#i very definitely feel like making gifsets of a bunch of movies now

[musicalfilm]

My absolute favourite thing about returning to this blog after a few years and getting into musical films again is finding out how many of the old ones have been released on Blu-ray in the meantime. There used to be so many movies that I never even attempted to gif because I only had them in potato quality. That’s still the case for some (especially if they don’t star one of the major performers) but... The Pirate! For Me and My Gal! Gosh I’m so happy. Not even sure how much I’ll get back into gif-making because I don’t have much time but even just rewatching these movies in good quality is such a different experience altogether. Anyway, just a random observation haha.

[hacash]

Series asks:

• The Terror

• The Musketeers

• the last movie you watched

Marvellously the last film I watched was LOTR, which makes this beautifully easy! Also I want to sue for making me choose just one husband-candidate from the Terror character list, this is nothing but pure biphobia.

The Terror

Character I’d want as a best friend. - Depending on my mood it would either be Bridgens (sweet, gentle, loves books, will clearly be a comforting presence) or Fitzjames (gossipy, kinda bitchy, would enjoy drag brunch and hopefully sharing his fabulous wardrobe with me).

Character I’d want as a parent. – I was going to say MacDonald, as he’s just so nice and dry-witted and shaped like kindness, but honestly one of the fundamental rules of life is that you can't think your parent is hot and Charles Edwards remains an absolute dish, so it's gonna have to be Captain 'Grumpy Pants' Crozier here.

Character I’d want as a sibling. - Irving, my troubled dweeby little baby queer: I have so many queer Christian groups to share with you.

Character I’d want as a significant other. – SOL TOZER. LOOK AT MY TAGS. THIS MUCH IS APPARENT. He's loyal, he's snarky, he's genuinely protective of his men, he's the hottest one of the bunch and clearly takes orders well: which is basically my dream husband. Because I'm greedy I will also dub Fitzjames and Hartnell as very close runners-up: two absolute Good Eggs who also happen to be very pretty.

Character I’d want as a child. – Honest to God, if I could pop baby Thomas Evans into a sling like a baby kangaroo and carry him around all day, I would, with his curls and his pinchable cheeks and his heartbreaking loyalty to his buddies.

Character I’d want as a weird inlaw. – There is only one possible right answer for this, and that answer is Thomas ‘Monsterfucker’ Blanky.

BBC Musketeers

Character I’d want as a best friend. - Porthos, 100% the best musketeers of the bunch.

Character I’d want as a parent. – Obviously Captain Treville; apparently a specific blorbo-type I have is ‘gruff figure of authority who would die for anyone under their command’ and Treville was definitely a foundational blorbo here.

Character I’d want as a sibling. - Sylvie only had a single series and I'm still gutted about it; not only do I think she'd be a great sibling but we could overthrow the government together.

Character I’d want as a significant other. – I didn't spend several years spamming your feeds with reams of d'Artagnan gifsets and meta not to dub him my honorary husband now.

Character I’d want as a child. – Aramis: granted he’s an adult man but I feel like he needs a full-time parent just to tell him what not to put his dick in.

Character I’d want as a weird inlaw. – Can you imagine going to family dinners and having Louis as an in-law? Those meals would be so messy, I would absolutely love that.

LOTR

Character I’d want as a best friend. – I would argue that pretty much the entire point of the trilogy is ‘you will never get a best friend better than Samwise Gamgee’, so obviously my answer’s gotta be Sam. We both like gardening, planting, being snarky little shits and loving Frodo Baggins so we’d probably get on.

Character I’d want as a parent. – Absolutely Theoden: Bernard Hill’s delivery of ‘no parent should ever have to bury their child’ ruined me twenty-two years ago and honestly I’ve never quite recovered. (He makes such a good dad!!)

Character I’d want as a sibling. – Boromir is the archetypal big brother; I would bond with him over adorable hobbits and being aspec so so much.

Character I’d want as a significant other. – My little eleven-year-old self’s crush on both Pippin and Merry was a significantly formative period in my life, so honestly, either of them. They’re both Good Eggs, we can bond over cooking, Pippin can make me laugh lots and Merry can compensate for my utter inability to plan anything ever.

Character I’d want as a child. – Those two adorable baby hobbit kiddos played by Peter Jackson's kids.

Character I’d want as a weird inlaw. – Gandalf is the only weird inlaw.

[madame-airlock]

I was tagged by @witchybitchybisexual

Hiiii! I am so sorry it's taken me forever to do this. I've been crazy busy with work and I've had very little time to answer. I hope it all make sense. Most of the answers were typed out while half asleep, throughout the week, and I may have gotten some episodes/seasons mixed up. Sorry and enjoy?

1. How did you find out about the show?

It was 7/8 years ago.

I'm pretty sure it was a gifset on Tumblr. I already knew Betty by fame so I knew this show would be good. If I remember correctly it was a gifset of the scene where Rose asks "do we have any orange juice left?" And Dorothy says "no we're all out" while pouring herself a glass of juice, followed by a bunch of comments about the show.

2. One storyline you’d eliminate?

It's been a while since I watched the show so I don't remember everything. I can't think of anything besides empty nest right now.

Either that or the one about Blanche's daughter's artificial insemination. I didn't enjoy that one that much.

It's not exactly a storyline, but I'd eliminate the amount of unnecessary comments both Rose and Dorothy got in the later seasons, for being dumb or ugly. I think they went a little too far.

3. Best guest star/character?

I have a soft spot for Jean and her episode 💜

4. Character you most relate to?

Rose, 100%. I'm not the brightest, like her, and I love animals.

5. Favourite character?

Blanche and Rose

6. Favourite story of a cast member?

As in, behind the scenes? The joke they played on the girls, where the photo albums had the crew's crazy photos in them (it's a Christmas episode, when Blanche gives the others calendars).

In the show? 72 hours, for the message it delivered.

7. Which was the episode that got you hooked?

There wasn't a specific one. I hit play and never stopped watching!

8. You could wear one girl’s wardrobe for the rest of your life, who would you pick?

Uhm, honestly? Nobody's 🙈

9. How many kids do you think they all actually had?

I lost count. Around 10-12 among the four of them? Maybe???

10. Do you think the actresses would’ve gotten along with their characters if they met in real life? Why/Why not?

I don't know much about Estelle and Rue to say it for certain, but I'd say yes, purely based on vibes.

11. What are your other comfort shows?

I'd say Nurse Jackie, but only the earlier seasons with O'Hara. I mostly have comfort movies, like the parent trap or the emperor's new groove.

12. Headcanons? (Feel free to list as many as you’d like)

And if I said Dorothy and Blanche secret bisexuals in love with each other? 🙈

If either of the girls is feeling down, the other two (minus Sophia) are probably ready to give her a cuddle and have an impromptu sleepover.

13. What would you change (if anything) about the show/ characters if it was set in the modern day?

Make Dorothy and Blanche girlfriends :D

14. Which other Fictional Characters would you like each one of the golden girls to meet?

I'm not sure tbh.

15. Who were your favourite duo?

Each pair had their moments, but I especially liked Rose and Dorothy or Rose and Blanche.

15. Who should’ve got more 1:1 screen time with each other?

Dorothy and Blanche, I think.

16. Calmest season?

I want to say the first one, maybe? I don't remember all the details

17. Most chaotic season?

Season 2, between Rose's love interests and the song contest, is definitely a crazy one. Although S7 had some solid episodes as well (sick and tired and the one about the murder mystery dinner)

18. Favorite Season?

Season 2 has most of my favourite episodes.

19. If the girls hadn’t had their established careers, what other ones could you picture them doing?

Rose: something with animals

Blanche: iirc she's a pretty good dancer, so maybe that?

Dorothy: I'd say a literature professor or something in academia

Sophia: maybe a cook?

20. Best aspects of the show in your opinion?

The way it tackled certain topics that are a taboo still to this day, and they mostly did it with care. Sure, not every joke has aged well, but most of them did! And even if there was conflict, it got solved. I'm thinking about Sophia's thoughts about Phil, for example, or the way Sophia and Rose acted in the AIDS scare episode.

21. (This question is for my fellow cheesecake lovers) favourite cheesecake flavour?

Plain with chocolate chips, with caramel sauce, with strawberry or raspberry sauce.

22. Storyline you wished they had expanded upon?

I know I've brought her name up way too many times already, but I'd have loved to see Jean coming back to the show in later episodes/seasons

23. Questions you’d ask the actresses?

Nothing comes to mind right now :/

24. Episode that brings you the most comfort?

The one with Jean.

25. Episode that made you laugh the hardest?

The Great Herring War

26. Which other work that the actresses did, did you enjoy the most?

I really enjoyed Hot in Cleveland. I tried watching TMTMS but I wasn't feeling it. I watched 3/4 seasons of Maude and I enjoyed it but not my favourite.

27. Best St Olaf Story?

Obviously the great herring war

28. Best slut story?

"what do you mean you had 56 boyfriends?"

29. Best Sicily story?

I'm not a big fan of those, I can't honestly remember any specific ones off the top of my head.

30. Which girl would you be most interested in seeing a prequel of? And at which point in their life?

Honestly? Neither. We have seen something about their past in the show. I think a full prequel would take away the key elements of the show. And, you'd find out which of their crazy stories are true and which aren't, when I prefer to keep it a mystery, if that makes sense.

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, ��Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[number5theboy]

Hiya, random musing but have you ever watched “no country for old men”? The main villain uses a captive bolt pistol to kill people/break locks, which is directly referenced in s1 of TUA when Hazel and Cha Cha break into the academy. I thought this was weird because there’s no reason for this to be in the show outside of being a blatant reference, the weapon is never seen, mentioned or used again. The only other possible references to this movie I’ve noticed is that Klaus steals a black briefcase hoping that there’s money inside, ultimately getting himself into a world of trouble with Vietnam and Time Travel, while one of the main characters (a Vietnam veteran) from ncfom finds a black briefcase full of money that gets him into world of trouble with the villain and various gangs. I’ve never seen anyone online mention this. It’s strange as well because my Dad showed me ncfom just a few days before my sibling showed me TUA, so I made the connection easily. This, the Luke Skywalker comment, and the Footloose scene are the only movie references that I’ve caught which is extra strange (though maybe that’s just me not having seen any other references) because you’d think that a reference that blatant would have some kind of running gag or meaning or foreshadowing but it’s dropped and never picked up again. I know ncfom did well with the critics but it’s not something that’s referenced much (although I think the line “I’m older now than my father ever was” may have originated with this movie? Which is a line I’ve seen circulating a couple times).

Apologies if you have mentioned this/seen this and I’ve just missed it.

hey, pretty sure i sent an ask about No Country For Old Men and I just wanna add that hiding a black briefcase in the vent of an old and rundown motel, moving between motels to hide, and having a shootout/confrontation in a motel is also a direct parallel/reference to ncfom idk why the showrunners continuously reference this movie in particular but it's definitely purposeful at this point. if i didn't send that ask to you originally or it got lost i'm sorry to have confused you lol

Hey Anon!

This was a really interesting ask to receive. I hadn't noticed the parallels because it's been a while since I saw the movie and I never really felt the desire to circle back to it.

But it does make sense as a movie to make callbacks to, what with the story about a contract killer and someone fleeing from him while law enforcement runs around in circles, unable to do something about the abundance of violence. I will say this, apart from the captive bolt pistol (and even that), I don't know if the references are specific enough to truly be confined to that movie in particular. Motels are common locations in thrillers, and briefcases are a common object in heist movies and the like. There are some more visual parallels that can be drawn, like these:

But I do feel like 'tough person cleans up their wound wearing a wife-beater' is a visual I've seen a bunch of times, and 'cool guys don't look at explosions' is literally a trope so overused there's a fifteen-year-old parody song about it where that scene from No Country for Old Men literally features in the music video.

I get where you're coming from but I genuinely don't know how many - if any - of these references are actual references or if they are just entries in a long-standing visual history of crime cinema. It's not out of the question for it to be deliberate, Season 3 very deliberately shouts out Wes Anderson and specifically The Grand Budapest Hotel (see this amazing gifset for examples), but Wes Anderson has a more distinct visual style than the Coen brothers, so for S1 it really depends on interpretation.

[cowboyshit]

twenty questions

tagged by: @dustofinsanity (thank you so much my dear!!!!!!)

what do you prefer to be called name-wise? honestly I’ll probably answer to most things as long as they aren’t mean. but ash, ashley, doe, those seem to be the solid three I’m known by around here when is your birthday? november 30th!  where do you live? in a tiny, backwoods cow-town smack dab in the middle of california three things you are doing right now? filling this questionnaire out, eating dinner I just finished cooking, and petting sadie with my foot since she’s curled up at my feet after she finished her dinner four fandoms that have peaked your interest. I guess I can go with four I’ve been heavily involved with, even though there’s plenty more than that since I’m a little fangirl at heart, but wrestling (obviously), black sails, the night shift, and pirates of the caribbean how has the pandemic been treating you? uh, I mean, it hasn’t been great and I’ve had to deal with some pretty bad shit as all of us have, and probably some of my worst mental health battles I’ve had to face in about a year or so, but honestly? I just kind of count my blessings these days. lucky to still be employed, even if my pay got a little cut it was nothing that keeps me from paying my bills. all I had to do was take away a few luxury things to make ends meet, and that’s a lot, LOT less than other people have had to do. so yeah, it’s been pretty shitty, this year has been bad news after bad news both personally and globally, but whatever. it could be worse. a song you can’t stop listening to right now? it is no-joke like a four-way tie. a bunch of good songs were in my discover weekly and I’ve been playing four of them on non-stop repeat one after the other. oh! and one my best friend showed to me. this baby don’t cry by k. flay, rock bottom by grandson, ok ok by hoko, and insurgents by the poolside by denny recommend a movie. i’ve jumped into holiday mood early af because tbh I need the holiday cheer, so keeping in that theme, I suggest the holiday with jude law because DUH how old are you? thirty! school, university, occupation, other? had some college, been working in my current career for the past ten years. hoping to pursue a promotion finally since my supervisors have been telling me for the past eight years that I need to promote do you prefer heat or cold? cold pleeeaaaase! I’m a radiator and put off heat like nobody’s business. I’m always warm. name one fact others may not know about you. this is hard because I just constantly blab everything about me, and I have two people who literally know EVERYTHING about me lmfao uhhh I guess... something people may not know... uhhh... on my dad’s side of the family one half was ashkenazi jewish who had to flee germany to avoid the holocaust, where they went to live in italy, while the other half were nazi’s committing some pretty bad stuff that my family won’t talk about, even to this day. funny how two descendants eventually met in america and fell in love, huh? and when they DID fall in love one of them was half italian and in the mafia! so I always joke that my bubbly cheerful self is a descendent of some pretty evil shit, and it feels like a nice little stab at those shitty ancestors of mine. are you shy? uhhh yeah and no??? like. I think I’m shy, since all interaction terrifies me and exhausts me, but everyone tells me I’m a social butterfly? and I’ve noticed in places I’m comfortable and confident, I do tend to be less shy and more involved and interactive? but I think I can be shy. a lot of waiting for other people to initiate because I’m too afraid to, struggling to talk or carry a conversation at times... I don’t know I think I’m overcomplicating this answer LOL preferred pronouns? she/her!  biggest pet peeves? gatekeeping, to be perfectly honest. I stopped following wrestling back in 2014 because when I first tried to get into the fandom, someone was trying to gatekeep a wrestler I also liked and had started making content for and they made me feel like shit for liking them, and I absolutely hated it. that’s why it took me an entire two years of quietly lurking in the wrestling fandom before I finally got brave enough to come out of the woodwork, and I’m grateful I’ve been so well received this time around. but now I’m hyper-sensitive to gatekeeping and I fucking hate it. no joke. and since it’s a pet peeve and I’m irked just remembering all that bs I went through, ima say I’m only a part of fandom to share my love of whatever that thing is with other people who love it too. I can’t stand anyone who thinks they have some sort of “claim” over a celebrity or a show or anything. get a different identity that isn’t wrapped up in that thing and stop seeing it as a threat when other people like it. be happy someone else is as passionate about that thing as you are and make a friend. damn. what is your favorite “dere” type? I’m pretty sure this is something with anime or that originated from anime, right? unfortunately I don’t know what they are so I can’t say LOL I don’t even know if I’m right about it coming from anime tbh rate your life from 1-10, 1 being crappy and 10 being the best it could be. 4, 5, but I’m putting in the foundation now and working to make it a 6, 7, or possibly 8 by a year or two from now. what’s your main blog? funnily enough? this one. my OTHER blog that was my main blog since I joined tumblr in 2009 got shoved to the side for this one last year LOL I assumed I’d log onto this blog once in awhile, but now it took over my whole damn life so here I am I guess list your side blogs and what they’re used for. I’m going to be fair and ONLY list my active ones because I have a few side blogs from when I role-played on tumblr that I haven’t touched in over a year. @doedreamss is my non-wrestling blog that WAS my main blog before this one, @cowboysht is my archive where I am ONLY putting my original gifsets/analysis/fanfiction so that one day I can offer people a blog of just my original work and no other posts (the queue is very slowly catching up I think I’ve queued posts up until june this year), @illfatedandstarcrossed is just a non-frequently used outlet for me to mope and dump emotions when I get sad about my relationship things (like a diary! but... public? and not my original thoughts? LOL), and then I have one more blog but it’s locked and private and it’s LITERALLY my diary where I can just vent when I got shit I wanna get off my chest but don’t necessarily want people to see it. Is there something people need to know about you before becoming friends? I probably won’t talk to you daily, tbh. I may not even talk to you weekly. socializing takes a lot out of me, on top of an already energy draining day-to-day in my personal life. I have a handful of people I connect with who I talk with frequently, but unfortunately as much as I’d love for it to be endless, I have to keep that list short for my own sanity. my infrequent conversations mean absolutely nothing about my lack of interest in you or how much I care about you. my granny once said I would be the perfect friend for someone you only want to talk to twice a month and she thought she was insulting me, but deadass I just said “YEAH! EXACTLY!!”

tagging: I really like this one so I WANT to tag people, but I feel braindead and also just want to post it cause I feel like I am definitely gonna forget to tag someone tbh aaaaahh okay okay I’m just gonna throw some names out there but please don’t feel pressured to do this (it is TWENTY questions) @kennyhoemega, @champbucks, @superkickparty, @adampage, @hintsofsunshine, @audreyhrnes, @sheslikealostflower, @lancearchers, @champnick, @janelanutella, @edgecution, @superrezzy00, @wardl0w, @writinglionqueen, @orangechuckiet, @hungmanhorsecarriage, @icouldbesus, @thatnerdwriter, @rampagewriting, @snarkandsarcasmftw, @tetsuyainthesky AND I DUNNO JUST ANYONE WHO WANTS TO OK I LOVE YOU ALL BYE

[t100ficrecsblog]

an interview with @queenemori (she/hers)

what are you working on right now? I recently started posting We Don’t Need To Say It, which is a multi-chap Memori actor AU. It’s a slow burn, don’t ask me how I looked at Murphy and Emori and decided to write a slow burn, but it’s what’s happening. I really do mean slow, the chapter I just finished writing is only the beginning of the angst, you’ve been warned. My beta tells me she hates me at least once a chapter if you want an idea of how angsty this is gonna get. I started out writing for Bellarke in this fandom, and I’ll be going back to that later this summer. Anyone who follows me knows I’m obsessed with Emma, and I have an Emma Bellarke AU that’s in the outlining stages currently. I’m hoping to work on it more once I get further into this Memori fic.

what’s something you’d like to write one day? The fic I’m working on now is actually the thing that I was like, “I want to write that one day”. I love actor AUs and I wanted to write one for some fandom at some point, and in January I got this idea, but I was working on other stuff, so I was like, well maybe I’ll write it this summer. And now I am! Though I would like to write something featuring dad!Murphy in the near future.

what is the fanwork you’re most proud of? It’s actually one I haven’t published yet! I participated in Bellarke Big Bang this year, and I wrote a soulmates rom-com fic. I’m excited to share it soon once we get the go-ahead, and the artist I got to work with @clarkeindra has made some amazing art to go with it! For ones that you can actually go physically read, I will say You’re Already Breaking My Heart. It was my first fic I wrote for t100 fandom, and also the first thing I wrote after a really long time of just not writing anything, so I’m proud of it for getting me back into something I love and I’m glad that other people seemed to enjoy it. It’s what got me more into this fandom in the first place and how I made some of my first friends.

why did you first start writing fic? I got more into writing around the time I started college, though I always used to write little stories. There were a few times I almost wrote fanfic before then, like the time I almost wrote a Glee fic in ninth grade, or the time my junior year of high school where I almost wrote a Downton Abbey fic where Sybil and Branson were pen pals while Sybil was on her nurses course in season 2. But the summer before college, I wanted to write, and didn’t have any ideas for characters, but I had just read a really amazing next-gen Harry Potter fic called “Potters, Weasleys, and Misguided Snogging” which made me ship Scorpius Malfoy and Lily Luna Potter, or Scorily. So I started writing a couple stories specifically for that ship, back when I still used FF.net. It was just a one-shot and a multi-chap I never finished, but it was fun to interact with people and get to hear what they liked about the story and that they hoped I continued it, so I guess I caught the fic writing bug then.

what frustrates you most about fic writing? I wish people would leave more kudos. I’ve had this discussion with some friends before where they’re like, “What makes you leave kudos on a fic?” and I leave kudos on most fics I read, so it’s very interesting to hear people say they don’t do that as liberally as I do. If I made it to the end of the story, I’m probably going to leave kudos. The writer kept me engaged long enough to get to the end, which I think is worthy of showing some sort of support, even if I don’t leave a comment. Though I am trying to get better about leaving comments more often. Kudos are a very low stakes way to show you like a story that someone put out. Afraid to comment, but want to show the author you enjoyed reading? Leave kudos. A couple of stories I have out have gotten a fair amount of hits, but the amount of kudos in comparison to the amount of people who have probably opened it is a little disheartening. I’ve also heard people say they don’t want to leave kudos on stories that have been out for a while, but I love to get kudos on my old work! It’s fun to see that people are still reading things I put out in like 2017 or even just last year. Kudos brighten my day just as much as comments do sometimes, especially when I know not everyone feels comfortable leaving a comment!

what are your top five songs right now? The answer to this is 98% always related to what I’m listening to when I’m working on a certain writing project lol.

Sweet by Cigarettes After Sex Heartbreak Weather by Niall Horan I Will Follow You into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie Bye-Bye Darling by Borns Fire for You by Cannons

what are your inspirations? Red, White & Royal Blue, since I read that recently. It honestly just made me want to write a movie, and I kind of hope that whatever TV or movie adaptation it ends up getting in the future I’m able to work on. I want to be a screenwriter, so I tend to get inspired by TV a lot. The Mindy Project, Insecure, and even Never Have I Ever are big inspirations for me. Or more like, anything that Issa Rae or Mindy Kaling are involved in, to be honest. I write a lot of modern AUs, so just anything that shows good relationship progression or has fun with mundane, everyday situations.

what first attracted you to Memori? what attracts you now? So fun fact, I stopped watching the show for a bit. I binged basically two seasons in a weekend while visiting a friend in like 2017, and I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t obsessed? Then I started s3 and a bunch of characters were getting on my nerves so I put it down for a while. Then I was on Tumblr at the beginning of 2019 and saw a gifset from 3x05 of Murphy and Emori kissing and I was kind of like, “That guy’s still alive? And he has a girlfriend?” So I started watching again, legit only because I was shook Murphy had survived lol. So the thing that first attracted me to them was just the fact that they were a couple at all, I guess. I’d say now that I’ve rewatched the show and seen their relationship develop, I love that these are two people who have always had to fend for themselves and kind of had that “me against the world” mentality. And then they find this other person that cares about them and wants to take care of them, and life becomes a lot less lonely. Also now we get to see their relationship after years together, so they’re very domestic, which adds this lovely sense of normalcy on this post-apocalyptic sci-fi show that I absolutely adore. Their interactions especially in s7 just read as a married couple who are very comfortable with each other, but still incredibly devoted to one another and in love.

Besides Memori, what character or pairing do you like best on t100? For ships, I also really like Bellarke. When I was more casually watching the first time around, I didn’t have much of an opinion on them/didn’t really ship it until season 4, but ever since then I’ve been on board. It’s very clear I’m a huge Memori person, but I do ship Murven, though mainly in AU settings. And Memoraven are my OT3!! My other fave character is Bellamy. And I feel like Gabriel has also quickly become a favorite for me. It’s definitely a mixture of his confused, but obsessed with science vibe on the show and the fact that he has been very fun to write in my actor AU when he makes appearances every so often.

why did you decide to start writing for bellarkefic-for-blm? Ever since I’ve been home due to the pandemic, writing has kind of been my escape. Weirdly enough, I’ve written so much (both fic and some real life stuff), even though I’m still working and everything like that. And when the BLM movement was getting a lot of traction specifically in our fandom spaces, I was immediately skeptical of people’s intentions because as a Black person in America specifically I’ve seen this happen before where all the attention is on this issue for a couple weeks and then everyone goes back to posting what they normally post about. And I guess this time things are a bit different, but the thing that began to frustrate me was seeing people shame others for saying they were going to watch the next episode of the show or for working on their fanfic. Fandom spaces have been my biggest escape from the news since March and while I was glad people were focusing on this sort of thing, I kind of hated the way people were making it out to be like this was a new issue when in reality it’s just my life. When I close my laptop and go out into the world, I’m still Black. I had considered opening my ask box up for prompts in exchange for someone donating to a bail fund or something like that, especially since I had just reached a follower milestone, but when I saw that Sam was organizing this and it was going to be an ongoing thing rather than just for a certain period of time, it was heartening to see someone realizing that this isn’t something we can just stop talking about even when the media moves on. The structure of these prompts makes it so that a person has to do a bit of research on BLM and educate themselves or confront the issue in a way they might not have had to before. And it gives me a chance to write things like my fluffy Memori wedding fic ! It’s a way to have my little fandom escape and also stay aware of what’s going on in the real world.

what’s your writing process like (esp for prompts, chopped!, etc)? I LOVE outlines! The Virgo in me loves to talk about my fic outlining process lol. With some short one-shots, I tend to just go in with a sentence or concept that I write at the top of the document and just write and see where that takes me. I also put at the top of the document all the things I want to tag it as when I go to post to AO3, so I don’t have to spend too much time thinking of those when it’s time to post. With multi-chap fics, I first make an ideas dump document which is just me typing out a bunch of thoughts, things like who’s in it, the premise, stuff like that. My actor AU has three preliminary documents: My ideas dump, the actual outline, and then the outline for what happens on each season of the TV show the characters are all on, since I reference those plot points a lot. For things like Chopped or prompts I receive, I do a mixture of the outline/ideas dump in one document. I put at the top all the information I received (so with prompts I tend to just copy/paste the ask from my inbox, and for Chopped the different tropes and theme), then think about what characters I want to use if it wasn’t specified, then kind of do bullet points on what happens in the story. These have all been really helpful in terms of keeping me on track, but I make sure to remind myself that things can change as I write and take a different direction than I expected. So my outlines are constantly changing, but the general idea is already written somewhere so I don’t get too stuck.

what are your thoughts on dad!murphy? The concept of dad!Murphy has really been living rent-free in my brain since before the beginning of season 7. I just kind of love the idea of Murphy (who is a character at first glance I feel like people don’t picture as much of a father figure) kind of falling into being a dad in an unexpected way, and then realizing how much he loves it. It’s just such a sweet thought, and I talked about it so much with some of my friends, that we started a Dad!Murphy Enthusiast Club server on discord (we’re always accepting members so DM me if you’d like to join us!). We just kind of talk about our dad!Murphy headcanons, share fics featuring dad!Murphy, and then get excited when people make new dad!Murphy content. It’s a fun time and though I am a very large Memori, I’m a multi-shipper at heart, and Murphy is one of those characters that I find easy to ship with a lot of people, so we love dad!Murphy in all forms!

what are some things you’d like to recommend?  This is a mix of Bellarke and Memori stuff, since that’s what I mainly read.

Literally everything @mobi-on-a-mission writes, but if I must get specific, then Revive and The Cockroach. 

Almost Paradise (We’re Knocking On Heaven’s Door)  by @nakey-cats-take-bathsss , 13 hours by Kats_watermelon, feat. by Debate, and of course, my comfort fic so i sing a song of love  by twilightstargazer.

The best place to find @queenemori is here on Tumblr. You can find her ao3 here. Request a fic written by her via @bellarkefic-for-blm.

[butterflydm]

2020 (what a weird year)

I did not get very much done this year at all. The business I work for got us all classified as essential workers which... tbh, I did not agree with as a categorization. It’s meant that hours per week stayed the same, but my anxiety levels at work skyrocketed. And most of the time, after getting home, I basically had enough energy to check some stuff online but I mostly needed to decompress by doing something familiar, which I’ve been doing by replaying FFX and FFX2, and my brain mostly hasn’t had room for anything new. Which is a shame for all the plans I had to watch tons of new media! I had a long list of things I wanted to check out and I haven’t really watched any of it.

I did get a chance to watch a few new things (as always, tbh, any recs of mine are basically ‘you will like this thing, if this is the kind of thing you like’):

The Old Guard: Really enjoyed this movie. It’s been out for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to watch it, it was a fun, easy watch that also made me think some interesting philosophical questions about life. A good time! It’s honestly the only movie I watched during the 2020 pandemic period, unless I get around to watching anything else in the next couple of days.

MXTX’s Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System: I love love this story. I’ve watched the donghua (looking forward to S2!) and read the translation by BC Novels, and the story just has so many things that make my heart go ‘yes!’: it’s funny, with a charming PoV character who both doesn’t take himself too seriously and also seriously misunderstands himself in a lot of ways -- very relatable. It’s dramatic AF, with romantic lead Luo Binghe at the heart of a lot of that drama. It’s clever and I love the way the premise is used for both humor and pathos.

Tone-wise, it reminds me of works like Galaxy Quest or Northanger Abbey. Honestly, that light tone helps in some of the later chapters, which have content that is actually very dark and very heartbreaking if taken seriously, but because of the momentum of the story and the tone of the narrative, I didn’t feel like I got lost or bogged down in the darkness.

And I love the relationship between Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe a whole heck of a lot. I think the way it’s structured is clever and sweet and sad and makes for an interesting story. There is an element of an unintentional romantic obsession that SQQ created by the way he flipped between kind and cruel (against his will, which is what makes it forgivable for the audience, imo, because SQQ wanted to always be kind, though not always for the most selfless of reasons) and how LBH had to try to mentally justify/rationalize how the same man could act in such completely opposing ways. And the narrative symmetry between how SQQ thinks of LBH as the center of the universe because he’s the OP Protagonist (!) but LBH thinks of SQQ as the one that everything revolves around and how that’s narratively true because, of course, in the story that we’re reading, SQQ is the protagonist and LBH is his love interest.

I also actually really appreciated the bad sex near the end of the novel -- sex-to-save-the-world is a trope that can easily get romanticized but here it’s (literally) painful and ugly instead, as all of LBH’s trauma pairs with the influence of Xin Mo on his mind. Even through the translation, it definitely feels like bad sex written well, rather than badly-written sex that is supposed to be good, if you know what I mean. Sex can be an important narrative tool in stories and I feel like MXTX uses it very effectively here.

I think I burnt through the entire translation in just a few days. I’ve been reading a lot of fanfic afterwards and I think my favorite so far is I Wish You Were My Husband by Feynite. It’s an AU but it keeps the same kind of vibe as the original story.

Bridgerton: Goodness, so enjoyable! Julia Quinn is not My Most Favorite of the various romance writers that I read but she was one of the first writers that really got me back into reading romance and it was delightful to see her world on screen. I don’t picture people when I’m reading novels; I have to have a visual first and then I can carry that into the reading, so it was nice to be able to assign faces to some of these characters that I’m already very fond of. Simon and Daphne had a nice amount of chemistry and I loved the Bridgerton family relationships.

I hope they get to cover all the romances in the series and continue to do some updating as well -- I generally liked the changes they made to Simon and Daphne’s romance (a few I wasn’t as into but could see why they’d done it -- mostly For The Drama). And I really loved what they did with Simon and Lady Danbury’s relationship. It took me some time to tell the three older Bridgerton brothers apart but that’s pretty much canon, lol. Anyway, I was invested enough in it all that I stayed up all night on Christmas eve to watch it all and I had no regrets afterward.

I started watching S2 of TharnType but then my work schedule changed and I was working on Fridays and (see above) I just didn’t have the energy to watch anything after work. I might wait and binge the rest of the series once it’s all out, now that it’s gone this long without me being caught up.

I do think I’ll take a break from Critical Role for a while, after it comes back. I’ve just come to an unfortunate place where the show literally cannot win with me re: the romances, as I’m annoyed when they happen but also, perversely, annoyed when they get ignored because my brain goes “they gutted beaujester for this limited amount of inferior romance? At least commit to giving an adequate amount of the romances that I dislike!”. And so it becomes a vicious circle. Good sign that it’s time to take a break. My unhappiness with one part of the show is overshadowing everything else and maybe some time away will change that. Or maybe I just need to pick it up again with campaign 3. I guess I’ll see how it goes. I also admit that I’d hate to pick up the show again only to have Lucien get killed off in a few episodes.

I want to try to watch some more shows in 2021, and maybe I’ll have time, if I’m freeing up several hours every Thursday.

I want to watch Heaven Official’s Blessing and I’ve had a translation of the novel on my phone for the entire year and I really do want to read it as well. I’d like to watch Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo’s new shows (The Wolf & The Legend of Fei) as the gifsets I’ve seen have been interesting and enjoyable, and there are a bunch of shows that I’d gotten recommendations about after watching TharnType that I still want to check out too. Plus, I have the new Stormlight Archives book and I want to read that as well. So, there’s quite a list.

It’s still probably gonna be quite stressful at work for a while, at least until I’ve had a chance to get the vaccine, but at least I am going back to Thursdays & Fridays as my days off at the start of the year, so I’m looking forward to that. I’m also hoping to get back to my detailed rewatch of The Untamed, because that was so much fun but I did not have enough brain this year to do any more of it.

[ageofgeek]

Guys...they did the impossible. I liked Rise of Skywalker! They ended it well, and there were a bunch of parts that I REALLY liked (and really only a few parts that I was "meh" about).

SPOILERS UNDER THE READ MORE!

So!  Let’s go through the main reveals/plot points and then I’ll go into more specifics. Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter - I’ll be honest, I did NOT expect that. I think after TFA came out, I reblogged a gifset that included all of the Rey parentage theories, and I was like, “lol what? who the hell thinks that Rey is a Palpatine? wtf?” And now it’s canon?  Honestly, it’s the same kind of batshit reveal that I’d expect from Star Wars, so I’m kinda okay with it.

Kylo Ren’s redemption was...not as terrible as I thought it would be. As y’all know, I am very anti-Kylo and anti-R*ylo, so I thought I was going to Suffer in this movie. But I was surprised by how I felt about it - only mildly irritated instead of bursting with rage. I still think he doesn’t really have a personality other than 1) whiny 2) manipulative and 3) emo, but I did like the scene where he hallucinates Han and repeats his line from TFA (”I know what I have to do but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it”). That being said, it is still highly questionable to have Kylo’s redemption built on Leia’s death/sacrifice for her son (it reads a little too much like fridging a woman to save a male character), but I will excuse the filmmakers for that because they didn’t have much footage of Carrie Fisher to work with, so there wasn’t too much they could do if they wanted to commit to not digitally reconstructing her (which I am glad they did not do).

I digress (I’ll talk about Leia in the next paragraphs). I did like that Kylo just showed up to the final fight with Palpatine in like, a henley and slacks. It seemed like a very Skywalker thing to do, lol. Also, thank God that he died. Like, damn - I see all these Kylo stans being so upset at his death, and I’m just like?  His character purposefully paralleled Vader - a parallel which I think was weak, at best, but still, a parallel - and you thought that he wasn’t going to die?  Also, what would have happened if he had lived?  Oh right, he would’ve gone to prison for the rest of his life and not gotten married to Rey and have kids, lol, what universe are you living in? As it was, I think that they did his death well - like Vader, they had him sacrifice himself for somebody that he loved (although the bond between Rey and Kylo is, once again, much more questionable to me than the bond between Luke and Vader/Anakin). And like Vader, he turned back to the Light because of his family (Leia and Han). Thinking about the 2 other ways Ben’s character arc could’ve gone (1) he doesn’t turn back to the Light or 2) he turns back to the Light but doesn’t die), this was the only satisfying way to end his arc (at least in my opinion).

That being said, I REALLY could’ve done without that kiss. Like, really? You just had to force it into an unnecessary romance? You couldn’t have just had them hug or cradle each other, platonically? Both of the climactic emotional moments of the previous trilogies were completely non-romantic, and both focused on love of FAMILY - Luke cradling Anakin, his father, as he dies, and Obi-Wan being forced to “kill” Anakin, his brother. It would’ve been so much better if they had ended this one with Rey cradling Ben, her brother, as he died. But no, we can’t have nice things because heteronormativity exists. *sigh*

But, we’re moving on. I thought that they handled Leia’s character really respectfully - I think Carrie Fisher would’ve been proud. I’m still bitter and sad that we only got one scene in the entire sequel trilogy with Luke and Leia (the OG Skywalkers and you only had them in one fucking scene together? Goddammit), but that force ghost scene at the end with the two of them made me happy - it was a bittersweet happiness, but happiness all the same (also, since it is canon that force ghosts get to chill and rest and be happy in the afterlife, I am more than happy with that ending. It also makes me want to write a ton of fanfiction. Stay tuned for that). I also burst into tears when Leia died and Maz stood near her bedside and whispered, “Goodbye, Princess.” Wow, that did things to my heart!

Ian McDiarmid continues to be a goddamn delight to watch as Palpatine, and he was genuinely creepy and horrific in this movie. I still feel like bringing Palpatine back to life (albeit in zombified form) was a real slap in the face to the perfect ending of ROTJ (and it especially cheapens Anakin’s role as the Chosen One, which is really a slap in the face for me), but they did it as best they could. I think I would’ve preferred if Palpatine was in spirit form in this movie, trying to come back to life by using Rey as a conduit or a body? Something like that would’ve honored the end of ROTJ a bit more while also bringing him back as the big villain.

All in all, I liked TROS much more than I hated it, especially since I had pretty low expectations going in. I’ve talked about the big “reveals” and moments so far, but I really liked the little things in this movie! For example:

Rey, Finn, and Poe were a full-on OT3 trio in this movie, and I loved it! The mission to find the wayfinder in the desert? Adventures! Chase scenes! Exploring! Jokes! I loved it - it was definitely giving me “Tatooine in ROTJ” vibes. They all kind of wandered apart in the second half of the movie, but they came back together at the end for that hug!! Which made me cry buckets!! (Poe holding Rey’s hand as they both hug Finn??? Wow, OT3 goals, they are so in love)

Chewie and Lando were great!  Lando felt a little random in this movie (no explanation as to where he was? No mention of Han’s death?), but I always appreciate Billy Dee Williams, so I’m not complaining.

In that same vein, WEDGE CAMEO!!! They got Denis Lawson back, and right after I got back on my Wedge/Luke wagon! Damn, I wish we could’ve seen more of him (maybe there are some deleted scenes??? Listen, I neED MORE WEDGE IN MY LIFE).

And again in the same vein as cameos, um, that Jedi voice scene??? Listen, ok, hearing Hayden’s voice again was more than I ever thought we would get, I was sO EMOTIONAL, I heard him and almost immediately burst into tears. And they got Ewan and Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson(!!!), and the voice actors for Ahsoka and Luminara and WOW I am super emotional, that was hands-down the best scene in the movie for me. I was so happy to hear all of them - the acknowledgement of the prequels and the rest of the Jedi, FINALLY, after 2 previous sequel movies that didn’t give a shit about them. FINALLY we got this. And you know what? I would’ve been even happier if they had shown their faces, but I will take it. I will fucking take it. (That being said: Oh, Disney Gods - please let Hayden return for flashbacks and/or hallucinations in the Obi-Wan series. Please. It’s all I want in life).

The confirmation that Leia trained as a Jedi and had a lightsaber - I almost full-on clapped in the theaters at that scene. And I loved the training sequence/flashback that they had with Luke and Leia - they actually showed them sparring and I loved it so much! It was amazing - why couldn’t they have included that earlier? (Cue me singing: “We could’ve had it allll!!!!!”).

Luke’s Force Ghost appearance really redeemed his character from the beating it got in TLJ. It was a short scene, but it felt so much more like the Luke Skywalker I know and love, and I’m glad that they gave Mark Hamill a chance to really play Luke again.

The end scene with the Resistance coming to help. It felt a little Endgame-ish to me (then again, that was arguably the best scene in Endgame), but we definitely came full circle from TLJ, where the Resistance was basically abandoned on Crait and nobody answered their distress call. In TROS, everybody answered their distress call.

I also like that C3PO had a bit more of a role! I really love R2 and C3PO, and I like that they kept to Lucas’ original vision of the two of them being the only ones to be in all 9 films. I also deeply appreciate R2 being with Leia when she died - that felt incredibly moving and appropriate, and also coming full circle from Leia’s first scene with R2 in ANH.

Finn being confirmed as Force-sensitive! Finally! Fucking 4 years since TFA and we finally got it - hallelujah.

I think that’s about it! Honestly, I’m just so high off of the endorphins of hearing Anakin and Obi-Wan and all of the Jedi again! That scene made the entire movie worth it for me.

But this is the end of the Skywalker Saga, and that makes me really sad. The one thing that I am really upset about with regards to this movie is that it literally ends the Skywalkers. At least if you end the original 6 movies with ROTJ, the implication is that Leia and/or Luke will continue the Skywalker lineage, and they will continue to be leaders and jedi and heroes - but when you add in the sequel trilogy...it just ends. Anakin’s grandson turns to the dark side and ends up (indirectly) killing Luke, Leia, and then himself. And THAT’S how the Skywalkers end? After the tragedy that was Anakin (and Padme’s) life, history just repeats itself and the family line ends? That’s...depressing. But I think that the sequel trilogy, in a way, is still very distant from the other 2 trilogies - in a way, it reminded me of a weird, high-budget delve into the EU that is technically canon, but doesn’t feel like it’s canon???

Either way, I’m happy to accept the sequel trilogy as pseudo-canon, but still apart from the original 6 movies. I’m glad that we got to see some, if not all, of the OT characters again. I wish we could’ve gotten more - out of the old and new characters - but what we got was okay, and I enjoyed the ride.

And now, I’m just going to go cry over the Skywalker family and read force ghost fanfiction :’)

[eldritchsurveys]

680.

Do you or have you ever owned a cup with your name on it? >> Actually, I have two. One time there was this dude in Meijer who was doing a promotion for Guinness, and the promo was apparently... giving out custom-engraved pint glasses???? You told him your name and he had this machine that put it on the glass for you. It was weird, especially since it was free... The font that your name is in is a bit wack, though. The other thing I have is a wine glass painted with a nighttime-y scene with skeletal trees and ravens on it. It has my name painted on the stand part, along with the date of my wedding. Sparrow has one too, with her name on it. I’m not even sure where they came from, tbh, but they’re pretty.

What’s the most expensive crafts tool that you own? >> I don’t think I own any expensive crafts tools. The only things I have are, like, pencils, a sketchbook, knitting needles, and yarn.

Have you ever woven baskets of any kind (wicker, paper, cardboard etc.)? >> Maybe as a child.

How do you like Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis? >> It’s all right.

Speaking of Jerry Lee Lewis, have you seen the biopic about him? >> I don’t think so.

How about the biopic about Tina Turner? >> Yeah, I saw that one.

Do you like the TV-show Frasier? >> I do, it’s actually funnier to me now than when I was younger. Back then I thought it was boring but it kills me now.

What’s something you know by heart? >> A lot of song lyrics? Also, the Litany Against Fear.

What is something you’re greedy about? >> I don’t think I’m particularly greedy about anything.

How valuable does a coin have to be for you to bother to pick it up? >> I’d pick up a quarter, maybe. I’m just no longer in the financial position where picking up coins substantially enhances my available funds.

What would be something you would wait in line to get for free? >> It depends on how long the line is, what kind of mood I’m in, and where I am... not just on what the item is. If I’m in a good mood and the line seems manageable, I’d wait in it even if the item is just some random trinket that I have no real use for. If I’m not in a good mood and the line is insane, I wouldn’t wait in it even if it was for an expensive thing I’ve been wanting for ages.

Has there ever been a leak anywhere in your house? >> No.

Have you ever slipped in the shower? >> Not to the point of falling.

Have you ever made any decorative crafts? If so, are they displayed? >> Not in recent memory.

Is it very humid where you are right now? >> Nah.

What is the most suggestive thing someone has said to you? >> *shrug*

Do you have friends who you playfully flirt with? >> No.

Doesn’t the Z in the Bzoink logo look like an L to you, too? >> I mean, not really, but I see where you’re coming from.

Did you ever take that 5000 question survey that was circulating Tumblr? >> Yeah, I took it a long time ago. Once the novelty wore off, I realised that most of the questions were just terrible IMO, which is bound to happen once you endeavour to write a survey with quite that many questions.

Have you ever had to change a zipper in your favourite article of clothing? >> No.

Do you prefer buttons or zippers in general? >> Zippers.

Did you grandma have a box full of pretty buttons? >> ---

What’s the most exotic spice in your spice rack? >> Hmm... garam masala, maybe? We have a wide variety.

Do buttons tempt you to press them? >> Not usually, but sometimes.

Do you have a favourite television host? >> No.

What’s your opinion on celebrity chefs? >> I think some of them are cool and fun to watch. Alton Brown is probably my fave.

Back when it first started, did you watch ANTM? >> I think I’ve seen a season or two. I knew someone who got on it, too (Isis King).

Did you know, that there was even a Finnish version of ANTM? Miss Jay made an appearance in the first season, too. >> No, I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. There are a bunch of those shows modeled after American Idol, too, for different countries.

Are you accident prone? >> No.

Have you ever broken something really valuable? >> I accidentally broke a laptop screen once, and that was pretty damn valuable to me.

What do you see as timeless? >> ---

What is something that you own, that has sentimental value? >> Most of these plushies.

Have you ever had your own website? >> Yeah, I’ve taken stabs at it.

What’s your favourite board game? >> ---

How about your favourite card game? >> ---

What’s something that you finished recently? >> I finished watching Sparrow play through Death Stranding, lol. I’m glad it was her and not me, because I’m pretty sure that game would have made me ragequit within the first few hours, and that would have been a shame.

What’s the smallest town you recall visiting? >> I have no idea.

What’s the longest distance you’ve had to go to work or school? >> ---

Would you learn a new language, if you didn’t share one with your lover? >> Oh, like in Love Actually? I mean, I can’t imagine myself in that situation, but I thought it was cute.

Do you have friends who are constantly tagging you in challenges on FB? >> No. People who have me on facebook should know I prefer to do my actual fun socialising on here or Discord.

When it comes to chocolate, do you prefer nougat, jelly or caramel filling? >> ---

Are you more concerned about winning than just participating? >> No.

Has somebody you know taken their own life? >> No.

What is a number that has some significance to you? Why is that? >> 9. Well, there’s a lot of synchronicity.

Do you prefer onions, leeks or chives? >> I don’t think I have a preference, I’ll take all three. Onions may be the most versatile, though, so maybe those.

What’s the most adult thing you have to do every day? >> I don’t think I have to do any adult thing every day. Maybe feeding myself is an adult thing? Although teenagers and even kids do that too.

What’s the most immature thing you like to do every day? >> ---

Have you seen the movie, Clue? If so, isn’t it fab? >> No, but I’ve seen some funny gifsets that make me think it’d probably be a good time. I might give it a shot if I run into it on a streaming service one day.

Do your cheeks get flushed easily? Do you blush easily in general? >> No, I’ve never felt that feeling.

Are there any social cues you miss entirely? >> Oh, definitely.

When someone doesn’t smile back at you, what’s your first thought? >> They probably didn’t want to, and that’s okay. I don’t always want to smile at everyone who smiles at me, either, and it shouldn’t be a mark against my character just because I don’t smile at a stranger. But, you know, whatever. Any stranger that takes that much offense at me not smiling at them probably wouldn’t get along with me for very long anyway, so it’s a useful social litmus test in the end.

Is there a person who melts your heart just by looking at you? >> No. Well, maybe Can Calah sometimes.

Have you ever had tom kha kai? It’s a Thai coconut soup, and it’s amazing. We serve it at work. >> No, but I’d definitely try it.

Have you, or anyone you know ever been rude to a server? >> I’ve never had the experience of having to watch someone I’m with be rude to a server and I am so glad for that.

What’s something you’re opinionated and very vocal about? When’s the last time you had to verbally defend your stance? >> I don’t know. I don’t really defend any stance of mine, I just put it out there sometimes if I feel like rambling about it and then leave it alone. Arguing with people about shit that ultimately really don’t matter is a waste of my valuable energy.

Have you ever played BitLife? I sort of got hooked on it, it’s like sims but in text form. >> No. I quite like the graphical form of The Sims, so I’ll stick to that.

What’s something you regularly order online? >> CBD.

When’s the last time you made a penpal? >> I’ve never had one.

Do you often make friends online? >> I make a lot of acquaintances online. Friends are far fewer.

Do people ever try to get something from somebody through you? As in, they ask you to ask the person they should be asking in the first place. If that makes sense. >> No. Which is good, because I wouldn’t do it.

What do you think when you see a couple holding hands? >> Nothing???

Is there anything you’re forced to share with someone else? >> No.

What’s something stripy that you own? >> I have a black-and-royal-blue striped robe with the Ravenclaw logo on the back.

How about something polka dotted? >> Nothing.

What is something you find absolutely appalling? >> Some people’s utterly disrespectful behaviour on this website.

Do you like elevators? >> I mean, they’re fine. I don’t dislike them.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say “midnight madness”? >> Like... premieres? Or book releases? Or something like that. I have a vague association but I can’t remember exactly where it comes from.

What is a country you would never want to visit? >> ---

When you’re angry, does it ever get physical? >> Well, yeah, but not necessarily towards someone else.

What do you do, when you’re immensely happy? >> It depends on how I feel like expressing it at the time? Sometimes I don’t express it much at all, and sometimes I literally jump around the room.

What made you scream out loud the last time you screamed? >> ---

Can you hear your neighbours through the wall? >> Sometimes.

What is something that frustrates you to no end? >> Noise.

Do you wear shoes indoors? >> Absolutely not.

Who is your favourite stand-up comedian? >> Bo Burnham, Dylan Moran, and in general I’m fond of how Tiffany Haddish presents as a person and performer.

What’s the weirdest video youtube has suggested to you? >> It doesn’t usually suggest me anything weird.

What’s the funniest infomercial you’ve seen? >> ---

Is there a drink that just goes right through you? >> I don’t feel that way about any drink, no.

Is there a food item you can’t eat because it doesn’t agree with you? >> Not that I’ve encountered.

Do you playfully compete with someone about something? >> No.

Would you rather swim or run? >> I can’t swim, so my options are a little limited here.

Do you like the smell of tar? >> Sometimes, yeah.

Have you ever been to a sauna? >> No. I couldn’t last two minutes in a sauna.

Does your doorbell ring unexpectedly often? >> Not often, but sometimes people will ring multiple apartments trying to get into the building, which is fucking irritating.

Is your favourite fictional character a human, an animal or something else? >> I am my favourite fictional character. /facetious

Have you ever helped a stranger? If so, what did you do? >> I mean, sure. Just simple stuff, like picking up something they’ve dropped or letting them know they’ve left their key in the apartment door or dropping their mail off when it gets mistakenly put into my box.

Do you share hobbies with any of your friends? What do you do together? >> ---

Do you have any flags on display? If so, what flag(s)? >> I don’t. Sparrow has a rainbow flag with a peace sign in the middle on her wall.

[harris-coopers]

Who are your best friends on tumblr and how’d you find them?!

Okay so these are in no particular order or ranking. I love all of these lovely humans and every single person whose ever said so much as Hi to me! (Random anons, ya’ll make my day). Also this got super long so I apologise!! Again i appreciate absolutely everyone I talk to!

@reinhartmendes: Shards was the very first friend I made on tumblr and to be completely honest, I almost lost it when she messaged me for the first time. Here I was thinking ‘omg I am not worthy of this’ because I saw her on my feed all the time and had always been far too nervous to say anything to her! Also she messaged me the day of the MET GALA (8th of May) and honestly that day was the day of blessing so I should have known only amazing things could come from it, and of course apart from well... THAT the other equally as amazing thing was my friendship with Shards. She’s stunningly talented at everything she does and I am super grateful to have her!

@forsythpendleton: Okay so the first time Sarah and I ever talked was because she had sent me an ask squealing over the fact that I was from Melbourne like her and that we liked all the same things. Half the message was in caps lock and thats when I knew, that were were destined to be good friends. Also one of the first things I ever said was invite her to a comic con viewing party and she didn’t run away so that was a pretty good sign. Honestly, I flood her messages with ramblings in all caps about SH on the daily and I swear sometimes she’s probably comes home to like a gazillion and one of them, she never cares though and sometimes she joins in, which makes me feel a LOT less crazy than I do. Also she super nice?? And caring?? and her photography skills?? Sprouse worthy. 

@emmalrb: So I can’t actually remember 100% which post it was but I messaged Emma because I knew she was Australian and basically just wanted to make some more friends on here and honestly you get 100 friends in one when you’re friends with Emma. We bonded over where we live and then shortly after over the fact that KJ was coming to Melbourne and we both were super stocked for it and also that we have basically almost the same job?? (working with kids/teachers). Also I went to comic con by myself this year (which was amazing, both the con and being alone) and I was messaging her updates throughout the day and honestly, she was so invested that she may as well have been there with me! ALSO She will randomly message me and tell me to have a great day?? Like go get yourself an Emma if you don’t already have one bc she’s amazing and her messages are the sweetest! Also she’s a super detective?? If I EVER need help with anything SH related she always knows the answer or can find a link (seriously you’re the best) And she’s also helped me lot with the Sprousehart timeline, along with everyone else in SSH which has literally been super helpeful!!?!. Love you lots!!

@jugheaddjones: Amber, my Brisbane buddy! Our conversation first started because she had messaged me and then straight after that, I messaged her with a gif and asked if she knew where it was from (sidenote: she did and I had been looking for that for SO long) We then realised that we were both from Brisbane (which if you know nothing about Australia, Brisbane isn’t the hottest city to visit). AND THEN  she freaked me out by joking around about if we knew each other in real life!! ( seriously my life flashed before my eyes bc LORD I would have passed out cold) anyways turns out we didn’t and that we both had a secret riverdale life (her words A+++ btw Amber) THEN  we both died over the fact that KJ was coming to Melbourne ( and then I cried a little bc I knew SH wouldn’t be) and basically I too, also spam her inbox with random Sprousehart info or moments. Also we both almost died on may 31st (Met Gala selfie anyone??) so if that didn’t bond us idk what would. Anyways, Amber your an A+ human being and an even better friend ily. 

@itsnotoktohit: I first spoke to Shirin about a gifset I had made, where one of the gifs was broken and I messaged a few people to see if they could delete the broken set while I fixed it. Anyways, long story short, we ended up talking for a really long time about absolute nonsense (honestly a lot of our convos, except for SH related ones bc #facts) Shirin is literally one of the best motivators ever, she is constantly happy and appreciative of literally everything. Half the time I complain to her about things and just basically spurt a whole bunch of 1st world problems stories out and she never cares?? Also she nicknamed me google in the group chat and even tho I don’t think I deserve it, it was still a pretty great confidence booster honestly. Also her love and enthusiasm for SH and all things RD is absolutely amazing and I will cherish it and her forever. 

@bugheadlover101: Peyton, Peyton, Peyton, where do I even start? So the first contact we ever had was of her sending me a post about Cole wearing Lili’s sweater and honestly?? That’s the way to my heart fam. We’ve basically been messaging about RD and SH ever since. She’s somewhat new to the fandom but honestly that’s never stopped her. She’s fits in absolutely perfectly!! We had bonded quite quickly over our love of Sprousehart and it went from there! Peyton is always willing to dig up any old/new sh info to share even just really randomly it’ll pop up in your inbox and you’re just like ‘I came out here to have a good time and honestly I’m feeling so attacked right now’ bc it hits you in the feels and takes you a while to recover. I love her to bits, please never change.

@betty-cooper: Okay so Katie! The first proper interaction I remember having with Katie was actually a tumblr post. I had posted something along the lines of ‘Cole Sprouse, the one person physically unable to look unattractive’ and then Katie (of course) replied or reblogged it and said ‘I present to you Lili Reinhart’. I then amended my post bc ya’ll a girl can’t argue with that truth. The next interaction we had was actually me asking her for a link to the bughead discord. I saw her on my dash all the time and she seemed super lovely and nice so I figured she’d be a good person to approach about it (she was!!) She then helped me with sorting all of that craziness out (turns out I suck at firguring that site out lmao) and basically she’s just been a positive light that guides me ever since. If you didn’t already know, Katie is one of the most considerate, caring and generous people on the planet. She is always willing to help me with a photoshop question or answer ( hello?? GIF QUEEN right here). Also her writing is amazing too?? What can’t she do?? ANSWER: Nothing, she is perfect. Also we bonded over the fact that Lili in Law and Order is absolute golden acting and all the other movies of hers that are less well known. Also Katie, I quite possibly the nicest human being you will ever meet. She is always positive and happy and I really appreciate that. She always pops into my inbox when I least expect it and honestly that’s amazing because she always ends up reaching out before I even realise I need someone to talk to. Katie, you’re fantastic and an absolute gem of a person, ily.

@ccshbh: Nina! First off the first interaction I ever had with Nina was based off a comment that she had left on one of my fanfics. And honestly at that time I about died bc Nina is pure royalty in this fandom and I was pretty stunned that she had liked something of mine (nevermind when she followed me. I nearly passed out that day) The next few interactions were me asking if she knew of something or could help me with finding a fic (sidenote: It was the fic where Cole tries to sneak out of Lili and Madelaine’s shared apartment, which is by far one of the best fics to grace the planet also that fic is pure canon don’t @me) Also literally allll of her fics are amazing and you should definitely read them.  Also her “Idiot...oh, but my idiot” tag on a gifset I made, basically made my day and stemmed a whole other gifset too. Also she is literally the most inclusive person in the entire world and my tumblr life got like 1000x better when you added me to the group chat! Bc I felt like I had friends on here!! Nina is basically a walking bible when it comes to anything and she always knows what she’s talking about! She’s also a super caring friend and is constantly checking in with me when I get bad anons or whatever and I really appreciate it!! She’s super lovely and really approachable and and just an all round great person!! Thanks for everything lovely!!

[sunsetcurve]

MANA!!!!! HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY BESTIE!!!! 🥰🥺💕💗💖💞💓💝 (sorry in advance if this is ramble-y and incoherent, I had a treatment yesterday alsdkjf) So. I definitely have a gifset for you. And I even started a bunch of my birthday gifts a few months ago to give myself plenty of time to finish them but uhhh. I severely overestimated my skills and severely underestimated how complicated it is so. I’m still gonna try to finish it today but i also don’t want to rush it so I’m very sorry that it’s most likely going to be late 😅 Anyway, I’ll try to keep this brief cause I feel like I’m just going to be repeating myself for the millionth time but literally. I love you so so much, you’re legit one of my favorite people ever. I’m honestly at a point now where I value your opinion so much that when I start something new I have to resist the urge to drop it in the DMs because if it doesn’t have the Mana Seal of Approval I’m instantly like “is this even worth pursuing?” alskdjflsdkfj Okay, I don’t know how to explain this next part in a way that makes sense but like? You have such a presence? Literally, you’re just one of those people that even online, where we’re not seeing you in person it’s still like. The energy on the dash just shifts in the best way when Mana’s around because you just have that powerful of a presence (sorry that’s confusing but hopefully you get what I’m trying to say laskdjf) And honestly why wouldn’t you, like the TALENT!!! And now you’ve added gifmaking to that mix like hello??? You're latest Lab Rats gifset is sick as hell????? Legit, is there anything you CAN’T do?? The answer is no. Also, you know how excited I am for the Hemlock Society, and you can catch me in five years being one of those annoying people telling EVERYONE that i was around for the beginning. Me @ the Publix cashier: “yeah, you know that super popular movie that just hit netflix? I was around when it was being written 😏” Anyway, this ended up being long and rambly anyway and I still don't really feel like I was able to articulate exactly what i wanna say but like. You know 💕💕💕 but I hope you have the best birthday ever because you deserve nothing less and I miss you and I love you 💞💖💝💕💗💓

nikki you literally have nothing to apologize for!!! it means the world that you’ve been making something at all and i really don’t mind it being late i know i’ll love it with all my heart regardless !!! seriously none of you guys are obligated to do anything but the fact that you are is so so sweet 😭.

also i’m just …. this ask made me almost tear up i love you SO SO MUCH!! this is just the sweetest thing ever and i’m so glad that i met you 🥺🥺🥺. i cannot even begin to explain how much you’ve always and continue to inspire me so just know that you’re a part of literally everything i do <3333 you’re literally one of the most genuinely kind hearted and talented and supportive people i know and i love you so much 💖💖💖💖 i know i’m absolutely terrible at responding but please know you can ALWAYS dump ideas or thoughts or just whatever you want to talk about in my dms i am always happy to hear from you !!!! thank you so so much for this mwah i hope you’re doing well and i love you SO much <3

[bellarkefanfiction]

Lina got the chance to catch up with @ticogirls author of I Think You're Cute, Between the Lines, what a delicate heart, what a hard head and many more on ao3.

BFF: Tell us about yourself!

Mel: I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who starts sweating whenever they get this kinda question but here goes: I’m Mel and despite what my Twitter handle says, that’s not short for “Mellamy” lmao. I’ve been on Tumblr for close to eight years now (I just got a small stroke from saying that), I watch a fuckton of TV and movies (I mean. Who doesn’t, right?), and I’m also a proud BoC (Bisexual of Colour).  

BFF: When did you start shipping Bellarke?

Mel: The first place I saw Bellarke was, I think like many of the fandom, on my Tumblr dashboard. During the post-S1 hiatus, one of my favourite gif-makers (she’s changed her URL and gone on several hiatuses so I genuinely don’t know where to find her anymore) was posting a bunch of gifsets of them. Again, like many of the fandom, from the gifs and screencaps of S1 alone, I basically assumed Bellarke was already a canon couple and decided “ooh, they cute. Lemme watch this show for that Good TV Romance™”. (Once more, like many of the fandom, I got a Rude Awakening when I started watching the show because it turned out to be So Much Worse… but also So Much Better.)

As for when I started really shipping Bellarke in the actual show, I think a lot of people fell in 1x02 (Bellamy saving Clarke from the grounder pit) or 1x03 (Clarke relieving him of the burden of mercy killing Atom). While those were both huge steps for me in terms of perceiving their relationship, I don’t think I really fell for this ship as a potential romance until 1x04, ‘Murphy’s Law’. The Charlotte/Murphy conflict peeled back the layers on both Bellamy and Clarke: his posturing and bravado was melted away in front of the delinquents, and all of her cool logic and reasoning was temporarily suspended. That, for me, was the first episode that really showed that despite all their oil/vinegar clashes throughout the show, at their very deepest core, Bellamy and Clarke were always going to be unified by the same goal — to protect their people.

BFF: How long have you been writing fanfiction?

Mel: I used to write (bad) fanfiction for some older fandoms, back when Wattpad and AO3 weren’t even conceived yet and all we had was FanFiction.Net and LiveJournal. Shit, I was really out here when ‘My Immortal’ was still being updated, lmaooo. I stopped for several years for a multitude of reasons — overstuffed schedule, physical exhaustion, a bunch of big life transitions, mental health issues etc. Bellarke was THE ship that restarted my fic-writing engine in 2015, and I think because of that, I’m always gonna have that Soft Spot for them.

BFF: Are you a part of any other fandoms?

Mel: Aside from The 100, I’m a huuuuuuge Star Wars hoe. Original trilogy, prequels, Rogue One, current series — I love them all. I’m genuinely nervous about Disney’s future plans for reviving this franchise but having quite literally grown up on this stuff, I just don’t think it’s ever going to be possible for me to walk away from this franchise, no matter how Messy it gets (and I’ve a feeling it will!).

I’m also really big on the MCU (currently obsessed with Thorkyrie) and From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, which I have no shame admitting is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.

BFF: Are there any writers that you’ve drawn inspiration from?

Mel: I’m going old-school here, but I’ve always been enamoured by Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series) and K. A. Applegate (Animorphs series). It’s not so much about their kickass creativity with plot or characters, but more of the rhythm and pacing of their writing. They’ve each got a great way of balancing story and characterisation, all underscored and punctuated with these unique comedic inflections and beats.

BFF: Do you have favourite side-pairings or characters you also enjoy including?

Mel: I love writing Minty and, I’m not gonna lie, it’s mostly as a fuck-you to the writers for refusing to acknowledge Monty Green’s Gayness™. Memori have got a really fun dynamic to write too, and I still include a lot of Jasper/Maya in my fics because they deserve to be happy and in love forever. As for solo characters, Raven is hands down my favourite to voice, mostly because I feel like I can 100% relate with whatever’s going through her head in any given situation.

BFF: What are your favourite tropes to write?

Mel: Oh LORDT, do you got a full hour???

Lmao okay but real talk, I absolutely love writing Enemies to Friends to Lovers. I prefer Modern AU’s, simply because I like the concept of breaking our fave characters out from the grimdark world of The 100, to see how their relationships and attitudes could possibly evolve if they were allowed to care about dumb stuff like TV shows and public transport instead of just whether they manage to live or die. I am also a die-hard fan of the Roommates trope, simply because it’s the most convenient fic-writing device for ensuring that your ship will always have some reason to share the same space alone together with some regularity.

BFF: What do you predict will happen in season 5? Especially for our favourite duo?

Mel: So this is basically just “do you think Bellarke will become canon in S5”, right? (lmaodskjfhks) Well I hate to sound like I’m pushing a fatalistic attitude towards S5, but honestly, I don’t see Bellarke becoming canon in S5. After all, they’ve got a lot of ground to cover once they reunite on the ground. Six years is a heck of a long time, especially when one of them fully thought the other was dead. (It’s hard for us as fandom to grasp because we have been shown that Clarke’s fully alive and well, but we gotta remember, death is a separation of utmost finality. It’s not just like thinking someone’s away or missing.)

I do, however, think it’s feasible to expect some kind of recognition/acknowledgement of explicitly romantic feelings on either one or both their parts.

BFF: Do you have any plans for other fics you’d like to write, if so could you spoil or tease us?

Mel: Oh boy, do I ever. Full disclosure, I’m currently working on about 6 or 7 fics for Bellarke alone, but they’re setting up to hit at least 8k in length each so they’re definitely not going to be ready for publication anytime soon.

I do have one that I’m planning to post as a multichap, which means I won’t have to wait until it’s fully completed. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s based on a French romcom titled Blind Date (Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglément). It’s basically a neighbours / enemies to friends to lovers AU, and I’m really excited for y’all to read it!

BFF: What advice would you give novice writers?

Mel: I answered this question a good while ago in this post here with a few major points, but I think the most important one is this:

You are your best competition. I know it’s a lot easier said than done, but this is seriously the most important thing for me as a writer: DON’T COMPARE YOURSELF WITH OTHERS. It never makes anyone feel better (especially if you’re, say, writing fic for a big fandom with a lot of existing content). Honestly, it doesn’t even make sense when you think about how every writer is different and has their own unique style.

Be your own harshest critic, but also your biggest cheerleader. Write for you, to express yourself. That way, whatever you write/publish, at the end of the day, you feel good about it.