#hes. hes really complicated. and he hides all this behind this silly persona he has you know

[glaiveprime]

14!

14) Who's a character your OC cannot stand! It's on sight when they see them!

so originally i was just gonna say it was ballas or something, but i thought about it a little more, it would. actually be his operator self

he hates that opfrey is doing so much better than him in so many ways. frey kind of suffers chronically from the typical traumatized adult pit trap that is feeling like you never matured past 16, this isn't even just void bullshit, this is fully just. frey feeling like he never grew up, despite the fact that he's physically 24 now

(read more because its getting long lol)

that combined with the fact that his 16 y/o self is quite literally still just walking around, living a better and healthier life. it pisses him off to no end, and he knows he's being unreasonable

so much of frey's complexes and uphangings have already been gotten past by opfrey. he has spent so much more time outside in the real world w/ other people.

hes had so many more guiding figures in his life to guide him and teach him that despite everything, he can allow himself to rely on people, he can allow himself to be loved and he can trust them. that he doesnt have to hiss and bite at every chance of help, he doesnt have to be survive anymore like what he had to do on the zariman, he can just live

and then theres. frey. who doesn't have any of that. as a result he sees the lotus/natah's and ordis's affection towards him as pity hand-outs, that the affection only exists because he looks/reminds them of opfrey, not actually because they see him for who he is

because well. he is opfrey. its complicated but he is, but he isnt that same, he isnt the same rough teenager they loved for so many years, hes some messy grown-up that feels like hes walking in the skin of a kid whose far more perfect than him

even when opfrey tries to reach out to him, because he's just. more emotionally mature than frey at this point. but frey just sees any and all attempts from opfrey to help as pity or some sort of cruel joke. he hates it when people's eyes gets like that whenever they look at him. especially when its from himself

frey really fucking hates it when he gets bitter like this, because it truly feels like hes retreating back to his old methods he had to use to survive back on the zariman without a deal from the indifference to protect him. he knows he's repeating a pattern of violence that had made him like this to begin with, but he cant help it.

and this is made all the worst because his brain keeps telling him to just put it behind him. be the bigger person. just be happy! and it'll all go away! but he knows that isn't the case, but what choice does he have? this is the only way his fucked up brain would allow him to act, so the next day it all repeats

he just feels so incredibly frustrated and bitter at everything that opfrey is, because that could've been him instead.

so anyways hes probably really happy about getting to leave sol for a bit to go hang out in 99, sexy man aside

[actualhumantrashcan]

I can understand a silly workplace comedy about pirates not being everyone’s jam but I really can’t understand the amount of queer people I see hating on ofmd.

like for one thing most of the debates turn into gatekeeping queerness (which I think has a lot more to do with the ages of the main couples than actual concerns about authentic representation but that’s another post) and the rest are just hateful because it doesn’t directly name or label it’s queer characters but like why do we need that at this point?? listen I love heartstopper with all my heart but it is exhausting to watch them explain queer identities sometimes (even though I do think it’s super useful for younger audiences I’m just not the target demographic!) and ofmd is an explicit, violent, adult show that doesn’t NEED to explain it’s character’s identities.

queer people past their 30’s are usually very well aware of their queerness and have had (hopefully) plenty of time to go through the arc of discovering that. so why would we need to see Stede or Lucius or Ed going through turmoil because they’re attracted to men when they have already come to terms with that at this point in their lives?? i for one find it so fucking refreshing to watch a show where the characters being queer is not their main arc, they just ARE queer and life is still happening to and around them. maybe that’s just the millennial gay in me talking, but it gets emotionally exhaustive to watch show after show where the queer character’s arc is overcoming homophobia. yes obviously homophobia still exists and yes obviously if ofmd was trying to be historically accurate these characters would be living in a very dangerous time to be queer but it isn’t trying to be accurate!! it’s trying to be fun and diverse and kind!!

and also, they aren’t pretending homophobia doesn’t exist!! it’s just addressed in a different way. Stede was emotionally abused by his father for his entire life for being “soft” and then was chased down by his homophobic childhood bullies, one of which explicitly told him that he “defiled” the great pirate Blackbeard by simply falling in love with the man behind that name. Meanwhile Ed was forced into the world of piracy at a young age and developed the entire persona of Blackbeard (who fits the toxic, violent masculine stereotype of the time) to hide the fact that he’s actually an incredibly sensitive and deeply queer man! and is told multiple times by male figures in his life that sex with other men is fine but it is absolutely unacceptable to be in love with a man. both of their arcs contain homophobic rhetoric that is still present in society today, but its never presented as a problem that they have to wrestle with. they don’t have to come to terms with what it means to love each other, they just have to overcome some trials that go along with the complicated lives they both lead as a pirate and former aristocrat. the homophobia in ofmd is woven into the backstory of each and every character, it shapes them into the people they are at the beginning of the show when all of their walls are up and they are performing the “pirate” roles they are supposed to play. and then we get to see them grow and realize that they are in a safe space, part of a community not just on the ship itself but in the life of piracy (which in the show is pretty much explicitly an allegory for queer lifestyles.)

anyway, I could rant about this all day but just truly why do we have to tear people down for enjoying something? why do we have to find reasons to hate something so obviously created with sensitivity to it’s queer audience and with so much queer joy? if historically inaccurate gay pirates going on silly adventures and falling in love are not your thing, fine! but perhaps just let people enjoy things and find your own things to enjoy.

[clandestinegardenias]

Pete: Front Stage and Back Stage

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, but Ep 13 really drove it home for me so I’m back on my social theory meta bullshit bandwagon! JOIN ME. 

Today’s theorist is Erving Goffman, who did work in the realm of social psychology; basically how individuals interact with society and social groups. 

[Special Skills: Accidentally invented postmodernism?]

One of his big theories was dramaturgy, aka the idea that individuals have social ‘personas’ that they act out in everyday life. These performances are intended to convey a certain impression to a given audience. They allow us to manage how others see us. 

A big part of this is the concept of front stage/back stage. 

Front stage is the show that we put on for the audience; the intentional impression that we act out and work to provide. The audience, we are aware, is judging this performance and evaluating what kind of person we are. 

Back stage is the relaxed, core, true self. It’s the parts of ourselves that we hide, disguise, and choose not to show to an audience, thereby managing their impression of us. 

A classic example is customer service, where a helpful friendly persona is put on so that customers feel at ease and accommodated. The workers true feelings towards the customer are hidden in the backstage–the act may or may not be genuine, but the IMPRESSION is given that it is. 

The back stage normally comes out when the audience is not perceived as being present to judge an individual’s performance–but what happens if the audience never leaves? What happens, say, if you’re a bodyguard under literally constant surveillance or threat of surveillance? 

You might put on your front stage ‘mask’ all the time, to the extent that NO ONE gets to see your back stage. It might seem, even to yourself, that you don’t have one any more. You’re permanently in customer service mode. 

You have become the mask, the cardboard cut out version of you that you put in front of your true self. 

This really hit me with Pete when he’s breaking down in Ep 13 after Vegas threatens him. 

His assertion that he “has no feelings” and even no humanity…

( Image @vegastheerapanyakul )

…is quickly replaced by an equally strong pleading statement to Vegas that he’s human and has feelings.

(Image @liyazaki​ )

So why the quick turnabout?

My front stage/back stage take is that Pete’s initial statement that he has no feelings and no humanity is all about the front stage that Pete has constructed. 

Everyone around Pete (us as the audience included) sees him as relatively one-dimensional for the first ¾ of the season. Pete is friendly, happy, silly, maybe a bit naive, and he lacks depth. 

However in the arc with Vegas we learn that this is all a show–Pete has trauma, and soul-deep sadness, and complicated emotions. He’s a fully realized person, but no one ever sees that Pete; he never SHOWS that to anyone (except perhaps Porsche in little doses?). 

I think that when Pete says he has no feelings/humanity, he’s referring to the act, the mask, the cardboard cutout version of Pete that is so firmly in place at all times that Pete is afraid that’s who he has BECOME–so afraid he’s ready to die rather than go back to that.

And Vegas threatening him, going back to their earlier dynamic, is shoving Pete back behind that mask. Denying that Vegas has SEEN Pete’s back stage and should KNOW that Pete is more than he first appears.

Pete’s asserting that he DOES have feelings and is human is a reclamation of the fact that he has a back stage, he has depth and complexity and trauma and darkness, and finally, FINALLY someone (Vegas) has seen all of it. 

Pete is begging, pleading with Vegas to confirm that–you see me, right? You see that I’m a full, true, complex person. I’m not just your pet, your cardboard cut out version of me. 

Don’t make me go back behind the mask–I half believe that’s all I am myself, don’t you believe it too. Not after you’ve seen otherwise, and reminded me to see it too.

(tagging fellow KP social theorist @yeetlegay​ and my muse @stormyoceans​)

[aggressive-positivity-network]

Do you have any autistic Scout headcanons? :P

Hell yeah!

I’ve actually thought about this a lot. A lot of people might think that Scout has ADHD, but I think he either has both ADHD and autism or just autism.

This is both because labeling Scout as having just ADHD is kind of a low-hanging fruit, and I also want to explore his symptoms a little more. So, in a word, I do, and thank you for asking about them!

*****************

Scout’s Spectrum:

So, where exactly does Scout fall on the autism spectrum?

First of all, he probably has both ADHD and autism, but wasn’t diagnosed with the latter until much later. This means that some of his symptoms were taken into account, but not all.

The ones that were paid attention to ramped up out of control, and the ones he didn’t hear about were stuffed away.

His ADHD symptoms include impulsiveness, need for stimulation, hyperfixations, forgetfulness, and insomnia; his autism symptoms include trouble with social skills, stimming, near inability to remember names and faces, lack of eye contact, hyperfixations again, and sensory processing issues, especially with noise and touch.

He used to have a lot of meltdowns when he was younger, usually about wearing new clothes and the amount of noise his eight brothers generated.

However, he was teased and pushed into masking nearly all the time, and made his whole personality about his ADHD, since that was what everyone accepted.

As he got older, he usually wrote off any autistic tendencies as either his ADHD or just “little habits” of his.

During his middle school years, he used energy drinks to bounce back from being exhausted every day after school. This would work, except those energy drinks would upset his ADHD, and would make it much harder to focus on even basic conversation.

After a while, he got such bad grades and had such a hard time making friends that Scout just stopped going to school altogether.

Baseball helped his focus, and the quick movement and thinking made a lot of sense to him. He never had to wait very long for the next development, and the instant gratification and community it provided supplemented what he never got at school.

With sports on his side, he rarely ever drank any energy drinks (the coach would never let them on the field), and he drank bucketfuls of water during every meet and game. Those teenage years were probably the healthiest he ever was.

However, with the amount of rumbles he got into with his brothers, and the turf wars that constantly raged in those neighborhoods, it was only a matter of time before his crime caught up with him.

After his first incarceration, he was booted from the team, which led to a downward spiral of unhealthy coping mechanisms - which included fighting someone tooth and nail whenever he could.

Even if he lost the fight, it not only catered to his impulsive nature and impatience, but also gave him roughly the same sense of friendship and camaraderie that baseball had.

One thing led to another, and by the time Mann Co. found him, Scout was a monster in hand to hand (and bat to bat) and had racked up quite the criminal record.

A perfect mercenary, ripe for the picking.

On The Team:

Scout very quickly adopted the “stupid, scrappy Boston boy” persona.

It was the only thing that made sense, and it kept him from having to try too hard in both the battlefield and socially.

Besides, that meant that he could be as silly, forgetful, and fidgety as he wanted, and no one would bat an eye.

And if he ever needed to take a break from the team, he figured everyone would appreciate the quiet.

The only thing that ever gave him away was him occasionally dissociating right when battle began, especially if the day had been stressful.

It was usually how he calmed down after a fight when he was young, but now he sometimes slid into that state when he was overwhelmed.

However, a yell from one of his teammates would usually snap him out of it.

Medic noticed this pretty early on, and wanted to look more into it, but Scout would keep making excuses not to get a mental examination.

He would blame it on zoning out, being tired, drinking too many Bonks - whatever it took for people to stop asking.

And, eventually, they did.

Even Medic stopped asking after a while - he couldn’t get a thing out of Scout.

This “try so little that when you do try it’s above average” charade worked for a long time. In fact, it went on for so long that Scout forgot how much he was actually capable of.

He began to internalize the stupidity, the exacerbation, the many comments on how dumb he was, everything.

The only time he ever gave his all was on the battlefield - moving fast, memorizing strategies, doing complicated footwork, knowing exactly how much force it took to crush someone’s skull with his bat.

That was one of the only things that he felt good doing, the only thing he could really work on without him being “found out.”

That and drawing, though he never showed the actual pieces to anyone. It was all stick figures and crooked lines with everyone else.

Sometimes, though, Scout wouldn’t be paying attention and he’d let something slip.

One time, Engineer was looking for his screwdriver, and couldn’t seem to find it anywhere.

Scout, not looking up from his comic, said, ��Under the couch cushion, hard hat.”

Engineer bent down and reached into the couch, and his hand came back with his red and yellow striped screwdriver.

“Well I’ll be damned…”

At first Engineer thought Scout had just hid it, but Scout explained, still not paying attention:

“Last time we went out on th’ field, you had it on your belt, like always. But I was walkin’ by your workshop, you were usin’ a quarter to tighten a screw or somethin’. Your screwdriver had to be somewhere between the battlefield and your workshop. Engie, you’re like freakin’ clockwork. Every day, after a fight, you go to the kitchen, get a water, go to that couch, between the second and third cushion from the left, and sit there. Then ya go back to the fridge to get lunch and a beer, and ya go to your workshop until somebody needs you for somethin’. Your back loop in your tool belt is looser than all the others, ‘cause the screwdriver pulls against it when you sit down. The shank was probably in between the two cushions, and when you got up, it fell in. Demo, Pyro, and Heavy all sit on the second or third cushion at some point, so it got shimmied down. And since that’s the only time you sat down, ‘cause you woulda heard it if it dropped on the floor, and I…uh…”

“I’ll be damned,” Engie repeated, and felt the back tool belt loop. It was indeed loose.

Scout finally looked up, and realized what had happened.

“Uh, uh - l-lucky guess, huh Engie?”

Engineer squinted behind his goggles. “Yeah…real lucky…”

What ensued was Engie trying to get Scout to turn into a B.L.U Spy by chasing him around with his wrench. After a few good hits, though, Engineer saw that it was the teammate he knew and loved.

“But…how didja…?”

Scout threw his hand up, the other rubbing the back of his head where he’d been hit.

“I toldja Engie! Lucky guess! Jesus!”

Ever since then, Scout chose his words more carefully.

The Breakdown:

But, unfortunately, Scout could not pretend forever.

There was one week where Scout’s assignment count was so high that, if he wasn’t in a fight, he was on a mission.

Usually, Pauling wouldn’t trust him with so much, but no one else was available - or willing - to do the jobs.

Even when she was getting concerned about the amount of hours Scout was putting in, he blew it off.

“It’s no sweat, Miss Pauling! Their practically givin’ me the pay day. Those yahoos don’t know who they’re messin’ with.”

Over time, though, Scout had a harder and harder time staying focused and alert.

He’d sleep through alarms, stare off into space, zone out completely during briefing (not that he didn’t already do that), have a hard time hearing people in battle - even through his headset - ignore Spy’s taunts, and even forget to bring his bat onto the field.

Nothing seemed to help - Bonk!, warming up, stretching, cold showers, setting reminders, nothing.

And the team was starting to notice.

At first it was with the regular frustration - maybe Scout was just being lazy.

But as time went on, and his condition grew worse, their scorn turned into worry. They implored Medic to do something, but he had no way of getting through to Scout.

The doctor wasn’t above simply sedating him and dragging him into his lab for a check-up. However, he had a feeling that this was more than a physical issue.

The worst came when Scout was doing a routine battle with the B.L.U team on the field.

Everything had started out okay - he even remembered to bring his bad this time - but suddenly, everything was ear-splittingly loud.

He couldn’t focus on more than one sound at once, much less communicate the best course of action to his teammates.

He ended up hiding in a dilapidated shed, in a dusty, dark corner, somewhere between zoning out and panicking.

Scout’s head was in his knees, he was shaking, close to crying, when a sudden splitting of wood roused him.

A B.L.U Soldier had kicked his way into the shed, either having heard Scout or to hide from the other team.

Scout was stunned at first, but something of a blind terror filled him. He picked up his bat, screamed, and started pummeling the surprised Soldier.

At some point, he threw aside his bat and began to swing punch after punch, just like he did in his gang days when he had felt overwhelmed. Still screaming. Still crying.

By the time Scout had dissolved into a rocking, sobbing mess, the Soldier was long dead, with a gigantic pool of blood staining Scout’s shoes.

No one even knew where Scout was until a few hours later, when Spy heard a faint note of “Sexbomb” coming from Scout’s Walkman.

Scout had crawled into the shed’s framework, between the outer and inner wall, and was playing a specific verse over and over and over again, looking like he was on another plane of existence.

Spy immediately called for Medic, who had to lift Scout out by the underarms through a jagged hole in the side of the building. By then, the fight was over, so they could take him directly to the lab.

Medic’s Evaluation:

“I’m guessing zhis is your first mental breakdown?”

“Mental…doc, I ain’t crazy. Wait, you’re not goin’ to put me in a straight jacket, are ya?”

“If you’re not doing anyzhing later.”

Medic started to laugh, but quickly realized this might not be the time.

“No, Scout, everyvun has a mental breakdown at least vunce in their lives. It’s a…how do you say…a vake-up call of sorts. Vhen your body has no other options left.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“For zhe past few months, you health, both physical and mental, has been deteriorating. You eat less. You talk less. Your attacks are lackluster. You have bags under your eyes. You flinch vhen somevun yells for you. You stare off into space. Your routine, vhich usually has at least some changes, has become stringent, as if you can’t possibly expend any more energy into extra activities. You have avoided Demoman on zhe battlefield, even though you usually use him for cover.”

Medic flipped through his notes.

“I have pages and pages of your decline. However, as a scientist, I believe it is caused by zhe same source. And, though I usually respect my patient’s right to privacy vhen it comes to these sorts of matters, I believe you’ve been keeping something from me. Something that I should know as your general practitioner…your doctor.”

Scout shrugged, already shutting out the conversation.

Medic sighed.

“Maybe I tried to talk to you about zhis too soon. After all, you’ve just had a very sudden and exhausting episode. But…perhaps…”

Medic took a sheet of printer paper from his clipboard and a spare pen from his pocket.

“…zhere is an alternative.”

Scout was still unresponsive, but Medic continued.

“Zhere is a patient in my vaiting room vis a metal pole through the chest. It vill take me at least an hour to properly remove it, and a few minutes more to heal zhe area. Vhile I do zhat, vhy don’t you draw how you feel?”

Medic smiled.

“I know how much it grounds you.”

It wasn’t until Medic left that Scout actually picked up the pen, but he began drawing immediately.

For the first time in a while, he wasn’t trying to hide his strokes or scratch up the cleaner lines. No more stick figures. No more pretending.

Five minutes later, he was fully engrossed.

Medic started to walk in at one point, but, seeing how relaxed Scout was, decided to give him a few more minutes.

He deserved it.

[cafedanslanuit]

Sure! I loved writing these, hope you like them <3 Also, here’s the Dabi + Shigaraki relationship headcanons SFW & NSFW

|| SFW ||

Keigo would want your relationship to stay hidden from the media and the Hero Public Safety Commission. They have access to almost everything he is, does and owns, so he rather keep them away from you. He wouldn’t want them interfering with something he really cares about.

Your relationship with him grew organically, there was no formal question asked. You had kept bumping into each other at random places, so after thinking you were very attractive, he asked for your number. You thought it was a joke because why would the Numer Two Hero actually give you his real number, but hey, that same night he texted you. Months after him stopping by your place to eat take out and chat about everything and nothing, he kissed you.

You did your best not to interpret his kiss as anything more than that but a couple of weeks of kissing later, he referred to you as “his girl” once he was teasing you through text and you just knew.

His favourite kind of dates is sitting on your living room floor and eating take-out (preferably something with chicken). You chat until it’s past midnight and then go to sleep or watch a movie until both of you do.

Keigo’s favourite sleeping position is him on top of you, resting his head between your neck and chest. He loves when you fall asleep caressing his wings. He also likes sleeping on his side, but his arm always ends up in a strange position when he tries to spoon you.

He loves making playlists. He has a playlist for almost every occasion. Once, you were sitting down on the floor after having dinner and he suddenly asked you to dance. You expected some silly music, probably the one you would hear at a nightclub, especially when he turned the lights off, the only light coming from the moon peeking through your open window. You were pleasantly surprised when he pressed play and took you in his arms, slow-dancing to probably the corniest but also most beautiful playlist you’ve ever heard. Your love for him only grew when, after a bunch of songs, you took his phone to pause it and realized Keigo named the playlist after you.

Has a habit of sending one of his red feathers flying through the sky until it reaches your always open living room window. It’s a reminder he’s thinking about you even if he’s not around and you always smile whenever you find one of those.

While on public he’s always smiling, agreeing to selfies and signing autographs, his social battery tends to drain out when he’s at your place. Sometimes he wants to be with you, but he doesn’t really want to talk. He’ll just watch TV on the couch or take a nap on your bed. You’re more than welcome to join him, though, but please don’t talk. He just needs to feel you there without the need of having to fill the silence with words.

It’s very important you understand both of his sides. It’s not that his Hawks persona is entirely fake, he really likes making cheeky comments and teasing you until your whole face is burning. But he also lives a very complicated life, not only as a hero but also because of the way he was raised, to serve the Hero Public Safety Commission and do what he’s told to do. Behind his TV smiles, there’s a kid who lost his childhood and one of the things he loves about you is that, with the small amount of information he’s managed to tell you so far, you’ve understood the depth of his character and learnt when to give him space and when to cuddle him with a big grin.

Keigo’s philosophy is always oriented to the greater good, so he has a problem with putting himself first. His choices will always go to which one will bring peace to the world in the most immediate manner. That’s one of his main issues when you two start dating. You’ve taught him that is okay to choose himself from time to time, but it’s difficult to change what he’s been taught at such a young age. This will lead to him missing dates or taking on missions he doesn’t really want to do just because the Hero Public Safety Council tells him to do so.

One of your favourite bird-like characteristics of him is the fact that Keigo likes to collect little items from each one of his favourite dates with you. He has a drawer filled with folded-up receipts, a couple of taps of soda bottles, the extra disposable chopsticks the restaurant had accidentally sent you the first night you ate together at your place, a pen from the hotel where you two had spent a night under fake names with the help of a wig and the tape you used to hide Hawks wings under a trenchcoat. You sometimes wonder if your missing earrings are there as well.

Your least favourite one is the fact he’s always up at ungodly hours of the morning, no matter which time he went to bed. He’s learnt to stay on the bed until you wake up, though. Sometimes, he will wake you up with a trail of kisses from your neck to your shoulder. Other times, he will find a more creative way...

|| NSFW ||

Yes, you guessed it. There have been times where you have woken up, feeling Keigo’s erection grazing the back of your thighs. When you do, you tend to turn around and kiss him, but sometimes you decide to play with him a little. You will play-pretend to be asleep, trying to cover your smile when Keigo, quickly catching on, jokingly laments you’re still asleep. “Aw, I wanted to play with my baby bird” he will say, softly playing with your nipples and leaving small kisses on your shoulder. “Too bad she’s still asleep. Maybe… there’s a way I can wake her up…” he says, as he slowly pushes himself inside your already wet core.

Keigo only has to modes: animalistic, rough sex or quiet, caring sex. There are times he’s going to take you on all fours, his fist grabbing your hair from behind and other times he will lay between your thighs, grunting against your neck, his hands settled on your waist as you circle his hips with your legs.

There are a lot of fun times, though. Sometimes you’re riding him while he’s sitting on the edge of the bed and one bad movement bends his cock. You both groan at the pain as you quickly remove yourself, but end up laughing so much it takes a while before you can resume your previous activity. He also never lets you forget the time you accidentally fell off the bed while he was taking you sideways and thrusted particularly hard.

One of his favourite things to do is sitting you on the kitchen counter, kneeling between your thighs and eating you out. He loves leaving you hanging, stopping just before you’re about to come and have you beg him to bring his mouth back on you.

Keigo also really likes overstimulating you. Once he lets you come, he’ll keep his mouth on your folds, wanting to see how many times he can make you come.

He’s all up for pleasing you. He really liked when you comfortable enough with him to tell him what kinks you wanted to try out. You set out a whole night for exploring. It started with spanking and somehow it ended up with you dropping hot wax on his chest. Even if most of the things you tried out didn’t stick, it was probably the most intimate night you two had, laughing when you discovered the wax had stained your sheets and him accidentally swallowing the Halls candy he had on his mouth while eating you out.

I can see Keigo being really into role-playing. He especially enjoys situations where he’s in control and you’re more than happy to give it go him. You haven’t experimented too much into this, but he definitely loves face-fucking you, seeing the tears running down your cheeks.

One day, you were coming out of the shower and felt really confident in how you looked. Knowing you had a date with Keigo that night, you snapped a nude photo of yourself kneeling with your legs wide open on your bed in front of the mirror. You grinned to yourself when you got a text back: “fuuuuuuck. you’re a whole course meal, baby. can’t wait for tonight”. Your giddiness stopped when that night, as you opened the door for him, you saw a bruise on his forehead. Concerned, you asked him about it, only to laugh loudly when he explained he had crashed into a lamppost when he opened your message.

[3pirouette]

Fic: Move Forward From This (1/1)

Title: Move Forward From This By: TriplePirouette/3Pirouette Disclaimer: They're not mine. Distribution: AO3 Anyone else please ask first :)

Story Summary: Set Post-Age of Ultron, written in 2015. Wanda and Steve don’t sleep, and they’re both dealing with loss.

Chapter A/N: This has been written for a while, I don’t know why I never posted it. I think it’s great now that I’ve re-read it. Another fic posted thanks to the Tumblr WIP Title Game. Implied Steggy.

~*~

She doesn’t sleep. Not anymore. Not when it’s dark outside or light outside or even when she’s exhausted from training.

She’s an Avenger now, she has to be ready for anything, and that means at least trying to rest.

But when she closes her eyes, she sees it all. She sees the death, the destruction, the fear and evil and pain that was in their heads.

She comes to the lounge on the third floor west wing, the one that most people don’t go into during the day because the sun filters through the glass and turns the room to an oven despite the air conditioning, because the angle as the sun sets makes the walls look like they’re on fire. It was a consequence of the modern design, and most of the staff just avoided the room and wrote it off. She’d heard Stark mumbling about using it for storage one day as he passed.

She loved it. She could lay curled on her side on the couch, invisible to the rest of the base, and face the long windows, feel the warmth of the sun and feel alive, watch the sunset and feel like she was burning. She could hide here, and feel things she could hide her pain in.

Imagine that it was the sun that hurt her eyes- that’s why they were filled with tears.

When she’d been a child she had always scoffed at her teacher’s lessons about heroes, about their journey and the hardships. She’d watched newsreels and laughed at the idea at these people felt pain, that they had suffered like she had.

Now she knew they did- she knew their suffering intimately, it lived in her brain, sitting between every memory she had, pulling the images out every time she closed her eyes.

She had been so wrong, and it hurt to try to think that she could move forward from this.

All the bright, shiny jackets, thick rubber boots and training sessions in the world could help her put on a strong, brave face, but it would never change what had happened, it would never take away that image of her brother limp and lifeless in Clint’s arms.

She’d tried tonight, she’d tried harder than any other night to get her mind to slow, to calm, to forget and get some rest, but she’d only been able to sleep for two hours before she awoke screaming and tangled in the blankets.

She’d come back to the lounge, a mug of tea in her hands. Sam had suggested it- chamomile, he said, helped calm the nerves. She wasn’t sure if it was the tea, or the clear night sky beyond the windows, but after a while her breathing slowed.

She was contemplating the stars, searching for constellations that weren’t familiar to her when she saw his reflection in the glass before her.

Wanda saw him in the halls late at night often, but they simply passed one another like ghosts with little nods of the head and went their separate ways each time. Tonight, he wasn’t moving, but didn’t approach her, either.

Wanda closed her eyes and she saw the beautiful brunette. We can go home, Steve, she said in her mind, a light English accent floating over her spine and making her shiver.

“You’re not like them,” she said softly, her eyes still closed tis form in the glass, concentrating instead on feeling his presence behind her. “They were afraid of violence, of destruction. I reaching into their minds and pulled from them their nightmares.”

Steve’s footfalls were quiet as he rounded the small couch, sitting gently on the edge. “Is that what everyone saw? Their nightmares?”

It hadn’t been so long ago, really. A month. Thirty days, exactly in the morning since it had all happened. Far away and yet in the scheme of everything, so very close. She nodded. “Thor transcended his fear to a higher plane, though I’m not sure how. He feared bacchanalia without purpose- he feared the loss of purpose and responsibility. Tony- Tony saw the destruction of all that he loved at his hands. Natalia, she saw her past. And yet you- I would be happy to have that dream.”

A dark smile flitted over Steve’s face as he contemplated his hands, held in tight fists and resting over his knees. “It should tell you something that you tried to pull out a nightmare and you got that, shouldn’t it?”

“Who is she?” Wanda asked quietly, setting her tea don on the small coffee table in front of them.

Steve looked at Wanda, taking in her disheveled hair, her tired eyes, her hopeful look, and cleared his throat softly. “She… she was the girl I was gonna marry when the war was over.”

“Your fiancé?” Her voice was high and confused. He’d long since been used to her steady demeanor, tonight she reminded him just how young she was.

“Not quite.” He shrugged and leaned back. “We were in love, though.” He gazed out the windows, taking in each tree and twinkling star instead of looking at Wanda as he spoke. “It was complicated back then- like now, but different. It was a different time, a different war- but there was this expectation that we all had that one day it would be over. I owed her a dance, but we never got it- instead I…” He couldn’t finish, just let the words trail off as his chin hung to his chest.

“Your hell is the life you never got to live,” Wanda whispered, heavy with understanding.

“Every night,” he affirmed, rubbing his tired eyes roughly. “Sometimes it’s the dance, sometimes it’s a little house just outside of Brooklyn or in the English country side.”  He threw his hands down to his thighs, shaking his head to try to rattle the images free. “It’s not like we had specific plans or anything, it’s not like we ever even explicitly said- but-“

Wanda reached out, taking his hand in hers. It was something she rarely did- touching other people. It made the connections strong for her, too strong sometimes. He looked at their hands held close with wide eyes. “The loss of possibilities, yes? The loss of ‘what if’?”

He held her hand tightly, just s tightly as she held his. “Yes, exactly.”

“I never imagined my life without Pietro in it, not for one second, and yet now I am faced with his absence every day.” She let go of his hand and filled her grasp with her tea, cradling the mug close to her chest. She looked at him from the side of her gaze, the sadness wafting from him mingling with her own. “We will never be who we were, or who we thought we’d be then.”

“No,” he agreed without looking at her, “we won’t.”

She sipped the tea, surprised at how comfortable she felt, wallowing in the sadness, sharing it, letting it just exist rather than fighting it. She could almost label it contentment. Almost.

The idea, the image popped into her head before she could stop it, the mad being overtaken by the mask. She wondered if it came from him or her subconscious, but either way, it made her sick. Her stomach rolled and her breath quickened until she nearly screamed. “No!”

He jumped back, looking at her with wide eyes on edge. “Wanda-“

“We are not just soldiers, Steve.” She shook her head, her tea spilling as she forced it back on the table as she climbed to her knees, turning to him and grabbing his shoulders. “We are not going to disappear into these personas of nothingness. You are not just Captain America now, I’m not just the Scarlet Witch or whatever silly name Tony’s come up with for me. We’re not characters on a t-shirt or in a movie. We’re people. You’re Steve and I’m Wanda and we’ve lost things that are so dear to us we’ll never be the same!”

He gently pulled her hands from his shoulders, his eyes sad as he willed her to calm down. “It’s easier. It’s easier to just be a soldier.”

“She wouldn’t want that, you know she wouldn’t.”

He pulled his hands away like she was fire. The truth hurt him like a knife, she could feel the energy in the room change and she knew she’d taken it to far. For the first time in a month she’d felt a connection and she’d broken it. She jumped from the couch, knocking the coffee table and her tea over in her rush to get out of the room.

“Wanda!” He called to her, stopping her just as she got to the door. She held the jam tightly, her fingers turning white. She wouldn’t look at him, couldn’t.

The silence held fast, heavy and long to the point where she was ready to leave when he finally spoke again. “I know she wouldn’t.” He sighed. “This life wasn’t a part of any future I imagined for myself.”

She cocked her head, just enough to see the shadow of him in her peripheral vision. “A life without Pietro was not every anything I planned, either.” She let her forehead rest on the door jamb. “But when you lose enough, you stop making plans.”  She took a deep breath, her fingers picking at a tiny dent in the metal jamb. “Maybe… maybe we need to start trying again.”

Steve didn’t leave the couch, but she could see him moving, heard the sound of the table being up righted and the shards of ceramic mug being picked up. “I’ll…” he sighed, stopped, and started again. “I’ll bring the tea tomorrow night, how about that?”

Wanda couldn’t help the small smile that spread over her face. “Yes, I think that is a good plan for a start.” She didn’t turn back as she left, pulled all of her senses inward so she couldn’t feel him, and headed straight to her room. He couldn’t be her brother, but at least, she thought, Steve could be a friend. Wanda didn’t remember the last time she had called someone that, and the idea of having one was warm enough to lull her back into bed, a happy enough thought to get her another hour of sleep.

[queerchoicesblog]

Rooftop Talks (Platinum, F!Raleigh x MC)

Since I noticed so many fics starring M! Raleigh but none with F! Raleigh, here’s my attempt to fill that void. Inspired by the rooftop scene, this is my entry for the prompt “ honesty” of the @choicesjulychallenge hosted by @kinda-iconic !

In short, Raleigh and Rachel (Dorian, MC) grow closer as they make a habit of meeting on the abandoned building’s rooftop to avoid paparazzi and spend with each other. Then one night Rachel has a question for Raleigh...

Prompt: Honesty

Discalimer: mild use of bad words and hispano hablantes over here: I tried to incorporate some occasional Spanish in here - I wanted to incorporate that trait in Raleigh’s character- so please tell me if I messed something up with the language (I took Spanish classes ages ago) or in general and I’ll fix it!

Word Count: 2328

Perma Tag: @brightpinkpeppercorn @melodyofgraves @bhavf @abunchofbadchoices @silverhawkenzie @begging-for-kamilah @kennaxval @strangerofbraidwood @crazypeanat @desiree-0816 @universallypizzataco

F! Raleigh x MC Tag: @hellospunkiebrewster @furiouscloddonutpeanut

________________________

The night of the charity gala none of them would have expected it to happen again but Raleigh and Rachel made a habit to sneak away from the paparazzi and hide on the rooftop to catch some breath. They would chat and flirt, share takeaway food and views and suggestions about each other new songs. Some nights they would even bring their guitars and jam together: most of the times they would end up playing and singing their heart out silly hits of the past or campfire songs only to laugh till their cheeks hurt as if they were teens at a party their parents knew nothing about. Other nights they would be a soundboard for each other, especially Raleigh: she would listen to Rachel's ramblings and second-guessing herself and offer her advice: how to keep the tune on that note, a better rhyme, a few sick moves for her next video...even how to make the right impression during interviews, because Raleigh was a professional, not just her rebel stage persona, and she had been around journalists and paparazzi way more than the new sweet shining star. 

In return, Rachel would suggest new kinder strategies to deal with fame and fans or to call home every once in a while: even if she left when she was fifteen, she must have someone who missed her. The thought made Raleigh smile, but in a good way: it was almost painful to see how genuinely good the Dorian girl was.

"Are you homesick, Rachel?" she inquired to divert the question.

"Hm, not really, no...” she said, stirring her noodles as she considered her answer. "But I've lived with my parents longer than you did. I just wanted to break free and find a place of my own after I got my high school diploma. I mean, I love them but at a certain point in life, your roads need to part, so to speak, right? But you, it was different for you...that's why I asked. I hope I didn't overstep though"   Raleigh shrugged and took a bite of sesame chicken.

"I talked with dad a couple of weeks ago. It was his birthday, mom and the whole family squad set up a party for him. And just so you know, he hates parties. He's a good ol' grumpy fellow"

"Aw cool! I bet he's your number one fan even if maybe he doesn't show it much? I mean, your whole family should be your number one fan!"

"Nah, papi sticks and will always stick with the classics till the end of time and mamita y tìa were and still are -I guess- huge fans of Ricky Martin, el Rey del Pop Latino" Raleigh explained.

She didn't realize until the day after that she couldn't remember the last time she had talked about her family with someone. Everyone always asked her about future plans, career path, tips maybe, but private life? Never. Unless it meant asking out on dates, heavy flirting or scandalous gossips about a former lover. Only Rachel asked her about the life she had left behind in Puerto Rico and everybody had long lost interest in.

"You don't strike me as a fan of Ricky Martin" Dorian chuckled.

The R&B singer flashed her a wide grin.

"Not exactly, but thanks to them I can make quite a good impression of him. Wanna see it?"

"Is that even a question? Of course!"

Raleigh laughed and reached for her phone as the new star put down her empty food box and shifted to sit more comfortably. She scrolled down a YouTube playlist then her eyes met Rachel's again.

"You ready?"

As the young woman nodded she pressed play and ran her hand through her hair and produced her best puppy dog eyes, making Rachel laugh. She put down her phone and walked backward theatrically opening her arms.

Un, dos, tres Un pasito pa'lante María Un, dos, tres Un pasito pa' atrás

Then as the tune became more upbeat she produced herself in a complicated yet effortlessly fluid sequence of hands clapping, swirling and hips swaying. Latin Pop may have not been her favorite genre but damn, she owned the choreography just as she owned the stage during her shows.

Así es María Blanca como el día

She sang quickly stroking Rachel's cheek with one finger before spinning and turning away.

Pero es veneno si te quieres enamorar Así es María Tan caliente y fría Que si te la bebes de seguro te va a matar

After striking a dramatic pose, she winked just before bursting into laughter.

"Oh my God! That was everything, Raleigh!" Rachel enthusiastically applauded.

"Muchas gracias, nena" she said ruffling her hair and taking her seat beside her.

"Now I'm living to see a Ricky Martin and Raleigh Carrera duet"

Raleigh looked at her and snorted.

"I don't see it happening but paradoxically my team might love the idea so never say it out loud when they're around. Never!"

"A girl can dream, right?" Rachel shrugged and giggled.

All of a sudden way less bubbly considerations crossed her mind and she lost in her own train of thoughts. A girl can dream...she had repeated those few words in her head so many times lately. Every time Raleigh absentmindedly stroked her arms on a fake date, every time she caught her looking at her from afar, every time they kissed.

Then the night of the gala happened. When the two of them sneaked away and hopped on Raleigh's motorbike. She still remembered the cool breeze of the night caressing her skin as she held herself to her "girlfriend". That was a moment of rare perfection: the two of them finally alone and careless, the adrenaline of the ride, the warmth of "the R&B time bomb"'s body pressed against her. When they arrived on the rooftop and she admired the breathing view of New York skyline, her head almost started spinning, just like when Raleigh twirled her in her arms on the gala dance floor.

But what made her heart skip a beat was hearing Raleigh talking about that place, sharing memories of her past, when her teen self felt lost and lonely in the big city...and her project to turn the abandoned building into a community center for kids.

"You make me feel like I want to tell you things. I don't know why" Raleigh confessed that night.

That was when a familiar warmth settled into Rachel's chest. The same feeling she experienced when her high school crush caught her singing to herself in the auditorium and told her that she sounded like an angel and stopped to chat. She didn't ask her out before leaving - Rachel Dorian life had never been a romcom so far- but the little casual talk stole her younger self's breath away.

Rachel instinctively knew that Raleigh never shared that with anyone else. It was just her tone, the way she said it. And she couldn't remember a single interview or tweet mentioning it. So...Raleigh's walls were crumbling down? You don't share secrets, very private secrets with anyone!

Maybe I was just being paranoid as my usual...maybe I didn't misread the signs, she thought as Raleigh not only accepted but enthusiastically returned the kiss that followed. And took her to the railing, her lips never leaving hers or her neck.

But later...

Raleigh suddenly making a loud noise with her soda breaking her train of thoughts.

"Earth to Rachel"

Avery's protege turned to see her looking at her with a slightly amused grin on her face as she played with the straw.

"Sorry, I spaced out" Rachel smiled shyly, avoiding eye contact.

"No biggie. Just glad we're on the same planet again"

Rachel looked at her sideways: Raleigh was happily humming one of her latest songs. She seemed to be in a good mood, she always was in a good mood when she was on that rooftop. Or so Rachel could tell by what she saw over the past few weeks. Which lead her to summon up her courage and ask her a question that had been troubling her for a while.

"Why did you bring me here the night of the gala?"

Raleigh was probably caught off guard by that but concealed it well. She shrugged again and leaned down on the carpet, propping herself up on one elbow.

"I told you, I had to take a break from those stupid fraud activists and this is where I go to catch my breath. We were at the gala together so it made sense to ask you to join. Lie to me and tell me you don't like it here" she said, flashing her signature grin.

"Of course I do" Rachel gave a quick smile.

Maybe that's the problem. I like it here, when it's just the two of us, no one else in sight...probably I like it too much.

But this conversation was going nowhere. So she sighed and spoke again, hoping to find answers and hopefully reassurance:

"Our time is ticking out, right?"

When Raleigh looked up to her, the usual cheerfulness of Rachel had been replaced by what looked like...melancholy?

"What? It's barely midnight, the night is still young, Rachel!" she joked to clear the mood.

Then she gave another grin and reached to playfully bump the other girl's arm.

"I have a bad reputation in case you haven't noticed. You should know that I'm not the kind of girlfriend who respects nor gives a damn about curfews."

But Rachel didn't play along this time.

"That's not what I meant" she said as her eyes met Raleigh's again.

The Puerto Rican singer knew what she meant. The big issue that had been lingering between them for a while and that was written all over Rachel tired face. She felt a pang of pain at the thought of it and she decided to conceal it as she always did.

"Oh well who knows, Rachel? I haven't spoken to my PR manager about it on our last meeting"

But the other woman didn't seem satisfied with that brief explanation.

Raleigh grimaced and sat up. It actually hurt more than she thought. She reached for Rachel's hand.

"Hey, we both knew the deal. Start a fake relationship and get a career and reputation boost"

"It's all it is, huh?"

The Dorian girl looked at her with painful expectancy. Gosh, I knew this is what we would get out of this, Raleigh thought.

"Well, yes and no. I mean, I like you, Rachel, I'm glad we got closer. You're shockingly pleasant to have around, rising star. And you've been...well yeah so far you're the best fake girlfriend ever, seriously. I hope we will still be friends when this...you know..."

"Yeah, sure"

Rachel diverted her eyes as her chest tightened. She misread the signals, shit. She kept fantasizing and being oblivious of their current situation...but she couldn't blame Raleigh for it. That night, their first night on the rooftop, when the kisses grew hungry on the railing, the Puerto Rican star too soon parted and told her to follow her, she wanted to go on another ride on her bike. Rachel reached for her.

"We don't have to stop, you know..." she noted, gently stroking her hip.

"What? Too scared to admit you might be catching feelings?" she teased, since the other woman just stared at her in silence.

"Whoa, there. Let's not get crazy. I'm a seasoned professional" Raleigh interrupted her, walking backward.

What a stupid I am! What was I thinking? That she, Raleigh Carrera, might fall for me?, Rachel grimace, her face hidden from the R&B star's view. Your life is not a romcom, Dorian, and you have embarrassed yourself already. God, that night she might have...she totally thought I was taking advantage of the situation? Oh shit shit shit!

Her phone beeped. She picked it up as a deep blush spread on her face: Low battery warning.

"Rachel, are you okay?"

The girl didn't turn but she felt the weight of Raleigh's concerned gaze over her.

"Yeah, I'm good...I just-I just forgot that I have a meeting with Avery early tomorrow. Very early. Like dawn"

"Why so early?" Raleigh gave her a quizzical look.

"Oh it's Fiona's doing actually" she said as she stood in a swift motion and gathered up her belongings. "She just want to introduce us to some yoga routine or something like that. She said it stimulates creativity... the point is I gotta go. I'm sorry"

She gave a quick apologetic smile and moved towards the staircases.

"Oh, okay" Raleigh was visibly confused by the sudden change in her "girlfriend". "Do you want me to give yo-"

"No no, I know the way! I'll call a cab!"

Before she opened the metal door leading downstairs, Raleigh spoke again.

"You sure, you're okay though? Did I say something wrong? About the-"

Rachel stopped and slightly turned her head.

"No, of course not. It's just...my silly little head that keeps forgetting things. How things go. Buenas noches, Raleigh"

That said she speed up down the stairs and only the echo of the door resounded on the rooftop, "their place", before the other woman could say goodnight back.

Something doesn't add up, Raleigh thought, still struggling to make a sense of the last few minutes. What did I-

Then her eyes fell on the purple guitar she gave Rachel sitting not far from the wooden bench. Dorian jealously kept her ever since the first day they met. She wore it on every show, even in the music video they filmed together. She even caught her smiling down at it as she strummed a new melody. She really made her happy with her guitar: Rachel would never go anywhere without it, even the press noticed...and now it was there. Did she forget?

"Oh crap!" Raleigh sprinted to the staircases and opened the door, calling her name.

"Rachel hold on, your guitar! Rachel!"

But her words were welcomed by silence only.

[crimsonbluemoon]

Do you think vanoss and del are comfortable with themselves and thats why they joke with each other like "delirious if we make it out of here will you kiss me" fangirls can dream they are gay right haha

I’m answering this before a ‘real more’ because its a lot longer than I mean it to be. 

Haha I mean I can’t say for sure what they are or aren’t because there’s a lot of factors that kind of go into this. Despite us wanting it to be true, the boys personalities on their videos aren’t always 100% who they are in real life. Sometimes they play a character in order to fit the needs of the video or because that’s who they’ve established themselves to be. They hide a lot of who they are from the world. So if any of us think we know the real Vanoss or we know the real H2O Delirious, we’re kinda fooling ourselves. 

I love Delirious as much as I humanly think is possible, but I also recognize that he isn’t the crazy, silly, fumbling mess of a person in real life that he is when he makes a video. And Vanoss is nice, but like you know he hides parts of himself because he’s a youtube superstar and that means he can’t show everything (I feel Evan more so than anyone is aware of what he can and cannot do on the internet which is really actually very smart of him). So when people say (like me for example) they love the BBS boys, its more so their characters and their famous personas than who they are as people. Again, I’m sure who they are in real life are lovely people, but until you sit down and talk to someone for some time, you can’t claim to know them. That then becomes stalkery/weird. 

I mean, the one that pops out to me as being the most ‘real’ or the most ‘genuine to their real personality’ is Mini Ladd and look how many people don’t like him because of it? Mini doesn’t hide behind a character really; he says what he wants and he does what he wants and he doesn’t really care what anyone thinks. If he’s mad at something, he says it. If he wants to do something other than what everyone else is doing, he does. And a lot of people have pointed out all of his negative flaws and at times kind of shunned him for it. I’m not saying that the stuff that Mini has done is good or bad (cause I’ve had my moments of annoyance with him), but I’m saying its real. You can’t really show your whole personality like that if you wanna keep fans, which is sad. 

So when it comes to like, them saying sexualized stuff like that, I think that its more a comfort level with who their character is over who they are. Like Del’s kind of made comments about the possibility of him being gay/bi-sexual in videos and it’s hard to determine if this is a reflection of himself or a reflection of the character he’s built. And I mean Vanoss has just recently burst through the wall with sexual stuff (although some of that I’ve got my own thoughts about) in his videos and because that’s the character he’s crafted for the moment, hes comfortable with it. 

In conclusion, I think the boys recognize that sexual jokes or comments are kinda what their population of fans want, and they’re not really afraid to toe that line. But I don’t know if it 100% proves anything about their sexuality. I do have some exceptions to this statement that I’ve talked about before, such as if a Youtuber acts one way with everyone else but changes who they are with one other youtuber, but that’d be too complicated to get into atm. Just know what every rule has exceptions, but it doesnt take away from the actual rule set in place. 

Hope this answers your question?

[otomates-a]

For the muses that don't have the special voiced lines available.. What do you imagine they sound like?

Ah, yes, talking about my muse’s voices… my favorite activity…

This kind of goes hand in hand with the accent headcanon I answered a little bit ago, so I’ll link that here too, since I’ll restate some of it briefly for relevancy.

I don’t really have voice claims right now because that’s… a lot of effort, but maybe I’ll get around to that one day.

Under a read more because this one is LONG KJNHMKJHNM.

For the Voltage characters (currently) without V/C content,

↪ Prince Edward

Again, super 👏 SUPER 👏 thick French accent.

Very soft. Never raises his voice, even when angry or passionate. Typically has to clear his throat before speaking to garner attention to avoid being drowned out.

Whispers more than talking normally.

People often note that Edward in general has a very “melodic” tone of voice.

Bonus: doesn’t laugh so much as let out very quiet giggles.

↪ Prince Keith

Boy’s got a New York accent going on and we appreciate him.

Often speaks loudly enough to be heard over people in his immediate vicinity.

Has a a slightly lower-pitched voice that tends to get a little higher and squeakier when he’s getting upset or bitching about smth lmao.

That said, will mostly often speak normally with a very bored “are we done yet” tone of voice.

Bonus: always muffles his laugh by covering his mouth with both hands.

↪ Prince Roberto

He’s got that Spanish accent going on.

Excited, energetic, just happy to be here!! He has a bit of a higher pitched voice, so whenever he tries to do a deeper voice impression and sound “super serious” it’s actually just really silly to hear.

Constantly yelling and going a mile a minute or singing or whatever.

He will get serious for real sometimes, though, and when he does, his voice is always gentle / calming and full of emotion. He’s very soothing.

Bonus: will roll over on the floor laughing unironically. very loudly.

↪ Prince Wilfred

Soft, British and would rather not be having a conversation lmao

He’s even more quiet than Edward, but it’s mostly because he doesn’t like talking to people.

His voice is extremely monotone and devoid of emotion. He sounds like a robot reciting lines, which is true both when speaking to him in person or when he’s giving a speech. This is something that doesn’t ever go away completely, even if he falls in love with a person, though they’ll hear more emotion in his voice than most get the chance to.

If caught in the right moment, sometimes he almost sounds like he’s on the verge of tears, though.

Bonus: laughs are very short and breathy… more like a quick ‘aha’ than an actual laugh.

↪ Prince Yakov

I hope you like Russian accents thicker than this prince’s beautiful braid, because he’s undoubtedly got the thickest / most noticeable accent out of the princes if only due to limited chances to actually put the other languages and dialects he’s learned to good use!

Very loud! Very demanding! But also very approachable. He can be extremely stern or extremely welcoming and his voice drastically changes between disciplined / friendly as needed.

Bonus: he laughs a lot. And his laugh is also super loud and boisterous.

↪ Luke

Much more subtle New York accent compared to Keith ‘cuz he suppresses it.

Very timid & gentle normally. He’s got a quiet, hesitant tone of voice because he’s usually pretty unsure of himself.

When he’s getting on to someone or trying to stand up for himself or scold other people, though, he also gets kind of high pitched and squeaky because he’s a puppy like that. Eventually, this matures and he inherits his grandfather’s skills in scolding people sternly lmao.

Bonus: will try to hide laughter by covering his mouth with the back of his hand, but will fail.

↪ Claude

British boi #2.

Stern as all living hell. If ever a voice could send chills down your spine, it would be Claude’s. He’s an extremely serious person and he’s not playing games, man.

That said, in rare moments when he shows his softer side, he can be very gentle and warm. It’s just unlikely.

Bonus: hell will freeze over before you hear this man laugh.

↪ Zain

Does have a very subtle English accent as a result of his time with Nobel Michel, but his is hard to distinguish. He’s one of those ppl everyone will stand around like “what???? is that accent???? what is it, it sounds like 5 different accents, i can’t????”

Elegant and sophisticated, at all times, his voice reflects that. He’s always proper and calm, so his tone is likewise monotone, but in a kindhearted way, as opposed to Wilfred’s robotic voice.

Will easily become very expressive and full of emotion when impassioned, however, no matter how hard he tries not to.

Bonus: very soft chuckles.

↪ Ryuga

Loud and happy! He’s super energetic and friendly and that shows through in how he speaks.

His voice is on the lower / gruffer side, however.

Kind of has a very very vERY subtle hint of a British accent sometimes because of where he grew up, but mostly maintained a Japanese accent from his family.

Bonus: EXCITABLE, UPBEAT LAUGHTER !! LAUGHS FOR /DAYS/

↪ Roy

British accent so thick he actually has trouble being understood depending on what part of the world he’s sailing in. Took after his mother.

Mostly speaks with a quiet, thoughtful tone of voice, like he’s always lost in his own head.

He’s very expressive though, so if he gets startled or has strong emotions over something/someone, etc, his voice will raise in volume and panic and etc.

Bonus: he’s the type to laugh behind his hand and muffle it

↪ Shin

Thick Czech accent, not as pronounced as Roy’s.

Extremely intimidating and hard to approach. He always sounds either strict, angry, or annoyed. Mostly because he’s probably all three of those things.

Even when he tries to be soft, he can come off as mean. He takes a little work, but eventually, he learns how to come off as gentle.

Bonus: doesn’t laugh so much as snort derisively.

↪ Miyabi

Has two settings: obnoxious and serious, which he will usually switch between throughout the day

He constantly sounds really full of himself and full of mockery, despite seriously lacking in confidence lmao

His actual tone of voice is mild. He’s very emotional, though, and can sound scary or loving depending on what buttons are pushed.

Can also sound pretty sensual / seductive at times, too.

Bonus: medium-toned laugh, directly in your face KJNHMKJNM

↪ Ichthys

Check accent hc for details on him, he’s more complicated I’m crying.

That being said, one of the louder / happier sounding out of the muse group. He’s constantly laughing and putting on airs for people, so he always sounds like he’s having a great time.

As for the actual tone of his voice, he’s one of the few i DO have a voice claim for yay

Bonus: can and will go into long laughing fits

↪ Rhion / Mad Hatter

Switches depending on what persona he’s “playing.”

If he’s just being himself, he’s very soft, unsure, quiet, but friendly. He’ll openly show his emotions and usually sound pretty happy / upbeat, but it’s like he’s lost in a different world, daydreaming.

As the Hatter, he’s SUPER loud and dramatic and over-the-top, because he’s putting on a show. He’ll drag words out and make drama out of sentences that are super mundane.

Bonus: snorts when he laughs, thanks.

↪ Yuya

This one is easy, let’s all just accept that Yuya is obviously a ripoff of Kurosawa Yamato and obviously his voice is going to match up 😂😂😂

Bonus: tends to burst out laughing if he finds smth funny

For the non-Voltage muses who don’t already have voiced lines in their respective games,

↪ Chezem

Thick Arabic accent.

EXTREMELY soft and aloof. He literally sounds like he’s speaking through a vacuum because he mumbles and trails off so often. His head is up in the clouds.

Deeper voice.

When upset, can be very scary and stern, has a habit of intimidating people and purposefully trying to run them off by presenting himself this way, but actually very soft in reality.

Bonus: brief, short laughs that sound more like sighs.

↪ Saizo

Tone of voice can be summed up as “constantly exasperated” and “really wishes he weren’t here right now.” He ALWAYS sounds like he’s annoyed or sighing at someone’s stupidity any time he opens his mouth.

Deep voice, which I actually have a VC of Jun Fukuyama for. My cg bias shows through, but there u go.

Bonus: usually has short, unexpected laughter in which he tries to keep it from coming out.

↪ Munenori

Upper-class and elegant. He sounds kinda snobby, but not in an obnoxious way. He uses long, big words and tends to trail off to enunciate quite often.

Is the type of person to pause mid-sentence and go… ‘hmm…………………’ while regarding the person he’s talking to for a long while before continuing lmao

Also has a very deep voice, but speaks lightly compared to anyone else in the NL group. His way of speaking is just… very “airy,” like he’s just breathing the words, idk how to put it

Bonus: has the softest chuckles out of anyone in this blasted group

↪ Lysandre

Thick French accent 2 : electric boogaloo

Has a lot in common with Chezem, tbh, so I’m gonna reiterate: soft and aloof. He literally sounds like he’s speaking through a vacuum because he mumbles and trails off so often. His head is up in the clouds.

However, he maintains his softness even when he gets emotional or angry. He can be stern, yes, but he doesn’t lose his poise. He’s extremely put-together and graceful.

Voice isn’t very deep, he also tends to sound kind of “airy” when speaking

Bonus: rarely laughs, mostly smiles… but has a breathy laugh when he does

↪ Chase

Australian accent !

Sounds super tired and dead inside all the time. He just wants to go home and sleep and for everyone to leave him alone my dude. He’s always scoffing while talking, so he can sound pretty stuck up.

Medium-toned voice, not high pitched, not deep, just right in the middle.

Tends to drag out words because he sounds pretty bored most of the time. That is to say, he’s pretty monotone.

However, voice starts to perk up when he starts brightening up around someone he cares about. He can actually sound pretty happy and loving near constantly, around the right person.

Bonus: snickers rather than laughs. unless he’s with someone he adores, then he’ll laugh rather loudly.

[fors-nat]

A lil something for @booksnchocolate as a thank you for the lovely tag to my last lamen post (yes, I do read your tags, people)

 So LAURENT MAKING NEW FRIENDS:

-       The first friend Laurent ever makes is a teenage son of some nobleman who arrives to the capital for some kind of festivities. He is in this age when he wants to rebel but his father puts too much hope and pressure on him and demands perfect behavior and all kinds of successes. The kid is very annoyed of everything and does not even try to hide his attitude. Yes, he is a bit spoiled. Laurent notices him across the table during a banquet when the conversation turns to something boring, and he catches his eye and causally performs some trick, something silly like an olive disappearing in his hand, trying to cheer him up (like he usually does with kids). But the kid is not a child anymore, he is not so easily amused and he just rolls his eyes (at an Emperor, yes, the audacity!) so Laurent accepts it as a challenge and he tries all kinds of silly stuff to get a reaction from him, all while trying to be unnoticed by anybody else. The kid watches him for some time without showing any emotion, and then calmly pulls some prank on a nearby guest or a passing servant. It’s not a very nice prank, something like putting a bug behind somebodies collar, or rearranging the dishes and glasses in such a way that a person knocks over their wine, but it turns out kind of funny, and people laugh, and Laurent laughs too, and the kid smiles smugly. So Laurent repeats the prank on Damen who is in a middle of a conversation, and the evening turns into a mess after that. The next couple of days they just silently compete at “Who Is The Biggest Prankster” pulling all sorts of jokes and tricks, and the court quickly learns to be on their guard when those too are in the same room. Which only offers them more of a challenge they are only too eager to meet. Also they often request dirty songs from the musicians during the banquets to make everybody uncomfortable on purpose. Damen is amused, the courtiers learned to just roll with it, Nikandros is getting migraines.

-       The second friend is a person who is in charge of teaching the children of the Akielon nobility to fight and… ya know… be athletic in general, because Akielos makes a big deal of sports and all that. For Laurent it’s a good opportunity to learn some Akielon fighting techniques, also Nikandros cannot be teaching him wrestling forever, the dude’s got a job of his own, and Damen is not always available, so Laurent starts practicing with this guy, who is nearing his old age, but is still in good shape, and is the best in the business. He is used to dealing with kings, princes, and other nobilities, so he does not let Laurent slack off, yells at him for mistakes and is strict as heck.  We all know that Laurent is a good learner, so he picks up quickly, and the coach is very pleased. Sometimes Laurent practices with the kids, and the coach even asks him to do it more often, because the kids try harder if they spar with the Emperor. Laurent often lets them win, and gets very over-dramatic in his “defeat” to make kids laugh. At the end of the practice they talk a lot about strategy, and the dude uses Damen and his first days at learning as an example pretty often (best fighter in Akielos, duh). Laurent remembers all those bits of information and uses them to try and defeat Damen in a match. The “I’ll avenge my brother” days are over, but the idea to defeat Damen in a fight is still there. The coach values Laurents determination and hard work, so he gets really proud of him, and he appreciates Laurent being a good listener and a hard-working student, so they often talk for hours.

-       His third friend is a librarian in a public library. Laurent and Damen founded some schools and they gave most of their books to the public library. They still have some private collection of old and/or rare books, but most of the books are accessible to common people now. And Laurent visits the library pretty often to get something to read, or to bring new books he keeps collecting from all over the world. The librarian is an energetic lady who speaks several languages and is super excited about books, and old history and old historical songs and suchlike. So naturally Laurent who opened such a library and keeps bringing her books is a God in her eyes. They have a lot of common topics for conversation, and she gets so carried away that she forgets their difference in social rank, and Laurent can just enjoy a lively conversation about books and history with an equal. Although one time he returned a book in a bad condition (knocked over a jar of water and spilled it over a book), and it nearly killed the librarian. She was visibly worried about letting him take any books from the library after that, and Laurent had to put some effort into regaining her trust.

-       He is also friends with an eccentric scientist guy, who is partly an engineer, partly physicist, partly traveler and cartographer. He travels so much and absorbs the cultures of the countries he visits so much that nobody is sure where he is from or where his home is. Damen and Laurent met him when he came to the court with some request about a permission to use some warehouse for an experiment or something like that, and they were like WTF? Why? So he started to explain and it turned out interesting and complicated and a bit crazy, but they did help him with an experiment, and he gave them some music machine as a gift, which was a huge hit at the court, and that’s how he became persona grata in the country, and every time he visits Delpha, he is invited to stay at the palace, and he has his own special premises for conducting his experiments, and a number of people working for him and taking care of his machines and other staff while he is away. Laurent and Damen give him money for his research, and support him in any way they can, and he shares all his inventions with them, and brings back books and other souvenirs from his travels, and they talk a lot about all sorts of ideas and inventions. He always invites them to go on his travels with him, and they always mean to do it one day, but only really manage to go in their old age, when their kingdom is safe and there are heirs to the throne who can safely take care of things while they are away discovering distant lands and their wonders.

[class-wom]

downtonabbeyandausten asked: Tell us how you think "Matthew's Mary", aka the best version of Mary, differed from the Mary we got during the post-Matthew seasons. You already know that I agree with pretty much everything you'll say on this point :)

First of all, as I think a bit more about this, I should probably warn you that there may be an edit or two.  Or three, four, or five for good measure. 😈  Bwahaha…anyway, here goes…

I think the biggest difference is that, at least from what I’ve been hearing, the Lady Mary of later seasons seemed to shift dramatically from one extreme of goodness to another extreme of badness with little if any balance.  The Lady Mary of earlier seasons seemed to be a lot more evenly distributed and was using her cool demeanor as a front to hide a much more complicated personality capable of deeper feelings.  As I mentioned before, my personal favorite example of this is the moment from the second season where she observes “Aren’t we all stuck with the choices we make?” and proceeds to soberly stir her tea as everyone else looks on thoughtfully.  For some reason, it reminds me of one of my favorite “No dialogue necessary”-moments from the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility where, following the departure of Wilhoughby, Elinor quietly sips her tea alone on the steps listening to the intense and passionate wailing of her mother and sisters from their respective rooms.  (I guess it’s in the sense of everyone else surrounding her clearly going through a great deal of emotional torture and turmoil while the lady in question has clearly reached a level of acceptance of her own situation if that makes any sense.  The fact that both cases involve a cup of tea is simply a British coincidence, I’m sure!  😁 LOL…)

And that, I think, is another major difference.  I think it was you who may have mentioned that she’s the type of person who will very quietly work behind the scenes (definitely a trait she picked up from her grandmother) and support others, such as informing William of his mother’s illness in the first season or arranging for Anna’s “honeymoon” with Bates by “reserving” an upstairs room in the second season.   Another character this trait reminds me of is Rick from Casablanca: Rather than taking center stage with “causes” a la Victor and leading the entire Cafe Americain in a rousing rendition of “Marseilles” to drown out the Nazis, he would very quietly turn a blind eye to rumors of resistance meetings or even sneakily arrange for a young Bolivian couple to win much-needed escape money at the roulette wheel.  Perhaps not as dramatic as Victor’s definitive stance of defiance, but not an entirely convincing display of neutrality either.

And I think that’s another quality of “the True Mary:”  She’s quietly supportive and/or helpful rather than swinging from one side of nastiness to the other side of subservient angel, as we saw her devolve into from the fourth to the sixth seasons.  And I think the scenes from the second season where she coped with Matthew’s wartime woes and grappled with the existence of his engagement were the most telling of that blend of character; far from being a wooden caricature of later seasons, we would see her persona shift from cool and calm to deeply disturbed and troubled, such as the scene where she witnesses Matthew’s arrival at the hospital following his injury or the moment she walks away from him after (at his urging) she has given him a carefully-worded prognostication of his condition.  (One of my favorite scenes, in case you can’t tell; as far as I’m concerned, Dan and Michelle absolutely hit that one out of the park in terms of showing the turmoil lurking under the surface.)

Do I think “the True Mary” has to be deadly serious?  Absolutely not.  As a matter of fact, I think many of MD’s scenes with DS gave her some wiggle-room to add an element of humor; the post-dance scene where Mary and Matthew quickly realize that an ill Lavinia has “caught them in the act” and they flash those “hands-in-the-cookie-jar” smiles at her is a terrific example.  I also thought the scene from the third season where she and Matthew quietly let a fleeing Branson into the house and make up the silly BS-story at the dinner table about who was at the door (some guy giving out pamphlets or something like that) gave a hint that, if MD had given lighter and more humorous material with which to work on a regular basis, she could have had a lot of fun and been spectacular.  (Perhaps DS could have reconsidered his decision to leave had he also been given more post-S2 opportunities to shine and/or flex his own acting/humor muscles, but that’s another topic! 😈)  I have never actually watched her in Good Behavior, but I’ve seen a commercial or two that seems to suggest that she’s really showing that she can handle some pretty crazy comic situations and opportunities and could have really done Sir Fellowes proud had he generously allowed her the flexibility to do so.  Now maybe those who actually watched S4-S6 could tell me if she ever was able to add those elements of humor in later seasons, but from what I’ve seen, basically she just seemed to be a naughty little girl who finally got scolded until she “agreed to be a good little wife" with little if any of the dimension of earlier seasons.  (That’s how it looked from my vantage point, anyway!)

As I said, I may edit this at a later time.  But this seems to be a good start! 😁

Okay, a few edits and a day later, lol, I’ve had more extensive thoughts on what I mentioned yesterday about S6 Mary’s “emotional extremes” versus her more balanced persona of S2 in particular.  And I will be honest:  This is going to be a rant, and it’s mostly going to be an anti-S6 Mary (or more to the point, the cynical subtext of her fate and the treatment thereof, at least as I saw it) expounding on what I mean when I refer to extremes of “Good Mary vs. Bad Mary” and the so-called “implications” as they appear to have been intended.

So if you’re a reader who's had his or her fill of anti-S6 rants and anti-S6 character rants, I understand, and this is a fair warning:  You may turn back if you like, and I respect your decision to do so. 😉

Yes, I could have simply edited these thoughts into my original post.  However, I wanted to verify that they would be seen; I had hoped to simply reply to my original post, but that doesn’t appear to be happening, I suppose since I was responding to a message or whatever. 🤷

Okay, so we start out with seemingly relatively independent, all-business Mary at the beginning of Season 6 announcing “I’d rather be alone than with the wrong man.”  Fair enough, right?  Sounds reasonable to me: A once-happy wife now blossoming into a strong, surprisingly capable widow working towards the legacy of Downton to preserve it in the name of her late husband for her son, which as I see it would have been true to “the True Mary" and a fitting homage to the memory of Matthew, to say nothing of a promising future for George.  (Okay, yeah, Depression, World War II, yadda yadda yadda, lol...)  From therein (again, at least as I understand it from the spoilers I can stomach), we devolve into scrutiny over Mary’s “high standards” in men (again, I personally see nothing wrong with this; I mean, hey, we are talking about the whole “Till death us do part”-thing, so she better be sure, and if she’s not, she’ll be better off in the end!) which earns her endless ridicule from friends and family, then insults, then a barage and constant repetition of the word “love” which is simply supposed to “convince” us to accept this manipulation of rewriting of Mary’s character as suddenly “deciding” she’s in love (yes, I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but please bear in mind that this so-called “cowardly bullying bitch” was only “convinced” after literally everybody and her sister had to coerce her into “confessing” she’s in love...but she’s the only bully that counts here, I suppose because she’s an old-fashioned bully rather than a progressive bully 🙄).

Now during the aforementioned, we have what I call the “Bad Mary”-extreme (throw the “Edith’s deep dark secret” in here for good measure, since this ultimately plays no small part in it; I believe I’ve made those thoughts quite clear otherwise, lol), which is to manipulate the viewer into shrieking, “For crying out loud, can’t something be done to get her back in line?!?”  Now as I remember interviews and press at the time, the way we were supposed to watch this was that “Mary was supposed to learn to 'love herself’ (wait...did she hate herself with Matthew?!? whaaaat?!?) and ‘make peace’ with her situation”...by “professing her love” and entering lickety-split into matrimonial sex (yes, I’m calling it as I see it) with a car guy (by all accounts, Violet and Evelyn came perhaps the closest to addressing this issue head-on)...but hey, it’s okay, because she’s in love.

Yes, that’s it -- she’s in love, everyone (it’s repeated as many times as possible rather than richly shown, as it would have been in previous seasons)...and now she’s getting that “wonderful” (not to mention productive) sex...and because she is now a well-sexed wife, she is now the extreme of the “Good Mary” character.

And here we come to the cynical note of this type of writing, and why I refer to it as “extreme characterization” compared to “the True Mary,” most notably of S2.  I had mentioned the more subtle subtext, I had mentioned that scene that reminded me so much of that 1995 Elinor moment from Sense and Sensibility and why.  Frankly, Mary’s ultimate "romance” to me felt like Elinor marrying Edward*, only to lose him in a crazy barnyard accident, then years later being approached by some hot, wild-and-woolly brother/cousin of Wilhoughby (since he married someone rich, he’s out, lol), and when she ultimately resists, is scolded by her mother to “make peace” because she “believes in love,” so they head off to Gretna Greene and drive off in his speedy new barouche!

And this begs the million-pound question:  What would Jane Austen say?  Or any other true romantic, for that matter?

*Yes, I know who plays Edward in the 2008 version; I can assure you that’s unintentional.  LOL...

[disco-vampire-thing]

Gothoughts - 3.15, How the Riddler Got His Name

SO!

I’ve decided to do a bit of a review for the newest episode of Gotham, along the lines of my comics and movie reviews.  Spoilers, unsolicited opinions, and undignified squeeing behind the cut. :)

As far as I’m concerned, Gotham’s return with “How the Riddler Got His Name” is a home run.  I know some fans were worried, looking at the earlier promos, that Oswald would be too quickly forgotten or we wouldn’t see the emotional fallout from his murder.  Instead, what we get really surpassed my expectations, with some fantastic interplay between Ed and his hallucination of Oswald, as Ed struggles both to come to terms with what Oswald really meant to him, and to take the next step into truly embodying the Riddler.

Speaking of which, I love the fact that Ed knows who he is, but is struggling to become that.  I love that, for him as it was for Oswald, the birth of the legend as we come to know him is not easy.  I think that’s one of Gotham’s real strengths.  While most supervillains do get their own origin stories in comics, I’ve found that a lot of versions then skip straight from the origin story to the villain as a fully-fledged threat, as if the decision to become a criminal meant you got a welcome basket with a pre-tailored costume and a starter pack of henchmen.  I know that it’s often done to make the villains seem more mysterious and, therefore, more threatening, but I think there are a lot more storytelling opportunities in letting us see, not only Batman’s training and struggles and failures, but those of his rogues’ gallery, too.

Something that’s interesting about Ed’s origin story in particular:  Okay, so Gotham always kind of rides this line between gritty deconstruction and comic book show, and sometimes teeters a little too far in one direction or the other. When I first heard Ed describe what he’s doing in this episode as “becoming a villain”, it made me wince.  “Villain”, in this sense, is basically a metafictional concept, and it’s not one that people would generally apply to themselves.  You know the saying, “Everyone is the hero of their own story”?  When you make yourself a villain, you’re essentially making yourself an obstacle in someone else’s story, and in real life, people don’t tend to do that.  

And Gotham is usually fairly realistic in this respect.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone in this show has called themselves “a villain” unironically.  Mobsters like Carmine Falcone or Fish Mooney wouldn’t think of themselves that way – they’re powerful, ambitious businesspeople. Even someone unhinged like Jerome or Barbara would probably only say it in an ironic echo of how they think the world sees them.  I don’t think Oswald, in real life, would have said it about himself.  His path hasn’t been driven by the urge to become a villain, it’s been driven by the urge to rule Gotham. Even his becoming “the Penguin” was kind of unintentional.  He claimed that persona, but he didn’t set out to construct it.  (And hallucination!Oswald even unpicks this onscreen: he didn’t teach Ed to be a villain, he taught him to be Edward Nygma, “a man who could run the underworld and hide in plain sight”.)

But I have to say, this episode won me over in this respect.  I came to realise that out of all the rogues in Gotham, Ed is the one for whom this explicit “becoming a villain” shtick actually works.  I can see Ed deciding, “I recognise myself as a villain/recognise the villain in myself, and I will set out to embody him.”  It’s a reflection of how Ed tends to approach life and interactions with people in general:  it’s this attempt to apply high symbolism and abstract systems of rules to the real world. Which, incidentally, is also a pretty good description of how riddles work.

As for the way this episode explores Ed’s relationship with Oswald, I basically have nothing to offer but delighted shrieking. :)  I was expecting Oswald’s “ghost” to be tormenting Ed, the way Kristen’s has in the past; the fact that Ed takes such genuine pleasure in seeing him (even to the point of thanking Oswald for being there, as if he’s real) and is even taking drugs to be able to see him – a pretty big departure for someone who’s as invested as Ed is in control – came as a pleasant shock.  The moment where he finally says goodbye to Oswald, and admits how much he cares about and misses him, is genuinely heartwrenching.  And hallucination!Oswald is a delight throughout, from his eating popcorn to his exasperation with Ed selecting Jim as his archnemesis. :)  He’s wonderfully salty (as with his line about how he’s “not really a fan” of the view from the docks), but he also knows exactly where and how to slide the knife in under Ed’s defences.  Robin Lord Taylor is a tour de force in this episode – his performance as hallucination!Oswald is an exaggerated version of Oswald (because this is Ed’s mental reconstruction), but still nuanced, and he’s just fantastic to watch.  And holy shit, but that serenade makes me happy.  Ed actually hallucinates Oswald, dressed in gorgeous clothes, singing him a sexy ballad under a red spotlight.  I’m not only really pleased that the creators took it that far (making it pretty undeniable that Ed at least has some attraction towards his friend), I’m also impressed that they pulled it off. That scene could have so easily tipped over into being silly, but it’s executed with a deft hand and grounded in two really strong performances, making it erotic and eerie instead.

(Also it seems somehow cosmically unfair that anyone is as good looking as RLT, just saying.)

I’ll admit, I was underwhelmed by how the reveal of Oswald’s survival was handled. Granted, I don’t think anyone was actually going to be shocked, but I was hoping for something a bit more dramatic than him waking up in bed in an admittedly charming chintzy sweater.  What, no surge upwards out of the water of Gotham bay, mirroring the first episode?  Not even a scene of Oswald being discovered washed up on shore?  Just, oh, hey, you’re awake, isn’t it handy that gunshot wound and the accompanying near-drowning weren’t fatal?  I realise the episode packs a lot in and the creators probably didn’t want to spend too much time on the mechanics of how Oswald survived, but it still felt like a bit of a letdown. (However, pretty much the only letdown in a stellar episode, so I’m not too fussed.)

Speaking of Oswald’s survival:  Ivy was also absolutely nowhere on my list of prospective rescuers.  I assumed, as I think a lot of fans did, that the most logical person to pulls Oswald out of the harbour would be Fish.  She believes in his potential, so she might well think he could be useful to her long-term; she may also feel like she owes him for sparing her; she’s got access to Hugo Strange’s revival technology; and it would open up some pretty heady symbolism (Fish fishing – hee – Oswald out of the water after he pushed her in, the maternal imagery of her bringing him back into the world). Jim was also a possibility, as was Gabe, or the Court of Owls (who’ve shown an interest in Oswald before), or even Selina. I never would have thought of Ivy, though, and it seems somewhat out of character for a woman (a girl, really) who’s never really shown much of an altruistic streak.  (This wasn’t just a spontaneous moment of kindness, either – she’s apparently nursed him and hidden him for weeks!) However, I’ll admit that I’m intrigued.  Oswald and Ivy make an odd pair, but one with a lot of potential.  Both shunned as children for being different, both grown ruthless largely out of necessity, and both (as we’ve now learned about Ivy) with the capacity to be selfless, even self-sacrificing.  I can see them as a team.

So, that takes care of the Nygmobblepot elements (the Nygmobbleplot, if you will) – what about the rest of “How the Riddler Got His Name”?

I think one of the standout elements, for me, is the rivalry that’s shaping up between Ed and Lucius Fox.  We’ve seen them square off a few times before, providing a foundation for their evolution into archnemeses here, and I’m really glad that the show went in the direction of making Lucius Ed’s foil, rather than Gordon.  It helps break up the recurring theme of “Jim Gordon is the central figure in everyone’s life”, which made some sense in the first season, when Jim was the only honest cop in the city (and therefore naturally the most likely to be complicating the life of your average Gotham rogue), but has started feeling increasingly forced.  More than that, Lucius fits the role perfectly.  He’s a lot more willing to pursue Ed through all the labyrinthine twists of his games than Harvey or even Jim would be.  He’s as frighteningly brilliant as Ed, and (as Chris Chalk confirmed on Twitter), Lucius recognises a similarity in the way both their minds work.  (Hell, they’ve also both scientists who’ve been on the receiving end of what Lucius has called the GCPD’s “fascistic meathead culture”, so I suspect Lucius may understand all too well some of the forces that shaped Ed.)  And Lucius hasn’t given up on Ed, which I think is fascinating – especially as Ed seems shaken, at least temporarily, by Lucius’s sympathy.  I’m so looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Their confrontation on the stairs, playing mind games for Harvey’s life, is just brilliant.  It’s a shining moment for Lucius – not just for the way he solves Ed’s puzzles, or even because he manages to best him at the riddles game by coming up with an answer Ed hadn’t thought of.  It’s the fact that Lucius actually pieces everything else together just from the few, tortured fragments that Ed lets slip.  And ohhhh, that moment where Lucius picks up that something’s wrong, that Oswald’s gone and Ed is coming unglued without him, that something happened.  So good.  

I also like how the riddles tie into the wider themes of the episode.  Ed’s answers are all solitary, in keeping with his mindset (loneliness, an individual, a reflection), whereas Lucius’s are more upbeat.  But Ed’s insistence that, “You have to come up with my answer,” mirrors what he’s been doing for the entire episode.  He knows, deep down, that he killed a part of himself when he killed Oswald, he knows he can’t really replace him, but he’s still pushing to get an answer he likes better, to get his answer.  (And of course, the answer to the third riddle being “a reflection” is fitting, as it’s normally a bit of poetic licence to say that your reflection “knows your every thought” because it mimics your expression, but for Ed, his reflection really does know – and is a manifestation of – his thoughts.  And then the “reflection” imagery becomes terrifyingly literal in the next scene when Bruce spots his clone in the mirror.  I love it.)

Incidentally, you could also call this episode “How Harvey Bullock Flirted Shamelessly with Lucius Fox for the Entire Length of an Investigation”, and it is glorious.  I’m not saying I don’t love Jim Gordon, but I’m starting to wonder if we really need him back in Gotham, at least right away.  I would watch the shit out of a show that was nothing but Lucius being a jaw-droppingly brilliant investigator and conducting Interrogation Via Weirding People Out, and Harvey, as his partner, showering him with fond looks and ten-dollar words (“Did you see how I used that word, ‘allocate’?”), fishing for compliments on his suits, and generally failing at pretending he doesn’t fancy Lucius rotten and also getting tied up occasionally because hello kink I didn’t realise I had.

I can’t wait to see where all this goes next week.

Random points:

I do have legitimate questions about why all scientists in Gotham work in big glass cages, but that’s by the by.

Robin Lord Taylor isn’t the only one showing off his acting chops here by playing with different versions of a character.  David Mazouz is amazing at getting across the subtle distinctions between Bruce, clone!Bruce, and clone!Bruce pretending to be Bruce.

You have to wonder if Harvey ever just flops down at his desk and contemplates what his life has come to, that he’s now in charge of frantically dredging the river for the guy he once arranged to have shot and dumped in the river.

Speaking of which, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Harvey (presumably) first interviewed Ed after Oswald disappeared.  Neither of them is all that keen to find him, but they’re both forced to pretend that they’re desperate to – and on top of that, they both loathe each other. That would have made for some interesting viewing.

There is no limit to my love for Ed’s fruit messenger. (Why IS he a bunch of grapes?  Who knows?  It’s brilliant.)

It’s probably a testament to how many gimmicky serial killers Gotham has that not one of the people who used to work closely with Nygma, know him as the riddle/puzzle guy, and know he’s murdered people connected him with this rash of puzzle-related murders.

It is pretty comical how much shabbier Harvey’s nicest suit is than anyone else’s suit.  It’s also a little bit heartwarming.  Remember when Harvey had a few Italian suits that had just wandered into his closet after they were confiscated during a bust?  Now, his nicest suit is clearly something he bought on his un-supplemented, honest cop’s salary, and takes good care of.  It’s this bit of meta sweetness.

This is such a weird thought, but – how did the Court duplicate Bruce’s clothes?  Do they have an entire wardrobe based on his wardrobe (how?), and when he left the house some surveillance van called in to say, “It’s the black turtleneck and the three-quarter-length black coat today”?  Or did someone run out and try and buy those clothes based on a photo, and dress clone!Bruce in them, all in about half an hour?  How do you go out shopping in a city the size of Gotham for ten minutes and manage to exactly match clothes that could have been bought a year ago?  Am I overthinking this?  (The answer is yes.)

Is it just a thing in Gotham that when you want to test someone’s loyalty and maybe kill them, you take them to a cabin in the woods?  At least Jim’s uncle isn’t trying to hold his hand romantically over the breakfast table.

[class-wom]

Tell us how you think "Matthew's Mary", aka the best version of Mary, differed from the Mary we got during the post-Matthew seasons. You already know that I agree with pretty much everything you'll say on this point :)

First of all, as I think a bit more about this, I should probably warn you that there may be an edit or two.  Or three, four, or five for good measure. 😈  Bwahaha…anyway, here goes…

I think the biggest difference is that, at least from what I’ve been hearing, the Lady Mary of later seasons seemed to shift dramatically from one extreme of goodness to another extreme of badness with little if any balance.  The Lady Mary of earlier seasons seemed to be a lot more evenly distributed and was using her cool demeanor as a front to hide a much more complicated personality capable of deeper feelings.  As I mentioned before, my personal favorite example of this is the moment from the second season where she observes “Aren’t we all stuck with the choices we make?” and proceeds to soberly stir her tea as everyone else looks on thoughtfully.  For some reason, it reminds me of one of my favorite “No dialogue necessary”-moments from the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility where, following the departure of Wilhoughby, Elinor quietly sips her tea alone on the steps listening to the intense and passionate wailing of her mother and sisters from their respective rooms.  (I guess it’s in the sense of everyone else surrounding her clearly going through a great deal of emotional torture and turmoil while the lady in question has clearly reached a level of acceptance of her own situation if that makes any sense.  The fact that both cases involve a cup of tea is simply a British coincidence, I’m sure!  😁 LOL…)

And that, I think, is another major difference.  I think it was you who may have mentioned that she’s the type of person who will very quietly work behind the scenes (definitely a trait she picked up from her grandmother) and support others, such as informing William of his mother’s illness in the first season or arranging for Anna’s “honeymoon” with Bates by “reserving” an upstairs room in the second season.  Another character this trait reminds me of is Rick from Casablanca:  Rather than taking center stage with “causes” a la Victor and leading the entire Cafe Americain in a rousing rendition of “Marseilles” to drown out the Nazis, he would very quietly turn a blind eye to rumors of resistance meetings or even sneakily arrange for a young Bolivian couple to win much-needed escape money at the roulette wheel.  Perhaps not as dramatic as Victor’s definitive stance of defiance, but not an entirely convincing display of neutrality either.

And I think that’s another quality of “the True Mary:”  She’s quietly supportive and/or helpful rather than swinging from one side of nastiness to the other side of subservient angel, as we saw her devolve into from the fourth to the sixth seasons.  And I think the scenes from the second season where she coped with Matthew’s wartime woes and grappled with the existence of his engagement were the most telling of that blend of character; far from being a wooden caricature of later seasons, we would see her persona shift from cool and calm to deeply disturbed and troubled, such as the scene where she witnesses Matthew’s arrival at the hospital following his injury or the moment she walks away from him after (at his urging) she has given him a carefully-worded prognostication of his condition.  (One of my favorite scenes, in case you can’t tell; as far as I’m concerned, Dan and Michelle absolutely hit that one out of the park in terms of showing the turmoil lurking under the surface.)

Do I think “the True Mary” has to be deadly serious?  Absolutely not.  As a matter of fact, I think many of MD’s scenes with DS gave her some wiggle-room to add an element of humor; the post-dance scene where Mary and Matthew quickly realize that an ill Lavinia has “caught them in the act” and they flash those “hands-in-the-cookie-jar” smiles at her is a terrific example.  I also thought the scene from the third season where she and Matthew quietly let a fleeing Branson into the house and make up the silly BS-story at the dinner table about who was at the door (some guy giving out pamphlets or something like that) gave a hint that, if MD had given lighter and more humorous material with which to work on a regular basis, she could have had a lot of fun and been spectacular.  (Perhaps DS could have reconsidered his decision to leave had he also been given more post-S2 opportunities to shine and/or flex his own acting/humor muscles, but that’s another topic! 😈)  I have never actually watched her in Good Behavior, but I’ve seen a commercial or two that seems to suggest that she’s really showing that she can handle some pretty crazy comic situations and opportunities and could have really done Sir Fellowes proud had he generously allowed her the flexibility to do so.  Now maybe those who actually watched S4-S6 could tell me if she ever was able to add those elements of humor in later seasons, but from what I’ve seen, basically she just seemed to be a naughty little girl who finally got scolded until she “agreed to be a good little wife" with little if any of the dimension of earlier seasons.  (That’s how it looked from my vantage point, anyway!)

As I said, I may edit this at a later time.  But this seems to be a good start! 😁