for your friend with such humiliating naïveté. this cannot happen. you have to get to him before the mail can, somehow. he was currently staying at an inn nearby the funeral parlor—there’s gotta be a way to be quicker than the mail deliverer.

you hurried out of your office and hailed the first rickshaw you see lined up on the street, and ordered him to drive you to the inn, as soon as humanly possible.

upon arrival, you leapt out of the seat, tossing an indiscriminately large fare at the driver before stumbling onto the sidewalk, almost dropping your things. slamming open the door to the inn, you reach the front counter. asking breathlessly, “which room is mr. tartaglia staying in?”, you hurry to the room the doorman indicates to be the fatui’s residence.

but before you get the chance to even look for the room, you turn the corner and slam into a taller body. to your dismay, you look up and see the face of a shocked tartaglia looking down at you, a stack of papers tucked under his arm. shit.

shit shit shit. this cannot be happening right now. maybe he hasn’t read the letters yet? slim chance, though—he’s always been nosy.

“[y/n]...” Childe looked at you with a pained glint in his eyes. he reached out for your arm with his free hand.

ah. so he knew.

you tried to jerk away, feeling your cheeks heat up with embarassment and the pressure that always comes before tears. things are never going to be the same again. all because of my stupidity.

you felt yourself colliding with the wall of tartaglia’s chest again, as he abruptly dropped all he was holding. a pair of arms wrapped themselves assuredly around your waist, so familiar, yet so foreign. not able to hold yourself together for any longer, you let yourself go, crying into tartaglia’s chest, your voice racked with harsh, humiliating, childish sobs.

“why did you hide it from me for so long?” you felt tartaglia whisper into your hair, his breath grazing your scalp. his warmth was so delicious, something youve been craving for so long finally being satiated.

looking up, his usual charming smirk was much more sad, almost guilt-ridden. “i care about you so much [y/n]. you know you can tell me anything, right?”

gasping for air, you felt so ashamed for making such a scene in front of him. “i was so scared, ajax. scared that i would drag you down, or scared you would leave me behind.” you couldn’t bear to meet the pained gaze of the boy yoy so hopelessly fell in love with.

his rough hand smoothed over your hair, comforting you like he used to, back when you two were children in snezhnaya. drawing you effortlessly closer towards him, until you felt his lips plant a chaste kiss upon your forehead.

“you know i love you, [y/n], don’t you? i always have and i always will.”

you clung on to him tighter, fearing what the world might return to if you ever let go. you couldn’t let him slip through your fingers, not again.

“i don’t want you to suffer because of me anymore, my dear.”

a/n: to clarify YES THIS IS A HAPPY ENDING READER AND CHILDE GET TOGETHER i just didnt wanna go any further and do a complete 180 on the tone lolol i hope this is okay!!

#childe x reader #genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #genshin headcanons #childe headcanons #childe imagines #tartaglia x reader #tartaglia headcanons #genshin childe #genshin impact childe #childe fanfic #childe fic #when will i stop writing angst

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richardlawson · 3 years ago

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After a screening this afternoon, I stood on the busy sidewalk of 29th street and smoked my last cigarette of Cannes (having been home for almost a month). I decided to listen to a sad song while I walked back to the subway rather than finishing the latest comedy podcast droning its way into my ears from LA.

It was windy, but the air was still humid and close. The weather felt big, and the tall, tall buildings of almost midtown were enormous. (It is still so boggling to pop back into Manhattan!) I walked the short distance imagining myself at the cinemascope ending of a movie—what a poignant, subtle conclusion it would be, a person simply making their way to the subway after so much has happened.

It is difficult to grapple with what’s happened. Am I the only one finding that? I know that we must admit the important layers of this: we did not die, loved ones were okay, we kept working, held ourselves in the clench of our lives as so much cratered outside. Past that, though, it was tricky. It still is. More than that. Immediately post-vaccination, I felt the airy lift I was supposed to, the world not cracking open but gently re-revealing itself, a shining, outdoor Shangri La that had been hovering there, only hidden, all along.

That feeling lasted just a few weeks, though, as grim news lapped at the edges of the merriment. But it wasn’t really the news—concerning as it is—that sunk me back down. It was more the sudden weight of life, tossed into the pool and crashing down on me just as I was coming up for air. It was the realization that a year and a half—and quite likely longer—does actually change a life, that things will never go back to being the same. And the realization that I no longer really remember what that same was.

I remember parties, and a kind of cross-city ramble resembling the boozy digression of my 20s, but a bit more assured. I remember a rush, a haze, a feeling like I was living some grand existence without ever touching the ground, ever really connecting to any one thing. Of course, there were dull and dire days during all of that, but who would choose to remember those? No, in the abstraction of my mind there is just a sparkling blur, one I have found myself clumsily grasping for as real life has, allegedly, set back in.

I hope I am not alone in this feeling of mourning, this constant fear—a terror, really—that I am scrambling at something entirely irretrievable. Like I am trying to pick up an anecdote midway through, after a long and pregnant pause. Isn’t it so strange, and so sad, that so much is now definitively over, that we are on the other side of an undeniable piece of punctuation. There is no return, really. There is only carrying on, a new limp a part of the portraiture.

My sister and I took a trip in July, she meeting me in France after the Cannes film festival, and that almost felt like a before thing. Except it was charged with difference—masks and tests and all that necessary protocol, yes, but also an ineffable haunt, this little curl of a voice that whispered, “It’s not like it used to be.” I thought maybe it was France, that I’d somehow grown tired of it (spoiled me!), or it was just the weirdness of rumbling around on trains with my sister for the first time in so long, surrounded by people speaking a different language.

But it wasn’t that, not really. It was "not like it used to be" in a sharper, more persistent way, the pebble in my shoe that has me so startlingly aware of the lines and shapes and matrices of the world, all of a sudden. How could anyone, with death so persistent a topic for so long, not grow to see the frayed and finite threads binding us to everything? How are we supposed to enjoy anything fully again, when we’ve had such a regular reminder of its eventual end?

Luck, I’m aware of. Fortune, too. I know that some maudlin post about how out of step with reality I have been feeling is, well, out of step with reality. But there it is anyway, this nagging feeling like maybe we all died already, that what we're staggering through now is some after-effect, residual but fading. I find myself imagining a membrane that I might step through—back into the life I think I had, or into a future when all of this feels so peacefully settled.

A friend and I found a little tucked away space in a park by the river, a picnic table and an umbrella where we can post up to surreptitiously drink wine and watch the boats on the river. I love those fucking boats, the busy process they confirm, New York chugging along in its infinite capacity. You can see the planes from Newark, too, a view recently stolen from my building's roof by some hideous new condo building tinkering its way upwards to blot out the sky. There, in that park, the East River breezes whispering a calming song, I begin to feel re-clarified, certain again about my mind and my body and their place in—as Mary Oliver wrote—the family of things.

That feeling is fleeting, though. Then it's back into the plainness of life, the sensation that everything has flattened into some tiny fragment of what it once was. I have to trust—I hope you trust, too—that we'll get it all back. Or, rather, that a new and thorough thing will slowly bloom in the old thing's place, for those of us lucky enough to still be alive and, for all the wear of age, healthy enough.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about a restaurant in Cannes, in which I wondered what it might be like to revisit it in the future. I found it again this year. It was still open, though I think it has a different name. And the little burbling fountain that stood next to its outdoor seating was silent and dry. So there it was, still plugging along, just a bit hobbled by circumstance, a little less pretty than it was in more ideal times.

I hope I get to wander by it again next year. I hope that the person glimpsing it then feels fuller, sturdier, more sure of the weight and consequence of his presence. That he knows he did not disappear into the couch, was not wholly lost to worry, did not irrevocably snap some tether that linked him to the great and troubled and bitterly missed past of his life.

The song I put on, walking to the subway in all that huge weather today, was this. I love its swell, its grandeur, its reminder that some stuff is not entirely reducible. It stays, small and determined and indelible as the new scar on my shin, from when I tripped on my suitcase, the night before I got back on a plane, cursing in the dark, forgetting how grateful I was to be feeling it at all.

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youcantfiremebecauseiquit · 3 years ago

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idk if u care but crispin gray recently had an interview about his entire career and it kind of changed my perspective of queenadreena…idk if for better or for worse lol. it was weird to see him so dismissive of a lot of his catalogue w katie except for ‘love your money’ just because that was the only remotely chart successful song. i get you want to be able to sustain yourself but jeez him and katie really had a weird back and forth relationship

Sorry i'm replying late, i've seen the interview pop up on Youtube but honestly i was too invested in university shit recently & generally not in the good mood for that but i'm planning to watch. How did it change your view on Queen Adreena, did he say something mean specifically on QA or Katie? I mean i gotta watch it but honestly? Not surprised in the slightest. A few years ago he was asked to describe fave songs he recorded throughout the years and he listed more of Daisy Chainsaw ones than anything else, with Love Your Money as number 1. The differences in their points of view are real something, Katie Jane absolutely HATED Love Your Money, same as Daisy Chainsaw. Kinda apparent he wanted bigger fame but DC dropped fast and QA failed to live up to their predictions.

i had a time when i liked to dig up old Queen Adreena interviews that are lost in the old internet & generally not available for years (which i planned to post on is-she-suffering but my investment in that site is... varied in its intensity). Also that was back in the days when i wrote Queen Adreena book during manic phase and tried to sell it but lost motivation Well since i don't do anything with that knowledge anyway i'll put what i know here as i love fan discussions

So they sure had/have odd back and forth love-hate relationship & that's the reason why their career went how it went. There's been a huge tension between them at some point. I'm sure you know she had a major mental breakdown (probably schizophrenic episode) after Daisy Chainsaw, or even beginning before her leaving, and then she went into isolation and lived with an old woman in Lake District for awhile. She left Daisy Chainsaw cause Crispin didn't want her to come up with her own songs (all of DC was by Crispin except for Lovely ugly brutal world by KJ).

They almost split up as Queen Adreena after Drink Me. The material for The Butcher and The Butterfly was written at different times, originally it was meant to be called Atom Bomb at Bikini but it was constantly delaying and they eventually recorded everything they've got live. So that's obvious right? But i was surprised to find out they were writing songs separately. Some of them (i forgot which though) were written by Katie Jane and Pete Howard's sons band (they're even credited) + some with Melanie Garside, Richard Adams + some other musician. Katie Jane didn't like it. They intended it to be their last album at the time. She also hated live at ICA show but they released it cause they were broke

But that's a digression. I just wanna say that at this point they were done with each other but kept pushing it. Katie had her own art projects and stuff, Crispin started Dogbones with Nomi and i just remember how vaguely pissed at Katie he waas in the interviews. Like he stressed that Dogbones is his number one priority and if Katie wants to do something with Queenadreena, she must wait til Dogbones have a break first or something, and it sounded oddly bitter.

RaCH and Djinn era are just so weird, they had opportunities but let them go in a way. I don't think many people know but they were huge demand in Japan. They entered album charts and were interviewed by 11 magazines and 6 (!)TV stations there (wtf happened to that material i want to know???). But they only played 5 times or less.

Katie said she considers the band dead but they decided they can try to play for a couple more months. But aside from that she 100% lost the interest in the band around Djinn. There's an interview where she says "the overall image is Crispin but the shape will change again at rehearsals". And you can hear it, it’s more blues rock than anything. IMO it's their worst production wise. Instruments are fine but Katie's voice is so badly produced that sometimes i find some songs fucking irritating, cause they didn’t cut out her breaths and the vocals are TOO LOUD, to the point of distorting. As if she stands too close to the mic. The album is fine but it feels unfinished.

And here we come back to Crispin... here's what he said after the QA split:

Why the Dogbones started? “I needed to work more than the previous band I was in was working, the previous band who shall remain nameless, haha… um… Queenadreena. I wanted to work more than the singer of Queenadreena wanted to work… so that’s why it started. Fine by me… but I really like to be in a band, I’m not a solo project kind of guy. The last album (‘Djin’) did come out in the UK, but it was so low key because Katie kind of disappeared so there was little point in promoting it. Personally it’s my favourite by far so it was a shame but there you go… So here are Dogbones, it’s not been an easy ride but we are trying very hard.

Ok so the bitterness is kinda apparent isn't it. I think there were two reasons why they argued so much, first musical differences. Katie at some point lost interest in loud rock music for some years and went the folk way in Ruby Throat. I have a theory that Taxidermy and Drink Me are more influenced by Katie Jane and Butcher and Djinn are more Crispin. During first albums i think Katie more actively took part in music composition and choosing arrangements. She wrote lyrics, melodies but also composed a lot of songs on some little electronic keyboard thing and 4 track (Heavenly Surrender, Pray for me, My Silent Undoing, all Lalleshwari +more). Plus she wanted more peaceful/dreamy sound on Taxidermy than full on rock, Crispin complained about it in some 00's interview, that he'd like it to be more rock. Then there are 2 versions of Drink Me, the original has rough and alt versions of songs (it was sold by Katie and it's leaked on FB and probably YT). Crispin Gray apparently really hated the final Drink Me. Now next album is The Butcher & The Butterfly and it's more standard blues rock, no more crazy dreamy things of previous albums etc., Djinn is even more blues rock but darker. Djinn was his favourite at some point while KJ hated Butcher, not sure about Djinn. So i think they had different views on where they should go, Katie made her weird simplistic creepy tunes (like Lalleshwari) and folk melodies adding that strange things to noise rock. Crispin probably wanted blues & rock.

Other than that, i’m convinced they are bitter exes, lol. There’s been rumours about them dating during Daisy Chainsaw for years, plus Katie had a history of dating band members. Crispin wrote X-ing off the days about her. I don’t know if they dated again in Queen Adreena. Then there’s this interview, timeline is unclear, either The butcher & the butterfly or later:

„Katie writes all the songs herself and often looks for melodies and structure with the drummer. With Crispin - her husband or ex-husband, which is not entirely clear to me - for almost three years she has no longer been in a room. "Sometimes we send him a letter with a new song and that's all we can do. All we have are our lungs and our musical talent and we have to do with it. It is repugnant difficult life, I know most of the time how I should deal with it." But Queenadreena will still remain even exist? "I think so, we are now pretty busy and I see where the ship aground.”

I always wondered what exactly happened after Djinn, i’ve seen Katie Jane say „i think they gave up on me” while others said she disappeared. Other times CG said there’s no bad blood between them but at the same time there’s been some weird tension. As of recent i thought they reconnected somehow through the internet and had a good relation but who really knows.s

I get why Crispin gets irritated when people compare everything he does to „stealing from KJ” but honestly, he gave them good reasons, at least in the 90’s. I can believe Starsha Lee singer isn’t copying Katie cause she’s from Brazil or something and she didn’t know Queen Adreena before. But everything else… Crispin’s problem is that he doesn’t know what he wants. He spent 90’s chasing something, tried singing himself, had girl singer replacements and even one KJ copy. Dogbones was ironically his most original non-Katie band, even with all their grunge influences. In a way he wants to be a frontman and at the same time doesn’t. Idk if he’s very controlling, but Daisy Chainsaw shows he valued his songs/lyrics first & in Queen Adreena he had to step back a lot, cause Katie’s condition was she would be in charge of the lyrics. I don’t think he realizes how strongly Daisy Chainsaw issues affected Katie, i mean from her own words you can read that aside from media attention/hate, her being unable to write lyrics had a role in her breakdown. I think she now let go but for years she hated remembering Daisy Chainsaw and she felt kind of worthless cause she was only somebody else’s mouthpiece. I’m not trying to say he’s cruel or anything, but i firmly believe rock lyrics writers should sing their own songs or else there are problems.

They both were writers-composers with different vision and i have impression they struggled a lot while shaping their songs, cause they both stuck to their ideas. Hence 2 versions of Princess Carwash maybe. Katie once said that he „gets terribly upset with her” cause she writes her songs on a simple wind organ and uses a few chord buttons only. Clash of writer ways/personalities/egos and at some point they had to let go.

Maybe he prefers music/bands where he was 100% in control including lyrics (note he wrote/sang some lyrics in Dogbones too). Daisy Chainsaw achieved bigger success US and UK wise as they were offered to play Top of The Pops, and they’re more well liked/remembered by „general alt public”. Queen Adreena however is way more valued as a cult band, with cult following and admiration in UK & France. Most people think Pretty Like Drugs and other QA songs are his best work and he probably finds it irritating cause truth is, he never managed to be more successful than Daisy Chainsaw/Queenadreena. Love Your Money is ironically the least Crispin Gray/DC/QA sounding song in my opinion. I kinda find it irritating that he downplays Queen Adreena cause it was probably his best work in this band but whatever

So yeah sorry for the word spill, that’s what i can think of it right now but as i said, i haven’t watched the interview yet, it’s just this kind of treatment is in a way consistent for him

#asks

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joanofarchetype · 6 years ago

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A Connecticut Yankee...a kid...that's all well and good but we really don't talk enough about the werewolf in King Arthur's court

This is not a shitpost — in Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory makes mention of "Sir Marrok, the good knight that was betrayed with his wyf, for she made hym seven yere a wer-wolf". Of course, Malory lifted the tale of the werewolf knight straight outta "Bisclavret," which is one of the Twelve Lais of Marie de France. And it is...wild. There's also "Melion," an anonymous Breton lai which along with "Biclarel" is believed to have evolved from the same source as "Bisclavret". In this post we're gonna refer to the protagonist as the "knight" or the "wolf-knight" and tell a somewhat composite tale.

(A note: this takes place well before commonly established werewolf lore, which crystallized thanks to Universal's The Wolf Man. Curt Siodmak wrote all that stuff about the full moon and silver bullets in 1941 so well that our common imagination accepted it as ancient fact.)

So anyway our guy is a knight who disappears for a couple nights a week and his wife is like ?????? dude ??????? where ??? do you ???? go ??????

And my dude is like "babe I love you but I can't tell you because you won't look at me the same" and she's like "I am your wIFE you better tell me right quick or otherwise have a good nose for almonds in your oatmeal" (jk she doesn't say that because if she did he might've gotten a little foreshadowing of her treachery, but alas, our man was a sucker)

So the knight tells her he's a werewolf, and on the nights he disappears he's wolfing around the countryside and his wife is like !!!!!!!!!! on the inside but makes sure her face is only 🤔 on the outside

(Mind you, Marie de France goes into how the wife is grossed out because she shared her marriage bed with a beast, which has some interesting implications but we'll get to those later)

She starts digging about his transformation until he explains how in order to return to his human shape, he *needs* to put his human clothes back on or else he'll be stuck as a wolf, at which point wifey is 👀👀👀👀

Wifey's like, "but if ur in wolf form, how do u remember where u put ur clothes lol" and the knight's like, "no no, I retain my human mind even in wolf form and besides, I always put them under this one rock outside this cave"

now bear in mind he's never been able to talk about this to anyone so he's pouring his heart out about his deepest secret which he kept even from his wife & I know we're all pretty used to medieval repression but imagine how it must have felt to share this secret at long last 😥

So to recap:

knight: 🤵🏻🛡🐾🌕🐺🤫😅😍♥️💐 wifey: 👰🏼💭🤢🤔👀🧐💡💡👔💍🔪🔪🔪

Our knight is like "yeah so I was born this way and it's just a part of who I am and whew it's kind of a relief to finally be talking about it with someone"

Wifey nods along 🤔🤔🤔 because she's had a💡moment and is 🍳 up a plan...

so the knight has unleashed (pun intended) his secret for the first time in this life and is feeling just dandy, but what he doesn't know is his wife is already plotting his downfall with her...LOVER (dun dun dunnn)

wifey & her secret lover steal the knight's clothes when he's transformed, essentially trapping him in wolf form, get him declared dead in absentia, marry each other & take over his lands

and the royal court goes for this because at this point the whole kingdom knows about the knight's habit of disappearing for days at a time (because medieval nobles are messy gossipy bitches who live for that drama) so they just assume he abandoned her

*~*ONE YEAR LATER*~* (or if you're Malory, *~*SEVEN YEARS LATER*~*)

the king & hunting party corner the wolf-knight in the woods. knight is overwhelmed at the sight of his monarch & runs up to what for all he knows might be his oblivion to kiss king's feet at which point king's like, "THAT'S NO ORDINARY WOLF. HE SHALL JOIN MY COURT IMMEDIATELY."

the wolf-knight goes to live at court where he's basically regarded as a knight (so the takeaway from this part of the lai is that a literal wild animal had a better chance of becoming a knight in ye olden days than a peasant or a woman but I digress)

anyway so there's a celebration at court and who comes to the party but the ex-wifey's new husband, now a baron. understandably, the wolf-knight does NOT react well and attacks him, and the reaction of everyone at court at this near-mauling isn't to say "whoa whoa maybe bringing a wolf to court was a bad idea" but rather "huh, this wolf has never been hostile towards a human before so obviously this guy must've personally wronged him." which is...progressive.

so the new husband/baron/co-conspirator is all "wtf keep it away from me" and the king is like "idk man, what were you wearing? maybe you smelled like royal beef jerky at the time. seems like you were asking for it"

king & the other barons take wolf-knight to the new baron's property. they just need to figure out what's going on because they're not ready to take sir wolf to his final veterinary visit, u feel? they're attached. now get ready for this next part because it's a doozy.

ex-wifey hears about the king's visit so she's waiting with gifts & cakes & shit. the wolf-knight sees her & immediately BITES OFF HER NOSE & he bites it so good her progeny can feel it & henceforth all her descendants are — I SHIT YOU NOT — born noseless. talk about losing face.

under questioning (*cough cough* torture *cough*) the wife admits to her crimes & yields the stolen clothing, which they put in front of the wolf & he just stares at them until they realize "wow yeah sorry dude our bad" and leave the room to give him privacy

when they see the wolf-knight again he's in his human form and in Marie de France's "Bisclavret" it's expressly written that the king embraces him in the bedchamber and gives him "many kisses" (hashtag heterosexual friends doing heterosexual things)

the king restores the wolf-knight's lands and ex-wifey has to live with her ex-baron in exile, forever marked for her betrayal. some real Mark of Cain shit. (obviously this lai has a lot to say about spousal dissatisfaction but that’s another day’s dissertation)

the wolf-knight (Bisclavret, or Melion, or Marrok, or Sir Wolf or whatever you fancy calling him) not only regains his good name, but also the support of a court which now knows his secret dual nature.

something to be hated or feared, only understood and accepted. no one at court shuns him once the secret's out & no one tries to change or "heal" him of his lycanthropy.

remember when I said we'd come back to the wife's reaction? in "Bisclavret" Marie de France specifically states that upon finding out his secret, the wife no longer wishes to "lie beside him." let's unpack that a bit by exploring similar themes across folklore.

the marriage bed serves as a common motif in tales of animal transformation. ex: in "Beauty and the Beast," the protagonist has to overcome her revulsion towards her suitor's ostensible monstrosity before she can accept his marriage proposal. traditionally these stories with mysterious, beastly husbands who are secretly a true catch serve as an allegory for arranged marriage, designed to help young women process their anxieties about being passed from their father's house to that of a strange new husband.

(we should differentiate these tales from those of an ostensibly appropriate groom who turns out to be a monster in disguise such as "Bluebeard," "Mr. Fox," and "The Robber-Bridegroom," as those deserve a detailed thread of their own but also provide good thematic contrast here)

more often the Beast is kind, patient & gives Beauty the time she needs to the detriment of his own freedom from the curse. once the protagonist gets over her anxiety, she ceases to perceive her groom as just a hulking hairy beast and he can take the shape of a prince at last.

circling back to wolves! in most lore both ancient and modern, werewolves represent something uncontrollable; an animalistic second nature which threatens to literally tear through our well-mannered social façade. "Bisclavret" and its various incarnations don't do that.

if you read "Bisclavret" under a queer critical lens, you can interpret the knight as bisexual; a husband has a secret duality to his nature which he is unable to express in their current social order. significantly, he is born with his lycanthropy rather than being afflicted by the sudden, violent means through which most fictional werewolves are afflicted. it's a part of who he is, and it requires no further explanation or cure.

the wolf-knight finds freedom rather than shame in his lycanthropy, and as a result maintains both honor and control while in wolf form. unlike other famous werewolves, he doesn't function as an expression of tension between the id and the superego.

considering how often wolves are used to imply sexual violence (see also: "Little Red Riding Hood" or its medieval predecessor, "The Grandmother's Tale") this would be a fairly positive portrayal of a bisexual man.

however, his wife doesn't see it that way and is repulsed at the thought of sleeping with him again, so she commits adultery and conspires against him. so really, the crimes in "Bisclavret" have a lot to do with sex, just not sexual violence.

the king's attachment to the wolf & the way he embraces the knight can easily be read as homoerotic. there's absolutely an argument to be made about the normalization of homosocial behavior & male kinship across eras but...two things can be true. either interpretation is valid.

so what we have is a werewolf protagonist — not a villain or tortured anti-hero but an honorable man who isn't made to shed his lycanthropy at the end of the tale (tail). rather, he is accepted by his contemporaries and given a place in society to live as he truly is/ROLL CREDITS

#bisclavret #marie de france #medieval literature #queer theory #queer critical theory #medieval lgbtq #werewolves #werewolf literature #i originally posted this to fb & then twitter so u can find these there #my twitter handle is also @joanofarchetype #(it's my pinned tweet)#long post #gif warning

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beccalina · 4 years ago

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So much has happened, but--

OH my gosh, I love this man.

I am sitting across from him now as he works and I reflect back to-- well, *everything*

It is December 3rd. On the 15th, we will be married and living everyday together for the last 4 months. He has been my husband for 4 months.

I am talking about Will.

This man right here. My husband.

Will is the man I wrote my last lengthy post about a while back, in 2018. And yes, it has been that long and A LOT has changed in my heart and mind. I really haven't written anything else original since then. But since then my world has changed forever. I found my heart growing in love for someone who wants to spend forever with me. The idea of that just boggles my mind. Honestly, I didn't expect myself to get this lucky--to find someone who would EVER love me like I deserved and like I always dreamed. Those are big shoes to fill but he filled them. I am the classic hopeless romantic who always dreamed of having just one minute of my life lived out like a movie scene where the two main characters finally fall in love. Look at my flipping Tumblr from over the last 10 years for goodness sake, its full of ROMANCE and LOVE and TENDERNESS between two people. Well I found my tenderhearted romance in a man who loves me more than all the worlds in this galaxy combined, it seems. And if that's how it seems to me, can you imagine how much God, our Father, ACTUALLY loves us if we feel an earthly love alone spans so far? Can we just talk about how far I-- no WE-- have come and how much we have learned about one another, God's path for us so far and just EVERYTHING about relationships??

Will is my first love & God-willing, my last. He was the first person to ask me out to dinner and keep pursuing me after that first encounter. How could I just give in after the first date I've been on? Aren't there SO many people out there? I have friends who told me, "Bec, he doesn't have to be the One, he is first person you've ever dated!" The thought always plagued me and made me think that at some point I needed to move on. It made me notice things about him that annoyed me and gave me reason to think it wasn't going to work. I would pull away at times and try to evaluate and talk over and over with people about it. I talked about it more with others than I did with him. It made me doubt and it made me worry when he would be nice to me and show all the intentional things I loved, but then showed a sign of something that could bother me or I wasn't the biggest fan of also. In every case they were small things. They didn't matter in the slightest on a grand scale. None of those things changed who he is as a person, and what kind of many he could be. But also, I didn't think I was gonna get this lucky on the FIRST TRY. How the heck did that happen??

ANYWAY, I have done some reflecting and have looked back on my errors along the way that I know I would want to pass on to someone else in my shoes one day. The "late to the game" dater. One of them is this--

You need to be CONFIDENT in your relationship with that person.

I made the mistake of seeking advice and counsel from people that probably thought I was crazy for overthinking things and would laugh at some of the things I would perseverate on, but also the people that are close to relationship but might not have your best in mind. They may not have the best in mind when being the person you confide in. I found myself in our first year of dating going to someone close in Will's life, someone who I connected with and felt and easy comfort in talking to about the ups, downs and questions I had about this new relationship. This person took me under their wing and was working on their end to push advice and certain practices on the both of us is different ways. Will, on one hand, is sweet and easily molded by some and can be persuaded by the right person to do whatever it is that's suggested. I am not, more so than him, BUT there was a differing factor that shot all this down. I was not feeling confident in the relationship yet and in us and I let me guard down with someone who could influence my thoughts and actions towards Will. This person would get me alone for us to gossip about him and talk through what bothered me and make the guise all about helping me learn more about Will and help is grow. But in reality, this person also frequently made commentary openly about Will talking to me privately if we were in public, or pointing out PDA as something that made others uncomfortable-- and yet, this person does these things as well but of course as a married individual. That seemed to be the reason any action between a couple is acceptable; if they are married or been together for years. These are the things I let influence me in --what I will admit-- our first year of dating. That first fall and winter as a couple was hard for me to wrestle with my doubts. But a portion of that is because I trusted the wrong people to help me change that.

Even in this moment, my heart is overwhelmed with love and appreciation for the man I love and all I have discovered about us both and how I will fight to defend our relationship to ANYONE who tries to discredit or belittle our actions towards one another. Now that Will and I are married, you better believe I have spoken up to my "early confidant" to call them out in a moment where our love was mocked openly and in a way that no longer acceptable by me or for my husband. What makes this harder is that the person that has done this is on Will's family and is very close to him. I am going to digress on this topic and maybe pick it back up another time. But it has toughened me and made me wise to factors that the Enemy want to throw at us to jeopardize us. I look at that man and I will come back on anyone who says any ill word to him or about him. I wish I knew and felt that way sooner, but the past cant be changed and we need to move forward with our shields ready to defend something beautiful, life-changing, but also still new and fragile at times as Will and I navigate marriage these last few months.

Will is my first one many areas of growth and learning and he is the reason I feel joy and smile and feel more love towards myself. He is my greatest gift and my greatest joy in this life, truly. My heart aches for his past hurts and for anything that will ever happen in the future to hurt him. There is a line from one of my favorite Japanese films by Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle when the two main characters reunite among forces destroying their city and Howl is fighting to keep the girl he cares about, Sophie, safe from war and fire reigning down. She runs to him and they embrace, but shortly after he gets her someplace safe he turns to go leave to return to the fight but Sophie grabs him, begging him not to leave and for them both to run somewhere to escape it all. Howl fully turns back to Sophie and tells her he must go because...

"I have something to protect-- it's you."

#marriage

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elegant-etienne · 5 years ago

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Catharsis

WARNINGS: Abusive/toxic relationship talk generalized abuse talk, drugging and substance abuse, suicide, self-loathing, externalized and internalized transphobia, complicated feelings and bitterness, sex talk. This ship was Yikes On Bikes.

And a special shout out to @avenai / @stormandozone for the tarot reading mentioned a few times in this (and @likeadistantstar / @celestialalignment who recently posted an amazing piece about responding to tarot readings!), that led me to think about how Etienne wanted to finally make peace with things. I decided they’d write their ex-husband a final letter.

Don't hold your breath, forget you ever saw me at my best You don't deserve what you don't respect Don't deserve what you say you love and then neglect

- Lucy Dacus, Night Shift

"This is Sizha'to. He doesn't talk."

You used to wear that mortarboard hat. Even in the Quicksand, really, it was adorably clueless. And as I quickly found out, you were alright writing notes back and forth. I perched on a stool, leaning over in the crush of bodies and sweat and folks looking to drink, forget, and get laid, not necessarily in that order. You were alright if we spoke slowly. You were just surprised, you said, that someone like me would talk to someone like you. People didn't take the time. We were outsiders in Ul'dah together. I made you little bouts of ice in front of the Ossuary.

It was nice to just talk. I had the reputation back then for being frigid. For telling men loudly I didn't want to fuck them. I didn't want to back then. I didn't want anything to do with anyone. I thought I'd always feel that way because I felt it intensely then. A kind of intense argumentative rebelliousness.

You said you fell in love with me in a few days, the day I chewed out a man who teased you about your stutter. I had forgotten that I even did that until you told me.

I tried not to speak for you, usually. Once or twice you wrote me a note, and I read it to someone else, but more often, I tried to get them to slow down - to let the asking and answer take their own forms. It was better, I thought, to simply not force things to happen before their time. While we were together, I watched you blossom. I watched you run Medica, patch up adventurers. You were the good one, the innocent one, and I was the dirt for you to grow in. That is how I viewed it.

It is not really your fault that is how I viewed it.

But.

Something is wrong. I can't say anything.

When is the first time I had that thought, about you and me?

Far later along in things than it should've been. A full turn after we met? Later? A turn and a half? To be honest, I ignored the worries in the pit of my stomach the sun before we got married. I did anyway. I promised. I couldn't think of a good enough reason not to. I wanted to be the kind of person who would get married, I wanted you to want to be my husband. Even after your dark shadow said he'd kill me. Even after the nights of shouting at each other about necromancy. Even after you did the ritual that left you so addled you no longer remembered me. No, those were all problems I blamed on myself. So I think it was after Henri abducted me. After your heroic rescue.

Back then, I spent a lot of time on that bench in Medica, staring at the medicine cabinet across from it. You were always working late with patients late into the night, and I was always waiting. I'd bring up a tray of tea and fresh-grilled crumpets from the kitchen downstairs and wait. I never looked behind the curtain.

I sat there that day, after we both staggered back hurt, and begged with my mind, Tell them I'm hurt. Tell them I need help.

No one noticed I wasn't speaking.

I thought, Please tell them I'm hurt, and you kept not mentioning me, even though the whole thing was because of me. And everyone was telling you that you were brave and stupid for going to help me. I'd been missing for almost a day. What a good husband. What a frightening experience.

Finally, one of your medic friends approached me and realized I could not speak, my breathing was coming in wheezes. I'd been beaten to the seventh hell. Everything tasted sour and bloody and bitter and nauseating. Everything hurt. And I wondered if I had pushed you forward, in front of me, if I had shaken my head and indicated that I'd be alright. It could've easily been my mistake. But that's the first time I recall thinking things weren't going well.

As my throat was recovering, I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I wanted to speak now that I couldn't. Hardly anyone we worked with knew what my voice sounded like, and therefore most did not notice its absence. I wrote to you, Ask me what happened when I can speak again. You never asked. Mayhap I was never ready to speak.

It's a joke to think there's narrative symmetry here, that there's structure, that there will be a moment of revelatory truth toward the end. That this story has an ending. You tried to force one, but I made a mistake and kept living.

It’s just ironic when I write it all down. This started out without you not talking. I suppose it’s fitting, then, that you didn’t say a thing when you left.

Did you leave because you were disappointed I didn't have the balls to leave you? I threatened you only twice, toward the end. After all, if I even asked to be alone for a little while, you started to cry and beg me not to leave you. You fucking prick. You cheated on me while I was in the long-term care after the suicide attempt. The third one I had because I did not know how else to get a moment away from you, and I kept having thoughts like I cannot get away and this will not change and he will not let me leave him.

How many suns was I in care before you got bored and started fooling around? I was only gone two sennights.

And I don't care if you fucked him or not (You absolutely fucked him. I know you did. But even if you didn't--). You lied about his feelings for you and pretended I was insane for noticing how he stared. You lied about what you were doing. You, in fact, did every single thing I asked you not to do. To me, that is cheating. And I don't care if you fucked him or not. But you absolutely did, I could tell. I scared the shit out of him when I came looking for you.

You once told me that you would be disgusted if I ever had breasts. That you hated them, feared them really. What a thing for a medic to say. Perhaps, you said, you would have come to think of me as an older sister and cared for me that way, but you would not have ever loved me. I thanked you for your honesty and thanked my body for its shape. When I fucked you on the couch I thought I should be grateful. I should be grateful anyone at all would want this body. I should be grateful the makeup never bothered you. I should be grateful you did your best to switch pronouns. Some would find filing for divorce easier than changing pronouns.

While we're being honest, darling, I was broken before I met you. It's possible I was born broken. I told you everything, and you held it, and I thought there would never be anyone else who would try. I trusted you because you listened, long before I knew what you were really like. That was my fault.

I had a glamour prism I wore sometimes to the market. It made me look feminine. I showed you once, and started crying, and put it away. You asked if it was because I felt like I couldn't have that. You asked if it was because I was sad when the illusion was done. I wondered if you remembered what you said before. I said it felt wrong. I said I wanted a child one day, too, and I hate I could not give you one, though you had not asked for one. We were always going to adopt. We call this future faking. Sometimes I forget that you were the first person I told all that because it hurt too much to consider in the days you left. Because I knew what you truly felt. You'd told me. And staying would've been a compromise.

You promised you would try and understand, try and find a way for us to have that child. You dealt with my tears with promises, usually, or drugs. You could've just told me no. I suppose you did, eventually.

I'm not saying you forced me back into the closet. I was too afraid that others would reject me, it's true. But. Well.

I've changed so much since you left me. I will probably adopt children one day. I don't need anyone's help with that.

If you wanted to leave, you should've just said. I could've taken it. I would have understood if you couldn't love me anymore. If you made the distinction that it was because you no longer desired me, I would not have grown to believe it was because I was an inconvenience. Perhaps this is quibbling. Most folks do not receive itemized lists on why their relationships fell apart.

I don't really remember the morning you left. Even growing up during the war, I'd never felt someone disappear so completely. Not without saying goodbye. Not without a prayer or a personal effect to hold onto. I couldn't stay in the apartment. It was the skeletal belly of our marriage: white, bleached, echoing. Though I was no longer being digested, my skin still burned.

Did we kiss each other goodnight the last time I saw you? I don't recall. Probably. I digress.

Back when you brought me to that boy of yours, the one I already knew about, I started seeing double. Your dark shadow, the poor vulnerable thing you pretend to be when you want men to love you, and my husband, spineless, but mine, damn it. Mine and worth fighting for. Your dark shadow huddled against him. You sat next to me too. The light was dancing through leaves, everything green and sweet-smelling and indistinct. We sat on the stone benches in the view of the waterfall and the blooming flowers. That was the idyllic scene in which you told me the truth of it all. I think all three of you expected me to be shocked and to cry. I was shocked by how calm and unsurprised I was. I told you how little I thought of you. I told you just what a violation it was, from the beginning, how much it had taken for me to trust you. How you lied to my face about the nature of the relationship when I suspected, both you and your shadow and your boy. I told you both in no uncertain terms who I was, the person you all betrayed. I suppose I ended it when I said if you ever put me in such a position again I would leave. I suppose, from a certain perspective, you were the one who had to gather up the strength to go.

I suppose I was unreasonable. We had not discussed the terms of our marriage. I had assumed you would not lie to my face. I had assumed you would not run off with some little boy while I was in care. I had assumed after I nursed you through your agonies that you could care for me similarly. I say you abandoned me in the night without warning. That is wrong. You abandoned long before that. Some part of me had accepted it by the time you brought me to those stone benches. Most do folks do not leave your life all at once. They leave little by little like the color leaves bones bleaching in the sun.

I write this as if it is entirely your fault you felt you had to split yourself between him and me. It is not. I can say now with confidence I would have been fine if you left me for him. I might have even let you keep seeing him while we were married if you hadn't lied. I can that now with confidence because I was fine. But. I know you were worried. If only had been a bit more calm and stable when you twisted me up in a web I couldn't seem to escape. If only I hadn't thought I needed you so much. If I only I were as beautiful and immutable as a sword. Then I would've been able to let you feel the freedom to leave. Then I would have been sharp and strong, and I could have cut our cords with a light, clean snap.

You hurt me, alright.

You hurt me and it's so godsdamn humiliating. Does anyone meet someone with my height and my broad shoulders and my cleverness and level-headedness and experience and think that some spineless, stammering healer could reduce me thus? How dare you. How dare you embarrass me like that. I made excuses about you to my friends. You made me look like a fool.

Who could I tell about it? Who would have believed me? The wedding that dozens of our coworkers attended? You never hit me. And the way you cowered when I shouted at you. I was a monster every time I was angry. I had a beast inside me that I fed drinks. When we were together, I lost the capability to win arguments or be right about anything, but I foolishly kept trying.

You hurt me and recently the stars or the cards or a girl said I need to admit that it hurt. I have wanted to be above it for so long. When I look behind me to the road I paved with the mistakes I made getting away from you, I don't like to acknowledge that you had anything to do with it. I am too proud to be hurt. I was hurt for a little while and I got over it when I realized I was better off. That is how I tell the story. I was relieved you left. That was the truth. I put myself back together. I went to parties. I cried a little. I recovered. That is how I tell it.

Grief is not static, grief is not a river that you jump over. I am still here with this grief. But you were not the 'before,' and now is not the 'after.' I should have admitted a long time ago that I never really got over being abandoned like that. Not because it was going well when you did it. Not because I had no idea what was wrong.

Your leaving added insult to injury.

I should have left, but you left. I deserved one victory, but you left.

It's so embarrassing. I would have let you kill me.

Maybe the stars or the cards or a girl meant that you were hurt, you needed to admit that hurt. I'm sorry. I think I wanted you to be someone you weren't. If I hurt you, I'm sorry. I have examined every angle and I am not sure what I could have done differently aside from throwing you out. Imagining I knew your feelings and told you to be honest with yourself about them. What else can I apologize for?

I'm sorry I tried so hard to make it work.

I'm sorry I was your first.

I'm sorry I'm a drunkard.

I'm sorry I struggled to remain well.

I'm sorry I wasn't the man you thought you married.

I'm sorry for pressuring you with my expectations of marriage.

I'm sorry for trying to keep you on the path I saw as good.

I'm sorry you felt like you couldn't leave, so you had to sneak around. And then away.

I'm just really sorry it ended like this. I wish I could have said goodbye, but I might've just told you to fuck off and die, so, perhaps your instinct was correct.

I know folks who can do exorcisms, but you can't exorcise the memory of a person. That is the problem. You can't drink them away, either. Little pieces of you will always be embedded in me, shards of glass. Your nickname for me. The way you'd yawn and stretch in our bed. The jobs I joined and left for you. The jolt of the seal on the door when I touched it the time you locked me in. The steady quality of your voice as you adjusted the dose and promised it wasn't habit-forming. The way your voice sounded the first time you threatened me. The color of your eyes. The way you'd smile and call my name. Your vows.

(What color tuxedo did you wear to our wedding? I wore pink. I don't remember. Red? That sounds right.)

(Actually, what color are your eyes?)

Did you even love me? Do you even know how to love? Or do you just like folks to push, folks to test things out on, folks to bleed into inkwells and then write spells with? Did you even like the food I cooked you? Did a fresh fried fish taste as good as forbidden aether?

I could be falling again. I am afraid to say I am falling again. I'll tell you that because you were my first love (You weren't. You were my first love since I was free.). I'll tell you that because I hate the thought of you believing I never moved on. I hate the idea of you getting off to the fact that you broke me, broke my heart, was never anything more than what I was when you pinned my arms over my head or talked me off a ledge (Which of those things did I ask you to do for me? Which was for my own good?). I think I am terrified of you coming back and saying, very sincerely, with a very sad face, that you are sorry. I am equally terrified that you never, ever will. I am terrified you are dead, and I am still angry, and I want us to remain connected by the intimacy of how thoroughly we ruined each other's lives. Except you aren't here, so it's just me. I'm ruined. If you told me to live my life and be happy because I deserved more than you, I think I'd slap you across the face. Nothing in life is about what you deserve, there is only what is and what isn't. And you weren't. I wasn't.

If we were to look at it that way, my darling, my sweetest one, my one and only, my beloved, my dearest, my dear heart, I think we deserved one another just fine. I wanted to be punished, and you gave me just that.

I know I'm supposed to say it's all your fault. Victims can't change their abusers. But victims are allowed to feel a lot of things. And what's hurt the most over all these years is my impotent frustration at not getting the ending I wanted. I didn't get to stand with my hands on my hips, triumphant to have defeated you. I didn't get to hear you sincerely regretted any of it, or that you didn't mean it, or that you were wrong. My friends have told me the best revenge is living well, and damn have I ever lived well. But I don't feel better about it. I don't know if it's something I'll ever feel good about.

We were both so stupid. Oh. Darling.

I asked the stars or the cards or a girl about you, and she said you had the potential to be happy, or maybe she meant I do, because you were not present. You are living some other life now, and you probably haven't thought of me in a very long time. She said I was an amazing person and I deserved for someone to treat me as the priority I am. I said I am trying, and I hope it happens.

You hurt me. You hurt me. You hurt me. You hurt me.

You didn't respect me. You didn't deserve me. But I was still willing. I was still so willing.

That will always hurt, but it's a hangnail, not an open wound. I'll let someone else rip me open again. I know I will. I want to. I'll keep trying until someone pours my inside into a jar that I like the shape of. I look at him now and I think, oh, he could ruin my life, but I won't let him. Oh, I hope I don't ruin his life.

I hope I ruined your life.

I need to get out from under the shadow cast by your loss. The job I took out of guilt, the life I live to try and somehow alter all the ways I've been broken, as if somehow if I bled nothing but light and sunshine and fucking grace and sweetness everywhere it would cancel it all out. Not just you. Not just Henri. All of it. The being-born-in-a-body-I-hate thing. The-raised-away-from-my-own-people thing. The alcoholism. The grooming. The institutionalized abuse. The coercive abuse. The Church. The suicide attempts. I thought I could cancel it all out if I was just a good enough person. I'd be satisfied if I somehow approached some enlightened state of self where I never felt guilty about anything. How arrogant of me.

How arrogant to assume the abuse only happened because I was secretly good because if I was secretly bad, I deserved it. No. I know I fucked up.

I was arrogant to think I could ever change you. All we can ever really do is love one another, and sometimes we do it entirely wrong. We could have been amazing, but we weren't. And that's all I really have to say. It’s true that you hurt me. It’s true that it still hurts. But... I hope you are well. Not sarcastically. I hope you are doing as well as I am. I hope you are not hurting anyone else, but there’s nothing I can do if you found someone new to abuse. I could do no more than I did.

I’m ready to be done. It isn’t a river I jumped over, but the water only barely covers my feet now. A little more time, and perhaps I will do the unthinkable and simply step out.

Your loss, love.

Goodbye.

#writing #retired ship name here #ic #i mean idk some of this is a repetition of other things i've written but i needed to write something new and get things out of my system #i've been feeling so depressed and stagnant

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professorspork · 6 years ago

Note

Can you talk a little more about why you found Endgame devastating in a bad way and not a good way?

I sure can! I can talk a lot more, in fact! I’m going to put this under a cut because Ihave a feeling it’s going to get Quite Long (ETA: it is, this is 6k words I amso sorry) so if anyone just wants the tl;dr version, I recommend GaviaBaker-Whitelaw’s excellent article ‘How the straight agenda ruined Avengers:Endgame.’

If you want my own personal take, well. Enter at your ownrisk, here be monsters, etc:

First of all, the very short answer to your question: Itagged this photo as emblematic of all the ways Endgame was “devastating in thebad way and not in the good way” because, if I’m being really honest, Steve and Natbeing queerplatonic life partners (who maybe occasionally fuck but mostly don’t)was my absolute favorite thing about the MCU. (Yes, despite all the words thatfollow hereon about Bucky, I stand by Steve&Nat being my Absolute Favorite,because it was entirely about what was onscreen and nothing about the fanon thatfollowed.) And now it’s Gone and not only is it Gone it was Taken From Me, andI’m salty.

The much longer answer:

What’s maddening is that I honestly loved the vast, vastmajority of Endgame. I adored, like, 92% of it!! It’s just that the remaining8% is the part that’s a) most relevant to character arcs and b) permanent,which leaves me at a bit of an impasse. It’s hard to remember my delight overthe way Natasha laid down haphazardly over old take-out containers whilebrainstorming at her peak adorableness when she’s, y’know, dead. (Which isn’teven my biggest issue!)

I’m going to break it out by character, from most toleast irksome to me so we get the heaviest stuff out of the way and then by theend I’m just shouting on my lawn going “AND ANOTHER THING.” I’m also not goingto go into The Thor Thing, because I think everyone worth talking to is inagreement about that being fatphobic and offensive.

Okay, here we go:

STEVE

I fucking hate that Steve went back in time to marryPeggy. AND I LOVE PEGGY AND I LOVE STEVE/PEGGY SO I’M SO MAD THIS IS WHERE I’VEBEEN LEFT. I have tried to make my peace with it, I have failed, and I amhonestly not used to being this mad at a fictional character. I know it’suseless to hold it against him—something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately isthat argument some fans make about like “why are you slutshaming X characterfor wearing skimpy armor, she just feels most empowered riding into battle withnothing but a strip of leather over her tits” when like, the characterdid not make this choice, the writers made it be that way—but unlike, say,the characterization of Steve in Age of Ultron, which I can happily disregard becauseJoss hates Steve, Markus, McFeely, Russo & Russo have been the architectsof everything I love about Steve. It’s straight from the source! And soI… I’m taking it personally, though I know I shouldn’t. I feel like Steve turnedhis back on me and left me behind.

Well. Me and Bucky Barnes.

It’s probably no secret if you follow this blog that I’ma big Stucky girl. I have admitted it’s one of my top three ships of all time;my steve and bucky tag is 21 damn pages long. But I promise, I PROMISE, thisisn’t even about that. Regardless of whether or not you think these two are orever were in romantic love with each other, their best friendship is one of themost important and indelible parts of the MCU.

Steve’s emotional arc over the last several movies hasrevolved around his intense obsession with all things Bucky. He bailedon his concert tour, defied orders and became Cap-in-combat to save Bucky in1944. He tore down SHIELD, HYDRA and the whole world for Bucky when he foundout he was alive. He became a war criminal on the slightest chance he couldprove Bucky’s innocence! And then, when they were finally reunited, finally foronce on the same page at the same time, Bucky was taken in the Snap. And so,like. It seems a bit WEIRD to me that Steve’s heartbreak over the Snap isframed as a Peggy thing (see: him looking at the Peggy compass before their first act attack on Thanos; his talking exclusively about Peggyin the Snap support group he runs WITH GAY MEN) when Peggy died a natural deathafter a long life in Civil War and not, y’know, Bucky, his oldest, mostintimate relationship-haver, or even Sam, his best friend. It seems a bit ODDto me that we see dozens of cute, short reunions and meetings in the finalbattle with 2014 Thanos—known Extremely Important Relationships Tony/Dr. Strangeand Peter/Carol are given significant on screen exchanges—but we don’t seeSteve and Bucky reunite with one another. It feels a bit CONSPICUOUS to me thatSteve does not tell Bucky what he plans to do when he goes to take the stonesback, full on SUSPICIOUS to me that the two don’t say boo shit to each other—can’teven stand in the same group together when Steve comes back from histime vacation—and outright UNBELIEVABLE to me that Steve Rogers would choose tolive seventy years of his life without Bucky Barnes.

I just don’t buy it.

I don’t buy that after four movies of you telling me itisn’t the case, Steve Rogers’ happy ending doesn’t include Bucky. (Andwe’ll touch on the whole idea of what it means to have a “happy ending” in abit.)

It feels like a deliberate side-step. It feels like thecreative team tried and failed to come up with anything approaching a normal,just-two-bros reunion scene for them and with the weight of their past intimacyeverything they wrote came off as a marriage proposal so they scrapped itentirely. It’s insulting. Not on a “my ship didn’t go canon” level—I never in amillion years expected Steve and Bucky to ‘get together’ in any concrete sense,I wouldn’t even have known what to do with it if I got it, I never wanted that.All I wanted was for the text to honor the affection, the bond between thesetwo just as much as it did in any of the other movies. One of the best featuresof the MCU is its consistency when it comes to character detail andrelationship nuance. So how on earth (I know how, we all know how) did theydrop the ball on what is literally their flagship friendship?

But it’s not just that Steve goes back in time withoutBucky, or without saying a word to him about it. It’s that Steve goes back intime and then, apparently, does absolutely nothing for seventy years, includingsaving Bucky.

The time travel rules in Endgame are… unique. They areunprecedented. And it’s easy to tell that’s true, because not once have thedifferent members of the creative team been able to give a consistent answer onwhy or how it works in interviews after the fact. So like. I accept that mytake on this may not be the “canon” take, and until we get a post-Endgame moviethat addresses these things there IS no canon take. Regardless of what their “thisisn’t Back to the Future” rules means about whether or not changing the pastmeans changing the future, in the future all of these characters lived Buckywas on ice/doing murders until the events of Winter Soldier, also in which theworld learned SHIELD was HYDRA. The Russos think Steve created his own branchreality when he went back in time, and the question is then how he got back toour world to hand off the shield; Markus and McFeely don’t think that’s true;they think Steve lived concurrently to his own regular timeline and was always Peggy’s husband. YOU WOULD THINK THEY’D HAVE REACHED AGREEMENT ON THIS EITHER WAY BEFORE THIS POINT, BUT I DIGRESS. This meansthat either a) M&M are right and Steve went back in time and neither toldhis new wife Peggy “hey honey, you know that startup you’ve got going withHoward, maybe don’t invite Arnim Zola unless you want your entire legacy to beNazis,” nor did he save Bucky when he knew he was somewhere in Eastern Europebeing fucking tortured and brainwashed. He didn’t stop Howard and Maria fromgetting in the car. There’s a lot of joke tweets about how Captain America just“let 9/11 happen” and like—it’s a joke but it’s also NOT A JOKE--- orrrrrr b) theRussos are right and maybe Steve did all of those things in a branch reality,which they felt no need to mention when they were wrapping up the emotionalstoryline for their marquee character, which is lazy at best and kind ofunforgivable at worst. Even in the Best Version of Events, where not only arethe Russos are right and Steve went back in a splinter timeline, but in thatsplinter timeline Steve co-founded a Nazi-less SHIELD with Peggy and theyfought crime Hart to Hart style, saved Bucky, stopped the Vietnam War fromhappening and cured AIDS, it still means Peggy no longer did everything she didon her own, fighting and clawing for it like a honey badger. And should shehave had to? No, of course not. But is it her defining trait and greatestaccomplishment that she did? YES! This matters to me! Erasing it without givingher a say matters to me!

And the fact that all of this is in doubt is BONKERS. Iwould feel less weird about if they didn’t leave all of it unsaid! If they’dincluded a scene with Bucky before Steve went back where Bucky just went “Steve,listen. I know what you’re thinking, and you can’t save me, okay? It wouldbreak the time continuum or something. Now go be a reckless idiot like I knowyou’re gonna and say hi to Carter for me” it would at least feel like theycared the slightest bit. Hell, if they gave Peggy ANY LINES AT ALL it wouldfeel a heck of a lot more like the reuniting of two characters I love and lesslike a mortifying hetcon where Steve erases all of Peggy’s professionalaccomplishments and canon husband and other family just to have hisfairytale happy ending with a voiceless woman-shaped smilebot.

Do you have any idea how much I would have cried if we’dgotten a scene were Steve showed up at the Stork Club in time for his dance?Peggy doesn’t even need to have A LOT of lines (though she should!) A tearysmirk and a “you’re late” reprise would have gone so far! (Especially if they’dhad a final, heart-wrenching goodbye for closure and then he’d returned to thefuture, giving us the best of both worlds, but what do I know.) But no, EdwinJarvis gets a line in this movie and Peggy doesn’t. She has no say in the endof her story—it’s a decision that’s made at her. She’s a bit player inher own life. Steve isn’t reunited with Peggy, he gets a dance with the idea ofPeggy. But like. The real Peggy is brash and terrible at emotional honesty! Shewould be a nightmare to be married to! So is Steve! That’s why I love them,they’re awful! And it just feels like all of that was erased in a moment infavor of a vision of unsustainable hetero bliss.

(Honestly, the way I make peace with this is by thinkingthat after maybe six months with Peggy they were both like “oh godwhat were we thinking, this is never going to work” and broke up, and thereason Steve didn’t tell Sam his wife’s name is that it wasn’t Peggy andhe’s too embarrassed to say so.)

And like. I’m trying not to feel like an awfulbitch/bitter old crone about it, because the thing I keep circling back to inconversation with others is them saying “can’t you at least be happy for himthat he’s at peace? Don’t you think he deserves to rest? After everything he’s done,shouldn’t Steve get a chance to be happy?”

Listen. Do I think Steve deserves a chance athappiness? Yes. Do I think Steve Rogers actually has the capacity forsustainable, long term happiness? … Honestly, no. That’s one of the reasons Ilove him.

Steve is miserable. His life is hard, he’s got PTSD, hehas trouble adjusting even in the best of circumstances. But he’s a fighter.And the reason I admire(d) him so much is that no matter what life threw athim, he was relentless in his forward momentum. He had to go on, he had to keepstanding up for others. He didn’t know how not to. Does this mean he needs ashit ton of therapy? Yes, it does—and the therapy is better in the future, Imight add! But like. As much as the creative team keeps going on about howtheir overall arcs were “Tony needed to learn to be more selfless, like Steve,and Steve needed to learn to be more selfish, like Tony” I think there’s adifference between learning to grasp happiness with both hands in the unlikely,miraculous event it comes your way, because it’s brief and shining and worthcelebrating, even though it comes with heartbreak, and just… noping out of yourlife and ignoring your problems for seven decades while everyone else worriesabout it. I’ve never seen Steve sit still and keep himself out of trouble forseven minutes—now I’m supposed to believe he managed it for seventy years? Hewas Peggy’s weird secret attic husband no one knew about? I respected him,loved him, and identified with him—I felt represented by him—because not onlydid he have to fight for every scrap of happiness he’s ever had, he felt likethere was honor in that fight. That’s why Mjolnir declared him Worthy!! And forhim to then lay down his responsibility and NOT FIGHT for 70 years momentsafter being given that distinction… it stings.

I appreciate my happy endings when they’re hard-won. Thatoften means they’re bittersweet. And if Steve’s ending were framed that way—yes,he got back his Era and he got the girl, but he lost his best friend, his foundfamily, and any determinedly-etched-out balance—I might be more okay with it.But it’s presented as the uncomplicated ride off into the sunset he deserved,and… I don’t want my stories uncomplicated. Steve Rogers is not anuncomplicated man. I know a lot of this is YMMV and I’m maybe a bit more darkin my tastes than others, here—hell, I think it’s cheap that the Elrics got alltheir flesh back AND Mustang got back his sight in FMA:B, that feels like toohappy an ending for me—but telling me that what Steve’s really wanted allthis time was to have a house in the ‘burbs and chill doesn’t resonate. Steve’swhole thing since Day 1 was “how can I sit idly by while other men risk theirlives? I can’t stand that.”

It feels like a How I Met Your Mother ending. If Stevehad had the option to go back at the end of Avengers 1, I’d have bought itcompletely that he’d take it (both for character arc reasons and for “he didn’tknow Bucky was alive then” reasons). But he’s not that guy anymore. Yet itseems like they decided a long, long time ago that Steve was going to go backin time and get a do-over, and years of development, growth, moving on andbonding with other people be damned. Who cares if Steve got Bucky back, whocares if Steve got Sam back, who cares that he’d lived 13 years, his entireadult life, in the future? Nat’s dead, might as well go back to the other damewho liked him!

And. And here’s the thing. If everything else were equalbut Bucky and Peggy’s roles were reversed—if Peggy fell from the train, and itwas Bucky who founded SHIELD with Howard; if Steve met Bucky again as adementia-ridden old man and Peggy were the Winter Soldier, if it were PeggySteve spent all these movies desperately trying to save and nurture—I feel likeeveryone else would find it REALLY WEIRD if Steve went back in time to do itall over again with Bucky! That’s not a question of romance, or gender. Not forme, who loves all of these characters equally. It’s a question of the emotionalarchitecture the story is built upon.

Historically, every decision Steve’s ever made in theentire time we’ve known him has been about Bucky. And for this ending to work,it requires us to either ignore that, or think this single-minded focus wasnever about Bucky at all—that it was instead a sublimated love where Buckybecame a signifier for Peggy or the past Steve lost, instead of a person in hisown right, the person Steve’s always chosen and who’s always chosen him, sincethey were kids. Til the end of the line. Asking me to believe that is a)horrible, and cruel, and frankly homophobic and b) simply untenable—I don’t thinkthat the plots of First Avenger, Winter Soldier or Civil War stand up to thatreading.

And even in the kindest reading of all of this—that Stevedeserves to return to the time he was stolen from, because it’s his TrueTime and Peggy’s his True Love—then my god, doesn’t Bucky deserve that, too?Steve was an orphan with, after Bucky’s “death,” ONLY Peggy and I guess theHowlies to tie him to the world. Bucky has a family! He’s got sisters! Theythink he’s dead! If Steve deserves this, doesn’t Bucky, after everything he’sbeen through, deserve it too? If it applies to one of them, it applies to bothof them, doesn’t it? No matter which way you slice it? (For the record, if Stevehad taken Bucky back to the past with him I'd still be scratching my head aboutthe timeline bearing out—and I think it would make the Sam!Cap offer even morekind of paltry and afterthoughtish than it already is, Sam deserves FIREWORKSand A CROWD damn it, and it also deserves to be a decision not made AT him, seeabove—but at least I could be like “yeah, that's exactly the kind ofhilariously not-thought-out decision Steve would make, have fun kiddo.”)

But I guess Steve inviting Bucky on his Happy Ending Tourof the past would be too much like a fucking proposal so, uh, no, we don’t getthat.

NATASHA

Here is a top ten list, in no particular order, called “I’dbe fine with it, but.”

1. I’d be fine with it—Natasha is a hero, and she deservesa hero’s ending, she merits going out in a big swing to save the world—but she’sstill the Smurfette, man. It means something different to kill your only original female leadthis way than it does to kill a male character. It especially means that whenyou kill her in the exact same way you killed Gamora—THE OTHER SMURFETTE—onemovie previous. It feels cheap, and it feels callous. M&M&R&R havetalked a lot about the woman/women in the office who read a draft where Clintdied instead and said “DON’T YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM HER” but a) tbh I feellike maybe they were reading a different draft than was ultimately shot, thismovie evolved a lot over the years and b) when you’re the Token Girl, your storyis more than just yours. In a franchise of this scale, it’s just… it’s notequal yet. If the circumstances had been utterly different, if Nat haddied wielding the Infinity Gauntlet, at least it would be novel. And like—I amnot the kind of person who thinks standing against Bury Your Gays means no gayscan ever die or else, for example; sometimes a Good Death is warranted if it’swell-written enough—but again: it’s the “she feels empowered in that skimpysuit” thing. You didn’t HAVE to create a murder cliff that only exists forfemale characters to die for the men who love them. You made that choice. It’speak “why do we even have that lever?!”

2. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of course shewouldn’t let him die for her, not when he’s fighting to get back his family—butit would have made more sense for Clint to die as penance for all of the ninjamurders he did after losing his kids than for Nat to die because she can’t haveany. It feels like it privileges bio family over found family in a way that’skind of dismissive and gross, and it calls back to the mortifying line in Ageof Ultron were Nat referred to herself as a monster over her infertility. And theargument that Clint couldn’t die, there’s a Hawkeye Disney+ series falls flatwhen Nat has a MOVIE coming out and Vision also has a Disney+ series and yetis, as of this moment, still dead.

3. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of coursethey’d bicker over who would jump—but when the “dramatic” scene that precedes amajor character’s death resembles nothing so much as this comic, you’re doingit wrong. I shouldn’t be giggling over their antics right before someone fallsto their death.

4. I’d be fine with it—Nat did it for her family, whomshe loves—but her family didn’t even honor her back, and that’s bullshit. Tonygets a massive funeral and Nat gets nothing? I admit that what I trulywant for her—a long sequence of RENT-style “what Angel meant to me”testimonials—would have been a bit weird to include pacing-wise, even if I dothink if I asked Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner nicely over twitter they’dprobably improvise one for me anyway. But it didn’t have to be that. A singleshot in a montage would be enough. A shot of Clint, Laura, Fury, Steve, Sam, Okoye and Pepper doing a shot of vodka together and pouring one out for Nat would havebeen enough. Simple, elegant, gets the point across. It’s not hard!!!

5. I’d be fine with it—they needed to get the Soul Stone,for skimpy outfit reasons someone had to die, I get it—but then Steve has toput all the stones back to reverse the heist and stop the branch timelines fromcollapsing like The Ancient One warned about. How the fuck do you return theSoul Stone? And Steve could, wouldn’t that cosmically mean we get Nat back? Asoul for a soul, isn’t that the deal?

6. I’d be fine with it—I understand that playing the longgame and forcing yourself to fall in love with Red Skull so you cansacrifice him, though hilarious, is not actually a solution—but it just seemslike there are other ways to write around this moment. Nat and Clint have bothlost so much, sacrificed so much. That doesn’t count? This isn’t like Thanos,who’s never sacrificed a thing in his life. Nat’s given up so much for thecause; Clint lost his family. The Soul Stone couldn’t just sense that?Or—what if they’d jumped together? Full Rose and Jack, “you jump, I jump,right?” Refusing to be separated. What would the Soul Stone math be then? Ifeel like it would have been a cooler story to find out.

7. I’d be fine with it—ScarJo needed a way out of hercontract, after the Black Widow movie (which: how they’re going to make thatwork is a whole other rant I do not have time for here)—but killing Natasha inthe one irreversible way in a damn comic book franchise just feels soneedlessly final. If you’d said “after everything, after holding the Avengerstogether for five years with nothing but the force of her will and some peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches, she’s tired and disillusioned with it and wants toroam the world for a while without the team, maybe fight some normal crime fora bit” and had her phased out quietly I would have understood! It would havebeen fine! Preferable, even!

8. I’d be fine with it—I don’t think it’s total bullshit whenM&M&R&R say that this was the end of her arc, she’d found herfamily and become a true hero—but the implication that death is the only way toend an arc is lazy and, in this case, hurtful. It comes off as “we couldn’tthink of anything else to do with her, so we killed her.” You can’t do betterthan that? Tony and Steve were gone. Natasha ran the Avengers, andpulled Nick Fury duty on top of it, for five years and death is the onlyend of her arc? Again, I know ScarJo’s contract is up, but that answer is justoffensive. In a perfect world, given the circumstances you’ve described the endof Nat’s arc would be continuing to lead the fucking Avengers.

9. I’d be fine with it—maybe all those office ladies wereright, maybe it would have felt pandering and sexist and deflating if Clint hadstolen Nat’s moment and died for her—but it’s kind of conspicuous that thereare only two female leads in this movie, Natasha and Nebula, and when both trulyexhibit their agency in their climactic moments, they choose to die. And Nebulakilling her past self to save Gamora is one of my favorite moments of the film!But god, there’s more to female agency than suicide, right?

10. I’d be fine with it—the way Steve cries when he findsout is gratifying and in-character—but Tony’s question of “Did she have anyfamily?” is fucking horrifying. You know she doesn’t, Tony, Jesus Christ.It was a sloppy, lazy setup just so Steve could say “Yeah. Us.” Which wasfucking unnecessary because we know that, that’s why she died for you. (Thecomedy reading, which is that Tony was implying she, like Clint, had a secretFarm Family is hilarious but, y’know. Not the right time.)

And speaking of the sir himself…

TONY

This one is a big case of “it’s not what you say, it’show you say it.” I didn’t expect Tony to get out of Endgame alive. (In fact, Ihad braced myself for a total party kill for the original six, which, if it hadbeen a TPK, I would have felt way better about it tbh. If they’d gone down one byone Rogue One style, at least the playing field would be even; that wouldremove a lot of the sting.) Tony’s the bedrock, he’s where we started, and ofcourse this would be the end of his road. He was going to go out big, he wasgoing to save the world. I knew that was the deal.

But they also gave him a little girl.

To my eyes, you can give Tony the ending he deserves—the endingwhere he and Pepper get to settle down, where he gets to be the father he neverhad, the one where he’s finally stable, finally at peace—or you can giveTony the Ending He Deserves—the one where he, the flagship, the starting pistolof the MCU, gets to vanquish Thanos saying “I am Iron Man.” Epic.

You… you lose me when you do both.

Here’s where I get my hackles up:

Were there any other outcomes you considered for Tony?

MARKUS No. Because we had the opportunity to give him theperfect retirement life, within the movie.

McFEELY He got that already.

MARKUS That’s the life he’s been striving for. Are he andPepper going to get together? Yes. They got married, they had a kid, it wasgreat. It’s a good death. It doesn’t feel like a tragedy. It feels like aheroic, finished life.

It is a fucking tragedy! Pepper is left alone with a fiveyear old girl! Pepper does not get a perfect, finished life. It’s a gross,reductive, alienating view of fatherhood, which is all the more starkly (punintended) contrasted when you compare him to Scott, a good dad whoactually gives a shit that he missed out on three years of Cassie’s lifein prison and then ANOTHER FIVE in the Quantum Realm. Honestly, this is whathappens when you don’t let women write these movies—the characterization formen suffers, too, not just women. Because it wasn’t even a factor to them.Like. They literally cut a scene from the movie where a vision of Morgan fromthe future absolved him of guilt for leaving his family behind. That’s… reallyawful, fellas. Surely you can see how awful that is?

I want to feel good about Tony’s death. I want to feelinspired. Part of me does. But god, that little girl. God, Pepper.

But then, it’s pretty much par for the course. Because it’sworth it to talk about

WOMEN

This isn’t about how the one “Girl Power” shot wasshallow fanservice instead of substantive representation, how it makes no sensein the plot of the moment, or how it’s a totally empty gesture unless they planon giving us an A-Force movie (though all of those things are true).

It’s about how this movie has a gender problem in whichthe vast, vast majority of female characters got to be “badass” by bucklingunder the will of their male counterparts—and those who didn’t mostly justweren’t in it enough for that to be true.

Peggy doesn’t get any lines; she is presented not as thestrong, capable individual we know her to be but as a storybook reward forSteve’s good behavior after all these years. She is a prop, not a person.

Pepper is, for the thousandth time, defined as strong andcapable because she’s able to withstand all of the crap Tony puts on her. Ilove Tony/Pepper, I think they’re the beating heart of the MCU, their screwballenergy left a positive and indelible mark on the MCU that redefined how loveinterests work (well, barring Betty Ross, I’m so sorry Betty your movie isawful and you deserved so much better). But like. Tony gives her a company whenhe doesn’t want it anymore, he gives her a suit even though he knows she’s notinterested, he talks her into having a child together and then he leaves herbehind. Pepper is like an amazing, super intense version of one of those cookswho up-cycles leftovers into new, amazing, even-better-than-the-originaldishes. But she shouldn’t have to be, and she deserves better.

The same goes for Valkyrie, who is literally handedthe crown of Asgard for no other reason than because she’s there. It’s notthat she’s not capable, it’s not that she doesn’t deserve it, and it’s not thatshe won’t do an amazing job, but again: it’s a decision made at her. Why isthis still happening? (See also: Sam!Cap, and another way that Sam is stillgetting the Love Interest treatment after all of these years).

Carol was underused, and utilized entirely as a Deus ExMachina instead of as a person with feelings every time she did show up. Whileshe has the raw power to back up that plot usage, aside from her little smirkand “hey, Peter Parker,” we got almost no humanity from her. It’s not like theMCU is bad at establishing loads and loads of nuance in just a few lines—the massivejuggernaut that is Clint/Coulson shipping was launched when they exchanged twosentences to each other!—so it doesn’t feel like a lot to ask that Carol bein the scenes she’s in. You know?

For the most part, I really love how they handled Gamoraand Nebula, but the fact that 2014 them were Super Team Thanos flies directlyin the face of where both of them were at the start of GotG—and for Gamora tochange her mind after learning that in the future, she and Nebula are trulysisters when it’s Nebula who always wanted that for them is… a littlereductive. This was Their Movie—five more minutes to really tease out thenuance here would have really gone a long way.

Plus there was that whole scene where Frigga was like “actuallyit’s fine if I die; I’m just glad you’re okay honey. I feel so empowered inthis skimpy outfit. It has to be this way!” If Nat didn’t die the way she did, this scene would read differently! But she did! So it doesn’t!

Okay. Okay. I’m sure I’ve forgotten things that botheredme, but I have to stop somewhere so it might as well be here. In fact, here’s alist of things I really liked, to remind us all that I did like this movie:

America’s ass! “I could do this all day”/“I know!” ThePB&J cut diagonal! Cooper’s baseball mitt! Tony and Nebula playing PaperFootball! Nebula and Rhodey being best friends / “he’s an idiot!” Clint and Natforehead touch! Nat lounging on the takeout containers! When Hope calls Steve ‘Cap’and Scott gives her a little Look about it! Instant Kill Mode! Bruce and TheAncient One talk metaphysics—and the fact that Bruce is what is astrallyprojected out of Hulk! The redo of the elevator scene being subverted with “HailHydra!” Tony and Howard! Rocket’s much-needed frank pep talk to Thor! Ding dongditching 1970 Hank because he deserves that and so much worse! Tony revisitinghis Age of Ultron mentality at his lowest—frankly, it made me buy it in a wayall of AoU didn’t! Nebula murdering who she used to be so she can becomesomething new (let the past die, kill it if you have to amirite?)! Theindulgent credits sequence with the original 6 and their autographs! Quill’sface when he saw 2014 Gamora! TIME HEIST AS A CONCEPT LBR. Everyone’s funeralfashion choices, some of which are patently Bonkers! Smart Hulk having to riphis shirt off and pretend to enjoy smashing to blend in in 2012! The whole tacosight gag outside the compound! I love you 3000! Scott reuniting with Cassieand saying “you’re so big” instead of “you’re so tall!” Steve being Worthy!Thor doing a self-Fastball Special by hitting Mjolnir with Stormbreaker! YIBAMBE!

I don’t think I have ever cried as hard as I didwhen Sam said “on your left” and all of the Snapped heroes came back in Strange’sportals. Desperate, sobbing, joyful, elated, transported, awe-filled GASPINGkind of crying. I could hardly breathe. I really freaked out the guy next tome, I’ll tell you that.

I’m upset because these movies are good. This movie isgood. It made me feel… I don’t think I can describe the acute, painful ecstasyof that moment as long as I live, when everyone I loved, everyone gone,returned and returned and returned. I’m tearing up just describing it to younow.

I say these things because I care. I say these thingsbecause I don’t want to stop caring, and when characters I love are written inways I cannot understand, that I cannot abide, I am removed from the equation.And I am the damn target audience for this fucking movie. What I think matters.And it matters that I say it.

If you actually made it this far, I am very impressedwith your fortitude, and I thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#hoo boy #i do not want this in any tracked tags #not that those even work anymore #but here's some filler #and one more #okay #avengers endgame #endgame #mcu #avengers endgame spoilers #endgame spoilers #Anonymous

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halfpintkay · 5 years ago

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So I saw It Chapter 2 last night (and I’m going again later today because my one friend couldn’t go last night and she wants to see it) and I really liked and I swear it didn’t feel like it was as long as it is.

I mean yeah there were so disappointments but over all it was a pretty good follow up to the first movie.

i might be biased but i feel like Ben was such a freaking boss in this. Like I feel like they got him a little bit more correct in this one just by showing that even as a kid he was pretty good at building shit (even if he was still working on improvements for the clubhouse). And not to mention it seemed like he tried to be there for everyone and even tried to convince Richie to stay (which I wonder if he realized his convincing didn’t work as well as he thought). But also like him and Bev being there for Eddie after Henry attacked him pulled at my heartstrings. And of course everytime Bev was like gaga over Bill thinking he wrote the poem and what not I just felt for Ben because you could see that despite him growing up, losing the weight and being successful he still had the insecurities he had when he was 13.

My heart literally broke for a second in the flashback scene where “Bev” was talking to him and she started insulting him. But then I realize it wasn’t actually her but still my heart went out to Ben so much there. Not to mention that poster in his locker i was sort of expecting that to come to life instead of pennywise appearing in the locker..but that scene ughh...i know what it feels like to feel like you don’t have friends and feel second best to someone, hell I still feel that way sometimes especially when my friends tend to forget i exist because they have boyfriends or just friends who they would rather hang out with..but I digress.

There at the end where Bev was in the stall and Ben was being buried alive I was actually halfway wanting to freak out. Although I did appreciate the reference to The Shining in that scene. But my heart melted when they started reciting Ben’s poem and Bev finally realized it was Ben who wrote it and not Bill.

I was a bit disappointed that Audra and Tom’s scenes were so short but I understand that it’s not really about them. And tbh Tom was kind of useless in the book except to get Audra into the sewers where he just promptly dies so I do get why those two weren’t involved as much. I think that’s what the kid was added and they had that fun house bit for Bill to show his fear of letting another person die because he wasn’t there for them like he wasn’t there for Georgie. I mean how awful was that kid’s death? Ugh.

I still freaking love Richie and Eddie. Their scenes were awesome. I especially liked in the flashback where Eddie tried to get Richie to give up the hammock and when Richie wouldn’t he climbed on it anyway and stuck his feet in Richie’s face...like series I couldn’t get that short little scene out of my head for a bit last night. I also loved the scene where they opened the door and Pomeranian was there and I just couldn’t help but think of an idea of Eddie and Richie adopting a dog...then it turn into that demonic monster looking thing and that kind of ended that thought.

I freaked out during the scene (flashback and present day) in Mr. Keene’s backroom (basement? whatever you call it). But I cracked up when the Leper threw up on him again and that song played. It just caught me off guard enough I couldn’t help but laugh.

And the Paul Bunyan scene made me jump...although again when Pennywise burst into song I laughed because it was so unexpected and it kind of confused me at first...still not sure how I felt about particular part of that scene but...

Eddie’s death is so much worse than I imagined..OMG it just seem so cruel to make him suffer that long and be able to talk to Richie and them while he was dying. Bill Hader’s acting after Eddies death was so amazing . And like Ben pretty much had to drag Richie out of there just broke my heart.

Stan Omg I cannot stress how much I think they used Stan as a way to sort of inspire the rest of the Losers to fight. I do wish his scenes were longer in the movie and we could have gotten a bit more of Patty. But that letter at the end was so heartbreaking. I just ugh... I fully support any and all Stan lives AUs.

I am so glad though that they all remembered each other at the end instead of everyone forgetting. Yeah it means they remember some very traumatic events but also they remember all the good times they had and the one thing that upset me the most about them forgetting was they forgot Stan and Eddie two which seemed like an insult to their memories. Kind of like how Ben said he’d like to remember the good stuff from their childhood. And it opens it up for them to visit each other and gather and honor Eddie and Stan.

I loved Stephen King’s cameo though. It made me laugh and I knew right away that the whole thing about Bill being shit at writing endings was a nod to some of the critiques about Stephen King’s endings (That and I think yesterday or maybe Thursday I saw Stephen King post about someone saying he couldn’t write endings soo). I have to admit his endings may piss me off sometimes but I don’t feel like they are all bad although some of them do fall rather short but like Chuck in Supernatural said “Endings are hard”.

I even got to Like Adrian Mellon in the short scene he was in before he got assaulted and thrown into the canal. It broke my heart then to see how helpless his boyfriend was while watching him get beaten and thrown over. And then to watch him get eaten in front of him basically..ugh..poor guy.

Over all I feel like it was a pretty good movie and I can’t wait to see it again.

#ooc #it chapter two spoilers #it chapter 2 spoilers #it spoilers #spoilers

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theguardianangel-fanfiction · 5 years ago

Note

⭐️

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines.

Or, send in a ⭐star⭐ to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

Thank you so much for submitting this! There’s one section of chapter 26 (We Hope For Better Things) that had me stumped for literal months, and I wanted to kind of discuss my thoughts and concerns behind it, its canon counterpart, and the ways that I intended it to be interpreted; however, any way that you interpret it is fine.

Fun fact: Chapter 26 takes place during episode 2, A House Divided, which actually came out on my 13th birthday (March 4th, 2014).

This will contain spoilers for Once Bitten, Twice Dead chapter 26, We Hope For Better Things.

First off, let me talk about my grief with season 2’s treatment of Christa. Now, I don’t absolutely hate that she was, presumably, killed off; I dislike the way that they, in fast succession, killed her and Omid off, never mentioning the baby except for a very brief hint in episode 4 (Clementine closes her eyes and says, “Not again…” when AJ doesn’t immediately move after he’s born). Because of the fact that Clementine is literally around Rebecca for almost the entirety of season 2, I found her lack of reaction to Rebecca’s pregnancy a bit strange.

Like I said, my dislike of the handling of Christa’s pregnancy and Clementine’s thoughts about it have a lot to do with the following paragraphs. I’m all for Clem being able to actually stop and deal with her thoughts and somewhat deal with her emotions (I mean, shit, read my other series posted on AO3 and you’ll see what I mean).

In chapter 26, we get a discussion between Rebecca and Clementine about the baby, Alvin, and the circumstances surrounding this, something that leaves Clem feeling ill, anxious, and somewhat guilty about what she knows that Alvin doesn’t. But the discussion also leaves Clem thinking of Christa, and of her thoughts about Christa’s pregnancy. She is also very prone to comparing Christa and Rebecca, as seen below:

Clementine grasped her left wrist, leaning against the railing as she spoke, watching Rebecca’s mannerisms. She looked nauseous, though Clementine found it hard to tell, as she hadn’t exactly known Rebecca very long; Christa used to get sick, something Clementine could easily remember, when she smelled Omid cooking meat of any kind over the fire. At least until she started showing. In the later stages of her pregnancy, Christa didn’t have any sickness or dizziness. But maybe Rebecca was different.

This only adds to the way that Clem adjusts to and interprets Rebecca’s pregnancy, something that I intend to tackle in another chapter (somewhat in chapter 29, and likely a lot further than that).

Crossing her arms, Clementine spoke in a low voice. “I don’t know.” She hesitated, but then sighed as she thought of herself. She was still alive. But she thought of Duck – the only other child that she spent longer than a few hours with after the beginning of the outbreak – and she thought of his end, and how Kenny couldn’t protect him.

How Kenny couldn’t protect Katjaa, either.

She thought of Christa and Omid. She thought of their child.

This brings up the subject of Christa and Omid’s child, and why Clem is so uneasy about Rebecca’s pregnancy is also brought up. This leads into Rebecca asking Clementine if she wants to listen to the baby kicking. Now, in the game, I said yes, and the scene was absolutely adorable. I love the relationship between Rebecca and Clementine. But with Clem’s past with Christa, I found it to be a little bit unrealistic. Clem obviously has feelings about the baby, and because it was never explored, we as players don’t know whether or not the subject was traumatic to her.

Now, I have almost the exact same age difference with my younger sister that Clementine and AJ have. I’m 18, and my sister just turned 7, if that gives you an idea. Therefore, I remember what my mother’s pregnancy was like, and I remember the kicking and listening to her kicking – it’s a very surreal thing, and for someone like Clem, who for all we know could have witnessed the baby’s death, it can be downright triggering.

That brings me to Clem’s actual apprehension.

“She’s kicking.” Rebecca suddenly spoke, removing both hands from her stomach. She used one to push herself forward, and the other to reach out to Clementine. “Wanna listen?”

Clementine froze in her spot, still staring Rebecca in the face. Rebecca’s expression didn’t change, and she instead reached for Clementine’s hand, but Clementine’s mind was elsewhere.

Can you feel her kicking, Christa?

I don’t think she has feet yet, Clem.

Blinking, Clementine retracted her hand from Rebecca’s grasp and slowly shook her head.

“Can I… just… feel?”

Rebecca’s lowered smile was subtle, but she nodded anyway as Clementine reached out again, her fingertips barely close enough to feel the fabric of Rebecca’s shirt. Carefully, she placed her palm flat against the area that Rebecca guided her to; immediately, Clementine felt her heart racing.

The smallest thump against Clementine’s hand made her slowly pull it away again.

I believe there was a developer or writer for season 2 that claimed that Christa miscarried, but after the amount of misinformation and, might I say it, somewhat lazy writing that came from season 2 (don’t get me wrong, I love season 2), I don’t like this reason.

Why? Well, in All That Remains, Christa appears to be about 7-9 months pregnant. My own mother was about that size when she was 8 months along with my sister, though my mom is 5’2 and Christa looks to be closer to 5’10-6’0. But I digress. Anyway, since Christa was probably about 8ish months along, a miscarriage would probably have killed her. The baby would be nearly fully formed by then. But in OBTD, my idea was a little bit more realistic – not every baby survives birth, and some die before labor.

Clem’s canon reaction, as she looks at a barely conscious newborn AJ, kind of gave me an idea. Stillbirth is a much more likely reason for Christa to lose that baby, as sad as it is. Either that, or SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

Therefore:

Clementine crossed her arms, but only to hide the sudden lack of feeling in her fingers as they trembled. Slowly, she asked, “Do you think she’ll be okay?” Just as soon as she spoke them, Clementine regretted it.

And just as soon as Clementine spoke and regretted speaking, Rebecca’s eyes became wide, her eyebrows scrunched. Clementine crossed her arms tighter, her shoulders arched as she did so, and mentally scolded herself. She shouldn’t have said that. She should not have said that.

Just because what happened with… Clementine’s thoughts were cut off when Rebecca spoke in a hushed voice.

And a little bit later, we have:

“I’m… I’m not trying to be weird.” Clementine turned back to Rebecca, “I just… I don’t know.” Once again, she crossed her arms and peered over the railing. Both Sarah and Sarita had abandoned the Christmas tree. “I was just… thinking.”

“About what?”

“Christa.”

“Your friend.” Rebecca placed her hand on her bump and looked into the same direction that she had before, as if expecting Alvin to walk back into the room at any moment. “Why?”

“She was pregnant for a while.” Clementine paused, biting the inside of her mouth and her tongue. She avoided Rebecca’s face. “And I don’t like thinking about it.”

Even later than this, we get a bit more confirmation and insight into Christa’s baby:

Clementine’s gaze focused on Rebecca’s bump just as much as she focused on the words that Rebecca spoke earlier – It’s not his. As in, it wasn’t Alvin’s. Rebecca wasn’t carrying a baby that was her husband’s. If Clementine’s very limited education on the art of where babies came from was any less, then she wouldn’t have even believed Rebecca. Yet, here Rebecca was, pretending that nothing was wrong. Flirting back to her husband.

Her stomach hurt, and Clementine locked her hand onto her opposite arm as she weeded through the other possibilities. Clementine knew that Christa’s baby girl (as much as it pained her to think of that cold, dead face) was Omid’s. She had looked just like Omid, after all, with very little of Christa.

There was, I think, a 5 month difference in this update from the one before this one. Now, I suck at updating as it is, but I will fully admit that this scene stumped me for quite a while. I had a conversation with my dad, and I recall saying to him, “I need a realistic reaction to seeing a pregnant woman in the apocalypse. [Clem] is supposed to have PTSD and her last interaction with a pregnant woman resulted in the death of the baby. You got any advice?”

My dad actually did help a little bit with a reaction; he suggested avoidance, and I was like, “Holy shit, that’s true.” And that’s how I wrote Clem. I have written Clem with implied PTSD and mild anxiety before, but I felt that this was a different situation, because this is meant to be a form of establishing her character in OBTD. She’s similar to one of the ways that I played her in season 2, which is someone who only really talked a lot to certain people (like Walter or Sarah) and was silent in certain situations (like at the dinner at the lodge or after Sarita’s bitten death in episode 4 when Kenny goes off on her).

I’m doing my best to be the best writer that I can, especially while writing from the POV of an 11 year old who has experienced violence, kidnapping, emotional manipulation, and has now seen both childbirth and infant death. Part of the reason that some of more recent chapters have taken so long is this reason, and the surrounding circumstances.

Because of how long OBTD is meant to go for (trust me, we are barely even started), I have to establish both Clem’s actual, legitimate fears and her more childish fears and quirks. I’m trying to do this without her being that mature for her age; yes, she is mature for her age in OBTD and canon, but she is not an adult and I absolutely cannot stand when people write her as so.

It’s different when we’re talking about season 4, where she’s literally been raising a child on her own for quite a while, but in season 2? No, she’s still going to have some childish thoughts, fears, and quirks.Her connecting Rebecca and Christa is, in my opinion, something that realistically would happen if the events of TWDG were real and she were an actual person going through this. The establishment of her issues in not connecting a trauma and a similar act are something that I think was somewhat touched upon in season 2, but I wanted to look a more realistic angle.

In summary, I’m looking to get further into her psyche and how a child in her situation would actually react, but in a more consistent way. Stories need consequence, and I think the small changes in the way that characters feel about each other should actually impact their actions. She feels uneasy Rebecca’s pregnancy, and later what she believes is an affair, and she feels guilty from keeping this from Alvin. Hopefully, I can do this justice as time goes on.

Thank you for your ask, and thank you to anyone who made it to the end. 😊

#obtd fanfiction #twdg fanfiction #obtd meta #meta #twdg clemetine #twdg christa #tw: infant death #obtd announcements #asks #carmypen

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orderuponthe99prettygrimmdiaries · 5 years ago

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On my own terms

Wow, it’s already been 5 months since I wrote my last post. Well, clearly failed at the monthly posting again.

So much has happened since then.

I just realized that my last post was talking about reconnections and even the countdown to Avengers: Endgame. Well, as I write this post, I’m listening to the soundtrack. Sad to say that the plan with that friend to watch on premiere day had failed, but those were reasonable reasons, and sadly we didn’t get to watch together eventually, but we made it for Spider-man: Far From Home. Even went to see Endgame another 3 times, alone too, just because. And it actually felt good to watch a movie alone. I was always kinda fearful of that, but I actually liked the experience of it.

And speaking of reconnections.. There are a couple that I’m close to again, while some others not exactly close but I mean we talk occasionally, and that’s freaking wonderful. Super touched with the effort some are willing to put in too. I now understand how exhausting it can be to reply long texts after work, and sometimes just to check your texts. It takes 2 hands to clap. Effort has to be from both sides. So I just wanna say I appreciate them SO SO MUCH, even though none of them are likely to see this.

Anyhoo, also got to make a couple new friends too. One day, I got a little bored and started checking out recommended apps, and I found this one called Bottled. It’s a pretty cool app, sending out bottled messages and getting to talk to random strangers from around the world. Maybe that’s odd? But I enjoyed it. It did get a little overwhelming after a while cos I got too enthusiastic about accepting messages. But eventually, I decided whom to move over to Whatsapp or other socials so we could talk more. Some worked out, some.. not really.

Some worked out a little more than well too.

It felt a little strange definitely. And obviously didn’t like catching feelings. Especially with people who were across the world from me that I might never meet. And not sure if it was the hormones at that point or what it was, but it definitely felt like I was falling easily. But now, I think I know what I feel. Emphasising “I think”.

Okay, but I digress. What I really wanted to talk about in this post was about my job. Not entirely sure what my last update was, but since it was like March-ish, I’d guess it was during that period I was deciding to leave, got new job roles, still wanted to leave, but got motivated a little by someone from work so I stayed.

And well, look, now another 5 months have passed. I’m working there for almost a whole year now.

Things got better, yet worse.

By now we’ve had 2 new colleagues, another left for China, and another left for good. One’s great, didn’t had too good an impression of her initially, but now she might be one of my closest work friends. We even started hanging out for lunch with the 2 store guys now. At times. Oh, and the girl whom I took her job, she’s back too. She’s pretty nice! And well, the other one. She didn’t seem bad, until having to work closely to her and teaching her. It drove me nuts. And it wasn’t even just me, most of us, well all of us who had to teach her anything was mad. She isn’t just slow, she makes tons of mistakes. And the best part? She. doesn’t. take. notes. Probably a huge reason why she makes so much mistakes and never correct them all or remember shit.

And now, today, I finally had a epiphany why everything at work seems to be falling apart. I mean, since my colleague went to China in early May, I’ve had like maybe 3 or 4 breakdowns. I never really understood what caused it, all I knew it was a build-up. She wasn’t great at handing over her stuff, most of it was half taught, while some others I never really bothered to ask (which is on me, but at the same time I guess I couldn’t care less) because all she told me was to do this and that, let the formula do the trick, and voila! Results. Kinda got me in a pickle that day with the boss regarding this, but honestly, I didn’t care enough for this job to put in the effort either.

Apart from that, after she left, the new girl was supposed to be helping out with her work. But because she barely helped, it felt like we were understaffed. Now made worse with our other colleague leaving. With everything she does wrong, we all end up taking our own work back. There’s just more to do, and never enough people. And they’re not exactly willing to hire, or do they even seem to have the means, anymore.

I absolutely hate myself for ranting so much, not just on here, but for the past couple months to so many people. And especially to those new friends having to hear me as this whiny human who complains all the time about work. But seriously, at this rate, I think this job might just kill me.

Every day I just look forward to the end. The end of the day, the week, the month. To the next vacation. To the next time I end up falling ill and taking a day off or two. I just wish to take a week or a whole month of no-pay leave. I’m starting to think if this job is pushing me to my bad place.

Well, I think I was almost there last month when I got really overwhelmed. I had just gotten to do designing since the freelancer wasn’t available. I was excited, and it was great to get to do it. But it overloaded me with the amount of shit I already had to do. And of course, the boss doesn’t understand. All he knows and wants, is his stuff done. So yep, that got overwhelming.

And also the additional hundreds of orders at times, that even the boss himself claimed could kill us. The first time, I literally puked when I got home cos I couldn’t breathe while rushing through it all and I couldn’t properly digest my lunch. And the fucking newbie could still be snacking while we were rushing the final orders. Real. Fucking.

Also, I learnt I had to move to the other side of the office (where the bosses were) because the girl was returning, it sucked. I lost my chance to design, and obviously the great spot, and especially the few colleagues I was close to. I wished that losing my design stuff would be a way to get my old seat back, but well that didn’t work. I got way too upset at first, but then I realized that they never wanted to let me do this. I only got to cos the freelancer wasn’t around. Maybe it was better not getting to do it - less work, less stress. And designing always meant overtime from home that I don’t get paid for. And I’m already underpaid, why should I do this? And well, after that, I just got into the whole motto of “Fuck it”. Seriously, it felt much better. No longer worrying about design, deadlines (short af, both because of the buyer side and ours), no longer worrying about rushing the boss’ work while handling other stuff, no longer worrying about every little fucking thing.

I guess I’m still in that mood now. A little self-destructive. And that ain’t good at all. So I guess I’m just planning, yet again, the best time to resign. Leaving on my own terms. But it’s like every time I’m determined to do it, something pulls me right back. But, I think this time, I have to do it, for real. For my sanity. For my mental health. And before I officially self-destruct.

There have been so many people supportive of this decision, and I thank them for it. I thank them all, and any of you who bothered to read this, everyone who has been listening to all these god damn rants for the past few months. I just hope I can do this right, and that I’m not making the wrong decision. But, I guess it’s time to take that leap of faith. Stop worrying, and trust those Peter tingles.

#life #work #personal #post of the day #rant #friends #decisions #self destruction

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twdmusicboxmystery · 6 years ago

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How Henry Spoilers Define Daryl’s Arc

Okay everyone, let’s talk about Henry spoilers! These were officially leaked about six weeks ago, and I’ve been wanting to post about them since then. I didn’t get around to it before the holidays, and I’m just now getting back into it, as you know.

***So, if you hadn’t figured it out from that first paragraph, I will be discussing spoilers in this post! Don’t read if you don’t want to know. You’ve been warned!!!***

In info from the spoiler site reads thus:

“The information on Henry is evolving. He escapes the Whisperer camp sometime in episode 15 and heads back to the Kingdom. This is when he will encounter Alpha, but it looks like he will not survive and will likely end up on a pike.”

As I told my group when these surfaced, man I hate it when I’m right. At least, when it’s about something depressing.

Here’s the thing: if you look HERE, I predicted that Henry might die by the end of the season. And it was a very casual prediction. I just felt like in episode 6, they were focusing a lot on the Carzekiel family dynamic and how devoted Carol and Ezekiel were to their son. It just felt like a tragedy waiting to happen. And then there was Henry’s promise that he’d be back for the fair. Yeah, probably not gonna happen, y’all.

But then in THIS POST where I talked about predictions and possibilities for Daryl’s arc (because he’s going to be looking for Henry, much like he looked for both Sophia and Beth) I said I no longer believed Henry would die. Sure, it’s a possibility, but I thought it was more likely that Daryl would find he and he’d represent Daryl finally finding someone and getting redemption in that way.

Nope. Nada. Poor Daryl can’t catch a break. Yeah. Totally sucks. For everyone.

So what does this mean? Well, let’s discuss.

First off, you know how I keep saying I don’t think Ezekiel will get his comic book death. Of course we won’t know for sure until the Whisperer arc is over and he hasn’t died (I.e. it could still happen at any future point) but for me, this is pretty much confirmation of that. Zeke isn’t getting his CB death. It’s going to Henry.

Foreshadowing:

As depressing as this is, TD should also look at it from a foreshadowing fulfillment stand point. Once again, THEY DON’T SAY THINGS LIKE THIS WITHOUT FULFILLING THEM! We really should have guessed this outcome from this line. We’re all just too optimistic and want to think our beloved characters will live. And for the record, most people assumed this pointed to Ezekiel’s comic book death. They threw a twist in by making it Henry’s instead. Yet another thing TD has been correct about.

And what’s the last thing Daryl said to Beth? “Go up the road. I’ll meet you there.” Beth’s last words to Daryl: “I’m not gonna leave you.”

More foreshadowing:

This already made sense because Carol lost Sophia and Michonne lost Andrei. But once again, CALLBACKS ALWAYS DOUBLE AS FORESHADOWING! The proof is in the pudding, folks.

Not to mention, the kids around Carol pretty much always die. Totally sucks for Carol, and we wanted to believe she would get to keep Henry. And to some extent, she did. She had six good years raising him from a young boy into adulthood, but it still sucks that she’ll be burying yet another child.

(Remember when I said Carol might cut her hair again after a tragedy? Still remains to be seen, but I’d be willing to bet this is the tragedy and the short hair will return after Henry’s death.)

Henry/Beth Parallels:

I know people are going to worry that, what with all the Henry/Beth parallels we’ve already seen this season, this shows that Beth is dead, just as Henry will be. Please don’t let that worry you. Let me show you why, despite the parallels, it’s not the same thing.

In fact, I’ve gotten several comments on my picture posts showing Henry/Beth parallels by people who are obviously NOT TDers, who see the parallels and say things like, “So Henry is going to die, too.”

And I understand where that comes from because they think Beth is dead so parallels between her and Henry make them think he’ll die too. Now he will, and that’s not the best thing for TD because people will be able to point at that as a way to prove Beth is dead. But, check it out: In my predictions post, I said if Daryl looked for another person who dies, that would be three searches for a rule of threes. But I realized I was actually mistaken about that. If we include Rick, this will be Daryl’s 4th search.

1) Sophia

2) Beth

3) Rick

4) Henry.

And that simply means the rule of threes doesn’t really apply here. (I could get into intricate details and MAKE it fit 😉 , but it doesn’t apply in the way I was thinking of when I wrote that post.

But that made me think of another…pattern, I guess, for lack of a better word. One we couldn’t have seen before knowing about Henry’s death. Henry’s arc, at least in how it turns out, will be exactly like Sophia’s. Putting parallels aside, it will turn out MORE like Sophia’s than like Beth’s. The reason being that we will see Henry’s remains, just like we did Sophia’s. So in both cases, while the missing person wasn’t found while they still lived, or in time to save them, they were SORT OF found, but only after death. Sophia came out of the barn. Henry, I’m assuming, will be on a pike. *winces* Beth and Rick, by contrast, we never saw bodies for. They simply disappeared. And Rick, at least, we can prove is alive. So she’s more like Rick (alive) than Sophia/Henry (dead).

That begs the question: why all the Henry/Beth parallels, then?

Well, as per usual, @thegloriouscollectorlady had some amazing insights about this and how it shapes Daryl’s arc. Hence the title of this post. Let’s start by talking about what the spoilers are saying about the Whisperers:

“This whole Whisperers situation and conflict is going to be more complex than the comics. We think there’s more going on and we may be in for some surprises.”

That just SOUNDS like something that might include Beth, doesn’t it? But more than that, we’re already foreseeing a lot of possible parallels between Grady and the Whisperers. We know Henry goes looking for Lydia, because he likes her. We don’t know much yet about the confrontation between him and Alpha that leads to his death, but if it’s something about him wanting to free Lydia, who’s a prisoner to Alpha, well, doesn’t that sound a whole hell of a lot like Beth trying to free Noah from Dawn, just before being shot?

So we’re thinking we may see some powerful Beth/Henry vs. Dawn/Alpha parallels when all this happens.

Also remember that Whisperers have rape culture, just like Grady did. The leadership dynamic is also strikingly similar (female leader, males are second in command, people not treated well, and leadership held through sheer force and brutality.) So Whisperers = Grady 2.0 and that’s Beth’s story. What better way to reintroduce her than through this similar dynamic? We always said what she learned from Grady would be important moving forward. And the Whisperers, more than any other villainous group we’ve seen since S5, are shaping up to be EXACTLY like Grady.

Not to mention, in the CBs, TF finds Alpha just before finding the heads on pikes and she’s brandishing a bloody machete. So the red machete may reappear thru the Whsiperers, which may be the point of the RED MACHETE miniseries. If Beth is with the Whisperers, Legs may still be her, but the point may have been to show the audience how the red machete went from Rick to the Saviors and eventually to the Whisperers.

And that becomes interesting too (seriously we could spin in a million different directions with this) because Rick got the red machete from a bad group (the Claimers) and now, if it’s in Alpha’s hands, it may eventually pass to Beth, who’s so heavily paralleled with Rick.

So the Whisperers are kind of like the Claimers 2.0. (We also see this because in the trailer for 9b, Lydia tells Daryl he’s more like one of them, the Whisperers, than like one of Michonne’s group. That’s a whole lot like what Joe Claimer’s argument to Daryl was.)

But I digress.

Okay, so what does this mean for Daryl? Why parallel Beth and Henry so closely? First, it’s important to note that ONLY Daryl and the audience is aware of these parallels. Maybe that seems obvious, but Carol secretly watched most of Daryl and Henry’s interactions, right? But she’s not relating it to Beth in the slightest because Daryl and Beth were alone on the road together. So we, the audience, can observe these parallels, but in terms of characters, they ONLY mean anything to Daryl.

That’s important because this is going to reopen a very raw, unhealed wound for him.

For Daryl, looking for Sophia represented finding a place for himself in the group, and also reliving his childhood because no one looked for him. He was strong and saved himself. In 9x08, Aaron also says fear stops Daryl from letting people get too close to him. Fear of failure. When he loses someone he’s searched for, he blames himself.

Both Beth and Denise recognized this fear in Daryl and called him on it. (Beth in Still bc since Sophia, he never lets anyone get close; Denise because he isn’t handling his shit and it’s stupid.) It’s not Daryl’s job to actually save them, but rather to try and save them. They generally have to save themselves. But Daryl can’t see that. He can’t see beyond his own failures to save people he cares about.

Daryl has to learn that he can’t save people directly. He can give them the skills to save themselves, but they have to choose. And this is what’s always happened. He gave Tina meds to help her survive, but she did something stupid by walking up to two walkers and getting herself bitten. Daryl gave Dwight and Sherry the opportunity to be saved, but they chose to go back to Negan. (This messes with Daryl’s head, by the way, because he can’t understand why someone would choose not to be saved. He simply can’t comprehend that level of stupidity.) He gave Denise the opportunity to go on the outside and learn to protect herself, but she still died. And of course, he gave Beth the skills to survive on her own, but she has to save herself.

Again, this was @thegloriouscollectorlady’s insight into Daryl’s arc, and it’s fantastic! Because he can’t see beyond his own failures, this is not something he ever has or ever will learn. At least, not on his own. When he couldn’t save Rick, he started living on his own in the wild.

The only way I imagine he’ll learn this is by Beth’s return. Not only will he see that he was never gonna be able to save her—she had to save herself and did—but he’ll see that he gave her the skills to survive, but it was up to her to use them. I think he’ll finally start to comprehend this, and maybe it will even be a matter of her telling him. She pointed out his emotional stumbling blocks to him before in Still, and he realized she was right and then proceeded to move past them. He hasn’t had that kind of break through since he lost her in S5.

So, in short, with spoilers of Henry’s death, we’re starting to understand why the parallels between him and Beth are happening. It’s going to be the final straw for Daryl before Beth finally returns and he learns what he needs to learn in order to be the person—maybe even the leader—he needs to become.

Another interesting parallel:

Apparently, Henry will get so close to the Kingdom before actually being caught and killed that he can see the lights from the fair. This is like Andrea (who got close enough to prison to wave at Rick before being captured, which leads to her death) and Beth (almost got her out of Grady but got shot at the last possible minute).

I should probably touch on Carol’s arc since Henry is her son. I won’t go into much detail, but let’s just say we’re hoping Carol deals with Henry’s death in a healthier way than she did with Sophia’s. Still mourning, of course, but not devolving into the person that burnt David and Karen alive.

Notice I said, we HOPE that’s what will happen. Honestly, I’m not convinced. We saw her burn the Saviors in 9x01, which was a close parallel to her burning Karen and David in 4a, so that might foreshadow her returning to that mindset.

She may also end up taking Michonne’s CB arc at some point. If that doesn’t mean much to you, don’t worry about it. If it does happen, it probably won’t be this season, so I can talk about it later.

Finally, I want to mention one more detail. Then I’ll shut up. I promise. I’ve had a lot of people this season asking me what the point of killing Carl was when Henry seems to be taking all his arcs, and is roughly the same age. Well, Henry’s impending death pretty well answers that question.

1. Carl wouldn’t have survived much longer. It’s not like they killed him off and then gave someone else his arc (Henry) and kept him on for multiple seasons. If Carl had kept this arc, he simply would have died this season rather than last season.

2. It has to do with how this affects Carol and Daryl. Obviously this will drive Carol and Ezekiel’s arc in a way Carl’s death never would have. As for Daryl, well, it just wouldn’t have been realistic for it to be Carl. Carl would never have left Alexandria, Michonne, and Judith behind to become a blacksmith’s apprentice at the Hilltop. So then Carol would never have asked Daryl to protect him, and the rest of Daryl’s impending arc would have been kaput. See what I mean? It just wouldn’t have worked if it had been Carl, so they gave it Henry, and it appears it will end relatively quickly.

So yeah, just wanted to point that out for the people who’ve asked. It’s not a hating-on-Carl thing. It really is a serving-the-story thing, which is what Gimple told us back when Carl died.

Thoughts on any of this?

Special thanks to @thegloriouscollectorlady, @wdway, @bethgreeneisqueen, @lilly.loop, and @frangipanilove for contributing their thoughts to this.

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

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