#i feel like this comes of stupidly preachy

[roguestorm]

Where does the idea of Jean Grey being angry come from? I always seen her as reserved and collected. The moments where she was angry were imo justified and valid.

When I talk about Jean being angry, I'm trying to 1) add flaws back to her character, to keep her from being one-dimensional and perfect and 2) explain the Dark Phoenix Saga in the way that makes the most sense to me, which is the idea of repression.

I think Jean often is collected, especially around new people, but I think that's because she's repressing a lot of her emotions, including her anger.

We see her express anger some in Claremont:

In X-Factor, where Jean (like everyone else) is having a quarter life crisis and is pretty emotionally unstable, it comes out a lot. In scenes like this one:

and this one:

And though she mostly settles down by the end of the run, more confident in herself and in her relationship and her team and its goals, we do get some good angry!Jean in the nineties:

And then this one, where it's harder for me to put a name to the emotion, but I think it's anger. Righteous anger, maybe, but still. Anger.

(Lobdell Jean my incredibly preachy beloved <3)

And then the famous confrontation between Emma and Jean in Morrison's run:

Morrison and I have our differences on Jean characterization (bc they are incredibly stupidly wrong and I am always right, of course) but I feel like a reading of this scene as an extension of Jean's rage is possible. It feels a bit like the earlier confrontation with Psylocke.

I guess the question for me isn't whether these moments are justified, but more 1) What is it that triggers Jean's anger? and 2) How easy is it to trigger?

A lot of the time it's Scott or Scott-related, frequently it's injustice, and with the Logan one, well, maybe Logan just sucks to be around. How easy it is to set her off depends greatly on the era -- Claremont's Jean is more composed than Simonson's. Taylor's Jean is never ever angry, because Taylor is boring. So it depends, but I think you can say that she's easier to set off than some people (like Taylor, or maybe Duggan) would write her as being.

[petorahs]

@vickdoom​ while i was formulating a response my brain was like. wow! it really is difficult keeping this compact without torturing myself so! why not make a new post! life is easier now lmao

i agree that the EN vas are fine and the comparisons of “sub is better than dub!!11!!1″ have all but been exhausted but yea! it really can be looked past. also jp akechi and en akechi really are like two different beings entirely and i love them both so i think either way. i would’ve liked jin anyway

The weird talk about murdering a guy actually being good for him, all things considered, WASN'T a mockery, after all, and he is just really really stupid...? 

I will admit, you lost me there! Is this about Jin at the final confrontation? Takaya was being quite insane at the end there I will admit and either really uncaring about his own teammate’s life or just straight up stupidly not thinking about the consequences but I would just chock it up to the desperation that comes with last-ditch efforts like his. and also bad writing. i barely remember anything from that part of the game tbh because i was emotional about SEES but true! i agree go off, slay king (doesnt really understand what this is about my bad) 

I've tended to think of it as maybe a way of coping with the clash between the neurotic hyper-independence and the desire to actually keep his two friends close by just considering them a extension of himself, but the cultish angle sounds very much probable!!

also that wasn’t the intent of the point i was trying to make with the first person plural of “our chidori” LMFAOO it was a bit hard to keep things in that little comment box so i think my point wasnt explained very well but thats ok!! i mostly agree with the former, not the cultish angle thing!! 

anyway on to p3 criticism :D 

( i have to preface this that if i disagree it’s not for the sake of disagreeing but rather i just like having internet discourse in a chill way y’know. like i genuinely do like to discover other people’s perspectives on media and consider them! far be it from me to “defend” p3 eventho its my fav rn in fact i’ll probably agree more than otherwise. )

first of all the comparison of eva and p3 is pretty apt LMAO i haven’t watched it myself but from what i gather. both it and p3: 1) have protags that maybe reflect the target demographic in the audience (troubled youth?) 2) timeless classic according to fans. (i agree. a lot of people still talk about both till this day) 3) themes that draw in familiarity? is that the word (biblical or greek, respectively) 4) loved to death by fans and impacted them greatly

i think, the last one, is definitely due to the emotional responses the two evoked in its audience as well as the nostalgia factor. hence, criticism on p3 (idk about eva honestly) is rarely ever talked about, which is why i prompted for your opinion, cause I really do rarely see criticism on it aside from the surface level (like p3p VS fes, ken s.link, minato’s moon s.link, is the answer good etc). 

there is a very specific set of circumstances that i got into p3 with that none of the aforementioned really applies to me. no nostalgia aside from the 2000s stuff which p4 also has, so! when you strip it all away i feel like it’s just a game with silly pacing among other flaws.

on to the vagueness of p3′s themes in comparison with its sequels, i do believe it’s due to the fact that the developers left it intentionally individualistic in order to not sound ‘preachy’. 

- HASHINO, from this interview (which i’ll be referring to down the line as well). 

there really wasn’t an end goal they set in mind, they just wanted to depict as many reactions to death as possible. 

One time, I read a magazine article that discussed the various ways in which people wished to meet their end. As you might expect, the answers were just as diverse as the people giving them… but the majority of them did agree on one point: they wished to die surrounded by loved ones. -HASHINO

except for one: the message in p3 seems to lie in its social links, and that to die surrounded by loved ones, or rather knowing you impacted them positively, is “the answer”.

now far be it from me to take anything this man says too seriously since his direction of the persona games, while generally good, have so much dissonance in them sometimes with its themes that its almost painful (seen in p5 most recently). also in this same interview he says 'I’ve never successfully forged a true friendship with a girl in real life.’ and like.

hmmm on the ryoji and shinjiro bit. frickkkkk i never even pictured shinjiro in that same way i view ryoji now that you mention it,,,, this is a great depiction of the “dissonance” between themes I was talking about. although I don’t completely understand the “healthy and content millionaire raised by a loving father” part you mentioned suddenly, i think this is about takaya (strega) VS mitsuru (SEES) is it? cant say it’s about shinji and ryoji since the only thing we know about ryo’s parents is that they never existed. i wouldn’t super call the late kirijo father as outwardly “loving” either. i think i need more context on this LOL if you dont mind.

kirijo group’s unsavory practices have always been out in the open like that yeah, and no one says a thing cause i guess rich = OK and mitsuru is a baddie so = also OK. yukari tries to call her and kirijo as a whole out on it but it’s always with the underlying message of “yukari’s just jealous of mitsu” that gets resolved as soon as yukamitsu’s personal problems do. imo, i sort of liked that the kirijo group wasnt exactly a saintly company cause lbr what companies even are, but their current actions really are just reprehensible to say the least and don’t reflect their “change in ways”, that i can agree with.  

now, if i were to rank the closeness of modern persona game’s main casts with eachother it’d look like p4 > p5 >p3. SEES don’t get along with eachother, this is a given. and i do think it was intentional on the game dev’s parts as seen here: 

SEES are functionally colleagues with lives outside of eachother. i noticed them being referred to as “friends” during May, yes, but I noticed that only when I wanted to select yukari or junpei in the shrine fortunes, or during Fool Arcana rank ups which are semantics the game has to play by to just, get the point across to the player. they are “friends” in the same way we’d refer to our college classmates as friends, but once semester break rolls around we tend to hang out with other people, right? that’s what SEES are to eachother, at first. also, if we go by the RP-ing as the MC aspect that persona tends to do, then it’s most certainly not just ‘the game’ referring to them as friends but rather the MC seeing them as such. and i dont know, it’s a nice characterization for minato and minako to me -- seeing their dormmates as friends when they dont necessarily feel the same yet. its like they want to be close. 

i have to respectfully disagree about the nuance thing as well. interestingly, even the most diehard p3 fan from what i’ve seen sometimes shares your views as well. case in point, yukari being hostile in ‘the answer’ when she supposedly went through character development already in ‘the journey’, which i presented my disputation for here. this, coupled with the junpei thing you mentioned... i think it’s brilliant! call it bad writing, but honestly. to be real. humans make the same mistake over and over before they finally get it. i know i did. especially as a 16-17 teen. these characters are in different contexts most of the time which makes them react in somewhat same ways. 

let’s take junpei again as an example. at the monorail he expresses his jealousy, gets over it. during june/july, he gets jealous again, but worse, and this time he doesnt get over it too much until he meets chidori (someone he wants to have lean on him). during that time between the problem and meeting chidori, he hands a quick apology to MC, but that just marks another pivot where instead of taking it out on MC, he takes it out on himself self-deprecatingly. he knows that his problem is himself now -- that’s development to me. and lastly, his conflict with the MC comes out during the climax when he blames them for the shadows, and everything that’s happened. for making their lives hell. understandably, its a hotheaded response to have in that situation. i could see a past teen boy me that would react somewhat the same. but that is not the same as his petty jealousy anymore.  all three are still dickish moves, but when we look at it, all three are pretty different contexts? feel free to prove me wrong but i see it as pretty in-line with what we know of junpei tbh. 

nothing to do about tartarus im afraid <3 im the type to be okay with grindy gameplay at a modicum myself and i haaaaaated exploring when i first played p3. i almost dropped it actually (so glad i didnt) but yeah. i definitely prefer p5′s main gameplay module, and i wouldn’t mind trading the slog of two hundred+ floors for something more mementos-like. 

that’s the spirit! i hope you enjoy p3 one day as much as i do :”) again, i hope this is less of me defending my favorite persona game so much as me just idk. wanting to share good parts of it despite understanding its flaws (i still think the pacing is ass even now). i do mostly agree with your points. have a good day!! (thank u if you read this far oh gosh). 

I feel like the main problem with how Strega (Takaya and Jin, at least) are written is just about the game desperately wanting them to remain excessively unlikable until after they are defeated, which is…bizarre and unnecessary, to say the least. They are never actually doing anything of importance, so the narrative relies on "dehumanizing" them into stock villains, to give the players some reason to dislike or, at least, oppose them on a personal level, hence the lack of meaningful characterization. Jin's November comment about SEES "not having a clue what will happen if the Dark Hour disappears", impliedly being about the memory wipeout, since Takaya told them outright they would lose their powers earlier, is the perfect example of this, imo. He gets cut off mid-sentence, so he doesn't spoil it for later, naturally, but it's never brought up again, after eventually being reveled by Ryoji, because that is actually a pretty solid reason for them to antagonize the protagonists (imagine waking up on the streets, with no personal documents, feeling awfully sick and wondering why no one is looking for you!) but, again, they are yet to be defeated and not meant to come off as even remotely sympathetic until then. It's just very…unskillful writing. Sorry for the long message, btw, I initially just wanted to leave a regular comment, actually, but there's just so many words it apparently wouldn't fit in less than five separate responses 😵‍💫

yoooo thanks for the input. thats also a really good way of looking at it! the game needing to make them unlikeable pretty much explains things. it just ends up being really goofy. which is a shame because they really do have great backstories that remain largely unexplored.

Jin's November comment about SEES "not having a clue what will happen if the Dark Hour disappears", impliedly being about the memory wipeout, since Takaya told them outright they would lose their powers earlier

honestly? i never made this connection myself so thanks for telling me! i could see that being true and i'm about to hit that point in my replay game soon myself so i can look at it with this context. question is how could jin have possibly have known this info... my guess is ikutsuki could have fed them that info since he also supplied them with his suppressant drugs, plus they even knew about the Ruin thing that Nyx could have brought about. honestly, including ikutsuki the "antagonists" of p3 are an interesting bunch with how much potential they have that's not really explored but i guess thats just a hashino persona game thing.

also i just think between them and ikutsuki i def see strega having more sympathetic light being shone on them since they were the direct victims of old kirijo's depravity. out of all the kids, only they survived? your comment about them "not having any personal documents" just strikes me as so fcked up. damn. hope it changes a bit in reload.

[actuallyvady]

I wasn't planning to be unemployed for as long as I've been (almost an entire year now with the exception of a job i held for two months but was terrified of something similar happening to me that caused me to leave my last job) and my partner has been so supportive and she really is amazing being the breadwinner. but we just can't afford to only have one income any longer. Plus I've been feeling guilty as HELL about it.

I've been hesitant to get back to work partly because dealing with antimaskers was a nightmare the short amount of time I have worked during this pandemic. and partly because I have really bad respiratory issues but now that I'm getting my second vaccine next week I don't have that as an excuse anymore.

I'm glad your family is so supportive and understanding. Thanks for letting me vent in your ask I feel like my friends (while non of them say it) think I'm being a giant baby about having to work another shitty job. because a lot of people work shitty jobs and just deal with it. but WHY. like why are we all so complacent in this hellscape we call society? we were not born for misery. and we absolutely weren't born to be yelled out over things out of our control. I really wanted to find a work from home job or at least a job I wasn't working with costumers but the only places hiring/calling me back based on my experience are costumer service jobs. and retail I think caused some of my worst anxiety issues and it certainly made my depression much worse. but here I am going back to it. like. the pandemic has been stressful but I've felt much better not being berated by people on a daily basis or doing work so soul crushing I feel like my brain is rotting.

I do plan to talk to my doctor and I really want to find a therapist but im having a hard time finding someone accepting clients or who specalizes in the shit I already should have been seeing a therapist for in the first place. im still young enough to be on my parents health insurance at the very least but thats another reason I had to get this job. I turn 26 next year. I feel like I've done nothing with my life. I don't want to die I don't think but I don't want to live like this.

I’m glad you have a supportive partner <3

I don’t think you’re being a baby about it, tbh I think you’re being realistic. It’s shitty as hell that people have to work, have to put up with the worst conditions just to keep themselves alive. Yes, a lot of people do put up with it, and maybe, in practical terms, you’ll have to tolerate it for a while as well... but it isn’t bad to recognize how shitty it is and to want to find another way.

I obviously don’t know any specifics about you or your situation so I can’t, like, offer specific advice, but-- if there is a kind of work you can picture yourself doing, perhaps working towards that as a goal can help ease the pain of your current situation? Like. Teach yourself new skills on your days off, when you have the capacity. Or take online classes, or try to find a community (a writing group, if you want to be a writer, that sort of thing). I talk about using distractions to keep myself from going under, but distractions are even more effective when they feel productive.

Retail is the actual worst and I hope you find a way to get out of it. I ended up stumbling into a manufacturing job, before the pandemic, and the simple fact that I never had to deal with customers made it the best “I have to work to survive” job I’ve ever had. (Not that manufacturing jobs are particularly great, but at least it wasn’t retail, you know?)

It’s funny, I find myself wanting to say things to you that are basically what I need to hear right now-- I’m 36 and I feel like I have done nothing with my life, and I don’t particularly want to die but I also don’t want to keep living like this. I don’t know if it will help you to hear, but my friends are always quick to assure me that even if I feel like I have contributed nothing, my presence in their lives is worthwhile, and I contribute simply by existing. So that’s what I will say to you: your existence, your life, and your presence in the lives of those around you is worthwhile. You exist, and therefore you have not done nothing; your existence makes the world better for the people around you. You do not need to earn your place. You are more than your job, more than your productivity, and the good you bring to the world by being you is more than enough.

[paintedrecs]

I was going to name a different one, but: the scene between Owen and Demona at the beginning of "All Is Mended" chapter three. :-D

That’s 800 words, so you’re cheating. Also what other one were you gonna name hmmmm.

For this meme.

Excerpt from this fic. (Gargoyles, Owen Burnett/David Xanatos, 11k, Owen POV, canon compliant.) Discussion under the cut.

“I don’t understand you,” Demona said.

Owen watched her approach; he’d heard her glide down to the castle but hadn’t bothered to move from his seat on the edge of a wide stone wall, overlooking the bright lights of the city stretching out far below. She was an ally for the present, working with Xanatos on his latest attempt at immortality. That didn’t mean Owen trusted her.

“You’re not human,” Demona said, folding her wings as she perched beside him—graceful, and dangerous, but not someone he wasted effort fearing. “Yet you act like one. Why.”

“I made a promise,” Owen said. He could’ve left it there, but he swept a sidelong look at her, then added, dryly, “Perhaps you need the word defined.”

“Funny,” she said, in a tone so casually uncaring that he could tell he’d poked at a particularly tender spot, one she’d spent centuries ignoring.

“So I’ve been told,” he said.

Demona’s lips pulled back slightly as she spoke through her fangs. “That’s what I mean, Puck. Why do you persist in masquerading in this skin, when we both know who you are?”

“I’m Owen,” he replied, adjusting the glasses that had slipped a little down his nose. The frames didn’t fit right around his ears anymore; he should have the screws tightened, when he had the time.

“You’re pining,” she spat, as though she’d never heard a fouler word.

That, he hadn’t expected. He didn’t bother denying it; Demona was many things, but never a fool. “I don’t see what relevance that has to you,” he said. “You wish to gain immortality; I’m doing my part. Owen is perfectly capable of playing his role.”

“And Puck has powers Owen could never dream of.” Demona tilted her head, watching him thoughtfully. It was unpleasant, but he let her eyes scrape over him. “When you were last in your true form, as Puck—” she began.

Owen let out a sudden, scoffing breath. “When you held me in chains and made me do your bidding.”

She shrugged, lightly. “You said something to me then. You told me that if I wished, you could make Goliath love me again. Was that true?”

“I bend the truth,” he said. “When the mood strikes me. I do not lie.”

“So it was possible.”

“Yes,” he said. He narrowed his eyes at her, unsure where she was heading. “Titania’s mirror is beyond your reach now. Even if you had it in your grasp, you know full well I wouldn’t carry out the wish the way you wanted.”

“Because you’re a trickster,” she said, with annoyance that bordered on grudging respect. It was clear that she hadn’t often run into someone who could best her. “But my point, Puck, is that you have this power. You could make David Xanatos love you.”

Owen’s lip curled in disgust; he turned away from her.

“Don’t pretend you have a human’s misguided sense of honor,” Demona chided, human sounding like the darkest expletive she could harness. “You’ve done worse, over the centuries, as have I.”

He didn’t bother dignifying her with a response.

“Answer me, Puck,” she demanded, then, dripping with disdain, when he remained silent: “Owen.”

“You think ill of humans,” Owen said, each word precise, biting. “You blame them for all your errors, for the foul deeds only you were responsible for carrying out. You think yourself above them, and you assume that I, as someone who has lived far longer than you, who has seen worlds you cannot fathom, will treat humans with as little esteem.”

Demona rose to her feet, towering over him, her eyes flashing red in fury.

Owen cast her a look that carried the full weight of his contempt. “Yes, I have the power to do as you say, and far beyond that. What you don’t see—what I suspect you’ve never seen—is that forcing someone to bend to your will is meaningless. All it does is show how weak, how petty, you are.”

Demona hissed at him, but did not approach. She unfurled her wings, and as she dropped from the turret, she cast back her parting shot. “You should know, then, that Fox is pregnant.”

“I know,” he said, to the now-empty sky. He watched as she followed the currents across the city, well past the clock tower where her former love resided, no longer thinking of her.

Xanatos hadn’t told him yet, but Owen was familiar with the signs. He’d seen, too, the way Xanatos had grown more careful with her, how his hands would instinctively stray, now, to her waist, her still-flat belly, not yet swollen with life. How he looked at her, with a light in his eyes that would’ve burned one less worthy to cinders.

“I know,” he repeated quietly and, adjusting his glasses and briskly dusting off his suit, returned to his work.

Commentary! Oof we’ll see if this gets long. Character limits on twitter make it easier to be concise. And please please let the read more actually work this time, tumblr.

So this is actually one of my favorite parts of that fic.

In general, I reach an Avoidance Point with my own writing; I edit obsessively, post, edit the posted fic a little more, then panic and stop rereading it. If you don’t check your bank account, it’ll never be empty. If you don’t reread your fics after you’ve posted them, you’ll never find out that (a) they’re terrible (b) there are a dozen more areas that could use more editing.

Nevertheless, I’m still, I think, really proud of this one. This particular section isn’t something that’s terribly new for me, not like other parts of the fic that stretched me beyond my usual comfort levels, but it is an interaction between two characters I’d never written before.

I’m really pleased with Demona’s voice here. The way she spits out Owen’s name, the hatred she shows for anything human, her very dubious (and self-centered) morality, the hints of lingering heartbreak over Goliath, her deep confusion over Puck choosing to take on human form. It’s the worst curse she can imagine - and since this scene takes place after “The Mirror,” you’ve seen how horrified she is at seeing herself as a human, a “gift” Puck bestowed upon her so she won’t turn to stone during the day.

Demona pissed Puck off, so he gave her what she asked for, but at a price he knew she would absolutely despise.

But Puck loves being a human. He loves being Owen. It’s something Demona can’t ever understand, and here she’s trying to, as much as Demona ever tries to truly understand anything that doesn’t directly benefit her.

Why would Puck spend his days in a form where he doesn’t have ready access to his exceptional powers? Why would he allow himself to continue serving a human - when he broke away from her so quickly, so easily? Demona might occasionally work with Xanatos, but she doesn’t like or trust him, and she’d readily destroy him alongside the rest of humanity, after she’s gotten what she wants/needs from him.

Why would Puck fall in love with a human - something that’s become obvious even to Demona, from working alongside the two of them. Worse: why the hell won’t he do anything about it, when he clearly has the power to make Xanatos do whatever he wants?

These were all questions I wanted to pull out of the story, and Demona - as someone who actually knows who Owen truly is - was a natural choice to press hard for some answers.

I layered a bunch of stuff into this interaction, but here are three main concepts:

1. Love isn’t selfish.

I don’t think Puck would’ve actually cast a love spell on Goliath if Demona had asked - not without throwing in a few twists and tricks. But the fact remains that he could have, and that it would’ve been comparatively easy. Demona didn’t ask for and didn’t really want that, but she did love Goliath for a long time, as much as she’s capable of loving anyone, so that offer would stick with her.

And Demona...well, Demona already used one free-will-spell against Goliath, so it’s not like it’s an idea she’s entirely adverse to.

Owen, on the other hand, would never consider making Xanatos do something against his will. (This is, in fact, something he and Xanatos share - Xanatos’s immense caution against pushing Owen into something he might not want contributes to that stupidly long gap before they resolve their relationship.)

If Xanatos doesn’t love Owen, that’s his choice. Owen is heartbroken about it, and he’s out here on the rooftop indulging in some quiet reflection on how it feels for a human heart to shatter, but he’ll shake it off and go back inside before long. Demona’s an unwelcome intrusion, and he’s understandably sharp with her.

2. Puck is a trickster, not a villain.

I have a lot of thoughts about Xanatos, too. While it’s not entirely relevant to get too into depth with here, I do think that a huge part of Puck’s attachment and loyalty to Xanatos comes from the fact that Xanatos is fascinating - not dull and full of preachy speeches like Renard - without being actually evil.

Demona is interesting, sure - she’s lived a long and exciting life - but Puck would never, ever willingly serve her. She’s selfish. She’s cruel. She’s vindictive. Puck doesn’t want to destroy humanity; he likes humans. He likes Xanatos best, yes, but he enjoys being in this world with the rest of them.

In the City of Stone episode, Owen stands toe-to-toe with Elisa and says, “Mr. Xanatos is trying to fix things. What are you doing to help?”

And that, I think, is the crux of the relationship between Owen and Xanatos. Owen sees Xanatos’s delightful trickster spirit, and he also sees the good in him. They’d both upend a city but would be careful to put it back to rights if things went too far. Demona would gladly stand back and watch it burn to the ground.

Demona can only see reflections of her own cruelty now. She hates humanity because they’re the easiest target to blame for her own flaws. Owen sees humans’ complexities and loves them for it.

And because he isn’t truly human - because he’s a fae who’s wandered the earth as long as Demona has, and has lived longer, with a much wider perspective on the world and all of reality - he has no reason to listen to her petty whining. And she might actually, for the barest moment, listen to what he says to her.

Of course, she has to get in one last dig before flying away in her usual dramatic huff, but he already knows that, too. Demona can’t hurt him; Owen made his own choices, knowing the consequences. And, unlike Demona, he’s willing to live with those consequences without trying to reflect the blame elsewhere.

3. You can choose your own identity.

Demona has very rigid ideas about...well, about pretty much everything. Humans are bad. Gargoyles are good. (As long as they side with her.) Her human form is something that’s useful to her now, but she’ll never stop loathing it or wishing she could shake it off.

She thinks everyone sees the world the way she does, and she assumes that Puck is (a) not entirely happy being trapped as a human, chained to Xanatos by a contract, like she attempted with the mirror (b) “pretending” to be someone else when he’s wearing his Owen shape.

But what I wanted to show throughout this fic is that Puck is Owen. And that even a fae subject to Oberon’s Rule can choose his own identity, his own name, his own place in a life that he wants to lead.

At one point here, Owen refuses to respond to Demona until she calls him by his proper name. She spits it out, hating it, but he’s already told her once that’s who he is. He gave himself that name; it’s the one he wishes to use.

Owen was born into a specific life. This life - with Xanatos, as Owen Burnett, glasses and suits and clunky flip phones and all - is the one he’s chosen for himself. And he’ll do everything in his power to keep it.

[scribblesandsnark]

“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)

There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)

I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)

Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,

Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.

But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.

Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?

I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.

There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.

So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.

There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)

…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??

(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)

The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).

Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start.  In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)

I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever  appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife.  And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).

Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.

Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)

Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.

Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)

Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.

Con: Leon is a fucking moron.

Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??

Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)

Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.

Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.

I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))

Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!

It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.

Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.

There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.

Dammit, Shane.

You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.

Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)

I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.

Moving right along…

Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.

I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?

I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.

Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.

It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”

Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)

Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.

Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)

The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.

I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.

On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?

At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)

Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.

I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…

Ahem.

Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)

Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.

Wait.

Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.

I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.

I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.

PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.

DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.

The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.

That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.

I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…

I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.

That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.

Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)

Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.

There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.

The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!

(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)

CORAAAL!!

Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)

Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”

As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)

Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?

Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.

Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.

(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)

Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.

Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…

Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.

The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.

Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!

Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.

Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?

As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?

There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!

Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.

I do love that shot though.

Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.

Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.

Sidebar complete.

I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.

It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.

I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.

Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.

Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.

Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)

How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.

Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.

Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)

There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.

Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)

Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.

How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??

I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.

Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.

Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?

This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.

Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.

I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)

I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.

“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.

I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.

As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!

RIP Leon Basset.

I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??

Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.

There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).

Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.

Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.

Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:

Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.

Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.

WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.

Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)

Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…

It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.

God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.

Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.

I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??

So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??

Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.

…that poor horse.

Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.

Iconic shot!

It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).

Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)

There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.

One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…

I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.

And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.���

So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.

For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.

Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.

I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)

That poor horse…

Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”

Men have huge feet. Yeek.

It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)

Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.

I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.

“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.

Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?

love  em

[twodaysintojune]

Seven

Supernatural, Sastiel, Warnings-Graphic depictions of Blood, Torture, Decay and Gun Violence

One Shot Masterlist, Long Story Masterlist

Find me at AO3

Sastiel Creations Challenge | @twodaysintojune

↳ Theme: SEVEN | Prompt: WRATH

It might not have been the best idea to watch this movie after the events of the last week but Sam was spent and frustrated and pretty much all he really wanted was to get into his little happy serial killer binge, as fucked up as that might have sounded for anyone else. He was so tired that by the middle of the movie he was already snoozing. 

The sun was heavy over them, their necks were dripping sweat and the dirt road was picking up all the dust that lifted while the car moved over it, covering it with a fine layer of evident beige. Dean was grumbling below his breath complaining about it when they arrived to the point Nick, who had finally shut up after a two hour long trip, had showed them on the gps. 

He had said that was the place where he hid the most important part of his murder spree, something that the police wouldn’t care about. The boys didn’t like it at all, the whole ‘follow the psycho leader’ thing but there wasn’t much they could do right now. They had allowed the monster in so it was their job to clean this mess. Sam kept his ear over the calling phone for as long as it rang until the line broke.

“Anything?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll call back when he can.”

Sam gruffed while looking outside. Three days. It had been three days since Sam last talked with Castiel and he just couldn’t take off this feeling that his friend needed him. Two days since they had found Nick and one day and almost disfiguring his face in order to get the location of this mystery thing. 

The place was surreal. A flat dirty surface extended everywhere around them. Electric poles carrying immense charges of electricity at either side of the car. A storm on the horizon made the area where they were standing feel dense and stuffy. Sam hated everything about this place.

Dean stopped the car, jumped out and opened up his side to pull Nick from the backseat.

“Alright asshat, where to now?”

Nick looked at Dean like a kicked puppy after he had pushed him further away from the car and turned to look around. After a moment scanning the area he signaled an electricity tower with his head.

“There, that pole there with the white stripe. I buried the box in there.”

Dean looked at him and then at Sam in annoyance. He moved to the trunk and searched for a shovel, leaving Nick to Sam.

“You know Sam, everytime I see how much you care about your angel I just have this feeling of… utter frustration in my guts. Like, why would you even waste your time calling him? Lucifer told me all about Castiel from that time he used his body as vessel and trust me when I tell you I was shocked to hear an angel could do something like that… I mean, you must remember all the bad things he’s done, like, releasing the Leviathans? Breaking your soul?” Nick winced. 

“Shut up Nick.”

They had gotten close to the pole, Dean had walked before them and was already hitting the ground in a place that had been recently removed.

“And honestly, I get it, he helped you. He allowed you to lean over him, well maybe he allowed your brother more than you but you get it, right?” Sam glared at Nick “Most likely because he felt guilty but still he was there and he provided as much as he could…” 

Nick’s thought process went mute, he was watching Dean shovel like he was in a trance for a while.

“And he was smart. I bet he could have even told you how to open a door to the Empty if you had only asked. He had been there before, there was no way he wouldn’t.” Dean lent down to remove something from the hole he had done. “But I was not you so he didn’t tell me.”

Sam turned to look at Nick frowning, he had tried to block out all his previous comments until the last one. There was something about those lines that just felt wrong. Nick turned to look at Sam, capturing his sight.

“We discussed a bit, you know? I called him out and he came unto me all preachy. Sam and Dean would never do this. They would never do that. When I was done at listening to the way he stupidly thought so highly of you I made a bet with him about how up to the righteous challenge you could go.To see how well you can hold yourself.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Dean’s cry was filled with shock. Sam turned to see his brother move away from the opened cooler box with a hand covering his face and eyes wide open. Soon enough he turned away and began to barge out all he had eaten earlier.

Curious with Dean’s odd behaviour, Sam went forward to look at the contents of the box but when Dean noticed he ran towards his brother and pushed him back.

“No Sammy, you can’t see this.”

Sam glared at Dean vexed, it was ridiculous to think that anything could be horrible enough not to look at by now in their line of work.

“What’s in the box?”

Everything went into slow motion. Him struggling against Dean. Nick egging him to look into the box laughing.

“Tell me Sam, how human are you for real?”  

“Dammit Dean, what’s in the box!?”

“No, Sammy, please stop!”

After a couple more steps he was able to glance into the box. He saw black. Black hair. Ashen skin, lips slightly falling apart in the usual state of a corpse that has already lost the first stages of rigor mortis. And the eyes, gone. 

Sam could have stood closed eyelids, heck, he could have stood open fogged eyes that would never see him, really see him again but this? Eyelids torn apart and eyeballs missing? Where had Castiel’s eyes gone? Where had Castiel’s beautiful piercing blue eyes disappeared? Where is the white noise coming from? Where is the mortifying silence coming from? Where is that ringing noise coming from? Why is it growing louder?

“What did you do to him?”

“He told me I was unable to see things how they really were.”

“What. Did. You. Do to Him!?”

“He said that maybe I should try to see you with different eyes.”

Sam’s breath went faster, his bloodstream boiled as his sight began to blur and darken on the sides, tunnel vision impeding him to see anything else but the head of the friend that had been by their side for so long.

“So I took his eyes.” Nick chuckled “Though I have to admit I didn’t see anything different after that!” He began to laugh as if he had said the funniest joke.

Sam turned around, the Taurus already on his hand, locked off and ready to strike as he turned to face Nick. He was screaming, he was screaming although he hadn't realized he was screaming and looking at Nick's mocking image he just couldn't stand it more.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

And Nick was still standing and laughing so hard, so Sam kept up just to shut him up.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

He pulled the trigger.

And his brother was trying to stop him. But Sam was larger and stronger and blaring deranged. He was so furious that no matter how many holes he was making on the man that had once hosted the Morningstar, it wasn't enough. He shot and shot and shot until the twelfth bullet came out and then, Sam woke up.

He opened up his eyes with a start and he could feel sticky sweat fall through his temples and making a cold path down his neck. His breath was ragged and his chest was in so much pain he felt like there was a stone pressing it. Desperate, reaching out for air, he turned to his side and sat up as fast as he could and when he finally regained some sort of control on the amount of oxygen getting in his lungs, he began to cry.

That’s the way Castiel found him. Small and crouched, tearing and trembling in the middle of a leather couch that under a light other than the cold, lifeless Netflix main screen might have been nice. He ran towards him and knelt by his side, reaching to his shoulders in worry.

“Sam are you alright? Sam? Sam!? … DEAN!”

When Sam barely registered the angel screaming for his brother he turned to look at him with desperate pleading eyes and threw himself at his arms. Body falling heavily to the ground at his lap.

“Cas, Cas, I’m sorry Cas, I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, I… I couldn’t...” 

A flow of words so mixed up with sobs that Castiel was barely able to understand. A rush of steps coming from who knows where. Strong hand grabbing the back of his neck with an ease that helped Sam realize he was safe but it still hurt so bad, it hurt so much he felt like breaking.

“Fucking hell Sammy just try to get up, come on man, you can do it.” 

That was the only thing Sam could process from all the things his brother was saying to soothe him. He doesn’t remember well how he got up, if he actually got up at all by himself but he does remember being gently led through the hallway by strong hands that obviously belonged to Castiel, to whom he was clinching like a lifeline.

He remembers laying down in a bed and being covered in a light cool sheet and holding so tight to Castiel that he didn’t realize who had taken off his shoes or when the lights had gone off. He remembers something heavy weighing down the other side of the mattress and Dean’s hand caressing his head like ages ago when he had been nothing but a child. He remembers gentle hands softly pressing circles on his back, soothing him, urging him to calm down and sleep. Just sleep. And he remembers that last vacuous deep sigh he gave away after tearing so much he believed there was not gonna be a way he could actually feel anything anymore and gave up his consciousness once more. 

The following day he woke up still spent and tired but feeling awkwardly light, free. The weight that had been his brother missing but still warm enough to show his place hadn’t been empty for long. He sighed once more and felt Castiel’s hand on his back caressing him in a soothing manner. He looked up to see his friend’s face. His beautiful blue eyes, currently darkened in between the shadows of the unlit room were there. Alive.

“Good morning Sam” Castiel said in a soft rasp whisper. Almost afraid to startle him as if he was a small frightened creature.

“...morning” He answered back by habit, unsure on how he should react about anything at the moment.

Castiel let out a visible sight and smiled tiredly at Sam. The angel was as beautiful today as the day they first met. Even more so because of the fact that this Castiel here was there for them because he wanted to and not because he had received orders from heaven or anyone else and because he was holding onto him like he had never seen him hold onto anybody else before. 

“I’m sorry, I must have freaked you out.”

“How do you feel Sam?”

Sam sighed.

“I… I had a nightmare, you know?”

Castiel heard it all and surrounded him comfortingly with his arm.

“It was just a nightmare Sam.”

Sam tightened his grasp on him and hid his face in Castiel’s neck. 

“Yes but I… I was so mad and I killed Nick and—”

“Sam.” Castiel pulled him away enough to look at him “It was a dream. Nick is dead. You never did anything to him in real life so I believe you can have a bit of leeway in whatever your dreams want to do with that excuse of a human being.”

Sam looked at Castiel surprised and considered his words.

“Maybe you’re right.”

“And most important, you’re just human. There’s no sin in that.”

“Guess I’ll have to take that seeing that an actual angel just said it.” Sam confided coyly.

Castiel laughed and, unlike ever before, he caressed Sam’s face. Moving away some strands of hair from his face and tucking them behind his ear. Sam felt the intimacy like it was the first time he had ever felt Castiel’s fingers on him and he looked at him with a longing that he had never felt so strong before.

“What is it Sam?”

He was so close and Sam was so tired of everything going wrong in their lives, before his brain could stop him he leaned forward and pressed his lips against Castiel’s softly. And he felt it, he felt the shock of his friend in the way his fingers retreated for a second and in the way he stopped breathing for a moment and then he felt how the angel began to caress him and tangle his fingers in Sam’s hair, kindly pressing back into Sam.

They didn’t make out passionately like in the movies, they just turned their heads enough to lock their lips and kiss in a tender, sensual motion, grasping tight enough to stay together but not hard enough that it would be painful to the other. Sam was so enthralled in Castiel’s touch that he didn’t feel his brother come back with a cup of tea. 

Dean stopped for a second at the frame of the door glancing at them, soundlessly moving inside to place the cup at the bedside table. He looked at them once more almost to be sure his eyes were not playing tricks on him and then, scratching his head, he walked away from the room sighing and closing the door tight. 

There would be plenty of time to make fun of them later. At least he was glad his brother would be alright.

[nevjpegstuff-blog]

letting go.

i can’t pretend i’m not angry. i can’t pretend i’m not upset over what everything has turned into. we’ve all become so disconnected, some of us more than others and with that disconnect it’s almost as if we’ve forgot that people are human: breathing, with emotions, opinions, stories of their own. 

i can’t blame it all on one person, or one thing, one situation. 

i’m not going to pretend that it’s not a combination of things.

that would be an injustice.

what i am saying is that we can do better. 

i first entered this place in hopes of finding refuge. that itself didn’t come for years after. i am not the same kid i was back then. i’ve grown, so has he, so have you, we all have but the environment that exists doesn’t align with how much i know we’ve learnt. this environment doesn’t encourage me to stick around. 

everyday i watch people i like move on, change their names, their photos, distance themselves and erase that part of their life from history. 

i cannot pretend that doesn’t hurt.

it feels like a door has been slammed shut, locked up, bolted, keys thrown away.

not just between us and him, but for everyone, as a collective.

sometimes i forget how quickly life can change, how short relationships can be. things went downhill in such short time. yesterday, we were cracking jokes and crying over every little thing. today, we throw harsh words unwarranted, more than we ever did before. 

it’s a result of decisions we’ve all made and i will be criticized, told to shut up and leave but that’s what comes with having an opinion. i accept it. you are allowed to feel that way.

i am not fourteen anymore, the posters are down. they have been for a while. i stress about accountability, always afraid to lose people for holding them responsible over what is not morally correct. i fear to come across a know-it-all or preachy, but it comes with having an opinion.  

this didn’t happen overnight, it was months of watching from the outside. stupidly feeling as if i had lost something i had with someone i barely knew. standing up for them whenever someone had something negative to say, only to be proven wrong. i won’t say there’s no care but then again i’ll never know. i adored what felt like a connection, without an us would there be a him? am i ready for that conversation? 

i cannot regret the time i devoted, the support i gave, i can’t take it back, i never would but i question whether tirelessly defending someone out of the sheer fact that i struggle to let go is healthy.

it’s not that i can’t. it’s not that i wanted to unfollow him but for the last several years, i have placed him on a pedestal that he has now been removed from. a decision like that, is never an easy one for me. a girl who cannot even delete old instagram posts “because memories.”

we prioritize the wrong things and the team prioritize the wrong things because they know that. songs with deeper meanings pushed aside because society will always have something to say about the politically & emotionally charged but will consume the latest gossip without a second thought. 

i know too much about all the wrong things and not enough about what’s important but who could blame little me. in her head, she could never see things being like this. the boy next door with the guitar, how could he possibly hurt her?

indirectly. 

through ignorant tweets, stupid words, stupid actions.

so it’s not that i’m trying to be harsh but i remember the feeling of standing in that arena in april, a feeling that lasted for months after until it vanished. 

and i know i am not the only one, who feels like something’s missing and i am scared of that. scared that more people i like will feel they’ve lost him and i won’t be enough to convince them to stay. 

and it’s not that i won’t eventually heal, it’s not that i won’t get over what feels like shallow teenage nonsense, it’s not that i don’t know who i am outside of here. 

i’m scared of a me where there is no association to what once was and it sounds stupid but it’s true.

so before i let go, can we be a little kinder, try a little harder? diversify and try to be better people. even if it’s just for a moment. just for a second because life’s really short, the world can be toxic, even damaging but we can be better than this.

we are better than this.

[thewrittenpost]

Here’s a bit of a rant

But it’s really important to me, and I want to get it out here. Sorry for the length, but I really want this to be seen. It might not change anything, but you know what, at least someone will see/hear it.

Rise on NBC was a great show. I’m not caught up completely because of school, but finding out it was cancelled? That just feels like such a blow, because it was just so good.

I only watched bits and pieces of episodes as I crammed studying and homework down my throat, but every bit of it was good. Now, I’m a theatre geek, I don’t hide that, so that might be some of the appeal. But that definitely wasn’t all of it.

The show tackled very real issues; teen pregnancy, coming out, the foster system, teen alcoholism, families breaking apart... in a way that wasn’t wholly tragic or preachy. The teenagers are kids, they’re growing up, and that’s important because not every teenage experience is inherently good. But some of it is, and Rise does a great job of portraying that.

Added to the things I’ve mentioned above, from what I saw, they tackled these issues with grace and didn’t make an apology for characters doing what they would do. A teacher standing up for his program, or his students, or his beliefs; a teenager wanting to stand up and believe in her father, despite his cheating; a star athlete wanting to do something different than just their sport (bear with me, it is not quite as HSM as it sounded). The cast isn’t all-white, but diverse as a freaking high school would be, so that was also really cool.

What got me however, in just the first couple episodes, was their inclusion of a trans character (Michael). Now, that’s not an area in which I have a lot of expertise, so I’m not going to go on and on about it. But what I loved was that you know what? The teacher, although it was pretty clear that this was his first experience as well, worked with it. When someone besides Michael told him about their transition, he asked if it was okay for the other person to tell him (It was not widely known at all, just so y’all know). And later, when Michael put both their birth name and Michael on the audition sheet, the teacher checked with him as to what the right name would be to use. He wanted his student to be comfortable in that space, with their identity, and that was important. There are of course other moments throughout the season, I’m sure about that, but again, I don’t really have the experience to talk about this subject, and I still have to do some catch-up on episodes.

Like honestly, this was just a really good show that offered diversity in the cast and the characters, and I’m going to say something that might turn some people away from the show, but bear with me. Rise took everything, and I mean everything, that was good about shows like Glee and High School Musical and made it better. It offered characters that people can relate to, an actual show from the world off tv instead of ones made just for the movie -I’m looking at you HSM... do you know how long I wished I could have actually seen the “show” you sang from?-, and just so many things that people do go through without making everything painful. There are happy moments, and sweet teenage love, and character growth that definitely worked but could have gone even further with a season two.

Also, it’s a show about a musical, and Auli’i Cravalho was in it, as a lead. Y’all telling me you don’t want to hear more of that voice? She’s absolutely incredible, and no season two means no more hearing that singing in the near future. Moana was on this show and they’re cancelling it.

I just watched the end of the finale (my mom was watching it so I caught the tail end) and just... there is so much they could do. There could be a season two. And just... even if they don’t renew it (I did see a petition, so I’m off to that in a minute) I think it’s an important one to talk about and for people to see. I didn’t even go into half the things I adored about it, and there’s a lot. I referenced some of the different things they did, but there’s tons. I won’t go and say there’s something for everyone, but it’s pretty close. I’m pretty sure most people will find at least one character that they relate to, and that’s important on television shows these days. And they do it without absolutely tormenting people, because you know what? There is a joy in this show that is absolutely beautiful.

So yeah. I’ll end the rant there. It’s gone on a bit longer than I’d meant, but I have a lot of feelings about this show and I’m going to watch all of it and I’ll probably get it if I find it on DVD somewhere. I do highly recommend watching it though if you can, because it was just... so so good. And if y’all want to talk to me about it (or yell at me because this was a stupidly long post) I’ll be back in the morning.

I’ve got a petition to go sign.

[onceuponamirror]

It's crazy to me that your % is that low? Your fics are pretty popular. I didnt realize the problem was that bad

honestly i have it pretty good all things considered!!! i am very lucky and pleased to get the reviews that i do, and i know that my average is pretty solid in comparison. 

but that’s kinda the point i’m trying to make, so i’ll explain thoroughly about how i got those readership numbers.

i’m sorry this is dumb amounts of long and is depressing and has math in it (ew)

so—as a freelancer, i run my own business, so i’m in the habit of keeping track of simple numbers and statistics. 

and i’ve been struggling to put into words the frustration i feel (as well as similar feelings i know other authors have as i’ve spoken to them about it) about how reader engagement—especially when the platform is fandom, of which the whole purpose is fan engagement—never felt in line with readership counts, etc. 

and i couldn’t really express it, ironically, without feeling just really confused about what the “industry standard” was, more or less. is what i’m feeling valid, because these are actually low comment numbers? am i just late to the game on how it works? does this feel high? is it low? what’s the average? 

i’m very annoyingly one-track-minded and a weepy ass emotional person so i decided i needed some statistics to confirm or deny what i was feeling. so i started doing some math, to have some facts. 

i used to work retail, and one of the things we would track is conversion. 

as in, how many people come into the store that actually buy something? and/or, how many people come onto a fic that leave a comment?

to do this, the process is: number of sales divided by number of people who came in. so if 300 people came into the shop and 75 people bought something, the conversion would be 25% of people were buying.

in our case of fic, let’s say a story has 1000 hits and 50 reviews. think this is pretty generous example when it comes to fic, but the conversion would be 5% of readership “bought”/commented.

so first i went looking across a few different fandoms to get a sense of this. i found a oneshot—from a couple years ago, granted—that had currently 17k hits……..and 27 reviews. SEVENTEEN THOUSAND. 27 reviews. (that’s the number without author replies)

goddamn!!!!!!!!! that is really fucking depressing. not even doing that math. i’ve got more numbers and they’re sad as hell, so at a certain point i stopped looking at oneshots, especially older ones. 

then i went to a long, popular, completed fic in the bughead fandom, which has what i think a lot of us would consider good review counts. 

conversion? approximately 1.7% overall. 

what about rereads, you might ask? sure! 

let’s say a completed, multi-chapter fic has 25k hits, and 500 reviews, not including author replies. this seems like a pretty solid, average number, right? possibly even unaverage. and we’ll be generous and say half of those hits were people rereading the fic twice. 

so 500 reviews at 12.5k hits is 4% of readership commenting.

now, let’s say it’s a third of readership rereading over time. 500 divided by 8333 jumps the number up to 6%

so, in the breakdown of per chapter, i can only do my own but—for example. as of right now, my latest chapter update on stealing home got 700 hits. as of now, 40 reviews. 

that’s approximately 5% of readers who read the latest update and then commented; 11% if i’m being very very generous and assuming all those people were actually rereads. but, i kind of doubt it. 

and 40 reviews!!! hot damn, that’s great. please, please, please, don’t misunderstand that i am incredibly grateful for every single comment, and again, i fully realize that’s a more generous number than many more deserving fics get. 

but again—that’s part of my point. 

it’s not perfect math by any means 

(and if you disagree with my numbers, please, anything other than basic math and i fall apart, so i could be embarrassingly off about the application of the equation and in which case i will eat my words. let me know if i’m wrong)

1. there’s no way to track exact hit numbers per chapter. i do it by just writing down the hit count right before i post a chapter, but obviously this isn’t precise.

2. because hit count isn’t necessarily even an individual person every time. but i googled this, because listen i’m nothing if not obsessively thorough, and ao3 does track IP, so clicks by the same person within a reasonable span of time only registers as one hit. 

            a. but again, those hits can count for rereading, over time

3. there’s a certain amount of shrinkage in these numbers, as ao3 doesn’t offer individual statistics like FF does.

4. on the other end, there’s also a valid amount of growth in a fandom like riverdale, which i feel like really swelled in size over the summer. but people still aren’t commenting on fics they may be reading retroactively.

because it’s not just my fics that i was tracking the review-to-hit ratio with; these numbers are pretty consistent, i’ve found. popular fics and lesser promoted fics as well. 

don’t get me wrong

i feel really lucky that my fics are p visible within the fandom, i do genuinely feel like they’re appreciated or at least being more or less well-received, especially because a lot of the reviews i get are so thoughtful and wonderful, and i am really pleased as punch about all that. 

and i’m personally not doing it for the reviews. i’m really not—i love writing, i love the storytelling, i find it immeasurably satisfying and i’ll keep doing it regardless. 

but it sucks, to be completely frank, to feel like you’re doing all this work and then shouting it into a vacuum. but you also know it’s not a vacuum, because you can see people reading it. you can see that it’s got hits. so then what? 

maybe you don’t know what to say. maybe you can’t muster the energy, or the time. maybe you didn’t like the chapter and you didn’t feel like leaving constructive criticism, that’s all okay. maybe you are one of those rare people who reviews later on, when you have time. 

maybe you’re a ghost with a wifi password. maybe you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to admit you read fanfic, which, hey, honestly i get. but the guest features exist and i know that you know it. 

really, there are plenty of factors. authors get it. it’s really, genuinely all chill, amigos, but that can add up, that’s all. 

and i promise you, it’s draining for the people putting out the content for you. we just want a little nudge so it doesn’t feel like said vacuum.

tl;dr

this is something that i’ve been thinking a lot lately now that i’m writing consistently—and at length, i spend hours and hours of my time on stupidly long chapters—and suddenly just feel….hyperaware of it all, whereas i definitely wasn’t before this past summer. and i’m hoping y’all weren’t aware of it either. 

i know i have a tendency to sound preachy so that wasn’t my intent, and frankly i kind of regret starting this math equation because it just made me more depressed, but hopefully idk, y’all find it as interesting and important as me. 

but i hope the takeaway is, regardless, review if you read it. 

[alizabear]

A Letter to My Family

I hate writing this stuff cause I don't know how to truly formulate this idea without coming across...cliche, cheesy, preachy, or not very knowledgeable. I guess it may be just a confidence thing, who knows. Anyways, here we go.

This semester has been one of the most challenging in my academic career. Honestly, I am neglecting my homework to write this. But, with the hustle and bustle of school, work and having a relationship, and then trying to sliver out some sort of free time in all that can be a lot, especially going into the holidays. Hey, don't get me wrong, despite all the stress I am very grateful for the stuff that keeps me busy. Not everyone has a job or gets an education. 

But as I approach the holidays, and as I ignore my homework, I began to think about family. Ya know, I think it is easy to do one of two things (or both) with family.

One, you kind of just neglect what they mean, cause hey, they'll always be there for you (the one's that are, I don't know everyone's family situation).

And two, you are their number one fan. I swear, my parents are THE best.

Looking at the holidays as what I consider myself now as a full fledged "adult" purely based on my age (26), and not entirely based on how I feel inside (though I do feel tired all the time, so that partially qualifies me too, right?), I want to key in on my family.

Oh family, oh holidays, all those warm, fuzzy feelings right?

But with Thanksgiving knocking on our door let me be thankful for my perfectly imperfect family.

Ya know, no family is perfect for the obvious, "humans aren't perfect" ordeal. But man, I got to say, my family is pretty chill, pretty stable if I do say so myself. No real issues that I have ever personally had to address, though, to their credit I am pretty much the baby of the family, so who knows what I have been shielded from. But I have witnessed families be torn apart, kids grow without a parent or grow up in an abusive situation. Some kids had to deal with addiction issues. Some families are known for getting together and just arguing each time they are together. For the most part, not us. 

I am a child of divorce. I got to say, probably the worst thing my parents "did to me." Though it was not an action taken directly towards me. Oh sure, my parents have made mistakes or argued with me where we have gotten really angry with each other. I used to get so mad at my mom when I was a real young kid I would leave her angry letters in our mail box for her to find. Though I usually wrote her many more love letters instead. I definitely still butt heads with my dad, which I chalk up to generational, personality differences, but I think he's the wisest person ever so it's fine. 

I think with whatever mistakes my parents did make, and whatever effect the divorce had on me, it just is simply not on my horizon anymore.

Let's get really real for a hot second. Not long after my parents decided to divorce my depression in middle school went into its full effect - I began to hurt myself and things got really dark for some time. And I've grown with my depression and my anxiety and realized that, that would have occurred no matter what and I don't blame my parents for it for a second. Though I am sure depression brain at the time was angry with the entire world, though mostly myself. I mean, I remember I wrote and sent a card to my Aunt saying I would love to live with them because their home ALWAYS made me happy and it would be easier than dealing with what's going on at home. But things got better in time.

Well, long, confusing story short, I have learned to deal with my mental health and give it up to God. It is certainly a struggle (though drastically different from childhood, no harming for me friends) but I think the most important part of it all is that I did not let my depression and the anger that came with it stick to my relationship with my parents.

I think it would have been easy to put all the blame on them and not take responsibility for myself. I think it would have been easy to make them the scapegoat, despite their problems only being a small sliver of my internal issues. I think I could have resented them for not doing x, y, and z different. But I've always been fortunate that God granted me maturity at a younger age and made me realize, that one, forgiveness is great, two, they are not to blame, and three, you only get one set of parents. 

I am lucky my situation was never worse. I was never abused or forgotten. And that's not to suggest people can't be angry or upset, even if it can be worse, but I decided for myself that life is too short to make the world your enemy, especially the people who have sacrificed for me beyond my comprehension.

As I have grown up, and now in my mid-ish twenties...my parents are like my greatest prize, and my best friends. I am so grateful that even after a divorce, my parents are still kind to each other, can rely on each other, and that we can all spend time together, even outside of holidays. We have always stayed a family, even a broken one. 

My favorite time of year is around the holidays though, and it is for the easy, cheesy reason of the fact that I get to spend a dedicated time celebrating with my family. Those traditions have moved around and shifted. Some people have left, some people are no longer with us at all, and some of us have simply grown up.

My greatest fear is that someday I will have to face losing all of this. If that fear alone is not enough to make someone forgive...dang. 

Anyways...

Thank you Mom and Dad for being the perfectly imperfect parents God blessed me with. The road has never been smooth, but that's life. But I have never seen you guys waiver in your love for me. I think it's easy to forget the toll life, the divorce, our actions as your children even may have taken on you. As children I think we sometimes forget to acknowledge that. But know that I amazed that not only were you strong in withstanding that (even if you ever felt weak) but that you did it while raising us, you did it all while loving and giving to us, you did it while still making mistakes and failing as humans, but I love you immensely all for it. I acknowledge you both and I thank the Lord that I get such giving and generous people - who cares about the bad stuff from the past anymore anyways?

I would like to also say, that the other portions of my family have helped me feel loved and help me grow too. They helped me, whether they realize it or not, in those dark times, simply for their generous, loving hearts.

Let's quickly pivot on over to my Aunt and Uncle for a quick second. I grew up visiting them several times a year, and always loving going to Fresno to see them (I love all of my other family too, so very much, but these two are like another set of parents for me). And as I have grown as into being an adult, my love and adoration for them has only increased. I didn't live there 24/7, but in what I know and what I felt, they are people of the Lord. They are some of the most thoughtful and generous and wise and obedient people you can find. Their hearts inspire me so much. Again, very perfectly imperfect and I thank God for you all being there for me.

I hope when I become a wife and a parent I can become some rad combination of them and my parents. Like a super spouse/parent.

I don't know guys. I don't know where I am going with a lot of this other than to say...I go on the internet and story after story is someone losing a loved one. And I just can't imagine that pain.

I think life is too short to not celebrate people. 

I am already anxious about what I've written cause I really wanted to give some back story but now I am scared it is outweighing the nice stuff? I just kinda want to write every single reason why I love all these people - but maybe I can love on them and remind them in other ways too. 

I don't know who is going through what out there, and my experiences and feelings may not match yours - but whoever it may be, treasure the people you love. Deeply love them, thank them, forgive them too if you haven't (remember, not forgiving is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die). But look around you and be stupidly grateful.

More and more I feel like I am going around feeling like... thank  you Lord that I have this person. Thank you Lord that they gave so much that I don't even realize. Thank you Lord that they are imperfect humans, who had to deal with a lot while also dealing with me. Thank you Lord for their love or their friendship or whatever it may be. Help me to be more loving and thankful and forgiving and honest with my emotions and responsible with them and generous with my love just as you are Lord. And I still do not think I am doing it remotely enough. So maybe this is a good first step?

I leave you with this.

Ephesians 4:32 "Be kind to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."

[404botnotfound]

Words: 3,067

Universe: Uncharted (AU) Featured Characters: Samuel Drake, Nathan Drake, Quinn (OC/AU), Elizabeth Giudicelli (OC/belongs to @editoress)

Sam dreads it when the nuns call him to Father Duffy's office.

Did Nathan get into a fight again? Did their father decide to come back and regain custody so he could have someone to take his drunken fits out on? Did something happen to Nathan? Did one of his mostly-illegal side jobs cause something to happen to Nathan? About the only time Sam couldn't care less about an office visit was if it had anything to do with himself and himself alone.

But the worst thought that made these long walks to the office utterly terrifying and unbearable was this one: is this going to be the time they tell me someone's adopted Nathan?

It's this fear he's confronted with when he pushes Duffy's office door open and sees Nathan perched on a chair in front of the priest's  desk, too-short legs kicking at open air with a neutral content, and the back of a blonde woman sitting in the other one.

His nerves are already frayed, and he's only just set foot in the room. This is it, he thinks, resignedly, I'm going to have to commit murder or a kidnapping to be able to stay with my brother. Then the woman turns around and Sam blinks in shock. He just barely stops himself from shouting "what are YOU doing here?" but he's unable to hold back the flash of immediate recognition in his face and he hopes father Duffy and sister Katherine don't notice.

"Uh...hi?" He says, blinking between the three adults as he not-so-subtly steps towards his little brother; ready to grab Nathan and make a break for it if he needs to.

The woman he'd first met almost a month ago (after she screamed at him to climb in through her window and off the damn roof, do you want to break your legs, what are you doing) smiles at him."Hello, Sam."

Duffy stands from his seat behind the desk and steps around it to stand near the two boys; he'd always been observant, and though he's one of the few decent people in the home, Sam still wasn't that fond of him. Too preachy. Came with the territory, but still. "Miss Giudicelli is here to sign some adoption papers for your brother, Samuel. The sister and I thought you might like to say goodbye." Duffy says, and the gentle tone just agitates him more than he already is, especially because he knows it was only Duffy's idea judging by the scathing look Katherine was sending him. Before Sam can snap something at him, Elizabeth speaks up. "No, I said I was adopting them both." Her tone is even but firm, and Duffy and Katherine both start as though taken aback. Sam finds himself blinking in disbelief at the woman, himself. "We did warn you about Samuel's...record, I think." Katherine says, haltingly, and Sam wards off snapping at her, too, by glancing down at Nathan, who's still kicking his feet and now grinning at him. Sam's mouth twitches into a smile of his own, and it sticks when Elizabeth responds with, "Yes, I'm aware." She shoots Sam a pointed look with a raised eyebrow, and Sam shuffles his feet and rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. "I want them both, provided they're okay with that?" "Can I bring my books?" Nathan asks quickly, scooting forwards to the edge of his seat. "Of course. You can never have too many books." She says, matter of factly and with a cheery smile on her face. "And I can take you to the library to get more." Nathan's grin returns to Sam, and the puppy eyes almost work, but an itch at the back of his mind keeps him from agreeing to it right away. He looks at her again, warily, one hand settling on the back of Nathan's chair. "Why?" It sounds more ungrateful than he wants it to; it's not that he isn't ecstatic at the idea of his brother getting a good home to be in at the end of the day, but there's that nagging paranoia that it's going to backfire, not going to work out, that something is going to hurt Nathan more than getting dumped on the orphanage's doorstep and losing their mother had. He's known this woman for a month now, stopped in intermittently in between jobs before heading back to the orphanage, and he gets the feeling she's a good person, someone who'd take care of them just for the sake of it and not for brownie points. He just worries that his luck isn't that great. Nate was a great kid, smart for his age, moody due to their past but kind nonetheless, and the only reason he hadn't gotten adopted to this point was because Sam had thrown fits and sabotaged any attempts to adopt him and him alone thus far. But he knew it couldn't last forever--Sam was almost eighteen, and the chances of any family wanting to adopt a teenager over a younger kid was almost zip to nil, not even mentioning the chance of any of them wanting to adopt both brothers. So why, all of a sudden, was life cutting the two of them a break? "Why do I want to adopt the both of you, or why do I want to adopt you with your record?" Elizabeth asks him, crossing one leg over the other in her seat. Sam blinks again, not sure which question he had actually been asking. "Yes?" He asks, stupidly. She laughs at it. "Because I think you both deserve a good home, and neither of you deserve to be separated." He hears an unspoken after what you've been through already, and Sam feels a warm wave of gratitude soothe his nerves. "I..." Sam says, feeling slightly dazed at the idea that he and his little brother were getting adopted. After six years in the orphanage, Sam had lost hope that they'd get picked up--the both of them. He feels tears prick at his eyes and swipes an arm over his face quickly. He's too damn old to cry. "I, uh...alright then." The bright, ecstatic grin on his little brother's face just makes it harder not to get overly emotional. "Why don't the two of you go pack your things while we take care of paperwork?" Sister Katherine doesn't sound terribly thrilled; probably doesn't think he deserves a home of his own. Sam glances at Elizabeth, who smiles gently at him and nods. "Yeah. Yeah, sure." He says, ruffling his kid brother's hair. "C'mon, Nathan." Nate zips around the halls as they head back to their dorm, buzzing with energy and talking about the fact they're going to have an actual home to go to, and Sam's just as excited--if wary--but a thought occurs to him that keeps him from expressing it. Nate's going to be devastated when he remembers that he'll be leaving Quinn behind. While Sam had been disappearing from the orphanage more often than not lately to try and support his younger brother Nate had latched onto the girl to the point of considering her family. Sam didn't find it all that hard to admit he liked her, too, and had begun to consider her a sister as well, if only to appease Nate. He doubts he'd be able to convince Elizabeth to take the seven-year-old girl, too. They get halfway through packing Nathan's books before he brings it up. "Wait, Sam--we can't leave Quinn behind!" Nathan says, suddenly alarmed, with his copy of Treasure Island in his hand and ready to pack. "She can come too, right?" Sam winces, slowly zipping up Nathan's other suitcase that holds his clothes while he tries to formulate a response. "Sorry, buddy, but I don't think so." He says eventually, tone gentle. It doesn't ease the boy's worries. "But she's our sister." "She's not--" Sam starts, but stops himself and takes a deep breath. "Yeah, she's our sister, but she's not actually related to us, so the state ain't gonna see it that way. I didn't think the two of us would get to be adopted together, I don't think we're gonna get lucky enough to bring her with, too." He doesn't look at his brother's face, because he knows the crestfallen look he's gonna see there and he knows if he sees it, he's gonna break down and have to walk back to that office and say Sorry, lady, it's all three of us or not at all. He wants his brother to have a better life. His little brother deserves a better life. So he moves to take the book from Nathan's hands and help him finish packing, but he jerks it back and holds it to his chest. "Then we're not going." Nathan says, firmly, but not quite able to manage not sounding like the pouting child he was. Sam sighs. "Nathan--" "We're not going!" "You're getting a home, Nathan!" Sam grabs his brother's shoulders and shakes them lightly; he knows it's asking too much of an eleven-year-old to understand, but he wants to try anyway. "This isn't one! No matter how much the sisters dress it up to be. I want you to have a home." His little brother looks on the verge of tears--angry tears, most likely, but still tears--and Sam nearly cracks. He hadn't realized just how attached Nathan and Quinn had gotten to each other. He sighs again. "Look: this'll be temporary. I turn eighteen in a couple'a months, and I'll come back and try 'n get her outta here myself. Alright?" Nate won't meet Sam's gaze. When Sam opens his mouth again to try and plead the case farther, Nathan finally says, "Fine," and then returns to packing his meager things with a bit more force than necessary. Sam presses fingers into his eyelids and exhales, feeling something heavy and unhappy closing around his chest. He doesn't want to leave her behind either, but it's just...not likely to happen. He knows it's not. It's unlikely enough as it is--his prior meddling notwithstanding--that the two of them get to stay together. Including a little girl who's not even related to them by blood? It takes less time for Sam to pack his things; most of the time he's scaled the orphanage walls and is out in the city anyway, so he just has to grab a few things he doesn't keep in his backpack all the time and the spare sets of clothes (fewer than Nathan's) and he's ready to go. When they head back for father Duffy's office, Elizabeth is standing outside chatting with the priest and sister Katherine. Both brothers are quiet, with Sam doing his best to keep his expression neutral and Nathan is glaring at his shoes. Elizabeth notices immediately. "Is there something wrong?" Sam glances at his brother, but Nathan doesn't seem to want to answer. He opens his mouth, tiredness seeping into his expression, starts to lie, to say no, everything is fine, but he's cut off with a word halfway out of his mouth by the sound of a set of tiny feet slapping against the wood floors towards them. All of them standing outside Duffy's office watch as a little blonde girl comes running around a corner at full speed, nearly tripping over herself, and makes a beeline for Sam. Sister Katherine huffs right about the same moment Quinn latches onto Sam's leg and refuses to let go, and a stream of mach-5 words leaves the little girl's mouth almost immediately. "The sisters told me you were leaving and they told me I couldn't say goodbye I came anyway don't leave please don't leave please!" Sam sees Nathan wipe his eyes; oh boy, the tears arrived. "Who's this?" Elizabeth asks, glancing at sister Katherine as the nun steps in and tries in vain to pry the little girl's arms from around Sam's leg. "She's--" "She's our sister." Nathan says, and then when Sister Katherine makes a noise of disapproval he adds, "she is!" The nun gives up on trying to pry Quinn away from Sam, given the little girl just was not giving up, and instead stands and brushes off her frock. "Nathan. I thought I talked to you about this." Katherine says, and sighs heavily when the eleven-year-old doesn't respond. As he stoops to gently separate Quinn from his leg and give her an apologetic hug, Sam notices the flicker of impatience on Elizabeth's face. "About what?" After a moment, the impatience is replaced by recognition and she turns to Sam. "Sam, is this the little girl you've mentioned?" Both Katherine and Duffy start at the question, sharing a look that's clearly asking what does she mean 'mentioned'? Sam glances at them, then at the little girl who's now refusing to let go of his torso, and with a soft exhale he nods. "Yeah, this is her." He tries to get her attention again. "C'mon, sunshine, it's not gonna be forever." Quinn's little arms tighten around him, and Sam's shoulders slump. He doesn't want to let her go. This was gonna be harder than he thought. "I didn't realize the little girl you kept mentioning was your sister, Sam--" Katherine cuts in, impatience in her voice, and Sam knows she's probably vying for a cigarette from the pack he'd swiped from her earlier. "She's not their sister. Nathan has grown close to her but they're not related by blood. This is just...petulance." Both Sam and Nathan shoot her a sharp glare that makes the nun's lips purse. Strangely enough, Katherine's response actually seems to aggravate Elizabeth, and Sam has never seen her get angry save for when she first spotted him clambering around on her neighbors' rooftops. She's quick to replace it with consideration, and looks between the little girl holding onto Sam for dear life, him, and the eleven-year-old currently on the verge of angry tears. Katherine moves to attempt removing Quinn from the group again, and as Sam instinctively curls his arms tighter around her Elizabeth holds up a hand to halt the sister. "Hold on." She says, and with another huff Katherine folds her arms over her chest. After a quiet moment, Elizabeth steps towards Nathan and slowly crouches down to be at his level. "Nathan?" The eleven-year-old makes a noncommittal noise in response, and doesn't look up from his feet. "You're not going to be happy unless she's with you boys, are you?" Elizabeth asks him, and Sam braces himself--for what, he's not sure. To console a temperamental pre-teen because he lost a limb (because that's what they were for each other, weren't they? more than family, parts of a whole), to grab Nathan and Quinn and run like hell wherever they could just to stick together. For her to rescind the adoption papers and go home, leaving them to an orphanage that only really cared about how many state grants their presence could get. Sam threads his fingers through Quinn's hair and sighs, realizing that it would, in fact, be the three of them; this little girl wormed her way into Nathan's heart and into his no matter what he told himself. She was family, blood or not. "She's our sister." Nathan repeats, finally looking up from his shoes and glancing between Quinn and Sam, and then looking up at Elizabeth with too-big eyes. Sam sees the answer in her face before Nate even says anything. Her eyes flick between the two brothers and Quinn, and she nods, placing her hands on her knees and pushing herself to her feet. "Alright then." Her hands clap together as though dusting them off, and she looks expectantly between Father Duffy and sister Katherine. Then, she looks at Nathan again. "Nathan, why don't you go help Quinn pack her things, too?" The change in his little brother's demeanor is instantaneous and stunning; withdrawn and upset and angry one second, and bright and excited and so, so happy the next. Sam lets out a noise of shock along with Duffy (and Katherine's scoff), and Quinn finally loosens her grip on him long enough to blink up with teary-eyes. "Really?" Nathan asks, and at Elizabeth's answering smile and nod his expression brightens even further. He reaches for Quinn's hand and leads her off at a run, jabbering to her excitedly as they round the corner and out of sight. After a moment of silence, Elizabeth's attention returns to the priest and nun. "You have a third adoption form, I hope?" Father Duffy balks another moment longer before lifting his eyebrows. "Are you--" "Sure? Yes. I am." Sam watches the two head back inside the office, standing from the crouched position he'd been in to hug the little girl he now calls a sister. His eyes drift down the corridor Nathan and Quinn had run down, and then back over to Elizabeth. He struggles with what to say for a moment. "You don't have to--" The words end with a choked noise he thinks might be tears, and he masks it with a laugh. "It's the crocodile tears. They get me, too." Her answering smile is even gentler than the one she gave Nate, and Sam has to swipe at his eyes again because he swears there's something in them. "I know I don't. I want to. Family doesn't have to just be blood, and I meant it when I said you don't deserve to be separated."

Sam Drake presses the heels of his palms into his eyes to stave off the tears, and manages to say “thank you” in a quiet voice that barely sounds like his own. It doesn't feel like home when the three siblings and their new guardian head for her apartment, and Sam knows it probably won't for a while--at least not for him or Nate. They spent six years in that orphanage, and 'home' is still a simple 'wherever they're together'. But Quinn immediately hops up onto a bed in one of the two rooms Elizabeth shows them to, and Nate grabs a blanket and curls up at the foot of it while Elizabeth frets and promises to buy another bed tomorrow, and Sam thinks he could get used to having a home. The second extra bedroom is his, but for the first few nights, Sam drags a few pillows and blankets into his siblings' room and sleeps on the floor. And every day after, he climbs out onto the rooftops outside his bedroom window just to get his new guardian to yell at him.