#i fear this is going to become increasingly unhinged

[maukree]

Masterpost with all parts Welcome back to this increasingly unhinged 616 winteriron timeline that was supposed to be a quick primer for my fic and has somehow turned into a full-blown, too-many-bad-jokes-per-paragraph alternative wiki. If you’re still reading this, you’ve either developed an unhealthy attachment to my mediocre sense of humor, or you’re just curious to see how many things I’ll get wrong, which is fine by me either way.

When we last left off in Part 4:

Tony deleted his entire brain like it was a corrupted zip file because Norman Osborn stole his job as Director of the no longer existing S.H.I.E.L.D. by shooting a dying alien queen on national television.

Bucky, now wearing the stars and stripes (and somehow making it hot—sorry, Steve), is moonlighting as “guy Tony secretly trusts with literally his entire mind.”

Steve is still dead. (But also: comic books. So, not for long.)

Peter is emotionally ping-ponging between every dad figure he’s ever had, while Nat, Sharon, and every other female is there to remind everyone that sometimes our boys do have girlfriends, which is canonically inconvenient, but somewhat relevant.

Everyone is mad at Tony, who is in a coma and technically brain-dead.

Jarvis was a Skrull. Still not over that. 

A quick note from your exhausted, ship-crazed tour guide:

This recap series has become so much larger than intended, and I am, frankly, sick of narrating Marvel events designed specifically to injure our already injured blorbos while trying to get to the fucking point. So going forward, we are skipping content unless it is:

Directly relevant to potential winteriron tension/interaction

Supremely shippy for other ships

Too sexy, sad, or stupid not to mention

So. Let’s see how far we can get in this part—from Tony's brain-melted coma to his eventual reboot, to Tony and Bucky finally working together, Steve doing his signature “surprise bitch, I’m back,” and all roads leading to Fear Itself, because Marvel can never just let anyone heal in peace, and at least I’m here for it. 

New Avengers (2004–2010) #48–#60 (ish)

While Tony is getting ready for his Sleeping Beauty arc, Bucky gathers the New Avengers crew in Steve’s old place and tries very hard to turn it into his own MCU-style Avengers compound where they all live, train, and pine for each other.

Now, since we’re aggressively cutting content unless it’s relevant to ships or breakdowns, the important thing that happens here is this: Bucky and Peter are finally in the same room. That’s it. That’s the post.

Okay, fine, a little more: those five seconds of on-screen interaction that birthed an entire winterspider ship get canon support here. Peter’s there. Bucky’s there. They talk. There are panels. They breathe the same air. I blacked out slightly from excitement, but trust—it happened.

Plot-wise, Luke and Jessica are off having the worst parenting arc imaginable, because Skrulls kidnapped their baby and everyone (and I do mean everyone) is running around 616 trying to beat intel out of any remaining lizard still in hiding. The power of friendship prevails, the baby is found (yay), and in the process we learn Bucky has allegedly never been close to a baby before (?), and Peter announces—with a lot of surprise—that babies don’t actually smell bad, which honestly makes it sound like he’s never met one either. Boys, please.

Bucky’s base officially gets named Avengers Hideout, Bronx, plot is plotting toward Siege (ugh, another Event), but the key takeaways are:

Peter keeps calling him “Bucky Cap” like it’s a cute nickname. Bucky hates it and keeps asking him to quit it.

Peter unmasks in record time—doesn’t learn from his mistakes, obviously—because he wants Bucky to see how pretty he is.

Jessica straight-up admits (in front of her husband, no less) that she was totally in love with Peter in high school on the account of him being so pretty just to point it out to Bucky, and I just… yeah.

Everyone keeps sitting down for family dinners while still wearing their uniforms, and this has so many found-family vibes it needs shit written about this group specifically yesterday. I would, but… nobody would read it.

Oh—and Issue #55 puts Peter on top of Bucky on the cover. Physically. As in: on him. And that’s the moment I briefly forgot this was a winteriron timeline and started vibrating at frequencies only my dog could hear.

But circling back: two seconds after unmasking, Peter has a small meltdown about it (relatable), doesn’t trust anyone, and wants to crawl back into the safety of full-body spandex. That said, he’s still on the team (Bucky’s real pretty too), they act as illegal Avengers, do some adventuring with Dr. Strange, fight Osborn’s evil version of Avengers, nearly die a bunch of times during cathartic superhero shit, Bucky gets to yell “Avengers Assemble,” and Peter pouts because he never gets to say it. 

The whole stretch of this is basically winterspider fanservice in disguise, and I, for one, am not complaining. But I should probably stop thinking or talking about it before I completely defect from winteriron and write 80k of Peter stammering while Bucky Cap cleans his gun.

Captain America: Reborn (2009) #1–6

Essentially the mini-run where Steve returns to Sharon through the power of eye contact with Bucky.

After all this build-up and me repeating “Steve is dead” about a hundred times, he was not so much dead as he was... time-stuck? Yeah. Marvel got tired of resurrection by cloning, so we get a super special time gun that launched Steve into his own greatest hits playlist. As the run goes on and other things are happening, Steve is bouncing around his own past like a patriotic screensaver, reliving key moments of his life on an endless loop. (It’s philosophical for like five pages and then becomes deeply boring, very fast.)

In the actual present-day plot everyone suddenly remembers that Steve was hot, important, symbolically useful, and very marketable. So, naturally, Osborn wants him, would love to slap a fresh coat of fascism on the shield, and trot him out like a rebranded action figure next to his other evil Avengers. To make this happen, Osborn teams up with Crossbones and Sin, and they start executing their weekend-at-Bernie’s plan to put Red Skull into Steve’s body.

Bucky, meanwhile, just wants his other man back. For normal, definitely not gay reasons.

What Tony is doing exactly during this specific run is a bit… unclear? Captain America: Reborn #1 dropped in July 2009, which lines up with Tony’s World’s Most Wanted, so he’s either just starting his “on the run with a dying processor” arc or already napping through it all, too medically unconscious to be helpful. If you know what happens first, congrats. I don’t care. Steve’s back by the time Tony wakes up, so let’s not split hairs.

Anyway, the bad guys get to Steve first and yank him out of the time vortex. They plug Red Skull into him like a USB drive of evil, Steve wakes up a bit wrong, throws Bucky around a little, but fear not: Stucky prevails. 

That thing happens. You know the thing. The thing where Steve sees Bucky’s pretty face and immediately has an emotional aneurysm. The Red Skull is yeeted out, Sin takes a near-fatal injury to her face (which we’re calling a literal and metaphorical facelift), and is carted off to be annoying—but now also creepy-looking and a lot less hot—in some later arc.

I am sure it will not surprise anyone to find out that Steve spends the final pages of this run brooding on the roof instead of celebrating because he’s allergic to joy and addicted to foreshadowing.

Invincible Iron Man (2008–2012) Stark: Disassembled #20–24

(Tony commits medical fraud on himself while his boyfriends squabble over his coma body)

So, post-World’s Most Wanted—triggered by Secret Invasion, public disgrace, and Bucky deciding “hey, maybe I’ll just walk away from you with everyone else for dramatic effect”—we kick things off with Tony being officially, clinically, but not quite spiritually bricked. The issue opens with him lying in a bed like a hot paperweight while Bucky, Nat, Maria, Pepper, and Thor stand around—Bucky specifically looking way too emotionally engaged for someone who hasn’t been banging Tony in secret all along.

“We bring him back. We have to.”

And may I gently remind the class that, even if we set aside my unrelenting ship brain for five whole seconds, so far in the canon continuity we have:

Tony giving Bucky the shield and making him Captain America within an hour after Bucky tries to murder-kill him

Tony designing him a suit (collab-style, no less) and protecting him from the government

No joint panels for X amount of time until battle with Skrull

Tony sending the digital ghost of himself to Bucky, labeled “do not open unless you miss me”

And yet Marvel’s official stance is: nah they barely interacted, so you don't get those panels.

Excuse me?

Then why the everloving fuck is Bucky, presumably a nearly-stranger, in this arc at all and acting like he shares Tony’s pillow every night? It’s like they want you to fill in the blanks here with shippy shit just so you keep paying for their comic books in the hopes of seeing some established heroes finally come out.

Anyway. While Tony did nuke his entire brain to protect Peter (and, like, some other heroes, presumably—but mostly Peter, even though he has no clue how pretty he is at this point), Tony, being Tony, obviously left behind a reboot plan. And that plan includes a totally chill, completely medically sound procedure that requires:

Extracting Pepper’s arc reactor, which she has for reasons

Putting it in Tony’s chest (for the first time ever in 616, so this is his MCU origin finally catching up)

Zapping him with Thor’s lightning, because we’re just skipping every actual defibrillator in the hospital

Using Steve’s shield because of symbolism

Totally normal ER behavior. Ten out of ten doctors recommend rooftop resurrection. But we won’t question comic book logic, because if we did that, well, why the fuck are we here? 

The plan is solid, let’s go with that, but there is a minor hiccup with Pepper. She’s understandably cranky—her husband Happy is very dead, and Tony had to pull the plug on him during Civil War, which sucks. Still, the moment she hits us with “why does he get to be saved?” I have to step in and say: girl. He gave you this arc reactor to save your life, your own flying suit, and your CEO badge, not to mention an orgasm the last time you’ve interacted, unless you faked it, but that's on you. At least let the man be electrocuted into consciousness without sounding a bit ungrateful.

Which Pepper does, of course, but only after Steve comes back from being freshly de-time-looped and convinces her to help. One guy already sporting a suit of Captain America by Tony’s deathbed wasn’t enough, clearly, but Tony was always an overachiever.

They take Tony to the roof of the hospital (because that’s where all high-stakes neurological procedures happen), and Thor tries to zap him back to life, but this unfortunately doesn’t work immediately. Bucky is there, by the way, hovering next to his head like a sad war widow after helping carry Tony out, and is essentially drawn just about not looking down at his face like he’s memorizing it. Again I ask: why can’t winteriron be canon? Like… gimme a What If, Marvel. What If for popular fanfiction ships would slap.

So they try, but Tony, in true diva form, is like, no thanks, not waking up today, which is valid, because emotional hurt/comfort was not invented by fanfiction. 

It takes a lot of fuckery and a few comic book issues to eventually get him to wake up, and Bucky is, sadly, not there when it finally happens, but neither is Steve (suspiciously). I am going to have to assume here that they both stepped away to get a quick break before returning to his side, and possibly shared a shower to conserve some water. 

The day is saved by Dr. Strange, who rolls into town with “Trust me, I am a doctor” dialogue, which never gets old.

Boom, Tony wakes up, the arc is over, but what follows is just… devastating. The arc ends with us realizing that he doesn’t remember Civil War, doesn’t remember fighting Steve or losing him, doesn’t remember being Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Secret Invasion. And, obviously, after all of that… doesn’t remember Bucky anymore. 

Bucky, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. But listen: I believe in you. If there’s one constant in the fandom, it’s that Tony Stark will fall in love, given literally any opportunity and no matter the roadblocks. And, yay, you didn’t actually snap his mom’s neck in this one, so you’ve totally got this. Go, ruin him a second time. For love. Come on, honey, time to move in together. 

Which they do. They do move in together. I mean, okay, technically they are both using Avengers Tower as Avengers after this (or about to), and I’m not actually clear on if they both live in it, but we’re gonna assume they do. Yes? I honestly haven’t checked, as it’s been a while, but this is your golden era of heroes (fact), we have an Avengers team in the Tower again, so let’s not dig too much into whether Bucky is ‘crashing’ with Steve for old time’s sake or not. Cool? Cool. So, it’s been established—possibly in canon, and definitely in this house—that Bucky moved in, either into his own suite in the Tower or into Tony’s.

BUT before we get to the domestic vibes and unresolved sexual tension, we have to speedrun through one more crossover Event (I know, I’m exhausted too). Don’t worry, I promised lore restraint, and for once, I’m keeping that promise. Because Siege (2009) #1–4 is blessedly short and dumb in a fun way.

So here’s what happens just after Tony wakes up without Extremis, with an arc reactor and no memories of Bucky:

Asgard is hovering over some random Oklahoma field.

Loki and Osborn go full bitch collab and convince the government that Asgard is a threat.

Steve, Bucky, Peter, and some other warm bodies show up to unfuck the situation before it becomes World War Norse.

Ares and Sentry have a deeply unchill throwdown, and Sentry tears him into ribbons. It’s gross. Ares is super dead.

Tony gets invited to the fight while still running on maybe 3% battery and a single juice box. They hand him a wrench and his old suit and say, “get in, loser, we’re going to war.”

Asgard is blown to smithereens because Tony is taking his time, but we’re not going to blame it on him, for once.

Peter gets to punch Osborn for harassing him across the last six events and ignoring the restraining order.

When Tony does show up, he turns a helicarrier into a bullet to take down Sentry, who gets a bit upset that he went all murdery again (Yes, there is a panel. Yes, it’s as stupid-cool as it sounds. Shut up and let it happen.)

Sentry, over his own edgy nonsense, begs to die, and Thor respectfully flies him into the sun for a nap before he gets resurrected in some other event.

And then—most importantly—Steve gives up the shield. The basic tone of this is: “Nah, Bucky, honey, you’ve got this. I’m busy being promoted by the U.S. government to superhero dad-in-chief now that both S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.A.M.M.E.R. are gone, so keep the shield and, while you’re at it, keep Tony. I’m over brunettes and going to shack up with Sharon for a bit.” (Which we are totally cool with, since—I cannot state this enough—we love Sharon, and this is a winteriron timeline.)

So, the end of this event kicks off: Steve being in charge of them all, metaphorically blessing their union, which leads to Tony and Bucky being officially on the same team. Working together. In close proximity. In the Tower. With shared living spaces, presumably. 

Before they fully move in together to set the scene for perfect pining, we also get a pit stop in Invincible Iron Man (2008–2012) #25, where we find out for sure that the backup Tony left was pre-Extremis. So, factory reset, for which the man is pretty much called lazy, because if there’s one thing you’d think you’d keep backups of, it’s your brain, but alas.

It takes only two of Marvel’s allegedly smartest men—Reed “I ditch my family for Tony during Civil War” Richards and Tony “I fucked up my brain for love” Stark—to build the Bleeding Edge suit, which now lives inside Tony, and honestly, I can’t believe Reed/Tony isn’t more of a thing as far as shippy shit goes, because they’ve got that bisexual genius mutual-respect-disaster dynamic, and it is right there. But I digress.

The rest of Invincible Iron Man (2008–2012) is... not really my fave. Tony tries to fix his reputation, build Stark Resilient from the rubble of his company (idk, maybe Pepper not wanting him to wake up was because she drove SI into the ground, down to one helicopter and the logo), and revolutionize clean energy. But unless it’s relevant to Fear Itself or involves Bucky being lovingly exasperated while Tony does something reckless, I’m not covering the rest of this run. We’ve got enough emotional ruin on the itinerary already. Onward.

We make another quick stop at Captain America (2004–2011) #600–605—but first, a PSA: after issue #50, Marvel smashed the legacy renumber button. Who the fuck knows why, honestly. Timeline-wise: this specific arc happens before Bucky joins the Avengers. So, while Tony is doing his thing, re-downloading trauma into his shiny new Bleeding Edge brain, Bucky yeets himself back into solo plotlines for just a second. The plotlines happening in #600 and #601–605 are those that are too stupid not to mention.

Captain America (2004–2011) #600 is essentially Vampire Bullshit (yes, really).

This issue is a flashback inside a flashback and is set during the time when Bucky was secretly working with Fury during Civil War. Bucky sees surveillance footage of Tony and Steve’s friendship break-up, immediately decides Tony is too sexy to be such a fucking idiot, and has a sadboi spiral about a vampire mission from the good ol’ days with Steve for no reason. Because, oh yeah, in 616 we have full-ass Dracula lore, and nobody warned me about it before I got invested. I am only mentioning this because people are into vampires, and the art is fire.

Captain America (2004–2011) #601–605 is more of a filler too, but it has a ton of SamBucky vibes, and there’s some wild shit buried in the nonsense.

The plot of the arc is that Steve’s wackass clone—the one who’s been running around pretending to be the original—is back and has decided he is absolutely the real Captain America. And, logically, if you’re the Real Cap, you need two things:

Your own Bucky

Some sort of epic standoff at a historical place (in this case, Hoover Dam, which Evil Clone wants to blow up)

I’ve seen fanfic with less cracky premises, but let’s not get into that. When actual Bucky and Sam show up to put an end to the clone, they immediately get kidnapped, because of course. Clone Steve forces Bucky to dress up in his old Bucky suit (not the sexy kind of forced dress-up, tragically), and there’s a moment of “haha, look at the symbolism” before Bucky’s like “absolutely fucking not,” and some fighting happens. Sam gets his hero moment, Bucky ends things messily, and the clone gets his brains ventilated.

SamBucky shippers, you’ve got a lot of material here, so go read this. Do I personally care? Not unless they’re both thinking about Tony while it’s happening.

Now, important footnote that has absolutely no business making me feel things but does anyway: Nick Fury tinkers with Bucky’s metal arm and changes it to look and feel human. Because Natasha complained it was too cold. That’s right—this man is getting tune-ups because his girlfriend wants him to be warmer during post-mission snuggles. To which I say: boo.

I mean, sure, thoughtful gestures are fine, but the arm is iconic, and Tony would never complain about it. Tony would absolutely be into the cold-metal aesthetic. He’d imply or straight-up admit that he wants to do indecent things to it. He’d design a docking port, if needed. He’d name it. The whole “warm and flesh-colored” moment doesn’t even last too many issues, because readers (and the artists, probably) were like, “bring back the chrome daddy murder limb, thanks.”

In all seriousness, Bucky doesn’t actually spend a lot of time as an Avenger, because, let’s face it, he’s infinitely sexier as the Winter Soldier, but he does officially join the team alongside Tony, Peter, Thor, Clint, Wolverine and Spider-Woman, and dutifully, suspiciously consistently hovers around Tony in Avengers (2010–2012) #1–6. Does he do much during these issues? Debatable. Is he 100% looming like a broody protector from a soulmate AU? Absolutely.

But as it stands now, Tony and Bucky officially kick off Avengers Vol. 4 together, which means all those “Bucky is an Avenger” fanfics are comic book canon, babes. Whether those fanfic authors knew it or just manifested it through pure gay desperation, they were right. And while winteriron overlap here only lasts one arc, and it’s very sad that it is only one arc, that just means there’s more unsupervised shippy headcanon space between the panels for us to thrive in. Bless.

Plot-wise the arch is a bit… meh. Let’s speedrun it too.

Steve, now promoted to Grand Poobah of All Capes, pulls a bunch of new teams together and sticks my favorite disaster OT3—Tony, Bucky, and Peter (plus Clint, but we’re not calling it an OT4 yet, calm down)—onto one team. Then he has the nerve to tell Tony he believes in him, totally trusts him, but, like, also he’s not leading the team. That honor goes to... Maria Hill. Which. Okay. Sure. Let’s put the only non-super hero in charge here just so Tony doesn’t feel forgiven yet. 

Before Tony can spiral about it, Kang busts in from the future like a knockoff Doctor Who villain he is and starts ranting about how the team's future kids are ruining everything. Whose kids, do you ask? Great question. Tony and Bucky’s? Peter’s and literally anyone’s? No idea. But the plot is essentially a “spin the bottle of disaster lineage” situation, and Kang’s solution is to blackmail them into saving the timeline or something by using a doomsday device Tony once thought of but never built. So, pretty standard.

The arc itself includes time-travel shenanigans that I won’t pretend to understand. Something something paradox. The team splits, paradoxes paradox, battles happen, and eventually they punch the right number of problems to save the future. Yay, teamwork. Whatever.

But the shippy content is shippy as shit, for real. There is touching. There is Tony telling Peter he could kiss him while simultaneously Tony doing his “I’m the smartest bitch alive” routine while clearly trying to impress someone while showing off too much skin. 

I’m going to call out specific panels next because they’re so choice, but just know this: Avengers (2010–2012) #1–6 is short but shippy.

Okay, okay, the ones above are related to what I’ve described already in regards to Steve. A tasteful sampler for Stony shippers and to confirm the plot. And I’m not gonna post every single panel of Bucky lurking in Tony’s personal space (mostly because there’s an image limit and I do respect the platform… a little). BUT. I am gonna drop the best bits below. The hovering. The loitering. The tragic staring. 

Fine, it’s not that direct, as if, but yes, the following selection should be considered evidence_for_court_dot_png. Screenshots for the soul. Brought to you by someone who has stared at these pages long enough to astral project into the Tower HVAC system where Bucky is 1000% hiding between missions, watching Tony solder wires and trying not to feel things.

Exhibit A: They finish each other’s sentences. Yeah. I know. It’s crumbs. It’s microscopic. It’s blink-and-miss-it-tier. But when Marvel gives you nothing to work with but mutual trauma of losing Steve and two panels of syncopated dialogue, it’s not nothing. That’s foreplay. We are starving in this house, okay? Let me romanticize it in peace.

Or like—okay, maybe we’re not totally starving on the Starker front here (don’t yell at me, I contain multitudes), because at one point Tony’s suit just gives up on life, he starts free-falling like a hot brick, and someone—either Bucky or Clint, the art’s unclear but my delulu ass knows it’s Bucky—screams “TONY!” out of a hole in the wall instead of, y’know, fighting the actual villains. Priorities.

Peter, a hero that he is, immediately goes full-action scramble to save Tony mid-air while Tony, mid-plummet, casually calls him “kid” (identity porn alert), and then says, “I could kiss you.”

Sir.

Peter, to his credit, declines on the grounds of delicate skin, which: fair, but also, babe… Tony would definitely shave for you. Probably exfoliate too. I promise he could make it work.

I mean, maybe Peter refuses because deep down he knows he can’t come between one true love. He sees Bucky, sticking out from a wall hole in all that glorious anxiety, and he understands the assignment. Either that or he’s just playing hard to get. I respect the drama either way, can’t help it. I am so close to shipping all four of my boys, Clint included, in any combinations. Think about it. Winteriron (duh), Starker (must), Winterhawk (practically canon), Ironhawk (I am so tempted) and, of course, Winterspider (love). I digress again, sorry. 

This one’s more of a filler panel compilation, yeah, but it still delivers. Our boys are in sync, working together like they’ve definitely coordinated some covert tactical positions before (interpret that however you want). Bucky, once again, is framed so delicately on purpose, making sure Tony tells them what he needs from him and Peter. It’s the casual “I’ve got your back” energy from a semi-stranger, y’know. As soon as this mission’s done, they should all just—you know. Fuck.

Wait—no, sorry, wrong tab. I meant: Bucky and Tony should fuck. Peter can watch. Or, like, sit in another room and wait to be invited. Whatever works for the perverts reading this, I’m not judging and only reporting the vibes.

Obviously, I’m closing out the Avengers Vol. 4 evidence folder with this gem, because yes—it has touching. As in, Tony just got a little shaken and fucked-up (as one does), and who’s right there leaning in all concerned? That’s right: Bucky “I’ll die for him” Barnes, hand on Tony’s bicep like it’s muscle memory. He’s saying “Here,” which—okay, on paper? Innocent. But in context? It’s soft. It’s intimate. It’s “Sweetheart, you okay?” levels of tender.

Let’s assume for a minute that I’m not a full-blown ship obsessed crazy person here foaming at the mouth and reading into every panel like it’s a biblical text, but even then—what the actual fuck goes through a writer or artist’s mind when they’re like, “yeah let’s frame this with Bucky gently bicep-gripping Tony like he’s checking if the love of his life is still breathing”? Huh?

Tell me with your chest that isn’t deliberate. I dare you. I’m not going to insist it’s a declaration of love disguised as casual concern, but I am saying this is basically the comics equivalent of Bucky whispering “I’ve got you” in a fanfic and then carrying Tony bridal-style out of frame. So jot that down.

Vibration intensifies.

Alright, now that we’ve lovingly and obsessively established that Tony and Bucky were officially on the same Avengers team (canonically sharing air, a fridge full of Red Bull, and Peter), and that this blessed overlap gave us just enough panel crumbs to construct an entire alternate reality fueled by ship vibes and bicep touches, let’s look at what happens after.

While Tony remains on the team after that sweet little team-up moment in Avengers (2010–2012) #1–6, Bucky straight-up ghosts. Poof. No warning. One minute he’s leaning into Tony like a man who wants to be electrocuted back to life with him, and the next, he’s vanished.

Now, I don’t know exactly why his run as Bucky Cap-slash-Avenger was cut shorter than my will to live during Civil War and Secret Invasion re-reads. Maybe it’s because Steve not being Cap wasn't working out for the marketing team. Maybe it’s—yes—because the Winter Soldier aesthetic is just too hot to retire permanently (fair). Or maybe Marvel realized Bucky can only pretend to be emotionally stable for like six issues before the PTSD starts leaking out of the boots, and if he keeps sharing a frame with Tony, the bicep touches will get out of hand.

Whatever the reason, we pivot into something incredibly juicy.

Bucky’s got some personal shit to handle. And by “personal shit” I don’t mean repressing the urge to steal Sharon’s man in Captain America (2004–2011), but being put on trial for war crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier while brainwashed by evil communists. Not gonna lie, it’s one of my favorite arcs. Fuck, the angst is unbearable and hurts so good. 

Okay, so Captain America (2004–2011) #606–610 is not a filler arc, and I know I’ve cried wolf on that like ten times already, but for real—this one actually slaps. It’s got plot, it’s got emotional devastation, and it’s got Zemo crawling out of whatever ratty purple monologue hole he’s been lurking in just to make Bucky’s life worse.

Now, Zemo’s beef with Bucky is big. Like, giant man-child grudge levels. And this beef ends with Zemo outing Bucky as the Winter Soldier. Globally. Just absolutely fucking blows his cover sky-high. Everyone sees it. Everyone knows. And it quickly becomes a problem for many people—Tony included—who now has to defend the decision he doesn’t remember making to offer Bucky the shield. 

Captain America (2004–2011) #611–615, or The Trial of Captain America should’ve been called ‘Let’s Emotionally Eviscerate Bucky Barnes for Five Issues Straight While Tony Has a Slow-Burn Breakdown in the Background’.

I’m gonna be real with you, this arc is fucking devastating. Like, genuinely painful. Not "oh no the plot is bad", but the "I'm gonna lie face down on the floor for 20 minutes after reading this and think about metal arms and unspoken love". Bucky gets thrown in prison, Tony nerfs his arm down to “just a guy” strength levels so they don’t take it from him entirely, and everything spirals from there like we knew it would.

This arc is so good, Marvel actually dropped a whole omnibus just for it. Character deep dives. Legal drama. Violence and introspection in tasteful grayscale. The court of public opinion don’t give a single flying fuck, and as far as the media is concerned, Bucky’s guilty before he even sets foot in the courtroom, because who cares about being a weaponized trauma victim when there’s a sexy scandal headline to run.

Tony is out here defending Bucky at Avengers meetings, going toe-to-toe with Clint like “Hey maybe don’t be a bitch about my sad ex-Winter Soldier boyfriend, thanks.” And you know Clint’s only mad because he sees it too. He’s like “wow, Tony’s very emotionally involved in this, should I be jealous?” (Answer: yes, always.)

Jokes aside, while Bucky is trying very hard to rot in a jail cell with dignity, Sin is out here popping up out of the woodwork again. She picks up a new himbo sidekick, goes full daddy-issues-core and decides she’s going to be the next Red Skull. She now also looks the part and there are too many panels of her making out with no face on. Ugh. She kidnaps Nat and Sam since they are Bucky’s support humans, and lures him into escaping custody for a rescue mission.

Bucky, of course, breaks out, saves the people he loves, and then walks his pretty ass right back to jail. Voluntarily. Because he wants to face the consequences. Because he wants to take responsibility. Because he’s like “yeah I was brainwashed and had zero free will but I still feel like I deserve to be punished for it” and if you’re not sobbing yet, you’re stronger than me.

Oh, and just when the trial actually goes his way—somehow—after he literally pleads guilty, and they sentence him to 20 years with time served (read: “you can go now, sweetie”), he gets deported to Russia. Because they already ran their own shady little trial in secret and decided they want their war weapon back. So the arc ends with our boy being sent to a fucking gulag just as he finds the will to want to be free, like he hasn’t suffered enough. 

Captain America (2004–2011) #616–619 is where Bucky goes to an awful-awful Russian place, mentally dies a bit, and Tony is mentioned twice so I had to read it twice.

So, America yeets Bucky back to Russia like he’s a slightly defective product, and now he’s stuck in a gulag, getting punched for sport while slowly dissociating into the cold steel of his trauma. Fun? Hell no. It is bleak. Bucky’s not doing great. There’s blood. There’s pain. There’s soul-crushing monotony and flashbacks to violence, in addition to real-time violence. And just to twist the knife, there are not one but two separate mentions that “Iron Man” might visit—as in, “Hey, maybe your hot billionaire will come get you out?” (almost). And then... crickets. Tony, come pick up your future husband from the Russian fight club before I scream.

Tony, for reasons unknown, doesn’t visit. But Sharon and Nat, being badass motherfuckers, hop on a plane to go figure out what the fuck is happening in Russia, because someone has to. Steve, for his part, is doing his own thing in the U.S., but I’m going to go ahead and headcanon that he’s spending this time babysitting Tony, making him tea, and deleting Russian headlines from the Stark servers.

Anyway, our boy Bucky is spending most of his days getting his ass handed to him in pit fights while wearing the same sad grey hoodie of despair. He’s isolated, miserable, and yet still hot enough to make the snow in that Siberian awfulness melt. He’s also being reminded that oh yeah—he trained a handful of elite sleeper agents to infiltrate the U.S., and they’re still out there, frozen like evil murder popsicles. And if he doesn’t help stop them, someone else is gonna wake them up and let the body count begin, which he eventually will do in his Winter Soldier comic book run (which I am also not covering here, but I might do a from Winter Soldier to Revolution timeline, just for fun, because you all need to know how he gets Alpine, at some point in the future.) 

In present, however, Nat’s like “fuck this, I’m done waiting for my bestie” (and I’m using his words here, because Bucky keeps calling her his best friend every ten minutes), so she punches some bad guys, wrecks some shit, and assists Bucky in breaking himself out. The whole arc is God-tier content, cross my heart. I am here for the quiet devastation in Bucky’s eyes, the offhand Tony mentions, and the subtle, soul-shattering reminder that no matter how far he runs, the Winter Soldier still owns his nightmares.

Anyway, this arc ends with the jailbreak, and, just for drama, let's say that the real prison is the guilt Bucky carries. And the other real prison is me, in hell, because Marvel refuses to just let him be held by a certain genius. But we’ll get there. If not in comic books, then in fanfiction.

So… Fear Itself. The end of the road for this entire recap. The tragic gay crescendo. The dramatic mic drop that Marvel fucked at our collective heads just when things were getting soft.

If you’ve been here since the beginning (blink twice if you need help), you now know this whole cursed journey from Extremis/The Man Out of Time to this point is essentially two parallel, occasionally intersecting trauma arcs.

Fear Itself is the moment everything unravels again, beautifully and horrifically. It’s not just about Bucky dying (kinda) or about the ship angst that comes with that (although, hi, yes, that’s here and I’m sobbing into my keyboard). It’s about him stepping out from under Steve’s red-white-and-blue shadow, finally—not to replace him, not to cosplay patriotism—but to carry his own name and start working on his own legacy to eventually ditch being Winter Soldier and become Revolution waaaay later. It’s also about Tony breaking his sobriety for… reasons. 

To me this Marvel event doesn’t just close out a plotline, but very much closes a loop. Fear Itself is where my fic (last plug) taps out, too—because yes, obviously, I take some creative liberties and give these blorbos a happy ending. 

Gather ‘round, kids. It’s lore time. Once upon a clusterfuck, Odin locked away a spooky little number under the ocean. And then, slightly less once upon a time, Red Skull decided to help Hitler win the war the old-fashioned way, flexed a casual genocide of a thousand of Namor’s people to summon some eldritch hammer of power, which immediately crashed down to Earth in a very normal "Hi, I’m here to ruin everything" fashion.

Unfortunately for Red Skull at the time, he couldn’t lift it, so this evil hammer just sat there in Antarctica until Red Skull’s deeply unwell daughter Sin shows up, picks it up, gets a makeover that does nothing to fix her very unsettling face, becomes Skadi, the herald and unlocks the real boss of the game: The Serpent. Also known as Odin’s creepy brother, also known as the OG All-Father, also known as Evil Sea Dad. And in Fear Itself #1 Odin takes one look at this cosmic horror comeback, goes “SHIT,” slaps Thor so hard he needs therapy, packs his sparkly god bags, and hauls Asgard’s ass off the planet, leaving the rubble behind like, “Good luck, Midgard, I’m out, don’t @ me,” dipping the second things got spicy just as Tony was going to use Stark Resilient to build them a new home instead of the one destroyed in the Siege and create some jobs for hard-working Americans in the process. 

In Fear Itself #2, the Serpent chucks a bunch more evil hammers at Earth, and these babies are pure apocalyptic energy designed to possess anyone who can pick them up with unresolved rage issues. Juggernaut is like “yoink, this is mine now,” Hulk gets one too and turns into the green embodiment of a nuclear anxiety attack. Titania, bless her scary wife soul, grabs one and says “I’m built for this,” and points her hubby in the direction of his. Others follow, but you get the idea. Serpent goes full Oprah, giving out divine rage steroids: You get a hammer! You get a hammer! Fuck you, everything’s on fire! Earth is then immediately on fire, and humanity’s general response is: “Uhhh hey Avengers? Y’all up?”

Fear Itself #3 is the issue that neither I nor Tony are ready to fucking process. Like, if you’ve got coping mechanisms, good for you, but I personally had to go and hug my doggo after reading it for the recap, and I will be purging my phone of those screenshots as soon as I post this.

Here’s the quick and dirty: Odin, in peak absentee space-dad form, locks Thor off-world because he disagrees with his grand plan—to burn Earth to stop the Serpent—and I’m not even going to get into that because my blood pressure is already high. On Earth, the Thing picks up one of those evil rage-hammers, but this issue is really all about Bucky.

Bucky, fresh off his Siberian trauma vacation, is back in the field, back in the stars and stripes, trying his best to pretend he's fine and definitely not still bleeding guilt from every pore or missing Tony. He rolls up as Captain America to fight Sin, who, and I say this with my whole chest, is the worst. She goes on a rant about how it's her destiny to kill him (whatever you say, twat), and then that rotting cheeto of a fascist feral child rips off Bucky’s metal arm, guts him, and beats him to death with her hammer.

I can’t even be funny about it. I mean, I will, but just know I am heartbroken, even though the dying doesn’t stick, obviously. Tony’s not on the page when it happens, but he feels it in his soul, okay? Somewhere, wherever he is at that moment, something slips from his hand and he looks off into the middle distance, because he just knows he’s lost the one person who never asked him to be anyone but himself.

That’s where we’re at. Bucky gets murdered by a Nazi in a shitty bondage outfit. Fuck you, Sin, and fuck you, Marvel, for making me go through this.

As a side note, the evil hammer powers amplify the supers who picked them up, so there’s death, carnage and all-in-all shit all over the world, with people going crazy, dying by buckets, riots, looters, etc, the Serpent feeding on fear. But who cares, Bucky’s dead.

Okay so, Fear Itself #4 is where I throw my hands in the air, say “fuck it,” and recap it alongside Invincible Iron Man (2008–2012) #503–509—because even though Bucky is dead for now, the ship goggles are still on and I refuse to take them off. Half the ship might be six feet under as far as the reader is concerned at this point, but sorry MCU, your impact was weak, and that never stopped us before.

Now, in the main event issue, we find Tony standing over Bucky’s very dead, very ruined body, and he’s got the helmet on. Which is… interesting. Because in basically every other important conversation Tony has, that helmet is off. The consensus here should be that if he takes it off, we’ll all see the tears and collapse. So yeah. He’s got it on. He’s grieving. And yes, we noticed.

Nat is openly crying over Bucky’s body too, our girl has range, Steve picks up the shield, and Thor, fresh off being grounded by his shitty space dad, shows up to help punch things. But the real butterfly effect of Bucky getting bludgeoned to death is this: Tony relapses straight after. Total coincidence. He sacrifices his sobriety as soon as he leaves the room Bucky’s in, pours a drink in the middle of a ruined world, and prays to Odin since, according to him, he’s giving him the only valuable thing he’s got left.

Eventually, Odin (who is, in fact, also the worst) transports Tony off-world to a magical forge because sure, let the sad tin man cry into the bottle surrounded by dwarves while he tries to make some weapons to help the Avengers beat the Serpent, and maybe he’ll feel better. He doesn’t. He angsts the whole time, but he does build new weapons for the Avengers, and at the end of this arc he shows up back on Earth in a new, shiny, spiky Iron Man suit, still under the impression Bucky is dead.

Next slide, please. Let’s, for the moment, stop being heartbroken because of Bucky and get heartbroken for other reasons.

Fear Itself #5–7 is three issues of watching the Avengers get their collective asses handed to them while everything explodes and hope gets dropkicked into the sun. Like, things are bad. So bad that even Peter—sweet sunshine boy, human serotonin dispenser, the kid who once tried to high-five a symbiote—starts having a crisis because he thinks they’re actually gonna lose. And when Peter loses hope, that’s when you know we’re absolutely fucked.

For a bit, Steve and Thor are out here trying to hold the line, but Steve’s shield gets smashed, and Thor takes on like five rage-hammered kaiju at once and barely crawls away with internal organs still attached. There’s a whole lotta death in these issues, and when Tony shows up, decked out in a magic-ass suit made of grief, dragging along weapons for the rest of the team, and Odin gives Thor his Ragnarok sword and armor before the final fight, Thor uses it to end the Serpent—only to go down himself like the noble himbo he is.

Technically a victory, though Sin is alive to cause trouble in some other arcs, but it’s giving zero joy. No joy to be had at the end of this event. Unless, y’know, you count Fear Itself #7.1 that—phew—confirms that Bucky is alive.

No way a babe as hot as this gets to die. Not on Nat and Fury’s watch. In a flashback, we learn that just before Tony walks into the room with his “My God… it’s true” entrance, Nat and Fury injected Bucky with a serum. In fairness, it wasn’t guaranteed to work, and they needed Steve back in the game and figured traumatizing him into reclaiming the shield was a solid strategy. Normal friend stuff.

So yeah. Bucky technically flatlined, but got better. Was it sketchy? Extremely. Did they tell Steve right away? Absolutely not. When Fury eventually spills, Steve punches him. Repeatedly. They say their goodbyes, Bucky gives Steve the spotlight back, and slinks off to his own solo title, while Tony doesn’t find out Bucky’s alive for so long. Unfair, if you ask me. Perfect shippy blind spot for fanfics, if you also ask me.

I’m not here for canon. You’re not here for canon. We’re here for the sweet, unhinged dopamine injection of winteriron endgame fix-it fanfic based on MCU anyway, okay? That’s the content we deserve. That’s the timeline we manifest. Or something. Idk, I’ve been losing the plot for the past 20k of this recap, and can’t think of anything else to say that doesn’t end up being a massive rant about how Tony and Bucky are soulmates, damn everything.

And that, folks, brings us to the end, since we are skipping that rant. I wish I could give you a chirpy little bowtie ending, but this is comics. It always gets worse before it gets rebooted. No final thoughts. Get out of here knowing that winteriron prevails either way, and in any canon/headcanon. Unless it’s some other ship, since every ship is valid.

Masterpost with all parts

[icycoldninja]

Can you write a reader who’s like Mileena from Mortal Kombat

Mileena is a mutant hybrid clone of Kitana, created in Shang Tsung's flesh pits at the behest of Shao Kahn, who had become increasingly paranoid that Kitana would one day learn the truth and betray him. As a fusion of Tarkatan blood and Edenian physiology, Mileena combines and fully utilizes attributes of both races in combat, boasting incredible speed, brute strength, nimble acrobatic prowess, and frightening, carnivorous savagery matched only by Baraka.

In stark contrast to Kitana, Mileena is an evil, sadistic, cruel, twisted, hot-tempered, selfish, and psychologically unhinged opportunist whose fondest wish is to kill her "sister" and claim her existence for her own. She fights using a pair of sais and a hideous, razor-sharp Tarkatan maw which she uses to bite off chunks of human flesh and crush bones

When the boys confront the reader asking why she’s hellbent on stealing her sister identity, she finally confessed that she wished to have an identity of her own, and that she’s tired of being referred to as “Kitana’s clone” and wants to be reminded as “herself”

She felt robbed of her own autonomy and sense of self every time she looks into the mirror just to realize she’s nothing more that her sister’s clone, not a person of herself. She felt that if she kills her sister, only then she feels that she can no longer be someone’s clone, just a solitary individual

As for her mouth, she’s proud of it and yet sometimes feel shameful for having them because while they’re excellent for combat, it’s a hassle taking care of them and hide them away when needed. Because she’s half Tarkartan, she always felt as if she’s starving and it gets on her nerves a lot, so she had to restrain herself from consuming humans ( not that she had a problem for the taste, it’s just that covering up the crime scene can be a hassle and will draw more attention than needed ) so she started shifting her attention to devils

“ Anything that’s not poisonous and alive…it will go in my stomach either ways”

She’s pretty much a voracious eater as well, f eating etiquette, we’re eating plates and stuffing food down our throat now

Also, Mileena is a really brutal fighter so I can imagine the boys having the “should i be scared or turn on” face when she perform the Fatility on whatever unlucky devils happen to be nearby:

https://youtu.be/fpvzIGHueqo?si=eYoeVa63mUOVzhOr

Sure, sure. Enjoy.

Sparda boys + V x Mileena-like!Reader headcannons

¤ Dante ¤

-Dante thought you were pretty fricking hot from the moment he met you.

-Your fighting style, your insane brutality, everything was just so cool.

-He knows he should be scared when he sees you rip someone's throat muscles out with your bare hands, but at the same time, he's kinda turned on. He wonders that if you had enough strength to manhandle him during intimacy. Now that'd be something.

-He wants you to know that he loves you, and only you, for who you are and not because you happen to be a clone of someone he doesn't even know.

-He thinks your mutant mouth is pretty damn sexy, though he does wonder how he's supposed to kiss you without getting pinched by your teeth.

-Your appetite is amazing, since it's just like his. You guys could chomp away on pretty much anything, enjoying yourselves (and the food) the entire time.

■ Vergil ■

-Vergil admires your strength and exceptional battle prowess, for it is a testament to your immense POWER.

-He finds your Sais and how you use them elegant in its own bloody way.

-He has nothing to fear when you go full rabid-wolf-monster on your opponents because he knows you would never hurt him, and if you tried, he could easily defeat you.

-Finds your bizarre mouth oddly enchanting, and though he'll never admit it, he'd love to feel that long, frog-like tongue down his throat.

-He MOTIVATES you to have pride in yourself and celebrate your individuality. You are awesome, who cares about your sister? He doesn't even know who that is anyway.

-Your eating habits are disgusting, and Vergil will not hesitate to tell you this.

□ Nero □

-Nero felt bad for you, not feeling happy with yourself all because of something you couldn't control.

-It wasn't your fault you were a mutant clone, and besides, Nero is sure you're way better than the original anyway.

-He respects your strength and would love to fight alongside you in battle, but you're so brutal and violent. It's kinda scary.

-Even though Nero has seen millions of nasty demons and equally nasty ways to get rid of them, your methods are beyond anything he's ever seen before.

-He loves you lots, but doesn't want to be anywhere near you once you start ripping people's organs out, or when you decide to scarf down some of the demons' remains mid battle.

-One of the many things Nero finds attractive is that gorgeously long tongue of yours, and he often fantasizes about what you could do with it.

● V ●

-V finds your violent side rather charming, strangely enough.

-He loves watching you fight, even when you do the most obscene things like chugging a can of something, then spitting it out at your enemy, and killing them with it.

-Your abilities are truly astounding, and V never hesitates to tell you that.

-He loves you for more than your combat prowess, however, he also loves how driven and wild you are, in contrast to his reserved and introverted nature.

-He could never be scared of you, for although others view you as a hungry, cruel monster, he sees you as a broken woman who never got to live her life, always being seen as a clone of someone else.

-He wants to help you create a new identity that might aid in your mental and emotional recovery. He's patient; with time, you might be able to live a happy, stable life.

[merv606]

I, for one, firmly believe that Terry would eventually r*pe Daniel in Mercy if Daniel doesn’t give in to him, far more sooner than later. Obviously, it’s not going to happen in Mercy, but I 100% believe it would if Daniel doesn’t give in sooner than later—which we know he will. 

Terry is already molesting and sexually assaulting him repeatedly while he is asleep and/or unconscious. His touches are getting a lot more sexual and graphic in nature too. He’s getting increasingly desperate not just for Daniel’s heart, but his body. We saw in the “first kiss snippet” that Terry very brazenly groped Daniel in the dojo, and then had the audacity to be angry when Daniel moved away in fear and anxiety and discomfort. He’s getting bolder in what he’s doing to Daniel when he’s awake—the hold on his ankle, shaving his stubble, the lingering touch on the temple when Daniel wore his glasses. The kisses on the hand when Daniel saw his mother’s picture in the “Romanian snippet”. Helping Daniel into his sweater in chapter 34. Anything to get his hands on him. 

The touches and open displays of affection and lust are becoming more frequent; almost as if he’s grooming and forcing Daniel to accept more and more of his touch when he’s awake and also not so heavily drugged. Which, considering this is Terry, definitely seems like something he would do to psychologically bend Daniel to his will even further. 

It’ll work too, because Daniel is increasingly ground down and worn down by the isolation and only Terry for company; it also doesn’t work in his favor that he’s so affectionate, cuddly, and yes, sweet. He hasn’t been physical with anyone in months (even with simple affectionate gestures which are normally frequent for him), and subconsciously yearns for a kind and loving touch. This was shown when he snuggled into Terry while asleep when Terry forced them to share a bed. Also shown in how he’s grown accustomed to Terry’s hand on his back or his arm, or holding him close to his side while under the guise of escorting Daniel from room to room. Daniel doesn’t even try to resist Terry anymore. He can’t help himself. No matter how long Daniel holds out, Terry will hold out longer. 

Until he doesn’t.

Terry is an incredibly patient man, something that is both a vice and a virtue with him depending on the context, but that patience is not eternal. Considering it’s been months of Daniel bravely holding out against him while being so tantalizingly near to him—that’s a torment upon itself. 

Daniel is finally unraveling and becoming more unhinged, but so is Terry. They’re like dark mirrors of each other, and sooner or later will snap and break. And though it has been stated that Terry wants and needs Daniel to reciprocate his love and desire, and that r*ping him would ruin that dream of his—I can’t help but believe that if Daniel just kept holding out, Terry would be incredibly hurt, but also incredibly angry. There’s no way Terry would just let Daniel continue to live there with him week after week, month after month, without having him physically. Absolutely not. 

We saw what he did to Daniel to spirit him away to Moldova in the first place. I can easily see Terry saying fuck his dream of Daniel’s love and desire, and just having his way with Daniel entirely one day. He might even blame Daniel in the aftermath, saying it’s Daniel’s fault for not accepting him. Anything to justify his actions. Daniel would be too mentally damaged and broken by then to do anything, but I suppose Terry would have snapped mentally enough himself with his own actions that he would just accept it, and this shell of Daniel. If I can’t have you in one way, well…

Darkest timeline in an already dark tale, but a possibility. Always a possibility. 

Perhaps.

The motivation for refraining from doing it outright is in his mother’s words.

If you can’t remember, it can’t hurt you.

In Terry’s mind he hasn’t hurt Daniel - in any way.

Physically, those were necessary evils and not 💯 his fault, and while this stage is emotionally and mentally difficult, once again, necessary to get him to see.

Terry thinks Daniel wasn’t satisfied, and not living the life meant for him.

He is, above all things, trying to show him that.

When his boy realizes and accepts that, well, the end will have justified the means.

He’s not doing this because he wants too - he had too. For both of their sakes.

Terry doesn’t want to hurt him. He never did. That wasn’t the point when he spirited Daniel away. He wants him and this was the way he went about it -having no other option. He wants Daniel to willingly want it (him) and enjoy it (which isn’t possible at this stage) so when his control starts to slip (having what you want more than anything so close test so far away) he resorts to that.

I think a part of Terry knows if he were to truly force Daniel he would break it all beyond repair.

There is a messed up moral logic just like his messed up sense of love.

Crazy, not stupid.

[irkimatsu]

🔆

Hey Irk, I know I haven't said much lately, but I still really appreciate seeing you around, and I'm glad you're having so much fun with your self-ship! It makes me happy to see that kinda thing, hehe! (Also great to see fans of our demon show having solidarity with each other in the midst of all the hate, too! I can't wait for the rest of the FOUR SEASONS WHAT THE FFFF-)

Right back at you! I may know absolutely nothing about CRK, but I'm glad you're enjoying your time with your queen~ I haven't read the fic, I fear I'll be utterly lost, but seeing you have so much fun with it has been a delight. And other people are having fun with it, too! So damn proud of you, Lauri!

(Also thank you for sticking around even as my self-ship becomes increasingly unhinged. When I first started shipping with Ichi I still cared about maintaining some respectability, and by the time I dropped that act I'd fled to Twitter. Now I'm back and unwell. Whoopsie.)

(FOUR SEASONS, AND THEY NEVER SAID IT WAS GONNA END THERE, EITHER, HOLY SHIT. Words cannot begin to express how happy I am for Viv, Jesus Christ, she is living her dream. And that merch reveal panel is in an hour, too! Sponsored by Hot Topic! We are going places!)

[brightbeautifulthings]

Those We Drown by Amy Goldsmith

"He made it sound so simple--a girl there one moment, gone the next. But if this trip had taught me anything, it was that people didn't disappear. Things happened to them. Usually bad things."

Year Read: 2023

Rating: 2/5

About: Liv is the only scholarship student aboard the cruise ship, Eos, for an educational program called SeaMester that could be her ticket into a good college. The first night, her best friend, Will, becomes sick enough to be quarantined. The more days pass without hearing from him, the more convinced Liv becomes that something terrible is happening on the ship-- and that Will may no longer be aboard at all. As her paranoia increases, she fears that even the staff and her cohort may be part of a conspiracy of human sacrifices and old gods. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Delacorte Press. Trigger warnings: human sacrifice, abduction, injury, illness, gaslighting, classism, threats, bullying, underage drinking.

Thoughts: Everything about this, from the title and the description to the tentacles on the cover, said this book should have been for me. Watching The Beast (1996) as a kid with my dad instilled an early love in me for water monsters. Unfortunately, Those We Drown promises way more than it delivers. What little ocean horror we have is sadly underutilized, and the plot is much more focused on spiraling into paranoia and conspiracy than it is on diving into its world-building in any depth. By the time anything remotely full of teeth and tentacles appeared, not only did I no longer care, I had no idea what basis it even had for being there. Something something old gods and sacrifices. If you have a giant squid on the page and it doesn't attack anyone, what was even the point?

Instead, most of the page-time is devoted to Liv hating her rich cohort, obsessing about her ill-fated romance with Will, obsessing about yet another love/hate potential romance in Con, and chasing around increasingly ridiculous conspiracy theories. Does she have good reason for that? Yeah, absolutely. There is something nefarious aboard the Eos. But the reader came into the novel with that knowledge, and the whole is she being gaslit or is she genuinely unhinged cycle gets tired quick. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: paranoia is a difficult mood to sustain for any length of time, and it didn't endear me to Liv. Pull it together and have a little dignity, girl.

On a writing level, it reads like a first novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and the target YA audience probably won't be put off by it. Adult readers like myself might struggle a bit more. The descriptions are frequent and a bit forced, and there are some grammar and continuity errors. The first I can never help noticing (sentence fragments for days, and not as a style choice), but the second have to be glaringly obvious for me to pick up on them, since my general attitude is that time is more like a soup than a line. It makes Liv's character seem wildly inconsistent at times, though, when she walks into a glittering party going yes, this opulence suits me, to scorning it the next morning.

As I said, there's little coherent explanation of the supernatural elements, and the finale is left hugely open-ended, as if Goldsmith got so deep into her plot conspiracies that she couldn't write her way out of them. Given the complete lack of closure or explanation, I would say it reads more like the first book in a series than a standalone, but it's not billed or listed as such. Regardless, if books don't have plot closure, they should at least have thematic closure, or some general sense of why the readers and characters went through all of this. Those We Drown has none of those.

[fr3dsw0rld123]

Only Mine (Yandere Tokyo Revengers)

(This is just a draft for a story I wanna make, comment if you want more. I might add a Taiju draft thing maybe.)

Summary: You're a strong teen who recently transferred schools, with Takemichi as your clingy, weak “friend” whom you secretly despise. But soon, members of Tokyo Manji Gang Mikey, Draken, Baji, Kazutora, and Mitsuya become dangerously obsessed with you. Each one sees you as theirs alone and will do anything to keep others, especially Takemichi away from you. While Takemichi remains clueless and annoying, the others grow increasingly possessive, violent, and territorial. You try to escape their obsession, but you're surrounded by powerful, unhinged delinquents who have no intention of ever letting you go. They’ve decided; you belong to them. Forever.

You never asked for any of this.

One day, you were just a regular teen, walking home from school with Takemichi by your side, listening to him ramble on about his latest pathetic blunder. You never understood why you still hung out with him. Maybe it was habit. Maybe it was pity. Or maybe you liked having someone to look down on.

He was weak. He cried too much. He clung to you like a lifeline and that was starting to piss you off.

But ever since you transferred to a new school in Shibuya, things began to change.

It started with Mikey.

You met him by accident. He’d spotted you beating up a thug that tried to steal your bag. His eyes lit up like you were the sun itself.

“Oi,” he said, smiling like a devil in a child's skin. “You’re strong. I like that. What’s your name?”

You gave it, reluctantly. Mikey never forgot it.

From that day on, he followed you like a shadow.

At first, it was kind of flattering Mikey was cool, after all. But then the stares lingered too long. He started showing up outside your house. You caught him watching you sleep once, standing outside your window at 3AM. But you brush it off as a weird nightmare.

Then came Draken.

Mikey introduced you to him, and instantly Draken’s eyes darkened with something feral. “You’re the one Mikey keeps talking about.” He looked you up and down. “Tch. I see why.”

He treated you like glass because in his eyes you were fragile, like a flower untouched from the cruel world.

You didn’t even have to talk to him. Just existing in his presence made him possessive. He once nearly beat a man to death just for brushing against your arm on a train.

And it didn’t stop there.

Baji, always wild and chaotic, treated you like a prize. “You belong with me,” he growled after cornering you in an alley. “I’d burn Tokyo to keep you.” His fists were always bloodied, and sometimes... you feared it wasn’t just from fights.

He is extremely protective over you and can get a bit jealous at times. Sometimes will tighten his grip or he will grit his teeth when a person is near a five mile radius of you two.

Kazutora the deceiving and the delusional smiling bastard with those broken eyes, he gives you gifts, stolen trinkets, dead animals, pieces of his own hair. Usually he always leaves a note saying something along the lines of "I love you so much here's my gift to you <3 from ???" he stalks watches you when no one else is around. Leaving you feeling like someone is always watching you. Overall he just wants to make sure you get home safe cause he is obsessed in love with you.

Well Mitsuya, calm and kind is the most safest yandere yet. He made you custom clothes that looked like wedding attire, but at times you wondered how he knew your exact measurements when he hadn't even measured you. Mitsuya has told you he could make you beautiful things forever and you can ask for him to make it anytime (At least you get an infinite amount of free clothes).

And through it all, Takemichi remained oblivious towards their behaviours dismissing it as them being nice.

He clung to you, followed you around, smiled like an idiot when you snapped at him. He thought you were friends. You hated him for that. You hated how he never saw what you were going through. You hated that he didn’t protect you, didn’t fight them off, didn’t even notice.

And the others hated him too.

They’d smile at him — fake, cold smiles — while imagining the best way to get rid of him. Every time Takemichi called your name, Mikey’s fingers twitched. Every time he laughed near you, Baji cracked his knuckles.

One day, you found a note in your locker.

“If you want Takemichi to stay alive, stay away from him. You belong to us.”

You confronted Mikey.

He just smiled and held your hand like it was normal. “You don’t need him. He’s weak. He’s not worthy of breathing the same air as you.”

You tried to run. You tried to escape them all.

But Mikey was fast. Draken was stronger. Kazutora was insane. Baji was ruthless. Mitsuya had eyes everywhere.

And Takemichi?

He was too busy crying to notice you were gone. What a stupid fucking idiot...

[serpentizlord]

Today I am so very tired and I have been for a while now.

Physically it has gone a bit downhill. I find the "setbacks" the hardest to deal with... I know healing isn't linear, but losing the ability to do certain things again is so incredibly hard and trying not to freak out even more so.

It is becoming increasingly harder to find the right mindset when it happens, or in general really. I am not only physically exhausted, but also mentally and right now I'm only talking about the impact of trying to get better and healthy again, not even the exhaustion of long covid itself..

Almost a year ago since my body really started to fall apart. Time has honestly lost all meaning to me and I don't know if I'll ever experience it in a normal way again.

I really couldn't take it anymore these past couple weeks, which was frustrating as I knew not being able to just surrender made everything worse, but I just couldn't. I couldn't make myself lie in a dark boring room again. Void of any stimuli. I couldn't rest. Every time I tried I became horribly depressed and frustrated. Felt stuck in this downwards spiral and no way to stop it.

Luckily I have seem to regain some sort of control, but fuck, I am so exhausted if being exhausted.

My house is a mess and I want to fix it so badly, but I don't have the energy. Dishes pile up as I have to choose between making a healthy dinner, or doing the dishes and I will always pick nutritions for obvious reasons. It's making my mind cluttered and overstimulated. It's frustrating having to navigate in a messy house.

I cannot do the things one would normally do to have life energy as I like to call it. Every day I have to find the willpower and motivation to keep going and do my very best, but when you can't exercise, have been living a very isolated life for a year now, don't do anything, don't go anywhere, you really lose that life energy that keeps a person going and not fall into depression.

So yeah, I have to keep trying to pull this willpower out of a hat and lately it hasn't been working very well unfortunately. Luckily I can now surrender a bit more again, but I still remain very frustrated by wanting to do all these things in my home, but not being able to.

My biggest fear in life has always been finally getting better mentally, but then having your body give up. Leaving you imprisoned inside yourself. Same goes for me/cfs in general and symptom wise I definitely meet the requirements for such a diagnosis, even though it is something else.

Funny how life likes to throw these things at you

When all of this is done, I will either have the most insane character development or I become a complete unhinged weirdo. Whatever the outcome might be, I'll be happy it's over.

[bllsbailey]

Tim Walz Is Asked to Name the Dems' Next Leader, and the Look on His Face Is Priceless

Remember Tim Walz? The bumblin’, fumblin’ Minnesota Democrat governor who then-Vice President Kamala Harris inexplicably chose as her running mate for the presidential election? After the pair got slaughtered at the polls, they’ve both been licking their wounds as Team Trump reinvigorates America. When they do make the occasional appearance, though, they inevitably faceplaint and remind us of exactly how lucky we are that they didn’t win.

Walz continued the trend on Wednesday when he appeared on CNN with host Kasie Hunt, and immediately botched a question about the leadership of the Democrat Party going forward. He seemed paralyzed with fear as he was unable even to name a single credible figure who might be able to bring them out of their current malaise and dysfunction.

Watch as his mind works furiously to come up with an answer:

“We’re not going to have a charismatic leader right in here and save us from this.”   “Our job is, of people who do have power to enact things. We d-mn sure better be doing it, and we better be there standing alongside them.”

Weird: Tim Walz's 2028 Presidential Ambitions Are an In-Kind Campaign Contribution to the GOP

Tim Walz Gets Weird Again, Rambles on About How Country Has Been Stolen by 'Fascists and Nazis'

Like his former boss, Kamala Harris, Walz likes to make pronouncements as if they’re important—until you realize he didn’t really say anything. This latest one will go down as one of his more ludicrous musings, as what he said makes little sense (emphasis mine):

Walz appeared on CNN’s The Arena with Kasie Hunt Wednesday to discuss President Donald Trump’s joint congressional address. Hunt asked the governor who he thinks is the Democratic leader right now. The 60-year-old Democrat paused for a few beats before answering. “I think the voting public, right now, is what I would say,” Walz responded. “We’re not going to have a charismatic leader ride in and save us from this.”

It’s as if he just admitted that the Dems are cooked and their future is dark. How, Mr. Walz, do you plan on “saving us from this” without a charismatic leader? You think House Minority Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who has the magnetism of a newt, is going to rouse the electorate? Maybe Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) with his pathetic, impotent chants?

Gulp: Hakeem's Bad Dream: Deer in Headlights Jeffries Left Speechless When Faced With Trump Approval Numbers

His other point was equally absurd, though: “I think the voting public, right now, is what I would say,” he responded to the question of who’s going to lead the party forward. Tim, Tim, Tim: the voting public just voted in November, and they said no thanks to you and Harris.

The good news for conservatives is that “leaders” like Walz are apparently the Democrats’ A-Team, which means Republicans will likely keep creaming them at the polls till they come up with something superior. But there’s even better news: Walz thinks Kamala “certainly… could be” the Dems’ nominee in ’28. Oh, please, yes.

America has seen that movie before, and it was a box-office bomb. I definitely advise them to run it again and see if they get different results.

Democrats are increasingly on the ropes and becoming unhinged as Trump implements his vision for America.

[evonkyva]

I haven't watch bridgerton fully so my opinon is mostly using it to talkabout something that pisses me off. Which mean bridgerton trigger this thought but by no means is that a review of the show this is a bias it reminds me of I

My mother's fiance turn it on and it kinda remind me of what I think some incels wish society was without the work

" a club of aristocrats that don't work but are feared and respected for power they exploited and nothing more "

" women living thier life in a panic and centering thierselves around men desires even if those desires are painful and unrelenting childbirth and just being "pretty"

" men just existing and expecting women to come to them in order to exsist in soceity. Or men chasing women soley off of how high it will make them appear a better man "

" literally losing all your opportunities, your friends, your safety cause of fucking rumors "

Bridgerton is not a bad show, but I guess my absolutely unhinged tandrum is coming from the idea that I can't enjoy this. I can enjoy the subtle and sometimes obvious clips I see chanlleging the status quo and deep characters cause I don't see the fantasy.

I see the very restrictive bones..I see the current real life alternatives when I think of things like the over turn of roe v wade, the almost comical and offensive "concern " that soceity has about men soley cause men are not fucking and nothing else but never when women body were being restricted and objectified under the very real and still current rape culture.

Our bridgerton will not be pretty events and gowns and scrumptious gossips. It will be women suddenly not being allowed to have jobs, bank accounts or driving lessons and dying as a astronomical high level of child birth force on by said rape culture and and the fact many women will quickly do what they have to do to survive and if that means suddenly settling for any man who won't IMMEDIATELY kill them and having a child cause the goverment will pay them ( now that they have nothing else to depend on but that and thier "partner") and I'm not mad

And then there men. Yea a pleathora of those men will sharpen thier cruelty overnight. Yea now they have a world where women settle, where women very existence decide how much violence they deserve, were there suddenly more jobs but if the pay doesn't increase( cause women do get paid less no matter how much women say otherwise) it still won't be enough to keep the most desperate of wives and the children force on you. Men will get increasingly violence not just with women but with each other. Cause there more women there more jobs...I'm not.saying peace is bad for men I'm saying that change will not be good

As much as I hate that fucking mouse project when men ( thanks to soceity and patriachy conditioning) have a plethora of desperate women, cheap but unsuccessful jobs, and the pressure to be nothing else but a pussy magnet with money. . . Men will start to kill other men maybe at the rate they kill women maybe more and thats not a celebration....that's a fucking implosion of soceity

But conservatives, traditionalists and the extreme patriarchy will tell you making sure everyone has vanilla sex, as many kids as possible and a strict patriarchal system will save us.

I can't enjoy bridgerton because I can't enjoy the reality behind the fantasy. ...... because I'm an overthrowing autistic black afab and a nutcase and the adorable world of passionate lovers, juicy gossip and outfits cause it's 2024 we are literally inching closer to ww3, men are literally going to a cult of redpill before therapy, everyone becoming homeless ....and I'm tired.

This is just overthinking...this is madness...this is just my Friday afternoon shower thoughts

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

Part 4: damned if you don't

There are multiple species fighting against the time war → i really want something in new who that acknowledges this, because i love the concept of the resistance, of course there were people fighting against the time war, the time lords and the daleks aren’t the only ones with space faring capabilities, they aren’t even the only ones with time faring capabilities (though it seems implied that most of the other temporal powers got taken out early in the war)

‘I seriously doubt that any of them expect to live long enough to see the war end, i certainly don’t’ → oh narvin, this line brings me pain, but i do like it, the time war is horribly brutal, as well as its a time war, who knows how long it can go on for, do you think there were time lords who didn’t get to see its end, not because they died in battle or anything, but because they just didn’t live long enough

‘Under no romantic delusion that war is ever heroic or righteous' → can’t wait to get back to war room for this project (or really just any of gallifrey with rassilon in it) because this is definitely different to how rassilon and a good number of his followers see the time war

‘I still get reports from home about the increasingly unhinged schemes of rassilon the resurrected’ → rassilons insanity during the time war is so interesting to me, sure he wasn’t the best of people when he was originally alive, but he seemed somewhat more stable, less completely off the deepend, i wonder if it’s something about being in the matrix for that long that makes a person not quite right, you become a part of a repository of all time lord knowledge and then suddenly you aren’t and you’re back in a normal, mortal (to the extent that time lords are) body (the thirteen regeneration limit is there for a reason, that many lives can’t comfortably fit inside ones head, both in terms of that’s too much to have to remember and in terms of those past lives are still in there, at least somewhat independently of your current one), or is it a case of coming back to a society that practically worships you as a god (it’s probably both if we’re being honest)

‘I just hope they keep him away from the omega arsenal, too much to lose if that gets opened’ → interesting to me how, despite this seemingly being set pretty late in the time war, there’s still a whole arsenal of weapons that they haven’t touched, that really speaks to the power and instability of them i’d think, that even at their most desperate, there’s things the time lords won’t turn to. I do wonder if these are weapons from omega’s time, or if it was just named after him (or some combo of both where some weapons were put there later because they were deemed to dangerous, though the specific phrasing makes me think that it stays sealed for fear of what the weapons would do if it were even opened) (and assuming one of those weapons is the moment, it would make sense that others may have their own sentience as well, so they can’t be exposed to the outside world for fear of what they might do, even without someone to wield them)

‘And as for my beloved leela’ → i think gary russell should just write short trips where narvin is in love with leela, he seems good at it, and if he does that we won’t have to worry about another placebo effect (probably) (if you’re new here, welcome to my one sided feud with this man, based mainly off of four pages from one book) (i would love one of these from leelas perspective though), also just like the way that he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s saying it until the words leave his mouth

‘Don’t let her hear that narvin’ → narvin i am shaking you, for so many reasons, but isn’t this a fucking report, that you are sending to other people

‘Romana did and now she’s gone’ → look look, this probably just him talking about the whole her being stuck in the matrix thing, but oh man am i worried it isn’t that

‘Braxiatel, vanished from the time lines’ → truly what the fuck is up with this man, i want to know what he is doing (and more importantly i want them to put him in the show so him and the doctor can be annoying at each other)

‘The time war has fractured us all’ → i’m sure this applies in the traditional ‘war is horrific’ sense, but it’s probably also more literal was well, this is a war fought across time, and therefore has consequences on timelines, how many times have they lived something, or met someone, only for that to be erased or rewritten by the war

‘One thing that no one brings up anymore is how all of this is my fault’ → oh narvin, but really this makes me think, how many people knew what he did, how far did that information spread, and who really blamed him for it out of those who did know

‘I’m as scared, confused, and frankly rudderless as they are’ → i mean that’s probably true to an extent, but narvin also probably has a lot more experience with this type of thing than any of them, not only was he coordinator of the cia for a while, but he spent who knows how long exploring other universes and even lived in one where most people wanted him dead, and then he spent time running through the time war with romana before joining the resistance, the war may be horrible and confusing for anyone, but out of most time lords, narvin is actually pretty well qualified to be out there dealing with it

Eris still running the resistance → look idk if he survives this war, but he is going to need the break of a lifetime after this

‘When i was training at the cia i had coordinators and castellans like vansell and matthias, even kelner, what i’d do now to be able to bounce ideas off one of them’ → okay so many things with this quote, a) kelner mention, this is possibly like his only acknowledgement of him after the invasion of time (at least that i know of), b) coordinators seem to be pretty high ranking within the cia, but narvin still worked with them while he was in training, this kind of lends to my theory that cia agents (at least the ones who really end up getting anywhere) are chosen rather than actually climbing up the chain of command, and that those who are chosen get to work directly with the higher ranking officers rather than having to participate in more basic training with the other trainees/junior agents, and c) the castellans work with the cia, this is interesting to me, but i don’t really know how to articulate how at the moment

‘Their homeworlds were both among the first casualties of the time war’ → nekkistani and sunari

Archetryx mentioned → is this the only time we hear of it outside of the context of the events of the apocalypse element?

‘I am at this moment completely unconvinced that what i am about to do here is survivable’ → oh narvin

‘Would anyone really care if i died here today, or notice. I’m not entirely sure i would’ → the sheer difference between this and him from damned if you do, the time war has really just broken him

Gallifrey has astronomers, unsurprising, but well that’s another official confirmation of a job you can have on gallifrey

Askran sounds familiar to narvin → he never truly forgot kransa (i really like the idea that you can’t truly erase something from someone’s mind, even if you hide it, the shape of it will always be there, the person will always be able to bring some of it back even if they can’t consciously remember it

‘Battle uniform of a gallifreyan chancellery guard’ → they have a specific battle uniform, i’m assuming it isn’t any of the ones we’ve seen on the show, as those seemed to be very bad for battle, maybe they upgraded them a bit after things kept happening and they kept being useless, or its just another case of the war consuming everything on gallifrey

‘There was no way of them knowing that’s where i was from too’ → something about narvin becoming unrecognizable as a time lord over the course of the series when he had started as very much a time lord vs leela being mistaken for a time lord by pretty much anyone who isn’t one when she started off about as different to a time lord as you can be

‘But our rational brains quickly reject it and we barely know it happens’ → something something time lords shaping their own version of the narrative so much that anything outside of it must be false, even on an unconscious level, if it doesn’t make sense to how their society works then clearly it doesn’t work that way and it’s best that you forget about it

Of course he feels guilty for what happened to ace, he doesn’t even know it was brax’s fault does he

He remembers the watchmaker here, interesting

‘Years, decades, maybe centuries ago’ → one day i’m going to figure out the timeline of this series, one day (well hopefully) (this is in reference to the beginning of romana’s presidency)

‘Not only had she ceased to exist, she never had existed’ → this isn’t like new information, but it’s still fucked up that they can do that

The time shade rewrote reality around narvin, changed the name of the planet, brought kransa back

Well, at least narvin eventually learned how to lie

‘One of the dalek temporal bombs that stuck in the early days of the war’ → this makes me curious as to a) how long the time war went on for and b) at what point in the war narvin is at now, because he’s talking about the daleks directly attacking gallifrey, which as of war room 2 they haven’t done, and by that point the war is very much an established thing, so is it a case of that’s going to happen soon, or that the war just goes on for so long that even if it happens in the future of where the characters are currently at it counts as the early war

‘We’ve spent however many years fighting this war’ → look, they’re probably being vague about the timeline on purpose so that they can do whatever they want within the war and not be constrained by a certain amount of years to do it in, but i want a timeline that makes an amount of sense

Stasers upgraded at some point in the war to be able to penetrate dalekanium

Is the staser sound different here or is it just me (i mean i guess he did just say they were upgraded, but i like the original staser sound, sue me)

‘She would have had enough instruction and vortex training for her mind to learn the time lord trick of telepathic translation’ → a few things a) seems to be implying that this is a skill any time lord is capable of, but not necessarily one everyone is taught, b) vortex training, what is that and how does what i’m assuming is exposure to the vortex help with telepathic translation, c) ‘for her mind’ not specifically kransa herself learning it, possibly just some weirdish wording, but it also has me thinking that this may be in part an unconsciously picked up skill through exposure rather than active practice (though i assume it would be some combo of both)

‘All my years with romana, leela, and the others meant my own was pin sharp of the practice’ → i’m going to assume that this just means that he’s had to use this skill a lot, but it does bring up the somewhat interesting implication that they were speaking different languages on the alternate gallifreys (or maybe just different versions of gallifreyan that weren’t completely different, but different enough that he had to use that skill some) since him and leela didn’t do much traveling together out in the universe outside season four, though this could be implying that he needed the skill because leela wasn’t speaking gallifreyan, but she was so sorry if that’s what you’re implying gary russell, you’re wrong

‘We knew you were destined to save the time shades’ → gallifrey is really just one big cycle of people using other people to their own ends, your value is only in your usefulness in so many cases on that planet, not even weird god/spirit things are above that

‘Shortly after graduating from your class with honors at the celestial intervention agency’ → so agency training is kind of like academy 2.0? I mean this would make sense, there’s a part where narvin references having had two hundred years of training when we know the academy takes less than that (romana started traveling with the doctor when she was younger than 140), but it is interesting to me that narvin specifically taught a class, despite at that point being a pretty high ranking officer (at least i would assume, since it probably was pretty near to vansells death and if he became the head of the cia after that he would have already had to have been high ranking), do they really just give people cadets to train instead of like having that be a specific role someone has, i mean there’s probably something to be said about having people who are presumably very experienced in what they do do the training, but also, don’t they have like other things to be doing

‘We thank you, for achieving what was foretold and must be completed’ → to me this kind of feels like the implication that even though it’s something that had to happen, narvin still could have just not done it (something something fixed points aren’t actually fixed, but more something that the time lords have decided must happen, so then they happen and they will do pretty much anything to ensure that they happen)

The time shade is able to just destroy the dalek weapons, but is not able to just do that on it’s own since it saw narvin being there, so narvin had to be there, once the future is observed, it is no longer in flux

‘We can influence only the effect, not the cause’ → interesting how this contrasts the whole ‘the story changes, the ending stays the same’ thing that the cia has going on (or had, given what point in the timeline we are at)

‘And that is how my resistance cell survived the last great timewar’ → Narvin survives to the end of the time war!!!! Also seems that he’s now telling someone this story (the war doctor (?) based on him asking where leela is, i mean idk who else he’d be telling this to and asking that so)

Echoes through eternity notes

Part 1: damned if you do

(i already did my reactions so this is mostly going to be focusing on lore implications) (fair warning, this is Long)

i will say, i love that they're putting the theme for the era each audio takes place in, season one theme i have missed you

the comments about bad weather not being common on gallifrey are interesting to me, is it a case of they're really just not common, or is it due to environmental manipulation (i'm inclined to go with the latter)

very interesting that the transduction barriers are only over the citadel (pretty sure this is contradicted in other things, but also maybe there are just different layers of transduction barriers, idk)

they're soundproof

outsiders -> societal rejects, like renegades, but without the leaving gallifrey (or possibly that they can't given they never reached time lord status in the first place (called 'uneducated'), is renegade only applicable to time lords) (also shaboggans are referenced later in this audio, are they different or just two names for the same group of people)

leela lives with the outsiders 50% of the time, wonder when this stopped (i'd say after becoming romana's body guard, but i feel like in the early seasons she still managed to find some time to spend in the outlands, and in the later seasons I doubt she leaves the capitol as much) (something something becoming more integrated into time lord society whether or not she or the time lords like it)

'all with more than a passing interest in our temporal capabilities' -> this is either referring to those at the academy and narvin distrusting them because of this or that the academy is open to anyone with an interest and i can't actually tell which

'all cia coordinators' -> very interesting to me that there are multiple coordinatiors, the thing is though that we still only really see narvin as the coordinator (same with vansell while he has that job), so my theory is that there is a head coordinator (in this case narvin) who has oversight over the whole cia and handles the majority of the diplomatic relations with the other branches of the government and is the one who is put in the public eye, allowing the others to work with more secrecy, i'd also assume that other coordinators oversee sections of the agency rather than the whole thing

establishment that the high council, inner council, and supreme council are all separate things, unfortunately this does not tell us what the actual differences between them are and neither does anything else really, though that's typical of anything relating to time lords

'various chancellors and castellans of the chapters and houses' -> there were references to different chapters having their own castellans in other gallifrey audios, but the inclusion of houses is interesting to me, i have the feeling that it wouldn't be all houses with their own castellan, but i'm not entirely sure what he means by this (maybe theres something along the lines of each chapter having a house that represents it on the high council?), also i thought the implication was that there was only one chancellor, it wasn't a per chapter things (though maybe theres like a chancellor chancellor who works directly with the president and then chancellors appointed for each chapter)

'that's the one constant on gallifrey, change is never irreversible' oh buddy you have no clue what's coming. I do find it hilarious how much he talks about not liking romana here knowing what he's going to be like in the future, it is genuinely fun to get to see early narvin in a context we never have before, especially with access to his inner thoughts, because even though he's an ass and still working against romana and leela, you can see the basis for the person he will become later, he still fundamentally is a guy that cares a lot about the things that are important to him

'rassilon, omega, and the other' -> finally the other gets mentioned, also kind of interesting to me how he's remembered, but his name is still lost (do we get an explanation as to why anywhere else? feels like some shit rassilon would pull, and given the other two have their names remembered i don't think it just happened naturally)

matthias used to be cia -> it's interesting to me that he goes from being cia to working in other parts of the government, because from what we've seen it seems that the cia is kind of at odds with the other parts of the government (especially the president and their immediate inner circle) so I feel like being ex-cia would not lend itself well to getting a job in another branch of government, it feels like they wouldn't be trusted enough by other politicians for that (not that there's really a whole lot of trust anywhere in time lord politics but you get my point) (though possibly depending on when he was cia it might just not be known by those outside the cia that he was once a part of it) (i say depending on the time because of the implications that romana forced the cia to become more public with its dealings and stripped it of some of its power) (that being said, i do think the coordinator was always a kind of public facing figure there to cover up what the cia was really doing and have a hand in politics outside the cia to keep the organization informed)

'although the practice was frowned upon for a cia coordinator, i had adjusted my wrist communicators chime to identify the caller' -> interesting how he specifies that its frowned upon for his position in particular (something something secrecy and not giving any info to the enemy (other time lords) something something)

'junior rank time lord' -> i do not understand time lord ranks, this seems to be used both in reference to experience and nobility status at different times, i need a fucking encyclopedia or something

shitting on prydonians!!!! <- words of a guy who definitely doesn't have opinions on the chapters and how prydonians are kind of stuck up assholes a lot of the time

'at the end of each semester she was seconded to me' -> she was just mentioned as having been a recent academy graduate, so i'm assuming that this is in reference to her cia training (pretty sure there's an audio somewhere where narvin mentions it being two hundred years, though i could never figure out if that was academy + cia training or just cia training) also if this is here cia training i find it interesting that shes working under a coordinator, i wouldn't exactly imagine the guy who runs the place having to deal with recent academy graduates unless that was something he chose to do (and given narvin's tendency to try and adopt/mentor any young adult he spends more than five minutes around this does not surprise me)

god i would love to see what young narvin was like, i mean we know he was at least somewhat defiant (you know the whole abandoning his chapter for the cia thing) but i wonder what he was like as a cia trainee (also the implication here that he was working under vansell much in the way that kransa is working under him, maybe the cia coordinators do take on apprentices (or what i think is more likely is that they select promising agents young and train them to take on higher up positions within the organization later in life, i mean we know vansell was working with the cia even in his academy days, so i don't feel like this is much of a stretch)) (though the way narvin talks about it makes it seem like it's just a part of the job and not something they choose to do, but then again time lords love nothing more than tradition so maybe its just a thing that is done and has been done, so they do it even if they don't particularly want to or have to)

the matrix keepers -> interesting how its a job for those on their last regenerations (something something the old are given the task of upkeep of gallifreys secrets because they're old enough to know them just from life experience?) (or them knowing the secrets is not seen as a threat because of how close to becoming a part of the matrix they are, whatever they learn there is just going to go back into the matrix after all, and there's really not that much time until that happens), they also seem to be separate from the rest of time lord society (they've got their own coordinators and they seem to live down there) so they're not really at rick of spreading gallifrey's secrets

the ability to see through perception filters is learned

catacombs protected by perception filters at the entrance and psychic defenses within the air itself -> and yet academy era romana was just hanging out down there for fun it seems (also the reference to the ancient beings that live down there ('almost mythical' which is so interesting to me since we see over and over again that gallifreyan myths are just stories about their actual history and that their monsters are real, it seems here that narvin is acknowledging this to some extent), so they just know that there's things down there i guess? i mean seems very time lord to not do anything about it because if they're in the catacombs they're presumably not bothering them, but they're still accessible if needed for whatever purpose they may see fit

love that narvin is just letting kransa tag along even though it mean she's technically disobeying orders just because it annoys valyes

'the cia decides who does and doesn't have clearance in all security matters' -> interesting implications that they have the final say when it comes to security of gallifrey, not entirely surprising though (something something it being leftover from their start as rassilons guards even though they've split from their association with the presidential office by this point)

'i was rather surprised at how easily i lied' -> narvin shouldn't that be part of your fucking job description, though it does have the interesting implication that lying isn't necessarily needed to get into the high rankings of the cia, this could make sense given how much power they seem to hold, its more of a need to know how to proper wield that power than to be able to lie

cia intervention used to get around the legal and political consequences fro certain actions -> they seem to still operate outside the law to an extent, though narvins reaction says that maybe they are still able to be held accountable to it

'perception filters had not been fully triggered' -> ???? narvin what do you mean by that, i've been typing for too long to actually put the effort into thinking about this one, i would like to request that narvin explain it to me personally, but honestly i don't think he actually knows about about perception filters for that

capitol seems to be split up into sectors, i very much would like a map of this place or something because it seems huge and complicated based on everything we've heard about its architecture

love the idea that you can look through a perception filter by catching it out of the corner of your eye

narvin not knowing how the perception filters work -> i wonder if this is a type of thing that you only learn if you pursue certain career paths, like you're not going to learn the details of how a perception filter works in an introductory engineering class, but you might learn how to create one in a more advanced class (also probably something something they don't want people knowing these things because even if they are other time lords they still need to be able to hide information from the general public and people knowing exactly how perception filters work puts that at risk)

being a time lord lets them see through the perception filter -> interesting how this is something that seems explicitly linked with the whole looking into the untempered schism thing, having that experience fundamentally changes a person and how they see the universe (also interesting how he links it to being 'time lords of rank and status' because as we have previously seen its a thing that happens when gallifreyans are pretty young, i am curious as to if he's just saying this to separate them from the alien students that managed to see through it though)

'a time lord, probably of the first or second rank' -> again with the time lord ranks, see he's talking about academy students here so i would assume said time lord is also an academy student, based on other bits from this audio i wonder if the ranks are sort of a way of showing how far along in their education they are (sort of an analog to stuff like elementary, middle, and highschool, as well as college and postgrad stuff), with his comment about the 'time lord of rank' and looking into the untempered schism possibly that is how you earn being a first rank time lord, if you pass the test of the untempered schism you get that rank, and then there's second rank which idk what that would refer to but it seems that it possibly still means you're at the academy, and given kransa is called a junior rank time lord, i'm assuming that is given to time lords pretty fresh out of the academy

interesting the implication that the houses get punished for the actions of their members whether or not they actually had anything to do with what that person was doing (something something legacies and nobility, can't have a bad mark on their record otherwise it says something about the whole bloodline)

the doors use biodata -> interesting to me because we see in other things that there also seem to be retinal scans and just straight up codes, wonder if this is a case of differing security levels, anyone can learn a code, and i would assume its much easier to fake a retinal scan than a scan of someones biodata

is it just the time lords we meet, or are all of them weirdly self sacrificial

'according to some accounts, we were no longer in the same time and space as the rest of the planet' -> fascinated by this, the catacombs are their own sort of pocket dimension (and there's the whole thing with the door disappearing after they go through it)

'the creatures and whatever existed in the catacombs had created their own pocket reality'

the thing about gallifrey as a planet is that it's full of people who insist on scientific belief and that religion and myth and magic are below them, but it fundamentally is a place that is full of magic and myth, their history is so long and complex that the time lords themselves are mythical beings and their myths are historical accounts

'assuming the dimensions in here are stable and not in a state of flux or wither' -> interesting to me because the like fundamental state of things on gallifrey is that they don't flux of wither, but the catacombs seem exempt from this, narvin assures kransa it's probably fine, but there's no guarantee like there is on the rest of gallifrey

and narvin discovers his instinct to adopt people -> i mean on that note i do like that even though this is early narvin and he clearly holds all of the biases instilled in him by time lord society, he still also clearly cares, we see the basis of the passion he puts into the things he cares about that leads him to be a better person in his future

are they using some sort of psychic whatever to choose the direction? intuition? because this is clearly some sort of teaching moment, so its not just random, but a skill that can be learned, what exactly are they basing this off of, like what are they subconsciously looking for to lead the way or do they even not quite know and its just a thing that they do

east gallifrey doesn't have houses!!!!!! -> god i love anything that shows that gallifrey and the time lords aren't just a monolith, they may present themselves that way to outsiders, but they're not all the same, there's also the fact that despite having no house she still has a chapter which actually i feel like helps to clarify a lot of confusion around how the chapters work (at least for me), so houses probably have chapters that they are affiliated with and if you are born into that house, you are probably going to be in that chapter, but at the same time it is perfectly possible to go to the academy for a chapter that your house is not associated with (though i'd assume this is much less common than joining the chapter associated with your house)

'someone from one of the greater houses' -> brax house (sort of) mention, there's also his thing about chapters and houses not mattering as much these days and it being like a thing that he wasn't ostracized for this (something something the houses must maintain their image because their image is their power, but that power (and with it the need to control the image) is slowly fading), the whole everything about gallifreyan class structure is very interesting to me, because clearly the time lords are the ruling class on gallifrey, but even among them theres differences, your house or chapter has an influence (prydon has produced more presidents than any other chapter and we know that multiple of the chapters hold little to no political power) (and with the houses we see in transference that being born into a house doesn't mean you'll go to the academy and become a time lord, but i'm sure that for the houses of higher status (say lungbarrow since we're talking about brax here) it's pretty much a guarantee that a person will go on to become a time lord)

'my own origins from a family of humble temporal engineers, my uncles transgressions that brought about his exile many years ago' -> i need to know more about narvins backstory, please tell me more about narvins backstory, what did his uncle do? also theres the fact that narvin was not born into high status but still managed to achieve high rank within the cia, wonder what that process was like for him

the bit about narvin wondering if brax was goading him personally -> the implication that narvin is very much affected by his house status in his everyday life/his career while brax probably doesn't have to worry too much since he was born into a high house

'is my background a problem for my training or future' -> time lord classism runs deep, i mean the eveything about this interaction shows this, but yeah

'the ground beneath us, well beneath me, i can only assume it was the same for kransa' -> the fact that the catacombs are weird and fucked up enough for this to be a thing he says is really something, i mean he does go onto talk about the wall being weird and them moving, the dimensions around here are weird and i like that, citatels haunted

seventh door -> what is the significance of the different matrix doors?

'conceptual environments that simply couldn't exist but appeared completely real' -> like i said before citadels haunted, but seriously i think its interesting that the structures themselves are alive, i mean we see this with the houses and stuff, but with the matrix it's a repository for the minds of dead time lords, so i have the feeling that it's less it was built to be alive in the first place and more the accumulation of time lords within it gave it a sort of life, and that even though these structures aren't entirely 'real' because they are built from the minds of a psychic species and are interacting with the minds of a psychic species they may as well be

'were the catacombs simply an extension of the apc net itself' -> see above

'but surely others had studied it before' -> if you have to say this they probably didn't (or it was like one guy) (speaking from experience)

'everyone knew about the catacombs ..... but i couldn't recall any reports from people who'd explored beyond, but surely they must exist. all the stories of the creatures that dwelt here must come from somewhere, someone, so why couldn't i remember reading anything' -> the information is known but it does not exist, love this concept, a society that catalogues everything and yet things from right under their own feet go unwritten, i feel like to an extent this is probably a product of how their society is structured and what beliefs they deem acceptable, all their myths and monsters are real, but that's too close to magic so we won't write it down, on the other hand maybe they don't want to be written down, maybe its that there is information that can only be properly passed on through stories and not reports, also something something all time lords are connected to the matrix, the matrix is the repository of all time lord knowledge, there are something that you don't need to read about, that you don't need to learn, but you still know them

there are non humanoid students at the academy -> don't think there's actually any big lore implications with this one, just seemed like something to note

'their torch light appeared to unnaturally stop' -> narvin your planet is haunted i don't know what to tell you

'it was as if by standing there he, she, it somehow absorbed light, shadow, anything' -> like i said before the time lords may like to present themselves as a society that's above 'primitive' beliefs, but fundamentally gallifrey is a place of magic (now there's the argument to be made that magic and science are one and the same but i don't thing that negates my point)

'the head was a black globe .... it gave neither light nor reflection, again as if absorbing everything around it. a black hole'

'i don't know why but i knew this thing was not benign' -> has some sort of psychic aura?

the implication here that narvin considers like actual emotional responses to be below time lords (reminds me of homunculette crying about marie while going why am i crying i'm a time lord i don't care about things)

'its ability to create pockets of frozen isolated time meant it was more powerful than anything i could ever have imagined' -> very interesting to me knowing that the cia have put whole planets in stasis or time loops or whatever before, does it get more complex as you get to smaller spaces? actually maybe its that they need complex technology to do this and the time shade is just kind of doing it

also i've said it before and i'll say it again, gallifrey is a deeply haunted planet, and i don't just mean that as a joke, it has a long enough history and its technology works in such a way that its myths and gods and ghosts are all real

'i'm going to be destroyed by the living embodiment of sarcasm' -> i mean really narvin, how else would you go out if not that

'the time shades were legendary, reports of their existence going back to the days of rassilon' -> something something the time lords dared to mess with time so it forever changed how their world worked, like with the matrix dimensions being weird and that information just being Known i feel like that could be a product of accumulated time lord minds within it, but with the time shades i feel like its more a consequence of if you mess with time it will forever change everything, both in your past and future, these things have consequences on the fabric of the universe itself

'the shade of eternity, the shade of war, the shade of dreams, the shade of protection, the shade of.. i couldn't remember the entire pantheon at the moment' + the shade of portent -> i truly do love how time lords act like they're above religion and all that but they undeniably have gods and they still do treat them as gods

i feel like there's probably something to the fact that it's wearing gold, i just don't know what at the moment

'for a time lord of so low a rank' -> see here i think its talking about rank in terms of houses not like achievement of status, because in terms of job narvin is pretty high ranking, but as we've established he does not come from a particularly noble background

'you are a pivot around which so much of what is to come rotates' -> this kind of plays into an idea that i really like and its that gallifrey's future is largely fixed, the time lords can mess with the time lines of other species and planets all they want, but by the nature of them being the ones to wield that power over time, they can't actually alter their own time lines all that much, since they can change time they are also the center around which time changes, the eye of the storm if you will, and that means that they have very little control over what happens to them (maybe this is why they're so obsessed with controlling the narrative, because if they can't actually control the events themselves, they can at least control how everyone perceives them)

'shocking really but it has been decreed' -> time herself said it and we can't argue with that (at least that's how i'm choosing to interpret this)

'free will, change, alteration is not an option'

the way the time shade talks to narvin (i'm not writing it all out sorry) about how he's just a small bit of practically nothing in the scheme of existence -> the time lords see themselves as so important, but really they are just people like everyone else in the universe and the universe will largely treat them as such, a king may hold more power, but at the end of the day he's just as human as a farmer, and the dirt they're buried in won't be able to tell the difference

'a shard of the essence of the untempered schism, but wrapped around reality, my reality' -> this is very cool imagery to me, just the fact that for a moment the web of time is bent to wrap around narvin and his existence, that the time shade has the power to do that

'the high collared black of a magistrate' -> more info about how time lords dress is always good to have, if you're me at least, not that i particularly do anything with this information, i just like having it

narvin seeing that he's the one to start the war :(

narvin is actually linked with a tardis (i'm assuming its the one ace rigged), i love that we get confirmation that it's not just a tardis he is flying, but His tardis (also the 'linked eternally' bit -> the bond between a time lord and their tardis is forever then? interesting given how other things have implied that the bond can be severed, but maybe this is only the case in extreme cases, but otherwise it just stays? also maybe something something tardises exist in a relationship with the vortex that means they don't perceive time linearly and that applies to their bond with their time lords)

the encounter with the time shade is erased from his memory, he still has the impression of it, but of course just writes it off as shadows, what else are you going to do in a place like that where reality isn't quite real

knowledge comes with a price -> the price was kransa

i said this in another post, but i'm going to say it again because it's still funny to me, but i know narvins note to romana is probably through official channels, but i am just imagining him sending her anonymous hate mail

interesting how even if its been erased narvin seems to be able to know something is gone and even what is gone (something something time lords and their unique relationship and ability to perceive time)

he still dreams about it, the burning planet and kransa -> he needs that knowledge for time to happen as it should, as it must (the time war was always going to happen and he was always going to start it, it's unavoidable, it's what time has determined will happen so it has to happen, the story can change, but the ending will stay the same)

'saving gallifrey from its president' -> well he will be doing that in the future, but definitely not from the president he was expecting

[biceratops7]

The hopeful ordeal of being known

I never really payed this scene much mind at first but on latest rewatch I want to put it in my mouth and shake it around like a scrap of meat till it’s bones are lying all over the floor for easy reading.

The layers of this initial reaction are so interesting to me. It’s a blunt response for blunt information, but you can tell by Ed’s tone it was highly unexpected. Ed knows full and painfully well that when he says “jump” anyone who’s even sniffed the ocean says “how high”. There’s a wonderfully strange mix of offense and baffled fascination at the notion that anyone, a newcomer no less, would tell him no.

So now after the initial shock Ed’s coming to his senses. Oh yah. He’s new. Duh. A little uncommon, but it’s not entirely inconceivable that there’s still people out there who don’t know who Blackbeard is. The possibility becomes even less ridiculous when the person in question has gained a reputation for having absolutely no friggin’ clue what he’s doing or what’s going on in a matter of hours. And this scenario here is certainly desirable to Ed. Someone who doesn’t know his reputation is a fascinating oddity at least and a potential although temporary refuge at most. It’s honestly almost impossible to tell whether or not Ed is consciously looking for genuine human connection at this stage, or simply a mechanical plan to escape the boredom of his life via the ye old trick-n-maim, but either way the start is the same. He needs to get close to someone, and the fear Blackbeard elicits has made that increasingly difficult.

But then Izzy manages to haphazardly sweeten the pot even more.

No actually, he does know who Blackbeard is, and he still doesn’t want to meet him. In fact he is so utterly un phased by the fact that Blackbeard summoned him in the first place, he turns down the invitation in a gratuitously insulting way. On top of that, Ed’s being lied to. The context that half this stuff isn’t even true and Izzy is just balls to the wall making shit up to drive the situation is so friggin’ hilarious cause he’s driving it on the one way highway to “sign me the fuck up”.

Ed turns toward the light. We’re able to see his face clearer than ever, and it’s hopeful, a smile playing on his lips. Well and truly stunned out of the persona of inhuman legend, there’s a reserved giddiness daring to shine through just a little bit. It’s a mere shadow of the utter delight to come, seeing Stede be his weird little self, sharing his wonderfully ridiculous idiosyncrasies with him completely unafraid.

The untaken care of hair that blocked these expressions from our view like a head made of smoke? It’ll soon be tied back. “Fascinating” quickly becomes “isn’t he amazing Izzy!” As Stede happily brings new life to the leathers that’ve come to dehumanize him over the years. And Ed doesn’t know any of this yet, probably can’t even fathom a guess, but he’s just learned that this bizarre fancy man already knows who “Blackbeard” is, and is unimpressed.

Although “Blackbeard” didn’t come out of nowhere and is a genuinely authentic side of Edward Teach, his monicker signals to everyone that he is less than human, and has done so long enough for anyone to snap. The turning point here isn’t that he’s allured by Stede’s boldness, nor is it that he’s captured by how absolutely unhinged you’d have to be to deny him. It’s the promise that someone who doesn’t fear the consequences of Blackbeard, doesn’t even care who he is, might maybe, just maybe, be able to see who Ed is.

[muchadoaboutstartrek]

Petty

Written for @salrevientad and inspired by conversation with @female-fogbank

Spock and La'an didn't argue often...

Well, at least they didn't argue about serious topics often.

But more often than not, Spock wondered if there was something in the human DNA, even augmented one, that made them more succeptible to irritation from a stimulus that normally wouldn't cause a reaction in any Vulcan. And as he stared at the red faced La'an, her braids a mess on top of her head while she gestured wildly with her hands, he concluded that yes, it most certanly was a human trait.

"You know I don't like it when you move my shit without asking me first! Why do you keep doing it?" His short girlfriend was becoming an increasingly warmer in the face, so much so that Spock started wondering just how long it's going to take before she turned the color of her uniform. If the vein ticking in her forehead was any indication, it shouldn't be too long now.

He suppressed a sigh as he knew such action would cause even worse reaction. Instead he squared up his shoulders as he gazed down at the woman half his size that looked like she was one wrong word away from ripping his head off. Her feisty nature and naturally short fuse were some of the things that Spock loved but also hated at the same time.

Not that he'd ever admit that to her out loud.

"I apologize for misplacing your work PADD without notifying you first. Next time I will make sure to send you a message beforehand."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Spock knew he screwed up. Even the most emotionally stunned Vulcan would have no trouble recognizing the sheer rage that almost radiated off of La'an as she shook in place, her fists clenching by her side.

"You did not just say that to me, you condescending fucker!" The words were more of a growl than an actual sentence, her voice coming from the deepest parts of her vocal cords.

There were very few things that would cause Spock to shrink in fear.

Enraged La'an was one of those things.

"I apologize. That was not my intention." He replied immediately, his voice even more apologetic than the words.

"You do this every time! You say something to make me mad and then apologize and look at me with those eyes and I just cave!" She shook her head, her index finger suddenly shoved up his face. "Not this time!"

Something in Spock seemed to snap at those words and without even thinking his actions through, he grabbed La'an by her hips and slung her over his shoulder in a fireman carry, her strained and surprised yell, followed by a string of profanities slung in his direction falling on deaf ears as he carried her over to his newly made bed and tossed her onto the sheets. He didn't even give her a chance to stand back up as he pushed her down, his hands gripping the band of her trousers and yanking them down her legs alongside her underwear.

La'an tried pushing him off of her with her hips, her voice straining as she repeatedly asked him about the state of his mental facilities, the answer Spock couldn't provide at the moment as he felt positively unhinged. Her trousers and underwear reached as far as her boot before Spock yanked it off as well and slid one of her creamy legs out of it before he spread her thighs like jaws of life and simply dived in.

La'an's protests died off on her tongue immediately, profanities that were aimed at him suddenly disappearing only to be replaced by shaky sighs as he feasted on her pussy. He put his anger and frustration into every lick and suck on her sensitive, twitching cunt, his feelings evident in the way he was eating her out, aggressively almost to the point where it matched her energy from few minutes before.

La'an was shuddering and grinding her pussy against his face, her hands sliding into his hair and tugging on the strands as he allowed himself to be directed in the way she wanted him to go, letting her enjoy that aspect, illusion really, of control because it was evident to him that he was the one in charge, holding her release in his hands.

As her sounds increased in volume Spock found that he had no heart to tease her and torture her with denying her release, even though she more than likely deserved it. Instead he doubled down on his efforts and sucked on her clit with more vigour, her fingers almost ripping out his hair in the process.

La'an let out a scream as she fell apart, her orgasm taking her by surprise as Spock grazed his teeth over the sensitive nub on top of her pussy, her whole body shuddering with the force of her release before she melted into the sheets, practically boneless.

Spock licked his lips, tasting the last remnants of her essence like he was savoring the delicacy, before he stood up, crawling over La'an's still half dressed body, her uniform shirt still on while her pants hung on one of her legs.

"How are you feeling now?" He asked, burrowing his brows as he gazed down at the completely fucked out woman who was screaming at him about misplacing her PADD only a few minutes ago.

In contrast to that image, La'an was laying in bed completely relaxed with a lazy smile on her lips. "Fantastic." She sighed dreamily and surged up to kiss him, her teeth tugging on his lip. She broke the kiss when air became the problem. "Spock?"

"Yes, La'an?"

"Don't ever move my stuff without asking me again." Her eyes hardened and Spock knew that she meant business. He, however, simply smiled and said nothing. He just found the way to make her effectively loose her train of thought and he planned to utilize it to it's fullest capacity.

In fact, if this was the way he could make her shut up, he might start initiating these petty squabbles himslef.

[the-elderly-are-evolving]

Allow me to try to impart to you some small idea of the absolute lunacy that has been our final Midsummer show.

For context, I (an idiot) am Puck. Brian (aka BGEltonJohnPimp, a dear friend and only an occasional idiot) is Oberon.

Before we even get into costume I have to explain the concept of ‘mid morning anxiety shits’ in front of both my directors as well as our costume manager.

Our company has a tradition in which those who won’t be returning give highly emotional (and usually very long and rambly) speeches about important experiences/ fond memories/ advice about the program and everyone sobs their little hearts out together. Anyways, one of our unhinged (affectionate) crew members came out as trans to the whole company, then immediately and without pausing to acknowledge anything about what they had just said, transitioned (hahah lol funny ik ik) into a performance, word for word, of that Lin Manuel Miranda Orders A Pizza video for their speech. It was insane.

Act 2. The long story short is that Brian misses his cue to enchant Titania’s eyes during Act 2, probably due to a mighty combination of heavy bawling and emotional distress from earlier in the evening and the uncontrollable fascination our strangely hypnotic fairy song produces (original music written by our director; upon hearing it most people feel the uncontrollable urge to salute and stand at attention or to go to sleep!!).

After several long moments where, despite our whole company having run this show with little to no incident for the past week straight, there is inexplicably not a single person who remembers who is supposed to be on stage right now. Hermia and Lysander accuse me (the nerve! You accuse Puck of miss the cue??! How dare !!!), I accuse Oberon (not my proudest moment but I panicked), he accuses Helena and Demetrius (not even remotely a possibility given that they just left the stage, but he was getting desperate). Suddenly Oberon turns very white and stalks out of the green room. Keep in mind, friends, the stage has been completely silent for several minutes at this point. Our director has appeared backstage.

Oberon materializes in the wings at stage right, the SR ASM, upon seeing someone who might save this, panics and all but shoves him on stage with the wild-eyed desperation of a drowning man. I now watch Oberon from the stage cameras. He walks, uncertain, across the thrust. He has forgotten his monologue. I know this because I can see the fear in his eyes. Also because he has not said a single damn word yet. He is in the belly of the beast and not even he knows what will come out of his mouth when he opens it. He then proceeds to utter the most plaintive cry for help I have ever heard from a man in pink jazz glasses and neon eye shadow,

“Puck? My most loyal servant Puck where are you, Puck?” It is clear he wants someone to come out and save him, but all I can do is watch my lord from the shadows, watch him finally cross the stage and melt back into the dark of stage left. The rest of Act 2 goes exactly as planned with the strange scene— wherein Oberon appears to get lost in the woods and then, whilst extremely high and paranoid and fucked up, stumble his way across the stage while trying increasingly desperately to get Puck to come help him— is never mentioned again.

We spend all of intermission trying to cheer Brian (he doesn’t take failure well) up. I make the butterfly kisses on his cheeks with my fake eyelashes (they are very long you see). Our director— a very put together and collected woman tonight— says the word fuck. Brian, inexplicably, feels much better. Everything is going smoothly at last.

Act 4. I suddenly cannot find Brian. I am supposed to be onstage, but so is he. I look in every backstage place. The green room. The boy’s dressing room. The girl’s dressing room. Underneath the fucking bathroom stalls. It is then that I become aware that our prop’s master, Carly, is trying to tell me something. Our rapid and hushed conversation goes a little something like this:

Carly, whispering furiously: Gabe, why aren’t you onstage, they need you right now!!

Me, panicked: I’m looking for Brian, it’s his scene and he’s gotta give the monologue to disenchant Titania!! I think he’s missing his cue again!!

Carly, seriously regretting being friends with me: You fucking acorn, Brian is already onstage. He’s been onstage for the whole scene. Go!!!

I have been backstage trying to not let Oberon miss his cue up again while Oberon is onstage, wondering why I’ve missed my cue. Luckily, he can see my hazard orange jacket from the wings and he doesn’t go through with his split-second improv plan which, he explained to me later tonight, was just to make up a story about how the Athenians had killed me, and then make up as many gruesome details as he needed to include in order to give me the time I needed to get in position.

[where-theres-smoak-2]

I just glanced at a Netflix video that revealed some new S2 details. In one scene, Aleks is gazing at the Darklina propaganda poster and he can't help but caress Alina's face before angrily shoving the paper away. It's like he's furious at himself for still wanting her so much ("Wanting makes us weak"). The voice over also revealed he still longs to join forces with her again.

(Mild Book Spoilers)

You know I went back and rewatched it after seeing your ask and you are right it does look like he is about to caress her face, I missed that the first watch, and honestly that does weird things to my heart. I do think you are right that he is angry at himself for still wanting her and I think its because of that longing to re-join forces with her, he doesn't want to be on opposite sides to her but he also believes that she is in the way of his mission to bring about a safer world for grisha. His cause is the only thing he has had to cling to for hundreds of years, then he meets Alina and for a small amount of time he has hope, he has someone who he thinks will be at his side and help achieve this goal, he's not alone anymore and he doesn't have to do it on his own anymore. But then he loses her and that dream along with her. I think at this point he is very conflicted because he wants to achieve his mission but he also wants Alina but believes he can't have both.

The voiceover is really interesting to me and not just because of the part where it talks about Aleks wanting to re-join Alina but because it also talks about the new found power Aleks has, which I think is his new ability to summon light, and all he gave up for it. What's even more interesting is when it shows the poster of darklina and Aleks pushing it away we hear that line we've heard in previous trailers 'are you willing to sacrifice that which is most precious to you?' I think it is really significant that they chose to use this line here as I think for Aleks the most precious thing to him, the thing he is having to sacrifice is Alina. Aleks has discovered this new power he has and, as the trailer says, he is more powerful now than he ever has been. He could use this power to help the grisha but he also knows that he had to lose Alina to achieve this so I feel like he is going to be feeling very conflicted every time he uses the power as we saw in the trailer him looking at hiss hand in fear and then gripping it and closing his eyes, we know from other trailers that his hand begins to emit light, so I am wondering if he is feeling a bit of guilt here. I am sure there are times when that knowledge that he lost Alina to gain this power becomes too much for him and that there are times he regrets it which I think makes him angry because he has never had anything waiver him from his cause before and he has never put anything else above the grisha, but then there is Alina and she is making him question things and feel really unstable I think which then in turn makes him feel angry.

I do think we are going to see an increasingly unhinged Aleks the longer he is away from Alina and the more he fails to convince Alina to come back to him. I mean we all saw what he was like in episode 6 when he first realised she was missing, he was frazzled and frantic and not at all the calm collected general we were used to seeing. I think this season is going to be like that only x1000.

[golvio]

Thinking about the potential implications of Ganondorf being buried with that Goddess Harp-shaped belt buckle and driving myself nuts.

Could you imagine WW Ganondorf’s big “your gods abandoned you�� monologue being applied to Hylia and, by extension, every single Zelda both past and present, as her being the alleged avatar of Hylia’s will on earth is the justification used for her and her family’s reign? Just going from saying “the gods abandoned me and my people to die of disease and famine” to “You abandoned me, specifically, and as you are the earthly figurehead of the theocratic monarchy that ruled the world in my time, I hold you personally responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to me, and I am taking you to fucking task.”

I hope if we meet Past!Ganondorf he ends up initially seeming like a Nice, Normal vassal of the Hyrulean Empire sworn to serve the goddess as all able-bodied young men are, only to reveal the depths of his religious trauma and his obsessive resentment of the person he was browbeaten into believing is the earthly avatar pf the Goddess in whose name his land was conquered and his birthright stripped from him in a series of increasingly unhinged “I know you can read my thoughts, Your Grace” moments, along with personally addressed prayers to a Goddess he knows will never answer and who delights in his torment begging to see his loyal sacrifice and avert his fate, bargaining for his life until it becomes clear to him that She will never hold up her end of the deal and will continue to take and take and take and torture him and his loved ones for laughs, all the while insisting she’s just a normal girl like all of her subordinates who just didn’t know about all those nasty things her father did, who can’t stop the authorities she was born to command from sacrificing him as the kingdom’s energy source in her place, who can’t be held accountable for the misery he had to endure at the hands of her faith, her family, her subordinates, and her empire that she’s set to inherit, unless he takes matters into his own hands.

He will either prove that she’s correct about “just being a normal girl” by ensuring she dies like a mortal and takes her whole faith down with her, or he himself will die trying. What could he, who already lost everything and is damned to suffer so much in life, possibly have to fear from any hell that Her Grace could conjure up for him?

And then in the present it culminates in this incredibly tense scene where Present!Zelda is hiding in an underground ruin somewhere while Ganondorf is prowling around like, “ARE YOU THERE, GOD?” *cocks shotgun* “IT’S ME, MARGARET.”

[queen-of-bel]

It's okay if you don't remember but remember when Shizuo and Izaya had their final battle and Izaya actually tried to kill Shizuo? What do you think would've happened if Izaya somehow actually succeeded or Shizuo was the one who killed Izaya instead?

Oh I fucking love this question.

I think if Shizuo had actually killed Izaya, not much would change. Izaya is already pretty much dead to Ikebukuro after their fight. Shizuo's life motto has always been "punch it until it goes away". Now, what "goes away" actually means doensn't matter to him. Did they die? Avoid him out of fear? Paralyzed from the waist down? Doesn't matter, don't care. The annoyance is gone now and that's all that's important.

Izaya on the other hand...

There are few things that Izaya has a genuine emotional investment in, but god damn is he invested hard. The first is his friendship with Shinra, the second is his fear of death and his mission to learn if an afterlife exists or not, and finally, his pure hatred of Shizuo.

By the time we reach vol 13, those first two things have absolutely gone to shit. Shinra has completely abandoned him and he's grappling with this idea that Shinra, who Izaya had considered to be his best friend for over a decade, isn't really his best friend after all. To say nothing of the reality that Shinra cannot be considered a friend in any capacity; that's a thought Izaya can't begin to entertain yet.

He also really fucked up by forgetting to ask Celty if an afterlife exists. All of his suicide meetups, trying to awaken Celty's head-- every hoop he's gone through just to ease his anxieties about death were for nothing. He had the opportunity to ask and was so dumbfounded at her appearance that he said nothing. Way to go, idiot.

So given that he's failed miserably twice in a row, the stakes are extremely high going into this fight with Shizuo. I think this is why Izaya views it as a fight to the death. He's become increasingly more erratic and unhinged as the story goes on, suffering blow after blow from reality that keeps forcing him to see that he is not the man he's built himself up to be. He wants to be so badly the mastermind and the one in charge, and the universe just smacks him and tells him to sit down and shut up instead. By the time we hit vol 13, we're seeing the accumulation of all of Izaya's self-destructive tendencies, as well as the horrible influences that others had on him his entire life. It's an extremely volatile storm that has more than just Shizuo's life on the line. It's also about maintaing his pride, ego, and just holding onto any semblance of the self he has carefully curated and presented to the world for the past 20+ years.

And that's why I think if he did succeed in killing Shizuo, that may be the tipping point for him to go from "morally gray asshole" to "genuinely evil". The man is so desperate from all of his failures that if he gets a taste of success, especially considering how long and deep his hatred for Shizuo runs, that's going to be a high he'll keep chasing no matter the cost.