#i thought i could go without makin a salt post but alas

[jennrypan]

If you have to make your characters ooc to make your other character a good villain.

THEY ARENT A GOOD VILLAIN.

YOURE A SHITTY WRITER AND NEED TO REWATCH YOUR OWN SHIT.

It makes nooo sense why everytime Lilas on screen she makes characters act completely different and it adds to the salt despite various things stacking against her what the fuuuuuck.

I was rooting for the season to not bring up so much dumb ass salt but here we are and to no surprise its about Lila again.

And now people are gonna start shipping her[Marinette] with Damian or some shit and shes gonna be completely void of her actual character traits. God dammit.

[angels-heap]

Peeping your tags, got any spare Lauren headcanons you could share ˁ˙˟˙ˀ

Oh god, I have enough extremely niche and specific Lauren headcanons bouncing around in my head to write at least two fics, but since I have decided not to write them for Fandom Bullshit Reasons, I’ve been shoving as many of them as possible into The Ghost in You instead.

But without spoiling that fic too much (or making anyone who hasn’t read it feel compelled to do so), here are a few miscellaneous tidbits from my mountains of unused fic notes and outlines:

Lauren worked in the Sector C cafeteria at Black Mesa, and that’s where she met Barney (and eventually Gordon, aka “Ponytail Guy,” the new guy from AnMat who only drank black coffee and never talked to anyone). Barney took Ponytail Guy’s reputation as a challenge, and thus, a beautiful friendship was born.

She liked to dance to old-timey jazz music and also had a bit of a houseplant hoarding problem. Secretly, Barney suspected that the main reason she moved in with him was that his dorm had windows to let in natural light.

Like Barney, Lauren was a huge conspiracy theorist. Unlike Barney, she thought the weird shit going on at Black Mesa was way more interesting than aliens and cryptids. She was able to take advantage of the relative invisibility her service job afforded her to snoop around during her off hours. Maybe she shouldn’t have done that.

Lauren’s behind-the-scenes meddling almost definitely prevented Gordon from being transferred to the Lambda Complex (and possibly disappearing under mysterious and highly classified circumstances) prior to the resonance cascade. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to know if that was a good call or a very, very bad one.

As I mentioned in the tags of this post, Lauren 100% picked up on the subtle homoerotic tension between Barney and Gordon pretty quickly, even though they were both deep in denial. Alas, she ran out of time to encourage them to act on it. Her thoughts on the whole situation ranged from “hilarious” to “kinda hot,” depending on the context.

Case in point: She and Barney once got really drunk together and decided they should both get one “hall pass” to sleep with another person, no questions asked, without it being considered cheating. They wrote their choices down on little pieces of paper and swapped them. Hers was Leonardo DiCaprio. Barney’s was Gordon. He later denied this, but unbeknownst to him, she kept the paper.

Bonus! I managed to find an old outline file for The Ghost in You. Enjoy(?) these snippets of half-written/half-outlined backstory that didn’t make it into the final draft of Chapter 10:

Gordon then proceeded to reveal Lauren’s best-kept open cooking secret to an astonished Barney. (“She just used Lawry’s instead of regular salt in recipes and put it on everything! How did you never pick up on that? You literally shared a kitchen, Barn! She kept the bottle in plain sight!”)

“She was kinda the black sheep of her family,” Barney continued; if he’d noticed his friends’ concern, he chose not to acknowledge it. “She grew up pretty comfortable”—Gordon briefly interrupted with a snort, suggesting that that was an understatement—"but her folks cut her off when she decided she didn’t wanna follow in their footsteps and become a soulless fuckin’ lawyer. She wound up getting a sociology degree at the University of New Mexico because it was the only place she could afford on her own, and…” He trailed off and narrowed his eyes. “Gordon’s makin’ his ‘sociology isn’t a real science’ face, isn’t he?”

[Alyx] also couldn’t help but giggle at Gordon’s absolute disgust for the way Lauren and Barney had shared some kind of cookies called Oreos. (“He’d lick all the cream off and then hand her the soggy cookie part and she’d just pop it into her mouth! It was barbaric!” “Pssh… how is that different from how you and I shared cupcakes at office parties, huh?” “Are you… are you telling me you didn’t scrape the icing off of those with a knife!?...”)  

(Much like the infamous movie theater “handjob seats” in It’s Only Natural, the Oreo anecdote was, unfortunately, based on an insane thing I actually witnessed in my real life.)

So, there you go. You asked for headcanons and you got the ghosts of my abandoned WIPs. I hope this was at least slightly entertaining in some way. And thank you so much for giving me an excuse to ramble about this!