#gb answers

[gnomeballed]

I wanted to make you a sort of gift for being jus the nicest person to me (sorry if it looks rushed I didn't have too much time but I still wanted to make smth for you)

Okay I’m gonna be honest, opening tumblr and seeing this in my inbox made my eyes a bit watery ;-;

Thank you SO SO much for this, like, I’m genuinely so honored that THE @duohadmehostage drew something for ME. I’ve always admired your art style, it’s very charming and I can tell that you put a lot of love and effort in what you draw. I especially like how you drew Simon’s eyes and hair here but I just love this drawing and all your other drawings in general. :D

Once again, thank you so so much for this. I’ll print it, pin it to my wall, and cherish it forever <3

[raytorosaurus]

Ray spent a night in prison?!! Nerdy sweet goody-goody gentle Ray?!!!

ya dude i know right 😭😭😭. it happened under perhaps the most Ray Toro circumstances ever, too. the four-track he used to record demos on when he was writing music on the road was out of batteries and they were broke, probably from having spent all their money on things like transformers action figures. he apparently could not live without his tape recorder, so he tried to shoplift two double-a batteries from walmart. and was an incompetent enough thief that he did not get away with it. but we have to applaud the spirit 🫡.

anyway he was obvious enough to get caught but not white enough to get away without disproportionate punishment so he literally got driven away in a police car and the others had to go pick him up from the station. he had to fly back to iowa a bit later for a court date and everything, but at least they did end up dropping the charges.

anyway, gerard claims that it was one of the things that originally inspired the writing of prison, and frank...well, frank couldn't miss an opportunity to lovingly kick a homie while he was down so, while ray was getting loaded into a cop car, frank - punk hairdo and tattoos and piercings and all - ran back into the walmart, stole an entire disposable camera AND. the SIGN FROM THE WALL that said "shoplifters will be prosecuted." and. took photos of ray getting loaded into the cop car. and then GIFTED HIM THE SIGN when they picked him up. i'd say it sounds like a fanfic, except that truth is not only stranger than fiction but also generally has ray toro in a much more interesting role lol.

[dreamtydraw]

not rlly an ask but i think ur onto something with renee li like if there were going to be dlcs aside from wedding and moments (which there aren’t due to time) i feel like there would be a renee dlc like baxter / derek in ol1

Tbh a lot of us were thinking that Renee would become a dlc Li as a stretch goal during the crowfunding before we got told that it was not a possibility due to the very understandable issue of « this would add way too much work » and in a way we got the Poly route option at least.

I think why renne fit as a li is because she has the same position than Qiu and tamarack hold ( a kid the same age who you befriend and with who you grow up with ) which in my mind makes her even more of a li position than derek and baxter ( both not appearing before step 2 and having one step where they are not in entierly)

And also simply I just think she’s neat you know ? Trans girl who likes zelda and has an angsty phase in her childhood but who’s chill and has an endearing personality ? Sign me up, truly sign me up !

Understandably we won’t get a dlc for her but that dosen’t stop the Renee love her to hype our wife okay- I love her very much and in my heart and headcanons my mc and her are kissing alright- who’s gonna stop me ?!? The sapphics yearns for renee content okay-

Also on a side note i am more than on the renee x tamarack train. This ship is adorable !!!!

[n1ghteeea]

Genuinely asking as an aroace person: why might ghostbusters want to have other romantic long-term relationships if they already have a committed group of people with whom they share a household, love to spend time, can be vulnerable and overall feel comfortable? Isn’t this why people get relationships in the first place?

[ink-the-axolotl-rabbit]

( @gbslament )

BOO.

CHAT IT FUCKING WORKED

[Now go kiss your bf gb]

[king-mera]

Considering her very complicated, negative for half of Afterlife, feelings about her father, I was pretty surprised Callie was going to be a Ghostbuster. It felt a little forced, maybe I can see trying to understand Phoebe (and maybe even Egon) more but I’m not sure…

Thoughts?

This is really interesting to think about and I think there's several factors at play here:

Even though Callie is Egon's daughter, I think in a lot of ways she was written as a revised take on Dana Barret. Like Dana in the original movies, she gets possessed by Zuul and sees her child (or rather, children) in danger. Unlike Dana, she takes a more active role in saving the day very quickly. After being freed from Zuul and given a very rushed explanation to what's going on in the final battle of Afterlife, she immediately asks what she can do to help and goes on to activate the trap field in front of the house. By the next movie she's donned the suit and pack as a fully fledged Ghostbuster herself. This isn't meant as shade towards Dana, btw. She's a fantastic character in her own right who responds to situations in a way that is natural to her. However, I think there's always been the lingering feeling that she could've done more (I could do a whole separate ramble on her, but that's another topic).

In regards to her relationships with Egon and Phoebe, that is a pretty good explanation you've come up with! It would make sense for her to learn the tools of the Ghostbusting trade as a way to get closer to them. She barely got to know her father when he was alive, but knew he loved her deeply from the wall of her pictures in his study and the fact that he trusted all his belongings to her in his will. Phoebe is passionate about science, a subject Callie avoided because of the association with Egon, but now she has the opportunity to make up for lost time and get to know her daughter better. There's also to more obvious, practical reason to become a Ghostbuster, which is protecting her children! Throughout most of Afterlife, she lets Phoebe and Trevor roam as they please, which lands them in a lot of danger. I think she realized that there was no stopping them from pursuing the supernatural, so the best thing she could do was join them.

Finally, I suspect there's one more reason Callie became a Ghostbuster, and that's because of criticism from certain vocal parts of the fanbase. I remember when Afterlife was announced there were a LOT of complaints from people who hated the idea of kids being Ghostbusters. Never mind that they were great characters who would grow up as the series progressed. It seems that Sony chose to course correct by throwing more adults in the mix, and Callie just happened to be one of them. I agree that it would've been better if they included more explanation on her choice to become part of the team. The Dark Horse midquel comics had the opportunity to do that, but didn't. Callie's just a Ghostbuster now and we're supposed to accept that from the jump. I would still recommend reading those comics if you'd like to see more of Callie as she's written very well there. She has a much healthier relationship with Phoebe and actually cares a lot about making sure the family has good communication and teamwork (This makes the friction between Phoebe and Callie in Frozen Empire all the more frustrating, but oh well).

I myself have been working on a fanfic that addresses Callie having to use a proton pack for the first time… Remind me to get back to work on that soon lol

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi! I love your meta and how beautifully you write about GSR, I would like to know what you think about this, do you think Grissom and Sara would have been good parents? Why do you think the show didn’t allowed them to have a geek baby?

hi, anon!

thank you for your kind words!

i have got a big, ol' meta that covers my thoughts on potential gsr parenthood here, if you're interested.

i also have another big, ol' meta that specifically covers my thoughts on how they would have reacted to experiencing an unplanned pregnancy during their "secret dating" phase in s5-s6 here, if you're interested in that one, as well.

the tl;dr version is that while i think grissom and sara would be kickass parents were that particular life choice one they ever decided to make together, i also don't think they would necessarily ever be likely to make that particular life choice together, just given their respective characters and backgrounds.

grissom is—prior to his retirement—highly career-driven, meaning he might not want to put his focus on parenthood rather than work. he likewise has some pretty sizeable hang-ups regarding his own capacity to nurture and be unselfish, his age, his social deficits, etc., all of which might cause him to question his potential fitness as a father.

there's a line from another show i love from a character facing down the prospect of first-time fatherhood that i can absolutely see grissom saying (in so many words): "if, for nine months, you're hearing how this is gonna change your life, and ‘you've never loved anything like this’ and ‘my god, the love!’ and ‘nothing is gonna be important anymore’—it just never felt to me like i was someone who had the capacity for those feelings. plus, you know, i-i like what's important to me. i want it to stay important. i wanna be able to do it well."

meanwhile, sara has her own considerable hang-ups regarding how she was raised, her family and personal history of mental illness, her social deficits, etc. that might cause her to feel similarly unequipped for motherhood. she is also in her twenties and thirties—i.e., prime childbearing years—very career-minded, like grissom, so she might not be inclined to step away (even temporarily) to have a kid.

maybe if grissom and sara were to experience an unplanned pregnancy at some point, they would (under very specific circumstances) consider the possibility of having a child. ditto for maybe a one-in-a-million type scenario where they encountered a kid in the system who needed fostering or adopting.

however, i think nine times out of ten, they'd opt not to have a kid—and especially not if "nature never came to bear" or if one was never put directly into their paths.

that said, since i personally find the idea of them as parents very intriguing—the issue is one that pushes a lot of fun character buttons for both of them, butting up against their hopes and fears and senses of self in some very complicated and interesting ways—i have written a big, ol' geek!baby fic, where they find themselves dealing with an unplanned pregnancy in an au version of s8.

i call it the happy accidentsverse, and if you're interested, you can read that fic series here.

as for the issue of why the show never pursued a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon, i think there are probably multiple reasons why they didn't.

more discussion after the "keep reading," if you're interested.

__

to my mind, probably the biggest reason why we never saw a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon is that, particularly in the earlier seasons of the show, the showrunners tried not to focus too much on the characters' home lives.

though they would show the occasional "off the clock" scene here or there or every once in a while toss in some kind of love interest- or family-centric story beat, anthony zuiker and co. wanted the majority of the show's focus to be on the job—on the cases the csis investigated, the goings-on at the lab and in the field, the team's interactions with each other as colleagues, the team's interactions with other law enforcement professionals and people they met in connection to their cases, in the politics of the department, etc.

they were much stricter about this policy even than other procedurals of the time.

that's why we saw so little of grissom and sara's romantic relationship actually play out on screen—because tptb never intended to offer us anything more than just a small window into their personal lives outside of their careers.

and while of course grissom and sara having a kid (whether through sara getting pregnant or them deciding to foster and/or adopt) would definitely affect their working lives and could allow for some interesting storylines centered around the lab and in the field—for example, how might sara deal with the physical and emotional requirements of her incredibly demanding job while pregnant?, how might grissom and sara have to change their workaholic habits if they were to try to become foster or adoptive parents?, how might having a kid in the mix affect both grissom and sara's willingness to face the dangers inherent in their profession?, would becoming parents change the way they responded to certain cases?, etc.—that kind of storyline, just by its nature, would also probably require the show to spend more time at home with grissom and sara than the showrunners and writers ever really intended to.

narratively speaking, catherine having a school-aged kid to start out the show is one thing, while grissom and sara having a newborn or a brand new foster kid and becoming first-time parents would be something else entirely.

in catherine's case, her being a mom to an older kid from the get-go is a much more lowkey deal, not only because a kid at that age can mostly exist in an off-screen capacity except for in episodes where her presence is plot-relevant but also because it's an already-established fact.

catherine is a mother—and an experienced mother, at that—from the very first time we meet her; it's part of both her personal and professional identities from day #1. the baseline is there. there are no questions about it. no big blanks to fill in. she's already made the life-changing decisions. she's already entrenched in that role.

the same would not be true if grissom and sara were to have a kid.

because they were "first timers" (and especially because they had seemingly never aspired to parenthood previously), the show would have to answer questions with them—depict grissom and sara making the huge, life-altering decisions; reckoning with big emotions; figuring stuff out; working through their fears and hang-ups; adjusting to a monumental change in their lives; drawing together in new ways; changing and developing as characters and as a couple; establishing new patterns; etc.

the groundwork would need to be laid where the audience could see it being laid in real time, you know?

and laying that groundwork would require showing lots of private conversations between grissom and sara, trips to the ob's office or talks with the social worker, painting the nursery or putting up a swing set, making childcare arrangements, changing their lifestyle, etc.

my sense is that tptb never really wanted to go there.

that much focus on grissom and sara's home life would have been too distracting—too much of a serialized personal storyline that required attention in every episode, regardless of the "case of the day"—for their tastes.

now.

in theory, the "keep the focus on the job, not the home" rule is one tptb could have considered breaking, had they really wanted to.

after all, it was just a production choice, not actually any kind of hard and fast rule, so if they'd decided they wanted to go the "grissom and sara have a kid" route, they could have done so.

there's always the old flannery o'connor maxim: "it's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. you can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."

however, another reason why i think they never chose to go the geek!baby route, beyond the "it goes against our sense of what our show is actually about" thing, is that, frankly, within the universe of the show itself, the timing for grissom and sara was never right.

grissom and sara don't even get together as a committed couple until s5/s6, so, barring a major deviation from what is now canon, they likely could not have had a child at any point prior to 2005/2006, just to start out with.

then their relationship remains a secret until the end of s7/beginning of s8, meaning that between 2006-2007, they're definitely not looking to have a kid and probably would be pretty averse to having one even were they to experience an unplanned pregnancy, just given the potential fallout where their jobs are concerned.

they would have to "come out" as a couple, and one or both of them might end up getting fired over it.

fast forward, and between s8 and s9, sara experiences a mental health crisis that eventually culminates with her moving away from vegas for the better part of two years from 2008 to 2009 while grissom remains behind—and by the time she's stable and moves back to vegas circa 2009/2010, grissom is then living abroad, and they're only seeing each other once a month via transatlantic commute.

back in the day, when sara first turned up in s10, i know there was some internet scuttlebutt that maybe at some point it would be revealed that in-between the events of episode 09x10 "one to go" (when last we'd seen them) and episode 10x01 "family affair" (when sara returns to vegas to "temp"), grissom and sara had had a "secret honeymoon baby."

however, such a revelation was never made—timeline-wise, it would have been a tight fit anyhow, as, within the universe of the show, episode 09x10 "one to go" takes place in january '09 and episode 10x01 "family affair" takes place in september '09—and neither did grissom and sara ever have a kid at any subsequent point.

with sara living in the states and grissom not, the likelihood that they would ever decide to expand their family steadily diminished as s10, s11, and s12 rolled on, both because they were getting older and because their marriage eventually ended up on the rocks.

cue the whole divorce debacle of s13, a few solid years of misery and loneliness in the interim, and by the time grissom and sara get back together/remarried in 2015, sara is forty-four years old and probably peri- or even full-on menopausal, and she and grissom are living a nomadic seafaring lifestyle, so the likelihood of them either having a biological child or fostering/adopting is incredibly low.

again, there was some speculation among fans—based on previous comments from showrunner anthony zuiker regarding his ideas for grissom and sara's post-"immortality" life at sea—that when the reboot rolled around, we would eventually get a "in the six years since we last saw them, grissom and sara have had a kid" reveal.

no dice, though.

s1 of csi: vegas ran its course with no secret boat babies anywhere.

all of the above being the case, there just weren't even that many points during the show's run when it would have made logistical sense for grissom and sara to have children together.

they were always either in a state of having to keep their relationship a secret for the sake of their careers or else of living apart from each other, and by the time they finally got all their shit together and were living in the same place on a full-time basis, sara was nearing the end of her prime childbearing years and they were living the kind of lifestyle where fostering/adoption would be next to impossible.

narratively-speaking, parenthood just was never in the cards for them.

of course, it's worth stating, the writers could have maybe swung a geek!baby storyline in the later seasons had they wanted to if they had just made the choice to move grissom back to vegas along with sara between s10 and s15. he wouldn't even have had to appear on-screen. sara would have just needed to reference him occasionally in dialogue and be shown to take phone calls from him at times, a "i'm meeting grissom for our first ultrasound appointment" here, a "he's been at home painting the nursery all morning. he put little ladybugs up the walls" there. they could have done a whole pregnancy storyline that way, and it would have given sara something to do during seasons when she is otherwise criminally underutilized. then maybe if they were lucky, they could have gotten billy to come back for a guest spot when it came time for the baby to be born. but, alas, such a storyline would have required them to imply depth, which is something they had no idea how to do.

—which brings us to the last big reason why i think the showrunners never had grissom and sara have children:

because, ultimately, they just never felt it was right for the characters.

as stated above, both grissom and sara have plenty of reasons, both individually and as a couple, based on their backgrounds and predilections and development, why they might never choose to pursue parenthood.

while there are certain very particular scenarios were i can imagine they might set those reasons aside, overcome their hang-ups and fears, and decide to "go for it" re: having kids, i also think it would take a lot of narrative work to get them there—that thread would be something the writers would have had to really develop, requiring more than a few "acts of god" and major plot interventions to make the idea seem feasible.

they could have done it if they really wanted to.

but in the end, i think they didn't feel any compelling need.

grissom and sara have been an unconventional couple from the get-go, and their development has been circuitous and unstraightforward. there have been many setbacks for them along the way and strange turns. they've definitely not done everything "by the book."

for them to have a somewhat "untraditional" happy ending—at least by primetime, network early 00s flagship couple tv standards—makes a good amount of sense.

they're not the "white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog" norman rockwell family, and i think tptb are very okay with that outcome.

they like the image of this middle-aged couple that found immense fulfillment in each other and in their shared work (whether as csis or conservationists) and never felt the need to look outside of those things in order to be happy.

that's not to say they might not have written things differently had some of the production realities of the show been different along the way—like, say jorja fox had never left the show during s8 and grissom and sara had been able to get married in vegas as planned while both still working at the lab or that billy had come back to the show with jorja between s10 and s15; maybe in those cases, they might have eventually decided to go for the geek!baby storyline after all—however, all things as they were, i think they were generally pretty comfortable with how things ended up in regards to grissom and sara remaining childless.

they had explored the notion of "csis as parents" as much as they cared to with catherine, warrick, and russell.

they didn't want to go there with grissom and sara.

and who knows? maybe there were other outside factors that influenced their decision to that end, like actor preferences or the difficulty of including infant actors in a complicated production such as theirs, etc.

suffice it to say, i think the showrunners' decision to keep grissom and sara childless was probably a multifaceted one.

the good news is, regardless of how things turned out in canon, we as fans can always play around with the geek!baby concept as much as we want to and in as many different permutations as we like.

i certainly have a lot of fun in my accidentsverse, imagining grissom and sara facing both the challenges and rewards of parenthood, and i know a lot of other fan authors who have their own takes on that idea, as well.

anyway.

rambling now.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[nightmarenoise]

[in-apricis]

GB Patch also posted the response to reddit, and when bi/pan fans pointed out that the comments were still biphobic, GP doubled down....by making biphobic comments as well.

reddit.com/r/OurLifeFanPage/comments/1eusp4y/gb_patch_games_sensitivity_reader_update/limw7vv/?context=3

i can’t speak much from the perspective of bi/pan fans BUT i can say that the way GB has been responding to all of this, at least from a person who is solely on the outside and isn’t privy to behind the scenes discussions, has been extremely lacking.

i feel like GB has to realize that at this point in the time, this matter has grown bigger than just them and the sensitivity reader (whether it should have or not is an entirely different matter). i understand GB wanting to protect their team (and in this situation, probably their friend as well), but i do wish they would take the time to really understand the perspectives of those who have been affected and hurt instead of always being on the defensive. if people have said that they’re hurt, acknowledge, apologize and then do better instead of immediately coming back with a defense for themselves.

but i get it. easier said than done. they’re one person. maybe they’re in over their head. at the end of the day, maybe it won’t even matter what they say since they’ll never be able to please everybody.

[gnomeballed]

mRow

Right back at ya Duo

[statiicstag]

[ okay i wanted to be on here tonight but work scheduled me 50 hours this week and omfg i can already feel the incoming insane burnout so pls forgive me if im even SLOWER than usual djkJSDFSDF those of you who are patient with my writing speed, thank you <3 i hope its worth it

catch me on discord if u dont already have me !! it's gbhorror ]

[hugheses]

Your skills of finding things are phenomenal because I couldn’t find one video of Jack fixing his hair before putting his helmet back on

my onedrive looks like this so your hands can look like this etc

[sherrymagic]

we (alpha enthusiasts) are eating so well this week finallyy <3

this ep had SO MUCH Alpha i was honestly taken aback, Sasa how is it that we've been winning so much recently? is this a dream? is it the power of love? did we give away so much we finally get to receive? whatever it is hope it never ends, our girl got so much screentime and proper depth and some actual backstory on what her hopes and dreams and plans for the future are, i feel blessed AAAAAAAAAA

[ilovettrpgs]

[yoitsgb]

Привет! Я тут задумалась: вот у сурвов есть дедушка Билл. А у манов? Как думаешь, кто больше подходит для звания "Дедушка всея убивц": Калеб или Док (или может кто-то ещё?)? И как бы это проявлялось?

здравствуй!! как по мне, на роль дедушки всея убийц подходит как калеб, так и казан :D казан тот самый дедушка, что расскажет о философии и чести, а калеб, в свою очередь научит создавать изобретения которые напугают вашу маму и рисованию чернухи. представьте себе легионят с кучкой всякой страшной и убийственной всячины. // eng translate hello!! i think that both caleb and kazan are suitable or the role of the grandpa of all killers :D kazan is that one grandpa that will teach you philosophy and honour, and caleb is that one grandpa that will tell you about gore and will teach you how to create inventions that will scare your mom. just imagine small legions with different scary and murderous stuff.