#henry blake especially

[toesareforfeet]

Frank, Henry blake and trapper are SOOOOOO MUCH BETTER than Charles, Potter and bj...

[hawkeyeslaughter]

blacked out and when i came to and there were tears on my face and this was on my screen

i’m SORRY if you’ve sent me a request they’re either in progress or on my to do list i’m just insanely unwell over them <3

[gold-onthe-inside]

mr belvedere

summary: a night spent babysitting henry leads to a conversation he's not quite prepared for, and a new way of looking at you. who? spencer reid (s8/9) x blake!reader content warnings: spencer and reader being lovesick over the phone, spencer being a godfather, domestic fluff, marriage talk word count: 1.5k author's note: based on this request. part of spring-fest. hope you guys like it.

Henry’s precocious for a three year old - bright and full of energy and in complete adoration of his godfather. His godfather who makes pancakes for dinner, even if they are a little funnily shaped, who makes sure his bath is extra bubbly and uses funny voices when he makes up stories using his bath toys. Uncle Spencer who plays along with pillow fights and struggles with helping him into his pyjamas, who lets Henry hang from his neck because he finds it funny and not at all dangerous (he knows his Uncle Spencer would never let him fall). Who tucks him into bed and sits beside him to read his favourite bedtime story (and three more, but no more than that), and turns out the lights, leaving a little star nightlight on for him before closing the door.

It’s as he’s cleaning up downstairs (with gloves and cleaning sprays, of course) that your call comes in. It’s become your ritual these past few weeks, telling each other about your days. Really, he just loves hearing your voice, the way it lifts and lilts as you speak, in every form possible. You’re tired more often than not, pulling 8 hour shifts, sometimes back to back, and he can hear the sluggishness in your voice. But there’s a quiet pride when you tell him about your patients, the ones making progress, however small it might be. He’s learned to tell the difference between a good day and a bad day just from the tone of your voice — he’s not a profiler for nothing — and he half-wishes he could be at your place right now, sprawled in bed, listening to you.

“Is that Mama?” comes a tiny sleepy voice from behind him so unexpectedly that Spencer almost dropped the phone from its pinned spot between his shoulder and ear.

“Henry?” he asked, barely catching the phone before it hit the tiled floors.

“I wanna talk to Mama,” Henry whined softly.

“It-It’s not Mama, Henry,” Spencer stammered, trying to figure a way out of this.

“Is it Aunt Penny?”

“N-No,” Spencer replied, haphazardly tugging his gloves off. “Why don’t we get you back in bed, huh?” he asked instead, scooping the 3 year old up.

“Spencer?” Your voice comes through the receiver, confused beyond measure, and Spencer would curse if not for the little blond boy in his arms.

“Yeah, can I call you back in a sec?” Spencer asked, harried as he took Henry back up to his room, phone pressed to his ear again.

“Uh, sure,” comes your confused reply, and he doesn’t have time to explain before he hangs up on you with a quick ‘love you’.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Henry asked, bundled up in Spencer’s arms, and usually, he loves Henry’s questions, loves nurturing the boy’s curiosity, but this is uncharted waters. Especially with a three year old who has a penchant for spilling secrets.

“I-“ Spencer started, then closed his mouth. How to explain this? “Yeah, that was my… my girlfriend,” he managed, putting Henry back in bed to tuck him back in.

“Is she nice?” Henry asks, eyes now wide with interest as he pulled his arms out from under the duvet, looking up at Spencer.

"She's really nice," Spencer murmured fondly, his fingers fiddling with the edge of the duvet.

“Is she pretty?” Henry continued, ever the curious little tot.

Spencer chuckled, the corner of his mouth tipping up. “She’s very pretty,” he told the little boy, his tone fond, despite the nerves.

Henry seemed to consider his next words with a seriousness that seemed way beyond his years. “You gonna marry her one day?”

Spencer's brain stalled, his lips parting in surprise. He wasn't exactly opposed to the idea, but it had only been a few months of the two of you dating. That said, the thought of you in a white dress, his ring on your hand, calling you his wife, being your husband... wasn't unappealing in the slightest. "Maybe," Spencer managed.

“Maybe?” Henry repeated, furrowing his tiny brow in question.

Spencer couldn’t help but laugh a little, smoothing down the unruly curls of the boy’s hair. “We’ve only been together for a little bit, buddy... but yeah, maybe -” one day, he wanted to finish, but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it out loud.

Henry looked up at him with wide eyes, an excited grin spreading across his face. “Can I meet her?” he asked eagerly.

Another loaded question. Spencer wanted to run away and hide somewhere, or call JJ and beg her to come back. Technically, the team knew you, just not as his girlfriend. Alex’s goddaughter. Nothing more. They also knew Spencer had a girlfriend, but the two dots hadn’t been connected. Alex was the only one who knew, and he was sure Derek had come pretty close to figuring out. And that was the other thing, you had never pushed him to tell the team. This thing between the two of you felt so fragile, he didn’t want to jinx it by introducing you as his girlfriend to a group of behavioural analysts, never mind their children.

“I’m not sure, buddy, we’ll see,” Spencer said weakly instead.

“Please?” Henry pleaded, giving Spencer his very best and most effective puppy dog look.

Spencer sighed. No matter how many times he’d told Henry that it wouldn’t work on him, it always did - every. damn. time.

"I'll see what I can do," Spencer tried. "But only if you go back to sleep. It's way past your bedtime."

Henry sighed, sticking out his lower lip in a pout, but eventually relented. “Okay, Uncle Spence.” Spencer tucked him into bed, pulling the covers up to Henry’s chin before turning on the stars nightlight.

“Goodnight, buddy,” he murmured, running a hand through Henry’s messy hair before pressing a gentle kiss to the boy’s forehead. He closed the door behind him for a second time, pulling out his phone to call you back. It only rang twice before you answered.

“Hey,” came your voice, tired - as it usually was, especially if you were working a back to back shift.

“Hey, I’m sorry about that,” he hurriedly said into the phone, walking silently down the hall into the kitchen to continue cleaning up.

"So... is there like... a secret kid I haven't been told about?" you asked, half-teasing.

Spencer nearly dropped the spray bottle of cleaning products he was holding in shock. “Wh- No! No, um - “ he stammered, trying to find a reasonable excuse that wouldn’t just make him sound like a lying ass. “It’s not my kid,” he finally settled for.

"I'm not sure that makes it better?" you asked, brow furrowed, your lips folded, your laptop set aside on your bed and phone pressed to your ear.

Spencer cursed silently to himself, racking his brain for any other plausible explanation that didn’t sound so bad. But he was really grasping at straws here. “Uh, it’s- It’s my godson,” he finally decided on. It’s not that he wanted to keep his ‘relationship’ with you hidden, but he also knew how the team gossip mill could get, especially when it came to the two of you.

"Oh," you breathed out, shifting to your side. He heard you shifting through the phone, and he could just picture you settling into the pillows, probably with your comforter tangled around your body. “Well, that explains it," you murmured, running a hand through your hair. "How old is he?"

“Three,” Spencer replied, a little sigh slipping past his lips.

“Well, that definitely explains the exhaustion,” came your voice, accompanied by the lightest chuckle. “Sounds like he’s worn you out.”

“Actually, his energy levels are pretty consistent with the developmental period he’s in,” Spencer explained, pinning his phone to his ear with his shoulder while he put away cleaning supplies. “Just nowhere near a match to mine.”

“Yeah, little kids are like that,” you said, rubbing at an eye as you talked. “I can’t tell you how many times the really young ones have made me run around after them in the hospital.”

“I bet,” Spencer said with a soft chuckle. “Henry’s a good kid, he just has way too much energy and an uncanny knack of being awake at the most ungodly hours.” He leaned his hip against the counter as he spoke.

"Huh, sounds like you," you murmured, teasing.

Spencer rolled his eyes, though his mouth curled in a smile. “Ha ha,” he replied flatly. “You’re so funny.”

He can feel your tired smile through the phone. "I should get some sleep," your soft voice said.

“You really should,” he replied, and he hates that there’s a small part of him that wants to beg you to stay on the line a little longer, just to hear your voice.

A beat passed before your voice came through again -- "Goodnight, Spence."

“Goodnight,” he murmured softly into the phone. “I love you,” the words slipped out of his mouth easily, something that’s come out of his mouth more and more often these past few months.

"Love you too," you murmured.

He could almost hear the smile in your voice. He held onto his phone for a beat longer, listening to the soft sounds of your breathing, before finally, reluctantly hanging up. He looked back up towards Henry's bedroom, turning over the question in his head. "You gonna marry her one day?" The answer, instinctively, was yes. But between your ex-fiance and his ex-girlfriend who lied about having a fiance, marriage was a topic that still felt too raw. And yet... the answer was still yes.

comments and reblogs appreciated <3

[santoschristos]

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

— William Blake

“Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree or a rose or a waterfall, or sun or stars. … The great French scholar Henri Corbin, basing his definition on the Sufi writers, especially on the work of In ‘Arabi, has coined the term “imaginal” to describe that order of reality proper to the imagination, since the word “imaginary” is in popular usage understood as something unreal. The word imaginal is the equivalent of the alam al-mithal of the Persian philosophers of the imagination, described by Corbin as that region of the mind where meaning takes on form and, by the same agency, forms take on meaning. The imagination is understood by the Romantic poets as nothing less than the fundamental ground of knowledge.“

– Kathleen Raine, W.B. Yeats and the Learning of Imagination. Image: William Blake, David Delivered out of Many Waters, c.1805

[campgender]

Hey hello! Can you recommend any excangelical podcasts? I hope you are doing well!

tysm, i hope you are too❣️ there are a ton of podcasts in this sphere & i often cycle through periods of intense engagement & more distance, so these recs are a combination of luck & personal taste — there are artists & activists like kevin garcia whose work i’ve been profoundly shaped by & whose podcasts i just don’t click with.

i’m also going to mix in the exMo & other deconstruction podcasts i listen to because i’ve found both the emotional experience really relatable as a pastor’s kid & thus someone raised in a certain epicenter of cultiness, & also, because the 1800s politics it reflects are foundational to evangelical doctrines & values, too, Mormon history & theology can be super useful for understanding what were more unspoken beliefs in my upbringing.

exvangelical with blake chastain

a good way to find other artists but not something i listen to more than selectively

combination of reading political commentary essays from his blog (i find the sentence structure of this type of thing difficult to follow, especially out loud) & interviews with other podcasters / artists about their journeys & work

#BadTheologyKills with Kevin Garcia

Andre Henry, author of All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep

mormon stories with john dehlin & the open stories foundation staff

john changed my life in high school as the first person i’d heard of willing to be excommunicated (largely) due to queer issues as an ally. i don’t always agree with his lens — he has a doctorate in psychology & more faith in the medical establishment than i could ever endorse — but he defends queer youth with his heart & soul & statistics and i have a lot of respect for him + his work.

combination of long-form (like, 3-10+ hours) interviews about people’s journeys in/leaving the church & political commentary / breaking news, usually in panel form, with some church history series with guests.

Ep 1442: Was I raised in a cult or high-demand religion? A self-assessment

Ep 1588: Noah’s Flood with Dr. Simon Southerton (I also recently finished a great book on this topic which i think was on his recommendation? The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood by David R. Montgomery; link goes to my review on storygraph)

REVcovery with justin gentry & rev sarah heath

i started listening to this one when it started because of justin’s other podcast (mentioned later), i find him really relatable in a lot of personality ways (things i associate in myself with being obsessive-compulsive) & i really appreciate the ways he relates those to Methodism, how that environment fosters + rewards those traits.

justin is also an ally who got fired from his pastoral position over being queer-affirming; sarah is an ally who ran an affirming UMC church before retiring from burnout.

there are two main reasons i like this podcast: the focus on (ex)pastors & the Methodist lens. similar to what i mentioned earlier, pastors are deeply “in it,” & i think the experiences of the hosts & their interviewees are relatable to a lot of people who were/are heavily volunteerized &/or publicized in church. like, by the time i was in middle school i was doing as much if not more church work as my dad (who was not a senior pastor at the time), so while some of their more “pastoral” experiences i can only relate to from a level of peer support, most of their discussions resonate directly

interviews about guests’ journeys, almost all (ex)pastors or other religious leaders + conversations between the hosts about a certain topic + practical advice like building a resume when your only experience is in church work

Episode 23: Pay Janice Lagata

Bart Ehrman, acclaimed New Testament scholar & former evangelical

the Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast hosts audio of select posts (his entire posting library is available for an annual fee his organization donates to charity)

a variety of his interviews & audio of his guest lectures can be found across various other podcasts

How Jesus Became God lecture (i also recently finished this book lol)

The Bible as Literature & Media lecture

Bad Words with Janice Lagata

she’s a former longtime unpaid worker in the upper levels of Hillsong

premise is “giving bad theology the read it deserves” — each episode discusses a chapter of a book reflective of evangelical theology/culture

she’s amazing but unfortunately i have trouble with the audio quality of her guests a lot of the time

her other podcast is God Has Not Given

Mormon.ish with Rebecca Bibliotheca & Landon Brophy

exMo & culturally Mormon news analysis & history

Rebecca does Mormon News Roundup which is sometimes cross-posted on Mormon Stories which is how i found her podcast, i find her style really easy to listen to

The LDS “Indian Placement Program” & Its Legacy with Native academic Dr. Elise Boxer (the blurb on the listing is accidentally from the wrong week but it’s the right audio)

LDS International Temple Building: The Same Controversial Playbook? with anthropologist Jason Boxer, about LDS neo/colonialism in Peru & how these tactics are then applied domestically

Go Home Bible, You’re Drunk with Tori Williams Douglass & Justin Gentry

started out with them doing drinking games to bible stories, now a mix of discussing bible stories or evangelical cultural phenomena, alcohol optional. more casual / laid-back vibe

gonna be a pedant for a second, honestly now that they do more cultural commentary eps i prefer those bc as someone who reads a lot of historical-critical biblical analysis it bothers me when they refer to the way they were taught / evangelicals teach the text as the meaning of the text, when there’s cultural/symbolic background they’re not aware of (in those instances; i’m not trying to say they’re uninformed or anything). particularly bothers me when it’s about a story from Judaism

Blessed Are The Binary Breakers with Avery Arden @blessedarethebinarybreakers

more Christian than ex but lots of trans guests + broad experiences of & perspectives on faith

Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr

he’s a Franciscan mystic & panentheist (distinct & very different, as he reminds listeners often, from my pantheism lol)

this podcast discusses his book The Universal Christ, he has other audio projects

i hope some of those are interesting to / helpful for you! wishing you all the best xx

[mostbelovedqueer]

Propaganda for Henry: He is so inprtant to me, he makes my heart ache

Propaganda for Yang: Lgbtq+Canon since Volume 9 of RWBY. Girlfriend is Blake Belladonna

Disclaimer

The tournament is based on submission!

If you don't think xyz character is queer, you can just vote against them! But at this point it is too late to take them out of the tournament without messing the whole thing up!

Rules

don't insult characters or fandoms, you will get blocked

reblogs are fine, but please don't reblog the same polls over and over (especially if you are a poll/tournament blog), you will get blocked

please stop yelling at me or calling me cruel for pitting "your faves" against each other, the tournament polls are randomized

[prpfz]

Hiya! 🕊 I'm a 21+ semi-lit to literate role-player casting a wide net for some of my favorite horror series with dying fandoms. As long as I can play as my favorite characters I welcome all OC's and crossover content. I also love AUs, multi-muse plots, and I prefer chatting OOC in between replies to keep me invested.

Below are all the characters I play. Over DMs I can give more information about possible ships, AUs, and plot ideas.

📞 Black Phone - Al Shaw(The Grabber), Max Shaw, Vance Hopper and Gwen Blake.

🎈It (2017) - The entirety of the Bower's Gang. Henry Bowers, Patrick Hockstetter, Victor Criss, Reginald Huggins, and lesser known book characters.

🪲 BeetleJuice - BeetleJuice- especially with AUs from the original script. (No BeetleBabes. I have nothing against it but I've gotten really bored with it in past RPs.)

🔪Child's Play - Chucky (Charles Lee Ray) but AU heavy with strong preference to human portrayal. Eddie Caputo, Andy Barclay, Glen and Glenda Tilly.

🍽 Texas Chainsaw Massacre - All of the original Sawyer brothers (Nubbins, Chop Top, Drayton) but particularly Leatherface (Jedidiah) himself. I follow the original timeline and ignore the remakes but I have a soft spot for Eddie "Tex" Sawyer.

Dead dove content is to be expected. The triggers present in the original series are likely to carry over to the role-plays. In particular I'd love to have some toxic relationships and someone open to writing smut. Bring me your most deranged characters or unwilling victims caught up in a killer's obsession!

give a like and anon will get back to you

[mashbrainrot]

Henry Blake in 'The Interview'

In 2006, Larry Gelbart wrote dialogue imagining Trapper, Henry Blake, and Colonel Flagg had featured in the M*A*S*H episode 'The Interview'. Here is Henry's, with the original available to read here via Google Groups.

REPORTER: How does it feel, having the responsibility for saving such a great number of lives? HENRY: We just take ’em one or two, sometimes maybe twenty at a time. The big trick is not to start thinking of ’em as numbers – as just so many stats that go into a report that winds up in somebody’s filing cabinet under “out of sight, out of mind.” You’ve gotta always remember that what you’re dealing with is hurt people, people that have been run over by a war. REPORTER: And not just – HENRY: You gotta remember to take a peek at the odd dog tag now and then and remind yourself that that dangling leg or busted gut you’re going to try and put back together again is somebody’s dad or son or boyfriend – that all that blood and guts soiling your linen belongs to somebody that’s got a name attached to him.

REPORTER: You can’t afford to lose your sense of humanity. HENRY: There’s just so many senses you can lose over here. REPORTER: Humor not being one of them, obviously. HENRY: Around here laughter’s just crying without the tears. REPORTER: You have a family back home, sir? HENRY: In Bloomington. The one in Illinois, not in Indiana – unless things have changed since I went away. REPORTER: You keep in touch with them, of course, your family. HENRY: We write, we phone. Far apart as we are, I don’t think we’ve ever been closer. REPORTER: Would you like to say hello to them on television? HENRY: Be better if this was kissovision, but, yeah, can I? REPORTER: Go right ahead. HENRY: Lorraine? Hi, honey. Hi, kids. I got your report cards this morning and I had Radar go out post ’em on the bulletin board here so everybody can see why I’m so darn proud of you. Especially how you’re doing in math. You must get those brains from your mom. Got to be. Old as I am, I still don’t know how many tens to give someone for a five-dollar bill. (TO REPORTER) Thanks. REPORTER: That it? HENRY: That’s it. (TO CAMERA) Except I’m counting the days till we’re back together again. REPORTER: You have any idea when that will be? HENRY: I try not to have too many ideas. There’s always someone who ranks you who’s sure you’ll agree he’s got a better one. REPORTER: When you do finally get home, what are you going to tell your children is the biggest lesson being over here has taught you? HENRY: To always try to work things out, I guess. Whatever those things might happen to be. You don’t make your point killing the other guy. Even if you do it’s kind of wasted if the other guys not around to get the message. REPORTER: You seem – if all may so, Colonel – you seem near exhaustion. HENRY: What I am mostly is tired of being tired. We’re supposed to be a hospital but it’s more like a chop shop around here. We’re up to our elbows in people that other people are doing their best to chop down. REPORTER: That doesn’t lead to a lot of sleep, I would imagine. HENRY: I used to think of sleeping in terms of hours. How many did I get last night, how many will I get to steal tonight. I’m down to minutes now. It’s like somebody broke one hand off the clock. REPORTER: Does that ever affect your performance? HENRY: I fell asleep a few weeks ago in the middle of resecting a patient’s bowel. How’s that for exhausted? REPORTER: Does that fishing hat mean there are those times when you do get to get away from it all? HENRY: What it means is that I have to fish for those times. And let me say, the biting’s pretty poor. REPORTER: Business is too good around here. HENRY: Let’s just say it takes a whole lot longer to take a bullet out of a belly than it does putting one into one. REPORTER: Thank you, sir. HENRY: Can I say one more thing? REPORTER: Of course. HENRY: I just want you to know we all here are grateful for this visit you’ve paid us, this attention you’re paying to the job we’re doing. You get the feeling sometimes, being over here that, aside from our families, we’ve kind of dropped off the planet, that we’ve been kind of disinvited to the party – like everyone back home is busy living their real lives and for us to give them a call when we get back to town. (TO REPORTER) That sound too preachy? REPORTER: It sounded just fine, Colonel. HENRY: Henry. I’m a lot more a Henry than I’ll ever be colonel. REPORTER: Thank you, Henry. HENRY: Tell me the truth: didn’t that feel better? REPORTER: You’re an excellent doctor. HENRY: Hey – that’s why I’m over here getting 300 hundred dollars a month.

[bestworstcase]

people who talk about "cast bloat" in v7/8 are so funny to me bc v4 and especially v5 really suffer from having so few minor and supporting characters—like. literally the only new faces are 1. nameless bit characters, and 2. arc antagonists (the albains, ilia, lionheart, raven, and vernal).

and i think that is the reason those two volumes feel so… empty. they're not actually that slow-paced and there is in fact a LOT of narrative meat on the bones, but v4-5 feel slower and feel like there's less going on in them. (and that is not exactly an uncommon opinion: "nothing happens in v4-5" and "v4-5 are slower paced and that's good actually" are both sentiments that i see a lot.)

but… like, v4 comes out swinging with salem putting her plan into motion, and while juggling between blake / weiss / rnjr / yang on their separate journeys does slow down the progression of character arcs in terms of watching time, narratively things do happen at a fair clip and the story does a good job of weaving these disparate threads together thematically. similarly, v5 murks up the timeline by being non-chronological but none of the characters are ever just sitting around and there is quite a bit of momentum. it just doesn't feel that way—

—because these narrative events feel isolated. menagerie is crowded with nameless extras, only one of whom gets a shred of actual characterization; the only side characters who get anything at all are the antagonists involved in blake's arc. similarly, rnjr meet a few bit players during their journey across anima and then… literally just lionheart, once they reach mistral. vernal is the only bandit with an identity beyond "bandit."

the atlas portions of v4 are comparatively memorable because we DO meet new characters of varying importance: jacques, klein, and whitley get a decent amount of fleshing out in relation to weiss and ironwood, with ironwood's headbutting with jacques giving an indirect glimpse into atlas politics; then there's smaller characters like henry marigold, the business people who talk about the faunus and economic inequality with jacques, the socialite who scoffs about the fall of beacon because how is this our problem.

the same can be said for the other arcs too. the blacksmith and the mayor at the beginning of v4 breathe life into that village; the friendly captain makes the ship feel more alive. nameless extras don't do much for a narrative—they just visually fill out a scene—but bit characters with a bit of personality bring the world to life.

so during the beacon arc, there's a steady widening of the supporting cast (team cfvy + sun and neptune + penny and ironwood in v2, winter and qrow and various tournament competitors in v3). and then in v6, we get dee and dudley, maria and jinn, the cotta-arcs and cordovin and the encounter with pyrrha's (probably) mother. and in v7-8 there's the ace-ops and the happy huntresses and pietro along with bit characters like the councilmen and racist grandma and fiona's uncle. and v9 is chock full of memorable side characters. there is a significant and consistent presence of side and bit characters.

compare that to v4-5, which have long sections of narrative where The Only Characters are… the core cast and the arc antagonists. it makes the world feel smaller and that makes the narrative events feel insulated and unimportant.

a bare-bones cast of only characters who are strictly necessary for the plot will not make v10 feel "tighter" or "better focused," it'll just make vacuo feel lifeless. lol. (and this is not even getting into how rwby uses side characters to develop its core cast; like the point of robyn being so prominent in v7-8 is not to develop robyn herself, it's to incite development with ruby, penny, blake, yang, ironwood, and qrow. she's a catalyst. this is true also of the ace-ops and may.)

[dionysian-sadness]

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

— William Blake

“Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree or a rose or a waterfall, or sun or stars. ... The great French scholar Henri Corbin, basing his definition on the Sufi writers, especially on the work of In 'Arabi, has coined the term "imaginal" to describe that order of reality proper to the imagination, since the word "imaginary" is in popular usage understood as something unreal. The word imaginal is the equivalent of the alam al-mithal of the Persian philosophers of the imagination, described by Corbin as that region of the mind where meaning takes on form and, by the same agency, forms take on meaning. The imagination is understood by the Romantic poets as nothing less than the fundamental ground of knowledge."

– Kathleen Raine, W.B. Yeats and the Learning of Imagination.

[scribe-of-maat]

Ranking DC Pride 2023

9. Love’s Lightning Heart (???, ???)

Starring The Flashlight and The Flash, I think? When he called the dude “Ray” in the beginning I thought it was gonna be The Ray, you know? This only scores so low because I’m not at ALL familiar with anything Multiversity and this story especially seemed to be absolutely thick with that corner of DC lore. I get there’s a Parallax type of thing happening but... this was kind of hard to follow for a payoff that’s pretty lukewarm if you’re not well-versed in who this story’s about.

8. My Best Bet (Jon Kent/Superman, John Constantine

This is hit especially hard in my ranking because it’s the last story in the book and the only thing DC Pride about it is that it stars two Bs. They’re popular queer characters but I’m here for stories that are specifically ABOUT LGBT stuff, not about LGBT people doing stuff. There’s nothing to really talk about here.

7. Found (Xanthe Zhou, Batwoman/Kate Kane)

I’ve been meaning to read Spirit World, and since I hadn’t gotten around to it Xanthe being LGBT was a surprise to me, but not as much as Kate Kane showing up was. It feels like someone threw a dartboard at WLW women and plopped in whoever came up, cuz I guarantee if I flip the newest Batwoman issue open to a random page she’ll have a girlfriend-slash-situationship that won’t be too happy about her seeming receptive to some flirting. But hey, I like Xanthe more now so there’s give-and-take.

6. And Baby Makes Three (Xiomara Rojas/Crush, Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn, Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy)

I like Crush. I can’t claim to have read much of her, because for now that means enduring way too much Damian Wayne, but she seems like an incredibly interesting character. But I could not tell you why she’s here with Harley and Ivy. This, moreso than anything else, has a less than negative chance of being referenced again and it’s giving me even more of that dartboard feeling the last story did. Plus if there’s one thing Harlivy can do, it’s carry a story by themselves. I wish we’d gotten something about JUST Crush, is what I’m saying. I feel like this was a status update for Crush, like her washing ashore was meant to bridge the gap between this story and whatever she was doing the last time she showed up.

5. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work (Natasha Irons/Steel, Nubia)

Listen, I will always have space in my heart for the Irons family. I love Natasha, and I love John Henry, and when DC lets either out of the ether every other year I’m front and center. That, and the recent super-push Nubia has been enjoying made this story one I was pretty excited to read when I realized who it was about. But THIS ART. These faces are TRASH. Even without looking it up I feel like there’s a 0% chance DC would give a nonblack artist this story, so it makes it especially confusing as to why the characters look like THAT. The actual content was fun and even though Io needs to come up off our queen posthaste, I didn’t have any (other) complaints. But it’s SOOOOO UGLYYYYY.

4. The Dance ( Minhkhoa Khan/Ghost-Makes, Thomas Blake/Catman)

I knew Ghost-Maker was bi prior to reading this, somehow. I’ve been meaning to read anything about him because his design is so awesome but I was only really guessing this was Catman alongside him. I really don’t know anything about him, so this ranks so highly just because of Ghost-Maker. I don’t really have anything else to add here since this story’s ultimate purpose seems to just show off muscley dudes post-sex.

3. Anniversary (Lucas Trent/Midnighter, Andrew Pulaski/Apollo, Alan Scott/Green Lantern)

These showcases tend to have like, one story that directly addresses inequality if you’re lucky. This is that story, and it’s such a good one. Midnighter and Apollo’s fame as the canon gay Superbat sort of eclipses anything else about them, but that reputation is put to excellent effect here. Plus, Alan Scott, one of my favorite Green Lanterns, finally shows up. Revitalizing that old slogan to make it clear the LGBT isn’t going anywhere was fun, too.

2. Subspace Transmission (Jules Jourdain/Circuit Breaker, Jess Chambers/The Flash, Andy Curry/Aquawoman)

Jess was an extremely fun and memorable character from the start like, half a decade ago and that holds true here. I was super uninvested in the Circuit Breaker part of this story. I don’t know who that is, and even after reading this I genuinely don’t care. This made my heart hurt for more Teen Justice and Future State stuff in general. That Jackson Hyde cameo at the end was also perfect.

1. Hey, Stranger (Connor Hawke/Hawke, Tim Drake/Robin)

I was definitely in diapers the last time these two characters spoke to each other. When there’s been THAT big a gap in timeframe I can’t be sure how emotional a reunion can be to a modern readership. None of that matters to my enjoyment, because Connor Hawke is far and away my favorite Arrowfam member and his recent resurgence (even if too much of it is attached to Damian Wayne for my taste) has been such a blessing. DC only trots this guy out three times a year but god do we eat good each time. They just need to do a LITTLE more with him.

[jamneuromain]

DEADPOOL 3:

deadpool and wolverine: 11/10 the plot is a lil weak as disney always is but the cameos...

spoilers under cut:

Chris Evans as Johnny Storm. I thought that the whole Fantastic Four cameo was fake news but NOOOOOOO HE'S THERE. (Though very unfortunately no Reed or Sue or Ben.

Cavillrine! Henry Cavill with that hair and that cigar and that beard and the motorcycle gets me. Every time.

Elektra, Gambit, Blade, X-23. Especially Gambit. Channing Tatum has a gift of whipping the roles he play into a full comedy XD

Lady-pool was played by Blake Lively. I wasn't so sure when she appeared but the credits said so.

a few others like Red Devil, Pyro are also in the movie. The toad guy and psylock too, but I'm not sure if they changed the casting

Happy Hogan! In the first few minutes when dp applied for the avengers. The photo of Tony and Peter, the half-made shield, a couple of iron man helmets, and that moving thingy in Ironman 2 where Tony finds it obnoxious on Pepper's desk were there in Happy's office.

It was a great surprise in general that they were able to be there and it felt like a revisit of my 2000s movie collection which I watched as a kid. The easter egg at the ending credits was a very touching moment, it was a video put together with blooper scenes from the X men films and fantastic four.

I think this movie is one of the best marvel movies after Endgame. The script writers really paid attention to the earlier movies and a lot of Xmen jokes were put into the lines. And I'm def planning to watch it again sometime next week<3

[santoschristos]

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” — William Blake

“Imaginative knowledge is immediate knowledge, like a tree or a rose or a waterfall, or sun or stars. … The great French scholar Henri Corbin, basing his definition on the Sufi writers, especially on the work of In ‘Arabi, has coined the term “imaginal” to describe that order of reality proper to the imagination, since the word “imaginary” is in popular usage understood as something unreal. The word imaginal is the equivalent of the alam al-mithal of the Persian philosophers of the imagination, described by Corbin as that region of the mind where meaning takes on form and, by the same agency, forms take on meaning. The imagination is understood by the Romantic poets as nothing less than the fundamental ground of knowledge.“ – Kathleen Raine, W.B. Yeats and the Learning of Imagination.

Image: William Blake, David Delivered out of Many Waters, c.1805

[adidegmez]

deadpool & wolverine spoilers

this movie is amazing. it was just amazing. this movie was truly a perfect gift for fans(including me).

I waited too long for this. The first scene was perfect, again. i love deadpool and wolverine. and cameos… wow i knew some of them but some of them I never expected. and the names they mentioned: daredevil, punisher, magneto…

thor holding deadpool, is hemsworth really back? It looked different than in the old movies.

i knew Laura and most of the mutants, i heard rumors about elektra but i was shocked when i saw happy, johnny, blade and gambit. But Chris Evans surprised me the most. i really loved the cameos. when i saw them i didnt think we would see them this much. im glad we did.

in happy's room i saw tony's Picture with peter and the Iron Man helmet was in front of Peter. This didn't leave my mind until the break.

ladypool is blake lively. but we didnt see her face. I'm a little disappointed.

nicepool was nice. dogpool is cute. we saw lots of deadpool variant and the fight was amazing. they all love peter.

all fight scenes were perfect. deadpool vs wolverine twice wow i need more of that.

Henry cavill!!!!!!

wolverine vs hulk!!!

i didnt know much about cassandra nova but according to the comic stories I heard online, she wasn't such a bad guy. she even let deadpool and wolverine live. Paradox screwed everything up. What were the people at TVA doing while Paradox was doing so much? They just came in the end. At least they let deadpool and wolverine be happy.

When I came out of the movie I was in shock. It took me a while to get over it and now I want to watch the movie over and over again.

deadpool and wolverine's chemistry is awesome.

story was awesome, characters action scenes everything is amazing. I don't know my current ranking right now, but I can probably put this movie in the top five of my favorite Marvel movies.

It was really nice that they included scenes from the Fox universe in the ending. I think Deadpool edited the Johnny scene in the after-credits, I think Johnny didn't say that much.

It was great to see Deadpool and Wolverine holding hands, saving the timeline together, caring about each other, and sacrificing themselves for each other. It was great to have everyone he loves next to Deadpool in the last scene, including Logan and Laura. Are Elektra Blade and Gambit dead? I want to think about what they are still experiencing. The fight at Cassandra's place was also amazing.

music was amazing especially the first fight scene and dp and logan holding hands and saving the timeline.

is cassandra dead? i think she might return.

[dragon-swords-prophecies]

1, 5, 28, 50 for the super detailed questions!

- @akindofmagictoo

HELLO thank you for the questions!!! I shall do these for James.

1. What’s their full name? Why was that chosen? Does it mean anything?

James Henry Blakely! James Henry was picked because I really like both those names, especially together. I have absolutely no idea why I picked Blakely or how I came up with it, but I really like how it sounds, both on it's own and all together.

5. Do they have any siblings? What’s their names? What is their relationship with them? Has their relationship changed since they were kids to adults?

He has two sisters, one older and one younger! The younger one is Peggy. She's a con artist and regularly commits mail fraud using the pigeon telegraph service. His older sister is Henrietta! She's a nurse, she was an army nurse during WWII but she now works at the hospital where Leo ends up after the whole murder attempt thing. They've stayed fairly close their entire lives, and even though they don't live together anymore and Peggy is technically on the run, they still talk to each other when they can.

28. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?

His worst fear is loosing his friends and the people he cares about (James' entire life would be improved if he had anxiety medication). This goes Real Well when his boyfriend almost gets fucking murdered. When he's scared he gets clingy, but he'll also start withdrawing. He needs permission to be clingy, almost, its a whole thing. Once he has that permission, though, once he has people he knows he's allowed to be scared around, he likes being able to hold people's hands or lean on them when he's scared, to remind himself that they're there and he's not going to loose them out of nowhere.

50. If they could only take one bag of stuff somewhere with them: what would they pack? What do they consider their essentials?

James is really hard to do this question for. He's got a book Leo gave him that he would take, and a photo of Leo and then a photo of his sisters & his family, but other than that I'm not sure. There definitely is stuff, but I don't know what.

[audikatia]

10, 13, and 17 for the end of year book asks. 💕

Thanks, Kellie!!!! ❤️

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

Henry Henry by Allen Britton

I don't know if I would recommend this overall to everyone because it is definitely a very Specific Sort Of Book, but god. A modern, queer retelling of the Henriad? I didn't know I needed this. This killed me, this revitalized me. I cannot stop thinking about it and I read it months ago. This is going to stay with me forever. Most of the books I read, I get from the library because I do not have the money or space in my apartment for all the books I read, but this... this I had to get a copy of it. I need to analyze it, I need to memorize it.

I knew the broad strokes of how it would go because, well, the Henriad has been around for hundreds of years. But the way it went? The liberations it took? It was exactly what I want from a tragedy where I can see the ending and I know the ending and I want so badly for the characters to break out of the Tragedy, but they never can. Beautifully executed.

13. What were your least favorite books of the year?

This is going to get long and ranty, sorry lol

Honestly, it was a year with a lot of low-rated books for me. It was not a good reading year overall, which is a shame. I have organized my lowest rated books into sub-categories because my complaints tend to be the same by genre.

Queer romances

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake (horrendous, I will never read anything by her again)

Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner (so aggravating, I am mad when I think about this book)

Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings (this made me want to not read sapphic fiction anymore, I was so fucking done)

If This Gets Out by Sophie Gonzales

Caught in a Bad Fauxmance by Elle Gonzalez Rose

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston (this made me realize I am so fucking done with Casey McQuiston as an author. I have hated all of their books except Red White and Royal Blue and I just need to call it quits. )

Time to Shine by Rachel Reid

Big Swiss by Jen Beggin (disappointing because this was so hyped up as a Genuinely Well Written book and the writing mostly was good, but the characters and execution just fell apart)

I don't careeeeeeee I just don't fucking careeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee atttttt allllllllllllllll. To be fair, I am not a big romance fan in general, but I do tend to like queer romance most of the time since there is like a genuine hurdle for why people can't be together rather than just bad miscommunication. But these just fucking sucked (in my own opinion, other people might have loved them and that's totally fine). A lot of the authors (I'm looking at you especially, Ashley Herring Blake) had some of the most tone-deaf ways of writing about characters of color or nonbinary characters, specifically writing afab nonbinary characters as though they were women and ignoring that amab nonbinary people exist. Totally tone deaf while also including so much virtue signaling I felt like I was watching fucking Dora the Explorer remind the audience that stealing is bad. The neurodivergent rep was just fucking horrible. I'm sorry, it was. Also, bad writing (minus Big Swiss, that was genuinely good writing), bad plots, bad characters, etc. Some of these characters are like 30+ years old and acting like entitled 12 year old brats. It was painful to read.

Also, Meryl Wilsner, girl, wtf. Watch TikToks about ADHD is not "medical research," jfc. And the word "queer" is not fucking linked with TERF-rhetoric. Are you fucking kidding me?

Thrillers/Mysteries

The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger

The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian (this should have been like 200 pages less and then maybe it would have been great)

The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson (this was baffling how bad it was. I like other books by this author. She's normally really good at plotting out a story that is a shakily plausible but mostly acceptable within the framework of mystery conventions, but this?? Wtf happened?)

Home is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell (I read this expecting it to be trash and was still surprised by how bad it was)

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin (This book could have been a tweet)

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead by Jenny Hollander (compelling premise, stupid as fuck execution)

The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon

Ughhhhhhhh noooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I love thrillers, but these didn't make sense? They just went for vibes and no actual substance. The plots were terrible, the twists were done only to have twists rather than to serve an actual purpose. Some of them had random 10 year time skips that were mentioned in a single sentence and it was so off putting? So many of them felt like the author copy/pasted twitter threads about social commentary into the book and made it monologues. It was terrible. None of these were compelling, none of these made me give a shit about the events unfolding. Just bland and unimaginative the whole way through, even if the premise itself sounded promising.

Contemporary Literary Fiction

Piglet by Lottie Hazel (I read a few books about EDs this year, but this had nothing else to really offer except Commentary. Actually, I think the issue was that it wasn't written like a real ED? It was written like ED as a metaphor, which just sucked. Although, admittedly, the food was described beautifully. I liked her writing style and will probably read more by her, but this plot and this MC did not work for me)

Mercury by Amy Jo Burns

Overall, I hate the term "chick lit" and find it to be extremely derogatory. But damn. These books were not making a good case for why that's a bad term. These books really were just "wow, women have it rough and we should be poetic about it" without any additional substance.

Superhero Genre

Breaking the Dark by Lisa Jewell

I understand that they wanted a big name in the mystery/thriller genre to write this Jessica Jones novel, but I wish they had gotten someone who was actually familiar with the source material or at least willing to research it before writing.

I like Jewell's books and writing style, so this wasn't a bad novel on its own. But it was a horrible depiction of Jessica Jones's character and ultimately a bummer of a read. Jewell basically ignored every aspect of Jones's personality and also didn't seem to feel like writing about any of her powers, so she just... ignored them? Ignored their entire existence? And she also just sort of passed over Jessica Jones's entire history about her family being killed and being held hostage and repeatedly raped for over a year. Like, I get that Jewell didn't really want to write about the ramifications of all that, but then don't write a book with a main character who went through all of that. I don't know what to tell you.

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson (I knew this was going to rip my heart out for personal reasons, but I also think it would have destroyed me even if I wasn't as emotionally connected to the plot.)

My Murder by Katie Williams (Amazing premise with fantastic follow-through)

The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul by Eleanor Herman (I like non-fiction, but I am always pleasantly surprised when the author manages to present it almost conversationally. This was in-depth without being condescending or overinflated and was genuinely fun to read)

Emma Southon's books (Basically the same comment as above. I expected something a little dry but educational, but I got educational and very cheeky!)

Bless anyone who actually read any of that lol