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cheese-enjoyer9471 · 5 months ago

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Getting to Know You Meme

thank you @russenoire for tagging me!! this took a while :3

01) are you currently in a serious relationship? nah.

02) what was your dream growing up? i think my dream was to be a vet. i've always loved animals since i was a kid, and i would always study animal facts in my free time. that didn't change until i learned about how many vets had to do surgeries to help the animals, and i don't think i have the guts for that.

03) what talent do you wish you had? the talent to actually be able to do whatever i set my mind to.

04) if someone bought you a drink what would it be? A cup of tea brewed from Twinings Earl Grey tea leaves.

05) favorite vegetable? i'm fine with most vegetables, but lettuce is great. i guess you could say i'm just like my first name, 楊 ��羊）

06) what was the last book you read? IRON WIDOW BY XIRAN JAY ZHAO. I NEED THE SEQUEL ASAP BEFORE I TEAR MY HAIR OUT.

07) what zodiac sign are you? uhhehhhhh...i'm 99.9999999% sure I'm an Aquarius.

08) any tattoos and/or piercings? none of the above!!

09) worst habit? wassup gang it's the professional procrastinator here :D

10) what is your favourite sport? badminton.

11) do you have a pessimistic or optimistic attitude? depends. i'm generally optimistic about others, and pessimistic towards myself. i think the closest thing to describe my view would be optimistic nihilism. nothing has value until you give it value.

12) tell me one weird fact about you. i have a small wing-shaped birthmark on my right shoulder blade.

13) do you have any pets? YEAH!! I LOVE MY DOG!!

14) do you think clowns are cute or scary? depends on the clown.

15) if you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be? i believe that i can change whatever i want to change myself.

16) what colour eyes do you have? very very dark brown eyes.

17) ever been arrested? i have not, hope not, and probably will not.

18) bottle or can soda? can. crisp snap can opening is my hobby.

19) if you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it? save it.

20) what's your favourite place to hang out at? indoors, preferably somewhere private like home.

21) do you believe in ghosts? probably. i'm curious about their existance.

22) favourite thing to do in your spare time? gaming (?)

23) do you swear a lot? i cannot deny that question.

24) biggest pet peeve? well.

25) in one word, how would you describe yourself? worthless. i have yet to give myself meaning, and i will do anything to grant myself worth in my own eyes.

26) do you believe in/appreciate romance? somewhat.

27) favourite and least favourite food? a single favourite? what's that? if i had to choose, i think it would be tonkatsu. i despise the disgusting school lunch eggs.

28) do you believe in god? to some extent.

29) what makes you happy: listening to music, being in my zone, eating good food, feeling the rain on my skin, and being with those i can be comfortable with.

30) currently listening/the last thing you listened to: Honkai Impact 3rd v4.6 [Unequaled, Unrivaled] (1 HOUR EXTENDED). i will not elaborate.

31) favorite place to spend time: home.

32) favorite lyric: "No one's gonna save you now So you better save yourself" from After the Storm by Kali Uchis

33) recommend a film: euhhhhh. i'm not really a movie person, so i can't think of anything.

34) recommend a book: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. I am never going to stop yapping about this book for the upcoming three weeks.

35) Recommend a band, a song, or album: Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto. it's my all time favourite.

36) recommend a TV show: do animes count? if so, i'd be here for a long while.

37) where are you from, and do you still live there? Where have you lived? taiwan, and still am.

38) do you have any pets or animals in your life? how did you find/get them? i used to have a dachshund for a few years. the lil guy used to be my parents prior to my birth, but they entrusted the doggo to one of their friends during my mom's pregnancy. there was a while when the friend had to move homes, so the dachshund came to our home for some time. after that, the dachshund returned to my parents' friend. during 2020, my family bought a shetland sheepdog. he's the silliest floofer ever and i love him.

39) what's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? i don't think i've eaten anything weird, but i can tell you something weird that i drank. i once drank melted chocolate ice cream added with one m&m, a bit of salt and pepper, a bit of sugar, shredded paper, more melted ice cream, a gummy bear that fell on the floor, and a few more ingredients i can't remember. i only took a sip.

40) how did you 'find' fandom? discovered it upon scrolling through wings of fire media.

41) make a list of 5 things that you see without getting up. an hourglass, a paper shredder, a calculator, a tray of my accessories, and this very laptop i'm typing on.

42) how do you style your hair? i just tuck some behind my ears, but i let the rest be.

decided to just tag some people, no pressure in joining!!

@aurae-rori @theinsomniacnerd @cnth-rb @cinnimartinez @lala1236 @cloud-player @woahgenshinimpact @aelxr @jazziethejazz

Getting to Know You Meme

tagged by @ygodmyy20! thankee kindly.

01) are you currently in a serious relationship? nope. can't say i miss it.

02) what was your dream growing up? i had a new one every month. the one that stuck around the longest was 'astronaut' until i learned that NASA's manned space program hasn't done much since skylab, outside of testing the limits of human endurance in low earth orbit. still cool! but i'll keep my unnaturally dense bones, thanks.

03) what talent do you wish you had? the talent to work any job i wanted without medication.

04) if someone bought you a drink what would it be? a cocktail of some sort. most likely a gin and tonic, a negroni or a mojito.

05) favorite vegetable? too many to count. easier for me to tell you what i don't like: green beans. if they're only palatable tempura-fried, i don't need them in my life.

06) what was the last book you read? currently working through your brain's not broken, by tamara rosier, ph.d.

07) what zodiac sign are you? virgo. and no, i don't wanna hear about how virgos are hyper-organized control freaks. i am neither of these things.

08) any tattoos and/or piercings? five in a single ear, one in the other. two make up an industrial piercing. i have no tattoos but want one of the kageyama brothers from mp100 someday.

09) worst habit? getting too hung up on the 'right time' to do things.

10) what is your favorite sport? to play? dodgeball. to watch? either figure skating or tennis.

11) do you have a pessimistic or optimistic attitude? recovering pessimist here. i'm optimistic about some things and nihilistic about others.

12) tell me one weird fact about you. i never learned to ride a bicycle.

13) do you have any pets? no. i love cats and regularly-washed dogs though.

14) do you think clowns are cute or scary? i don't have a strong opinion about clowns, tbh.

15) if you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be? nothing. anything i can change is changeable.

16) what color eyes do you have? brown.

17) ever been arrested? nope.

18) bottle or can soda? bottle. though i don't soda very often.

19) if you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it? pay off my student loans and save the rest.

20) what's your favorite place to hang out at? a vedanta temple in the foothills here, or a park on a hill with a historic frank lloyd-wright-designed home.

21) do you believe in ghosts? maybe. i know people who can see them.

22) favorite thing to do in your spare time? singing. or learning.

23) do you swear a lot? very much so.

24) biggest pet peeve? how long you got? we could be here all week.

25) in one word, how would you describe yourself? iconoclastic.

26) do you believe in/appreciate romance? *shrug* i believe in and appreciate love, wherever it comes from.

27) favourite and least favourite food? does anyone have a single favorite? anyone? i do not. least favorite food is canned vegetables, except for beets and corn.

28) do you believe in god? i believe in the divine, a Self that we are one with and all have access to. whatever you choose to call that is up to you.

29) what makes you happy: soft fluffy things, palpable texture in weaves and knits, sweet or creamy fruits, singing and/or listening to music, my friends, learning something new.

30) currently listening/the last thing you listened to: hiroko suzuki, 'bara wa utsukushiku chiru'.

31) favorite place to spend time: at home.

32) favorite lyric: 'love is like the scabs from sunburn' from the OP to kenda master ken.

33) recommend a film: at random? good morning, by yasujirō ōzu.

34) recommend a book: oranges are not the only fruit, by jeannette winterson; islands, the universe, home, by gretel ehrlich.

35) Recommend a band, a song, or album: uchikubi gokumon doukoukai, 'shufu no michi' (way of the house-husband)

36) recommend a TV show: rose of versailles. soapy as hell, but great if you love historical dramas and anime. it's fairly well-researched too.

37) where are you from, and do you still live there? Where have you lived? the pacific north american coast; i'm still here. i've lived in texas and georgia, USA.

38) do you have any pets or animals in your life? how did you find/get them? no pets.

39) what's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten? bull penis. 0/10 do not recommend. the most unusual thing i've actually enjoyed is probably fried crickets.

40) how did you 'find' fandom? got obsessed with a story and wanted to share that love with other people. didn't happen until my mid-thirties though with steven universe.

41) make a list of 5 things that you see without getting up. a heat gun, a soldering iron that i have never used for actual soldering, the laptop i'm typing this on, the laptop connected to my projector, a plastic mask.

42) how do you style your hair? usually a tall bun. my hair is long enough to sit on and this keeps it out of my way.

as always, no pressure: @yaraneechan @eshithepetty @impmansloot @gumy-shark @sukunekatano

@cheese-enjoyer9471 @sulfurousmirrorscapes @creativenicocorner or anyone else who sees this and wants to!

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copias-thrall · 4 years ago

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I believe you answered something semi-recently about the Papas and marriage, but what do you think their weddings would be like? And if you have the time, the ghouls as well!

Apologies for taking so long to get to you! I was not the person who wrote about marriage with the Papas. Does anyone know who that was?

But I can take a crack at their weddings (with some Era 4 Ghouls)!

*mentions of sex; animal sacrifice*

(Young) Papa Nihil: The ceremony takes place inside a circle of lilies in a meadow that’s surrounded by wilderness. The rest of Nihil’s followers are there as guests. Everyone—including you and Nihil—wear diaphanous garments of crepe and linen in white. As the sun sets, Sister Imperator ties both your hands together and declares you both married. Someone brings a goat into the circle, and Sister Imperator hands you a ritual dagger. As one, you and Nihil bring your tied hands down and plunge the knife into the goat’s neck as an offering to Satan to bless your union. Everyone cheers, and you and Nihil strip so the orgy can start.

Papa I: A simple ceremony in the chapel, the only attendees are close friends and family (there will be a big reception for the congregation later). He wears his vestments and you wear formal ritual robes. His youngest brother performs the marriage rites and Secondo stands up as his best man. Papa III sniffles his way through the marriage scripture, and halfway through Papa I produces a cloth handkerchief to hand to him. He elects for the long service, and at some point Nihil dozes off. The two of you exchange self-written vows professing your love for each other before Papa III tips a chalice of goat’s blood over your heads as a show of asking for Satan’s favor over your marriage. Papa I has the chapel cleared for the ritual consummation, which is brief but pleasurable. After the two of you clean up and change, you join the festivities in honor of your union that are already in full swing.

Papa II: He wants to be married, but hates weddings. He has a lower-ranking officiate do the vows in private with Ghouls as witnesses. In lieu of formal attire, you both wear simple, but expensive silk robes. Instead of a ring, he collars you, then leads you to the ritual altar where anyone who’s interested is invited to watch him consummate his bond with you. It’s not the entire congregation, but the hall is filled, including his family and band Ghouls. Everyone cheers once you’ve both completed, and he invites everyone to the quad to partake in the goat roast. The goats are trussed up shibari-style with little apple gags—courtesy of his youngest brother.

Papa III: Bride. Zilla. Did you think you were going to get much say? Designer everything and flowers galore. He has a list of 20 groomsmen, and you have to remind him that you don’t have enough people in your own party to pair with them; you manage to negotiate down to 5. He hires a wedding planner that he’s constantly fighting with on the phone. She’s a stern woman with an earpiece and is probably the only reason the whole event doesn’t collapse in on itself. A few days before the ceremony, Papa comes to you and has a meltdown because there was a mishap with the coolers at the florist, and now all the boutonnieres will be red instead of blush. You take him into your arms and remind him that as long as you get to marry him, your wedding will be a success. Your words and a little …*ahem* … comfort goes a long way to calming him down. On the day of, Papa is a mess, and you give his groomsmen a stern talking to regarding keeping him focused. He starts tearing up before Nihil even starts the ceremony, and he’s a blubbering mess by the time you get to the vows. The sacrificial blood is actually a really expensive wine that the two of you drink out of a chalice (“Our Dark Lord will know how much of a sacrifice it was to open that bottle, amore”). He elects to have the ritual consummation as part of your wedding night. After the two of you take leave of the reception (that has at that point devolved into drunken shenanigans with fire ghouls setting table covers on fire), Papa III leads you to the altar; he’s covered it with a warm blanket and lit many candles (“For mood lighting, dolce”).

Papa IV: As long as you’re happy, he’s fine with going along with whatever you want. His only request is that you follow the traditional wedding customs of The Church. When you discuss ring bearers, he suggests his ratties—but at your look, he laughs it off. You’re still not sure if he was joking or not. You’re surprised when he commissions formal robes that match his vestments, but you’re happy to color-coordinate with him. The ceremony is an understated affair otherwise, with Primo performing the vows. Nihil and Papa III doze off. Goat’s Blood? Gross, no thank you. You and Copia agreed to cut your palms over His symbol instead. There was some debate about the ritual consummation, and in the end, you compromised with the decision of a privacy screen. For the reception, Copia changes into a fresh white suit so everyone can see how much he adores you.

***

Aether: He wants to incorporate both of your traditions into the ceremony and is involved in planning the wedding every step of the way. The two of you have a traditional Church wedding, but afterwards you’ll do a Run out into the woods so he can catch you and prove he’s mate material. He adorns your finger with a ring because he doesn’t think biting you would be a good idea, but has you pierce the spade of his tail with a ring since you can’t really bite him with your blunt teeth.

Dew: Til death do you part sounds like a long time, but if it’ll make you happy, ok I guess. You do absolutely all of the planning. He goes out for his bachelor party the night before the ceremony and shows up the next day in rough shape and in a suit that is decidedly not the one you bought for him. He seems impatient throughout, perking up after his vows when he gets to put a claiming bite on you. Like Aether, he lets you pierce his tail, and smiles wickedly when he tells you to Run.

Swiss: He wants the complete experience! The two of you have the most traditional wedding, and he wears a suit so tight it could rival Copia’s. He likes the weight of your ring on his finger, but refuses to bite you (“I don’t want to hurt you or chance infection, babe”). He absolutely smashes cake into your face (he grabs a fistful before it’s even brought out and creams you as you’re accepting congratulations from the Clergy). He’s the first on the dancefloor screaming for “That Shout song”. A Run? Aren’t you exhausted from dancing? Let’s save the rest of your energy for the wedding night.

Rain: Is a little smushy about marrying you, but isn’t really interested in a Church wedding. The closet thing he can think of to a water ghoul wedding is a baptism. Officiated by Mountain, the two of you exchange vows standing waist-deep in a pool of water in the forest. You dunk each other in turn after your vows, then submerge yourself when you seal it with a kiss. He’s happy to wear your ring on a chain around his neck, and he likes the idea of his bite mark on you—but doesn’t want to scar your skin—so he has Mountain tattoo the pattern of his teeth on your shoulder. He hadn’t even considered a Run, but hey—if you’re offering.

Mountain: He takes you deep into the forest alone—this is something that’s just for the two of you. He finds a shady canopy and instructs you to ruminate on your love and commitment to him while he takes your hands. You’re not sure how long you both stand there, but when you open your eyes, the sun has moved considerably and Mountain is smiling a secret smile at you. He’s mixed up a natural ink, and the two of you tattoo his clan’s symbol for ownership on each other. Afterwards, he has you consummate your union on a patch of soft dirt. A little indignant at being left out, the two of you come back to the dorms to find the other Band Ghouls have thrown you an impromptu reception.

Cirrus & Cumulus: Our girls are a package deal! The three of you have a beach wedding, and they wear versions of white dresses—they love this human custom, but don’t quite get what makes a wedding dress a wedding dress. They’re happy to exchange rings if they come with a jewel, but if you want something pierced, they’re happy to give your ear a new hole for a little bauble. Copia officiates, and the Band Ghouls are there as the wedding party. Dew complains about the sand the whole time, and Cumulus finally threatens to dunk him into the ocean if he doesn’t shut up (Swiss and Mountain end up tossing him in later just to be assholes). There’s a buffet full of goodies, and everyone sits on beach blankets eating and laughing until the sun goes down. If you want to do a Run, they’ll happily chase you … but wouldn’t you rather get back to the bungalow where you can have some fun in front of the fire?

#sweet-bitsy #weddings #mostly fluff #the papas #reader #nameless ghouls #era 4

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againstfate · 4 years ago

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Here are some headcanons I vaguely remember from the time I wrote Eren.

Looks identical to his mother, extremely beautiful as he ages. During his trainee days like most teens he is awkward, full of limbs && knees. As he grows, the most prominent feature on Eren is the vivid teal eyes he has. Eventually, he learned to outline them in kohl giving a striking appearance to an already haunting visage. It is only when he has a bit of scruff && very long hair that he looks like Grisha. It makes him physically ill to hear anyone say he looks like his father - at all. His smile is utterly striking, full of teeth && like the sun, as he ages it vanishes altogether. It becomes meek, timid, rarely so but it manifests the love he has for his inner circle.

Prefers tea over coffee, it’s a habit he acquired with Levi’s original squad. Eren also learned what flowers were edible to steam && brew, but the rare indulgence are leaves that are hard to find. He has a bit of a knack for knowing what plants are useful due to the lack of provisions in Wall Maria. Carla taught him how to preserve vegetables && fruits, he even learned to smoke meats for winter preservation. Self reliant, could live comfortably on the land by himself - if given a future, he has no idea what he wants but returning home is the ideal. Wherever home is nowadays.

God Complex, falls easily into the category of looking at himself as the Devil && God. Willing to sacrifice others for his loved ones, will sacrifice his loved ones for others. It’s a moral dilemma that ignited after he merged with the Founding Titan. Sways between calm steadiness but erratic when spited, easily lashes out && becomes violent if his ideals are challenged as he views it his duty to pursue this goal of freeing everyone. Unaware that his own Achille’s heel is love, he cannot obtain it nor deny it. Easily will become obsessive && succumb to it, he is starved for affection. It is a hunger that could easily devour him that or his sanity that is slowly dwindling. They both are in line to destroy him, it starts to show as he ages he is nothing but a crying child screaming for his mother but he is still powerless.

{ Told you it got long! }

Incredibly intelligent, manipulative && deceitful. Many forget that despite failing in the physical training parts, Eren achieved high academic marks. While he appears to be nothing more than a hot head when younger, he is actually quite perspective. When older, Eren starts to read people preying on their weaknesses && emotions to gain the upper hand. His temper simmers but becomes cool, collective, calculating as if waiting for the opportunity to strike. He plays solely on emotional responses, as that is his own weakness.

Still wears the key around his neck, it’s a security blanket, he finds it oddly comforting as it is the only link to home. Eren also has his father’s glasses, he keeps them in his pocket at all times. Even when knowing the truth, he holds onto some naivety that it can’t be right. Through the Founding Titan’s memories, he knows that is simply a lie but deceiving himself lessens the blow on his mental state. Sometimes, he holds the frames really tight as if trying to hold onto the last preservation of home && happiness he had. He hates it, this weakness as it showcases he is nothing but a scared young man. Running && fighting so violently, unaware he is swallowing himself whole.

Now for something sort of happy because wow, those were dark these are all mostly modern AU’s. He picked up smoking from Zeke, only does so when extremely stressed or angry - the cheapest god awful brand, everyone hates him for it. Simply on the fact it smells bad! To mask it up, he often wears really feminine perfumes or soaps since they’re stronger. Vanilla is his favorite, he will fight anyone who says it’s an inferior scent. He has a pension for drinking && smoking - Carla has fought with him about this, he tries to tone it down for her since he only gives a damn about his mother’s opinion.

Doesn’t really have a style, he steals most of Armin’s clothes that are left over at his place. Otherwise, his wardrobe is pretty monotone except for a few jeweled rings && friendship bracelets. Prefers boots but in the Spring wears sneakers, he has the oldest pair from when he was a teen he cannot let go of. Wildly long hair he ties up in a bun, if chaotic or doing something terrible he lets it down while laughing even if he is in trouble. Clothes are always handed down, oddly fitting. He swiped one of Zeke’s leathers jackets, never gave it back doesn’t plan to. Few piercings, ears && nose which Carla did not like at all. Matching tattoos with Armin! Stars && sun, aligned together it makes an image of the sky.

First year med student, burning out really hard. He sleeps between Dina’s house && his mom’s, really has no set place on where he is staying. Gets along well with his father’s first family, but can see there is resentment by Dina sometimes he tries to not impose only visits to see Zeke. Which isn’t the best influence, some of the nihilism has rubbed off on Eren but he also still has that boy like curiosity to the world. Not sure if he wants to be a general practitioner or specialize, really just wanted to be an art major. Only did it for his father, though sometimes he does like knowing in the end his hands will help people - it makes him happy.

Big laugh, snorts when he can’t stop laughing. It’s thunderous, his entire gut shakes from it - the type that also makes you laugh along because it makes everything feel better. When he’s in a group he’ll instantly wrap his arms around the person that made him laugh to pull them close, it’s a mess of giggles && his wheezing. Extremely affectionate to those in his inner circle, it is his best quality. He shows love through physical touch, hand holding, kissing, hugging, clinging real tight when he hasn’t seen them for long. Regardless of gender, he doesn’t really care - if Eren loves you, it’s passionate even when platonic.

#you were born into this world that is your privilege. ( eren. )#// there's so much to write so little time

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zevons · 4 years ago

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what are your thoughts on the old guard movie!

Hello lovely anon! You've caught me on a lazy Sunday where I've done nothing but vacuum, do laundry, and drink a lot of Aperol mixed with various other liquids. Most of them gin. So I have an enthusiastic answer for you. I wish I was better at Analysis and could give you a more meaningful answer but instead you're going to get my feelings and excitement. But whatever.

The short answer is: I really enjoyed it! I like action films and I like supernatural elements and I like Charlize Theron. So it was very good to me.

The longer answer is: all that PLUS the fact that it felt wildly refreshing to have a ‘cynical old warrior finds new faith in the dark and cruel world by training a bright young talent’ story that revolved around two women, and also I’m always into Greg Rucka heroines so really I never had a chance against this story. I’d not read the comics beforehand (I’ve fallen off the comics bandwagon for the past couple years but this was a nice reminder that hey! I should get back up to date because there’s some really good stuff out there) so when I saw a couple gifsets floating around tumblr I didn’t realise it even was Greg Rucka- then I saw the opening credits and immediately had to pause and look up the details. I’m currently living quite a distance away from my very well-stocked public library and am also what they call,,eeuuuh,,, poor, so in order to read the comics I [redacted] but I will say that I did put my eyeballs on them and found them extremely good. A lot of the changes between the comic and the film I thought were well-chosen- particularly the choice to make Merrick a Pharma Bro in the ilk of Martin Shkreli rather than the tattooed vaguely-muscled dude he is in the original- it read as being a lot more relevant. The movie hit the beat of a pseudo 'for the greater good.....but actually money' villain that I KNEW (netflix notwithstanding...do //they// know??) that I enjoyed in a big way.

Also in terms of the comic- the comedic gold of Andy saying that the invention of sports bras is evidence for humanity being worth saving. Full agree.

So the source material is highly enjoyable. In general I'm a fan of the sort of ~dark age of comics~ stuff that is in fact quietly optimistic about the worth of humanity (call it a sign of the times, but I'm currently quite burned out on nihilism. Is it because I'm genuinely feeling quite nihilistic about everything, particularly at the moment? Maybe so!)

I'm also a massive sucker for historical AUs so giving me a canon where historical AUs aren't AUs at all but are in fact FACT is absolute catnip. I'm currently being murdered to death by the twin powers of work and the Terror Big Bang but once I've flung myself over those hurdles I'm going to jump head-first into the worst kind of self-indulgent history fic. Can't wait!

The story itself I also found really tight. Was it the most original thing I've ever seen in my life? No. But what is, anyways? I've seen some criticism that it was fairly predictable, which I can understand, but which I don't see as an entirely negative thing. Sometimes you're in the mood for a tropey tale. And this scratched that itch perfectly.

Honestly the only plot point I take umbrage with is Andy becoming mortal-for-good (apparently), but really just mostly because 'depowered' is a long-time least-favourite trope of mine. I thought the way it was handled in the film was quite good, actually- the whole scene with the pharmacist! Andy trying to figure what the heck she needs to patch herself up because she's never had to do it before! What is a band-aid! Very good. But the trope will just irk me incessantly so I can't get over it as quickly as all that. But otherwise every beat hit me riiight in the id. Found family, immortality, let's not-get-exploited-by-big-business, been-through-the-wringer kind of stuff: gaahhh. I also looooooooooved everyone's interactions with each other. Catch me crying in the club about the way Andy was so concerned about Booker coming back after he got half-blown up during the raid on the church. CATCH ME FLINGING MYSELF OUT OF THE WINDOW OF MY REMOTE WIZARD'S TOWER ABOUT THE WAY JOE NEEDED NICKY TO BE OKAY IN THE VAN SEQUENCE. There's a limited number of people in the world who could possibly understand what is it to go through this! So they gotta stick together! Even after Booker’s betrayal, he’s still a part of that group and they work with him! It makes his judgement so harsh, as well. Particularly since he's already the most susceptible of the bunch. Joe and Nicky have each other, and Andy's been through actual hell and forced herself to deal with it, but Booker's already borderline unable to handle the pain of his own condition. And so his punishment of isolation is basically the worst thing they could have given him. Oof. (I dig it.)

Also I've for sure rambled about this to friends before- movies NEED to realise that the sure-fire way to make me ship a heterosexual relationship is to Drop Hints but not actually show anything concrete, hence I think Andy/Booker is a gr9 ship. Andy in general is my little black dress for this canon. Andy/Booker, Andy/Nile, Andy/QuYNH??????? THANKS I'LL TAKE THE LOT. The airplane fight sequence would have been a sexual awakening if I hadn't already been so awakened by Keira Knightley pretending to drop the pirate medallion overboard circa 2003. (I'm required by boat-funkin lesbian contract to mention Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl in everything I do. Sorry.)

This is all disconnected garble with no deeper meaning whatsoever, but that's sort of my thing these days, so I'm at peace with it. Anyways. In conclusion, I'm rewatching the movie with some friends in about 15 minutes, so yeah, I liked it. <3333333333

#the old guard #also sprach sabina #in the morning i'll be irritated that this is the only reply i could give but heyyyyyyyyyyyyooo #Anonymous

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nikccs · 4 years ago

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*+ .˚ₓ hello new friends ! i’m mini from the 6ix . i’m here to cause trouble 😈 , with my new kid nikoo , neeks , neekeekee , nikoochu . i would’ve been here earlier but #theweedhittoostrong sOoOoOoOO . . . like this ( i’ll come love u ) and let’s brainstorm , send each other muse posts , make each other scream and discuss what we’re gonna do to S P I C E 🔥 things up around here ! let me know if u prefer discord ! [ 𝕚𝕥'𝕤 𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕙𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕚𝕞𝕖 !#0644 ]

do my eyes deceive me , or did i just see ( NIKOO MARTINEZ ) getting out of the car in hunnington ? i guess ( SHE’S ) living around ( DENALI HILL ) , which i could've guessed . hopefully they can keep their ( - SELFISH & - CYNICAL ) shit to theirselves , and focus on being ( + AMBITIOUS & + CONNECTED ) to avoid any problems . and for the love of god , lets hope they don't talk about the ( HIDDEN ) thing .

BASICS !

Full Name: nikoo [ knee - coo ] martinez

Nickname(s): neeks , keeks , neekeekee , nikoochu , kiko ,

Age: 22

Height: 5′2 ft

Date of Birth: january 25th 1997

Zodiac sign: aquarius

Hogwarts house: slytherin

Ethnicity: mexican

Nationality: american

Gender: cis female

Pronouns: she/her

Orientation: bisexual

Religion: agnostic-catholic

Tattoos: a cross on her wrist , latin saying down her spine saying ‘ex nihilo nihil fit . camino largo, paso corto.’ ( nothing comes nothing . long road , short road )

Language(s) Spoken: english + spanish

Accent: american

A LITTLE HISTORY ! [ tw * abandonment , violence , sexual abuse ]

nikoo doesn’t know who her parents were . her memory of them becoming a blur with each passing day. from what she could remember , was being left at a random sidewalk at the AGE OF FOUR with the clothes on her back , under pouring rain in miami , florida . luckily she was standing in front of a home with nice people who said nikoo kept repeating she was waiting for their parents . . . well , her parents never showed up and CPS showed up to put nikoo into the system .

you would expect she would end up with a family that loved her bc she was a baby still - - - WRONG ! every family she was placed with found some kind of fault , or their homes would be raided for maltreatment [ think of those horrible ppl that take in kids just for the paycheck ] , nikoo could tell you the many horrible stories from the homes she’s been in . AT SIXTEEN nikoo was at her last foster home , months before . she was left home alone with her fosterr dad , and her usually technique of ignoring him didn’t work . . . and well , things happen

DAYS LATER , neeks packed a bag in the middle of the night and left her foster home . she never went back . as in , she became a runaway from the state . living on streets , the couches of strangers . the streets became her home , and eventually at EIGHTEEN , she was living in an apartment with some other people who had nowhere to be . throughout the years , neeks met a guy when she decided to do a CO - OP program through high school in a car garage . so the man treated nikoo like his own . teaching her about parts - - - even involving her in his side business - - - stealing car parts from cars and selling them , specifically high end sports cars . that hustle was covered through the garage .

the garage eventually was raided but before that could even happen nikoo discovered a different way to make money . she is hell of resourceful , believing in survival of the fittest and the idea of looking out for yourself . she abandoned the man that helped her out , letting him go down along with his business - - - and nikoo started scamming the people she’s met through dating apps . whether it’s them giving her money , clothes , or paying for something . basically she’s a SUGAR BABY without really giving much sugar . that , and she works as a cam girl to earn even more money ( her savings are WILDD )

the good thing about her past is that she actually excelled in school ! nikoo got her degree in mechanical engineering , along with a songwriting and record diploma . random i know , but she got it , what can i tell you . though she keeps that a secret . technically her whole presence in north carolina is a secret . she lives with her ‘sugar daddy’ in DENALI HILL , whomst she claims is her uncle - - - twice removed bc they look nothing alike . she’s been iin north carolina only for a few years and tells herself it’s just a stepping stone .

PERSONALITY !

if you’re rich , or somewhat profitable , nikoo will find some way to use you . she’s a kiss ass without coming out to be a kiss ass . you know , she’s just slick about it . she loves to be tested mentally . like if you’re willing to tango , she’s all about it . settling for less is not in her mentality , she wants more , and the best of things because she’s never had it growing up .

she’s a straight up hustler ok , if there’s anything she can do for money , she’ll do it . she doesn’t like talking much about herself , and if she does , most things she’ll say about herself are lies . she lives a manageable double ( triple ) life , along with working on her masters online , she currently interns at TESLA . and ofc , she loves cars . one day she plans to put together her own custom car . she writes songs on the sides , not for herself , but for other artists and she’s pretty notable . she’s signed with a publishing house so she gets paid to do that too KDFJGHDFKJGH

to the rest of the world she’s just a mr stewart’s neice from texas , who is staying with him until she gets her feet on the ground with her ‘ modelling gig ‘ . it’s funny because she prefers people to think she was stupid than to actually figure out she’s smart , and also hella promiscuous . unless you’re one of her clients , or paying her for something , she has no interest in you . neeks prefers to be alone . choosing to stay to herself . she’s still the life of the party though , cos you know . . . she can take money out yo pockets , steal that louis wallet , probably hack your account if she wanted too . bitch is smart with computers .

if she’s friends with someone , again , they know what she chooses to tell them . but neeks is pretty laid back , chill . kinda hanging personality , though she dresses like she’s about to hit the club every night , rolling up in a nice ass tesla that’s probably paid for by her ‘ favourite uncle ‘ . she’s flightly af . bc of her clients , she doesn’t do relationships , she doesn’t even like to be touched unless she’s aware it’s coming . if you touch her without her knowing , like hugs , or even trying to scare her , she will. . . . maybe , cut you .

CONNECTIONS ?

I WANT THEM ALL !!!

PLATONIC , ROMANTIC , ENEMIES , BROTP’S , SEND ME SOME MUSE POSTS AND WE CAN DO THOSE TOO

LET ME KNOW YOU WANNA PLOT AND I WILL BRAINSTORM WITH YOU . I LOVE MAKING PLOTS AND TALKING AND BEING A HOT MESSS

#cancelled:intro #this might be . . . long #im #sORRY #LET ME LOVE U THO OK #there's trigger warnings inside this ok

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adamrevi3ws · 5 years ago

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Joker

When I first heard that they were making a Joker solo movie, I was frankly annoyed. In my opinion, Joker is possibly one of the most overrated and overused fictional antagonists of all time, being stretched so thin that the character essentially feels like a blank slate often used for nihilism, contrarianism, social critique, and cheap horror. The more I heard about the movie the more I internally groaned, with its extremely loose take on the comics come off as nothing more than a movie made by the type of idiot (or wannabe school shooter) who saw Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight as something far deeper than it actually was, you know, the “this says a lot about society” type schtick, and decided to make a movie entirely off that premise (these fears are becoming more and more real seeing the director’s recent comments complaining about cancel culture or whatnot). However, I am not entirely just a grumpy old man comic book nerd. I have a soft spot for superhero movies that try to be something a bit more than the hollow yet spotless cash cows of the marvel model, whether they excel (like Logan) or fail (like Batman v Superman). It looked like a clear-cut Scorsese clone, and I generally enjoy those (see: I Tonya), so I decided to give it a try.

And, well, it’s….something…

I’ll start out with the good. The directing, or at least the cinematography, is phenomenal. I love this movie’s version of Gotham City. Time period aside, it seems completely different from what we’re used to, and I dig it. I came in thinking it’d be a knockoff of New York, but no, it was much better, being this neverending disgusting concrete and brick dystopia, that felt like an exaggeration of everything negative and ugly about a city, as Gotham should be. In addition to its great capture of the setting, this movie is filmed in a way that feels the complete opposite of your standard superhero flick, and I am EXTREMELY open to more cape films looking like this. I love it.

Another highlight is that Joaquin Phoenix, of course, is the best of the best. While I have some issues with his characterization itself (which I will detail later), he is one of those actors where I will have extreme difficulty differentiating the character from the actor himself. I think one of the biggest highlights of his portrayal is his movement. Despite being written as far as possible from the character in the comics, Phoenix moves exactly like a weird live action cartoon character to both a funny and terrifying extent. I don’t think this movie honestly deserves that many Oscar nods, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if he got a nomination.

But that’s honestly all the best parts of the film.

There are two issues with this movie that have been pointed out by other critics, and frankly they’re kind of right.

The first is that this movie touches a bunch of social issues but doesn’t really have a message. Frankly, I don’t need Joker to be some sort of social critique. Everything IS political, but the character of The Joker shouldn’t be some sort of political icon. While he may occasionally bounce on social issues or his origin might reflect Gotham’s extreme income inequality (which has been a social issue integral to the setting, not the character), he’s always been chaotic evil, not lawful evil, and doing otherwise just feels awkward and unnecessary. While its exploration of social issues isn’t nearly as cringeworthy as I feared (although there is ONE quote at a pivotal moment made it difficult for me to take the movie seriously), its social critique just doesn’t really go anywhere? There’s a bunch of plot threads and elements that try to say something but never really pay off or properly connect to the rest of the overall character arc? Like I said earlier, there was a point where I couldn’t take the movie seriously anymore, and even though that was mainly due to a certain quote, it also coincided with when the movie’s take on social issues became even more heavy-handed. It felt like the movie was trying to say so much, but without saying anything at all? Although it was nowhere near as fake deep as I feared, it just felt unfocused and unnecessary.

The second critique that I agree with is that this movie has been marketed as a normal guy being driven to snap by “”society”” [FAKE DEEP INTENSIFIES] it never feels like he was a normal guy, to begin with? Despite Phoenix’s phenomenal acting, the character progression is frankly a bit too subtle and possibly nonexistent. I genuinely hoped that this movie would take The Killing Joke’s plot of a Gotham everyman snapping after “one bad day,” but that never happened? I genuinely thought by the end of the movie, he’d finally be as devious and diabolical as the Joker we know in his many incarnations, but at the end he’s just the same sad and weird character as he was in the beginning, except a lot more okay with killing people. For a movie that acts like it’s about being someone being driven to the edge, it’s just about a messed up person going through a lot of depressing things, and maybe expressing their messed up side a little more.

I think the last thing to address with this movie is all the fears of it encouraging incels and school shooters. Although I don’t know how provocative I consider it, I think the best way I can describe it is like Fight Club or Taxi Driver, except without the parts that clarify that the messed up main characters are in fact wrong in what they’re doing. That being said, it is in no means far-right propaganda, so I think while its criticism is valid, it might be a bit overblown. Another apt comparison would be to Tyler, the Creator’s first few albums. It’s obviously extremely disturbing and people will definitely take the wrong message from it, but it’s still decently art if interpreted in a certain angle and doesn’t reeeally need to be censored, but that’s just my flawed opinion.

Overall, Joker is nowhere near as bad as I thought it’d be but all the hype and critical acclaim is almost entirely unnecessary. It’s similar to Venom as in it’s probably the best execution we can get to a frankly horrendous concept. I’d also like to note that some may find this movie is EXTREMELY depressing and disturbing in general, so I wouldn’t exactly recommend it to everyone even if I liked it.

Seven “damaged” tattoos out of ten. Did Joker say a lot about society at the end? Not really.

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imaginetale · 6 years ago

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Pls tell me about your genderswap skellies like what you have for names, what theyre like, ect bc while i love my bone boys, man if my gay ass dont LIKE SOME LADIES-

Buckle in everyone, its gonna be a long post

Also, quick disclaimer - while I won’t be writing anything but gender neutral and het reader characters, you all are free to do so with my ladies!

I’m still working on everyone’s personalities, but I can give you guys the basics, as well as my designs for them! Keep in mind, theses designs are very sketchy and some are on lined paper, not to mention that this is what they would wear underground, I haven’t yet drawn their topside fashions, but as I feel it’s important to the characters personalities, I will say what kind of things they would wear topside. Let’s get started with the one who started this.

Tinta! Aka lady Ink!

She’s bubbly and hyper and pretty much socially inept. Her back story is similar to that of canon! Ink, save for two things. One, she ends up regaining her SOUL (like the Ink I write) and, two, instead of getting “tattoos” from falling through the code, her bones splintered, leaving scars once she finally got them healed. She still suffers from phantom pain but usually hides when she gets a pain episode so others don’t worry. Whereas Ink has memory problems, she is rather intelligent but comes off as ditzy due to her poor social skills. She almost always wears fully covering clothing because she’s self conscious of her scars, but she loves Decora Kei fashion and will wear it if she can find a way to cover herself completely.

Side note, Tinta was designed for my own genderswaped self ship, and while I don’t mind her being shipped apart from that ship, please don’t ship her with Error, genderswaped or otherwise, as i am really squicked by that particular ship.

During the time that I made Tinta, @nighttimepixels started making her Lilytale ladies and I was inspired to make more than just Tinta, so I ended up starting with Underswap. Aside from Tinta, these ladies have the most development

This is Muffin. She is training to become a royal guard and wants to look adorable doing it. She actually wears full armor under her magical girl inspired outfit. She looks like she’s just goofing around, but when push comes to shove, she’s dead serious. She’s who you face during genocide and she’s just as tough as canon Sans, maybe moreso since she’s been actively training. She also uses her cute looks to manipulate others into doing what she wants and into underestimating her so she can use it into getting the upper hand if need be. She’s still a kind caring monster, she’s just not naive. She believes in others to a point, but if you pass that point, she knows there’s nothing more kindness can do. When she gets topside, she still loves dressing like a magical girl, but she leans more into general Lolita fashion and anything super cutesty, although she does like to secretly try out biker esque fashion.

Then there’s Honey Bun, or Bunny, as Muffin calls her. She is a nervous bundle of anxiety and self esteem issues. She pushes herself to the point of breaking to try to both not worry her sister and impress her. She attaches herself to the fallen human because she relates to them, seeing as she’s mute most of the time if her sister isn’t around. Even in the genocide route, she believes that the human can be a better person if they just try a little harder. She’s a worrywart obsessed with those huge twisty lollipops, which she sucks on when she’s nervous. Her fashion sense consists of comfy, easy to wear clothes like sweaters and sweats, but when she goes out, she just wears a lot of maxi dresses

Also, shes the only one with a canon sexuality. She’s bi!

Solena is like Sans but less nihilism and and depression. Instead she has intense paranoia and trust issues. I’ll admit from this characters till horrortale, I need to work on my ladies personalities. Topside, Solena, or Sunny, wears punny t-shirts and skorts, with toches of casual hipster fashion, dispite not really knowing what a hippster is. She just likes the look.

This gal is Papagina, or Poppy. Yeah, that’s all I got for her, she needs some work, sorry. I see her wearing super summery clothing 95% percent of the year, and mixing it with rock chic for the other 5%.

Scratch is a bad girl with a heart of gold but will vehemently deny it if its pointed out. She’s protective of her sister but will take every chance she can to tease and mock her. But only she’s aloud to do that, anyone else talks shit gets hit. She’s also extremely good with kids and teaches the kids in Snowdin how to fend off bigger meaner monsters. She actually has a secret desire to be a mother of a lot of kids, but will again deny it wholeheartedly. She and her sister become their Frisks legal guardian, as well as their universe’s Chara and Asriel (All of my versions of all universes have Chara and Asriel come back, because kindly screw canon they get happy endings now) because the King and Queen need some serious therapy before they can take care of their kids again. She’s super active as a PTA parent because of this. Topside, she wears biker chic and Hot Topic, as well as some punk mixed in

This is Slash and she holds the award for the MOST FRICKEN REDESIGNS WTF. I could not get her look down for the life of me. ANYWAY, she is Captain of the royal guard and only those with a death wish try her. She’s fiercely protective of the monsters she deems worthy of her presence, and this includes her sister, even if she busts Scratch’s chops every time she sees her. But, again, only she is allowed to do so, lest you become the next human shiskabob. On the surface she wears preppy clothes and tailored suits and, occasionally, rocker chic.

*Horrortale starts here, mentions of death and cannibalism*

This is Pumpkin,and She’s not exactly a fan of killing humans for food and unlike every one around her, never really got used to it. The guilt still eats at her. She’s got a box in her room full of tiny bits of the bones of her victims, that she promises herself that if they ever do make it to the surface, she’ll give her victims a proper burial. Her necklace contains the hand bones of her first victim, which she wears so she can remind herself of what she’s done and what everything important to her has cost. The ghost of her first victim still haunts her, but he’s actually become more of a friend than a poltergeist. Topside, she wears casual, nondescript clothing, still wearing her necklace underneath until she can forgive herself for what she had to do.

This is Candy. Candy never actually killed any humans while underground, although she did eat them. She tries to be kind to all the humans she.meets, because she knows what fate entails for them. They should have a friend who stays with them before they die, right? She usually ended up as the one who distracted the humans as Pumpkin killed them as quickly and as painlessly as she could. She tends to make her own clothes even on the surface.

And even though I won’t be writing her, have a genderswaped swapfell sans, or as I like to call her, Cupcake

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pussyboie-blog · 6 years ago

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hello gays & gays ! ever seen a goth KING make classical music ? have u ever been in the process of making a muse & they turned out to be eons more emo™ than what you ever had in mind for them ? do u love cinnamon rolls that can cut ? mr rome right here is ALL THREE , homeboy just scored a hat - trick ladies and gents !!!! ─ ─ ─ what’s up nerds , i’m KERO and i love t*ddies u__u here with who may as well be foxcroft’s punching bag , my actual son & my stars ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟﻭ no more rambling , enjoy the intro & have his PINTEREST BOARD ! d*scord is the way to go & where i’m a tad more accessible right now and overall tbh , but ims are an option too !!! I Just Think He ( d*scord ) Is Neat . JPG @ 𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐎. #7261

❛ / ♡ I : APPLICATION 。

⦗ 𝙆𝙀𝙍𝙊 , 𝙏𝙒𝙀𝙉𝙏𝙔 , 𝙎𝙃𝙀/𝙃𝙀𝙍 , 𝙂𝙈𝙏 ⦘ ⇸ have you seen 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐁𝐘𝐔𝐍 walking around foxcroft? you know, the 𝐶𝐼𝑆𝑀𝐴𝐿𝐸 𝐽𝐸𝑂𝑁 𝐽𝐸𝑂𝑁𝐺𝐺𝑈𝐾 lookalike? apparently the 𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐘 - 𝐎𝐍𝐄 year old 𝑀𝑈𝑆𝐼𝐶 𝑃𝑅𝑂𝐷𝑈𝐶𝑇𝐼𝑂𝑁 & 𝐸𝑁𝐺𝐼𝑁𝐸𝐸𝑅𝐼𝑁𝐺 major is really + 𝐌𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖 , but also kinda - 𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 . i hope i don’t get on 𝑯𝑰𝑺 bad side.

❛ / ♡ II : THROWING IT BACK 。

𝐓𝐖 : domestic abuse , poverty , hinted depression .

rome byun hasn’t had the prettiest of lives, akin more to a tasteless joke or a bad dream. born in the borough of brooklyn: poor, with nowhere to drop dead & his only salvation a mother that got the soul beat out of heart by a man that didn’t love her, a stranger in the eyes of a kid that refused to acknowledge a monster as his father. the ticking bomb that was the repressed anger swallowed thorough the years turned the flimsy kid into a man throwing punches at the horror living in their house. far too young, with a lip split in two & body beat until he couldn’t anymore. but it’s okay mom, he’s far away now, forever. no more dry blood & purple blotches blemishing your skin.

life was spent in a multitude of badly paid jobs and alone. a mother that had to work as much as him to make it through another month & no time for friends. he didn’t need them, they won’t put food on the table, right ? his only comfort was music, the soothing medicine that calmed his aching, blue heart and nights wasted on nightmares. for as long as he remembers, he gave up many things to further drown himself in that little magic, not quite recalling when did he create his first beat, his first melody. he was enamoured, mouth watering then feeling like sand against his palate with the thirst to explore deeper into it.

❛ / ♡ III : NO PRINTER JUST FAX 。

to make it clear, the day he fought the rat and got his ass beat senseless the cops got called, now the bastard ( read: his father ) is in jail & has a restraining order for rome and his mum so who’s the real winner.

bitch is empty. EMPTY !!!! has a hard time getting attached to people, rarely happens, and same with passions / hobbies. can’t sort out his feelings at all. drake created the line “i only love my bed and my momma” SOLELY for rome, champagne papi said so.

don’t really know why but he radiates BIG DUMBASS ENERGY . think of usagi & goku. maybe naruto ? stupid sandwich. i also relate red roses to him a lot, dial god and ask him why, because i don’t know a single thing my guy !

to expand on his emptiness: there’s this sense of loneliness that has always been with him, a gaping hole inside him he doesn’t know how to fill up. sometimes he uses sex as a coping mechanism. it only makes him feel even more empty afterwards but at least he nutted (✧ω✧)

aside from music and the occassional sex, reading poetry is a strong way he has to cope and simply clear his mind. relax. goes second after music. likely to always carry one of the poetry books he has with him.

with so many jobs while simultaneously attempting to have decent grades in school, he has grown used to not sleeping much and lowkey became a night owl. nighttime slowly became a safe haven.

emo goth that likes tattoos but hasn’t really gotten any so far. always stares for far too long at people that has them. also likes polaroids, taking the train and fast food.

somehow clingy but in a subtle way ??? if you’re close enough he’ll probably let you play with his hair or do his make up or paint his nails, or he will hold onto the sleeve of your sweater or stand close or feed you. GOOD DOMESTIC SHIT. has a very lowkey of taking care of people too.

get used to this with me because i am: dumb but i almost forgot something REALLY important: weird that he’s majoring in MP&E on this institution but his reason is exactly that, because it’s unusual and he wants to expand his limits. he’s interested in all kinds of music and while he’s fluent in more modern, popular styles, this is something new for him and he’s THRIVING. thank you that was my ted talk.

❛ / ♡ IV : PERSONALITY 。

rome is really sweet and soft, a good person at heart, but the circumstances he had to grow in didn’t give him much room to grow outside of himself, so it has resulted in him being extremely closed off. he has an extremely hard time when it comes to opening up, letting others in, anything remotely related to feelings. he feels truly empty and believes he cannot truly love anyone other than his mum. but when he finally lets the walls down and allows himself to love someone ( be it romantically or platonically ) he loves like no other, goes fully in.

overall an extreme introvert and a bit deadpan, looks like he’s always on this neutral, impassive emotional state. well - mannered and respectful by default. his more animated side shows when he’s interested in something, like music. his sense of humour scratches nihilism, the kinda Life Has No Meaning , Hope That Truck Runs Me Over type of humour. kind of a pacifist too, doesn’t like to fight but will if he has reached his limit.

❛ / ♡ V : WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE 。

some plot ideas i’d like to have but like, you know, just throwing these in here so i don’t forget and in case someone fits in here. your ideas ? VALID.

𝟎𝟎𝟏 : 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤. / in summary, someone who has been in his life since he was really young, actively or not. a neighbor, someone from his school, an old friend. lots of room !!! they aren’t really close though, probably has seen him from a distance, or used to be in his life but not anymore. damn !

𝟎𝟎𝟐 : 𝑐𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑠𝘩𝑖𝑛𝑔. / yeah. text - book fuck buddies, friends with benefits, hit it and quit it. what mentioned before, somebody he nuts with when he’s feeling extra empty. hesitant about having two of these since he doesn’t have a high libido or is too into rawing, but still possible !

𝟎𝟎𝟑 : 𝑧𝑒𝑟𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑠. / lord forgive me for i’m selective as fuck with this one. rome needs a best friend and he needs it BADLY . it has to be someone he can be comfortable be, someone he can trust completely and someone that’ll understand him and be there for him. kid has a lot of inner demons. i think someone that’s the opposite of him could be good, but it really depends. if you can see it working, let me know !! just yeah, selective because rome is. well. rome.

me ? missing something ? LIKELY !!! but in conclusion: i love my son. revolting how long this got, so THANK U for reading this far, you have my whole heart and one titty. mwah (づ￣ ³￣)づ

#fc:intro #gotta hate when things get long unwillingly and there's no way to chop it u__u #the d app is there for plotting or just talking; open 24/7 for all your needs ^_^#navigation and a few pages coming SOON to your nearest cinemas!

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surveys-at-your-service · 6 years ago

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Survey #162

“in catholic school, vicious as roman rule, i got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black, and i held my tongue as she told me, ‘son, fear is the heart of love,’ so i never went back.”

Has a rainy day ever ruined your plans? I'm guessing at some point. Do you think you could survive a month of solitary confinement? HAHAHAHA NO I'd lose my fucking mind. What is something that you find utterly boring? TV in most cases. It's honestly really difficult for me to get into shows and be consistently entertained by them. What noise/sound can put you to sleep? Rain. When you are upset, do you tend to shut others out? It depends. Sometimes I seek comfort in others, other times I isolate. When was the last time you felt abandoned by someone? Recently. Does the sight of blood gross you out? Nope. Do you like red roses, or do you prefer another color? No preference, really. What is something you like to eat that is red? Strawberries. Have you ever gone through a red light? No. Do you fail to stop for stop signs, sometimes? No. When was the last time you were near the ocean? A couple months ago. What is your favorite eye color in the opposite sex? Bright blue. During which year of your life were you the most unhappy? 2016 was born of Satan himself. Have you ever seen a bluejay in person? Yeah, but now they give me a somewhat uncomfortable vibe, all the while thinking they're beautiful. Jason's nickname was "J Bird" by his father, and I collected feathers when I found them outside. Have you ever consumed a blue-colored drink? Mountain Dew Voltage is actually holy water. Is there anything you recycle, or should recycle? Ugh, we did recycle cans, but don't now. Mom got tired of going to do it. However, we do keep plastic bags for cleaning up a mess the dogs might make, and I also use it when changing Roman's litter. Do you like leaves better in the summer/spring, or in the fall? Is ANYONE going to answer with other than fall??? What is your favorite aspect of life? Just. Experiencing it, experiencing the emotions, feeling alive and real and valid even with how incredibly fleeting we are in the eternal universe. I really can't stand nihilism. Like make a DIFFERENCE, because enough of those change the world. When was the last time you were purposely amongst nature? Not since going out on that walk like... forever ago. I can't do this heat, but here, I don't really. Have anywhere to go. What do you think of global warming & the greenhouse effect? If you don't believe in them, honestly, just don't talk to me. Do you typically like green-colored candies? Yessss, apple-flavored. <3 Who is the most energetic and happy person you know of? Hmmm, that I personally know? I'm not sure. Who makes you smile the most often? Sara and Mark can do it at a snap of the finger. Magicians. How do you express your happiness? I become very vocally affectionate and obsessively express love for others, care more than ever at cheering others up, and I smile, laugh, and talk more. Has someone helped you out in a big way, recently? I don't know about /big/ way recently. Do you like to sing? I think I'm starting to??? I don't like my voice, but. It feels good to do. Where is somewhere that holds fond memories for you? This fishing spot deep in the woods that Dad and I would go to a lot to catch mostly striper. I loved that it was in the core of nature. Sometimes I would just stop fishing to explore. Do you like to watch the setting/rising sun? Always when I get the opportunity. Do you know of anyone who is going down the wrong track? Shit, most people I know. Most people I was friends with. Have you ever encountered a black widow? I believe so? Pretty positive at least once. They're so pretty to me, buuut not touchin'. What scares you, more than anything else? Losing those that mean most to me. I fear them leaving me in life by choice more than them dying, possibly. If there was no afterlife, could you handle it? Uh, I have to???? I wouldn't be aware of anything????? When in life did you feel the most care-free? Obviously as a child. Are you well-hydrated? Do you like water? Technically, no. I drink about two bottles a day I'd say, but that's not actually enough. I'm not a big fan of water, but. I do it for my health. Has an animal ever peed on you? Lol Venus did once when she was chilling on me for a long time, and some rodents I've had probably have. What would make a cool substitute color for the sun? Let her be p i n k. Which do you prefer: purple or pink? Can you guess??? What is your favorite color of the sunset/sunrise? *screams in pink* Is purple a good color for a car? Yaaaas. Do you prefer green or purple/red grapes? Purple. The green ones usually aren't firm enough for my taste. What color is your birthstone? Purple. Do you prefer hardly toasted at all or burnt toast? Barely toasted. Do you prefer guitar or piano music? Guitar if it's electric, but otherwise usually piano. Have your parents ever suspected something untrue about you? I don't believe so. Have you ever wished you’d been born someplace else? Yup. I'd far rather prefer to have not been born here. Have you ever had, or wanted, a pet ferret? Wanted. What’s a habit you find gross? Smoking. What’s the worst tattoo you’ve ever seen? This girl got her boyfriend's name a c r o s s h e r f a c e. What’s your favorite name ever? Alessandra. Think of how you used to be 3 years ago: how do you feel about who you were back then? Depressed as fuck. What’s the strangest fortune you’ve ever gotten from a fortune cookie? None come to mind. Do people ever force you to eat? Biiiitch you ain't gotta force me lmao. Is there a TV show you’ve wanted to start watching but never gotten around to? When I actually watched TV, uh... I'm not sure. When’s the last time you felt pressured to do something you didn’t really want to do? Not sure. Who was the last person to mess with your feelings? Mini. When was the last time you were in denial about something? What about? Boy, so many "I dunno"-type answers lol. I'm not really one for denial. Is there any certain style of architecture you really enjoy? GOTHIC. What was the last thing you gave up on? Colleen. 110% done with her ass. How easy is it for you to talk to someone else about your feelings? IT'S HARD. If you watch Parks and Recreation, who is your favorite character? Don't watch. Do you like watching documentaries? About animals, yes. What’s the last DIY project you did, if any? If you can’t remember, what’s something you’d be interested in doing? I've never done one. I suppose I'd like some Halloween ones I've seen. When’s the last time you had a problem that nobody could help you with? Recently. Friendship stuff. Do you have any siblings you absolutely despise? Why do you despise them? No. How many times a week do you shower? Is this a healthy thing for you? Four, usually. It's good for me. How many times a day do you eat a full meal? Is this a healthy thing to you? Like... maybe only once. Or none. What’s your favorite movie? Why do you like this movie so much? The Lion King. Who doesn't love it??? What’s your favorite genre of movies? Why is this? Horror. They just give me adrenaline, and I think about what if that actually happened. How many times a day do you say I love you? Who to usually? Always before bed to Sara. Sometimes multiple times a day to her. Always to Mom if she's leaving to go somewhere for a while. Do you prefer hoodies or jackets? Why do you prefer this choice? Hoodies. Just more comfy to me. Have you ever contemplated suicide before? Ever attempted it before? Contemplated a million times. Attempted once. Do knives scare you? Is it from watching scary movies? Yes, and no. They have horrifying potential to cause serious pain and warrant torture. Then I was running to slit my throat the night of the breakup, but Mom had to physically stop me, so I'm just. Uncomfortable around them. What would you consider to be the worst television channel out there? MTV. Have you ever had anyone drop off animals at your house and what kind? No. Do you remember when some of the Walmarts had a McDonald’s in them? Both the two in my area still do. When was the last time you were stung by a bee and what kind was it? Early spring, maybe? It was a bumblebee. Do you know anyone personally who had their house burn down before? Yes. Do you think the media can further manipulate our teenagers anymore? HAHAHAHA IT'LL NEVER END. Have you ever had someone sympathetically lie to make you feel better? Probably. Do you know anyone who has their septum pierced and does it look painful? Yes, and for me personally, yes, because I have thick cartilage. Has anyone ever kissed you in the rain and did it seem romantic at the time? Yeah, and I guess. When was the last time you listened to a genre of you music you despise? A couple days ago in the car. "IDFC" by Blackbear came on and I love that song okay. Have you ever taken a pregnancy test? No. Does your ex still think about you? Probably not. Honestly, who is the last person to tell you that they love you? Sara. Have you ever made out for more than a half hour straight? More like literally all night with a few pauses. What color was the last swimsuit you wore? Black. Have you ever been to an auto show? When I was very young because our family friend invited us to one. I was too young to stay home alone. Do you know anyone who still doesn’t have a smart phone? Maybe. Have you ever been on a cruise? No. Have you ever had an x-ray? Yes. What is your favorite Thanksgiving food? Honey ham, but I can't eat it anymore. What letter does your surname begin with? "D." Did you have a New Years kiss this year? No. Do you prefer to eat carrots raw or cooked? I hate carrots so much. What was the first video game you remember playing? Spyro. What is your favorite flavor of Skittles? Red. Have you ever met a famous political figure? No. What’s your go-to website when you’re really bored? I guess Facebook if it's been some hours since I looked. What is your favorite chocolate bar? The Reeses one made of little rectangles. But if you mean like, a *traditional* bar, Milky Way. What is your least favorite Sour Patch Kids color? Orange. Have you ever seen the movie Matilda? Yesss, adore it. Are you allergic to nuts or diary products? No. Do you have trust issues? "Pistanthrophobia: fear of trusting people due to past experience and relationships gone wrong." Do you think age matters in relationships? In romantic ones, yes it does if one is a juvenile. I can't find anything morally wrong with adults and big gaps, but they creep me out regardless. Has anyone ever called the cops on you? No. Have you ever had your nails so long that they curved down at the ends?  Omg no. Do you always wear flip flops no matter what the weather is? Is this??????? A direct attack????????? Has anyone ever told you that you have pretty feet? No, but it'd creep me the fuck out. If you don’t have one already, would you consider getting an iPhone? I want one. Who would you consider your favorite stand-up comedian? Living, not sure. Actually, probably Gabriel Iglesias. Would you say you’re too experienced or too inexperienced for your age? The latter. What is your favorite neon color? Ever buy nail polish that color? Pink. I don't paint my nails. Has anyone ever mistaken you to be a member of the opposite sex? No. Would you ever consider yourself over-dramatic? Not usually, but I can be. How often do you text people? Who do you text the most? Everyday, and Sara. What would you consider your second choice as a dream career? I really don't know. Both my dream jobs aren't obtainable for me, but uh. I guess something involving art. What is the longest amount of time you’ve played video games consecutively? Ha, definitely when a new WoW expansion came out. Can't remember if I played WoD or Legion longer in one go. Do you ever use cheats when you play video games? The kind that makes shit easier, no. Aesthetic changes, sure. Does your family go 'all out’ during the holidays? No. What’s your favorite kind of lunch meat to put on a sandwich? Ham, when I ate meat. When will you next see the person you love or are in love with? OCTOBER 3RD. Do you have anything that’s limited edition?  Maybe? How well can you handle vulgar things (i.e. gore, disturbing images, etc)?  I have a pretty high tolerance. But not so much at like disgusting medical issues. Would you marry someone if they were unable to have sex? I'm most likely marrying a girl. And I'm a girl, so. Who was the last male you hung out with? My dad! Who is your favorite person to text? Sara. She texts just like she talks, so I actually have interesting and more "real" conversations with her. What’s one nickname your family calls you? Just "Britt," really. Has anyone ever mistaken you for being gay/lesbian/bi? I had a therapist once who thought I was gay in middle school, so before I realized I was bi. Explain why you last threw up? A medicine I was on REALLY didn't like me. Ever kissed your best friend's significant other? That would be me. :'D But if you don't count Sara, no. Everyone deserves a second chance, right? Nooope. Would you ever want to ride in a canoe? I'd love to!!! Gay marriage: love is love or a horrible stand against God? Fuck any "loving" god who thinks consensual, sincere love is evil. Honestly. I will never be able to fathom how I was once against it. Do people tell you that you have an accent? No. Have you ever had an eating disorder? No. Do you prefer road trips or traveling on an airplane? Road triiiips! Do you enjoy tanning? Not at all. Have you ever seen The Breakfast Club and what’s your opinion of it? I didn't get the hype at all. Have you ever touched a dead body? Dead pets. Which of the seven deadly sins do you commit the most? Sloth. Did you have a Furby when you were younger? Yes. Demonic creatures. What part of your body are you self-conscious about? Everything???? But my stomach more than anything. Have you ever made out on a couch? Yeah. Have you ever been drunk at school or work? Nah. Have you finished school yet? I'm resuming college in January. What is your favorite kind of fruit juice? Mango and peach. Have you ever used a muscle stimulator before? Did it hurt? No. Have you ever done anything dangerous enough to have risked your life? Overdosing. Other things that we don't really think about too, like driving. Do you consider yourself egotistical? Do people call you egotistical? Not at all. I don't think anyone has? What gives you anxiety? So much, but I'll try to list those I can think of. Socializing (especially with those I don't know well), deciding the appropriate amount of eye contact when talking, making phone calls, driving, public speaking, being beside 18-wheelers, talking about things I'm really really passionate about, asking for things, awkward silences, answering the door for anyone (like when pizza is delivered and such), most men making even the slightest move that could be seen as flirting, and the list goes on and on. Could you ever be a medical guinea pig? Fuck that. Whats your favorite letter of the alphabet? "Z," maybe. Or "x." Whats your favorite Disney movie? TLK. "Finding Nemo" is right behind it. Have you ever handled a snake? Plenty of times. Could you ever be a living organ donor? For my mom, Dad, Sara, or my sisters, yes. Mom only has one kidney so I'd give up one of mine in a heartbeat if the last one was going. Have you ever contemplated suing someone? No. Have you ever drawn on a sleeping or inebriated person? No. Is it acceptable or unacceptable to smack a child as form of discipline? Fuck no. What’s your favorite way to dress? I feel most like myself in a gothic or metalhead look. What movie/game/etc. helps you calm down? My best bet of calming down via media is watch Mark. Probably go to old favorites. No movie is guaranteed to help me. Playing Silent Hill can soothe me, though. Ironically. Primarily the second. I think its the subtle ambiance and the steady footsteps that just relax me a bit. BUT SH2 also has my favorite soundtrack, so the actual music in it just does it for me. Do you believe in auras? I think I might? The concept is very interesting and some people really are talented at picking up the vibes of others. Animals are especially talented at that. What instrument do you wish you could master? Guitar. What do you put on hotdogs? When I ate them, ketchup and mustard. Do you have an unpopular opinion? What is it? Guacamole is fucking disgusting. Have you ever legitimately saved a person's life? No. What's your favorite book genre? Tbh, if I was to start reading again, I almost feel like it'd be something like teen/young adult romance???? Or fantasy, idk. Actually why not both. Do dogs like you? No joke, I've never had a dog be wary of me for more than a minute or so when first meeting me, rarely even that. Even when I go to others' houses and they have a usually uncertain dog, it's always pointed out that it's strange how (s)he takes to me so quickly.

#survey #quiz #questions #random

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vaguely-concerned · 6 years ago

Text

Overwatch fic - I hope that I don’t fall in love with you

PG-13, Hanzo Shimada/Jesse McCree, 7400 words, young McHanzo. Jesse and Hanzo are stuck in an airport overnight because of a snowstorm - drinks and shenanigans ensue.

On AO3

Outside the huge windows the snowstorm kept howling like the tantrum of some weather god whose idea of creativity stopped at ‘just turn the dial up as far as it will go and call it a day’, a shifting wall of white rushing by behind the glass.

Inside the airport it was quiet, though, like the snow had settled in here too and was dampening all sound. Everyone moved with the weary yet unflappable tranquility of people who had accepted the truth that they were stuck here until the forces of fate and air traffic control saw fit to release them. Even the baby that was invariably crying somewhere in the distance sounded like it was mostly phoning it in for the look of the thing at this point. With the darkness pressing in on the airport it felt like being trapped in a high-tech cave of glass and concrete, the lights kept low and lulling.

Jesse was aching for a smoke, but the lady behind the bar had that ‘overworked and ready to commit murder with a cocktail strainer’ look about her and he wasn’t ready to stand outside in the roaring gale again until the bourbon had properly thawed out his bones. So instead he fiddled with the corner of the coaster and idly kicked his heels against the leg of the bar stool, keeping half an eye on the holo-set in the corner showing some kind of soccer game and otherwise watching the slow trickle of his fellow waylaid travelers flowing past.

He glanced away from a thrilling 0-0 draw — Jesse wasn’t big into sports that didn’t involve horses at the best of times, and found that having to watch grown men aim for and fail to hit such a big target for ninety minutes straight was like sandpaper over his soul — to see Hanzo Shimada standing in the middle of the terminal, glaring at the flight information display screen. Jesse felt an instinctive twinge of amusement; there was no mistaking him, no other man could have so eloquently stared at a defenseless piece of technology like it had personally offended him and his entire family back several generations.

Hanzo looked no different than he had when they parted ways twelve hours ago, job well done and encrypted info on illegal weapons technology duly exchanged. Even in everyday clothes — well, what passed for it for him, anyway — he seemed… sharper than the people around him, like he’d been carved out of the world differently. Jesse leaned his cheek in his palm and took the opportunity to watch him without having to think about being watched back. Yeah, no, there really was nothing the clothes could do to hide the broad shoulders or the way he moved like he knew precisely where every part of his body was at all times. You could stick a hoodie on a wolf, but it wouldn’t make its teeth any blunter.

With his hair down and a look of peevish outrage on his face he looked younger and infinitely less forbidding, though, like said wolf caught using the drawstrings as a chew toy.

After a while he seemed to spot Jesse and stood for a moment completely still, as if making up his mind about how to react. Jesse decided to leave the choice to him and pretended he hadn’t seen him, instead taking a sip of his drink.

A minute or so later there was the sound of Hanzo clearing his throat, and Jesse glanced up to find him standing close by, snow melting on the shoulders of his coat.

“Oh. Hey there.”

“Hello again,” Hanzo said, letting his bag fall to the ground with a thump and the tiniest hint of clanking metal — Jesse tried to keep out of his mind how many lethal weapons he could keep stowed in there, security be damned. Not that he needed them to be the deadliest guy in the airport. Any airport.

“We keep meetin’,” Jesse agreed, tilting his head to the side. “You having a drink?”

“Why,” Hanzo asked, sitting down on the bar stool next to Jesse, “are you buying?”

Jesse let out a surprised huff of laughter — now there was a tone he’d never heard from him before. If he didn’t know any better he’d say that that was a touch of playfulness.

“Sure,” he said. “If the next round’s yours.”

“Of course. Have they said anything over the intercom?”

Jesse shrugged. “Nothin’ encouraging.”

Hanzo gave a dissatisfied grunt and ordered a drink after a perfunctory scan of the list. He checked his phone while he waited, his brows drawn together irritably.

“Good luck with that, the only forecast you’re likely to get is ‘disappointment with a chance of confused meteorologists’,” Jesse told him. At Hanzo’s surprised blink he added: “Checked it before. You know you’re fucked when they ain’t even had the time to give the storm a name before it hits. We’re right on the outskirts of it as it passes, though, so with a bit of luck we’ll be good to go before noon tomorrow.”

That same impenetrable blinking for a few seconds and then Hanzo gave a breath of laughter and put the phone down, accepting his Old Fashioned with a short ‘Thank you’ when the lady handed it to him. “I see.”

“Guess we’re stuck here at least overnight, huh,” Jesse said.

“It would appear so,” Hanzo sighed, running a hand through his hair to push it away from his face — it fell sleekly over his shoulder and down his back. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were still pink from the cold outside.

Strangely enough the confirmation that they were indeed trapped seemed to calm him down more than anything. He took a sip of his drink and wrinkled his nose, though it didn’t stop him from going in for another straight after.

Hanzo shrugged the coat off and rolled up his sleeves, the tattoo clearly visible on his left forearm. Jesse found himself wrapped up in the design, tracing the interlocking patterns with his eyes when Hanzo wasn’t looking — he’d been trying to get a better look ever since that first time he’d noticed it, when it had been way too dark to make out details and a smear of blood had obscured parts of it. Now that he could study it freely he decided the design suited the man, stark and bold and wound tightly in on itself in ways that didn’t look entirely comfortable.

Eventually Hanzo seemed to sense Jesse’s gaze on him and raised an eyebrow, glass halfway to his lips.

Jesse tore his eyes away and cleared his throat, leaning his elbows on the table. “You gonna get in trouble with your folks over this?”

“Hm?”

“We were already runnin’ kinda late before. Can’t imagine they’ll be happy with this little delay.”

“I… may have some explaining to do when I get back.” He stared into thin air, as if contemplating this, then grimaced and knocked the rest of his drink back in one go, waving for another even as he swallowed.

“Whoa,” Jesse said, equal parts impressed, perturbed and feeling his throat burn in sympathy.

Hanzo gave an acknowledging shrug and started in on the new drink with infinitesimally more restraint, sipping it like a man on a grim quest to escape the dingy shallows of sobriety. “It has been… a long day. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you have no one back home to answer to?”

Jesse made an indifferent sound. “Sure, but so long as I get the job done they don’t care much one way or the other how I get there. Would probably start askin’ around for me if I didn’t turn up in a week or so, though. At least I’d like to think so.”

“...an interesting way to run things.”

“I’m a bit of a special case,” Jesse admitted, shrugging. “And I’ve earned it, too. We’re not all charmingly free spirited mavericks like me, though, believe it or not; some of the guys actually do numbers and spreadsheets and shit.”

“Thank heavens,” Hanzo said, “I am not sure the world is big enough for more than one of you.”

When Jesse looked at him there was a smile playing on Hanzo’s lips even as his eyes were drawn and weary, a disarmingly charming expression just from how pleased he looked at his own joke.

“You know, like in your movies? ‘This town isn’t big enough for the both of us’? Dramatic duels at dawn?” He made the most deadpan finger gun Jesse had ever seen and lifted his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I, uh, I thought I caught your reference there,” Jesse chuckled, swirling his drink around in his glass. “You have watched a few Westerns in your time, then? You been holdin’ out on me?”

Hanzo gave a grunt and took a sip of his drink. “None that did not involve assless chaps and only the R-rated kind of riding. No horses involved, though.”

It was a near thing that Jesse didn’t snort bourbon through his nose. Hanzo’s smile widened almost imperceptibly.

If you’d asked Jesse before tonight about Hanzo Shimada’s defining qualities, his sense of humor would not necessarily have come up. The aloofness might, as well as the way he walked and talked like he knew, in a disinterested, blasé sort of way, exactly the most efficient way to kill anyone he set his eyes on if needed — the sparkling repartee, not so much. Jesse had always felt that slinging jokes in his direction was like appealing to a vaguely condescending brick wall. Well, more fool him; one on one and devoid of any business to discuss the guy could be hilarious, not even unintentionally, in a way that careened merrily between the sharply observed and the delightfully mean, though the worst of the nihilism eased once he started in on the third drink.

“So you’re telling me,” Jesse said, squinting at Hanzo’s face, “that you had to stay in character as a delivery boy for a month before the guy finally let you in?”

“It was the only way to get close enough to him,” Hanzo shrugged. “A deeply paranoid man. Rightfully so, of course, he had made some powerful enemies through his stupidity and greed.”

“Wow, Mr. Shimada, tell us how you really feel.”

Hanzo made a little face that clearly said ‘Eh, what can you do, there’s no helping some people’. It was the kind of expression that held the ennui and world weariness of a much older man — Jesse suspected Hanzo had been born with it already preprogrammed into him. “If he had been as willing to learn to cook for himself after divorcing his wife as he was setting up diabolical and deadly security systems… I might have had a lot more trouble. He used his last words to complain he had not ordered pepperoni.”

Jesse had a vivid, inexorable mental image of Hanzo dressed up as a pizza boy scowling daggers under the cap; he had to rest a hand over his mouth before he made a sound he might regret, though Hanzo picked up on it anyway.

“I am glad you seem to find it funny. I did not see the humor in it at the time.”

“I can see how you wouldn’t,” Jesse said, strangled. Pushing his luck he asked: “You keep the uniform, at least?”

Hanzo grimaced into his drink. “Perhaps you and Genji should get together some time and create your own comedy act. He asked me the exact same thing when I got back.”

“I knew that kid was alright,” Jesse beamed. “Good instincts.”

“Apart from having to endure your comedy it was a temporary indignity only and the job went smoothly from there. I did get a commendation from my employer several times,” he added, as if he’d only just remembered. “Had to all but fight off a promotion before I left.”

“Well then, at least you know you got a job waitin’ for you if this industry goes tits up in these peaceful Overwatch times. More than you can say for some of us. Ain’t got too many marketable skills outside of… this whole deal,” Jesse said, catching himself before saying ‘shootin’ people in the head’ as the bartender passed by on her way to another customer.

Hanzo made an unconvinced sound in his nose. “Oh, I would not be so sure of that. One does a lot of people watching in our line of business. You develop a knack for working people out, which is usually half the battle. Take that one,” he said, gesturing discreetly in the direction of a corner table with a lone businessman whose only crime, as far as Jesse could tell, lay in a supremely bland taste in ties.

“What about him? You find his fashion sense personally offensive?”

“Obviously, but beyond that he is clearly having an affair.”

Jesse squinted at the guy, finding that despite looking gracelessly and resignedly middle aged there was no lipstick on his collar, literal or figurative. “Oh, clearly.”

Hanzo, taking this as a challenge, held his head higher and appraised the man as a renowned art critic might the results of a ‘Watercolors For Complete Beginners’ course. “Hm. The first thing he did after sitting down was remove his wedding ring. Two phones, two separate credit cards, which — oh, how embarrassing, he still mixes up on occasion, so this fling might be a recent development…”

The guy sat there mortified while the server reset the card machine; Hanzo rested his chin in a studiously dispassionate palm and kept going.

“Generally surreptitious and flighty manner, so perhaps very recent at that, could be he is not entirely sure his new flame will show up — a newly bought and expensive if, hm, inadvisable outfit, a rather sad attempt at styling what remains of his hair, but I suppose there is something to be said for the nobility of doing what you can with what you have…”

Jesse bumped their shoulders together, chuckling despite himself at the sheer unfiltered disdain. “Okay, Sherlock, I get it. You can stop showin’ off.”

Hanzo shrugged and abandoned the theatrical thinking posture, sitting up straighter again. “Of course most cases are not quite so blatantly, pathetically obvious.”

“You really don’t like this guy, do you.”

A stiffening of his back, almost unnoticeable if you weren’t paying attention — perhaps he thought no one was. “I dislike disloyalty. If you have made the decision to devote yourself to something or someone, you stay true to it.”

“Well, I dunno. I’ve seen too many people stay loyal to their own misery. To bad places, or bad times, or bad people. Sometimes you gotta know when to fold ‘em and walk away, y’know?”

Hanzo glanced at him with sharp, dark eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, something written nakedly in his expression that Jesse didn’t know how to read.

“Not that goin’ behind the back of someone you’ve promised the whole ‘to have and to hold’ thing to isn’t a certifiably shitty move, it ain’t the way a man oughta treat his partner,” Jesse clarified, holding his hands up in easy concession and leaning back to show he didn’t mean to make an argument out of it. “Just sayin’ that there are some things that loyalty doesn’t… well. You see enough shit, it makes you wonder.”

“Hm.”

The corner of Jesse’s mouth wanted to twitch up — he’d known the man for almost a year now, and those little ‘hm’s still remained completely opaque to him.

Hanzo touched his arm and tilted his head towards their new friend with the bland tie. “Ah. Observe.”

The guy was still fiddling with his two credit cards when a woman — slightly younger than him and looking excitedly nervous in high heels — came over to his table, and in his rush to hide them away he almost ended up putting his mouth on her nose when she went in for a chaste kiss.

Hanzo gave a little ‘ta-dah’ wave with such withering sarcasm that it was a miracle the guy didn’t collapse on the spot. “See? He may be unfaithful, but he respects his wife and her intelligence enough to go out of his way to hide it. Touching, in its own way. Perhaps there is something to salvage there yet.”

Shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, Jesse brought his glass to his mouth but had to put it down again before he spilled booze all over himself. “You’re a cynical, cynical man, Mr. Shimada.”

“As cynical as any man who endeavours to see the world clearly.”

Jesse nudged his knee against Hanzo’s under the bar, inclining his glass towards him. “What’s that thing ‘bout how… behind every cynic there’s a disappointed idealist or whatever? Is there really no romance in your soul, sir?”

Hanzo quirked a strange little grin — he glanced at Jesse out of the corner of his eye and held out his glass too. “An odd question to ask a man who studies swordsmanship in this day and age.”

Jesse tipped his head to the side in acknowledgement and touched their glasses together with a clink, taking a sip. In his precise, certain way Hanzo pushed his hair away from his face, still that look about him like he was entertaining some private amusement.

“Such incisive commentary is enough to have me worryin’ what you see when you look at me,” Jesse said, meaning it as a joke. “Starting to think I’ll have to plant some red herring backstories to keep you off my trail. On an unrelated note — I ever tell you ‘bout how I was found as a baby by a circus elephant and was raised by a happy triad of clowns, knife throwers and fire eaters? The good ol’ ‘secretly a Russian princess all along’ ditty? How I got this scar?”

“You,” Hanzo said, the slightest slur to his words now when he didn’t watch it, “are… strange, mostly.”

When he finished laughing Jesse said: “Yeah, I’ve been reliably informed.”

Hanzo pursed his lips thoughtfully, looking at him with what seemed like honest curiosity. “It does not trouble you, then.”

“If it did I’d be nothin’ but troubled all the livelong day,” Jesse said. “Lotta effort, low payoff. Not like I’m ever gonna pass as anything but what I am for any length of time anyway. Might as well work with it.”

Hanzo smiled, his cheeks flushed with the booze and dark hair loosely gathered over one shoulder. He looked different when he smiled for real, almost surprised, like his face had just received an unexpected but not unwelcome visitor.

Jesse found himself smiling back.

“You, uh, you hungry?” Jesse asked after a while, without quite knowing why. “‘Cause I could murder a burger right about now.”

Hanzo blinked slowly at him. “...it is nearly two in the morning.”

“It sure is,” Jesse agreed. “You can have some of my fries, if you’d like,” he added, in the name of sweetening the pot.

After a moment of deliberation Hanzo shrugged. “Who am I to refuse such a deal. Lead the way,” he said, hopping down from the bar stool and gathering up his things.

———

After they finished eating they drifted aimlessly through the terminal for a while before settling down on a bench in an isolated corner, Jesse giving up on what remained of the ketchup splotch on the thigh of his jeans and tossing the paper napkin in the trash. He felt full and warm and oddly at peace with the world at large, and not just because of the booze or the fact that he’d gotten to see Hanzo Shimada — a man whose name was whispered with fear and deference in certain parts of the underworld — make fun of his smoking habit by way of creative application of a french fry not ten minutes ago. The image of Hanzo holding the fry between his fingers like a cigarette and giving a bad imitation of Jesse’s drawl would keep him warm on cold and lonely nights.

Their conversation had petered out to become a comfortable lull, and when Jesse glanced over at him Hanzo was glaring intensely at the opposite wall — almost, Jesse noted, like someone desperately fighting to keep their eyes open.

“Y’know,” Jesse ventured, having observed this internal battle for a while and taking pity, “you can have a snooze if you’d like. I’ll keep a lookout for any questionable characters headin’ our way.”

“Hm?”

“When life gives you jetlag, make a night shift, right?” Jesse said, waving at what he felt sure were the impressive dark circles under his eyes. “I’m not gonna be sleepin’ anytime soon anyway.”

Hanzo blinked in consideration for a while, then gave a ‘fair enough’ head tilt and leaned back. If he was anything like Jesse he probably had the chip with the data they’d traded somewhere on him, close to the skin, but he made a loop with the shoulder strap of his bag anyway and hooked his foot into it. Then he settled into perfect stillness with uncanny immediacy, arms folded over his chest and a look on his face like he was preparing to offer Mr. Sandman an offer he couldn’t refuse — since Hanzo’s eyes were closed anyway Jesse allowed himself a grin.

He rooted around in his bag to fish out the holovid, booting it up and navigating his way to the giant trove of video files he’d downloaded — extremely illegally — when he was eleven and had kept around and up to date ever since for occasions such as this. His logic had always been that should the war break out again he’d better be able to watch every decent Western ever made before the nuclear winter finished him off.

Hanzo drifted off quickly, if the way his breathing changed to be calmer and deeper was any indication, though he still looked stiff and tensed up. Occasionally he would let out a small, hilariously dainty sniffle as he shifted; Jesse was delighted to learn that even while far off in Dreamland he managed to look faintly peeved.

Jesse started the movie and let his brain slide into the comforting groove of the familiar plot. Sinking down on the bench he settled in, crossing his legs at the ankles and stretching out as much as politeness allowed.

When the first movie ended he put on the next one, whistling to himself under his breath as the title screen flashed to life. In his sleep Hanzo slid down the bench until his temple rested on Jesse’s shoulder — for a couple of mad, serene moments Jesse’s body acted like this was the most natural thing in the world. In fact it decided to just sit there for a while, smiling faintly down at the top of Hanzo’s head. They were close enough now that he could smell him, warm and clean and strangely graceful even after what must’ve been a couple of days of travel and half a night in the airport bar. Maybe the mystical mumbo-jumbo the Shimadas shrouded themselves in wasn’t all smoke and mirrors after all and the man was actually magic. It was either that or a really well picked aftershave.

(Jesse might’ve had more to drink than he’d thought at this point, he recognized absently.)

Huh.

…wait a fucking second.

Jesse’s brain felt a slow, indomitable wash of horror as it realized that what his body had meant to do was pull Hanzo in closer where he’d lie more comfortably and securely against his side before turning back to the movie.

Jesse stared into the middle distance for a long time. At one point an elderly lady walked up to him and asked him in hushed tones if he was feeling well.

“Never better, ma’am,” he said hoarsely, realizing too late that he’d sort of leaned back into Hanzo’s weight as if to seek out something sure and steady under her mild, concerned gaze.

She patted his knee. “I get like that myself,” she said wisely. “Put away enough gin beforehand and you’ll sleep through most of the flight anyway. I’m sure your young man won’t mind if he knows you get that worked up about it.”

Jesse made a strangled sound in his throat and nodded, smiling a fixed, manic smile.

As she winked at him and walked away Hanzo sighed in his sleep and turned his face further into Jesse’s shoulder — a soft, trusting gesture that had Jesse dizzy because...well, you wouldn’t know it to look at him, would you, that there could be that kind of easy sweetness in him. Normally you got the impression that he was the kind of man whose most pressing reason, at any moment, not to stab you to death was the potential dry cleaning bill, and nothing about that could prepare you for this.

Some locks of hair had fallen into his face, silky over sharp features. Jesse kept very still and watched him.

You deserve better, Jesse thought nonsensically, out of the blue, Hanzo’s face as he talked about loyalty flashing through his mind. Was loyalty really the word for it when you gave them everything and they seemed all too happy to take it and give nothing back?

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Hanzo gave a low sleepy sound and seemed to come awake. As he stirred he tilted away; Jesse hurriedly inched away before Hanzo’s eyes blinked open, desperately trying to pretend that his side didn’t suddenly feel very cold and lonely. He crossed his legs at the ankles and sank back against the bench, staring fixedly at the holovid as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

With a grunt Hanzo sat up, rubbing at his neck with a pained expression.

“Welcome back,” Jesse said, hoping his grin seemed natural enough to hide the fact that everything inside him was currently one long incoherent scream.

Hanzo smiled slightly and rolled his shoulder, working out the stiffness. “Thank you. Happy to be here.”

The scream in Jesse’s head rose to a violent crescendo at the easy sarcasm. Hanzo glanced down at the holovid for a second with an unreadable expression, then squinted at the big hologram clock over by the entrance, moving his neck like he was smoothing out a crick. He looked over at Jesse. “Hm. It is still only four.”

Jesse’s heart gave a thrill at the barest indication of a raised eyebrow, the invitation slyly offered and easily ignored if unwanted. “Ah, the night is still young, then. You up for another round, Mr. Shimada?”

“‘Hanzo’ is fine,” he said, getting to his feet in one mesmerizingly sure, fluid movement. “And absolutely. I have nowhere else to be.”

———

The bartender seemed both amused and unimpressed to see them again, but she acquiesced readily enough when Jesse grinned and told her to leave the bottle.

“Promised to buy you a drink, right?” Jesse said, waving Hanzo off when he started to say something and pushing a glass towards him. He felt sure he needed to be much drunker if he were to survive the night in this state.

Hanzo tasted the admittedly dirt cheap bourbon and wrinkled his nose. “...interesting,” he said, with the very faintest veneer of politeness the human voice could bestow to cover up the disgust.

“A free drink is a free drink, ain’t it?”

Jesse noted that Hanzo’s expressions changed after a few drinks — normally he looked like he meant to constantly school them even if the results were varying, any flicker of emotion the result of a momentary slip-up and immediately, angrily squashed, but tonight that mask had definitely fallen off somewhere along the way. It looked good on him, that new unrestrained expressiveness. Now that he knew the signs to look for Jesse was pretty sure he could start to pick up on them in a sober Hanzo too. “An excellent point. I apologize for my brashness before, keep it coming.”

“You got it, friend,” Jesse said and topped up his drink.

The nap seemed to have given Hanzo a second wind. There was more of a swagger to him now, a tiny lift of his chin. They talked shop for a while, in a vague and euphemistic dance to avoid saying anything that’d have someone in the bar calling the cops on them, then somehow ended up derailed enough that they were talking about the history of their respective countries in the eighteen seventies the next time Jesse checked in with himself and realized he was having fun. In his surprise he ended up stuttering to a halt; when Hanzo gave him a questioning look he floundered for something to say.

“Y’know, I keep meanin’ to ask,” Jesse said, hoping it covered for his momentary distraction and current existential horror at how charmed he was by Hanzo explaining, in his sardonic, clipped manner, the finer details of the military reforms of the Meiji restoration. “What’s the deal with the sword ‘n the bow ‘n stuff? Not that you’re not pulling it off like nobody’s business, but isn’t it a little… old fashioned?”

Hanzo wrinkled his brow thoughtfully, tapping his fingers against his glass. He looked Jesse over from boots to hat and back again; Jesse fought the urge to squirm under the inspection. “...was that a serious question?”

“Huh?”

That private half-smile from before returned, something brightening in his eyes. “Apparently it was. Hm. I suppose it is a little old fashioned, at that. But you never know — perhaps there is still a future for anachronisms.” He blinked slowly — well, he did have a few drinks under his belt at this point too, built like a brick shithouse though he was. “It is also a smidge quieter and more discreet than the hand cannon you carry around.”

“I’ll not sit here and listen to you besmirch my gun just ‘cause your taste skews more medieval,” Jesse announced. “Peacekeeper’s served me plenty well through the years, thank you very much.”

“I am sure it has. And I am even more sure that my ‘medieval tastes’ would still have you beat every time.”

“Would it, now?”

“In fact I am perfectly willing to put money on it,” Hanzo said, leaning forward, a glint in his eye that made Inner Jesse whimper. “Any contest, at any time.”

“Oh ho ho,” Jesse said, casually pushing his hat back on his head as his heart raced against his ribs, “you better believe that all that stands between you, an empty wallet and complete humiliation in this very moment is the laws of this land frowning on firin’ guns in public places.”

Hanzo gave a faux-haughty huff, eyes glittering. “A pitiful excuse.”

Jesse felt the grin bright on his face and leaned forward too. “Hey, gimme a time, place, and somewhere to dump the evidence and we’ll see ‘bout that.”

“That can be arrang — ” Hanzo stopped, a frown appearing on his brow.

“What’s up?” Jesse asked after a while, realizing suddenly how close their faces were now.

“I just had a strange feeling that — ”

Hanzo’s phone called out shrilly, a dozen times or so in quick succession. With the air of someone stepping up to the scaffold and giving the hangman a meaningful look to get it over with already he checked it.

After a few moments he picked up his drink, finished it in one go, poured himself another and then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the bar, the image of a beaten man.

“Uh…” Jesse said, tentatively resting a hand on Hanzo’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“My feeling was right,” Hanzo murmured, holding out the phone without lifting his head. “My brother is indeed disgracing himself and our entire family as we speak.”

“What, your Genji sense was tinglin’? You felt a great disturbance in the Force?”

Hanzo gave a mirthless bark of laughter. Jesse stared at the bared line of his neck, stumbling over the fact that he could barely remember ever wanting anything as much as he wanted to brush his lips there, to hear a breath of real laughter in response. The physical contact before had woken something inside him that had slumbered for a long time; he couldn’t remember ever longing for anyone to just… touch him before. It was easily the third most pathetic he’d felt in his entire life, sitting there yearning for what was likely one of the most dangerous men in the world to rest a hand on his shoulder, even for a few seconds.

He felt vaguely that his brain had broken or something.

Taking the phone he glanced down at the screen, then flinched back like he’d been stung by a wasp.

“Dear lord,” Jesse said, tilting the phone and then his head to try to make more sense of the image, morbidly fascinated. “The hell’s he doin’ with that lobster? How would that thing even fit down the front of his… huh. Well.”

Hanzo just whimpered, burying his fingers in his hair. “Keep going.”

Jesse flipped through the next few and whistled under his breath. “Well, someone’s havin’ more fun than us tonight, at least. Didn’t even know they made drinks with that many colors. Who’s the young lady with the… ”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Fair enough, that’s — whoa there,” Jesse said, hurriedly skipping one. “Don’t mean to be rude or anythin’, but that’s, uh, that’s more of your brother than I ever needed to see.”

“I know the feeling,” Hanzo said. “For what it is worth I think he sent that one by mistake. My name must be close to one of the girls he is… dating in his contact list, it would not be the first time.”

“‘One of’, huh. One of those situations.”

“Enough of ‘those’ to fill an entire four act comedy of errors.”

Helpless against the depths of resigned despair in Hanzo’s voice Jesse chuckled. “Sounded like you saw this comin’, somehow.”

“It is a special instinct I have developed,” Hanzo told the tabletop earnestly. “I can feel Genji shaming every single one of our ancestors from half a world away.”

Jesse snorted, squinting to make out an image distorted by blurred lights and excessive photo filters and deciding it might be a nightclub actively, literally on fire.

“Of course it is partly a matter of always being prepared to expect it,” Hanzo continued vaguely, sitting up. “Statistically I usually turn out to be right. Mathematics. You know how it is.”

“Least he’s kept his pants on in this one,” Jesse said philosophically, flicking through the last few messages to find that Genji had gone the extra mile by making a holo gif so the nipple tassels could have their full, animated effect.

“Sometimes,” Hanzo said, in a way that suggested he wouldn’t have done so sober, “it feels like he does it specifically to spite me. To get a rise out of me, rubbing it in my face just to show me that he can. Which is naturally ludicrous because I doubt he has ever thought that deeply about anything in his entire life, but it does not stop it from being… annoying.”

Jesse put the phone down, intrigued by the minefield stretching out before them. “Is there anything in those,” he waved towards the phone, “that you’d actually want, though?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hanzo snapped, though Jesse didn’t take it personally as the ire was clearly not actually directed at him as much as the very concept of the question. “It’s pathetic. But he stands free to do anything he wants and chooses to squander it on…”

He stopped himself, looking down at his hands tightly curled on the bar. With deliberate movements he unfurled his fingers, though the tension still ran through them like piano wires — some part of Jesse, having already barrelled through the first stages of grief and resting now in depressed acceptance, recognized that his hands were extremely nice, strong and sure and well shaped. He wished he could have managed to dwell in the tranquil valleys of denial at least until boarding his flight, but there you were. “No matter.”

“Hey,” Jesse said. “He’s just bein’ young and dumb. When’s the last time you saw each other?”

Hanzo shrugged. “Weeks ago. Half a month or so, maybe. Why?”

“You call him in all that time?”

“No. I doubt he would pick up if he knew it was me.”

“Maybe he wanted to get your attention somehow and thought actin’ like a dumbass was the way to go about it,” Jesse offered. At Hanzo’s blank, uncomprehending stare he quickly added: “Hey, what do I know, though, I’m just some random idiot with a neat hat.”

Hanzo, in a very un-Hanzo move, looked unsure. He fiddled with the edge of his sleeve, staring into the middle distance.

“I never know why he does what he does,” he said finally. “We… do not speak much anymore.”

“You used to?

Hanzo shrugged again, a tight, constrained little gesture. “Some. More. When we were boys. Before — hm.”

Jesse nodded, watching him out of the corner of his eye — he’d ducked his head again, as if going into hiding behind his hair, shutting himself off. There was an ache in Jesse’s chest, some puzzle pieces falling into place and making a pretty sad picture in his head. It seemed weird now that he’d found the guy so inscrutable and overbearing in the beginning. Considering where — who — he came from, it was maybe a wonder he had any urge left to connect to anyone else at all.

“Should I…” Hanzo furrowed his brow as if doing complicated calculations in his head and looked up. “...answer him?”

“Why not? What’s the worst that can happen?”

“You saw the nipple tassels, why would you underestimate him like this,” Hanzo said immediately, but he was tapping something out on his phone with a thoughtful expression. “I — would asking him to stay safe count as nagging, do you think?”

“Just like that? Shouldn’t think so.”

Hanzo made an absent-minded sound of gratitude and kept writing. There was something horribly endearing about the way he picked each character like he was setting down important messages in stone that people would see and judge for generations to come.

For a while Hanzo stared down at his finished message, a doubtful downward curl to his mouth. Finally he mumbled: “Perhaps I should not encourage…”

“Hey,” Jesse said, touching Hanzo’s shoulder. “Don’t think about it too hard. Just send it.”

“Is that your professional opinion?” Hanzo said sardonically, though there was a grin lurking in his voice.

“As someone who ain’t never thought too hard about anythin’ in my entire life,” Jesse agreed, bringing his free hand to rest over his heart, “you’d be surprised how often it works out.”

Hanzo chuckled, letting his head fall to one side. After a moment he pressed ‘send’ and put the phone face down on the table, giving a small sigh. “There.”

“And would you look at that, the world didn’t even end,” Jesse beamed, snickering when Hanzo aimed a cheerful kick at his shin.

He had his hand on Hanzo’s shoulder and Hanzo wasn’t shaking him off, wasn’t even acting like it was strange, just looked at him with eyes that were tired and soft with booze and still warmed by a small, rueful smile.

There was a chime of longing in Jesse’s chest, at first unbearably gentle like a bell struck by butterfly wings, but deepening, a call that couldn’t be silenced because it rang through his bones.

Fuck, Jesse thought, giving Hanzo’s shoulder a squeeze before pulling his hand back. I am so screwed. Twenty years of nothin’ and then I just had to go for the gangster ninja assassin. Sure. Splendid. Why wouldn’t I do that. Completely in character, if nothin’ else.

Hanzo’s phone buzzed again, only twice this time; he snorted as he checked it but wrote an answer before sliding it into his pocket. He turned back to Jesse. “My brother apologizes for accidentally mentally scarring us both. You do not have siblings, do you?”

“Not that I’m aware. I’ve known some of the boys long enough that it’s kinda the same thing, I guess.”

“It is, as they say, a mixed blessing,” Hanzo said. “On the one hand I have been in a constant state of worry for close to twenty years now, on the other… actually no, there is no other hand. That’s it.”

Jesse grinned into his drink. “Sounds like maybe I dodged a bullet there.”

“...I would not go that far.” There was a quiet, fond lilt to his voice Jesse had never heard before.

Fuck.

Maybe — maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad. It wasn’t as though he’d ever act on it, Jesse told himself. Just because he knew it was there didn’t mean he’d have to do anything about it. It could just… stay a background thing. A, what was the word. No, a less embarrassing word than that. A crush, perhaps. His heart could do its whole newfound pitter-patter tap dance routine now and then, backstage where no one could see it, and otherwise he’d keep it under wraps and act like the goddamn professional he’d been scrambling to pretend to be all these years. Topsy-turvy with the booze and the low lights as he felt he wasn’t dumb or mad enough to think that Hanzo would welcome any advances with anything but, at best and simultaneously worst, pity. This was not a knife edge he was eager to test his throat against.

And yet… even as he thought it the part of him that was always watching itself and was wise to his particular brand of bullshit braced itself for the inevitable hurt.

He did a mental shrug. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Anything that was worth doing was worth doing with panache and gusto, even if that thing was crashing and burning. “Can I interest you in more of the house’s finest damn disgusting swill, Mr. Shimada?”

“Mr. McCree,” Hanzo said, “I thought you would never ask.”

————

When the storm ended Jesse didn’t even notice for a while. It was first when Hanzo glanced over his shoulder to the windows and gave a small sound that he realized how light it was out, and that the low but constant howl of the storm had faded somewhere along the way.

Hanzo got up and stood by the huge windows, arms loosely crossed over his chest.

“It would seem the worst has passed,” he said, black hair outlined by the sharp clean light of the dawn. He glanced over as Jesse came up next to him. In the distance they were clearing the runways for snow at a fervent pace, though the inside of the airport had only just started to move out of its torpor. Soon it would be a real mayhem as people scurried to their new gates — but for now it was quiet.

“Seems that way,” Jesse lied blithely, watching his profile, the curl of his mouth.

They paid for their drinks — Jesse hissing between his teeth because well, he’d known it was gonna smart but he’d been trying to keep it out of his mind — and wandered off again, drifting idly through the terminal. Jesse was still tipsy enough that everything felt light and warm, all the sharp edges worn off the world. Hanzo was muttering something under his breath about the architect’s taste in dramatic floor tiles and looking enchantingly snippy while doing it.

Then the departure board updated and Jesse gave a grunt as his phone buzzed with the alert too. “Well, that’s me, I guess. Better get a move on. Thanks for the company, by the way,” he added, reaching out a hand before he could think better of it. “Saved me from being that weird guy getting shitfaced alone in a corner. It was fun.”

Hanzo blinked at him in surprise.

“Y’know, fun?” Jesse prompted. “Surely you’ve encountered the concept before?”

“Hah. McCree,” Hanzo said, taking Jesse’s outstretched hand and shaking it — you could sense the strength in his fingers even under such a controlled, careful gesture. He was grinning. “I… hm. We will keep in touch.”

“You better, we got a bet to settle now,” Jesse said, feeling mildly delirious. “Come at me whenever you’re ready for a taste of humility, I’m always ready to defend my gun’s honor.”

———

A couple of hours later he sat sleepless and hungover in the window row, leaning his head back against the seat as he replayed Hanzo’s startled laugh in his head again and again.

Part of the Scoundrels and Thieves ‘verse, which can be found here!

I would like to thank @callmesherly for helping me with what kind of drink Hanzo might go for if sake was off the table, and to @solivar and @bananamilk for lending their expertise on cowboy innuendo for Hanzo trolling Jesse! On another note — ‘leaving the bottle’ does not seem to actually be a Thing outside of movies and/or very special circumstances in most places, so let’s just assume that the bartender heard our two wonderful boys talking ~*inconspicuously*~ and was smart enough to go ‘haha I’m *not* getting paid enough to argue with international crime syndicates, if this weird kid with the hat believes the shit he sees in movies I’m not gonna be the one who corrects him’. (They did not finish that bottle by themselves, btw, the dialogue would have ended up a lot less coherent otherwise lol)

Also feel free to imagine, years down the line, Sombra finding Jesse’s old… holovid account or whatever they call it and just rubbing her hands together because surely there’s some embarrassing porn in there, there must be, he’s been updating this playlist all through his teens and young adulthood… only to find that no, it really is just every Western ever made, regardless of quality or merit, scrupulously organized like literally nothing else in his life has ever been. Which is, of course, also deeply embarrassing, but in a way that’s hard to exploit because he has exactly no shame about it and he always has at least one backup squirreled away so she can’t even threaten to delete it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lastly: There might be nothing funnier to me than the idea of Hanzo doing the social stealth part of the whole ninja bit. Entirely competent (because he would never allow himself to be anything less) but also wearing the most long-suffering FML face once the dupe’s back is turned? — yes good. Title is from a Tom Waits song because I am incorrigible and none of you can stop me.

#overwatch #mchanzo #hanzo shimada #jesse mccree #young mchanzo #my writing #Perhaps there is still a future for anachronisms #Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse #I'm really sorry if the @s don't go through -- I tried my best but I can't get them to work I think?? thank you guys anyway <3

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onimiman · 7 years ago

Text

I Should Have Seen This Coming...

After reading various articles and watching several videos that have been revolving around themes such as nihilism and cynicism that have been interpreted to be core traits in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it strikes me that this is something I should have seen coming around the time I heard that Rian Johnson had been the one to not only direct this film but also single-handedly write it, and it makes me wonder why, in retrospect, Lucasfilm thought this guy was a great choice to direct a Star Wars movie beyond the mere visuals.

I remember back when The Force Awakens was announced and a director had yet to be hired, so certain names were floated around, like Joss Whedon, Guillermo del Toro, etc.; you know, directors who would make sense to direct a Star Wars movie, what with their prior experiences in the sci-fi/fantasy genres. But two particular names that were floated around for potential directors for TFA were David Fincher and, of course, Rian Johnson, and these were names that struck me as odd considering their bodies of work.

Granted, between Fincher and Johnson, the latter still makes more sense to direct a Star Wars film (and I still stand by that even after the debacle that is TLJ), but I’ll get into why Johnson shouldn’t have been involved in TLJ in the first place. But for now, let’s get into why Fincher would have been an, if not terrible then, inappropriate choice for a Star Wars film. Now David Fincher is no stranger to sci-fi; his directorial debut, Alien 3, demonstrates that even when his efforts were hampered by studio executives from crafting a story worthy of the Alien franchise, he knew how to direct a film like that. And the thing was, no matter what you think about Alien 3′s quality, that film is, through and through, a bleak, nihilistic film that very much captures the spirit and tone of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece and then some. Then, when you look at several of Fincher’s other works (namely, his adaptations of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl), the themes of nihilism and pessimism continue to pepper his work, as these core traits are things that Fincher carries from his own personality and worldview into his craft. So I bring all this up about Fincher because when I heard that people (if not Disney/Lucasfilm execs, then people in general) were thinking about him as a possible contender to direct TFA because of his technical skills and experience, I thought, “No, the views that he brings into his work would be totally contrary to what Star Wars is about, which is about, among other things, persistent hope and heroism even in the face of the bleakest of times.”

Then we get to Rian Johnson. Now the works from Johnson I have seen were his episodes of Breaking Bad (Fly, Fifty-One [the episode where Heisenberg and co. pull the train robbery], and Ozymandias [the episode where Hank dies and Walter’s life completely falls apart) and his 2012 film Looper. Now the commonality between all of these works, and which brings a connection between him and Fincher beyond being potential directors for TFA, are themes such as nihilism, brutality, and pessimism, especially in areas where things fall apart. And also like Fincher’s Alien 3, Johnson’s Looper is a science-fiction film that incorporates such dour, depressing themes into its story, and imo, how he incorporated those themes into Looper, and especially in his episodes of Breaking Bad (which, of course, he didn’t write) worked well for that film and definitely those episodes.

However, it was because of Looper that made me wonder why he would be considered an appropriate candidate to direct TFA, and it really got me scratching my head once he actually got the job of writing and directing TLJ. I thought, “Well, this’ll be a departure from how he would do things.” But then the movie comes out, and when themes like failure and, yes, nihilism are brought up by fans on sites like this and YouTube, it becomes more apparent to me that Johnson was a mistake to write and direct a Star Wars movie. How he incorporates the themes he wishes to discuss are so out of line with what Star Wars is actually about and it certainly makes the characters included in this movie act OOC from how they were previously established in the prior films (I’m looking at you, Luke).

Quite frankly, outside of someone like David Fincher, it would be like if one decided to hire an arthouse director to direct a superhero action movie. I can’t imagine someone like Paul Thomas Anderson, who made such dramatic films like 2012′s The Master and 2002′s Punch Drunk Love, to direct an Avengers movie (which is interesting since he has professed to actually liking superhero/sci-fi action films, yet never directs them). Or how about David Lynch, an arthouse director who’s made movies like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, direct a Star Wars fil...

Wait... he was considered to direct Return of the Jedi?

WTF?

So I think the conclusion to be made here is this: In spite of the success of TLJ on both the commercial and (professionally) critical sides, if Lucasfilm and Disney hope to have Star Wars continue to be a long-lasting franchise, they must be careful with who they write and direct their films for the future, because a nihilistic pessimist like Rian Johnson would be so inappropriate to the point that they could damage the franchise, as Johnson has done with TLJ. And I speak as a nihilistic pessimist myself, and there are places that can explore such themes in fiction (i.e. Watchmen); hell, I could even see a Star Wars movie working with that PROVIDED THAT IT RECEIVES THE PROPER FOCUS. What do I mean by this? Well, pessimism and nilihism could work in a film focusing on, say, the criminal element of SW, like Jabba the Hutt or Boba Fett; a side element, if you will. But to have this sort of realism in the main saga of Star Wars, where bright, optimistic characters like Luke Skywalker are faced with bleak and grim situations yet soldier through them scarred but alive on both a physical and emotional level, is not productive to the main Star Wars saga.

@blue-mint-winter

#star wars #the last jedi

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theteenagetrickster · 5 years ago

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'It's a war zone': why is a generation of rappers dying young? | Music | The Guardian

It could seem insensitive, yet Jacob Thureson's moms and dads, Erik and Judy, were actually certainly not also worried when they found out about his latest overdose. It had taken place a number of times currently as well as the 18-year-old rap artist had actually constantly created it out of hospital in one piece. Thureson, that executed under the label Hella Sketchy, was actually one of the surge of emo-influenced snare rappers that arised utilizing the popular music system SoundCloud. He had just recently transferred coming from the family home in Texas to Los Angeles after being authorized to Atlantic Records.

As Erik steered to work, he cycled by means of a mental list of possibilities: a lot more inpatient treatment? Thureson had actually been to rehab, two times. Ketamine therapy?

There would be no further program. Not long after Erik left behind for job, Judy obtained another telephone call. Things were actually really negative, as well as they ought to pertain to the medical facility right now. Fourteen times later, on 27 June 2019, Thureson died.

Numerous younger rap artists have passed away before couple of years. Mac computer Miller perished in 2018 aged 26 after taking in cocaine and also bogus oxycodone including the man-made opioid fentanyl. Lil Squeak died at 21 in 2017-- an accidental fentanyl and Xanax overdose. Extract WRLD passed away late in 2013 after a drug-induced seizure aboard a private plane. It is felt he accepted various Percocet supplements in an effort to conceal them as cops robbed the aircraft. On New Year's Time, an uncommon women fatality: Minnesota rapper Lexii Alijai, the target of however another unexpected fentanyl overdose.

Together with these fatalities by accident, there are the victims of intense unlawful act. Despite being implicated of dreadful misuse by an ex-partner, XXXTentacion delighted in enormous popularity just before being gotten rid of in 2018 aged 20 as he was actually robbed outside a Florida bike car dealership. Pittsburgh rap artist Jimmy Wopo-- proclaimed as the inheritor to local forefathers Wiz Khalifa and Macintosh Miller-- was gotten rid of in a drive-by capturing the exact same day. Pair of full weeks eventually, 21-year-old Canadian rap artist and also Drake tourmate Smoke Dawg was actually eliminated outside a Toronto club. In March 2019, Nipsey Hussle was shot lifeless outside his Los Angeles clothes establishment.

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rounded-icon block-share __ product block-share __ item-- twitter js-blockshare-link" href=" https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text='It's%20a%20war%20zone'%3A%20why%20is%20a%20generation%20of%20rappers%20dying%20young%3F&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmusic%2F2020%2Fjan%2F31%2Fwar-zone-music-industry-confronts-a-generation-of-rappers-dying-young%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-2%23img-2" aim at =" _ blank" data-link-name=" social twitter" > Twitter Pinterest Several of these rap artists interacted with their very own mortality in verses that spoke about fatality, medicines and also depression. Fatality is actually almost everywhere in SoundCloud rap: the genre's off the record logo design is actually a drop. Smokepurpp presented in a coffin in the art pieces for his mixtape Deadstar, and also Peep-- typically called the Kurt Cobain of his generation being obligated to pay to his cherubic face, placid method and also dedication to his ever-spiralling nihilism-- intoned:" Everyone tellin' me life's short,

yet I wan na die," on his 2017 monitor The Brightside. Looking at such lyrics, you might sensibly conclude that these rap artists intended to pass away. Yet while a few of them carried out encounter mental disease and also dependency, their fatality desire was as a lot of an aesthetic as the pink hair and also face tattoos. Why performed the nihilistic position end up being a self-fulfilling revelation, finishing the everyday lives of youthful folks barely out of their adolescents? And what may be performed to prevent it? One complication hinges on the technique these rappers 'jobs have actually constructed along with remarkable velocity. While earlier productions of entertainers may spend years gigging before being spotted, DO-IT-YOURSELF rap celebrities have circumvented the file business's gatekeepers to accumulate wealth and excellence-- typically while still in their adolescents-- leaving all of them battling to adjust to unexpected fame." Peep went coming from having no supervisor to being managed through a large business that takes care of prominent performers, as well as with that said happened more funds as well as even more stress," claims his friend and also collaborator Adam McIlwee, who executes as Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. The rap game isn't like every other industry. There are a considerable amount of weapons and also bullets flying around In a sector that is actually ruthlessly committed to uncovering the popular new point, pastoral treatment could be void. Tape tags often do not look after regarding these rappers." They understand that when they're carried out, the upcoming SoundCloud or Instagram rap artist is responsible for all of them," mentions Calvin Emoticon, a specialist in hip-hop as well as social compensation at Seeker University in New York City. On an also much more negative details, he concerns why Juice WRLD was actually carrying his medicines personally. "I have actually been actually around hip-hop performers, and also the rule of finger is that there is actually a close friend that carries the medications as well as takes the loss," Smiley claims." You ponder: where were his trainers? Where were actually people providing him direction?" The function of control is additionally happening under scrutiny. Peep's mother, Liza Womack, is filing a claim against Very first Gain access to Entertainment, who managed the rap artist. She asserts that they encouraged substance abuse on Lil Peep's ultimate scenic tour, would certainly obtain medicines for him, and also drove the rapper beyond excess of "what a person of his age and maturation level could possibly take care of psychologically, emotionally, as well as physically".( First Get Access To Home entertainment carried out not reply to an ask for comment, yet in a legal submitting possesses mentioned its own negotiations along with Peep were actually" simply of a company attribute as well as certainly not the kind of exclusive connection generating a private task of treatment".) McIlwee claims that Squeak had a fight along with his monitoring not long before he passed away. "I know there was a show he did certainly not wish to participate in for whatever main reason-- as well as [the drug-taking] was him simply presenting the globe he didn't truly care." McIlwee claims that labels and also control need to give performers time to recuperate." If your musician remains in trouble, you possess to come in and mention it is actually opportunity to take a go back or re-evaluate the release routine, the touring," he says. "So the artist may obtain healthy and balanced as well as possess a long profession. That does not take place much, because long careers are boring."

There are actually signs that lessons are being actually learned. Giuseppe Zappala of Galactic Records manages Lil Tecca, the 17-year-old SoundCloud wunderkind whose track Ransom money hit No 4 in the United States and also has actually collected greater than 650m plays on Spotify. He has actually found out to check out Tecca's state of minds thoroughly: if the young rapper seems overtired, Zappala is going to remove the timetables. He makes certain that Tecca contends minimum a time off between shows and also scenic tours final no more than five weeks. In some cases he carries chefs while driving to guarantee he is actually consuming well. Sleep is another priority, although there is actually a limit to what Zappala can possibly do, considered that Tecca is a teenager. "There will certainly be actually opportunities when Tec would like to go to the workshop until 8am," Zappala sighs. "I claim: 'That might certainly not make the best sense, considering that you have actually obtained a show tomorrow at 1pm.' It concerns trying to instil routine in him."

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4.804-2.693 4.804-6.298 C22 10.54 19.763 8 16.363 8" > Pinterest Youthful rap artists can deal with merely as much pressure from outside the sector:" The atmospheres where these children happen coming from-- it's not a fairy tale way of living, "claims Taylor Maglin, that found out Wopo and handled him until his fatality." It's a battle area, you recognize? Rivals receive created, adversaries acquire made." He strongly believes that Wopo was actually killed through disaffected members of a competing group, that were actually envious of his excellence. (Wopo was presumably a member of the Mountain District gang 11 Hunnit, as well as was actually name-checked in a police denunciation not long after his death.) XXXTentacion's attorney, David Bogenschutz, mentions the rap artist had" been worried that an individual would certainly kidnap or even eliminate him. He was generating cash as well as notoriety." The day XXXTentacion was actually fired, it is thought he was haunted coming from his financial institution to the motorbike dealer." The rap video game isn't such as any type of various other business," mentions manufacturer Jimmy Duval, that teamed up with XXX. "There are a bunch of guns as well as bullets soaring around." Smiley says that hip-hop's connections along with medicines has altered" definitely ". Earlier ages of rappers utilized medicines as a device to build up wide range, talking about marketing all of them as a means out of destitution, instead of using anesthetics on their own( club weed and alcohol). When excellence got here, drugs were actually utilized as a social signifier: video depicting dining tables sighing with containers of Hennessy and also cocaine-dusted exemplifies. That truth has actually switched to a much more ostentatious kind of glamorisation. You need to perform 24/7, since every little thing has to do with likes, shares as well as awaiting just how lots of fans you possess A transforming point came with the spin of the 2010s, when rapper Juicy J aided popularise healthy, then the medicine of selection in Houston's diced and also turned songs arena. An addicting and also risky concoction of soft drink, goodie and prescribed coughing mixture containing opium, recommendations to lean oozed right into rap: Lil Wayne celebrates it, Youthful Criminal freely drinks it during job interviews, as well as Juice WRLD mentioned he was motivated to try healthy after listening closely to Future. Roddy Ricch's favorite keep track of Package, presently the United States No 1, has an anthemic chorus with a product line regarding consuming slim to" receive idle". Rappers also began striking event drugs like MDMA as well as drug, and also the prescription medicines OxyContin, Xanax and also Percocet. Future commemorates" molly, Perocets" in his 2015 smash Cover-up Off. (" That is actually a horrible combo of medications," says Duval of Disguise Off:" The entire hook is you having a fucking cardiac arrest.") The rap artist Lil Pump presented along with a Xanax-shaped cake to celebrate connecting with 1 million fans on Instagram, an especially brain-dead feat given that fake prescription medicines having fentanyl have been blamed for the 10-fold increase in opioid-related deaths in the United States in between 2013 as well as 2018. A lifestyle of performative excess began to strangle the performance, checked out via the panopticon of social networks, which encourages risk-taking practices, points out : "You need to perform 24/7, since every little thing is about likes, allotments as well as adding up the amount of followers you possess." Thureson uploaded online videos of himself consuming bank on Instagram; when his parents faced him, he claimed it was actually purple Gatorade. "He told me it was actually simply the society," his mum, Judy, says. Peep positioned along with prescribed supplements on his tongue hrs just before he perished.

Braden L Morgan, known as developer Nedarb Nagrom, was Peep's flatmate for three years. He strongly believes Squeak over used medicines to reduce the tensions of touring, which he despised, which hangers-on supplying him medicines made traits worse. "He was definitely good and will okay every thing, thus he would certainly carry out whatever anybody gave him. And also as he received a lot more prominent, more folks intended to be his good friend, so they gave him the stuff much more" He calls Peep's death an awful mishap. "He received unlucky. I believe that if he hadn't passed away, he was mosting likely to loosen up."

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Twitter Pinterest After plenty of deaths, a ruthless comedown."After Peep passed away, a lot of individuals quit partying on a daily basis," claims Morgan. He has actually observed medicine make use of tail off one of the younger rappers he makes; Lil Pump and also Smokepurpp introduced they were stopping Xanax following Squeak's death. "The more youthful youngsters do not do things as a lot, since they find all the crap that occurred in the last few years." For those who carry out still enjoy, drug-testing kits are actually becoming popular. "No person was actually evaluating drugs just before Squeak passed away," says Morgan.

There are actually promising evidence that the rap culture is actually beginning to course-correct. "There's sufficient of a bad taste in everybody's oral cavity that stating, 'go come a molly' does not really feel now," says Duval. The retaliation has been actually rumbling for an even though: J Cole's 2018 diss path 1985 was actually cutting concerning SoundCloud rappers. "They wan na find you wipe, they wan na view you put a tablet/ They wan na view you tattooed coming from your skin to your heels."

As the analgesic cosmetic comes to be less fashionable, rappers are actually becoming more mindful of the notification they are actually delivering to followers. Musicians including Isaiah Rashad, Lucki, Travis Scott and also Danny Brown have actually communicated out regarding prescription medicine dependency. Sacramento rapper Mozzy has recommended his followers to quit lean. Lucki, taken into consideration through some to be actually the father of SoundCloud rap, talks in Freewave 3 concerning his mama finding the impact of bank on his kidneys. Also Lil Xan, conveniently very most high-handed performer within this team, has taken into consideration transforming his name.

'Immobilize the ache with the funds': exactly how hip-hop turned nihilistic

Find out more.

As Miller performed in his most significant hit, it is actually time to lastly start practising some self-care. But the worry ought to not be up to people: as tags as well as control exploit this surge, they have to take more significant duty for performer well-being. "You have to prioritise their health and wellness and also joy and happiness before popular music or even fame," says Zappala. "It is actually hard being a prosperous musician, not recognizing whether the individuals around you possess genuine intentions."

His objectives for Tecca are crystal clear. "I am actually heading to create Tec right into an artist that has a 10, 15-year job," claims Zappala. "When he's 30, he's still heading to be actually appropriate."

This content was originally published here.

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nothingman · 7 years ago

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South Park turns 20 years old this summer, meaning that if those foulmouthed, crudely fashioned 8-year-olds that were first introduced on August 13, 1997 followed the rules of linear time, they’d all be adults farting down the barrel of 30. Similarly, there’s now an entire generation of people—spanning high-schoolers to middle-aged people who remember watching its early seasons in college, and who can’t believe they’re reading/writing 20-year retrospectives on it now—who were actually raised on South Park.

The show celebrated this existential crisis-inducing fact last year with a tongue-in-cheek ad, depicting South Park as a sort of benevolent guarantor keeping reliable watch over a girl from infancy until her first trip to college. It was a typically self-effacing joke, but it’s true: Our world is now filled with people for whom South Park has always been there, a cultural influence that, in some cases, is completely foundational to their point of view. The ad doesn’t end with the girl logging onto Twitter to complain that social justice warriors are ruining the world, but otherwise, spot on.

After all, for most of its 20 years, South Park’s own point of view has more or less been this: “Everything and everyone are full of shit—hey, relax, guy.” It’s a scorched-earth, deconstructionist approach steeped in equal-opportunity offensiveness that’s made South Park one of the funniest satires ever produced, and particularly potent in the time in which it debuted. “When we started, [it was] Beavis And Butt-Head, and us, and in some ways The Simpsons, and Married With Children—shit like that,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair last year, putting the Comedy Central cartoon in the company of other ’90s series that diverged from the “bland… shitty sitcoms that were just so lifeless” Stone and co-creator Trey Parker were reacting against. But South Park has now lived long enough to see the experimental become the conventional. And it’s outlasted all but one of those series not just by subverting formulaic TV, but by feeding directly off current events. As a result, for many of those raised by South Park, the show has functioned as sort of a scatological op-ed—in some cases, maybe the only op-ed they’ve ever been interested in.

To these acolytes, Parker and Stone have spent two decades preaching a philosophy of pragmatic self-reliance, a distrust of elitism, in all its compartmentalized forms, and a virulent dislike of anything that smacks of dogma, be it organized religion, the way society polices itself, or whatever George Clooney is on his high horse about. Theirs can be a tricky ideology to pin down: “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals,” Stone said once, a quote that has reverberated across the scores of articles, books, and message-board forums spent trying to parse the duo’s politics, arguing over which side can rightfully claim South Park as its own. Nominally, Parker and Stone are libertarians, professing a straight-down-the-middle empathy for the little guy who just wants to be left alone by meddling political and cultural forces. But their only true allegiance is to whatever is funniest; their only tenet is that everything and everyone has the potential to suck equally. More than anything, they’ve taught their most devoted followers that taking anything too seriously is hella lame.

So while they’ve advocated, in their own fucked-up way, for stuff like the right to abortion, drug legalization, and general tolerance for others, they’ve also found their biggest, easiest targets in liberalism’s pet causes, those formerly rebellious ideals that had become safely sitcom-bland over the Bill Clinton years—all of which were steeped in actually, lamely caring about stuff. Taking the piss out of the era’s priggish, speech-policing, Earth Day-brainwashed hippies was the most transgressive—and therefore funniest—thing you could possibly do. And so, South Park joked, global warming is just a dumb myth perpetrated by “super cereal” losers. Prius drivers are smug douches who love the smell of their own farts. Vegetarians end up growing vaginas on their face. “Transgender people” are just mixed-up, surgical abominations. The word “fag” is fine. Casual anti-Semitism is all in good fun. “Hate crimes” are silly. Maybe all you pussies just need a safe space.

“Did South Park accidentally invent the alt-right?” Janan Ganesh asked recently in the Financial Times, articulating a theory that began gaining traction as an entire political movement seemed to crystallize around the show’s “anti-PC chic” and general fuck-your-feelings attitude. Way back in 2001, political blogger Andrew Sullivan had already coined the term “South Park Republican” to describe the supposedly emerging group of young people who, like the show, were moderate on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but also rejected the stuffy doctrines of diversity and environmentalism. They also believed, as Parker and Stone would soon illustrate in Team America: World Police, that the world needed American dicks to fuck assholes, over the objections of liberal pussies and F.A.G. celebrities. That voting bloc never actually materialized—though to be fair, the show was only four years old at the time. It would take at least another decade of people with Cartman avatars just joshin’ about hating Jews before the South Park generation would truly come of age.

Let’s be real, though. South Park didn’t “invent” the “alt-right,” even accidentally. The “alt-right” is the product of lots of things—disenfranchisement; internet echo chambers; aggrieved Gamergaters; boredom; the same ugly, latent racism that’s coursed beneath civilization’s veneer for millennia; etc. The growing, bipartisan distaste for Wall Street-backed career politicians and the epically bungled machinations of the Democratic Party certainly didn’t help, nor did the frustrating inability of the social justice movement to pick its battles—or its enemies. Furthermore, it’s always dangerous to assign too much influence to pop culture, even something that’s been part of our lives for this long. And as South Park itself derided in “The Tale Of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” you shouldn’t go looking for deep sociopolitical messages in your cartoon dick jokes. (Then again, only three years earlier, it also argued that imaginary characters really can change people’s lives and even “change the way [you] act on Earth,” making them “more realer” than any of us—so you decide.)

Still, it’s not that much of a stretch to see how one might have fed the other, if only through the sort of intangible osmosis that happens whenever an influential artwork spawns imitators, both on screen and off. South Park may not have “invented” the “alt-right,” but at their roots are the same bored, irritated distaste for politically correct wokeness, the same impish thrill at saying the things you’re not supposed to say, the same button-pushing racism and sexism, now scrubbed of all irony.

There’s also the same co-opting of anti-liberal stances as the highest possible form of rebellion: Parker and Stone used to brag that they were “punk rock” for telling their Hollywood friends how much they loved George W. Bush; Parker even told Rolling Stone in 2007, “The only way to be more hardcore than everyone else is to tell the people who think they’re the most hardcore that they’re pussies, to go up to a tattooed, pierced vegan and say, ‘Whatever, you tattooed faggot, you’re a pierced faggot and whatever’”—a quote that may as well have been taken from 4chan’s /pol/ board this morning. “Conservatism is the new punk rock,” echoed a bunch of human cringes a decade later. Whatever, you faggot, a dozen Pepes tweeted a few seconds ago.

But well beyond the “alt-right,” South Park’s influence echoes through every modern manifestation of the kind of hostile apathy—nurtured along by Xbox Live shit-talk and comment-board flame wars and Twitter—that’s mutated in our cultural petri dish to create a rhetorical world where whoever cares, loses. Today, everyone with any kind of grievance probably just has sand in their vagina; expressing it with anything beyond a reaction GIF means you’re “whining”; cry more, your tears are delicious. We live in Generation U Mad Bro, and from its very infancy, South Park has armed it with enough prefab eye-rolling retorts (“ManBearPig!” “I’m a dolphin!” “Gay Fish!” “…’Member?”) to sneeringly shut down discussions on everything from climate change and identity politics to Kanye West and movie reboots. Why not? Everything sucks equally, anyway. Voting is just choosing between some Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Bullying is just a part of life. Suck it up and take it, until it’s your turn to do the bullying. Relax, guy.

Again, it’s a world that South Park didn’t create intentionally, just by setting out to make us laugh, or by Parker and Stone trying to get rich off a bunch of farting construction paper cutouts. But even Parker and Stone seem slightly, if only occasionally uneasy about the overarching life lessons they’ve imparted—often expressing that anxiety in the show itself. In “You’re Getting Old,” South Park’s most moving half-hour, Parker and Stone grappled directly with the cumulative effects of perpetually shitting on things—of allowing a healthy, amused skepticism to ossify into cynicism and self-satisfied superiority, then into nihilism, then into blanket, misanthropic hatred. That dark night of the soul later formed the through-lines of seasons 19 and 20, where South Park wryly, semi-sincerely confronted the series’ place as a “relic from another time” by putting the town under the heavy thumb of PC Principal.

Then—after hooking its red-pilled fans with an extended critique of the emptiness of neoliberalism, epitomized by a sneering, “safe space”-mocking character that was literally named Reality—it tried confronting the audience who had most embraced their ramped-up anti-PC crusades. Last season kicked off with Cartman admitting to Kyle, “We’re two privileged, straight white boys who have their laughs about things we never had to deal with,” a confession rendered only slightly tongue-in-cheek by the fact of who was saying it. And it culminated in Gerald, who’d spent the year gleefully harassing people online, squaring off with the Danish prime minister, a stand-in for every troll the show’s ever nurtured:

I want to stand here and tell you that you and I are different, but it’s not true. All we’ve been doing is making excuses for being horrible people. I don’t know if you tried to teach me a lesson, but you have. I have to stand here and look at you. And all I see is a big fat reflection of myself.

Ultimately, of course, Gerald comes to a familiar conclusion: “Fuck you, what I do is fucking funny, bitch!” he cries, before kicking the prime minister in the balls. Fair enough. South Park is, and always will be, funnier than any of the maladjusted creeps who have spent decades internalizing the show’s many false equivalencies and ironic racism, then lazily regurgitating them in an attempt to mimic its edginess—or worse, by treating them as some sort of scripture for living. And to be certain, there are millions of Poe’s law-defying viewers for whom South Park really is just a comedy, one that satisfies the most basic requirement of saying the things you shouldn’t say, in a far more clever way than you could say them. But regardless of their satirical intent, or the humanity that grounds even their nastiest attacks, it’s clear that even Parker and Stone sometimes question the influence they’ve had on the world, and who is and isn’t in on the joke.

Which brings us (as all 2017 articles must) to Donald Trump, the ultimate troll, and one that Parker sees as a natural outgrowth of South Park’s appeal to a nation bored with politeness. As he recently told the Los Angeles Times:

He’s not intentionally funny but he is intentionally using comedic art to propel himself. The things that we do—being outrageous and taking things to the extreme to get a reaction out of people—he’s using those tools. At his rallies he gets people laughing and whooping. I don’t think he’s good at it. But it obviously sells—it made him president.

Trump’s blithe offensiveness, rampant narcissism, and faith that everyone but him is stupid makes him a natural analog to Eric Cartman. But instead, South Park made him into Mr. Garrison—a decision that makes some logical sense (Mr. Garrison is of constitutional age, hates Mexicans and women, and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself), though it also felt a bit like dissembling. Nevertheless, as the election wore on, South Park again seemed to acknowledge its role in helping to create a world where someone like Trump could seem like an exciting, entertaining alternative to conventional blandness. And it made a real, concerted effort to stymie any suggestion of support by having Garrison declare repeatedly that he was “a sick, angry little man” who “will fuck this country up beyond repair,” all while openly mocking those who still loved him anyway as nostalgia-drunk idiots.

“Is it just me or has South Park gone full cuck?” wondered fans on Reddit’s The_Donald immediately after that episode aired, and probably not for the first (or last) time. But in the aftermath of Trump/Garrison’s election, those same, vigilant cuck-watchers were back to crowing over how South Park had really stuck it to politically correct types in a scene where Trump/Garrison tells PC Principal, “You helped create me.” That South Park positioned this as less of a triumphant comeuppance than a suicidal backfire didn’t seem to matter. And the show more or less left it there—portraying Trump/Garrison as a dangerously incompetent buffoon, but also as the ultimate “u mad?” to all those liberals they fucking hate.

All of which makes Parker and Stone’s recent declaration to lay off Trump in the coming 21st season a real disappointment at best, cowardice at worst. The duo is, of course, under no obligation to tackle politics—or anything else they don’t want to, for that matter. They’re also right that mocking Trump is both redundant and “boring,” and also that everyone does it. For two dyed-in-the-wool contrarians, Trump comedy feels every bit as bland, lifeless, and sitcom-safe as an episode of, say, Veronica’s Closet. Furthermore, Parker’s complaints of the show just “becoming CNN now” and not wanting to spend every week endlessly restacking the sloppy Jenga pile of Trump-related outrage is completely understandable. Believe me, I get it.

That said: Man, what a cop out. South Park has already spent the past 20 years being CNN for its CNN-hating audience. Meanwhile, Parker and Stone have proudly, loudly thumped for a “fearless” brand of satire that’s willing to mock everyone from George W. Bush to Scientology to Mormonism to Muhammad, even under death threats. To shrug now and say, as Parker did, “I don’t give a shit anymore”—right when, by their own admission, the influence of the show’s worldview has reached all the way to the White House—feels especially disingenuous, and suspiciously like caving to the young, Trump-loving fans with whom they have forged such an uneasy relationship. (“South Park bends the knee on their fake-news-fueled portrayal of President Trump,” one The_Donald post gloated, followed by many, many more.) If they truly believe that those trolls in the mirror are “horrible people” who are helping to “fuck the country up beyond repair,” it would be truly fearless to tell them why, with no hint of ambiguous, everything-sucks irony that can be willfully misinterpreted.

Instead, Parker now says he’s eager to get back to “the bread and butter of South Park: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous.” Which is great! South Park is absolutely at its best when it focuses on that stuff, and I look forward to watching it all on my hurting butt. Still, after 20 years, even they seem to realize that many of those ridiculous, outrageous kids for whom it’s “always been there” have long since grown up—and some of them have gone on to do some real, destructive adult shit. Like their inspirations, South Park’s generation of trolls are tiny but loud, and they’ve had the strange effect of changing the world. It sure would be nice if South Park would grow up as well and take responsibility for them.

Or, you know, maybe I just have sand in my vagina.

via A.V. Club

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