#i promise no Evil Mikes in this set

[exsqueezememacaroni]

here we go

Mike Patton with Faith No More, Download Festival 2009 Photos by: Chiaki Nozu, Gary Wolstenholm and Shirlaine Forrest

[luveline]

extremely random thought for shy friday: r works up the courage and bakes steve some kind of baked good. little do they know it’s with the one ingredient steve absolutely HATES (idk man like grapes or something) and he feels bad so he doesn’t tell them and eats it until dustin or someone walks in and is like 🤨🤨🤨 ur eating that???

thank you for your request! steve x shy!reader

Steve knows that while you may not seem nervous on the surface, you're a shy girl. You're always overthinking things, always watching people out of the corner of your eye so you can respond to their behaviour. You minimise yourself.

It's why he can't tell you he doesn't like raisins. You've made him something, expressed your creativity, your passion, and your feelings (he thinks) through baked goods. Steve's sure your German apple strudel would be delicious if he could stand raisins. He does a great approximation of a smile as he eats one.

"You like it?" you ask hopefully.

"Who doesn't?" he asks, clumsily avoiding the question. "Everybody likes strudel. Thanks, Germany."

Your smile cleaves him open. It's a mixture of incredible sweetness in line with your proferred treats, a hint of bashfulness he adores, and your usual go-to grin. It's familiar and new at once, and Steve wants to take a photo.

"I promised some to your friend," you say, closing the lid of the tuppperware you'd brought with you, "but what he doesn't take you can have. I kind of made them for you, anyways."

Steve melts. He's cool and sophisticated, obviously, but his stomach goes molten at the idea that someone would care about him enough to make him food from scratch without his having to ask, and that someone being you makes it all the more warming. He feels like jelly.

He's slow on the upkeep, and doesn't know who you mean until Dustin and co. are peddling up to the bench you're sitting at full pelt. Steve curses under his breath as they come to a slow, and Dustin's eyes hone in on your box.

"You have the goods?" he asks, like this is some box office drug deal, and not like he's interrupting your almost-date.

You shake your box gently. Lucas and Will share an enthusiastic, "Nice!"

Mike, less prone to distractions that aren't his girlfriend, nods at Steve's hand. He's frowning. "What are you doing?"

Four sets of eyes move between Mike's stare and Steve's hand like spectators at a tennis match. Steve can't tell him to cut it out while you're looking, so he polishes off the apple strudel, feels sick at the wrinkly, gelatinous texture of the raisins as they go down, and glares at the kids full force. "What, you're so greedy you need them all?"

"You don't like raisins," Mike says.

Dustin blinks at him. "You actually ate one of those?" He shifts on his bike, foot on the ground so he doesn't fall. "You said raisins are the evil cousin of a chocolate chip."

Steve doesn't know what's worse, the embarrassment of being caught red-handed or your tiny pout.

"Sorry," he says to you quickly, uncool, so uncool, "I mean. No, I don't like raisins. But they were still good!"

You're expressionless despite his insistence. "It's okay," you say, and there, a twitch to your brow he actually understands for once. You're amused.

You dole sweet treats out to the boys and they bike off calling thank yous and giggling like idiots at the mess they've made, no doubt. You smile down into your almost empty box, one remaining strudel with nowhere to go.

"Steve," you murmur, sounding pleased, "why didn't you say something?"

He hooks his elbow over the back of the bench. "And tell you to your face I don't like what you made for me? I know I fell off the wagon, but I'm not hopeless. You don't do that to girls."

"Well. Next time, you should. Is there anything else you don't, uh, don't like?" Steve can't hide his surprise. You drop your gaze to your lap. "You know, so I can make you something else?"

"You want to?"

You rub your thumb against the opposite index finger. You can't meet his eyes, but Steve knows you're alright.

"Yeah, I'd love to make you something you'll actually enjoy. Was kinda the whole point."

Steve places his hands between yours where they worry in your lap, dipping his head to the side hoping it'll encourage you to look up. You do, and he can practically see the heat emanating from your face, even if there's no evidence of blush.

"Anything you make I'll like."

"So long as it doesn't have raisins," you say.

He squeezes your hand gently. "Exactly. And maybe not too much cinnamon. It makes me think about my great grandma's house. Which wouldn't matter, but she totally died choking on a snickerdoodle."

You laugh, and you clamp your free hand over your mouth.

"That's terrible," you say between your fingers.

He elbows you gently. "You laughed. Makes you the terrible one." He thinks about your offer, and how sweet you are, and how horribly he fucked it up by pretending to like something he didn't. "Thank you. For the thought."

You take your hand from your cheek and place it over his. It's practically aflame it's so hot, and your lips are worse when you dot forward to kiss him. You were likely aiming for his cheek, but he turned a little and it ended up a centimetre from his closed mouth.

You sit back sharply.

"You're welcome," you say, eyes widened.

"Thanks," he says again. He clears his throat.

He pretends not to notice how flustered you are from your almost kiss. Maybe he should poke a little fun at you, call you forward or eager or in a rush, but he doesn't.

He'd be a hypocrite to make fun of you, because Steve's flustered too. Your lips are the sweetest treat you could give.

[flanaganfilm]

Hi Mike!

I am loving the LONG posts you’ve been making about your career and films. I wonder if there is any such one for ‘Ouija: Origin of Evil’?

‘Doctor Sleep’ was the first film of yours I had seen where I went “What else has this guy made?” And I was so surprised to learn Ouija was yours as well, it took me back to that college date! When I bought it on blu-ray and showed it to my friend, she saw Alice and Doris and went “It’s Shirley!”

Id love to know what your thoughts and feelings are on the film, 7 years later. Cheers!

Sure thing! This will be a fun one... I had such a great time making that movie.

Back in the spring of 2015, we were shooting Hush. Blumhouse was coproducing the movie with Intrepid Pictures. This was my second outing with Blumhouse after they came aboard Oculus at tiff in 2013, and they'd even hired me do a little uncredited consulting on another movie they'd made - a teen horror flick called Ouija. The first Ouija movie was... well... not great, but it made a lot of money. And I mean a LOT of money. A sequel was inevitable.

Jason Blum started calling me about the project while we were working on Hush. Initially I passed on it, I wasn't interested - I wasn't sure how to make a movie about a Ouija board interesting, and I didn't see myself as a sequel filmmaker. It just wasn't a movie for me.

If you know Jason at all, you know he is one of the most persistent and persuasive people in the business.

He wouldn't take "no" for an answer, and the phone kept ringing. The bar was low, he argued. The first movie performed very well, and because the franchise was just hung on a board game, there was kind of a blank canvas. "What movie do you want to make, buddy? Because I promise you'll wait your whole career for someone to make you this kind of offer again. You are a fool if you don't say yes."

He finally made me an offer that I couldn't refuse: I could approach the film from any viable creative direction I wanted, just as long as it connected somehow to the first movie and involved a Ouija board, and if I did that (and brought in the scares the kids wanted), I'd have a guaranteed worldwide theatrical release through Universal Pictures.

It's hard to understate how appealing that prospect was at the time. Oculus had been released theatrically but only performed moderately well. Before I Wake had been caught up in Relativity's bankruptcy, so the promised theatrical release never occurred (at this time, the movie was tied up in bankruptcy court without any release on the horizon), and Hush had been scooped up by Netflix, which meant it would never see the inside of a movie theater.

This offered me substantial creative freedom and a guaranteed wide theatrical release with the full weight of Universal Pictures behind it... I finally agreed.

How could I not?

The first film was a contemporary elimination horror film about a group of teenagers who awaken a scary little girl ghost with a stitched-up mouth. She kills them one by one. I wasn't really drawn to that, and I pitched Jason instead on a prequel that focused on a single mother in the late 1960s. To my astonishment, he agreed.

They had their conditions - it had to be PG-13, it had to directly connect to the first film, and I had to deliver the movie on their budget. And I had my conditions - I wanted my crew (including my producer Trevor Macy and my DP Michael Fimognari), I wanted my period setting, and I wanted the movie to look like it was made in the late sixties, down to the zooms, the film grain, and all the other aesthetic bells and whistles. This wouldn't look like a contemporary movie.

Again, to my astonishment, they agreed.

They had one more stipulation, this one from Universal Pictures - no one could smoke cigarettes. And not just that, there couldn't be evidence of smoking in the movie; not even ash trays.

"But this takes place in the sixties," I argued. The NO that came in was emphatic and resounding. There was to be no evidence of cigarettes in our 1960's, and this was non-negotiable. This was a priority for Universal Pictures, and they were far more interested in eliminating cigarettes from the eyes of their young viewers than they were interested in historical accuracy.

Frankly, they were right.

We all agreed on the terms, and to my own admitted surprise, I went off to write and direct Ouija 2.

There was an immediate skepticism in the press when the project was announced, and a fair amount of mocking online. I was determined to ignore it. I really thought this could be fun. I felt like I had been given a gift; I had a huge canvas and precious few rules, and a guaranteed theatrical audience.

I wasn't just going to make Ouija 2; I was going to make Ouija 2 as well as it could possibly be made.

Sitting to write the script was a unique process. The only thing I knew for certain was the very, very end. Our connection to the first movie was that we were telling the origin story of Doris Zander, the ghost from the first film.

She came with some backstory that we were married to: the first movie told us her mother Alice was a professional medium. When Doris had been possessed after using an Ouija board, her mother had sewn her mouth shut and killed her. And we knew her older sister, Lina, had spent the rest of her life in a mental institution (where she grew up to be Lin Shaye), and was absolutely not to be trusted.

So no matter what I did, we had to land there. Everything else was fair game.

I was very interested in the idea of a family who worked as mediums, but most interested in them if they were not authentic psychics. I'd researched a lot about fake mediumship, and the tricks that were used in those performative seances to separate willing marks from their money. What if that was the family's business? What if her mother was something of a con artist, and her kids were part of the act? And what if they ran afoul of a real haunting?

And further, what if it wasn't that they were con artists - what if they were good people, behind it all? What if they had experienced loss themselves, and had rationalized their behavior by saying they were offering people comfort? This was interesting to me. It was cool, it was fun, and I hadn't seen that movie before.

The story was a lot of fun to write. I really enjoyed the characters, I really enjoyed the world, and I kept thinking about the kinds of movies that I loved growing up. Yeah, this was a movie for a younger audience, but maybe they'd sit in that theater and have an experience that would stay with them, the way the movies of my youth had stayed with me.

I thought about those movies: Poltergeist, The Omen, The Changeling, Watcher in the Woods... and I thought about the theatrical experience of them. Their music (I particularly honed in on Jerry Goldsmith's score from Poltergeist), their aesthetics, even the little markers in the upper corner that signal the reel changes - "cigarette burns", as they're called in the business.

All of those things were ornaments of my earliest theatrical experiences, and I wanted to recreate that for the young viewers who might seek out Ouija 2.

One thing that set Ouija 2 apart right away was that we were going to shoot in Los Angeles. I'd lived in LA since 2003, but I had never actually filmed a movie here (and haven't ever again, sadly). This was a really exciting factor - I could spend the day in prep at Blumhouse, and then go home and sleep in my bed.

This was also great for my home life. Kate and I were engaged by then, and Blum was very happy with Hush, so she ended up playing a small role at the top of the movie. Having just spent the Spring living in a hotel in Fairhope Alabama and only working nights, it felt very novel that I'd get up in the morning and go to the office, and be home for dinner. We absolutely loved it.

Casting was also fun. Terry Taylor at Blumhouse did the casting, and for the first time in a long time I could be in the room when actors came in to audition. This was all in-person, because we were in LA. For Before I Wake, we'd had to run the whole thing through the lens of foreign sales value and over choppy, pixelated FaceTime meetings that did not give us much understanding of who we were casting. Compared to that, this process was a real delight.

For Lina, I really wanted to bring back Annalise Basso, the young actress from Oculus. She'd done a terrific job on that movie, and this was a great chance to work together again.

Henry Thomas signed on as Father Tom, and we hit it off immediately. I had been a fan of his since... well, forever I suppose, but I was really excited that he'd be in our movie.

The big revelation, though, was Lulu Wilson. We auditioned a lot of girls for Doris, and we used a particularly upsetting monologue as the audition piece - a 60 second speech about what happens when someone is strangled to death. Lulu's audition knocked me over, and we cast her immediately.

(Fun note: in the film itself, Lulu performs the monologue almost exactly as she did in her audition. And she did it so well, we never cut away. Don't know many 10 year-olds who can hold an entire monologue like that... in fact, I know a lot of 40 year-olds who can't. Lulu Wilson kicks ass.)

Production began in September 2015.

From the jump, this movie was FUN to make.

We were using an antique zoom lens package to achieve the look, and after spending much of prep obsessively watching The Changeling and The Exorcist for inspiration, we were really excited to do something fun. Every day was like a trip to an amusement park.

Michael Fimognari and I enjoy one of the vintage cars

One set, it was a family reunion. I had a lot of my crew from Oculus, Before I Wake and Hush, and a few familiar faces in the cast as well. It even reunited me with Dougie Jones, who had worked for one day in my debut feature Absentia, and agreed to let us bury him in gross demon makeup.

I really can't overstate how fun this was. The movie had more genre set pieces than most of my other work combined, which meant every day we were dealign with ghosts, ghouls, and some wild stunt work. Annalise and Lulu were just delightful, and spent their days pulling escalating pranks on the crew. I would find myself tagged with dozens of C47's (clothespins) whenever Basso was on set, and Lulu was doing all of her own stunts and making us laugh like hyenas.

I was also really enjoying Henry. Toward the end of the shoot, I told him I wanted to put him in everything I did. He laughed and said "whatever, sure man, sign me up." He's been in everything I've made since.

We didn't have a lot of money, but had a lot more money than I'd ever had before, and because Universal was committed to a theatrical release, they wanted the movie to work. I felt supported at every turn. Trevor handled the production the way we'd always done, and this was now our fourth collaboration - I knew I had a producer for life.

Blum was also a delightful collaborator, popping up frequently to check in but always just to see if there was something we needed. I felt an enormous amount of trust from Blumhouse, Hasbro, Platinum Dunes and Universal. That's a lot of cooks for one kitchen, and believe when I tell you it can easily go south... but it didn't. In this case, it just clicked.

We got to do a lot of fun things that had nothing to do with horror, too. There's a lovely little scene in the movie where Lina has her first kiss. We modeled the entire shot sequence after the best kiss in the history of movies: Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly's smooch in Rear Window.

We were even able to perfectly mimic a slower frame rate just as their lips meet, exactly as Hitchcock had done in that movie. If you look in the background, the Rear Window poster is hanging on her wall. We were always careful to cite our sources (and there were a lot of them).

My favorite scene of the whole movie was a dinner date between Elizabeth Reaser and Henry that we filmed at the Cicada Club in downtown LA. This was a restaurant that I loved, as once a month it transformed into a full-blown time machine, putting a brass band on the stage and functioning like a 20's-era speakeasy.

The scene where Alice and Father Tom spend an evening out together was among my favorites in the script. It was two adults who were clearly attracted to each other, and who acknowledge it, but recognize the reality of their situation. As we were filming, I remarked to Fimognari that - for a movie about a haunted Ouija board - we were really getting away with murder. This was lovely, sweet, subtle character development, and no one was stopping me. After what we'd gone through on Before I Wake, I had to pinch myself.

My favorite scene of the film

It was set in a restaurant in the late 1960s - almost everyone in that room would realistically be smoking. Universal had been clear that there was to be absolutely no suggestion that cigarettes even existed in this world. But for the restaurant, I had to haze up the air. It was the only time I was questioned creatively, as there was immediate pushback.

"It's a restaurant," I said. "What if there's a fire in the kitchen, an entree got burned and that's why it's smokey?"

No one bought that for even a second. But they let me go ahead anyway. Man, I love that scene. And later, when it was all said and done, Jason Blum shocked me by telling me it was his favorite as well.

We wrapped the movie just before Halloween, and off we went into post. The holidays came and went, and Kate and I got married in February 2016. There was gentle pressure in the cutting room to make the film as tight as possible, and keep things short, but as with everything else, the pressure was decidedly gentle.

The movie's test screenings were very positive. People were very engaged by the story of the family, and the only issue people took seemed to be with the ending. It was a real downer to get so attached to everyone, only to have to kill Doris so brutally. The ending was, to put it mildly, very depressing - Father Tom was dead, Alice was dead, Doris was dead (and her mouth stitched up to stop the demonic voices), and Lina was condemned to the asylum. It was exactly what was required of us, and what was dictated by the first movie. But it hurt people's feelings.

My original ending had Lina in the asylum, crafting a handmade Ouija board out of her own blood, and trying to contact her dead sister. She tries and tries, but there is no answer. It is just silence. And we leave her saying "are you there? Are you there?" over and over again, as tears fall down her face. Doris wouldn't answer - in fact, Doris wouldn't answer for decades, when the first movie finally caught up to us. It was a haunting and sad ending, and I kind of loved it.

But test audiences are a fickle thing, and so we came back to tweak the ending, as the studio wanted one last scare to send us out on - not an unreasonable position, though it was a cliched one. We shot the film's current ending, with Doris' ghost on the ceiling of the asylum. It's as rote and impersonal a horror movie ending as I can imagine, but... well, it was Ouija 2, for crying out loud.

The movie we'd made up until that point had no business being as much fun as it was.

I remember the phone call I got from Blum after the movie was done. Universal had decided that they wouldn't call the movie Ouija 2 after all, they were worried about the number 2 making it feel less interesting.

Instead, they'd taken a big swing: the movie would be called Ouija: Origin of Evil.

I laughed out loud. I thought he was kidding. When it became obvious that he wasn't, I filed a protest. "It's not very good," I said. "It's cheesy. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the movie depicts neither the origin of the Ouija board, or of - um - Evil."

"Buddy, the title tested well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Trust us, if the studio says it's Origin of Evil, it's Origin of Evil."

With a big theatrical release comes a lot of pomp and circumstance. There was a huge premiere for Ouija: Origin of Evil that October, and whatever nerves I had about the critical reception to the movie proved to be short-lived. People really enjoyed it. The overwhelming sentiment was that a sequel to a movie like Ouija frankly had no business being this interesting.

For all the pomp and circumstance, I missed it all. I didn't get to go to a premiere or walk the red carpet, as I was already in Alabama shooting Gerald's Game. On opening weekend, I took the cast and crew to a local theater in Daphne Alabama to see Ouija: Origin of Evil on the big screen.

The projection in this little backwoods theater was NOT good. The lamp was too dim (a common cost-saving strategy in some theater chains), and it was out of focus. I ran up to complain to the manager.

"The movie's soft focus on purpose," he said. "That's what the filmmakers wanted."

"No, it really isn't," I said.

The movie ultimately was not the runaway hit that the first Ouija was. Not even close, in fact.

To everyone's surprise, the teenagers just... didn't really show up. The first movie had grossed 103 MILLION dollars worldwide, but our little prequel only managed to do about 80. It was considered a modest success, not a hit by any means, but no failure. In the end, Universal decided maybe there wasn't a franchise to be had here after all.

So in the end, I had single-handedly revitalized and destroyed the Ouija franchise.

But man, believe when I tell you I've got no regrets whatsoever. I had the time of my life making that movie. Sure, some people groan about the ending, but that was kind of our only job - those were the cards we knew we had to turn over. Did you see everything that led up to that, though??? Did you see what we got away with?!

Since this movie, I've worked with a lot of people again. True to my word, I've put Henry Thomas in every single thing I've made since. Elizabeth Reaser came back to play Shirley in The Haunting of Hill House, and little Lulu Wilson - who was so wonderful as Reaser's daughter Doris - played the younger version of Shirley on that show. Lulu is also in The Fall of the House of Usher (and if you look closely, her original Ouija board and planchette are in frame with her.)

Kate sported a fun blonde hairdo for her small role in Ouija: Origin of Evil, and it was a really fun stepping stone between Hush and Hill House for her as an actor. There's a fun deleted scene where she goes home and murders her father, played by the great Sam Anderson. I really dug that scene, and I wish it was in there. You can see it on the blu-ray and DVD though, because even in a world where Netflix is trying to erase such things, Universal Pictures actually takes care of their movies with proper physical media releases.

I haven't yet found the next project to do with my friends at Blumhouse, but it's not for lack of trying, and my dance card has been booked solid since we wrapped this movie. It was an important step for my career, and their support was amazing. I know that we'll work together again, as soon as the timing is right.

Also, get this...

Ouija: Origin of Evil is my most successful movie.

Ever. Of all of them.

It did 82 million worldwide. That's better than Doctor Sleep, which did 72 million. It's better than Oculus, which did 44 million. The rest were all dumped to Netflix.

So yeah, Ouija: Origin of Evil is my most successful movie. Ain't that a trip?

We weren't trying to change the world, or reinvent the genre. I was making the second entry in a PG-13 franchise about an evil board game, and dammit if I didn't get to do everything I set out to do. There's an exuberance to the camera movement, the staging, the set design, and the lighting. There's an unbridled joy in this movie, and I smile whenever I think about it.

Up until this point in my career, every movie I had was hard-fought. Oculus was a trial by fire whose distribution deal was detonated days before it premiered. Before I Wake was a brutal experience both creatively and logistically. Hush was a labor of love and determination against all odds. But this one... man, this one reminded me why I wanted to make movies in the first place.

Because it can be really, really fucking fun.

[katerinaptrv]

Well, I never thought they would go full book drama, I really thought this part will be adapted to something else, so those who are curious and like me enjoy knowing the path ahead. I read the book and will share some context and spoilers and the things quoted to happen in the next episodes.

OBS: Although Tong did have a debt in the book and that did play a relevant role in the plot. The whole very real beating/death danger involving Joe by the debt collector was not presented in the book, this is a complete new plot introduced by the series.

BOOK SPOILERS ABOUT MING’S FAMILY DRAMA:

The person that Tong brings in the office scene is Ming’s sister(in the adaptation May), and she is the one that causes a scandal (she is very different, and insufferable there). She is also pregnant at the time, informed by Tong while trying to manipulate Ming to give him the money.

In the novel Ming’s father has been abusive to his children since infancy, it is said by Mike that he used to be more abusive towards Ming all along.

After his declaration, Ming is locked up in his room, and in retaliation he starts fasting. From JOV POV after their last sort of break up he just disappears, which makes him really concerned about it because is unlike him.

Mike meets Joe to try to convince him to break up with Ming and explains all that has been going on. He also shows Ing the contract they had, and says to her his view on their relationship to try to force Joe to reject his brother. 

Joe asks to bring him to see Ming, Mike brings him to a room where he is imprisoned  while his father is away. It’s shown that his mother is already softening in her resolution to keep them apart but is afraid of his father to stand up for them.

Is revealed that Mike was the one to bring Ming to the shaman in the past, concerned by his state post Joe’s death. 

Now this part is hard for me to remember the order of events from here, but i think Joe first visits his room, there is another confrontation with the father and Ming gets beaten up, breaks an arm and ends up in a hospital. Mike brings Joe to the hospital to see him.

Mike still tries to convince them that it is not worth all the trouble because they just met, but Ming tells him Joe is past Joe and he remembers him of his promise. Following the shaman’s visions Ming makes his older brother promise in those early years that if Joe came back he would help him to fight for their relationship against their family. From this point forward Mike is an ally to them, helping with the family.

Ming’s grandfather appears for the first time, telling his son to let Ming be, that he was young and they are old. His approach is not from a supportive or accepting standpoint, but more like they should not waste energy on this and Ming will outgrow it.

Ming is set free, he comes back to be with Joe, but later is known that his family is setting up an arranged marriage with a woman. And to be given his freedom he needed to agree to it and the generation of a son with her.

The above is the last conflict with MingJoe in the book, after this reveal and Ming explaining he fake agreed and had a plan. Joe makes a decision to be with him and fight for their relationship. From this point forward they face their enemies together.

Ming indeed has a plan, he means to use his grandfather's preference towards May to have a hand to bargain with him(with Mike’s help) to force the family to accept their relationship. Since he did not lend the money to Tong, the situation is getting more serious. 

Also his grandfather is a politician almost retiring, the debt was in the book an illegal dealing of Tong and his father that could put at least Tong’s father in jail. And look very bad towards Ming’s family. This way Ming’s indiscretion in their eyes is the lesser evil.

Ming and Joe are invited to a formal meal at Ming's family house, where his grandfather gives the final verdict to Ming’s father to let him be and focus on solving May’s situation.

That leads to the acceptance of the relationship from Ming’s family and their ending together.

Is clear the series intends to adapt some parts of this while removing others, also we have the whole new kidnapping Joe plot.

Theories from the preview:

We see mention of Ming disappearance from Joe’s talk with Sol, also we have Mike meeting him to try to convince him to break up. And Ing finds out (probably still Mike) about the contract.

We also see Joe protecting Ming from his father in the prison room, now i think they join things here, because we see Ming throwing up so i would bet he goes from here to the hospital (probably for passing out from days without eating or something).

I would bet they would remove the arranged marriage plot because it would take a lot of time to develop and we already have the kidnapping happening.

I am curious how they will solve the family problem, in how this will be shown in the adaptation. If they will do a brief version of what happens in the book on this or not.

In the series, the mother and the sister seem to change roles, May is shown to be compassionate towards her brother and likely will side with him in the family confrontation while the mother is the insufferable one making chaos along with Tong.

I am very curious to see if the grandfather character will be introduced at all or if another already known character will take his participation in the events.

PS: @fanfic-every-once-in-a-while kindly remind me in the comments that Mike was not the one to tell about the contract to Ing, more likely was someone else in the family like his sister/mother or even Tong.

[securitywaiter]

Aftonverse (Good Route)

Reposting from my personal blog to this one >~<

CREDIT TO @swingitshakeitmoveitmakeit FOR THE IDEA

Concept: Since MatPat says his name is Afton in the FNAF Musical, what if that applied to Ness? What if he were Vanessa's brother?

After the Bite of '83, Mrs. Afton divorces William. She tells him, "You get one. Vanessa or Nestor?" William chooses to keep Vanessa, as she's the younger of the two, and he doesn't want her to get hurt like [Crying Child]. So, Ness goes with his Mom, and for the next 17 years, he knows nothing about Freddy's, or his father and sister.

When he moves back into town, he notices that Freddy's is abandoned.

This prompts him to start digging, to scour public records and interview the locals about what happened to Freddy's, and the restaurant's owners. Well, one of them committed, and the other... no one's sure. All we know is that he moved out of town, and that was the last time we saw him after those kids went missing at Freddy's.

Ness hears this and IMMEDIATELY latches onto it, using it as his lead to delve even deeper into the restaurant's history. He starts an online blog, documenting all of his knowledge about Freddy's, secretly hoping someone out there cares. He has yet to get into contact with his sister.

One day, a man walks into the diner that Ness works at, followed by a young girl, no older than 8 at the most. They find a booth, and Ness notices the Freddy's keychain hanging out from the man's pocket. His vest has the word "SECURITY" written on it.

There's a new employee at Freddy's.

Ness does his usual waiter routine, before asking the man about his job.

"How... how do you know I work there?" The man asks, genuinely confused.

Ness shrugs. "Freddy and I have some history behind us. If you don't mind me asking; what's your name?"

"Mike," the security guard answers. "Mike Em- um, Schmidt." He warily eyes the girl across the table from him. They know something that they don't want Ness in on.

Ness pauses. "Nice to meet you. Ness Afton," he says, and shakes Mike's hand. "I'll be back with your drinks."

The next day, Ness snoops around the old Freddy's place, doing his best not to trigger any alarms or set off any security measures still active. One day, he finds himself in a storage room, and tucked away on a shelf, hidden under a tarp, is a strange black-and-white animatronic. Ness pulls it out to inspect it.

It's the Security Puppet. Marionette.

Ness quickly shoves it under his coat and hurries on out. He's just hit the jackpot---there's nothing else he needs from Freddy's.

Over the course of the next week, he observes the puppet, how its eyes light up silver every night. Ness presumes the battery still has some residual charge, in the same way that talking kid's toys sometimes go off randomly in the night.

The next week, it stops. It's gone completely inactive.

Ness decides to go back to Freddy's, now that Marionette isn't active. As he drives by it, though, he sees that the building is in shambles. He wonders what happened over the past week. His subconscious connects the puppet's activity to the restaurant's current state.

Ness decides to go in.

The building is completely ruined, and most definitely unsafe. But something catches his eye, one of the drawings on the picture wall.

An evil yellow rabbit, bloody knife in one hand, surrounded by five dead children.

Like the five missing children... a yellow rabbit, like his father's suit. Ness drops his flashlight in shock.

His father killed the missing children.

"You figured it out."

Ness whips around. Behind him stands a little boy, around the age of 5. How did he get in here?

"Who are you?" Ness asks, carefully picking up his flashlight.

"That doesn't matter," the boy says. "Can you bring me back? I promised Mike I'd keep them safe."

Ness thinks for a moment. He hasn't taken anyone.

Oh.

Marionette.

Ness nods. "Yes, I-- yes," he answers, and the boy smiles.

"Thank you," he says. He then runs off, hiding behind the stage's curtain.

Ness hurries out of the deteriorating restaurant, all the way back home, and collects the Puppet, quickly returning him to his rightful place.

On stage, with all his friends.

Ness can see a little blond boy smile at him from inside the restaurant as he drives away.

Maybe he should track down that Mike guy.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Adam Wren at Politico Magazine:

Mike Davis was steamed. The frenetic Republican lawyer and former Senate aide — currently Trump’s most fanatical defender on X and conservative media — had been in the middle of one of his near-daily appearances on the “War Room” with Steve Bannon when a protester materialized over his shoulder and began screaming into his ear. From his makeshift TV-hit setup outside the Supreme Court, Davis tried to continue to explain to Bannon and his audience the legal intricacies going on inside the building behind him. There, nine justices were hearing oral arguments over whether Trump was immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “They must have let people out of the mental health asylum for today’s Supreme Court hearing,” Davis said, grinning, but only for the camera. “We have our friend here — it looks like an MSNBC correspondent behind me.”

Bannon chimed in from the cozy confines of his studio with a warning for the protester. “Mike Davis is gonna punch your lights out,” he said. Davis is, at least according to Donald Trump Jr. and Bannon, a possible attorney general in a second Trump administration. But today, he was feeling powerless. After the “War Room” hit was over, Davis bolted off his set and zipped toward the Supreme Court Police nearby to complain about the protester. “You do not have a First Amendment right to scream in someone’s ear,” Davis argued to an officer. “I used to work in this building — I know what the fucking law is.” The officer took off his sunglasses. Recognition passed over Davis’ face. He knew this guy. “I remember you,” the officer told Davis. They both agreed he needed to talk to Patricia, the Supreme Court press wrangler. Davis knew exactly who she was; he called her and asked for access to the press corral. Patricia, who also remembered Davis, granted him special access inside, marking the first time Bannon’s show had a credentialed Supreme Court correspondent.

That day outside the Supreme Court, Davis showed the full, often at-odds, range of his roles in Trump world. He is the former president’s troll-in-chief, a frequent talking head in MAGA-aligned media known for his provocative, no-holds-barred defense of the president and crusade against Trump’s perceived enemies, especially in his legal battles. He rages against the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. He has promised to “rain hell” on Washington from a Trump administration perch come January 2025 and to eviscerate institutions that he says treat Trump unfairly. He calls Democrats “Marxists” and “evil” and has joked — in ways that many others don’t always take jokingly — that he would send journalists and former GOP personalities including George Conway and Tim Miller to “the gulag” and would put migrant kids in “cages.” “My goal,” he once told me, “is for the Supreme Court to dismantle most of the federal government.”

Davis, 46, also happens to have a deep familiarity with and understanding of those same institutions, which often works to his and Trump’s benefit. He did once work at the Supreme Court, as a clerk in 2017. He was also the chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley during the Trump administration and, as an outside adviser, led confirmation battles for two of those justices hearing oral arguments inside the building that spring day: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “Mike Davis was a standard-stock Republican, Federalist Society lawyer, right? Standard stuff. Played by the rules. Helped get guys confirmed, could play tough, but painted inside the lines,” Bannon told me.

Now, though? “He’s a full fucking MAGA warrior.” Davis, a stocky, redheaded lapsed Irish Catholic who calls himself Trump’s “viceroy,” is not officially affiliated with the Trump campaign. But he is undoubtedly close to Trump. In addition to being openly discussed as a candidate for attorney general, or acting attorney general, there is the more likely possibility of a position as White House counsel, chief of staff at the Department of Justice or as an outside adviser to Trump to select a candidate for any of those roles.

[...] Even less clear than what role Davis will fill in a potential Trump administration, though, is what he’d actually do in that role — and how much of what he proposes is, as he says, just “trolling.” In this way, Davis encapsulates a defining feature of conservatives in the Trump era: the dissolving barrier between reality and trolling, between serious political ideas and winking provocation. He seems to relish keeping people guessing about who he really is, what he really wants and what he will really help Trump accomplish.

I’ve had hours of conversations with Davis dating back to December from time I spent with him in Washington, Milwaukee and Manhattan. Davis is more cooperative with mainstream journalists than his rhetoric and his appearances on “War Room” would lead one to believe, but he was also unusually open with me, perhaps because I’m a national reporter who still lives in flyover country. In those conversations, along with those with nearly two dozen people who have intersected with his life, it became clear to me that even Davis isn’t always sure about when he’s being serious. That guessing only begins with the question of where Trump will put him if he wins in November — and whether the idea of Attorney General Mike Davis is the biggest troll of all.

[...] In the beginning, Davis wasn’t with Trump on every issue. Not on trade. Not on immigration. “I used to be much more globalist on trade and on immigration,” he said. He was, he said, “very Chamber of Cuck.” But he says he saw NAFTA destroy Midwestern manufacturing and send jobs to Mexico. He saw the middle class he grew up in hollow out. “The uni-party does not care about real Americans — Flyover Country, working class Americans in Iowa and Indiana and Ohio,” he told me. “That’s a problem.” He voted for Trump in 2016. In 2017, Davis reunited with Gorsuch, who would take him to the Supreme Court as his law clerk, a role he served in for four months — a stub term through the final months of the court’s 2016-2017 run. Then, from July 2017 to January 2019, he worked for Grassley as chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

There, Davis was at the center of what is arguably Trump’s most significant conservative victory: remaking the judiciary. Davis oversaw the floor votes for 278 federal judges and senior executive branch appointees, including Amy Coney Barrett to the Seventh Circuit. In 2019, Davis left the Senate and launched the Article III project, which he described to The New York Times as a “brass knuckles” advocacy group to remake the judiciary into a tougher, more conservative version of itself — “a hell of a lot more conservative,” he told me. Article III, which has a staff of eight and a slew of volunteers, also operates as a legal think tank committed to defending Trump in the courtroom and media. The organization, which runs entirely on donations, has no offices; Davis works mostly out of Colorado and makes periodic trips to Washington, where he also has a house.

It was when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 that Davis says he began to think the forces of the DOJ and what he calls the Democratic “regime” were fully aligned against Trump. He was suddenly everywhere, on X and Fox News and Bannon’s War Room, framing the Democratic case against Trump as “lawfare” — a phrase he popularized among MAGA supporters. Since then, he estimates, he has racked up more than 4,000 hits defending Trump since August of 2022, meaning he has done an average of more than five a day — though it’s often been more like 10. “It was pretty lonely around Trump world after the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trump’s going to remember who ran to him and who ran from him,” he told me. As much as conservative media and Trump allies thrill to his most outrageous statements, it’s his establishment cred that gives the conservative intelligentsia ammunition to fight Trump’s convictions.

[...] Last September, Davis made headlines for an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show in which he outlined a dystopian agenda for what he would do during a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s “acting attorney general before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon.” His list included firing “deep state” employees, indicting Joe Biden, deporting millions of immigrants and putting “kids in cages,” detaining people in the “D.C. gulag” and pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, “especially my hero, horn man.” “It’s going to be glorious,” he said. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Davis becomes Trump’s Senate-confirmed attorney general. Even Davis himself thinks it is far-fetched: “It would require 100 Republican senators to get me confirmed,” he once told me. Still, those close to the former president, including Bannon and Trump Jr., have mentioned his name to me as a possible acting attorney general and White House counsel or high-level DOJ appointee. “That’s Attorney General Mike Davis,” Bannon first responded when I asked him if he could talk about Davis for this piece earlier this year, not long before he reported to a prison for blowing off a House subpoena. Democrats appear concerned about the possibility — or, at least, have deemed it a fruitful possibility to raise money off of. The Biden campaign in April posted the clip of Davis on Johnson’s show to social media. “Trump’s potential Attorney General pick Mike Davis: Trump’s going to make me Attorney General and it will be a reign of terror.”

[...] Inside the 9th floor bar at The Trade Hotel, the unofficial watering hole of the Trump family during the Republican National Convention, victory was in the air. The Trump entourage, including Donald Trump Jr., his fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump and Eric’s wife Lara, held court on one side of the bar, while I stood off to the other side. An hour earlier, I had been with Davis on the convention floor as Trump gave his speech. Davis had marveled to me about what then seemed like the former president’s amazing week, not only surviving the assassination attempt and coming to the convention like a kind of caesar, but also a judge’s dismissal of his classified documents case. “Trump dodged the real bullet,” he said of the dismissal as Trump’s speech to delegates wore on.

Now, Davis entered the bar, where he was greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar himself. He told one to see him about a judgeship in January 2025. (Davis later told me he was joking.) He bragged to another that he had helped Trump get “six votes” on the Supreme Court. “The viceroy is fucking coming,” Davis said to David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager. “[Democrats] don’t know what’s coming in January 2025.” Davis made his way over to Trump Jr. I trailed, hoping for a quote, but stood a few feet away to give them some space. A tall, thick man standing beside Trump Jr. began eyeing me and my yellow media lanyard. I retreated to the other side of the bar. A woman with the man who later identified herself as doing work for Guilfoyle came over to me and two other reporters and chastised us for gawking. (Caroline Wren, speaking for Guilfoyle, later denied this woman did work for Guilfoyle.)

A few minutes later, close to closing time, Trump Jr. and his entourage started to leave. They passed behind me and Davis, who had come back over to talk to me, but not before Trump Jr. could give him a message. “I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years,” he told Davis, grinning. Davis said he would give Trump three weeks as his viceroy. “All four years,” Trump Jr. said. As I pecked notes on my phone, the woman who had told us to stop staring scolded me for chronicling the exchange and began recording me. She demanded that I delete the notes or give her my phone. When I tried to leave, she recruited four men to block the elevators. They stared menacingly at me and demanded I turn over my phone or delete my notes.

I was trapped. I wouldn’t delete my notes, and I was getting nervous. I called Davis, who had disappeared. He asked me where I was, and I told him. I explained to the woman I had to catch a flight to go home to my family in the next few hours. “You should have thought about your kids before you did what you did,” she replied. After roughly 15 minutes of this standoff, I searched for another exit. I ran down a hallway into a stairwell. Two people followed me.

When I was out on the street, Davis called me. By this point, Davis had confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down. You don’t ask a reporter to delete their notes, he told her, according to both Davis and a second person he recounted his remarks to briefly after. This isn’t North Korea. Davis had sworn to me he was not really serious about retaliating against journalists and throwing them in “gulags.” Now, he seemed rattled that others in Trump world might not be in on the joke. He told me he had never seen anything like that in his career. “Fucking shocking,” he said. Over the next few days, Davis checked in on me at least a couple of times a day, asking me if I was “OK.” He spoke with my editor. He called an adviser for Trump Jr., who then called me to express displeasure and say that the person responsible was not affiliated with Trump Jr. or the Trump campaign.

Politico Magazine’s Adam Wren has a detailed scoop on MAGA fascist Mike Davis, who is in line for a plum spot in a potential 2nd Trump Administration.

See Also:

MMFA: Politico journalist Adam Wren describes how he was threatened while reporting on Trump ally Mike Davis

MMFA: Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously

Read the full story at Politico Magazine.

[stop-talking]

Help I know I promised more Mike Schmidt content, but... I also really want to write about Derek Danforth. Such an evil little man. I love him.

These are the current fanfic ideas bouncing around in my head rn, help me pick one to start writing?

A:

Short story about how Mike got fired from Tire Zone (sales assossiate. two months. insubordination.)

It would just be a silly little story about him getting put in increasingly frustrating/embarrassing situations at work until he eventually loses it. Probably no romance aspect, since it takes place before the movie. (And written in Mike's POV)

B:

Mike x reader fic, set after the events of the movie, where he and Abby move into an apartment with you. (And they were roommates.... yk yk)

More specifically tho, the reader would be an eccentric 90's style goth, simply because I think Mike would make the perfect loser boyfriend for a hot goth girl. Also imagine bonding with Abby over makeup... making her into a baby goth... so cute.

It would be an angsty slow-burn friends to lovers.

C:

Derek Danforth x reader fic, where the reader is an assassin-for-hire... who really pisses him off. You're useful, but too sassy for his liking. He hates when he isn't in control.

It would be another angsty enemies-to-lovers fic. The reader struggles to get over guilt and the feeling they're unlovable because of their profession.

And Derek is just like?? Bitch?? I'm a worse person than you?? Idgaf?? True love <3

D:

Derek Danforth x reader fic where you're hired by his mother as a last resort to try and get him sober. Alone with just him for three weeks, your job is to rehabilitate him. (For the "I CAN FIX HIM" girlies)

Unfortunately, Derek sees you as his personal chef, maid, and whore. You flat-out refuse at first, but well, after so many days of only interacting with each other... The lines are a little blurred. something-to-lovers. It's complicated.

Btw if you're a writer and you want to use any of these ideas that's fine. Just tag me. I wanna read it too!!

[luftballoonit]

BIT Part One

Some thoughts on the first three chapters of IT, for the IT Bookclub! These first three chapters did such an excellent job of setting up everything. @bit-club already said as much in their notes, but it is really amazing how the themes, characters, and setting are laid out with such detail and foreshadowing in these early chapters. 

After the Flood (1957)

I love this chapter. When I first read IT a few years ago, I was instantly hooked by this first chapter. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying the scene with the storm drain is iconic. 

These lines stood out to me, primarily for their personification of the flood: 

“Stenciled across each of the horses was DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of the gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfuls—all of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street’s surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks.” (p.4)

If memory serves, this is the start of a motif. This town is being eaten away. Literally, in that It is feeding on its citizens, and figuratively in the way the town devours people who aren’t the white hetero Christian majority. The town is rotten, falling apart at the seams despite people’s efforts to ignore and slap bandages over the mess. 

Spoilers, but this is one detail of many in this chapter that wraps around to the end of the book. It begins and ends with a storm, only in the end, they really will need that ark for the storm that will cleanse Derry. 

After the Festival (1984)

A very brutal chapter, but necessary in showing the reader different perspectives on Derry and what it’s like. bit-club makes excellent points about the contrasting perspectives Derry’s residents have on the city, and people’s different ways of handling these perspectives. It is so common, so present and inescapable that people have learned to just accept It and willfully ignore what happens, if they don’t reject and try to leave the way Don Hagarty does.

Six Phone Calls (1985)

Stan’s chapter always makes me sad. That’s the point — it’s a tragedy, that this happy, loving, successful man is so terrified of the great evil he faced in childhood (the thing that he cannot comprehend, and therefore cannot accept and cope with as an adult) that he kills himself. I always wonder what Patty, his parents, and friends made of it. They had no idea what he went through, no idea why he would commit suicide. 

I never realized before, but the first thing Richie does is lie. He puts on a Voice to talk to Mike. This is a man for whom hiding, putting on a persona, is second nature. There is so much distance between the face (voice) Richie presents and the real him. 

“Because you made a promise when you were eleven? Kids don’t make serious promises when they’re eleven, for Christ’s sake!” (p.68)

I love this line. There’s this dismissal/disbelief around the things children believe and promise, but as King goes to show, kids’ promises can be some of the most true and powerful oaths there are. Children don’t worry about the logic or obligations of adulthood interfering. Also, it’s another thing that sets the Losers apart. The Losers are different. They’re adults, but they still hold to this promise they made to each other over two decades ago. 

I love Ben’s section, even if I don’t have anything particularly analytical to say about it. I love the look at his life we get through Ricky Lee’s eyes. It’s just chilling, how afraid Ben is and how he tells Ricky Lee he might be better off killing himself than going back to Derry. It continues to press how terrible and terrifying this horror they’re going home to is. 

Every time I read Bev and Bill’s sections, The Stranger by Billy Joel starts playing in my head. Bev fighting back and escaping Tom such a cathartic scene, but I love how Tom and Audra — two very different people, two very different spouses — recoil from the stranger their wife/husband become once the memories begin to return.

[kadytimberfox]

Kady's Expanse (Re)Watch Blog

Episode 1.01 - "Dulcinea" (Pilot)

And here we go for my...fourth time I've watched this episode I think? It's a really wonderful pilot that does so much work with introducing you to the world, our cast of characters, and setting up the threads of the main plot and does it all perfectly in a very tight 45 minutes. It reminds me a lot of Deep Space Nine's pilot "The Emissary" which is similarly a masterclass in tight storytelling and how to properly kick off a new series.

And speaking of kicking off a new series, hey! I'm watching this show that I absolutely adore again and I'm going to take the time to spout my thoughts about it on the internet because that seems like a fun idea! I really enjoy thinking about media critically but I've never taken the time to write down my thoughts before. It's a style of writing I've always wanted to try so where better to do that than a Tumblr blog? I'll try to keep these Brief and Not Boring but no guarantees on either. Especially on this one. It's the pilot, after all.

I also want to keep this as light on spoilers as possible; again though, no guarantees. Also if you haven't seen this show yet just go fucking watch it it's so good.

Later in this post is a description of torture that happens in the episode. I marked it with a TW and formatted the text to make it distinct from the rest of the post.

With that out of the way, there's nothing left to do except pick apart this pilot!

---------------------------------------

Summary

We kick off with a bang (and then some more banging) as we see a young woman named "Julie" fight her way out of a locked compartment, explore the darkened hallways of her Completely Fucked Spaceship, and watch her friends get eaten alive by some evil blue space goop. Surely none of that will be important later.

Cut to the adventures of hard-boiled Belter detective Joe Miller and his new Earthling partner Dimitri Havelock. They're private cops for an Earth corporation who theoretically maintain order on Ceres Station in the Asteroid Belt, the biggest shithole this side of pretty much anywhere. They go to a murder scene and do basically nothing, antagonize and then arrest people minding their own business at a bar, and take a bribe to half-ass a health inspection. Y'know, classic cop stuff.

Back at the precinct, Miller gets an off-the-books job from his boss to find one Juliette Andromeda Mao, daughter of megacorp magnate Jules-Pierre Mao and coincidentally the spitting image of "Julie" from our opening scene. Apparently, her pro-Belter activism is starting to piss off dear old dad and they want her to come home before she embarrasses the family any further.

In the middle of his investigation, he finds out that those air filters he "inspected" earlier crapped out and poisoned some children. Instead of taking accountability for not doing his job, he decides to throw the sleazy air filter guy into an airlock and only lets him out after he promises not to fuck it up next time. And also to pay Miller double. I'll let it slide though because Sleazy Air Filter Guy is an asshole.

Back on Earth, United Nations Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala shows up for about five minutes in this episode. The only thing she does is torture a guy. End scene.

Meanwhile, the good ship Canterbury is on its way to Ceres with a big haul of space ice that the station needs to turn into water. Second Officer James Holden gets immediately promoted, much to his dismay, because his previous boss Mike Ehrmantraut went insane from being out in space too long.

Mystery strikes when the gang gets a weird distress signal from a ship called the Scopuli. Captain McDowell, probably having watched enough Star Trek episodes to know that this can't be anything good, decides to ignore it. Holden just can't stop himself from doing a good thing, though, and secretly reports the signal, officially making the Canterbury Legally Obligated™ to investigate.

He picks his away team (unknowingly also picking the people he's going to spend the rest of this show with) and takes a shuttle to investigate the drifting Scopuli, where they find everything shut down except for the beacon that brought them here. "Pirate bait", or so it seems.

Suddenly, McDowell advises the away team that a very scary ship has appeared out of nowhere and that they need to get the hell out of there. The gang gets back on the shuttle just in time for the mystery ship to fire not just regular torpedoes, but nuclear torpedoes at them. The torpedoes close to zero...and then continue streaking towards the Canterbury.

Holden tells McDowell to eject the space ice to form a protective barrier, but he refuses, apparently willing to die rather than lose his payday. The payday (and everything else aboard) is lost anyway, however, as the Canterbury erupts into the most beautiful supernova I've ever seen.

"She's gone. They nuked her. She's gone."

-----------------------------------

My thoughts

So this is where I actually have to do the analysis thing. Since the beginning of this show is split into three primary subplots that all deal with a different piece of the Julie puzzle (a narrative device that I fucking love, by the way), I'll divide things up by talking about each one individually because that just makes sense.

Before I do that though, I just want to briefly say that that opening scene with Julie on the Scopuli is just the perfect opening to this show. It immediately gives us a very brief glimpse inside the puzzle box that our main cast is going to spend all of this season (and most of this show) trying to open. It's quick, it's tense, it's completely terrifying, and it's unforgettable if you've seen it.

------------------------------------

Miller on Ceres:

And we follow up that perfect opening scene with a perfect choice for which of these three main threads to start with. The thing that's great about dividing up the characters like this is that each of them only has a piece of what's going on with Julie and the Scopuli, but no one has the full picture. Miller, though, gets the most information off the bat and is the only person in the main cast who's looking for Julie specifically, so it's only natural that we should start with him.

His story is also the inspiration for the title of this episode, "Dulcinea". For those of you who aren't big Don Quixote fans, it's a reference to Quixote's fantasy lover that he invents because he styles himself as a knight and, of course, every knight needs his damsel. He describes her in excruciating detail; she's royalty in a far-off land who is the epitome of feminine beauty, the ideal of Womanhood Incarnate--or his vision of it at least.

And the deeper Miller goes in his investigation, the more quixotic he gets with his idea of who Julie is. He's never met or spoken to Julie, but as he unravels her activities prior to departing on the Scopuli, he becomes increasingly obsessed with her, imagining what kind of a person she must be, picking apart every little detail and transposing it onto his vision of what her life must be like. I'm sure he would call it "being a good detective", but it's much more than that to him.

Throughout Miller's jaunt around town with Havelock, they banter back and forth, and through their conversations, we get a great sense of their personalities. Whereas Miller is the grizzled veteran who's had his morality thoroughly beaten out of him, Havelock is a by-the-book rookie cop who seems genuinely interested in learning about Belters, if only so that he can police them more effectively.

It's a very tried-and-true buddy cop pairing, but it works really well here. Havelock gets to be our audience surrogate for this story as we learn more about how Ceres and Belters operate.

This thread has the biggest worldbuilding burden out of the three and it pulls it off so well. We get so much about life in the Belt, the politics of the Solar System, the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA (who will definitely be showing up later), and the logistics of maintaining a huge population of humans on a space station. And none of it feels clunky or awkward in the slightest. It's exactly the style of worldbuilding I loved in "The Emissary" from Deep Space Nine.

Ceres itself also has huge DS9 vibes, and not in a good way. The set design team did such a good job making this place look old, weathered, and completely falling apart. Except, of course, for the nice apartment buildings where the cops, off-worlders, and everyone else rich enough to ignore the seedy underbelly get to live.

There are a ton of fantastic, evocative lines in this arc, but I think my favorite is Miller's deadpan proclamation that "There are no laws on Ceres, just cops." A perfect summary of everything we see on screen about how power is wielded in this place.

-------------------------------------

Chrisjen on Earth:

This is the shortest thread where the least happens, but it will grow into one of my favorites. We don't get too much additional insight into what's going on, but we do get two important things: 1) Chrisjen Avasarala is a stone-cold bitch who thinks the OPA are terrorists, and 2) the OPA are apparently trying to get their hands on illegal stealth technology, which doesn't help with the whole "terrorism" thing.

This links up to both Miller's and Holden's subplots: we know about the OPA from Miller, and the ship that eventually blows up the Cant was using Martian stealth tech. Of course, since Holden and crew have no idea about the OPA, they immediately start thinking that Mars is out to get them, which will continue to play into the story going forward.

!-- TW: DESCRIPTION OF TORTURE --!

Also important to note is that Chrisjen is getting this information through the most brutal torture I've seen on TV in a long time: forcing a Belter whose body can't handle Earth's gravity to stand for hours on end by holding him up with hooks under his arms. After Chrisjen goes on and on about his "weak Belter lungs and brittle Belter bones", she coldly turns around and tells them to hold him up for another 10 hours. "If he survives, call me."

!-- TW ENDS --!

Fucking ghoulish, and definitely not a good look for Madam Undersecretary's first appearance. You're gonna have to trust me now when I say that she becomes one of my favorite characters in the main cast. This is about as bad as she gets, but she continues being manipulative and cold-blooded for most of this show. That's just who she is. To me, it's part of what makes this subplot of scheming at the UN so engaging.

We'll be seeing a lot more of Chrisjen going forward, and she'll get much better. At the very least, she will stop torturing this guy. But only because someone will tell her not to.

-----------------------------------

Holden on the Canterbury:

If Miller's story shows us life in the Belt and Chrisjen's shows us the politics of the Solar System, Holden's thread is all about life onboard a spaceship, which is important because we're going to be spending a lot of time on spaceships. This is also the part of the episode that has the most CG and honestly it holds up really really well. I know it's less than a decade old and they probably got a lot of money for the pilot but still! It looks great!

I'll drop a brief shoutout here as well for the ship designs in this show. They knocked it out of the goddamn park with the Cant's design: it's a big, boxy, dull gray, ugly thing that looks designed to haul ice and do literally nothing else. Everything is so practical and, above all else, plausible. They look like humans from the near future built them and that's the highest compliment I can give them.

There are shades of the first act of "Alien" here as we are essentially dropped into the Cant in the middle of its mission and get to see the camaraderie and hierarchy between all the members of the crew. We also get to know more about Holden, and immediately he begins showing us his defining character trait: he wields a lot of authority and respect, but he hates being in charge.

We see this in the very first scene onboard the Cant when one of the ice haulers, Paj, gets his arm severed while working outside the ship. He seems completely unfazed by this, though, since the company will send him a prosthetic and he's been working for them long enough to get a really good one.

Not only does this happen often enough that the company just buys prosthetics as a cost of doing business, there are literally tiers of coverage depending on years of service. What an optimistic future this is turning out to be.

Paj pleads with Holden to make sure the company doesn't send him a "used" arm (a frightening thought), to which Holden replies with something that he will continue to say, in so many words, over and over: "I'm just another clock-puncher like you." Holden knows he has authority on the Cant, but all he wants to be is a clock-puncher, which he makes very clear to pretty much everyone he talks to, including Captain McDowell when he essentially forces the XO job onto him.

Later on, we get our first glimpse at Holden's other primary personality trait, that being that he is The Main Character and therefore the most kind-hearted soul that can exist in this cold, selfish world. He logs the distress signal they received from the Scopuli, thereby ensuring that they'll have to divert from Ceres (and lose their on-time bonus) in order to investigate.

He shares this privately with Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata before the shuttle mission, to which her only reply is to tell him to keep that to himself. Fair play, considering she was just talking about how she wanted to strangle the little fucking do-gooder before she realized it was her new XO. Excuse me, Acting XO.

Before the shuttle launch, we're briefly introduced to the rest of the away team: the aforementioned Naomi; her mechanic Amos Burton, whose defining character trait is doing whatever Naomi tells him to do; ship's pilot Alex Kamal, who we previously saw being an annoying blabbermouth on the Cant; and Med-Tech Shed Garvey, who sewed up Paj's arm and wants everyone to know that he does not want to be here. Yes, his first name really is Shed.

Most of this part of the episode is setting up what'll happen next so we don't get a lot of time with any of these guys, but we'll have time for some great character work in the coming episodes.

----------------------------------

And that said, what a great setup for what comes next! Nearly all of the people we just got to know on the Cant are vaporized by a mysterious ship, there's a cloud of space debris hurtling toward Holden's little shuttle, and we have a hell of a puzzle box to dig into. Did Mars blow up the Cant? Did the OPA? Why would either of them want to? What does it all have to do with Julie and the Scopuli? And what the hell was that fucking space goo??

Despite covering so much ground in this pilot, The Expanse makes it very clear that we've barely scratched the surface. And even though I've already seen this whole show and know where it's going, it took everything I had to not hit the "next episode" button.

I will be doing that very soon though because I had a blast writing this up and I definitely want to keep doing it! Apologies that this one ran so long -- I assumed I was going to write a lot with this being the first episode and everything but I had so many thoughts that didn't make it into this post. I'm sure I'll be refining the format as we go along as well.

If you read all the way to here, I'm genuinely flattered and I hope you have a wonderful day.

~ Kady <3

[vintagecandyshop]

Ok. Hello, can I be unhinged about Willy Wonka for a second?

Yes, this is spurred on by the new Wonka movie, but I haven't seen it-- what I'm reacting to is the way other people talk about that movie. And most of all Willy Wonka as a character and when people try to explain what they think is wrong with Timothy Chalamet's performance. Here's a funny thing about me-- I'm an old movie fan, but I don't usually like movies from the 70s. And yet, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1970) is my all time favorite movie.

I have given the inner psyche of Willy Wonka more thought than any reasonable person should and if I wasn't so sure I could not do him justice I would draw this old movie character more often.

But here's the thing. Everyone in all the world is remembering this movie incorrectly. Let me get this out of the way now. Willy Wonka, the original film adaptation, the one of which everyone bases their understanding of the character on, the one that invented the orange oompa loompas and the boat ride, all that, DID NOT........ kill any children. He didn't even hurt them. He didn't even turn them into weird shapes like the Tim Burton one. Here's the part no one remembers-- There is a scene right before they get on the glass elevator at the end where Charlie asks Willy Wonka something like "what about the other children" because he's a nice boy and Wonka says-- and if you click the link you can see the clip-- " My dear boy, I promise you they'll be quite all right. When they leave here, they'll be completely restored to their normal, terrible old selves."

Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, the best one, the only one that matters, was specifically rewritten from Roald dahl's... deeply strange book... to be much more likable for the screen so that he would be seen as a more sympathetic and morally good character that you want Charlie to be friends with. He, at no point, directly harms a child himself nor does anything to trick them into being harmed, and once their parents fail to keep them from behaving erratically in a dangerous factory setting he personally makes sure they're ok and back to normal. Every single child's fate is caused by going against direct orders or suddenly doing something dangerous before they could be stopped. August was called for to stop eating from the river and fell in by himself, Veruca threw a musical tantrum destroying supplies and hitting tables and threw herself down a chute, Mike and Violet ran in and took something before they could be stopped. These things were entirely up to the parents to prevent, not the factory tour guide. In this adaptation, Willy Wonka's wit and calm in the face of panicked parents isn't apathy it's confidence. He knows they'll be fine, and he knows whatever happens to them he can undo, they'll just be given a scare. He wanted to teach the parents a lesson as much as the kids, as evident by how he most talks to the parents once the children begin acting up, but this particular iteration of him did not want to kill kids.

I MEAN-- I could go on, like make no mistake, Willy Wonka is an insane man, morbid and strange, driven to seclusion by bitterness and heartbreak, but above all he loved children. So much so that he believed only a child could run his factory. He idealized their child-like innocence and wonder-- something he was painfully aware he didn't have anymore after years of being taken advantage of. He had become cynical. But honestly I...... feel like all of that becomes pretty evident by just removing the pop cultural mythos of him being some kind of psychopath.

And the movie has all these themes of how capitalism scared away the artist that was Willy Wonka-- how he didn't really care about the money or want the negative attention it brought him, that he tried to share his art and his romantic idealism and all people saw was opportunity and money. But people still refer to him like a symbol of an evil capitalist instead of how the movie highlights a successful artist's struggle in a capitalistic world-- yes, he must make money to make his art, but bitterly so, not ideally so, to him the money and fame was a burden.

It just drives me insane that the movie is so widely interpreted in the most cynical way possible when that's exactly the opposite of what its asking you to do. At the end of the day I just want a T-shirt that says Willy Wonka did nothing wrong istg.

[yurtletheturtlehenderson]

COSMIC - S2:E6; Chapter Six, The Spy - [Pt. 1]

A Will Byers x Male!Reader Series

will's connection to a shadowy evil grows stronger, but no one's quite sure how to stop it. elsewhere, steve and dustin forge an unlikely bond.

||𝟑𝐑𝐃 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐏𝐎𝐕||

"Get him out. Go! Go!"

"God! Hold on, sweetie!"

Will screams in anguish as he is wheeled throughout the lab. He clutches his arm tightly, wishing he could tear the very skin off of his flesh, he feels as if he is being cooked from the inside out. Joyce stays close behind him, her tears clouding her vision, Bob and Mike right on her tail.

When she had left the tunnels, she was faced with the horrendous sight of her youngest writhing in the grass, near unconsciousness.

"I'm right here, honey. Just hold on." She cries, her hand outstretched for him.

They reach a room faster than she anticipates and she feels herself being ripped away from her baby when he is placed onto a bed. Bob is gently pulling her back, but to her, the distance is too great. She needs to be there, show him he's there. But for now, she's stuck, watching helplessly as her son is dying.

"Vitals?"

"Heart rate 220. Temperature's 106."

Several hands are prodding and poking, adjusting and readjusting but one nurse, in particular, leans forward. Her gloved hands gently grab the sides of his face so as to grab his attention - this whole while, his eyes have been closed as he screams.

"Will," she says urgently. "where does it hurt?"

His face is pale and his eyes sunken and dark, but he manages to open them for a brief moment to speak before falling into a fit of groans.

"All over."

"She says he feels like he's burning." Dr. Owen's interjects. "Check for burns."

Will's shirt is quickly cut open allowing them to work but there is no sign of burns to be found.

"I don't see anything!"

Once again, she grabs a gentle hold of Will leaning down to get his attention as the other nurses begin to apply wires.

"Where does it hurt the most, Will?"

"Everywhere!" He screams, launching his head up. "EVERYWHERE!"

His head is thrown back into the pillow in anguish, the doctors swarm his bedside doing all in their abilities. Joyce collapses in Bob's arms, her trembling hand over her mouth and Bob finds himself unable to bear the sight.

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

"Here we stand or here we fall

History won't care at all"

The newly formed, unlikely duo of Dustin Henderson and Steve Harrington stew in thick silence, nothing but the lilting voice of Freddie Mercury's carrying through the car's otherwise silent atmosphere as Hammer To Fall plays from the radio. Night has fallen and the two ride in silence, the maroon BMW barreling down the streets of Hawkins, clouds of leaves in its path. Dustin had shared his previous encounters with his newest ally which has caused the aforementioned silence. Finally, Steve finds his voice.

"Wait a sec. How big?"

Dustin stretches out his forefinger from his thumb roughly an inch, indicating to Steve.

"First it was like that," he then stretches both hands out wider than his shoulders. "Now he's like this."

Steve rolls his eyes, returning them to the road as he scoffs.

"I swear to God, man, it's just some little lizard, okay?"

"It's not a lizard."

"How do you know?"

Dustin turned to Steve with an incredulous look, mocking his confidence and the two begin to speak over one another.

"How do I know if it's not?"

"How you know it's not just a lizard?" Steve said, his voice rising.

"Because his face opened up and he ate my cat." Dustin snapped.

Steve's eyes widened, though his face quickly contorts into an awkward expression. Willingly admitting defeat, he shrugged as he pulls into the Henderson driveway.

The two exit the car and meet at the trunk, as promised Steve opens his trunk to reveal the infamous spike bat from the previous year.

Having ditched his toxic friends, Steve had come to the Byers's house to make peace with Jonathan after their fight. Only to find Nancy there with Jonathan as they set a trap for the Demogorgon the night of Eleven's disappearance. Consequently, Steve had been thrown into the chaos in their battle with the Upside Down where he upheld the infamous bat. The less than pleasant memories came flooding back to him as he glanced down at the makeshift weapon, and he sighs.

Tossing his keys to Dustin, he grabs his bat, twirling it in his grasp and he can't help but notice the spark of adrenaline that comes with it. The feeling of the weight in his hands, knowing he needs to be prepared at any moment. And he is.

Slamming the truck, Steve follows Dustin's lead into the backyard. He finds himself standing in front of a chained up cellar and Steve waits in hushed silence for any signs of movement. The flashlight beam dances across the steel as he waits, but the pair is only met with more silence.

"I don't hear shit."

"He's in there." Dustin shrugs.

Cautiously, Steve leans forward, his bat outstretched and he gently taps the wooden end of the bat against the steel. Again, no other sounds can be heard. Testing his luck, he steps forward again and whacks the doors with the bat creating a larger sound. Still no reply.

Steve turns hotly on his heel and shines the flashlight directly in Dustin's eyes with a less than impressed look on his face.

"All right, listen, kid. I swear, if this is some sort of Halloween prank, you're dead."

"It's not," Dustin argues, wincing from the harsh light.

"All right?" Steve pressed.

"It's not a prank." He urges. "Get it out of my face."

Steve reluctantly replies, lowering the flashlight and he gestures to the cellar.

"You got a key for this thing?"

The cellar doors are ripped open with an ear-splitting squeak and Steve peers deep into the darkness, his bat at the ready. Dustin stands behind him, flashlight in his shaky hand and Steve gladly takes it. He shines it further into the cellar, the milky white beam reached the bottom of the steps and dances across the cold, grey concrete.

"He must be farther down there," Dustin says uncertainly. "I'll stay up here in case he tries to escape,"

Steve looks up at the boy with a deadpan expression before back into the dark abyss with a supposed cat-eating monster. He shakes his head, unable to believe the dramatic, unforeseen turn his day has taken.

He sighs once more, not bothering to hide his unease as he looks from the boy to cellar once more.

"You have a brother, don't you? Why isn't he helping out?"

Dustin shifts uneasily.

"Yeah, about that," Dustin says, causing Steve to sigh. "He's with Byers. Also, he has no idea I found Dart after we lost him at school, or that our cat's dead so I'd rather not lead with that..."

"Jesus, I- Fine. Whatever, let's just get this over with."

Both bated breath, Steve descends into the darkness, his bat gripped tightly in hand, flashlight in the other. His body is tense and he is ready for any sign of movement. He reaches the last step, and his flashlight quickly scans the area though it finds nothing but a metal chain hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room. Deeming it safe, his guard lowers ever so and he steps forward turning on the light, the chain dangles around his head and for one blissful moment, he finds nothing but a regular cellar.

That is until his eyes land on the peculiar sickly pale green shape on the floor before him. In the dark, his vision had mistaken it as an old plastic grocery bag. But now, with the light illuminating the surface, it had a bright pale sheen and he could see it certainly wasn't anything normal. Extending the ends of the bat, the nails hooked into the strange wet substance and held it up to examine it.

The beam of the flashlight shone through the substance. After moments of contemplation as he watches it drip with mucus-like slime and is met with a horrid stench, he realizes it had once been skin.

His gaze wandered to a spot on the wall just beyond where he had found the shredded skin and he looked on in shock, his stomach plummeted as if he had dropped ten stories.

From above the surface, Dustin waited less than patiently, growing nervous for the Harrington boy.

"Steve?" He called uneasily.

The cellar light had been turned on but no other sign of life had shown itself. Fear crept into Dustin's heart and his unease festered.

"Steve, what's going on down there?" He asked a little louder.

Dustin jumped back in surprise when an unexpected beam of light hit his face so suddenly. His heart leaped into his throat and he was thankful he hadn't screamed. Behind the beam of light was Steve, looking up at him worriedly.

"Get down here." He ordered.

His voice sounded shaky, a factor in Steve that did not comfort Dustin at this moment. But reluctantly, he obeyed. Dustin descended the cellar steps to find a familiar substance dangling from the spiked bat, and his stomach twisted into knots.

"Oh, shit."

Without a word, Steve pulled the bat away and shone the flashlight towards the far corner of the cellar revealing his second discovery. A large trail of slime was strewn across the concrete leading to the far left corner of the cellar. Dozens of discarded bricks, broken remnants of splintered wood sprinkled the area as well as of mounds of dirt all flowed in from the gaping hole in the wall where Dart had escaped.

"Holy, shit!"

The duo stepped forward, bending down to examine the tunnel. The small beam of light was redirected once more and the two gapped at their microscopic view of the infinite tunnel that wound its way throughout all of Hawkins.

The currently vacant Byers living room is bathed in the pale moonlight, the only evidence of life is Will's abandoned maps that travel through the house like veins. An abandoned glass of water on the kitchen counter vibrates in only the slightest as the growing rumble of engines surrounds the house. A fleet of men flood routinely from the identical swarm of HAWKINS WATER AND ELECTRIC vans and storm the Byers porch. Within moments, the house is flooded with agents, dozens of flashlight beams dance across the floors, walls, and ceilings as they dissolve across the perimeter.

Light switches, remotes, doorknobs - apart from the front door - go untouched avoiding any trace they were ever here, only doing that which was necessary with gloved hands. They were quick and thorough, and apart from the brief but blinding flashes of cameras documenting the maps and the fleet of flashlights, the house is illuminated only by the moons soft rays. A pair of hands confiscate the videotape from Halloween night, that had previously remained tucked into the player, while another takes several photos of Will's drawing of the shadow monster that sits in his room, undisturbed.

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

Will's small and weakened frame lays unconscious on the medical bed. The color in his cheeks that gave him his usual warm and pinkish hue withered and was almost nonexistent, his skin now paled a sickly white and covered in a sheen of sweat from the long night behind him. Bob and Mike sit at his side, their eyes trained on him for any signs of disturbance as his body shakily rises and falls in a feeble attempt at stabilizing.

Meanwhile, Joyce sits at the head of the conference table among the lab's finest doctors and agents. She - much like Bob and Hopper - had traded their regular attire for scrubs during the night and she is in a heated discussion with Owens and his team.

"That thing, it..." she gestured over her shoulder. "It did something to him."

"Okay," Owens thoughtfully scratches his head, his mind scrambling to catch up and understand the situation. "And these now-memories, as you call them, how long has he been experiencing them?"

The impatience grew in Joyce at the repetitive question and fights a huff.

"I told you, since Thursday. Since I found him in the field."

"And why wasn't he brought in?" Asked an unnamed scientist to her right.

Her sharp and hostile gaze snaps to the man and she gives him a cynical glance, her palms hitting the surface of the wooden table.

"I have been bringing him in, and what have you done?" She spits coolly. "Nothing. Nothing!"

Owens nervously jumps in with an unintended stilted tone, his movements stiff, all in a pathetic and useless attempt to minimize her concerns.

"These are new symptoms, Joyce."

Joyce shook her head profusely, jabbing her finger in Owens's direction. Her promise to Will burning protectively in her heart.

"No. No, he has been telling you over and over that something wrong, and you said it was all in his head."

Owens squirms uncomfortably in his seat, his composure cracking under Joyce's fire. His mouth opens and closes, though his voice fails him.

"You said, 'Be patient.' Those were your words."

As she leans back into her seat, shifting restlessly Owens finally finds his voice. Her adrenaline and unease find a small and temporary outlet as her fingers drum against the wooden conference table.

"I understand that you're upset, okay? I get it. And I would be, too, if I were in your shoes." Owens gestured around the room. "But we are all in the same boat here, and I just need you to try--"

"What? Stay calm? Trust you?" Joyce looks around the table in disgust before shaking her head. "No, I want him transferred to a real hospital."

Dr. Owens's eyes shift to the papers in his hands, and while his voice is firm his nervous actions give away his discomfort.

"Well, you know that's not possible."

Another doctor joins in much to Joyce's bewilderment and chagrin.

"He really will get the best treatment here, Mrs. Byers."

"He really will." Another interjected.

She looked between them, utterly baffled, unable to believe the blinding negligence in themselves. She merely scoffs.

"And what are you treating him for, exactly?" She shrugs exasperated when she is met with no response and she rises to her feet. "Can anyone tell me what's wrong with him? Can a single person in this room tell me what is wrong with my boy?"

No one spoke, and she was met once more with dozens of eyes that avoided her gaze. Several men squirming uncomfortably in their seats and it only fuels the flames in her chest and her voice rises with her anger.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BOY?"

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

"Oh, He-Man, thank you for saving my life. What strong muscles you have."

Erica smirks at the dolls in her hands as she is splayed out across her bed. In one hand, her favorite Barbie doll, Christie. In the other, Lucas's He-Man action figure she had lifted from his room. She brought the two together in an embrace, their plastic faces touching as she made exaggerated kissing noises. The door was thrown open by Lucas and she looks up at him distasteful. His eyes fall to the doll in his hands and he glares at her.

"I knew it!" He scoffs, stomping in and ripping He-Man from her hands.

"Hey! They're in love!"

Lucas turns in her doorway, rolling his eyes.

"No, actually they're not. They don't even exist on the same planet."

"Aren't you too old to be playing with toys?" She quips.

Words die on Lucas's tongue and another rough sigh escaped him. He shakes his head, ridding himself of the comment.

"That... That's not the point. The point is to stay out of my room." He fires back, marching off into the hallway.

Erica calls after him, unfazed.

"Then tell your little nerdy friend to shut his mouth."

Lucas backpedals and returns to her doorway, giving his sister a quizzical look.

"What are you talking about?"

Erica merely shakes her head slightly and exaggerates Dustin's previous cries.

'''Code red, Lucas. Code red. Code red.' Bunch of nerds."

She rolls her eyes, reaching back for a nearby stuff animal, missing the horrified look on Lucas's face. He runs quickly to the end of the hall, not caring if he crashes into his door. He grips the doorframe as he scans his room, a frightened mantra slipping from his lips.

"No, no, no, no, no, no."

Sure enough, on his bed is his walkie, completely shut off. He rushes to his bed, flipping the dials and extending the antenna as quickly as he can.

"Dustin!"

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

The steel buckets hit the concrete with a decisive smack, and a container of gasoline is placed next to them. Dustin and Steve unload the trunk of monster hunting supplies they had scraped together for their plan against Dart. They had procured buckets and buckets of raw meat from the butcher shop and managed to gather the other supplies from Steve's garage. Dustin's comms come to life and immediately he recognizes Lucas's voice.

"Well, well, well, look who it is." Dustin feigns a smirk, gloved hands on his hips as Steve continues to unload the trunk behind him.

"I'm sorry, man." Lucas sighed. "My stupid sister turned it off."

"Well, when you were having sister problems, Dart grew again, he escaped, and I'm pretty sure he's a baby Demogorgan."

All Lucas could do in that short moment was blink as he processed the truckload of information.

"Wait. What?"

"I'll explain later," Dustin answered. "Just meet me and Steve at the old Junkyard."

Another wave of shock hit Lucas abruptly.

"Steve?"

"And bring your binoculars and wrist rocket."

"Steve Harrington?"

Behind Dustin, Steve had finished packing his bag and he closed the trunk. His voice barely echoed through the mic and into Lucas's ears, but it was undeniably Steve's.

"All right, let's go."

Dustin grabs the remaining bucket - the other in Steve's hand - and quickly falls in line.

"Just be there, stat," Dustin ordered into his headset. "Over and out."

[gayofthefae]

Thinking about early Mike versus El's relationship with Hopper and the sweet innocence versus the complex love required for longterm.

Mike says promises are something you never break. Lies are off limits. You stick to your word, no exceptions. Cute. Sweet. 12 years old. Puppy love.

Hopper breaks promises. Hopper lies. And he does it in complex situations with nuanced motives but he does it. And she's mad at him and he apologizes. And he improves but he also doesn't say he'll never do it again, because he doesn't know what complex situations will arise where he might lie to her. He might be late again because of reasons outside his control. He might lie for her safety. Promises might break accidentally that originally wouldn't have been broken because things happen sometimes.

And Hopper does mess up again. But it isn't a big deal, in part because he never promised that he wouldn't. And they know what to do. She doesn't even really fault him in season 3. Her general reaction is "oh, yeah, that's my dad for you; he's protective".

But because of the different setups, Mike lying about being able to say "I love you" and breaking his promise to "fix this" is a big deal. Because he swore he never would. And he's breaking it for the first time years later. And they've put this weight on it like any single lie would be the downfall of the relationship it's so evil. So in season 5, Mike and El need to let go of those childhood ideas and grow into a relationship as complex and longterm as El and Hopper's: Sometimes Hopper lies. Sometimes El lies. And they apologize and forgive each other because that's just part of relationships sometimes. They have an established plan in place for when that happens and they don't treat it like the end of the world. It's harder to have a plan when you've avoided it like the plague so you would never have to go through it so when it comes, you're unprepared.

Mike and El set up the structure of their relationship as kids with a simple moral worldview. And they've been so scared that letting go of that means letting go of the basis of their relationship that they never changed it, even when they both violated it repeatedly. I'm so ready for their relationship to become more complex. Not just in taking responsibility, but in expectations in the first place.

[bishop-percival]

@stuckinuniformdevelopment

(prev) When Revenard Mike dismissed Teddy’s promise (not threat, promise) he had no way to respond other than with what could admittably only be referred to as a pout. Once they neared the bottom of the stairs he consciously straightened his expression to avoid giving Revenard Mike the satisfaction. The first thing Teddy did when he spotted the vast stack of fabric was remove his glove in order to run his fingers across it to confirm it’s quality. It only took a few seconds to identify it from the list he sent Revenard Mike so he quickly turned his attention towards the machines. Teddy stopped to look back when he heard his name, then walked over while slipping his glove back on and gave their hand a firm shake. While he didn’t trust that (likely two-faced) gossip any further than he could throw her, their surface politeness made them one of the more tolerable Glornists. “Evil morning Deacon Autumn,” Teddy said as he slipped his other hand into his left pocket and pulled out a flexible tape measure. “May I take your measurements?”

“Oh! Hehe, sure!” Autumn smiled and lifted her arms. As they awaited being measured, they looked back at the fabric pile. 

“How’d you even manage to pull off this heist, Rev? You had to have someone help you this time ‘round.”

Mike folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “Nope. Just me.” He then also looked at the mess.

“Hope you don't mind doing some setup and organizing over there, Theodore… I kind of just plopped everything down. Gives you a chance to set it up how you'd like, anyway."

[xtinyslip]

“… okay. ‘Cause if you should be mad at anyone. It’s me. Mike did all that because he thought it was keeping me safe.” From you. It wasn’t as if he could actually say that though. Maybe, there would have been a time where she would have loved to give him a piece of her mind. Right now she didn’t see what good that was doing any one. “I don’t think you should hold your breath. What happened? It was bad.” Abby didn’t blame Mike for acting out against the other. At the same time… she didn’t want to lose him… it felt like the path he was on was going to ensure that. Even if it had been a while since her and Mike had properly spoken. She still couldn’t bare that. “I still can’t believe he let you in…” her tone wasn’t negative but it was uncertain. Abby knew not to trust him but finding out Edgar did? Enough to let him in the farm? She didn’t want it to change things and she’d always had her own mind but… “is your pizza THAT good?” she didn’t want to smile but maybe she had, just ever so slightly. “I’ll be the judge of that.” her tone still somewhat playful but it was on the edge. Like she couldn’t quite commit to being fully at ease with him. Her eyes shot down to his finger, she may aswell have been swaying towards him and away again with how torn she felt. Still, she didn’t want more trouble with Mike so she extended her finger to pinky promise with him. “DEAL.” Abby didn’t keep her finger there long. After all, he might have forgotten but she still remembered most of what had happened. She remembered how scared of them she had been. “… what if that…” makes you into an evil uh… she didn’t have the word for it but what if it did? of course, it was a genuine concern but she swallowed it back. “Edgar will know how to fix it if it happens. It’ll be okay!” That she did believe. “I don’t think I can right now, sorry. If you didn’t do anything to him,” and it was clear she believed that he hadn’t. “Then that means he’s really, really mad at me.” When she was little she’d shrug it off, knowing they’d both get the hell over it but it felt different now. Even if when she was around Mike she diverted back to being that little kid. She even did around William to a point. It was like her mind set changed without her permission and she hated it. She was tougher than that. @springbandit

"Tell on him? Of course, I'm not going to tell on him." William didn't like the police, despite his wife and daughter being part of the local force. He much preferred his own rough justice. "I know he has his reasons for hating me. Even if I don't remember them. I hope one day we can come to terms." He hated saying that, especially out loud. But, for now he needed to toe the line. "Letting me in? To the farm? Oh, I've been in before. Not to stay, of course. I'm sure he doesn't need all my medical issues busying up his community. I'm quite happy just to visit. Besides, he's eager for you all to try my pizza recipe. Which, I assure you, is just pizza." he smiled, grateful that Abby was at least willing to adopt a somewhat playful stance with him. A small paternal instinct in him wanted to protect her from Mike, knowing the harm he could cause to someone who displeased him, but, the rational part of him wanted nothing to do with either. Finding the balance was what was crucial. He put out his little finger, like she'd just talked about and offered a promise. "I won't tell Mike. But, you have to come to pizza night. Deal?" He didn't consider himself lucky to be befriended by Edgar, but, there was potential for that to change. If everything went according to plan, he could see them having a long, happy business relationship. "Well, I'm glad somebody sees it. Because, to tell you a secret, I've been worried that there's nothing there. That, since I got sick, it's like I've forgotten how to be happy. Edgar's helping me find out who I really am. Maybe, if you ever are able to believe me, you'd ask Mike to stop attacking me? He'd listen to you."

@xtinyslip

[twilightprince101]

"EVERYTHING IS FINE" is awesome, but it is NOT FOR EVERYONE

Hi! So recently I've gotten into the Webtoon "Everything Is Fine," created by Mike Birchall. And honestly? I'm fucking loving it right now! And I don't see many people really talking about it on Tumblr, which is frankly a crime considering how popular it is on Webtoon itself!!

I wish I could talk to all my friends about this webcomic, but I am fully aware that there are a few VERY BIG hurdles that some people would need to get past first.

So! To all my mutuals and followers, let me give you my pitch for this webcomic, along with a few disclaimers on what's to come.

IS THIS A "CUTE BUT SECRETLY EDGY" THING?

The main way I found out about this webcomic was through marketed/animated ads on Youtube. The general vibe that they were going for was that it was a "looks cute but is actually really fucked up" story. Think your Happy Tree Friends or Don't Hug Me I'm Scared's. Designed to lure you in and then SLAP you across the face with all of its gore and fucked-upness. If you've seen ads for a game called "Evertale" on youtube that kinda looks like pokemon, you understand what I'm saying and I get your apprehension.

And don't get me wrong, those worries are not unfounded! There's some stuff in this comic that is really messed up and honestly leaves me up at night. But while in the cases of the two above samples they feel more to shock, Everything Is Fine feels a bit more deliberate in what it does. They feel like they're a product of the world and a side-effect to the setting. The fucked-upness holds a purpose outside of shock and says something.

(this isn't to bash on the two above examples btw, no shame in liking them. However for me personally, it definitely seems more for the purpose of drawing in attention than telling a story)

The first 12 "episodes" have by far some of the darkest in terms of content-- ALL OF WHICH I WILL LIST AT THE BOTTOM WITH A "READMORE" LINK--but if you make it past those first 12 chapters, there's a really damn compelling story waiting for you. The moment that the main character Maggie opens up a science book, that's when you've crossed that threshold.

Everything past this point is spoiler territory, so if you already feel like going into this then I recommend just reading the warnings past the read more then heading into the story blind.

OKAY SO WHAT IS THIS STORY THEN

Here's my best elevator pitch for this series:

It's a dystopian domestic thriller that utilizes a suburbia setting to enforce themes of formality and productivity vs family and love, while also incorporating a "Mind games battle" style into its action ala The Promised Neverland or Death Note.

Whew, that certainly was a word salad! Lemme break it down a bit more.

-Dystopian Domestic Thriller?

The exact scale of this story (at least at the time of writing this) is very small scale. It focuses on two characters: Maggie and Sam, a married couple that are forced--alongside everyone else--to live in a picturesque happy neighborhood. A very "Howdy neighbor, can I borrow a cup of sugar" type place, and if you deviate from that vision then... well, it doesn't end pretty.

However, despite just how grand a change this is (the world is implied to have been just like ours 7 years ago or so), the focus is much more intimate. The whole first chapter solely focuses on five different characters, all of whom are neighbors in this dystopia trying to get by, along with getting the reader acquainted with their situation. And, despite the friendly faces, each family wouldn't think twice about throwing each other under the bus if it meant they could move up in the world and get a chance to [REDACTED, GOTTA READ TO FIND OUT YOURSELF BUD].

There are no evil monsters. There's no big bad boogeymen waiting in your closet to eat your brains. All there is is your neighbors, the ones that wake up next to you with a smile on their face. And it's almost impossible to tell whether or not their smile is genuine or not.

-"Mind games battle?"

If you haven't read The Promised Neverland (or watched season 1 of the anime and ONLY season 1) or are acquainted with "mind games battles" in general, imagine this scenario:

There are two different characters, each of them entirely equal in their strengths and weaknesses. One has a diamond, the other wants the gem for themselves. To try and get the diamond, the thief tricks the other into thinking they already have it, causing the owner to reveal the key's location so they can steal it themselves.

That is the essence of "Mind game battles" or (coined by SuperEyepatchWolf) a "Non-Battle Battle" story. Very little violence truly happens, the core focus is on espionage and getting a leg up on your opponent by figuring out what they're going to try and do, then countering with your own plan. Highly recommend checking out his video btw

This might seem a little strange compared to what I just described with the whole "Suburban Dystopia" setting, but this brings it down to its core elements. Everyone is a normal person, at the youngest about 30 years old, and in the end they want to throw each other under the bus to get further in life. It utilizes that suburban dystopia setting with the fear that "secretly, deep down, all your friendly neighbors and friends wouldn't blink to sacrificing you for something more" and it hits fucking hard, leading to a story about forging your own path and recognizing who truly matters in your life.

It is MUCH more subdued and tame compared to the above examples, but believe me when I say this was intended from the very beginning, and it's only going to get better.

BUT WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE STORY

geez you don't gotta yell like that every time dude

So if you're like me and you tend to try and search for a bit more meaning in your stories, you might be wondering why you should read this (aside from my recommendation of course). You might ask "yeah if it's scary/fucked up, cool. But is that all?" If you're the type that stays away from horror-esque scenarios like this, I can doubly understand (again, READ THE WARNINGS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST).

But as I've been growing into the adult world, a constant nagging fear that's been growing is the thought "People are only nice to you out of necessity, none of their kind words hold any truth to them. Their smiles are only of toleration." With how much of the business world thrives on that sort of formal kindness (job interviews, sucking up to your boss, etc.), it has ended up leaking out into my personal life and causing some pretty harsh damage to my mental health.

This webcomic not only feels like the first story to address this specific fear, but also one that has a direct answer/resolution to that. Yes, sometimes it may feel like it's impossible to tell who's truly kind and who needs to be kind. It will feel hard to truly tell that difference.

But no matter what fear you feel, no matter how impossible that feeling is to overcome, there will always be someone in your corner that loves you for you. Their smiles are not of necessity, but of enjoyment of your presence. And if you acknowledge them and trust in that kindness, nothing will stand in your way.

And... fuck man, I don't know. I think that's something I kinda needed to be told, and something I think a lot of other people need to hear.

So yeah! "Everything Is Fine" is a fucking banger and I highly recommend it! If all of the above parts (and the below warnings, FOR THE LAST TIME CHECK THOSE WARNINGS) didn't bother you and you seem intrigued, go check out the webcomic and send some cash the dude's way. Chapter 2 is getting into full swing, and I want some peeps to enjoy this with as these two keep moving their way upwards.

Either way, that's all. Hope you have a nice day!!

Now then...

TIME FOR ALL THE CONTENT WARNINGS

-One of the things in episode 1 at the very start is a decaying dog carcass, which has been implied to be sitting there for at least a couple months rotting away.

-In episode 3, a starving homeless man is given said carcass. I don't think I need to go into detail here.

-Body horror doesn't come up too frequently, but let's just say those masks aren't just masks. This starts subtly at episode 9 and 11, but from then on it'll become more apparent when it comes up.

-Several moments of suicidal implications come up throughout as well, most especially in Episode 11. They often have warnings at the start of the chapters when they happen though.

-Attempted murder and successful murder, via bashing a person's head in! Oh boy!! These will be apparent when they come up as well, keep an eye on that hammer.

The last warning is a SUPER BIG SPOILER so don't read it if you don't wanna be spoiled.

One of the biggest punishments/consequences that each of the characters can be given is called "Red Status." Getting into Red doesn't kill you, but instead it forces whoever is subjected to watch their children die--though vague, it's implied that those fates are. Not kind. Episode 26 gives us a front row seat to two children seemingly being forced to jump off a tall building and commit suicide. They don't show the bodies, but it still very much happens. It's one of the most subtle, but horrifying moments in the series so far.

Definitely not as bad as a lot of other stuff out there, but... that dog scene man. Fucks me up still today, and I know one specific person it would fuck up the most. So if these are too much for you, you know what to do.

[munningham]

Eddie/Chrissy OTP Questions (authors choice)

7. What is something they’d want to change about the other if they could?

Chrissy just wants to take away his demons. She sees the anger and the fear that bursts out from him at times (never at her), and it breaks her soft heart. She knows where it comes from, being abandoned by both his parents, always being the outcast, the punching bag, the freak. He’s come a long way in terms of feeling comfortable in his skin and his identities, but she still reassures him that she loves him just the way he is.

Similarly, Eddie swears he will spend the rest of his life showing Chrissy her worth, just the way she is. He would whisper in her ear a million times that she is beautiful, she is strong, she is brave, she is enough, if only that could convince her. When he sees her struggling with her ED, when her insecurities and people pleasing/fawning behavior show up, he wants to scream and bash Jason and her mother against a wall. Again and again, for how they’ve fucked with his sweet girl’s mind.

21. Are they interested in having children? Why or why not?

The real question is, how are they with The Kids?

I mean we’ve seen Eddie with the kids, he busts their balls and takes them under his wing. The Byers move back to Hawkins and he is equally impressed with both Will the Wise and El the Mage. He knows what it’s like to be the misfits, and he just wants to create a safe space for these kids, so they don’t have to go through the struggles he did. Eddie definitely has some heart to hearts with Will where he tells him it’s okay if he still loves DnD, there are some people who will never give it up. You do what you love, and fuck the rest.

Dustin and Lucas are such freaking dorks around Chrissy. Dustin throws all the charm on her, calling her “My fair maiden” and trying to ask her out. He loves acting like he’s gonna steal her from Eddie, Chrissy giggles and plays along, Eddie tells him to stop flirting with his girl, it becomes a whole thing. Ugh I just really need this scene......

Honestly I’m not a huge Mike fan, I feel like Mike would be a pill about Chrissy joining Hellfire Club, even if she’s just watching at first. Eddie tells him to cut his shit, and that he better respect her if he wants to stay in the club.

Eddie and Chrissy take Max under their wing, she comes over to Eddies trailer to hang out if she needs a break. They take care of her, they help her take care of her Mom. Eddie becomes the older brother figure Billy should have been 😢😭

26. What holidays do they like?

Oh Chrissy is a total Christmas sweetheart, she wants to do all of the things.

And of course Eddie loves Halloween, he gets super into it.

They both hate Thanksgiving for various traumatic reasons (fucked up families, food, etc)

Their first Thanksgiving together Chrissy is dreading it. She thinks she’s keeping it together, but she finally breaks down the night before. Eddie holds her and lets her cry and promises her it will be okay. She falls asleep on his tear soaked chest.

The next morning when she wakes up, she’s alone in their bed. She comes out to the living room, and Eddie is waiting for her in a black cape, costume, and full game board set up. “Lady Llira, your grace, as your devoted knight I regret to inform you a horde of goblins is outside your castle. Your villagers are begging for your help. What shall we do?” The rest of the day is spent lost in a fantasy land, fighting dragons and defeating evil. Throughout the day Eddie subtly brings out Chrissy’s favorite foods, but she’s so lost in the campaign she hardly notices that she’s snacking. Neither of them thinks about snide remarks or calories or drunken screaming matches or empty chairs.