#idk i went off there i just want dc to take it seriously instead of going the comedy route | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bigskydreaming · 3 years

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And another thing, he said as if its ever just ONE more thing, hahahaha look, fuck you numbers, I’m not about to be limited by the likes of YOU.

Anyway.

Anyone else think its kinda weird that in all the many years of “Dick not so secretly resented Jason because Bruce adopted him and made him Robin and that’s why they were never close” fics.......there seem to be a big whopping zero that take the fix-it approach:

“What if Bruce had been aware of the tension between the two because he’s not actually a Dumb Dumb McStupidhead and thought to himself, gee, if only there was something I, the parent, had the power to do about this resentment from one brother based on something I, the parent, did for the other brother who never did anything because he is not the parent and also he did nothing wrong? What if given that I and my actions are the actual problem here, I, the parent, he who holdeth both the actual power in this family as the parent and the power as the problem-causer, to address the problem.....like what if I got off my ‘matches with Batman’ butt and.....did...something? About it?”

Like.....oh I don’t know, just spitballing here....maybe explaining to Jason just what it was Dick was resentful about when it came to Robin and that Jason wasn’t the one Dick was actually mad at, which more than likely would have prompted the extremely empathetic at this age Jason to take Dick’s side and be like wtf, you gotta fix this B.

Or maybe like, going to Dick and expressing how sorry he is that he didn’t consider how Dick would feel about any of this and that he’s let it go unaddressed for so long since then, which more than likely would have NOT resulted in Dick continuing to hold a grudge against an innocent third party but rather be like thank you this is literally all I ever wanted, a fucking acknowledgment that you’d hurt me and that my being hurt mattered to you?

Or if the problem is more Dick being resentful that Bruce adopted Jason and not him, maybe Bruce explaining this to Jason and that Jason wasn’t the one Dick was actually mad at, which again, more than likely would have prompted the extremely empathetic Jason to go umm, wtf are you talking to me about this for then, if you think he’s upset about that why the fuck aren’t you going to talk to him about it and tell him all this stuff about regretting not adopting him before now and sparing him this hurt instead? Like what are you waiting for old man, your fucking helicopter to come pick you up? NOW. Go NOW. You’re not getting any younger, geez Louise, why are old people so dumb.

Or maybe like.....Bruce going to Dick and expressing how sorry he is that he didn’t consider how Dick would feel about.....look, you see where I’m going with this, right? You get it? Its not actually all that tricky to grasp?

Or hell, maybe even just in a fic where Jason nurses his own resentment over the fact that he’s heard so much about Dick and looked forward to meeting him and yet months and months go by since Jason’s adoption and in all that time his alleged big brother apparently can’t even be bothered to come introduce himself, RIP Jason’s feelings, guess he can’t possibly matter all that much to the guy, way to welcome him to the family......

I mean, its not like THAT thought neeeeeeever comes up in fic, so its like, hmmm, counterpoint, but where are all the fics that take the angle of rather than let Jason think he doesn’t matter to his predecessor and let Dick take all the blame for this impression when there’s LITERALLY nothing Dick could do about it since he found out about Jason from the freaking newspaper months after the adoption and only after Jason debuted as Robin.....maybe Bruce, could again, just like....start a conversation. And be like Jason I seem to have inadvertently given you the wrong impression here, but trust me, Dick not coming to meet you before now had nothing whatsoever to do with you and was purely because I never actually told him about you.

Again, cut to Jason, the actual brains of the family at this point in time, staring at Bruce with his mouth hanging open:

“Wait, so you’re telling me that after the two of you had this big fight and you haven’t seen him in like eighteen months, AND after his eighteenth birthday came and went without you bothering to even call him and let him know you still wanted him in your life despite him no longer legally being your ward, AND after you went and took me in and adopted me......you never at any point picked up the phone and said hey kid that I raised and consider family and still want to be part of my family no matter how long its been since we talked......I just thought you should know, given that we’re still family and all, that our family is now bigger, because that’s information that is kinda key to give to people you consider family, as NOT keeping them in that loop could kinda sorta maaaaaaybe give them the impression that you DON’T think of them that way or else you would have thought this was relevant information for them to have?”

Bruce: I’m not sure I see where you’re going with this.

Jason: How are you this dumb. No but seriously. HOW.

Anywho, cut to me, twiddling my thumbs here all super casual like.....

But HMMM, isn’t it WEIRD how fandom, which is totally better than canon, and definitely does not have patience for that unnecessary family angst porn DC is so obsessed with and just wants these goshdarn idiots to be a FAMILY, like......neeeeeeeeever utilizes the transformative power of fanfic and their much more reliable takes on Good Parent Bruce Wayne to like....have Bruce....do something about the problems between past Dick and Jason? In any of these fics? And instead has him just....let the opportunities to make things better for them, AND HIMSELF in the process, just like.....sail away into the rear view mirror, waving a hand at them as they pass, content to let things fester and worsen until cut to after Jason’s return, like.....oh gee, really wish something could have been done about the relationship between Dick and Jason way back when, maybe Jason could have benefited from another close relationship in his life then and maybe Dick might not be as bad off now if he wasn’t burdened with unnecessary guilt over having had human emotions when he was a teenager?

So so SO weird that this angle never comes up or gets tackled in ANY fics that emphasize Dick’s alleged history of being an asshole to Jason and the reason they were never close or barely knew each other. I mean, its such an EASY and OBVIOUS fix to all that, don’t you think?

Unless, of course.....in the fics that make an emphasis of this fandom created dynamic.....its not actually considered a problem to fix at all.

But rather, this manufactured dynamic IS the fix, to what they see as the ACTUAL problem......any kind of real or explored focus on what Bruce actually DID and didn’t do, that caused the resentment they’re all too happy to show Dick nursing, but seem keeeeeeeeenly deft in avoiding any exploration of him FEELING. Except of course when it comes to a reason for him to feel even guiltier BECAUSE of it.

Its almost like we would have had a ton more variety in how fics depict the early years between Dick and Jason, perks of this oh so easily arrived at fix-it angle.....unless those fics were always doing exactly what they intended by keeping every one in the comments sections so busy commenting on what a jerk Dick was in that chapter or in the older events that chapter mentioned, that they just so happen to never really spend much time considering Bruce’s inciting choices back then to be AS worthy of comment or criticism.

Idk you guys, I just happen to find it kinda hilar in that ‘what a weird coeenkeedink kinda way’ that so many of the things a lot of fandom are EXTREMELY loud about holding against Dick (whether Dick did or not actually do those things in the first place)....just so happen to be the very things that most of these same people REFUSE to ever hold Bruce accountable for, or admit that he actually did.

Y’know, like how Bruce never actually fired Dick as Robin, that was just a retcon (when there’s literally been more versions of events where Dick WAS fired than WASN’T at this point).....but meanwhile, Dick very much definitely did FIRE Tim, that was exactly how that went down.

Or how similarly, Bruce neeeeeever actually kicked Dick out, let alone made him give back his keys, but Dick DEFINITELY kicked Tim out of house and Gotham.....even though Dick literally did none of that and in fact was living at the penthouse the whole time he was Batman, meaning Wayne Manor was perfectly available to be Tim’s home base the whole time, if he’d wanted it.

Or how Bruce has never lifted a finger at his eldest, or thrown any kind of a temper tantrum, because he is a good person who would obviously never ever do that, BUT if the son he spent the longest time raising just so HAPPENS to end up with a reputation of having a hair-trigger temper, going off at the drop of a hat, blowing things all out of proportion and lashing out physically whenever he’s overwhelmed emotionally.....well, that certainly has nothing to do with Bruce or anything he’s ever done, lol why would it, BUT its definitely something that needs to be commented on time and time again because it very much did happen all these times in canon, whereas all these times you’re talking about with Bruce are very clearly out of character writing because see, Bruce just isn’t like that, uh doy.

Or how Bruce definitely wasn’t being problematic as hell when it came to his non-interactions with Dick back when Jason was living with him, but Dick’s non-interactions with Jason are 10000x more worthy of comment and criticism. And Dick’s responsibilities towards the emotional wellbeing of the kid he didn’t pick to be his family and wasn’t even actually legally family with at the time, let alone actually obligated to, are definitely the same as Bruce’s responsibilities to the emotional wellbeing of both the kids he did actually pick to be his family and did actually make obligations to. Thus the one is definitely more deserving of a call-out post than the other....wait, what? Dammit, I was SURE my math checked out on that one this time. Well fuck a duck, now I am THOROUGHLY flummoxed by all this.

Yup.....

Just really funny in that lmao ‘actually not at all sorta’ way, how its the extremely PRECISE things that so many fans absolutely REFUSE to acknowledge Bruce ever doing, that they just can’t help but ‘expose’ as a mere retcon, bad writing, ooc behavior, writers just ‘not getting who Bruce Wayne is,’ etc, etc, whenever it does get brought up by other people....

It just so happens to be these very specific things that come up time and time again as the things people just WILL NOT LET GO when it comes to Dick doing them.....even when.....in most cases he didn’t even actually do them! Not because they were ‘mere retcons’ or just ‘bad writing’ or ‘ooc behavior’ or ‘writers just not getting who Dick Grayson is’....but because they literally. Did not. Happen. Until fandom for some reason - ‘despite’ HATING canon for having Bruce do THESE VERY SAME THINGS - put their own interpretative or transformative spin on things and MADE those things happen in such huge numbers that a lot of new fans coming into fandom by way of fics honestly believe that THESE are the canon moments and its the ones attributed to Bruce that are just fans of other characters having their sour grapes moments.

I mean....

You gotta laugh.

Anyway. So I mean, unless I’m just totally reading the room wrong, I’d have to hazard a guess that the only real reason we NEVER see fics addressing things the way I outlined in my earliest examples at the start of this post.....is that a whole lot of fandom just kinda decided over the years that it was just waaaaaay easier to just redirect peoples’ ire at other characters, away from Bruce, than it was to go to the trouble of like....actually ADDRESSING Bruce’s pesky little canon mistakes.

Cuz see....writing a happier, more united Batfam in the years before Jason’s death is only a fix-it fic if the problem you’re fixing is the family’s relationships.....and not ‘Bruce acknowledging - let alone taking ownership of - his mistakes.’ If the latter is the REAL problem, well a more ‘together’ family isn’t something you actually need at all....you just need someone else to pin its divisiness on.

But I digress.

Aaaaaanyway.....now standard stock disclaimer that as I’ve always always always said....I don’t actually hate Bruce nor do I have anything whatsoever against Good Dad Bruce.....my issues are always just with peoples’ approach to his canon mistakes or poor writing being to double down on the problem but just make it someone else’s. And that one little thing where the Smartest Man In The World can come up with a way to fight Doomsday with a paper clip and some chewing gum, but goshdarnnit if he’s not completely helpless and powerless when it comes to fixing his own mistakes or interceding in his childrens’ emotional problems.

(As in by just y’know, parenting them. Sitting them down for a conversation. No, bugging their apartments and calling that his love language doesn’t count.)

Also, an Honorable Mention Pet Peeve goes out to all the fans who love to dismiss Dick Grayson stans raising this issue because ‘this sort of thing happens with all the characters’ when lololololol, no, it really actually does not. Given the weeeeeeeird similarities and parallels in the very specific things we tend to gripe about Bruce doing in canon and others tend to gripe about Dick doing in fanon, like, I’d actually think some of you would be a bit more empathetic about how much it sucks seeing your fave character condemned for stuff like this, given the lengths you go to when avoiding acknowledging Bruce doing it. But then again, that would defeat the point of attributing all that to a Bruce scapegoat instead of a Bruce in the first place, so I mean, I guess not actually.

But whatevs. I guess I’m just not able to grasp the nuances of how people criticizing or even fixating on some of Bruce’s worse actions in canon gains the ire of fans who are like, I am just here rolling my eyes at you guys for being so addicted to your shitty misery porn that you like, just loooooove going with the takes where Bruce is just the worst person ever and a totally shitty dad....

While meanwhile.....many of those exact same fans.....

Two seconds later: Now if you don’t mind, we have to get back to making up scenarios and bad faith interpretations that paint Dick as being just the worst person ever and a totally shitty brother or son. But in a not-that-we’re-addicted-to-shitty-misery-porn kinda way or whatever, because we’re obvs SO not, that’s YOU guys, this is totally different. We don’t LIKE doing this, we’re only doing it because we HAVE to. It has nothing to do with us not actually minding the writing or the content of what’s being written whatsoever, we just don’t like that it makes Bruce look bad, and as long as you keep fixating on how it makes Bruce look like, duh, what other choice do we have but to make someone else look worse instead? When you think about it, this is all your fault, really.

Anyway. You just gotta love the takeaway.

Us: Griping about something Bruce does in canon and how the writers portrayed it and any resulting followup.

Others in Fandom: manufactures a parallel scenario with Bad Brother/Son Dick Grayson out of a single out of context panel, tinfoil and some dental floss.

Fandom: These two situations are the same.

Us: Okay but see they’re really fucking not tho, is the thing....

#its a Friday night gripe #and Im feeling ripe....#wait. no #thats not a thing i take it back guys I promise Im not ripe I bathe Im hygienic #I Swear

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obxlife · 4 years

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In Need of Help (Pope x Reader)

A/N: Okay, so I had this idea for Pope and I knew I had to write it! I just feel like it’s very sweet and soft and idk. Plus, it has an enemy to lovers trope, which I personally love. Also, the valedictorian and salutatorian at my school are also dating and I just got that idea from them lol.

Word Count: 3,513

Request: -

Summary: Pope finds himself with some trouble regarding his scholarship work, and he knows he can’t turn to his friends for this. Instead, he sucks up his pride and turns to you, the runner up for the Lucas T Vanderhorst Merit Scholarship. Oh, and his enemy regarding academics.

Warnings: Mild swearing.

IN NEED OF HELP

Pope was in trouble. Not serious trouble like JJ regarding his dad or John B in relation to the DCS and basically being homeless. No, Pope was in trouble in a way that may almost seem absurd.

He was struggling with his goddamn scholarship essay. And the worst part of it all was that he had technically already won the scholarship.

See, this was just a follow-up essay he had to do to ensure he was not going to be ripped apart from the opportunity of actually getting the scholarship. And it had been the hardest essay he had to write. Mainly because it asked for more of a story instead of focusing on a scientific topic, and Pope had always struggled with that.

The paper he was writing his draft on was filled with eraser marks and little doodles around the edges. Most of the doodles were of things he could see. His eraser, his pinky finger, his cup of water on his desk. There was only one he wasn’t really sure why he had drawn. It was the one object that was not in the room with him at that instant, and the worst part of it all was that he truly hated it. What had he drawn? You.

For some reason, Pope had drawn you onto the edge of his paper. He didn’t really understand why he had because, as mentioned before, he hated you with a passion that ran so deep in his veins it was a part of who he was. Pope could not be himself if he didn’t hate you, and it was just the same for you. You couldn’t be yourself if you didn’t hate Pope.

Pope began to rub his pencil over the small drawing of your face, wanting nothing more than to get you out of his head. He hated that he had drawn you of al people, and he hated how stuck he was on this stupid essay.

Pope hadn’t realized how much force he was using to press his pencil into the paper until he ripped it. Throwing his pencil down, Pope sighed and pressed his hands to his head, stretching in his seat.

“That’s it,” he said to himself before grabbing the papers from his desk, his pencil, his eraser, and his pencil sharpener into his backpack. He then grabbed the folder that had arrived through the mail and gently took it into his hands. Pope turned outside of his room and headed towards the shop in front of his house.

His father was behind the counter, checking an old lady out.

“Dad,” Pope called out to him from the door. “I’m heading out.”

The older man froze. He thought he had told his son to work on his scholarship. “I thought I told you to work on your scholarship. Now you know I don’t want you slacking around -”

“I know, I know,” Pope told him. “I just need to clear my head. I’m going over to John B to see if my friends can help.”

“Look here, boy,” Heyward called out to his son while pointing his finger out. Pope stood at the door, on hand already pushing it open. “What are your friends going to help with? They’re all a bunch of good-for-nothings.”

Pope sighed, only shaking his head and turning towards the outside, throwing a “Later, Pops” over his shoulder. The hot afternoon air made Pope’s body break into a sweat, but Pope didn’t mind as he headed deeper into the Cut towards John B’s fishing shack.

The Chateau stood mighty and tall before the marsh and surrounding it were Pope’s friends. JJ was laying across the hammock sipping on a beer and a joint in his hand while Kie lay opposite of him, playing the ukelele. John B was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was probably inside.

“Hey, guys,” the dark-haired boy called out to the pair. He smiled as he saluted them with their usual handshake before taking a seat in one of the broken-down chairs. Pope set his backpack on the ground, careful not to fold the papers in his hands.

“What you got there, Pope?” JJ asked curiously. Pope knew what he held in his hands would not interest JJ, so he told the boy straight out what it was.

“Scholarship stuff.”

Indeed, JJ shrugged and turned around, bringing the joint back to his lips to take another drag of it. Kie, instead, showed interest in the papers held between Pope’s fingers.

“What do you have to do this time? Another essay about something science-y?” she wondered.

Pope nodded but then shook his head. “Sort of. It’s an essay but they want a story. But I don’t know what to write about. Like, most of the stuff we do is illegal.”

Kie laughed at this before saying, “Then lie. Just take the illegal parts out.”

“Hard to do when they’re essential to the story,” Pope replied.

Now JJ laughed, smiling at Pope and diving into one of the many illegal memories they had made together.

While this helped Pope clear his head, it was not guiding him as to what to write for his essay. After about an hour or two hanging out, Pope sighed, knowing he would now have to work on the essay.

“Okay guys, I need y’all to be serious right now. I really need to get this essay done. Any ideas?”

Kie and JJ stared at him blankly, not really knowing how to help. Pope groaned at their reaction, but then groaned even louder when Kie said:

“Why don’t you ask Y/N Y/L/N? Wasn’t she second place for the scholarship?”

“Kie, I literally hate her. We’ve been competing over the top spot in our grade for our whole lives.”

Kie shrugged. “Yeah, but now the scholarship is yours anyway. And besides, didn’t you say the only thing she was better at than you is story writing?”

“I said that when I was drunk,” Pope deadpanned.

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true,” JJ said quickly before taking another sip of beer.

Pope really didn’t want to go see you. He had way too much pride to do so. But his options were wearing thin and he had to send this essay in a week, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do so himself.

“Well, even if I went to Y/N, I doubt she would be willing to help.”

Kie gave him a hard look. “You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you, Kie,” Pope sighed. “Look, I’ll go to her but she probably hates my guts. I did take the scholarship from her.”

“Hey!” JJ scolded. “Don’t say that, man. We know you won it fair and square. You deserve it.”

“I know I did. But that doesn’t mean she won’t hate me for it. We all know she needs that scholarship just as much as I do to get into college.”

It was true. You had lived your life down in the Cut, working just as much as Pope did with his father. Your mother was the owner of a small boat repair shop which she had received after your father’s death. Because she couldn’t and didn’t know how to work on boats and because your father had taught you everything you know, you were the head repair woman there. Everyone on the island knew how much time you dedicated to the shop, almost as much time as you dedicated to school.

“Look, man. Let’s be real. Everyone born on the Cut knows they’re probably going to be stuck here forever. You and Y/N were just lucky to have the opportunity to might have not been stuck here, but in the end, you got it. I’m sure she won’t be bitter towards you because she probably still expected her life to be spent on the Cut either way.”

Pope sighed. He knew what JJ was saying was probably true but he hated to think of that.

“Just go to her, Pope,” Kie told him.

With that, Pope collected his belongings and headed out towards your shop. It wasn’t far from the Chateau, maybe a five-minute walk, but Pope managed to get there in thirty minutes. He was trying to push back the inevitable.

Once he arrived he stood outside for another good ten minutes, building up his courage to go in. Breathing in deeply, he told himself that he was going to be fine and that your hate for him had probably dissipated a bit since the end of the school year. He opened the door to the shop and found it was empty except for two men looking down at the bottom of a boat.

They didn’t turn around when Pope had entered, too concentrated on the person Pope just now saw that was under the boat.

“What you thinkin’?” one of the men asked as you pushed yourself from out under the boat. The skateboard you were laying upon was uncomfortable and your muscles sighed in relief as you stood up next to them.

“We’re gonna need two orders of plugs from Guffy and then we can start working on this bad boy,” you told them before wiping your forehead. “Well, I’m off, boys.”

And just as you spun around your eyes fell upon the boy at the door.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

Pope could only smile innocently, hoping you would spare him some time of day.

“What do you want, Heyward?” you asked rudely while heading towards the back of the shop. Pope began to follow you around, sparing a glance at the two men you stared at him dirtily.

Pope was sure you hated him now.

“Look, I-I need your help, Y/N. And I know you hate me but I really need it.”

Anger and pain were laced in your eyes as you spun around to face the dark-skinned boy. “Yes, I do hate you. And I don’t want to help you. You took the scholarship from me, Pope.”

“Well, technically I didn’t. I won it. But,” he raised his hands in defense when you gave him another murderous look, “I seriously need your help. They gave me a task I know you’re better at than me and I don’t know what to do.”

You began to tie your hair into a ponytail as you felt your skin grow hot with anger. “So what? You thought you would just strut in here and I’d be willing to help?”

“N-no, but I thought -”

“You thought what? That out of the kindness of my heart I would actually help you? Need I remind you that you took the scholarship from me?”

“I didn’t take the scholarship from you! I won it, fair and square and you know that!”

Your eyes fell to the ground, defeated. You knew what Pope was saying was true, but the denial had helped you cope with the fact that you weren’t enough for the scholarship. You weren’t enough to get out of the Cut.

“Look, Y/N,” Pope began awkwardly. He was scratching the back of his neck, not sure if he was going to be able to get you to help him. “I know you wanted the scholarship - hell, you probably wanted it more than me. And I’m sorry you didn’t get it because you truly deserve it, but I’m not sorry that I got it. And I know that’s selfish, but let’s be real here. We both want to get off the Cut, and we always knew that only one of us was going to make it. So please, please, please help me get out of this place.”

You thought about it. Really hard. And Pope stood before you fidgeting with his fingers and doubting if what he said was the best thing he could have said. He opened his mouth, a rant about to burst through his lips.

“Fine,” you stated. You were going against your instinct, but at least you would get him to shut up. “I’ll help you. But I get free groceries for a month.”

Pope stuttered before answering. “What - you - I - you know I can’t do that! My dad would kill me!”

“Well then, you’ll have to pay with your own money.”

“Okay, fine! But only because I’m really desperate.”

****************************************************************

And so you and Pope began to work together every day for the following week. It only took two hours for you to drop your grudge against him and laugh at his stories and jokes. He would smile at your reactions and feel his previous hate for you to slip into something more similar to love. He began to notice how pretty your eyes were when they seemed to sparkle in the afternoon light and how your skin reminded him of warm summer days. You began to notice how your stupid hatred for him began to transform into a crush. His chocolate brown eyes reminding you of coffees on chilly, winter mornings and his soft smile reminding you of innocence.

Between your hours spent working together, you would talk about other things. You told him about your mother and her disease (which didn’t let her work at the shop with you) and how your friends at school were all out of town because of a road trip they had planned which you couldn’t go on. He told you about the Pogues and the pressure he felt sometimes from his dad. You both told each other a lot more than you had ever expected to share, but the feeling of comfort and understanding that followed these confessions was enough to maintain the both of you stuck together.

Exactly a week after Pope had approached you at your boat shop, you both headed together to the post office that was near the police station. Together you sealed the envelope containing the finished essay and placed the post stamps onto it. You watched Pope pay for the dispatch of the letter and then you walked out together.

You felt dread in your stomach, not wanting to have to turn your back on your new friendship. You didn’t know if Pope felt the same way as you did, but you felt like you had come to the end of your short relationship. You felt as if, years from now, you would look back and remember Pope as the boy you only helped write an essay and nothing more, which made you afraid to no end. You didn’t want Pope to be only that.

Unbeknownst to you, Pope felt the same way. He was expecting you to turn towards him and say goodbye, followed by a snarky remark. He expected you to go back to hating him and not thinking about him. All he wanted was you to prove him wrong.

“Do you want to grab something to eat?” you both asked at the same time. Then, your eyes widened at the same time, both of you shocked that you wanted to carry on with your friendship.

“Wait, you still want to hang out?” you asked him. Pope nodded vigorously.

“Yeah. Did you really think I wouldn’t want to be your friend anymore?” he asked, a little hurt.

“Shut up, you thought that about me as well!”

With smiles on both of your faces, you turned around towards the Wreck, where you knew Kie would give Pope a discount.

**********************************************

The Pogues hadn’t seen their smart friend for a month. Ever since JJ and Kie had convinced him of reaching out to you for help, he had disappeared.

“Pope pulling a Houdini,” JJ remarked as he arrived at the Chateau to find that, once again, Pope was not there.

“Have you guys even heard from him?” John B asked.

JJ shrugged but Kie bit her lip. “I see him at the Wreck every once in a while. He’s been hanging around with Y/N.”

“Y/N?” John B said almost laughing. “Okay, we both know they hate each other and that’s a lie.”

“I’m not lying, JB,” Kie rolled her eyes. “I literally saw them there yesterday.”

“No way! Pope has to be dating her!” JJ exclaimed. “It only makes sense! Future valedictorian and salutatorian.”

“That would make a cute couple,” John B muttered while thinking about it.

Kie coughed, trying to bring the boys’ attention back to the main issue they had. “Look, guys, we need to get Pope to hang out with us again. He’s been blowing us off and I do not have enough patience to keep you two from doing dumb shit.”

“Mama’s mad,” JJ whispered. This earned him a smack on the head of the girl.

“Let’s just head over to her shop and see if they’re there.”

*********************************************

“Wait, so JJ stole some boat plugs?”

Pope nodded, perched upon the edge of the boat you were working on. He was leaning back, a book in his lap, as he told you one of his many crazy stories about his friends.

“I don’t know why you asked for my help for the essay when you have so many stories to tell.”

Pope sighed. “As I’ve said before, most of them are illegal.”

You nod your head at what he was saying, agreeing with him. You continued to work on the boat as you felt his eyes upon you.

Pope was looking at your eyes at first. He was counting how many flecks of color they held. Then, he moved onto your skin, noticing how smooth it looked. He wondered if it would feel smooth against his fingers, or if your mouth would feel smoother. He then noticed how plump your lips looked, and Pope could feel himself leaning closer to you.

“Y/N?” he called out so softly you almost didn’t hear him.

You spun your head to look at him, suddenly noticing how small the distance between the both of you had become. You felt butterflies erupt in your stomach and you wondered if he felt them too. Your heart was pounding in your chest, and you could only wait until his lips were pressed to yours.

Feeling nervous, Pope began to speak. “I d-don’t want this to be awkward but I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a while.”

You nodded your head, inching even closer to him. His lips looked a little chapped, but you were sure that it wouldn’t matter once you kissed him.

“And I don’t know if you feel the same or if you -”

“Shut up, Pope,” you giggled before plunging forwards. You pressed your lips to his own, moving them and giving him a few seconds to respond. When he did you smiled a little before continuing what you were doing. Your arms reached up to hold his face while his arms brought you closer to him and positioned you between his legs. Pope’s thumb was drawing circles right at your waist, and you finally broke apart from him when the door of the shop opened.

You didn’t break eye contact with Pope, but a sudden loud whoop made you stumble away from each other. Spinning around you found JJ, John B, and a girl you recognized as a Kook standing before you. You were frozen in place as Pope headed over to them to cover up JJ’s lips.

“Pope boy finally getting some action!” John B hollered while you felt your cheeks go red. The girl rolled her eyes at his friend before sending you an apologetic look.

It only took Pope three seconds to round them up and take them outside. You got back to working on the boat, trying to distract yourself from what had happened. You felt embarrassment rise up inside of you at being caught kissing the boy you liked.

Soon enough, Pope returned inside and stood next to you. You didn’t turn to look at him in shame and fear at what he might say.

“They wanted to see me since, you know, I haven’t been hanging around them recently.”

“Oh.” This was the moment Pope was going to tell you he didn’t want to be friends with you anymore and that he had now noticed how you were all too time-consuming. However, the boy surprised you.

“They invited us to hang out tomorrow. They said they want to meet you.”

You smiled and turned to look at him. “Really?”

“U-um, yeah. They kind of think you’re my girlfriend so…”

You blushed at that thought. Being Pope’s girlfriend was something that made your insides swell and feel light and soft and good.

“Okay.”

“Okay as in ‘yes, I want to hang out with them’ or as in ‘yes, I want to be your girlfriend’?”

You furrowed your eyebrows. “Is that your way of asking me to be your girlfriend?”

Pope awkwardly nodded before looking at you. The smile on your face seemed to be glued on and Pope copied your facial expression. You leaned in again, kissing him softly.

“Take your guess, Pope,” you teased him while smiling.

“I really hope it’s the second one.”

#outer banks #obx #obx netflix #pope heyward #jonathan daviss

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myriahkamm · 4 years

Text

I live-blogged watching BvS and Justice League on FB earlier; here are my unedited thoughts. :P

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

I'm watching Batman V. Superman (because bad movie night I guess idk), and during the opening scene rehashing the Waynes' deaths (for what feels like the millionth time in cinematic history--seriously, y'all, we can be done with that for a while and definitely don't need a 5 minute slow-motion scene about it), when Thomas says Martha's name as they're dying, I burst out laughing because (i) I didn't remember that he said her name during this scene and (ii) is this supposed to be some kind of foreshadowing for the really dumb crux of the movie where Batman and Superman stop fighting because omg their moms have the same name? I literally can't stop laughing. This movie is such a joke. 🤣

Having the Robin costume in this film with absolutely no context is just stupidly pointless fanboy pandering. Anyone who actually gives a crap about Batman lore should realistically hate that.

Lex Luthor, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, bitching about not having power is definitely on brand, but I am just super *not* a fan of the quirky, kind-of-nerdy-and-awkward Lex Luthor this film decided to go with. The hardcore businessman Lex Luthor from the 90s and 00s will always be the Lithor I like best. Y'know, the one based at least in part on Donald Trump. That one.

This Jesse Eisenberg version is way too much of a Mary Sue. Businessman *and* scientist *and* awkward nerd? Yeah, Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg, but I'm not sure Lex Luthor should be Mark Zuckerberg.

Ugh, I totally forgot about the Darkseid-foreshadowing dream that's never going to go anywhere because, let's be real, DC is never going to do a live-action film with Darkseid (and it would be awful even if they did). Also, Batman using guns in that dream is a thing I'll never be cool with. I don't care what kind of world he thinks he's living in in that dream; Batman has established principles and pretty much only goes against them in alternate universes.

Jesus, I forgot about the whole Flash-from-the-future scene, too. DC wrote a lot of checks we're never going to be able to cash in this film. Promising an Injustice-esque Superman-is-evil kind of storyline that they're never going to do anything with...why would they do that?

So in the dream, Darkseid-related stuff is going on (which, in Justice League, does sort of happen with Steppenwolf) and Superman says "she was everything to me, and you took her away from me." Then future-Flash says that "Lois is the key". Are they implying Batman has premonitions? Are they giving him a superpower? 🤣

Oh, that's right, they blew up the U.S. Capitol in this movie. 🤣 These scenes that are supposed to be really serious and filled with tension just keep making me laugh.

Why did they decide Batman needed to make a kryptonite spear? I mean, other than plot reasons so they could use it later against Doomsday. Batman uses projectiles and his fists; he rarely uses swords or spears or whatever.

Why did they decide Doomsday had to be created using a mixture of Kryptonian and Luthor's DNA? In the comics, Doomsday is an experimental clone based on ancient Kryptonian DNA. Why (in my opinion) make Doomsday so much more pathetic by adding human DNA into the mix? Freaking weird decision.

"Mm." What a weird quirk to add to Luthor's character. "Mm" every other sentence. What's that all about?

Luthor manipulating Batman into fighting Superman is...so unbelievable. Luthor manipulating Superman to hate Batman, waaaaay more believable. But no, that's not what they went with. They went with Luthor manipulating Batman for two years into wanting to fight Superman. Superman just randomly came to hate Batman on his own and only got manipulated into fighting him at the end. They could have just gone with hey, Batman's suspicious of everyone and would naturally be suspicious of a superpowered alien, especially with the whole setup they did at the beginning that coincided with stuff from Man of Steel. But nope. Nope, they went with the dumber plot.

Doesn't Luthor have way too much info about all these heroes' secret identities? Are we just pretending secret identities don't matter anymore? That's too 90s or something?

Why does the kryptonite spear make an "omg I'm a glowy thing" sound? 🤣

And now we're at the stupid Martha part that makes no sense because if you were about to die, you wouldn't say "save [mom's name]"; you would just say "save my mom!" 🤣

Batman would totally save Superman's mom even if their moms didn't have the same name. It's just such a stupid, stupid plot point and lends itself to endless mockery. 🤣

I *do* like this fight scene where Batman is making his way through the goons to get to Martha. The choreography is really good. Reminds me a lot of the Arkham video games.

Man, this Doomsday just...doesn't really work on a fundamental level. What makes comic Doomsday so powerful and terrifying is (i) it's not just a mindless monster, but is actually intelligent and can plan and strategize; (ii) iwas created through such extreme experimentation that it was repeatedly destroyed and then remade again over and over and over to give it endurance and formidably; (iii) and it's pretty much unstoppable from all that experimentation and uncontrollable because of its intelligence.

Also, what's with this explody thing Doomsday does in this film? A monster can be terrifying without being able to blow up a bunch of stuff. I'm not sure what the point of explody Doomsday is other than lazy writing.

The military hit it once and came to the conclusion that not only does it get more powerful "every time we hit it," but also that it's unkillable? Okay. More lazy writing.

And we're back to one of my biggest issues with Man of Steel: Superman just not giving a shit about collateral damage. Even if the island they're on is uninhabited, that doesn't exactly mean he should just be fine with blowing a bunch of shit up in the course of this fight. Sheesh.

How did Lois know they needed the spear again? She had no reason to go underwater to try to get it. This whole "let's make Lois useless time and again so Superman can save her" thing is really annoying.

Superman's "death" scene carries so little weight if you know (like pretty much everyone should have known, let's be real) that he's not really dead. Like, sure, for the characters it means something because they don't know he'll be back, but for the audience? At least for me, it doesn't make me feel a whole lot.

So all the soldiers at Superman's funeral--do they know they're carrying an empty casket? Just curious.

The dirt rising off the casket at the end for a split second is soooooo dumb. For anyone naive enough to think he *is* really dead, just let them think it. Just let that be a thing. Come on. (Also considering that he doesn’t just come back on his own; it takes a charge from a Mother Box in Justice League for him to come back. That makes this end scene a lie, too.)

Ok, BvS is done. Need another drink and a snack, then I'll move on to Justice League. 😅

Justice League:

Haha, obvious Superman facial CGI right off the bat, omg, I forgot how horribly obvious it is. 🤣

Also forgot that we're starting off with parademons right away. Sheesh.

Do all of Snyder's films have to have gratuitous slow-motion scenes at the beginning? Ugh, dude.

Everyone just throwing Bruce Wayne's name around in relation to Batman all the time. Secret identities are dead, y'all. No superhero can have a real life, I guess.

Ugh, I forgot this film pushes Batman/Wonder Woman pretty hard. 🙄

"It's cool if I show a bunch of Amazons with their midriffs showing as long as they have visible ab muscles, right?" Idk, Snyder, is that how armor realistically works? 🙄 Also, is it necessary for them to have lipstick on? That doesn't even exist on Themyscira, ffs.

The multiple (as I remember; only one so far) innuendo-based jokes really bring this film down, imo. "Clark said you were the thirstier woman he'd ever met." Really? Ugh. 🙄

The plot of this film is so LOTR. Amazons, Atlanteans, and Men all get Mother Boxes, sort of like the various rings of power. There's plenty you can pull from comics, y'all. You don't need to pull from other stuff.

Flash as comic relief I'm okay with. I'm not sure how I feel about *this* Flash's comic relief. I'm not a huge fan of the writing.

Break time because Je'von wants to go out on the balcony lol. 😅

And we're back. So can Steppenwolf breathe underwater? Is that a thing?

I guess it's supposed to be super funny that everyone disappears except the fastest one of them? Sigh. The writing in this film is just so awful.

Cyborg's CGI also isn't great. I really wanted more for Cyborg because he's awesome. Sigh.

Snyder must have loved being able to do stuff with Flash. All the slo-mo he could want.

I'm not a fan of neurotic Flash, afraid of pretty much everything. He can be funny in so many better ways, but instead let's just have him be afraid of everything and make sexual jokes every now and then. 🙄

"Let's keep having Cyborg wear sweatpants and a hoodie so we don't have to spend so much on CGI. It totally won't look ridiculous." 🤣

Batman making the argument to use technology he doesn't understand to try to bring Superman back from the dead is just so out of character it's not even funny. First of all, Superman didn't need technology to come back in the comics (whether or not his "resurrection" was silly is irrelevant). Secondly, Batman literally has an enemy (Ra's al Ghul) who resurrects himself on the regular, and Batman (i) knows it's a bad idea because it messes with Ra's's sanity and (b) would never consider using the Lazarus Pit even though he has a relative understanding of how it works. This film just literally disregards established character traits in favor of it's stupid-as-hell plot. Ugh.

Superman is vulnerable to magic, idiot writers. He shouldn't be able to fight Wonder Woman's lasso. Uuughhh. Have any of the writers of this movie ever actually read any Justice League comics? 🤦‍♀️

Well, those cops definitely know Superman's name now. Since you all keep saying it in front of them.

Superman hasn't even been gone for that long (seemingly; I mean, it's hard to tell, but S.T.A.R. Labs is still doing research on the Kryptonian ship in the same genersl area as in BvS, so idk), so all this talk about what he does or doesn't remember seems...weird.

Why not wait until you defeat Steppenwolf to let your mom know you're back, Superman? For all you know, you could die again. Wouldn't that just be harder on her after seeing you back?

Why was the lasso just sitting on the Batmobile instead of with Wonder Woman? Plot so that Aquaman could say some *super funny things*. 🙄 That's not even how the lasso works, you dumb writers. Someone has to direct another bound by it to speak the truth. Seriously, do some research. Ugh. It's not that hard.

"So your plan is dying? You really are out of your mind." "I'm not the one who brought a pitchfork." See, the writers prove that they can be actually funny if they try. *If* they try.

The "everyone trying their best to hold off the big bad until Goku gets there" vibe is super strong in this movie. 😑

Part of the reason the Justice League is a thing is because no one hero can do it alone. That means it all shouldn't be riding on Superman's shoulders. If you actually know how to write the Justice League, that is.

Don't know how I feel about everyone getting perks due to nepotism now that they know Bruce Wayne...must be nice to be buddies with the richest man in the world. 😒

The Flash vs Superman race at the end is more pandering. Ugh. It would be better if Flash was less pathetic as a character in this film. Super awkward is just not very funny, y'all. Write actual jokes instead.

Okay, that's over. What a trip. Both those movies are still pretty much garbage. 🤣 The question is, will I ever watch Man of Steel again? Probably not; I hated Man of Steel more than both those movies, actually. Wrote a 3-page rant about how awful it was after seeing it in theaters originally. $3 was still way too much money to spend on that crap. 😅

Oh, side note for the after credits scene: will they ever actually go anywhere with that? They might do an okay job with a Justice League vs. Legion of Doom (or Injustice Society or whatever villain team incarnation they would decide to go with) film. That might not suck.

#myri's thoughts #live blogging (sort of)#Batman v Superman #justice league #dccu #omg the awfulness is just wonderful #if you read carefully you can tell when i start getting drunk lol #WW is the only real saving grace in either of these movies

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zeravmeta · 5 years

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Give me your absolute best YGO x Fate headcanons

Ah gee since ya asked so nicely heres my convoluted crossover AU. Also this got hella long so I'll add a readmore

-the protags would all wind up at Chaldea due to being summoned by the godly powers within their own universes (Egyptian Gods, Crimson Dragon, etc.) and are tasked with helping them. Yugi is pre Ceremonial Duel (for Atem), the rest are from post series

-Gudas just so used to all the weirdness surrounding them so they take it in stride. Holmes on the other hand is losing it because he fears they may have been some type of dimensional collapse. He freaks out further when some of the kids say "oh yeah that happens all the time". Da Vinci sets them up to assist Guda since they can use magic (at least half of them use magic and the other half literally fuse with duel monsters) without needing magic circuits (which interests her GREATLY) so she introduces them as a set of new masters to help.

-their decks are still with them but now instead of being confined to the game they can actually summon them as Familiars/Phantasmals, though they can only support a few at a time.

-most, if not all servants are suspicious of these new masters (guda is my favorite master i dont need another one), but its only initial waryness since these are actual kids like Guda and they default to Parent Mode. Theyre even more surprised to learn about the exploits within their own worlds.

Now onto some of the dynamics:

-Yugi would just be happy to meet all these heroes from history. He understands the seriousness of the situation and despite his initial kickback he'd be onboard to help. Atem would take this opportunity to ask around to see if any of these ancient heroes would know him (since pre ceremonial duel he'd know who he is from Mem World). The Pharaohs (Ozy, Nito, Cleo) would be surprised about a Pharoah they've never met before, and especially his divinity since he could summon three Egyptian Gods to aid him. He was from 3000 years in the past so Egypt was beginning in its decline, so such a modern (relatively) Pharoah holding such power would shock them, though in the end Ozymandias would still declare him one of his friends and theyd get along. Yugi would leave the Puzzle with the Pharoahs so they could speak while he went around meeting a bunch of the heroes. He'd love to play with some of the kids though he has earned his fair share of ire since the King of Games never loses on Game Night, Poker Night, or any other type of games. Yugi has more supportive abilities in his skillset for the ourposes of battle, while Atem can more freely use his shadow magic since he's being supplied.

-Judai is more nonplussed than anything. He was already wandering the world so for him this is just another checkpoint. He finds the ability to summon his monsters as familiars more convebiant than anything since he could already speak to them. Many of the magic users are particularly interested in his ability to talk to spirits since its a rare ability in general and usually limited to one type of phantasmal, not to mention empathetic abilities on their own are somewhat unheard of in Nasuverse. Yubel is a protective force around him and for combat training scenarios shes extremely hard to get around since her deflection ability, while hard to maintain when Yubel uses her final form, is pretty much on par with Lord Camelot in terms of defense. He's generally friendly but comes off as rude sometimes due to his general nonchalance. Gets along especially well with some of the more volatile servants like Berserkers and Avengers since his empathetic abilities are soothing to them.

-Yusei is cautious and guarded here. He has responsibilities in his own world he'd want to get back too, but doesn't have it in him to just leave. His D-Wheel somehow came along (Yuya shivers in the distance) with him, so Da Vinci did the only reasonable thing upon seeing a miniature perpetual motion machine and tried to impound it immediately for study. Yusei was happy to share his info and skills on Momentum and implementing it into Chaldeas energy systems, something that had Tesla and Edison proud since one so young was already (but only barely) supassing AC and DC. Holmes was also extremely interested in Clear Mind and the Crimson Dragin, since Yusei managed to consolidate his own concentration into pure evolutionary energy and may have accidentally interacted with an elder god in the process (kinda like Holmes). Yusei assures him the Crimson Dragon isn't evil and that its called Quetzalcoatl, which has Fate Quetz coming in and asking about herself, further complicating Yusei's confusion on the Crimson Dragon. For combat, he starts off supportive by swarming his field with low power monsters before suddenly summoning a more powerful one. With Over Top Clear Mind they become even more powerful and evolve on their own, so Stardust can become Shooting, but summoning Quasar is very dangerous since its extremely powerful but taxxing.

-Yuma is absolutely excited. Astral not so much. "Astral these are literal HEROES how can you not be excited!?" "Idk probably the part where they'll kill us if we take a wrong step?". Yuma loves to hang around servants like Drake, Shiki and Beowulf, and loves swapping stories of their adventures. Abigail heard about aliens and wonders if Yog Soghoth is an alien, but Yuma tells her that the Astrals and Barians are not like Yog Soggoth, even if Don Thousand as described kinda sounds like him. Astral can be seen since since Heroic Spirits are consolidations of magic while Astral was basically an energy being of the same type, and does float through the halls, occasionally scaring someone by mistake. He does get along with a mysterious woman in a kimono who seems to appear in the twilight hours, but he cant ever really remember her face. In combat Astral and Yuma can do their usual combination form which causes their Numbers to automatically Rank Up upon summoning, the higher the form the further they can rank.

-Yuya has it a bit rough at first. He just got out of a war and now he was being dragged into another? Thankfully he gets his bearings quickly but is still somewhat shaken. Some of the servants are wary around him because they can feel the distortion that exists within his soul, his three other versions, and the power that could trun him into the Supreme King once again still exists there even if Zarc has passed on. He gets along with Siegfried well enough, and they swap stories about how the expectations of others can lead you to ruin. The Alter Egos feel a kinship to him since he's also a consolidated personality rather than a full person, though he gets along best with the Celts. Cu, Scathach and Fergus all love to see his performances, but to them that just meant that they can put him through warrior training especially after they hear about the war he went through. Scathach insists that him running for his life while she chases is good training, while Cu agrees while running alongside him. In battle he uses his acrobatic prowess enhanced with a little bit of fortification/protection magic, and can summon all four of his dragons to help him. Since the other Yu Boys are stuck within Yuya, they occasionally trade places:

Yuto gets along with Archer and occasionally helps him out. Archer is sympathetic to the struggles he unerwent in his own world and makes sure to keep his spirits up while also trying to ignore the irony.Yugo and David have struck up a strange friendship since they both have the issue of mistaking people for their so. David sees Yugo talk about how even if his life was hard it was worth it for the people he loved and remembers his son fondly.Yuri is generally avoided since even after the merge he's still something of a wildcard, but he gets along well with Hans and Kiara of all people. Sometimes he'd share the stories of the training he underwent in Academia, how the Professor trained him to see people as toys and all the people he's hurt, how his dragon was his only friend and how itd protect him, and Hans couldn't help but hate his pessimistic attitude in expecting this while Kiara wouldn't really care too much but also wouldn't insult him by offering condolences. He knows he's become a monster and he won't deny or forget his mistakes, he'll simply try to do better.

-[note: Vrains suddenly had its ending announced for Sept.25 (i believe it may have been cancelled) so based on the episode title of 120 Yusaku and Ai will reunite and thats what im following here] Yusaku is skittish at best, downright invisible at worst. He doesn't want to be found, and even some of the Assassin Class servants have trouble tracking him down when needed. Ai managed to bring along a spare SOLtis body with him so he can walk around and physically interact with Yusaku. Even if they still had some tension between them they still cared about each other so they would keep each other company. It got real awkward when BB first showed up talking about being a sentient AI, so Ai immediatelt tried to befriend her, only to learn about her inhuman nature. While Ai may dislike that aspect of her, he knows from what happened with Roboppy that you cant forcibly change what you are, so he does his best to try and get along, which infuriates BB to no end since she feels like she's being talked down to. Yusaku as a programmer helps with most of Chaldeas regular workforce and he accomplishes hiding in plain sight by being the only master to interact more with the regular work staff than their servants. That being said, it doesn't change how some like Tamamo or Suzuka try to drag him out so he can meet some of the other servants. He gets along well with Kerry. Likely because they barely speak and share E Rank Luck.

#zerav responds #whoA this got long #sorry #idk how to add readmores on mobile so i may edit later #fgo #fate grand order #yugioh

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bloodydamnit · 5 years

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You went to MICA, right? I’m currently going there and it’s good (stressful as fuck, but good) and I wanna know; what did you hate and what did you love about it? (Oh my god I sound like those end of year surveys they give you)

Hello there!!! Omfg I’m literally on campus right now for pride!!! LOL just got myself a smoky burger from OTH what what. okay okay okay good questions.

MICA has changed quite a bit since I was there. Like, my freshman year was fucking lit. If you take the shuttle and get Mr. Robert or Ms. Yvette, ask them about the nudists. Shit was wild.

Our freshman/foundation year was different in general too? Like

Okay. So. lol. Our classes were:

Elements of Visual Thinking - Which was a chance to explore concepts, mediums, learning how to properly critique, etc.

Critical Thinking - Which was just critical theory, but more on your own practice I guess? I don’t really know how to explain it.

EMAC - Which was exploring different forms of digital media and how to use them (Premier, Photoshop, Audacity, recording devices, etc)

Sculptural Forms - Which was a chance for you to explore 3d media. So it was held in what used to be 15/15 and it was woodshop, plaster, 3d printing, and cardboard.

Then, this is where I get pissed off and seriously fucking angry about this change.

But we USED to have Painting and Drawing. Now, if you got a 5 in AP art, you gained an extra credit and could skip Drawing/Painting 1. HAH. IMAGINE THAT. HAVING A PAINTING AND DRAWING CLASS AS A FOUNDATION FOR YOUR ART. BECAUSE IT’S KIND OF NECESSARY.

can you tell im a bit fucking salty?

They were separate classes and I think, they were extremely fucking important to the development of not only my art but my peers. For example, I fucking hated painting when I went to MICA. Literally fucking refused to touch the medium.

I went to my first class with Latoya Hobbs, tried oil paint, and everything fucking changed. I was a GD major (or that was my plan) and I immediately switched to Painting and I never looked back.

Unfortunately, yall don’t have that opportunity anymore. Especially since when you choose your major, you tend to stick with those classes. Which really fucking sucks, because you can tell the variety of art has gone down since this change happened. And I think that’s the thing that I dislike about MICA NOW the most. I had the chance to take things, was required to take them, and then I knew how to do a variety of things BECAUSE of those changes. And from what I understand, you don’t have those opportunities anymore. Which really fucking sucks. Because you also miss out on the amazing fucking professors in other majors as well. For example, Karen Warshal. I HIGHLY recommend taking her Portrait class and her Anatomy class. I swear to god, those were the best, more useful classes I’ve ever taken. Is she crazy? A bit. But she’s the most genuine, caring, supportive, and one of the hardest professors I’ve ever had. And thats what you WANT. You don’t want someone to butter you up, tell you your art is poppin when it’s not, and to try and let you off easy because you look upset. Karen tells you how it fucking is and that’s so god damn important. no matter what major you are, TAKE HER FUCKING CLASSES. They’re important and they’re necessary to your development as an artist. Even if you’re not into figural art. - also she makes food and brings it in. and if you’re sick she might make you chicken noodle soup. shout out to karen

Honestly, Karen was probably one of my favorite things about MICA. Along with Mark Karnes, TONY FUCKING SHORE. LISTEN. YOU NEED TO TAKE A CLASS WITH TONY SHORE (PAINTING). I think he might be doing a class on race (which haha he knows hes white as fuck) and i think it will be fantastic. so keep an eye out, AND RUTH TOULSON THE ANTHROPOLOGY TEACHER. IT MIGHT STILL BE A REQUIREMENT. HER CLASSES HAVE AN 80+ WAITLIST. IF YOU GET ON. ITS SO WORTH IT FUCKING TRUST ME. SHES OUT OF THIS FUCKING WORLD. PAUL LONG, HE’S AN ACADEMIC TEACHER (TEACHES POETRY AND SOME OTHER SHIT. HE’S GREAT. BRINGS SNACKS EVERY DAY), and others?? if you want to know more, please message me and i’ll give you them!

Anyway, I havent really answered your question!

Dislike:Housing situation fucking sucked. getting a room was fucking ridiculous. They ran out of room for us because they started accepting more (this happened when sophomore housing was required. My year was the first year that went into effect and they had to buy out bolton hill apartments. people had to break leases, etc. it was fucking ridiculous).

The MICA store is eh? It used really good and held in dolphin. But it was literally falling apart. Now its too.. idk. It’s fine. I prefer artists and craftsmen.

Access to studios and equipment is eh too. Because of time constraints.

How the student body treats the fucking faculty is DISGUSTING. One girl literally called one of the sweetest security guards the ‘help’. Ms. Gloria (senior in security) is fantastic, Officer Green is everything, Ms. Yvette is so fucking sweet, and Mr. Robert makes my heart sing.

The student body in general LOLOLOLOLOL. ‘Surround yourself with good juju’ - Former MICA Grad (my best friend) The fucking student body mica page is a fucking dumpster fire lol.

I don’t like how white MICA is and how entitled a good part of the student body is. The amount of entitlement is fucking ridiculous. And the amount of ignorance is astounding. Also the obviousness to what fucking city you're in, is so wild i cant fucking even. Like. MICA is deceptively beautiful (the MICA bubble). Which is why it is high in crime lol. Just be alert and don’t be a god damned dumbass walking around at 3 am with your fucking headphones in, smoking a cigarette, and acting like you’re fucking immune to being mugged. Just saying. Take the shuttles and you’ll most likely be gucci.

I don’t like how MICA spends its money (our money). And what they choose to invest in - like buying random fucking buildings and not telling the students what it’s for, and fucking raising the price of tuition and living in order to compensate.

The total and utter lack of transparency, etc. It felt eehhhh I don’t know how to explain it.

NOW. I KNOW THIS SOUNDS LIKE A LOT AND THAT IM JUST SHITTING ON MICA. BUT MY MICA EXPERIENCE WAS THE BEST OF MY LIFE. I LEARNED SO MUCH. AND I FIND WHAT I LEARNED THERE TO BE INVALUABLE (except for the fact that I’m 56k in debt. just saying)

But really. I loved MICA. I wish I could go back. I met so many amazing people, made great connections, and I don’t think I would have had the same love at any other art school. (I have friends in SAIC, Pratt, Parsons, FIT, SVA, RISD - they all complain about the same things. they in the grand scheme of things, are material. Which important because, hah, money. But, material nonetheless. If you have the means, I don’t think these things I explained are deal breakers)

Now what I loved about MICA. Because honey. I fucking LOVED MICA:

When I was touring schools, I was kind of eh about them? Not in the sense that I wouldn’t have a good time or be ungrateful, but I didn’t get that feeling. Does that make sense? For example, I took a tour at SVA and I have very very strong opinions about SVA, I had no feeling. When I stepped on MICA’s campus, that was fucking it for me. Not only was I comfortable there, but the professors that were at the tour, made it their duty and went out of their way to make myself and the other potential students feel welcome. They were personable, they were kind and welcoming, they were warm, and that continued even after I decided MICA was the place for me.

My class at least, had no drama lololol. Again, my freshman year was a hell of a lot of fucking fun. We didn’t have any big racist shit going on like other years (ahem ahem 2018, 2019). INSTEAD, we had the nudists, we had carrot videos (ask around about that), it kind of felt less cliquey? Because everyone was generally interested in being friends? Idk. Like we definitely had groups and they became more evident as majors really clicked in, but in the beginning, everyone was pretty much together (this was the first year that the grill opened and leake was a thing. So we were all figuring out the dorms together). I mean we had drama but it wasn’t... idk. It wasn’t like mica student body (maybe its because we didnt have that to fuck shit up lolol).

On The Hill was my shit. Still my shit. I fucking love on the hill with a fucking passion. Pom Iced Teas, where you at. The neighborhood in general was really nice. Baltimore is one of my favorite cities and the stigma of it will be broken as soon as you start exploring it. HOWEVER, BE FUCKING SMART. DONT BE A FUCKING IDIOT. IF YOU DON’T FEEL COMFORTABLE SOMEWHERE, YEET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE. TRAVEL WITH OTHERS. DON’T BE THOSE DUMB ASS WHITE GIRLS FROM RURAL FUCKING TOWNS THAT THINK THEY CAN WALK AROUND AT 4 AM OR JUST WHEN IT’S DARK OUT, ALONE, AND BE OKAY. TAKE. THE FUCKING. SHUTTLE.

The studio spaces were really nice so as they’re taken care of. the equipment is really nice. take advantage of it while you can. because once you’re out of school. hah. you’re screwed.

Networking was nice.

Being close to the Walters was amazing and the ability to go to DC for the day only spending 8$ on the Marc train to get there was amazing. Having Penn right on campus.

Again, the professors were in majority, fucking amazing.

Some professors had classes outside of MICA (karen has model drawing classes at her studio) take them! They’re really worth it!

I actually didnt mind the dorms. 10x better than most colleges.

Accessibility was amazing. Especially since its not a closed campus, but everything is in one place. That’s not the case with a lot of Art colleges.

And most of all, I just loved being there. I loved learning. I loved the people. I loved baltimore, i loved the professors. MICA 10000% shaped how I am as an artist in the best way and I think it’s an amazing place to be despite the downfalls.

Don’t take everything I said as gospel. like I said, these are just my experiences as well as a few of my friends in the same fine arts department. The others, I’m not sure about. But yeah. I hope this helps! You can always message me and I’d be happy to refer you to classes, professors, etc. Good luck with next year!

#MICA #MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART #'17 GRADUATE #PAINTING MAJOR #FINE ARTS #Anonymous

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70swonderpoisonstark · 5 years

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Poison ( V )

Villain’s are people too, are they not? (Y/N) is taking the “home grown” terror title a little too seriously. You’re really really bad, until you meet a certain super soldier who makes you consider a career change. It’s a lengthy process, but you’re willing if it’s for the right reasons. Maybe you’re not so bad after all?

//basically poison ivy and a little bit of bane but with marvel characters?? I’d be original but I love her and them so much so sorry. also some changes, idk I’m making them my own but completely based of the DC characters SNS. Nickname Ivy, real name, yours duh!//

***this is my first attempt at fanfic so any feedback is welcome! I love all these characters dearly so, here goes nothing! Hope you enjoy***

A/N: Violence, language, crime. Friendly banter, lowest level of smut possible {I’ll update these as the chapters come out}

recap: you were drunk and heading to bed, your reputation with the Avengers seems to be doing better.———————————————————————————————————

Bucky was up before everybody else, nightmares tend to have that effect on a person, so he wandered the compound like he always did. He knew every corner, every step and every curve of the technologically advanced palace. Venturing out and admiring how far society had come in terms of architecture and technology, gazing at the large rustic clock that hung over the marble fireplace beneath it, wondering just how many parts made up such a huge clock. Were there as many parts in the clock as there were in his arm? He'd probably never know, but it was still enticing to think about. Bucky's favorite place though, was the glass walkway that connected the garage to the main part of the compound. He was thrilled by the idea of making a secured walkway out of something so easily broken as glass. The amount of light that always seemed to shine through always brought him a sense of serenity. The ability to be free, yet also confined to a safe and armoured area was just what his never resting mind needed. He looked through the windows, staring into the rising sun as it filled the rest of the earth with golden rays of warmth.

Once the sun has officially taken its place in the sky, he made his way back to the kitchen. The weirdly shaped plastic pod popped into the modern coffee pot as he waited for his mug to be filled with black coffee.

"You know, Sam's gonna kill ya for drinking out of his mug again." A sleepy Steve walked smoothly into the kitchen. His white shirt loose for the first time in history, shifting with his hips as he walked to a seat near the island.

"If he ever wakes up we'll talk about it." Bucky retorted as he tipped the glass to his lips. He looked at the clock about the oven, it was barely seven AM, and after a night of heavy drinking, Bucky was lucky to see anybody, especially Sam, before noon. The abnormal twists and contortions of Steve's body on the bar stool produced a very concerning vibe for Bucky. He could tell there was news to share, but a nagging voice in the back of his head lead him to believe it wasn't good news, at least for himself.

"Speaking of people who won't be up for a while," Steve began. "I might have spent a period of time with the newest team member." Steve wiggled his eyebrow suggestively, looking very pleased with himself. Bucky's hands clenched, subtly cracking the handle of Sam's mug. His body reacting before his mind could, metal parts whirred and tightened at the sound of Steve's words.

"What do you mean?" Bucky asked, trying to mask the anger in his voice with intrigue. He spoke calmly, trying his hardest to be friendly and supportive. It had been a while since Steve was this jazzed about a girl, but it felt wrong. Bucky wasn't interested, but imagining Steve with her wasn't something he wanted to think about, ever.

"Well, after everybody went to bed there was a loud noise from her room. I checked on her and she was just laying on the floor." Bucky heard the noise too. How stupid could he be? HE should have gone and checked on her, and all of this could have been avoided.

"I picked her up, slowly though because of her tendency to jump to her defenses. She laughed a lot, but I got her sitting up and she slurred a thanks to me. You know, I never noticed how normal she was until right then, the whole teams been trying to kill her before she kills them and there she was, drunk and sleepy just like everybody else." Bucky's ear were red hot, listening to Steve describe Ivy as if he just realized she was a human being, it made him nauseous. He knew Steve was coming from a good place but, how do you listen to your best friend gush over a murderer?

"Then she kissed me. It was shocking, but welcome. Buck, she's amazing. I don't think she'll remember because the kiss was short, but she did say lucky her, well, I think at least, she definitely said something that sounded like lucky. Isn't that great Buck?" NO. No. Nope. NO. DAMMIT BUCKY NO. How was he supposed to react to that? Shake his hand and congratulate him. She was evil, and, well, quite frankly a flirt and just not right for Steve.

"I don't know Steve, I think the two of you would cause a lot of trouble." Steve's giddy mood hitched suddenly and hard. Trouble? He's America's golden boy, what trouble could he possibly cause? Steve mind flashed back before the war, before the serum, to how all of Bucky and his night's used to go, resentment creeping into his mind.

"And why is that?" Steve crossed his arms and shifted his weight to his right leg, face twisted tightly as he awaited Bucky's response.

"You guys are both lawless, breaking rules you think are unjust. The two of you would be great, uh, but you need a nice girl Steve, and she's a little.." He didn't know how to end that sentence; seeing the look in Steve's eye, the anger, caused his brain to malfunction.

"She's a little what, Buck? More your type?" That hit Bucky a little harder than it was probably supposed to. Your type? As if murderous, lawless, rebels were his type all of a sudden.

"Wha- No, Steve that's not what I'm saying, she's just-" Steve's emotions took over the conversation as all rational thought had been thrown out the window. He fought with Bucky. As his best friend he should be happy for him, not lecturing him about finding a good girl. Old Bucky would have celebrated that a girl even talked to him, but no, new Bucky couldn't accept the fact that he was fair game now.

"No. Stop talking. You just can't handle that a woman might actually be interested in me instead of you, huh? It's just like old times, if she doesn't want you then something's wrong with her?" Steve's anger bubbled over to fury. Bucky had always had all the female attention, and now that Steve wasn't doing so bad himself Bucky was just going to gut him? That's not the Bucky he remembered.

"Steve, no. I'm not interested I just mean-" Flustered, Bucky tried to explain, he really did just want what's best for Steve.

"You know what, I'm done with this conversation. I wanted to talk to my best friend about a girl. Which is to much to ask for nowadays." He stormed out of the room, pissed off that Bucky wasn't happy for him. Sure, he might not know if he actually likes Ivy, or if it's just the allure of the potential threat that she is, but still, he kissed a girl, a girl kissed him. Bucky should've been happy for Steve, they're best friends, he couldn't have kept his bad opinions to himself this one time? Steve pouted all the way back to his room, so caught up in his emotional turmoil that he completely missed you walking out of your room and towards the kitchen.

You meant to smile at Steve, but he seemed down, and was hardly paying attention to his surroundings, so you avoided any contact. You were severely hungover, but all your time as an RN had really taken a toll on your body, so sleeping in was never an option. You solemnly walked your way towards the coffee pot, noticing Bucky at the last minute. He too seemed off, trouble in paradise probably. You left it alone, he normally avoided you anyways so you weren't going to go out of your way to say anything to the metal-armed hunk. You pulled your coffee cup away from the machine, adding just enough creamer and sugar to make it taste good, but not enough so that it wouldn't actually taste like coffee. The silence that filled the room was comfortable, then again you were used to most people being quiet around you, especially Bucky. As you traced the ring of your mug with your fingertip, something, a small tug in your brain was trying to remind you of something urgent. Looking up at Bucky for a split second, you heard the alarm inside your head, but couldn't figure out why you're inner fight or flight mode was being activated. Something happened, something including Bucky. Bucky. Bucky.. Nothing. Nothing came to mind as you racked your brain trying to remember this thing that's sounding alarm bells inside your head. You knew you'd been drunk, very drunk, but you'd remember sleeping with somebody. You definitely hadn't fought him, mostly because he was still alive(All the physical fighting's just for show, if you were attacked one touch and they'd be in a body bag). You hadn't walked in on anybody. What on earth did you do that was so terrible your cheeks were burning bright red? You contemplated every reason for you to possibly be embarrassed by and nothing. It wasn't until you saw him wipe excess coffee away from his sweet lips that you remembered everything.

You had tripped walking to the bathroom, you didn't have to pee or anything you just wanted to take your makeup off and brush your teeth. You were exhausted, and after falling so many times that night you just gave up, laying still to gain the courage to try to walk again when he came in. Broad, strong shoulders, and large biceps picking you up from the floor and setting you on your bed. A muffled, "Are you okay?" was heard through your drunk and sleepy haze. You knew who it was, who else would hear a small bump in the night and check it out? The room was dark so you couldn't make out his features, but you knew, drunk you was sure of who it was. He asked a few more questions and helped you sit up straight, the two of you were already close, thighs touching as the two of you sat on your bed. You'd been crushing on him for so long, even before you became an Avenger-In-Training. He was everything you thought a man should be, a little broken, but with a huge heart and a dedication to do what was right, not what was legal. You couldn't help yourself, you just had to do it. You leaned in and kissed him right on the lips, hoping to God he would reciprocate the gesture, and to your surprise he did. He cupped his hand around your face, his rough calluses caressing your smooth cheek. "Bucky." You sighed, he was so incredible, you'd kept up with him since before the Avengers knew about him and had been fascinated ever since. He was strong, mentally and physically, but understands his trauma and how it affects his day to day life, and works through it. You'd never been so in love with a person you'd never met before, so when you finally did meet him, it was hard to stay a cold hearted bitch. He was so wonderful, you didn't want the kiss to stop, but refused to be the drunken lay of the Avengers compound and pulled away. A soft, "Goodnight." Was all that escaped your lips as he left your room.

Looking at him in the present light, sober, and completely off guard kicked you in the stomach. You tried to hide the embarrassment, attempting to keep the squirming to a minimum. You could feel him staring at you, he definitely remembered. Oh god how could you have been so irresponsible? Kissing a coworker after a couple bottles of alcohol? How stereotypical. You had to say something right? It's not like you could just sweep it under the rug? This was kind of a big deal.

"Hey, uh. Bucky." You started, could this be any more awkward? You were about to find out. "About last night, I-uh, I wanted to apologize for being so forward. I was really really drunk and I just kinda went for it without any notice on your behalf and if I made things between us worse then I'm really sorry and uh, we can forget about it all you want." Smooth Ivy, real smooth.

Bucky stood and stared at you for a while, trying to figure out what exactly you were talking about. He hadn't talked to you at all that night, he kept his distance and watched you from far away, and you definitely hadn't come and said anything to him after all that drinking. Bucky thought about what you could mean, knowing he wasn't drunk and had no clue as to what you were referencing, he figured he'd ask.

"I would love to accept your apology," Good, good okay so now you can just forget it right? "But I don't have any idea what you're talking about."

"You, you don't?" You were taken aback, was he drunk too? Maybe he didn't remember either? God were you going to have to say it out loud? How much more horrifying could this get?

"We, well I guess I, no we, well after I fell last night you came and helped me up from the floor, made sure I was good or whatever and then I... well.. you remember right?" Every muscle, blood vessel, and neuron in Bucky's body froze in their tracks. Was she about to say-

"Well I kissed you, and I was super drunk and I just wanted to apologize because you've made it clear you want nothing to do with me but yeah. I'm sorry we made out, uh, I was very drunk, and it won't happen again." You looked at a now stoic Bucky, was he angry? Oh god, you've really done it now.

"Uh, so yeah we don't ever have to speak about our kiss ever again, and I'm gonna go hide in shame, so thanks? I don't know, yeah, uh, bye, thanks." You grabbed your mug and headed straight for your room. What happened to cool and calm Ivy? What happened to kill a bitch Ivy? What the fuck IVY?! YOU DUMB BITCH IVY HOW WAS THAT SO AWKWARD FUCK. You grasped your coffee with both hands, silenting scream at yourself. You tried to stay positive, thinking, well. It can't get any worse than that. (Oh how wrong you were.)

Bucky stood frozen in the exact spot where you'd left him. Trying his hardest to process all the information that was just thrown at him. YOU thought it was HIM who kissed you last night? YOU thought YOU kissed HIM. YOU had, drunkenly, wanted to kiss HIM? But it was Steve, you kissed Steve? But you thought it was him? And now Steve was mad because he wasn't happy for him, but Ivy didn't think it was Steve at all, she thought it was HIM. SHE WHISPERED BUCKY! NOT LUCKY HER. Good god what was going on. How the fuck was he supposed to figure this one out on his own.

"Looks like you've got yourself a bit of a problem, huh?" Why? Why did God forsake him like this?

"Please tell me you didn't hear any of that." Bucky silently prayed that Sam hadn't heard a word, knowing that Steve had already shared the news with Sam, so Sam knew exactly what she was talking about.

"Oh, no. I heard all of it. You thought Steve was mad before, he's gonna kill you now." It was everything in Bucky not to slap the stupid smug grin off of Sam's face.

"Don't. Say. A. Word. Deal?"

"Deal? I'm not getting anything out of that agreement, Bucko." Sam wasn't going to tell sweet old Steve any of it regardless, but he never missed a chance to piss Bucky off.

"I'll replace your mug?" Bucky wasn't the best at bargaining, he usually just punched the person, got what he needed, and went on his way.

"You were already going to do that." He was right, Bucky had accidentally broken a few of Sam's mugs and replaced them all, sometimes without him noticing.

"I'll leave you and Steve alone for 'bro-time' or whatever you call it?" Negotiations were easier when you could kill the person afterwards. Now he actually had to do what he said.

"Again, you already kinda do that." True, Bucky was never much of a 'large group' kind of guy, and sometimes more than Steve counted as a large group.

"Fine. $50?"

"My man, we are in business." A large slap landed on the back of Bucky's back as Sam chuckled at his big business deal. He was screwed. Steve was somehow already in love with you, and the moment that made Steve think you liked him too, you thought it was Bucky. The whole situation was giving Bucky a headache. There wasn't any way for him to casually bring it up to you or Steve, he'd just have to sit there and wait for the brutal reality to fall on them.

You were a wreck, he had just sat there the entire time and said nothing. You'd always thought he was different, sweet, just a little damaged by society just like you. The talks the two of you have had ((when he was slightly drugged but still)) were so deep and meaningful, and it's like he doesn't remember any of it now. Was it because you were within reach? Was he just falling back on old ways and your conversations didn't meant anything? Was he disgusted by you? With the devil and Angels on your shoulders yelling distracting you, you ran smack dab into the center of Steve very hard chest, collapsing at the impact.

"Oh shoot, sorry Ivy I- I, uh, wasn't paying attention." He was jumpier than normal, you noted subconsciously.

"No, no you're fine Steve I, wasn't paying attention either. A lot going on, yanno?"

"Yeah, yeah I do." Steve had such a fondness in his heart for you. How sweet you ended up being once he you got past all that ice. He felt compelled to do something, he had to, right? After a night like that he had to do something to solidify the actions? Your smile was enough for him to gather the courage. He grabbed you by your waist and pulled you into a deep, passionate kiss. You were shocked at first, not wanting to react or kiss back, but the care radiating from his lips, and the general amazing feeling it gave you changed your mind. Not long after his surprising gesture, you had your arms wrapped around his neck , deepening the kiss as your tongues tangled in each others mouths. You felt hot, and wanted more, much more. You pulled down softly on his neck, his hands finding their way to your hips as he gently pushed you against the wall. His hand rests on your thigh, raising it to his own as the two of you exchanged silent, sloppy words. You broke the kiss, only to rest your lips along his neck, kissing softly as you felt his body tense, you were both hot, body's craving more as the loneliness hit you harder. You knew it was wrong, but for a moment his hands were cold enough to be mistaken for Bucky's. It felt so right, and then he grabbed you by your chin, twisting your head and returning the loving neck kisses. You couldn't deny how starved you were of attention, how much you needed somebody to touch and love you, how Steve was an opportunity to have a loving embrace. Your hands trailed their way from his chiseled chest to his cold belt buckle, lust devouring any rational thought that popped into your head. You were ready to give Captain America everything you were, and he was ready to receive it. Steve went to open the door to whatever room the two of you were in front of, when the whirring of metal made the two of you jump apart and run away very quickly. You walked into your room, cursing yourself for falling so easily into Steve. It was great, wonderful actually his lips on yours, his lips on your skin, but you wanted Bucky, you had to have Bucky, and now it just became even more complicated because you decided to think with what's between your legs instead of your head. Maybe he didn't think anything of it, he had been known to be very iffy with women so maybe you just weren't for him and he'd let you know next time he saw you. You weren't really his type anyways, he was a good guy, loved a blonde bombshell who volunteered and read to children and blah blah blah. He wasn't into you, you were a bad guy, past tense, but still he would never, right?

Steve felt like he could fly, the embrace the two of you just shared solidified the fact that he wanted you, and vice versa. He was going to continue his plan to somehow get you to commit to him. He knew your history with men was deadly, but he wasn't about to let that stop him. You were stunning and beautiful, and funny. You lit his skin on fire, just a touch and he was ready tear whatever clothes you were wearing off immediately. He wanted you, mind, body and soul, and he wanted you bad.

Bucky had wanted to talk to you, to tell you that it wasn't him but he wished it had been. He wanted to say that he would love to talk to you more, he wanted to tell you how he felt weirdly connected to you. And then he walked upon you and Steve basically fucking in the hallway.

His heart dropped. Seeing you with him, he knew it happened the night before, but you had thought it was him. You definitely knew it was Steve this time. Did he drive you to this? Or did you only want Bucky to get to Steve? Had you apologized because you and Steve were already dating? Who came onto who? Bucky didn't know what to think, but seeing Steve's hands rummage so sloppily over your full hips and waist ignited a fury inside him he hadn't felt in a long time. Was this jealousy? He couldn't remember what it felt like to be jealous but this was definitely what he thought it felt like. He was pissed, not only at Steve but also himself for not saying anything when you came to him. He could've said so many things that would have prevented that explicit scene in the hallway, but instead he remained speechless, silenced like always. It wouldn't happen again, he couldn't, WOULD NOT, let Steve have you. He could have any girl he wanted, you were his. And after 70 years of being deprived of needs, he would have you to himself. Someway, somehow, he knew he would, even if he had to dip back into his HYDRA roots he would find a way for you to love him, you were a villain after all.

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// sorry for the wait, a girls been kept busy. Hope the chapter turned out well, and thank the lord for the wonderful @lunathepettuna for being the cure to writer's block! Check out her amazing writing if you get a chance! If anybody has anything they’d like to see lemme know! Thanks again! P.S. if you guys want to throw random vocab words at me I’ll try and find a way to incorporate them and tag you! Thanks for reading! May Odin bless you! //

#bucky x you #bucky barns imagine #bucky barnes #winter soldier #bucky love story #steve rogers #steve x you #captain america #cpt america #marvel #marvel fanfic #fanfiction #mcu #mcu x reader #mcu fanfiction #poison series

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xfirechickx · 6 years

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Arrow Rewrite

So I’ve (finally) caught up with the latest seasons of all the DCTV shows on Netflix, and to the utter surprise of no one, including myself, Arrow has definitely not gotten any better since the first two seasons, and the only good thing that’s come out of this train wreck of a show since killing off the Black Canary, is bringing Katie Cassidy back as the Black Siren. But still, to say that this show is a huge disappointment is a gross understatement, so much so, that the only reason I still watch is for Katie and for the annual crossovers. But, to actually make keeping up with the show tolerable, I had to pretty much mentally rewrite most of the show and headcanon the shit out of it, and make my way through with all the denial I can manage. So, this is how I like to pretend that the show actually went. And even though I doubt anyone will read this - this is more for my getting my thoughts down - bear in mind, this is super anti F*licity with all the nolicity feelings I have. Also, after reading a whole bunch of posts with the same feelings as me, this became a sort of mashed clusterfuck of ideas that came together from everywhere.

SO first of all, Laurel is a metahuman, you know, like she should have been. What the fuck was the idea behind not giving her actual powers? That’s just stupid. So yeah, either Laurel was in Central City when the particle accelerator exploded, or some other freak accident gave her the canary cry. I don’t care how it happened, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Laurel is the team’s meta, and it caused her to want to don a mask even before Sara was killed.

Next, I’d like to think that she got the hang of street fighting a lot faster. Like, I appreciate that it took her awhile to be able to handle herself on the streets, but this “Oliver is the best fighter” mindset is absolute bullshit. Ik we’ve all been thinking of the Arrow as a bargain-bin Batman (and the horrendous bullet we dodged that was the mere suggestion that F*licity could ever be anything close to Oracle didn’t help), but I am so sick of Oliver’s fighting abilities being thought of as if he was the freaking Batman. Bullshit. I’ll admit, Oliver can fight and hold his own; he’d have to to be a vigilante facing down supervillains on a constant basis, that’s fine. But the Black Canary is one of the best fighters in the DC universe, and I will be damned if that was never acknowledged here.

So the way I see it, Laurel not only kept up with Oliver and Roy while on patrol, but after he came back from his new life in Ivy Town, Oliver comes to realize that she’s actually better than him. Like, I want them to be out on the field, and she’s literally outdoing him at every turn. And at first, he’s all, “Damn, I must be a bit rusty,” but it becomes clear after a couple more episodes, when he no longer has that excuse, that she’s actually running circles around him, whether it’s on patrol or while they’re sparring. In fact, I want an entire scene of them sparring in the bunker, and as distracted as everyone else is doing their own thing, everyone can clearly see that she’s holding back, and Oliver thinks that her head’s just not in it.

Oliver: Come on, I know you can do better than that!

Laurel: Nah, it’s okay. This is a good pace.

Oliver: Come on, you’ll never get better if you don’t give it your all. Let me have it!

And then she brutally knocks him on his ass.

“Lucky shot,” he grumbles as he gets up and gets ready for another round, and Laurel has a look on her face that’s almost annoyed, but honestly, she’s been waiting for forever to knock him down a peg. Diggle, Thea, and Roy are trying not to laugh in the background.

And speaking of Thea and Roy, holy shit, Roy doesn’t leave! Whoever came up with that idea needs a good smack. Team Arrow comes up with literally any other plan and Roy fucking stays! Thea, is instead given the mantle Artemis with her own outfit. Yeah, ik it still wouldn’t give us the Artemis Crock storyline, but it’s still better than the Evelyn Sharp bullshit that we ended up with. We currently have two tech geniuses on the team, what’s wrong with three archers? They could continue having their relationship ups and downs as subplots as the show goes on. I would even like that at some point, they decide to get their own place together, and Thea decides to sell her old apartment (you know, the one she was brutally stabbed in) to afford a nice one with Roy. And I would like F*licity try in vain to hide how much of an asshole she is by getting all indignant about it. Like, Thea offers to sell it to F*licity first, but she tries to spin it like, “You didn’t want it anymore, so I took it, so it’s mine now?” And everyone’s like, “What? No, that’s literally her apartment, which she bought with her father’s money? Idk how the hell it came to be thought of as yours anyway?” And she eventually has to break down and either buy it or move out because Thea and Roy have their hearts set on getting their own place.

As far as nolicity goes, I always thought that they would at some point have a brief relationship (a ship that I originally didn’t care for, but quickly became my ultimate notp) which would be doomed from the start due to having little to no romantic chemistry, and even though F*licity definitely had a strong sexual attraction to Oliver, she mostly seemed to view him as an older brother; or at least, Oliver viewed her as a slightly annoying younger sister.

But because of Guggenheim’s constant interference, the will-they-won’t-they crap just kept dragging on and on and on until holy fuck I have negative five care points to spend on these two assholes, just give me more BC! Their relationship has to be the most boring aspect of the show, something that’s definitely not helped by the fact that F*licity is an emotionally abusive and manipulative piece of shit Mary Sue. Seriously, for the amount of times that she’s been really vocal about how hypocritical and controlling she is, it just boggles the mind how few times anyone has called her out for it. I say few, because it has happened before, twice I believe, once by Oliver, who calmly insisted, “Enough,” and once by Ray Palmer after she threw his dead fiance in his face. Classy lady, isn’t she? But the farther this show goes on, the more she gets away with and the more infuriating it is that Oliver becomes the bad guy in her place. And holy shit the fact that literally everyone needs to assure Oliver - and the audience - that they are, in Guggenheim’s world, the perfect couple. I honestly can’t tell anymore if he actually believes this, and is just trying to shove his own weird obsession with EBR down everyone else’s throats, or if he’s just trying to get those of us who don’t like the ship to come to the dark side. Either way, I’m not buying any of this shit. SO, for every time that there’s a character to remind everyone how “good” Oliver and F*licity are together, take a shot, and then block out their words and then replace them with various observances and reassurances on Oliver’s behalf. I’d like to think that those closest to him, like Diggle, Laurel, and Thea were totally ready to call F*licity out on her shit whenever she started taking things out on Oliver, but he would subtly shake his head and calmly assure them later on that “F*licity’s right, I’m wrong. But no really guys, we’re totally happy together, I’d just appreciate it if you guys not confront her because she’s the queen of right on every subject ever and I’m just lucky to be with her.”

And the rest of Team Arrow just reluctantly agrees not to say anything unless Oliver is the one to bring up that he has a problem with her, but are totally ready to throw down at moment’s notice. Even people outside of Team Arrow notice it and tend to comment, with characters like Mick and Constantine on the crass side of the spectrum with phrases like “Does she occasionally let you take your balls out of her purse?” and more sensitive words from people like Barry and Sara, who actually try to get it through his head that, despite what F*licity says, not everything is his fault, and he does not deserve to be kicked around by her over situations that he had little to no control over (Samantha and William, anyone?)

And then there’s Damien Darhk. Hoo boy, my hate towards him killing Laurel burns with the fury of a thousand suns. There was literally no reason for it, you know, besides eliminating her as a threat to Nolicity. Except, she wasn’t even a threat?? It was pretty clear that Laurel and Oliver weren’t even considering a romantic relationship, and even I, as a hardcore GA/BC shipper, didn’t even want them to get back together at this point. Despite the unintentional victimization of Oliver, Laurel absolutely did not deserve any of his shit. So, as much as I wished that F*licity was the one who died, Laurel was still targeted by Darhk in order to get back at Lance, but she doesn’t just die and that’s it! She gets to be critically injured - getting intentionally stabbed by a former member of the League of Assassins tends to be pretty life-threatening - but she does get to heal while in the hospital and make it back out onto the field to continue as BC.

Hell, I’d even be okay with her actually dying that night if, and only if, they brought her back. For a universe based on superhero comic books, Guggenheim and company seemed to have totally forgotten (or just outright ignored) how often characters get brought back from the dead, at times in pretty nonsensical ways. But here, there was a way to conceivably bring her back; there were three in fact: In Arrow, the Lazarus pits would have been available; Flash could have brought her back with the introduction of Flashpoint, or you know, Sara, who happens to captain a fucking timeship could have brought her back, either by manipulating the timeline, or by pulling a Kingsmen II and had just shown up right after Darhk stabbed Laurel to revive her. I would’ve happily gone along with Team Arrow believing that Laurel was dead if the plot twist was that the Legends brought her aboard the Waverider so that Gideon could heal her.

Sidenote: ik that this would have never have happened simply because all of the Arrowverse shows have to check in with each other to some degree so that they’re all on the same page, but wouldn’t it have been absolutely fan-fucking-tastic if, after Arrow had confirmed that BC was for sure dead and wasn’t coming back, that Flash and LoT just totally undermined it. Like, if Laurel was brought back with either Flashpoint or the Waverider, and KC’s just hanging out on a different set while Arrow just tries its damnedest to discredit them?

Arrow: She’s dead.

Flash/LoT: Well she was, but she got better.

Arrow: She’s def not coming back.

Flash/LoT: Not until you learn to be nice to her anyway.

Arrow: She’s not the real Laurel. Our Laurel is D E A D

Flash/LoT: Nope, this is definitely her, and she’s going on cool adventures with us because SHE’S A DAMN GOOD CHARACTER AND YOU DICKBAGS NEVER DESERVED HER

All the while more of Arrow’s fans flock to every show except Arrow until the assholes in charge of the decision to kill Laurel finally have to (publicly) beg to have her back because literally no one will watch their shitty show anymore without BC, and then they’re forced to respect her character and give her a fair amount of screen time. That would just be poetic justice in my book.

So as season 5 kicks off, Oliver, Roy, AND Laurel take in and train the new recruits to join Team Arrow. I don’t have much to change about this season except that since Laurel isn’t dead, and as much as I like Juliana Harkavy, there’s literally no reason to bring in Dinah Drake. Also the shared hallucination in the Invasion! crossover partially rekindles the romance between Laurel and Oliver, which actually feels pretty heartfelt and like it could possibly lead to them getting back together for real.

And then F*licity ruins it because that’s what she does.

F*licity and Oliver get back together and things progress normally, with the rest of Team Arrow quietly building up a resentment towards the abusiveness of their relationship. I’d also like to think that since Curtis had progressed as a team member, that there’s a slight undertone of “what is she even here for anymore?” among them. Like, whenever she butts in with her hypocritical opinions, someone else will actually step in like, “Hey, you’ve had a long day, so why don’t you go ahead and go home. Don’t worry, Curtis knows what he’s doing, so we’ve got this. Yes, we’ll call you if we need something, but don’t worry. You’ve worked hard today! You deserve a break!” Meanwhile, the rest of the team is literally patching themselves back together with bandages and whatnot, blood and sweat everywhere, all giving each other The Look™ when she nods like, “Yeah, you’re right, I could use a hot meal and a shower. Plus, this tracking system is so simple an idiot could use it, just try not to fuck it up while I’m gone.” Still, no one says anything because Oliver is back to trying to make it work between them, and she occasionally helps William with his homework, so he can’t complain.

William btw, while appreciating the fact that F*licity brings intelligent conversation with her, has not forgotten how much of a bitch she was when trying to save him. Sure, he wasn’t present while all the shit-talking was going down, but there was no way that Samantha didn’t mention it at least in passing later on. “I’m amazed at how much Oliver has grown as a person. He was a real jackass when I knew him before, but he was genuinely worried about you and how we’d get you back. I just wish that the blonde chick he was working with wasn’t being such a pain about it. Like she had any right to any of our business, or any right to be a bitch about the rescue mission.” At this point, nolicity’s domestic life is pretty much out of some crappy fanfiction, and I will be damned if William doesn’t get to bring up F*licity’s pettiness at least once.

And since F*licity apparently feels threatened when Oliver’s past love life gets brought up, William tends to go to his Aunt Thea whenever he feels the need to talk about his mom without having to feel as if he’s the one bringing up a touchy subject. She’s also the one to get him out of the house whenever Nolicity gets especially nauseating at home, and he ends up growing a bond with the rest of Team Arrow in the process. While he still doesn’t want Oliver to be the Arrow anymore, he grows to respect the rest of the team, and ends up with all of their numbers in case he needs any of them to kidnap him for the day. He gets to spend some time in the bunker while they’re out on missions (with Diggle under the hood, of course). Funnily enough, after one mission without F*licity or Oliver, he asks Thea, “So what exactly do you need F*licity for anyway?” And Thea explains that she’s usually down in the bunker handling all the tech stuff while they’re all out in the field, but then he says, “Yeah, but Curtis was handling all that and working in the field??” And Thea and Roy exchange The Look™ again and change the subject.

Things finally come to a head during the Crisis on Earth-X crossover. Oliver, totally taken by the magic that is WestAllen still proposes during the rehearsal dinner, and F*licity, still very publicly says no. Classy. Naz*s invade and everything goes to shit, and Oliver and F*licity still try to make things about them while shit is literally falling apart around them, and to the people whose wedding actually got ruined for some reason. To her credit, Iris doesn’t outright tell F*licity that she’s being a self-obsessed drama queen at what is literally the worst possible time, but she does put out a few comments that both remind F*licity that it was in fact Iris’s day that was ruined, and gets her to shut the fuck up.

F*licity: Oh, wah! Oliver and I had a fight and then naz*s ruined any chance of makeup sex! Wah!

Iris: They literally ruined my wedding and abducted my groom.

F*licity: *internally* oh fuck I forgot about that

Meanwhile on Earth-X:

Oliver: Oh, wah! F*licity said she wouldn’t marry me after I proposed at your rehearsal dinner! Wah!

Barry: Yeah, what the fuck was that about anyway?

Oliver: Ikr? She wouldn’t say yes even after all the beautiful things that were said during the speech! If that doesn’t scream romance, idk what will!

Barry: I actually meant, why the fuck would you propose at the rehearsal when you can do it at literally any other time that isn’t supposed to be about Iris and I getting married?

Oliver: There was magic in the air!

Barry: *facepalm*

No, but the conversation between Barry and Oliver would go on to a touching, if not repetitive explanation about how Oliver was so taken, not just with Barry and Iris’s union, but the idea that Barry has been able to balance his life as a hero and his personal life. Oliver had once told him, “Guys like us don’t get the girl,” but Barry actually did it. And Oliver was envious, because his own life was one clusterfuck after another, with an on-again-off-again relationship that he’s only sort of making it work, and after the Dominator’s simulator, he realized how much he wanted his life as Oliver Queen to be fulfilling and filled with love, and how much he wants a partner in both halves of his life, like Barry and what he has with Iris. And throughout all this, Barry listens and quickly notices that throughout his whole explanation, Oliver never once uses F*licity’s name; he doesn’t even bring her up specifically. Barry probably means to point this out, but Oliver brushes him off thinking that he’s just going to tell him off some more, because that’s what he’s come to expect from having F*licity around all the time, and that’s what people who love you do, right?

It’s actually Snart’s doppelganger who points this out (after eavesdropping on their entire conversation) and suggests that maybe Oliver just hasn’t found the right person to be his partner the way he wants. “Just look at Barry and Iris, or me and Ray.” Oliver shrugs him off too, and just resigns himself to the loneliness of either being without F*licity, or being with her in all the wrong ways.

They get back to Earth-1, Supergirl is saved, yadda yadda yadda. I would like to change Stein’s death into him also making a miraculous recovery and leaving the show still intact. Just, using naz*s to kill off a Jewish character? REALLY?? Fuck all of that. Anyway, Barry and Iris still decide on an impromptu wedding right after *insert literally any event that doesn’t involve killing off Martin so disrespectfully* and Barry still brings Diggle to perform the ceremony, and Joe, Cecile and Wally are present because of course they fucking are. You could even argue for Cisco and Caitlin, but it doesn’t matter to me as much if they’re there. So Barry and Iris exchange vows, say their I do’s, and-

Fucking F*licity interrupts. Because of course she fucking does. “Would you marry us, too? Would you marry me?” A moment of silence and then everyone just explodes.

Barry: Seriously, though? After waiting my entire life for this, two more seconds is literally all I could have asked for

Wally: I’m a speedster, and I could have waited a couple more seconds

Iris: Really? Can I not just have one (1) wedding go uninterrupted?

Joe: In retrospect, we probably should have waited until these assholes left and done this at STAR Labs or something

And F*licity just gets overwhelmed because she’s literally never had so many people tell her she was wrong in her entire fucking life and Diggle tries to mediate (no matter how much he agrees with the rest of Team Flash).

Diggle: F*licity, you don’t even have a marriage license.

F*licity: Oh, no, it’s okay, John! We could just share the moment with Barry and Iris, and then go get a marriage license when we get back to Star City and have our own wedding there.

And then everyone explodes again because, seriously what the FUCK? “So I have to share my second interrupted wedding, and you’re just going home to have another one of your own?” And literally everyone is so fucking frustrated and angry, even more so because they all knew they should have been celebrating at that very moment but F*licity seems to think her awkwardness is still cute when it might just be the most infuriating thing ever. Finally she turns back to Oliver, who hasn’t said anything since she proposed like, “Hey?! A little help here?!” And Oliver is busy with finally seeing her without the rose-colored glasses and seeing her as the selfish and problematic person she is and it’s fucking glorious because he’s just so calm but everyone hears him when he just says, “No.”

F*licity: What? NO? What do you mean, NO?

Oliver: No, F*licity, as in, no, I’m not gonna help you ruin their second wedding, no I’m not going to defend you after fucking this up, and NO I won’t marry you. Not here and definitely not now.

Everyone else is pretty taken aback because up until now, no one’s ever told Queen Fefe off and they’re all doing an internal happy dance at how, for once, Oliver isn’t backing her up. Oliver and F*licity have a staring contest, F*licity waiting for him to back down, and Oliver holding his ground, until F*licity, finally realizing that she’s been unanimously outvoted, just storms off without saying anything, probably expecting Oliver to come running after her to apologize. But he doesn’t. He actually just quietly apologizes to Barry and Iris, and stays in his place as a groomsman (best man, my ass) and stands and waits for Cecile to take up her new place as matron of honor (how the fuck Fefe got that position is beyond me) all the while having this look on his face that says “It had to be done, but I’m gonna catch serious hell when I get home.” Diggle repeats himself in pronouncing Barry and Iris as husband and wife, they kiss, and the crossover ends with an UNBLOCKED shot of them two while their remaining wedding party claps it out.

I would keep everything in the gift scene in next episode of The Flash exactly the same except for Iris’s line is changed to, “Okay, not on the registry, but I guess trying to get married during our wedding wasn’t on the registry either. I’m not bitter.”

The whole wedding reception scene in Arrow is also completely done away with, and replaced with a long-awaited breakup scene, the one to end all breakup scenes (between nolicity anyway). Down in the bunker, it starts off with (what else?) F*licity trying to blame everything on Oliver. “Shit like this is why I didn’t wanna marry you. And then I put MYSELF out there and what do I get? Rejected, that’s what! I get rejected and humiliated in front of everyone!” And then she rambles on and throws in a couple references of the island and how he hasn’t changed since his frat boy days for good measure. Some guilt tripping and a few hypocritical statements later, and then she ends it. Or, at least, that’s what it’s supposed to be, but it really comes off as more of a threat to end it. Her closing statement sounds a lot like “You better straighten up because you’re damn lucky to have me.”

And Oliver just kind of silently stews until she finishes and he immediately jumps into how far he’d obviously come since his five years on the island, and how unfair it was for her to throw that in his face, and even worse how she tried so hard to justify butting her way into Barry and Iris’s special moment to further put herself in the spotlight. She tries to butt in a couple times (like she does) but gets immediately shut down because hell to the fucking no that was not okay. It ends with them trying to yell over each other, and F*licity yelling, “Well maybe I shouldn’t even be on this team anymore since you’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t need me!” right as the rest of the team walk in. They immediately try to backtrack, but F*licity, being her usual dramatic self yells, “No! No, you stay! I’ll go! He obviously doesn’t need me anyway!” and just leaves.

The rest of the team is just so shell shocked and embarrassed at having walked in at that exact moment (they’d all secretly been hoping to be there at that exact moment because that’d mean they’d officially have permission to drag F*licity the way she should have been several seasons ago) but the moment turned out to be more awkward than anyone could have hoped, so no one really knows what to do. “You alright, Hoss?” Oliver pretends that the past minute never happened and redirects everyone’s attention to the latest update on Cayden James. Meanwhile, Laurel, recognizing that Oliver is going to opt out of dealing with the problem, quietly excuses herself and leaves the bunker after F*licity. And Laurel finds her just outside the bunker, pacing because was she was actually expecting Oliver to run up after her after causing that big scene.

Laurel: That was some fight you guys just had.

F*licity: What, oh that? Nah, Oliver’s just being a jerk. Don’t worry about me, we’ll be-

Laurel: Where the hell do you get off talking to him like that?

F*licity: Wait, what?

Laurel then unleashes the mother of all lectures, bringing up every single problematic thing F*licity has ever said or done, which is pretty much anything and everything anyone has ever had to complain about the Mary Sue-ish nature of her character, every time she’s been an asshole, every time that she and the rest of the team has wanted nothing more than to tell her to shut the fuck up but how Oliver had asked them not to because of how much he wanted their shitty relationship to work, whether they were together or broken up at the time. F*licity tries to keep a stoic facial expression, but it’s pretty clear that she’s embarrassed and angry and incredibly surprised because damn, first Oliver and Team Flash, and now Laurel is calling her out on her shit and she was so far from expecting it. Laurel, to her credit, never even raises her voice, because she doesn’t want the rest of the team to hear and get involved, and she makes it clear that no one is kicking her off the team (if she wanted to leave, then that was her own prerogative) but she’s just so glad that she finally gets to unload everything she’d been holding back since Oliver and F*licity had gotten together and the bitch was not going to worm her way out of it this time. Her rant ends with the sentence, “Don’t think for even a second that you’re in the right about any of this,” and she turns on her heel and heads back down to the bunker while F*licity stays frozen where she stands, still trying to absorb that she’d just been told off, and how no one was going to apologize for it.

In the upcoming days, it seems like F*licity is gone for good; she hasn’t come back down to the bunker or contacted anyone on the team, and the team slowly adjusts to not having her around (and encouraging Oliver in that he did the right thing by breaking it off). Curtis pretty much takes over her role on the team (he’s the third smartest person in the DC universe, dammit! Why in the fuck has he been reduced to Fefe’s sidekick?!) and makes time to go out on patrol with the others and besides not having anyone back in the bunker, the team dynamic really doesn’t change. But just as things escalate with Cayden James, F*licity comes back; she shows up unannounced at the bunker after the team comes back from the field, and insists that she’s ready to resume her role as Overwatch. The rest of the team is pretty iffy considering all the drama that she’d left in her wake, but they agree to take her back because they’d probably need all the help they could get against Cayden. So the show goes on, with some tension still between Oliver and F*licity, but Laurel quickly shuts her up with a look every time it looks like she’s about to start some shit.

Team Arrow obtains the list of people on Diaz’s payroll, and after some celebrating on taking down the bad guy, F*licity announces that she was officially leaving the team. There’s a lot of confusion, since she made such a big deal about wanting to come back, but she explains how she only wanted to finish what she started with Cayden James, and now that the mission is over, she’s ready to go back to a normal life, like what she had originally planned when joining the team back in the first season. This scene is actually a bittersweet one; no matter any of our opinions on how badly this character was fucked up, she was a part of the original team, and her departure from it should be treated like the end of an era. She leaves, but not before assuring them that she would help out if they ever need it.

Idk what the future holds for the plot, but as far as GA/BC being endgame (because they were, dammit) I actually wouldn’t want it to happen in the next season. Now with F*licity gone, Oliver got bumped up from the second to the biggest asshole in the Arrowverse, and like I said before, Laurel absolutely does not deserve his shit. So I don’t want there to be any romantic relationship between them at all, for at least one whole season. Hell, I want them to date other people during this season. At this point, I’d just really like to see their friendship to become more solid. I want them both to come to terms with what happened between them in the past, and decide to extend their partnership. I want Oliver (and the rest of the team) to see Laurel as his equal, not as his potential love interest, and definitely not his sidekick. I want Oliver to start resembling his comic book counterpart at this point. I want him to more frequently crack jokes and become less like a Batman wannabe. It felt like that’s the Oliver we were supposed to get when this show started, after he’d had a chance to deal with some of his trauma.

The eighth season is when Oliver and Laurel start showing romantic interest in each other again. They maybe start flirting while on the field, and eventually they go out on dates without the masks. And at first it’s weird, because of all the history they share, and a running gag where every time they sit down, they’re immediately summoned on a mission (original, ik). But they not only find the time to be together, but they actually realize that the life actually works for them, because there are no more secrets between them anymore. I want them to start calling each other Pretty Bird and Robin Hood and pretty much all the fluffy (and probably smutty) scenes that it would take for their relationship to better resemble their comic book counterparts. And their chemistry is just as good as it was in the first season, when you could just look at Oliver and see just how in love he was with Laurel, only better now that they both share the vigilante lifestyle.

This all eventually leads to them getting married; it doesn’t matter if it happens in the eighth season or the ninth, but the proposal is similar to the 2010 Green Arrow short, where he proposes while in full costume after completing a mission together.

Their wedding could be the premise for the annual crossover, but I wouldn’t mind if it was purely an episode of Arrow. If it’s not a crossover, then I would at least like a brief cameo of Barry and Iris, probably calling or video chatting them before the wedding, wishing them luck because they sadly can’t make it due to having to deal with this season’s villain. But Sara has to be there, for sure; with or without the rest of her team, she needs to be present as the maid of honor.

And their wedding gets interrupted, because of course it does (probs by Orm leading the Atlanteans or some shit) so they break up the wedding party to suit up and join the fight. This is actually the first time we see F*licity since she left. They need her tech skills yet again because Curtis was either incapacitated during the fight, or he’s off on a trip somewhere with the hot police officer from this past season. Anyway, they’re at whatever office/genius bar she’s working at, hovering while she does her thing, and she’s rambling on as per usual until she says something like, “I expected to hear from you like everyday, tbh. I’m honestly surprised everything didn’t fall apart the moment I left.” And everyone just kinda rolls their eyes like, damn, what a bitch. And then she makes it more awkward when it comes out that Oliver and Laurel’s wedding was supposed to take place earlier that day, and it’s like, “Oh, so I guess you are willing to get married, just not to me!” And Oliver has to physically hold Laurel back from cussing her out because, “We need her, okay?”

The episode/crossover ends with the team (and William and F*licity because reasons) back in whatever location they’re using as the Arrow Cave at this point, everyone in full costume, patching up their injuries, and it overall looking like the shawarma scene from the first Avengers movie. And despite having just won the day, everyone’s still sorry that they couldn’t finish the wedding. So, just like how Barry and Iris should’ve had their second wedding in STAR Labs, they decide to hold their wedding in the Arrow Cave. So, everyone still tired and dirty from their recent fight, but it still makes for an interesting ceremony. But it’s mostly because I want Oliver to lift Laurel’s mask the way he would’ve lifted her veil. And not only do they actually have vows, they’re actually pretty fucking beautiful. Like, Oliver’s are about how he’s loved her for most of his life, but how this is the first time where he feels like he’s finally worthy of her, and how he sees her as an equal, and as his partner in both halves of his life. Laurel’s reflect on how they went from friends to lovers, to strained acquaintances, back to friends, to actual partners, and eventually back to lovers. And no matter how many times their paths lead away from each other, they were forever intertwined. And then Diggle pronounces them husband and wife and everyone cheers.

F*licity hangs back from the rest of the crowd that’s hugging and kissing and congratulating, because she really can’t stop herself from thinking “That should have been me,” but she manages to keep it (mostly) classy and only hints towards the thought twice in her rambling congratulations. In the end, she hugs the both of them, and makes her exit right after Oliver and Laurel stroll out to catch their plane to their honeymoon.

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kateanddevinreview · 6 years

Text

London Has Fallen

In which Kate and Devin write a porno

Devin: Okay, so this movie is just Gerard Butler being a badass right? Is this the one with Denzel Washington? Or are neither of those things right.

Kate: It’s something like that.

Devin: Well, Butler showed up in the credits, but so did morgan freeman?

Kate: It’s a trifecta!!

Devin: Or maybe I'm just racist and mixed them up.

Kate: Or maybe it’s the two of them being badass together.

Devin: I made some comment the other day about minorities being underrepresented at the oscars or something and they asked what actors I think should win instead and I blanked on literally every minority actor I knew.

Kate: Hahahah. It’s still true though. And to be fair, could you name any white actors?

Devin: My brain got stuck on Tom Hardy and forgot literally every other actor on earth

Kate:I think he’s on tv now anyway. So far this movie is starting a bit slow. Do you think someone is going to be shot soon?

Devin: I find it weird that we are in....India?

Kate: I think we’re at an Indian wedding. Terrorist’s daughter is getting married

Devin: This is set up for motive?

Kate: Probs

Devin: The Phantom of the Opera and Harvey Dent go for a jog

Kate: Why are politicians always running? I don’t think they do that much

Devin: I think cause DC? it's an easy excuse to pan around the lawn

Kate: Ok well fine, coming at me with movie reasons. Wait, is this a sequel?

Devin: Is it? Was the last one just called "London"?

Kate: I was thinking Gerald saved a president in the last one?

Devin: She has crazy eyes

Kate: She does but she’s pregnant

Devin: I'll forgive it if we get through this movie without her vomiting.

Kate: She’s in like her third tri already so she really shouldn’t

Devin: Google says this is a sequel, to Olympus Has Fallen. Lots of stuff falling apparently

Kate: Knew it!!! I’ve seen that one too

Devin: Really? I'm guessing last time he saved President Harvey Dent from terrorists, wooed or impregnated his wife, and got hired for secret service or unfired from secret service

Kate: Unfired, if it’s what I’m thinking of

Devin: This time he'll save the Prime Minister from terrorists, see his kid born, and...uh. Be knighted? That's my guess

Kate: Seems like a totally logical guess to me. I’m betting he discovers the Prime Minister was murdered. I don’t think people are expected to attend state funerals?

Devin: I think it's cause his vice isn't available? I think normally this is the kind of thing they send him for. But I am basing that on episodes of Madam Secretary so who knows

Kate: New guess!! President is killed and Butler has to protect Freeman

Devin: Hmmm. Maybe. Is Freeman the Vice?

Kate: Yes. He said “Hello, Mr VP”

Devin: I'm missing like half of this dialogue, idk how

Kate: Cause it’s boring

Devin: I want splosions!

Kate: This baby melodrama music is not my favorite. Once again I feel like writing is letting us down?

Devin: Yeah. Be better hollywood!

Kate: Also important people shouldn’t just sign shit without looking at it

Devin: is this the fringe guy? No. Who is he? He's someone

Kate: I think? No?

Devin: Fringe guy is similar but different. Oh! The Magicians? Magicians teacher guy?

Kate: No, definitely not him

Devin: IMDBing....

Kate: “Most protected event on earth”= everyone will die

Devin: Yup. This cast listing order is stupid. Do we know British Gerard Butler's name?

Kate: You mean the head of the British security? Also no. Also I think they’re going to use kids?

Devin: Yes, British guy. Mr. Sands! From Limitless. Thanks wikipedia, for your superior cast list

Kate: Limitless. That’s right, I never watched much of that

Devin: I really liked the main guy and all the arts and crafts in that show. I'm sad it was cancelled. Also we should add the movie to our review list

Kate: Yes!

Devin: Splosion! I didn't think those guards were supposed to have real guns? Then again EMTs should definitely not have rocket launchers

Kate: Hahaha, yeah, those cops are definitely plants. It’s clearly a very well orchestrated attack

Devin: Pretty sure only america gives their cops guns. Also, rocket launcher

Kate: Wow I don’t care how this movie ends the world would not recover from this

Devin: Yeah Kate, it's fallen. Show. Us. The. Egg. It's not London unless I see the big glass egg and the ferris wheel

Kate: How did they know that one president wouldn’t leave on time?

Devin: Trackers? Or they caused the traffic?

Kate: No, he decided?

Devin: Motorcycles, a car's only weakness

Kate: Nice driving!

Devin: Don't injure civilians!

Kate: Ummmm, Devin. I think that ship has sailed.

Devin: He rammed the bad guy into a non bad guy car!

Kate: Oh fuck. Ok so who is the black lady? Is she the First Lady?

Devin: Voight buddy, you could have moved. He's the driver, she's the head of secret service

Kate: He was driving! It was a bullet! Give him some credit. Is she?

Devin: Yes. According to wikipedia

Kate: She’s not doing much. And she hunkered with the president?

Devin: Right? Stop flailing. Where is your gun, woman?

Kate: Oh god. That was brutal

Devin: That was very brutal

Kate: Why didn’t they park closer to the chopper?

Devin: Crashing in 3...2...oh ok nvm

Kate: Hahaha

Devin: He's got a cane so you know he's evil

Kate: So true

Devin: Moral of this movie: don't trust the handicapped

Kate: And yet, they didn’t detect a plan of this magnitude

Devin: Uh, did those people just have labels?

Kate: Yes. NSA and something else

Devin: Like, movie? Movie. We do not care

Kate: I’m assuming it will be important later?

Devin: Why is the lady not doing anything?

Kate: Nice, flares! I like flares. Why are they flying so low anyway?

Devin: I got distracted googling the secret service

Kate: Anything pertinent to share?

Devin: Apparently the director just does the boring shit, so idk why she's even here

Kate: Ummmm, I think the movie should end here?

Devin: Yes they all died. The End

Kate: No way anyone survived that. I call bullshit

Devin: Also, I assumed presidents would have like one guy their whole time in office? But apparently they hire someone new a lot. Oh she dead.

Kate: For the secret service?

Devin: As director. Like Obama had 2

Kate: I mean, that’s four years for each

Devin: Trump has already had 2. The first guy for like 2 months? 1 month?

Kate: Well, Trump does that a lot. He’s had like 8 communication directors

Devin: I just wonder if they choose to leave or if the president purposefully swaps them out

Kate: Also working for the president is really intense, so maybe you just burn out and have to leave

Devin: Makes sense. The local biker gang is here

Kate: I don’t think bikes make that noise. That is dumb

Devin: Yes. Also no one checked the wreck

Kate: At least we know from earlier scenes they are fast runners!

Devin: This looks like he put his manifesto on youtube

Kate: What point is there in entertaining this phone call? Also why does he care about one president?

Devin: Imagine if he called before they watched the video! Like 5 minutes earlier

Kate: Right? He should take the uniform too

Devin:

"Who is this?"

"It's...seriously? You didn't see my video?"

"h/o googling it"

"It's on youtube"

"yeah one sec, gotta sit through this 50 shade of grey trailer"

Kate: Ahhhhhhh Being hunted by motorbikes!! Oh no

Devin: Sure, that's subtle. Also this is a regular subway

Kate: I like that he was able to loot the body for weapons. Very practical

Devin: Jesus Gerard Butler. WTF? You went from zero to torture in no time

Kate: I know, little intense. Definitely running on adrenaline

Devin: This is the most 'murrican fucking movie. You cannot convince me that huge squads of racists didn't come out of this movie going "rah rah ‘murrica"

Kate: Oh god. Unfortunately yes

Devin: Although these talky bits suck. I'd rather have more fighting. Oh, thanks label, I really cared what time it was

Kate: Everyone is dead, that’s what this discussion is. I mean surrender and then ambush. How many people do they think there are? You’re not going to be professional right now? Weird

Devin: Blah blah blah. Bitch it was a wedding. Of course his family was there

Kate: How did you not know his family was there? It was a wedding. So dumb

Devin: What even is the point of that dialogue? There better be drugs in his water or something

Kate: What kind of shoddy intel are you all operating on? This is dumb. Do criticize if necessary. You have to teach them. Also off color jokes?

Devin: "You know what's most important Mike? Children. That's why we are never going to spend time with ours in any subsequent movie."

Kate: Of course it’s not your delta team.

Devin: Yeah why was that message not in code?

Kate: Zoom in!

Devin: Enhance! Your safe house has a fucking skylight!?

Kate: Seems like a pretty lame safe house. Oh this is gross

Devin: This movie is very gratuitous with its gore

Kate: It really is. And president you should not have done that. You are not almost out of this by any long shot

Devin: There must be a porno of this where they fuck right then

Kate: Did all of MI6 just die?

Devin: I'm not going to lie, that weird pirate porno you made us watch that one time is better than this movie

Kate: Haha! Oh pirates. Also my taste is terrible because I still enjoy this

Devin: I don't believe the hackers would make this basic of a mistake

Kate: No, me neither

Devin: Also driving seems like the quickest way to be spotted?

Kate: They kept everything under the radar but you didn’t notice this earlier?

Devin: Ok I guess at least the car is bulletproofed

Kate: How many of these terrorists are there supposed to be?

Devin: It's just the same 4 guys, they're really fast. They keep healing when they're off screen

Kate: Seems like an infinite supply. Mutants!! Also Mike is still somehow always faster

Devin: Now I want an action movie where 3/4 of the way through you realize he's been re-killing the same 5 guys over and over and surprise! it's really a fantasy/horror movie!

Kate: That would be so good. Change the whole game. I do oddly think this would make a good porno with very very little change

Devin: It's cause there's so much standing really close while breathing heavily and the plot is basically just as thin

Kate: Yeah pretty much. It’s a male romance novel

Devin: Also there have been.....5 women? in this entire movie. 6, I guess. Wife, mother, secret service director, beehive, assistant cop, MI6

Kate: Assistant cop?

Devin: Black lady?

Kate: I don’t remember her

Devin: She was in the bullpen with not!Fringe guy

Kate: Ok sure

Devin: Oh, ok, and random lady who had a text label I didn't read

Kate: There was the turning 30 woman and one lady head of state.

Devin: Still, none of these people shooting right now? There's like 20 guys in this scene!

Kate: Nope. Can’t have women in harm’s way unless they don’t have a choice. Also no lady terrorists

Devin: Only lady terrorists allowed are dead motivation ones

Kate: Also I’m subbing lady because it’s faster to type than woman

Devin: Agreed

Kate: Omg. Whispered “Mike.” Straight out of a romance novel

Devin: What? Are you ahead of me or did I miss it?

Kate: Maybe? The president whispered it

Devin: No! I must have missed the Mike whisper

Kate: He should be really tired by now. He didn’t have dinner!

Devin: "Hear that? My boyfriend is coming"

Kate: He really should just kill the president. It doesn’t make sense not to

Devin: There is so much manly eye contact and face holding

Kate: So much

Devin: Like I'm pretty sure almost this exact sequence happened in Outlander

Kate: In the porn there would be a scene where the president seduced him, Mike walked in on it, and then they have a threesome

Devin: With the bad guy?

Kate: Yup

Devin: That seems like it would be out of place plot wise. Would the bad guy turn himself in or something?

Kate: No. Just random sex that doesn’t make sense

Devin: Weird. The sex should make sense!

Kate: It’s for real a thing that happens in porn, you get whiplash. Oh god. This is lame. Really?

Devin: One punch where he runs all the way across the screen. So stupid

Kate: Did we learn who the brit mole was?

Devin: Nope. They hacked the police station I think? Damn! Wheelchair guy didn't even get to make a speech about how bad America is. This movie is not even pretending to care about America's mistakes

Kate: Why didn’t he just shoot everyone?

Devin: Out of bullets?

Kate: He hasn’t run out of guns until now

Devin: What even is this dialogue right now?

Kate: Really dumb

Devin: "You fuck with America? OH HELL NO. WE BAT SHIT. WE WILL FUCKING MURDER ALL Y'ALL."

Kate: America’s not even 500. Witty banter!

Devin: "EVEN OUR PRESIDENT WILL PICK UP A GUN FOR MURDER TIME"

Kate: Also he’s not dead because you haven’t killed him?

Devin: Yeah you just punched him a bit and talked nonsense

Kate: Once again, another thing they wouldn’t have survived.

Devin: I feel like the porno version of this has them go back to their wives at the end with lots of meaningful looks and sly smiles between the two main dudes. Like "yeah, we'll do this again next mission"

Kate: Oh no! But yes probably. Why was there a lock in an elevator?

Devin: Is the president the only one alive from this whole thing? They would definitely make out in this elevator

Kate: I think one other world leader survived? There was a missing link to the terrorist?

Devin: I guess?

Kate: Who sent a fucking video?

Devin: Honestly this plot is stupid Yeah he's def the mole. Also he's running away? Like he obviously did it

Kate: Are we supposed to care about him or her? Because I do not

Devin: They would have had sex earlier in the porno

Kate: Yeah. It would have made more sense. Just kill him already

Devin: Also she would have just arrested him. I feel like the porno would have less murder

Kate: It’s weird that normally I complain about too much sex? But this would just be better as a porn

Devin: Yeah our review is basically "this would have made a better porno"

Kate: How would you have found him?

Devin: Who hears "look out your window" and looks up at the ceiling? Oh maybe that's what the missing link was?

Kate: Also the VP does not have the authority to call that type of strike

Devin: What is this 10 angled shot explosion? Ok, we've got a baby

Kate: So it’s been at least a few weeks

Devin: No prime minister but I didn't realize it was his funeral so I feel like the president is close enough. Now knighthood

Kate: Sure. They don’t know how emails work? Re: is for replies

Devin: "Many people would say this is our fault, but we're america so fuck those people. we'll kill those people."

Kate: “Commence spending no time with my kid”

Devin: In the porno version we end instead with a mirror of the earlier DC lawn scene, with them sitting on a bench watching their wives/kids, and the pres saying something like "still want to quit?" and Butler saying "and leave you, sir? Never." And then meaningful eye contact. Roll credits.

Kate: Hahahah

Devin: Okay, so scores

Kate: Yes. Scores.

Devin: 3/10 for the movie, 6/10 for the porno

Kate: I go a little higher movie? Like 4.5 for the movie. 6 for porno though. I think we can agree that no porn should ever rank higher than 7

Devin: Yeah. Like, even amazing porn is still porn

Kate: Ummmm tropes? So many, “family as our motivation”

Devin: “America is terrible and we never learn anything”?

Kate: Which is so hypocritical

Devin: “One man assumes command of literally every other character without argument”

Kate: Hahahaha. So like 7 on the tropes? They all fit the plot really well

Devin: Yeah, I mean it had a very particular niche and it played to it

Kate: Exactly

Devin: I'm going to give the title an 8/10. Catchy and accurate

Kate: I can agree. Thematic

Devin: London did pretty much fall. Like an old lady in a Life Alert commercial

Kate: Better than Olympus has fallen

Devin: Yeah, plus how fucking pretentious is it to call the white house "olympus"?

Kate: Exactly

Devin: What would the porn title be? I feel like they're usually puns?

Kate: Pun for sure. London may fall but our guys stay up

Devin: kind of long

Kate: It could be the tagline?

Devin: Oh yeah, good tagline. My brain gave me "Banging Private Ryan" which does not fit but is almost certainly a movie that exists

Kate: Hahahahaha. Banging president something? Whatever his name was

Devin: No idea, I called him Harvey Dent the whole movie. London Goes Down?

Kate: London laid down? Cause laid. Get it?

Devin: H/o I have to see if there is a real porn title for this. NSA people monitoring my internet searches, I'm really sorry

Kate: Gives them some spice! A story to take home

Devin: Top result for "London Has Fallen Porn Title" is:

"London Has Fallen movie condemned as racist 'terrorsploitation' "

"London Has Fallen is gun-barrel porn"

Kate: Whelp. Yep. I feel bad for enjoying it?

Devin: "London Has Fallen Is The Worst Film About Our City Ever"

Kate: Oh no it was a piece of shit for sure. Super fucking racist

Devin: “Blowing London.” That's my official submission

Kate: Nice! “Blowing London” is great. I thought you’d actually found it.

Devin: Ok, any parting words?

Kate: It was a dumb racist movie that I feel guilty for enjoying anyway? Which means we should have more action movies made with better plots and motivation. And female representation!

Devin: Or more action movies that are just porn

Kate: Or that. What about you? Parting words?

Devin: If you want to see a movie where Gerard Butler brutally murders everyone, this is it. Or, you know, go watch 300, it is less awful.

Kate: So true.

#kate and devin review #london has fallen #murrica

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rhyzsuxz · 4 years

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ww84 confused the fuck out of me. i genuinely enjoyed watching it and I think most of the criticism is pretty valid, but like it wasn't,,, that bad. A lot of the stuff I have a problem with is things that I was able to put in the back of my head and still enjoy the movie so I don't like the vehement hate and shit people are saying (unless it's about the racist shit, i’m am not uncomfortable with vehemently hating on the racist ass shit in this movie) but other than that like,,,, idk it was pretty good.

Spoilers for ww84 below

the plot wasn't amazing but compared to Infinity War? Endgame? Jesus christ is call ww84 a masterpiece compared to anything marvels put out in the past five years. I didn't enjoy the entire oil barron middle eastern/egyptian plot point. That was completely unnecessary and racist. Pretty much the entirety of what happened in egypt was,,,, not,,,, okay,,,, i’m not going to go into it but like that's a completely genuine criticism because what the fuck were they aiming for there??? The non-white and clearly middle eastern dude wishing for nukes while holding a gun??? What???

Next one isn't "racism" but like who decided to write, cast, produce, and film the scene where the woman wishes to deport all irish ppl and the irish dude wishes to kill her??? What the fuck was that??? It needed more context and if ur criticizing a movie and you say "needed more context" it means it probably didn't need or shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Uhhh what else,,,, loved kristen wiig. omg. But,,,, why was the entire plot line between her and diana just pitting them against each other?? The entire subplot didn't even result in any character developed that it showed Barbara doesnt "learn to love herself" or anything she's just like "wow having superpowers is stressful, nvm" and she barely even does that??? Also the part where it's showing her losing her "humanity" and she beats the shit out of her attempted rapist. Loved that part EXCEPT. Why is that how she loses her kindness? Like i've seen people say the part where she actually loses it is when she tells her friend to mind his own business, but anyone (esp straight dudes) watching that and even a lot of women could take it as framing her beating up the asshole as bad?? Like my dream would be to beat up ppl who've assaulted me or made me uncomfortable so the fact that they even left room for the audience to question which part was her losing her humanity made me iffy about it. Overall it's one of the things I think they could cut from the movie and it wouldn't make any difference.

something I liked about it was the cgi. It's been getting a lot of shit because it's cringey at points but like,,, I loved it. The parts where she's flying just felt like a comic book and yeah maybe it's not realistic, world changing cgi quality but it made me happy and I think trying to go for the ultra realistic shit would've taken away from the whole theme they were pushing with Diana's character which was truth and love. I've never read the comics or seen any other DC movies (other than the first gal gadot wonder woman) but she just felt like a cool character and watching her I really understood her falling in love with humanity. Her whole character might not had grown much in the movie in terms of a formal arc, but watching her grieve and mourn the loss of Steve and then go through the cycle of falling in love with humans again was genuine and just fun to watch for me personally. Was it a little repetitive to being steve back? I mean yeah, but like,, they played up the fact that she was still mourning him and hadn't let go yet so I didn't mind it at all.

I didn't understand the whole him possessing another person thing tho. Like them fucking in that random dudes apartment and taking his stuff just felt wrong??? And it's not even addressed?? They could've just brought Steve back in his own body like they made the porsches and nukes appear out of nowhere and completely avoided the rapey, gross, tones it gave off. Add this to the list of things this movie did that made me uncomfortable and were there for seemingly no plot reason I can think of. They made such a big deal out of Barbara getting cat called and sexually harassed/assaulted just to completely violate a male character? Male sexual assault already doesn't get enough attention and you can't tell me that it's weird and unnecessary that the writers have steve possessing this guy while also stressing female sexual assault and going as far as beating up an abuser. And then not even MENTION the guy steve is possessing other than saying he's hot?? Seriously just take out that entire section of the movie and you've got a plot that's starting to make sense, but instead they just don't.

I had to filter the tag for the guy who played max lord because jfc,,,, first of all not looking for madalorian spoilers and I just don't understand this obsession with his character. The acting was good but the writing was eh. It feels like the Max Lord in this movie was really complicated and had the potential to be a cool character with looking into the abuse, his child, being a single dad, the want to make his son proud and that relationship, like he just seemed like he could be a cool "villian" who's misunderstood and needs to calm down, but it was too much. I didn't even realize he was the kid being abused until I read a review after the movie and there was so much going on with the plots of developing Steve and Dianasa relationship, showing Barbara's character arc, and the entire world falling apart, that it really took away from Lord. Instead of cutting any of it to make Lord a well rounded and explained character or make him more stereotypical villian and expand on the Cheetahs character, they crammed everything into one and failed at both. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the movie, but it just feels like they just bit off more than they could chew but didn't realize it. I would much rather see a Max Lord villian centric movie that goes into Wonder Woman vs Lord and his character and then a separate Cheetah movie that went more into Diana and Barbara's friendship and saving her from losing her humanity, even if it writing that movie means completely taking her out of the Max Lord plot line. Over all id really like to see a good movie about two women struggling with power, loss, and existing in society where the writers don't pin them against each other with little to no plot explanation and a confusing fight scene that brought in a whole new subplot (asteria or whatever) out of NOWHERE.

In conclusion just do better next time. I enjoyed watching the movie. I enjoyed criticizing the movie. I would watch it again. I feel like the writers really got stuck between the desire to make the worlds greatest superhero movie that blows all of the others out of the water with a complicated plot and tons of characters and just the desire to make a good, entertaining movie. Not every piece of media has to be the new best thing since sliced bread and the cheesy cgi, flying, and "love and trust" references really got back to the roots of a good superhero movie, but then they went so far with the subplots it's like they couldn't decide what they were going for and turned what could've been that genuinely good superhero movie into a fucking mess with racist undertones, a convoluted plot, and a whole bunch of shit that genuinely made no sense.

#give me well written women or give me death

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aprilmillerphd-archive · 7 years

Text

This is a Bias List. Because I am Biased, and also a Follow Forever. For reasons. Mostly that April hit a milestone and that’s friggin’ amazing in my book.

So I have to start with @darcywho who has been my main and exclusive Darcy since... well actually since I took April from the private rpc into the independent rpc something like four or five years ago. I know Mariah IRL (and will soon be living within easy driving distance of her)-- and basically. Mariah is bombtastic. She’s hella smart and funny, and when I’m having a crappy day (or given how the beginning of this year went, a crappy year) -- she texts me incessantly to talk about what Darcy is doing, and what April and Darcy should be doing, and I have so much character history, and Important Events, and developmental experiences just from talking and writing with Mariah, that I honestly don’t think April would be the character she is, without having had Darcy’s mitigating influence. We’ve just done so much that we’ve reached a point in our friendship and writing relationship where I literally feel as if Mariah could write April, and do her justice and vice versa. If y’all don’t follow her already, you should get on that because seriously, she is the absolute best take on Darcy Lewis that I have ever encountered in the Marvel RPC, and I know the PC rp com is going to jump down my throat for ‘making comparisons’-- but again. THis boo is my main and exclusive Darcy Lewis, also I do whut I want. @scarsearned MANGOOOOO. Okay so funfact; this brat used to have a diff url and we chat on dis/cord and it STILL took me like three days to realize on tumblr they were the same person. I FOLLOW YOU ON FOUR BLOGS MANGO. THis is what you signed up for all those years ago. I’m sorry. SO TO THE POINT! Mango has a bevy of blogs she runs, I met her when she wrote almost exclusively on Rummers here, and what I say ‘met her’ I mean I started sending her asks talking about Brock Rumlow, reread her rules and realized she had a password, at which point we were already talking over Skype, and then I sent in her password and she teased me relentlessly for it. (I deserved it, I’m a total goob)-- Mango is right up there with Mariah in terms of IMPORTANT character development shit. Mango writes a CANON DIVERGENT Brock Rumlow, and has put so much time into developing him, I think Marvel should give her a fuckin’ job. She’s also like... insanely smart. I say this as someone who likes to play at being really intelligent. Mango talks and I feel like I’m back in grade school and I want to hide myself away in shame. So obviously it’s no wonder we ended up shipping. (Actually no, I still have literally no idea how or why THAT happened tbqh I’m a fuckin’ potato) -- but Mango and Mariah go hand in hand because I introduced them and now their Brock and Darcy are inextricably linked forevermore as siblings and it’s fuckin’ A Plus. @russkiyuragan YET ANOTHER PERSON I MET BECAUSE OF MANGO. But also hella quality child of canon OC. Like, legit we started talking because Mango dragged us into a group rp and it turned into us mutuall talking about character development and now basically Seamus is one of April’s smols. Even though he really ISN’T one of hers. She’s basically claimed him as a child who needs mothering and dammit she is going to give him all the mothering ever. Even if he doesn’t need or want it. AND BASICALLY THEY ARE A FUCKING SWEETHEART WHO NEEDS ALL THE FUCKING LOVE because they’re really insanely smart and super sweet and friendly and I heart them. @phxtxn PHIL!!! OKAY SO I MET PHIL IN A CLOSED RPC FOR-FUCKING-EVER AGO. And immediately Genis and April butted heads. (He destroyed like half her office, ruined a couple PRICELESS books and then offered to buy her lunch in apology. Suffice to say April was less than impressed) -- except over the years, they’ve gotten really close. Occasionally Phil and I delve into the divergent canon where April and Genis actually end up romantically involved but it always ends in heartache because April is bad at being happy and Genis is bad at... well.. mitigating April’s more extreme bouts of self-loathing. BUT they are exceptional friends and Phil has a fantastic knack for finding the fun and funny in every situation and driving April absolutely UP A WALL. Phil’s also another rp partner I dragged into the collective with Mariah, because I like it when my writing partners all write together because I’m a spoiled princess. Phil’s a total sweetheart though and his Genis Vell is motherfucking spot on. He’s spent a lot of time with the character and it shows, but he also understands pragmatic, human interactions from a writing sense so it’s always a joy when we write together or chat. @askprofessorx NAAAAYYAA -- Naya’s another of those rpers I sort of. Grew on. Like a fungus. I wooed her with poetry first and then introduced her Charl to April and what I consider to be one of my more beautifully painful plot ideas. It involved time travel and the overhanging possibility of April dying. And because April was from the modern era trying desperately to get back, it was that much more painful when she started developing connections. And basically Naya and I plotted everything out over IMs and asks and now we have the most ridiculous tiny person ship in the history of ridiculous ships and Naya’s Charles is like... the cornerstone of my favorite Charles’s. She’s got this beautiful grasp of our fave telepath’s charming flirtatiousness and paired with the very Serious way he views morality and the world, which combined with April’s general cynicism (and it should be noted, our mutant verse involves April being a touch-telepath who can’t actually touch people without destroying their brains because control? what is that)-- and you have an April experiencing her worst fear. Which is not being in-control of herself. It’s beautiful and Naya is beautiful bean. @iremembereveryonethatleaves AHAHAHA Lilo was the first ‘child’ April ever like. Accidentally adopted. And it happened entirely because of my age of aquarius verse, wherein instead of April seeking out Charles Xavier, she looked for Magneto instead. She found him. And his kid. And I literally have no idea WHY OR HOW April ended up becoming surrogate mom to Lilo since there’s no rational reason for Magneto getting along with April who is a cynical, borderline nihilist with Serious Rage Issues. But-- April and Lilo. Mommy and daughter and just. LITERALLY ALL MY HEART AND LOVE FOR THIS PERSON WHO MADE WRITING MUTANT APRIL FUN AND NOT PAINFUL. Until you (you asshole) made it painful. I still go through our tags to read all th angst, and I didn’t do it half so well as you and Tori did so.. @actually-i-prefer-magneto frick me so apparently I did my mutant crew in a triumvirate. The flipside of the age of aquarius verse, where April found Magneto instead and became part of his Brotherhood. Because who wouldn’t have a need for a hyperpolyglot, with genius level intelligence and touch-telepathy? Magneto knew what he was getting out of the bargain, I just don’t think he expected April Miller. TBQH. Nobody ever expects her which is great, and this basically started as an incredibly painful, probably tragic plot that I had (sort of) intended to result in April’s death and it didn’t go that route. Like. At all. probably because these two babes understand that good angst is hard to come by and with the persistent low-hanging threat of April’s head getting blown off, or even worse, her returning to her own time, it meant that every interaction was always charged with a lowkey kind of desperation and tension. Even when Erik and April got that ‘happy’ ending. It took an actual fucking lifetime to get there. And the best thing about Kristy is that she’s smart as fuck, I seem to surround myself with people who make writing look easy, and whose ability to thread together a long arching plot is so absolutely bafflingly amazing I am often struck stupid. @captain-outoftime AaBbbbYyyyYyy. So like- I met Abby through Mariah. Abby is the Steeb to Mariah’s Darcy. They’re hitched. It’s great. April helped Steve propose to Darcy even though April seems to have a PERPETUAL ISSUE with Steve Rogers that defies all explanation. IDK-- it’s probably something to do with the fact that April is a giant pain the ass and a tiny, fight-y blonde? WTF knows. Steve tolerates April. Abby tolerates me. Abby is a goddess. Beautiful, smart, funny as fuck, and like. Constantly busy. How she manages to balance RL shit with rp is beyond the scope of my ability to grasp yo but she’s the bomb-diggity. @americanasitgets MOTHERFUCKIN’ GABBY! My DC babe. Light of my liiife, fire in my loins, (not really but I was on a roll yo) -- I also met Gabby because of Mariah. And Gabby’s Clark. Gabby’s Clark is made of fucking sunshine okay, and the best part is, is that we’ve had like a sustained rp universe where April harasses Clark and doesnt know he’s superman, WHILE TASH-TRALKING SUPERMAN TO CLARK’S FACE. It’s comedy gold. Poor April. But I love Gabby, because she’s smart as shit and fuckin’ hysterical, and will literally snowball crack scenarios over IM into the wee hours of the morning. Even better, I’ve found someone whose as bad at keeping track of threads as me. (I say, as I eyeball our New Krypton thread that’s been in my drafts folder for like. Six months. Oops). @talonscourt D I KNOW THROUGH MY TIM BLOG-- but who I first met on April and then promptly FORGOT ABOUT because I’m a total dipshit. D writes Jason Todd, April surrogate son. This is a recent development. Tim loves Jason, April loves Jason. D is amazing as Jason. D is like... my platonic lover from Narnia. They’re smart as hell, and incredibly sweet even when I’m shit at keeping in contact because my real life is a hot-fuckin-mess and I’m always sick and on the verge of nuclear collapse. I would be TOTALLY LOST WITHOUT YOU. @galaeus Echo. As written by the ever talented Amy who I’ve known since April’s very first incarnation. Which... is a long ass time, Amy’s seen April through several character developments and rewrites, and has legit known April as a character since like. Legit. Post Tim. When April was a baby. Echo is April’s other southern, raised by a pageant queen biffle. They shoot the shit together, Echo is also legit the only person in existence whose allowed to give April nicknames, or turn April into a diminutive. Amy’s basically like... hands down the reason why i never gave up on writing an Indie female OC, and that’s because Amy’s a boss and she also happens to be a spectacular writer, both in the RPC and in real life. @agentharrisonofshield and last but not least, this girl. Right here. April has like... a bevy of Awesome Girl Squad frands. All of whom are infinitely more talented and bad ass than she is, like. Legit. April’s smart. but in a fight? She’s basically cannon fodder by comparison. She just isn’t built for the field. April and Viv became friends because they got locked in a closet together. I’m not sure HOW that happened, but now they get together and chat in other languages and April feeds her, and basically this s the woman April goes to when she wants someone shot. I literally love all the headcanons we’ve put together and that Agent Harrison is invariably the first ‘shield agent’ April casually mentions outside of Echo, in threads of mine. That’s how you know you’ve found an awesome rp partner and friend. When their own characters start casually infiltrating your threads in the form of namedrops.

#bias list #how the fuck did I hit a milestone y'all?#im confused #follow forever

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bigskydreaming · 6 years

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Whats Nightwing and Deathstroke's dynamic? Why does it make you wince? Im not very familiar with it.

Nightwing and Slade actually have a really interesting and compelling dynamic in a lot of ways, that can be really good when written well and really terrible when not. My biggest issue is it is that its not sexual in the comics (Slade is a good thirty years older than him) or in other adaptations that have a version of it, like the Teen Titans cartoon. But fandom being fandom, Dick/Slade is a bigger ship than like, half his actual canon ships, so any new take on it always comes with a big sigh at all the new Dick/Slade shipping that’s gonna crop up or have a resurgence cuz of it. And I’m annoyed enough with YJ right now that I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’ll do anything new or interesting with it that’s worth having to wade through pages of new Dick/Slade noncon in the months afterwards. Its a ship that generates a lot of non-con fic in particular, or at least my old favorite, ‘dubcon’, with the dubious part of the consent referring to the fact that it usually involves mind control or brainwashing, both tropes that show up a lot in their interactions anyway. (Not that there’s anything dubious about this NOT allowing for consensual anything, just that people love to call it dubcon because….fuck if I know).

But anyway….in the comics, Deathstroke is a mercenary who’s one of the Titans’ earliest and most iconic enemies. Though at various times and depending on who’s writing him, he’s sometimes an antihero and even a semi-trusted ally of the Titans (usually with Dick specifically), other times a villain but with his own personal code of honor that means he won’t help the Titans or other heroes but he’ll refuse to take jobs that would pit him against them, and other times he’s full on remorseless and sadistic villain who hates them all and wants them all dead.

He also had three kids, his son Grant (the first Ravager), his younger son Joseph (Jericho) and his youngest, their half-sister Rose (the second Ravager). Basically, the first time he interacted with the Titans was when the supervillain group HIVE put out a contract to have the Titans all killed. Slade turned them down cuz of his personal honor code and how young the Titans were, but his son Grant accepted the contract in exchange for HIVE giving him superpowers to help him fulfill it. The process didn’t work right though, and when fighting the Titans, Grant’s powers overloaded and killed him.

Slade blamed the Titans for this, and vowed to finish the contract and kill them as some twisted way of honoring Grant. He doesn’t do Logic so good, well no, its more like he doesn’t really do parenting so good, as in he tends to have fuck all to do with his kids 364 days of the year, but then something bad happens to one of them and suddenly he thinks he’s Dad of the Year and going 0 to Homicidal in six seconds flat is the way to make up for all the times he’s let them down or screwed them over, instead of just…not Doing That.

So Slade recruited a young meta named Tara Markov (yup, that one) and trained her as his apprentice specifically to help him get revenge on the Titans. At his prompting, she joined the Titans as a spy for him, feeding him intel and plotting against them in one of the best known comicbook storylines of all time, The Judas Contract. It was up there with some of the X-Men’s best known stories like the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. (In the 80s actually, the Titans comic book was almost as popular as Uncanny X-Men at the time. Like way more than the Justice League. They were DC’s big hitters, popularity wise - specifically the lineup that for the most part was centered around Dick, Donna, Starfire, Beast Boy, Cyborg and Raven, with other members like the original Titans and later ones like Pantha and Wildebeest coming and going at various points in the 80s too).

Ultimately, Tara made her move and betrayed the Titans, enabling Slade to kidnap each of them one by one and turn them over to the HIVE….all except for Dick. In the meanwhile, he was approached by Slade’s ex-wife Adeline Kane - who has an equally all over the place dynamic with Slade, like sometimes she’s his worst enemy and other times she’s manipulating events behind the scenes to help him without him knowing, because she still loves him…it basically just depends on who’s writing her, same as with Slade. Also, Kane is Adeline’s maiden name, she’s distantly related to Kate Kane aka Batwoman in some extremely complicated manner I can never remember, but that’s mostly just trivia. I can’t remember a time its ever been relevant to a story, and it has nothing to do with Slade’s interactions with Dick.

ANYWAY. Point being, so Adeline, who blames and hates Slade at this time for their son Grant’s death, along with their other son Joey, seek out Dick and offer their help rescuing the Titans and defeating Slade. Joey is a metahuman as a result of Slade’s altered DNA (he has regenerative powers and is actually immortal, due to experiments the army did on him while he was a soldier). So Joey was born with powers although they didn’t activate until he was a young adult. His codename was Jericho and his power lets him possess peoples’ bodies. He’s also mute, and I’m half expecting him to show up in YJ fairly soon. If not this season then hinted at by the end of it. Also wouldn’t surprise me if they had plans to have him be gay in the YJ universe. He’s a character who was coded as gay practically from his debut. Joey/Dick is actually probably Dick’s oldest and most enduring slash ship, for the record.

So Joey works with Dick to rescue the Titans and defeat Slade, who’s captured and goes on trial for kidnapping the Titans. Joey ends up joining the Titans in the aftermath, and Adeline’s yay good, this was my Sekrit Plan all along, I did all this solely in the hopes that you would end up a superhero and have positive influences and not end up a murdering douchebag of flexible morality like your dad cuz fuck that guy, am I right Titans?

Did Adeline really just do all of that because she wanted her son to have more friends? Like…idk honestly it could go either way. Like….it IS the kind of thing she would do, tbh, so its as likely she was telling the truth as it is she just wanted to screw Slade one last time to avenge Grant and then was like hey if I take credit for my kid ending up a Titan now, I could probably play the “you owe me one” card later if I ever need to. Addy does like handing out “you owe me one” cards, just to be safe. Never know when you might need one.

The thing all this has to do with Dick is like, so it basically ended up being Dick versus Slade in the big finale, while Joey was rescuing the others and helping them face off against Tara. And for whatever reason - with multiple takes on this offered by multiple writers in the decades since - something about Dick just stuck with Slade and he’s had a kinda fascination with him ever since. Like he’s always talking about how much more he could teach Dick than what he already learned from Bruce, trying to convince him he’s got a killer instinct that Bruce just suppressed and its holding him back, blah blah, like saying he’s good, but Slade could make him great, so he surpasses both Bruce and Slade. TBH, he spends WAY more time obsessing about Dick and getting Dick to join him than he bothers paying attention to his own kids.

It really isn’t inherently sexual though, its a weird kinda pseudo father/son, pseudo mentor/mentee type thing. And its not entirely one-sided, because Dick at various times IS…tempted? Kinda? Like whenever Dick’s having some kind of crisis of conscience, or he’s pissed at Bruce or is questioning the effectiveness of superheroes or why they do the things they do or what does it all matter blah blah blah like omg I love you Dick, I really do, but sometimes you are such a drama queen, my god, blast some My Chemical Romance, experiment with drugs and chill out already, its not that deep. (LOL I kid. Well mostly). But point being, every once in awhile something happens that puts Dick in a funk and makes him second guess himself, and he spends like….a month being convinced he should reinvent himself as the anti-Bruce, that’s the solution, and this usually sends him in search of Slade except he’s always like ‘OH FANCY MEETING YOU HERE, THIS IS TOTALLY RANDOM AND NOT ON PURPOSE’.

And Slade likes to take any opportunity to try and convince him like BE A BAD GUY DICK, KILL PEOPLE FOR MONEY, ALL THE COOL KIDS ARE DOING IT. Except inevitably Slade does something that pisses Dick off and Dick snaps out of it and is like NO, IM A HERO AND THIS IS BAD, I REMEMBER NOW AND I’LL NEVER JOIN YOU, YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD I HATE YOU! And then they fight again, but with swords, not words, and then they’re like crap, we’re too well matched, this is going nowhere, you’re a worthy opponent, the only one I can truly respect, blah blah and then they call a breather and Slade’s like hey kid, wanna grab a beer and Dick’s like yeah but only if you promise not to kill anyone. And Slade’s like ugh fine.

And then Slade’s all, look kid, its been fun but its time you went home to your real family and your real life, this isn’t you, you’re a hero, I can’t try and turn you into something you’re not, its Wrong. And Dick’s like….umm yeah, I know, I literally JUST said that, how hard did I hit you? And Slade’s like NO SHHH, DONT TRY AND ARGUE, GO, YOU GO NOW, GO ON, LIVE YOUR LIFE, YOU DONT BELONG HERE IN THE DARK WITH ME, YOU’RE ONE OF THE GOOD ONES, GO BACK TO YOUR OWN KIND.

And Dick’s like no seriously dude, I already called my dad to come pick me up, what are you even on right now, are we having the same conversation?

Slade, sobbing paternally: I HAVE TO LET YOU GO, ALL I EVER DO IS HURT MY KIDS, I’M A TERRIBLE FATHER, ITS NO WONDER JOEY HATES ME.

And then Dick awkwardly slips out while Slade’s mid monologue, with his head thrown back yelling up at the sky and shaking his fists like WHY GOD WHY IS THIS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN WHY - because the thing about Slade is he’s actually even MORE of a drama queen than Dick, he just hides it better. Most of the time. But seriously tho.

Anyway yeah, this is like…a pattern with them basically. And Slade’s like, you’ve inspired me, I see in you the man I could’ve become, maybe even that I can still be, and he like doubles down on his personal honor code and becomes a Mercenary With A Heart for a couple years and even helps out the Titans every now and then (basically just whenever Dick’s in trouble and he goes on a killing spree, like NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO MURDER MY KIDS BUT ME - also by this point in time, Joey had died because Slade literally killed him, I forget why, it was a dumb story, but its okay Joey came back, its not like his name is Uncle Ben. But yeah, killing his kids is kinda a thing with Slade too, and he’s very proprietary about it).

And then he falls off the wagon and is like fuck, I forgot how much I like murder, ugh, you should have never tried to make me change, THIS IS WHO I AM, and Dick’s just like….I literally do not know where you’re getting these conversations from, like am I there when you think we’re having them, am I just blacking out…do I need to see a doctor??? And Slade’s like YOU WILL RUE THE DAY YOU EVER MET ME, GRAYSON, FROM NOW ON I AM THE TITANS’ MORTAL ENEMY and runs off all dramatically while Dick’s like…..wut, and all the other Titans are like srsly, dude, what is WITH you too, and Dick’s all I DON’T EVEN KNOW, HE’S JUST LIKE THAT.

In all seriousness though, ultimately my take on their dynamic is that for Slade, Dick’s a combination of seeing himself and Grant in Bruce and Dick’s dynamic, and its like….all about his regret and missed opportunities. Like, he tends to be super judgey of Bruce and critical of how he trains (and raises Dick) and passive aggressively like *I* would never do that and Dick just kinda lifts an eyebrow and is all, you’ve literally killed two of your three kids.

But like, Slade kinda views himself as the anti-Batman and thus Dick is inadvertently cast as Grant, but its like Slade can never decide if he thinks Bruce is actually holding Dick back from his full potential and he wants to push Dick the way he thinks Bruce refuses to, or if like, he blames Bruce for getting Dick involved in this life, the same life that got Grant killed, and wants to protect Dick from Bruce and from the same thing happening to him. So its this weird mix of Slade manipulating Dick sometimes and pushing him way further than even Bruce ever does and saying its for his own good, but also randomly mixed in there are these bouts of extreme protectiveness, and there’s like zero rhyme or reason to which he is on any given day and there’s never any way to predict where Slade will land and so it always fucks with Dick’s head in a big way, he’s like…I’m getting whiplash.

And then on Dick’s end, like, the thing about Dick like I’ve mentioned before is he’s a huge people pleaser? Like he’s a very empathetic caretaker type personality who sinks a huge amount of his identity into being everything for everyone, to the extent that he tends to lose sight of himself in the process, sometimes. And he’s also a perfectionist who was raised with the most demanding father of all demanding fathers ever, and has a lot of abandonment issues and insecurities that Bruce’s mutant power is to trip over and set off in the worst possible ways.

And so I think the reason Dick keeps seeking Slade out every now and then is not because he ACTUALLY wants to ever take Slade up on his offer and genuinely become his apprentice or partner and like, turn his back on how he was raised. I think the point of it for Dick is the fact that each and every time he ends up affirming for himself no, wait, this ISN’T actually what I want, I just needed to be reminded of that, to remember that. That he always pulls himself back before going too far. And at the same time, I do think on some level he likes that Slade is this kinda constant in his life, that at the end of the day Slade is like…so fixated on his potential and his achievements and his worth as a fighter and a hero, because like….Dick Grayson is a person who craves validation but will never ask for it ever.

And he’s one of those people who everyone is just so USED to liking without even thinking about it that it never occurs to them when talking amongst themselves about how great he is, that they forget to say this to his actual face? And so he never hears it? And never asks for it, because gasp, then people might think he’s needy, and that would be bad, so he mostly just goes and sulks in his apartment about how nobody likes him and he’s terribad. Except for Slade. Slade always compliments him on what a good fighter and what a good planner and what a good leader he is, so hmm wonder what he’s doing. He hasn’t committed any crimes in six months and I can’t find any reason to track him down and bring him in? Ugh, that asshole. Okay, ummm, I guess I could tell him I’m thinking of turning evil again, I haven’t done that in a couple years, he’d probably buy it.

And then later Bruce is pacing around the Batcave wrathfully shaking his fist, like “Damn that man and his sick hold over my son, if only I knew how he keeps getting his hooks into you!”

And Dick basically shrugs and plays games on his phone. “He mostly just tells me I’m special, and that’s nice to hear.”

Bruce, still pacing and ranting and fist shaking: “What kind of evil genius is he, how master a manipulator he must be to be able to get inside your head and upend your normal views of right and wrong, to make you entertain these ideas of working with him, learning from him…”

Dick: No its seriously just the saying nice things about me bit. I like that.

Bruce: If only I had a code word or phrase I could use to snap you out of whatever brainwashing he seems to be able to affect you with any time you come near him, perhaps some kind of alien tech….

Dick: You could try “I’m proud of you, son.” I mean if you’re taking suggestions.

Bruce: There’s also the possibility of a magical component to consider, blast, I hate working with magic so of course he WOULD do something like that, ugh I suppose I could ask Zatanna or Jason Blood for help there…

Dick: Cool cool, well this has been a fun and productive chat as always, so you keep doing…all that…and meanwhile I’m gonna go ponder my fixation on father figures who are 100% more committed to obsessing over their failures as a parent than like…actual parenting of their actual kids.

Bruce, ten minutes later: Dick? Where are you? DID SLADE GET TO YOU AGAIN? RIGHT UNDER MY NOSE? CURSE THAT MAN AND HIS UNNATURAL SKILLS, HOW DOES HE DO IT??!?

Anyway, that’s Slade and Dick. There’s also the whole Renegade thing, when Dick asked for Slade’s help in infiltrating the Society of Super Villains in his fake villain identity as Renegade, with you know, lots of Slade trying to corrupt him and also trying to murder any supervillains who looked as his not!son the wrong way.

And then there was the time Slade brought his daughter Rose to Dick to train and said he couldn’t teach her himself because his track record with training his kids and them not ending up dead is like, not good, and he’s superstitious or something? Idk, I forget his logic, it was probably bad though.

And Slade was like, I only trust you to be a competent teacher for my daughter, I want you to teach her everything you know! Except for like, being a hero. None of that nonsense. I FORBID you from trying to make my daughter into a hero or the deal is off. (The deal being that if Dick did this, Slade would not do crime in Dick’s city for a year).

And Dick was like, you got a deal. I will train Rose but there will be NO trying to make her a hero, I swear. /he said while crossing his fingers behind his back because duh.

And Slade was like okay, fine, you got a deal, I will absolutely still do crime and be villainous but only in every place except for Bludhaven specifically. /he said while crossing his fingers behind his back because duh.

And then Dick tried to make Rose a hero and then Slade blew up Bludhaven and that was definitely a thing, so…yeah.

In summation, Slade and Dick are weird but also very interesting but also if we get another rehash of the Renegade/apprentice arc aka the Teen Titans cartoon adaptation of that story aka the single most popular Dick Grayson fic trope of all time, like….I swear I will probably get a brain bleed.

#Anonymous

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nointrustions · 7 years

Text

Season 2, Episode 2- “Heart Me”

hey, it’s me! here i am, back at it again. (i’m gonna aim for once a month with these, because, like, emotionally i am not down with spending 4 hours a week doing nothing but analyzing csi cyber. i have shit to do. like not watch csi cyber.)

if you’ve lost the plot a bit, i’ve got a list of all my recaps here. some quick stats for people who don’t want to read all that shit

times the writers didn’t actually know how computers or other electronic devices work- 65

times someone should have been fired or arrested for bad policing or hacking- 45

times brody should have been sent back to jail- 7

van der geek death toll- 4

times the writers forgot how time works- 22

times the writers forgot how the police works (for example, that there are other police and fbi divisions, including people who are qualified to do CSI shit)- 28

times i wanted to steal krummy’s lunch money- 53

times they used the holodeck that they invested millions of taxpayer dollars in- 4

times they use l33t sp34k to convey that someone is a hacker- 7

times vdg is a bad parent or partner- 13

times avery does bad psychology- 33

characters named ricky skaggs- only 1, unfortunately

times IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU- ALL OF THEM GET OFF THE COMPUTER

Triggers for this episode- alcohol, stalking, blood, drugging, kidnapping, basic entitled dude bullshit

we open at a hot, hot nightclub that's apparently an old castle or some shit. It's full of attractive young people drinking and dancing and using apps, so you know shit's going to go down. Raven is there with a friend, Tracy, and she asks tracy how she found this place. Tracy used an app to find it, so she's going to be the victim in this episode. She tells raven what she's been missing working every friday night- namely, “major male hotness.” man, i've really missed the csi cyber writers interpreting things that an actual human being might say. While they chat about the male hotness, some guy hearts them both on heartmate, an app which is not at all like tinder. They make fun of him for being a loser, a skill that raven needs to leverage more often in her professional life.

just as they team-reject this guy, some guy walks up behind tracy and hits on her. He asks if he can buy her a drink, and she turns him down, and he's like “hey that's cool I go to alcoholics anonymous” and she's like “samesies” and it's kinda weird and uncomfortable. He tries to pick her up, but she tells him she has a boyfriend, so he fucks off out of there, giving us a nice view of the fact that, in this incredibly packed busy nightclub, there's a solid 10 feet of space between the bar and any people. Tracy laughs and reveals that she lied about having a boyfriend to him. “But this guy,” she narrates as a guy hearts her on heartmate, “unf, hell to all the yeses.” these writers! They're so good at talking to people! The guy who hearted her walks over and starts nuzzling her, and rejected club guy watches from afar, glaring.

Afterwards, raven and tracy leave the club and hop in a cab. Rejected club guy opens up heartmate and clicks onto raven's profile. He somehow uses the distance feature to track her down, despite them being in a cab and him being on foot. When he gets there, he calls the police to say that he's worried, because his neighbour might be in danger and the guy's still in there. Oh, you sneaky boy!

a swat team breaks into raven's apartment, where tracy is sleeping on the couch and raven is apparently full naked in the bedroom. Wait, how did he know what apartment she was in? There is no way that heartmate is that precise in distance tracking, and even if he saw them through the window or something, I think “my neighbour is in trouble, I heard gunshots? Oh, where she lives? Uh, let me find a street number…. Yeah I don't know her apartment number, but I know the window faces the street and I think it's the third floor….” would not raise some questions.

one week later, raven is chatting with brody about the SWAT team. Brody, I know it's casual friday, and apparently permanent casual friday for you now, but I think you still have to wear your id. He asks if she knows who called the team, and she teases him because apparently when the swat team was called, he snuck out via the fire escape! Wait, what? Did she go home with tracy then call brody over to bang? Or was he waiting there all night in her apartment all alone? We know they're not roommates because apparently the knowledge that they were in the same apartment would be trouble, even though they're talking loudly about how they're totes magotes banging in their workplace, but whatever.

meanwhile, avery is looking at a tablet in her office, and db walks in with a baby binky in his mouth. Oh, so this is going to be one of the weird fetish episodes. Db says that he didn't get them so mommy avery could give bad baby db a spanking, but actually because they're bluetooth enabled and can detect the baby's temperature, location, and what medications the baby had. I don't know why he bought seven of them, but, like, whatever, you do you, dude. He asks how avery's doing, but before she can answer, van der geek wanders by to tell them that they have an update on the “infamous” (a word which here means that we've never heard his name) garth rizzo. You know, normally i'd say this guy might be a friend of ricky skaggs, but idk, he seems like a rat to me.

garth rizzo is otherwise known as “the most hated man on the internet.” he runs a revenge porn site called shamedexxx.com, which kindly places big black censor bars over the women's tiddies. Wait, even with the censor bars, is it still fine to just bring up porn on the big screen in the cybercave? Why did they have to give his website the hit? Anyway, vdg makes a point of how he really, really wants to arrest this guy, but he hasn't actually done anything illegal yet so they have to prove he's been hacking people. You know, guys, far be it from me to criticize vdg, but, like, this is the first time ever in his life that he's ever given a shit about due process. It's a bit weird that the first time he doesn't just show up and tackle a guy to the ground is the porn guy for jilted exes. I'm just saying, mister “i know what it feels like to want to murder your ex-wife!”

they explain what revenge porn is, and then raven glances at her phone so avery tells her to leave while they go through all the victims, track them down, and contact them to get their devices and see if they've been hacked. This guy hasn't even committed a crime yet! Are there seriously no proven hackers left?

raven goes to get a latte with tracy. She's been having hella computer-based problems. Her utilities were shut off, then her mail was put on hold via an online form (oh, no, not the mail! Like, seriously, it's been a week since they met club guy [also spoiler, it was probably club guy what did it] and it's 2015, it's not like anything important comes in the mail) and then she got fired from her job for sending an e-mail to her coworker about how she was going to tell his wife about the affair they were having. It's notable that he did not get fired for that same affair. Finally, two days ago, she got kicked out of her apartment, because she apparently e-mailed the landlord and requested to end the lease. I am not an expert on DC rental law, but I think 5 days isn't enough notice for your landlord to completely shut you out of the apartment. Did he get a new tenant, despite not showing the apartment to anyone because otherwise she would notice? If not, why would she not just sign a new lease under the same terms?

Then she went to the cops, and the cops told her that they couldn't do anything because she didn't know who hacked her. That's, like, the best cop-work i've seen ever? “sorry I know there has been a crime but I can't help you because you have not already solved it on your own, and we can't kick it to the cyber division because they're too busy tracking down every woman in revenge porn on the internet to see if they've been hacked.” raven offers to check out her computer and shit to see who hacked her, and just then her phone gives her a notification to let her know that her bank account has been emptied. Because that's a thing that happens, I guess.

meanwhile, back at the cybercave, vdg is telling someone on the phone that they're being unreasonable. He then gets back to work immediately, but avery stops him with an “elijah, there comes a point where whatever's going on in your personal life starts to reflect on your work.” yeah, and that point was halfway through the last season when he started emotionally abusing coworkers, destroying physical evidence, and committing some pretty serious police brutality because he was mad that his wife wanted to get her dream job and take the daughter that she was more or less raising on her own with her, but you were pretty much down with that noise.

It turns out that he was on the phone with his father, who had been refusing cancer treatment. This is a pretty personal and nuanced issue, which vdg boils down to “it's not fair to MEEEEE that he's chosen to go gently into that good night.” how dare he, when he could be taking care of my daughter for me!

time for a sick cyber-montage, in which raven hacks into tracy's bank accounts! We see that, instead of just transferring the money out, the hacker purchased several expensive things that just happened to add up to the exact amount left in her bank accounts. That takes skill. I would have expected the bank to call her about it, because usually banks do that when you spend several thousand dollars in three minutes, buying multiple TVs in one transaction, that sort of thing. She could also call the bank and explain that she was hacked- oh wait shit never mind I forgot that would make sense. Or maybe that cop from earlier also runs the bank. Who knows.

Anyway, she finds an odd ip address. The hacker is a guy named kyle bristow, which raven tells avery. Avery goes “listen, one case of bank fraud doesn't require the whole cyber division.” no, avery, it just needed raven, and she solved it. The rest of the cyber-division can keep working on trying to find what this one guy who is, I cannot emphasize enough, innocent of everything except being a scumbag, might have done wrong. Avery agrees to send van der geek out, as long as raven stays to work on garth rizzo.

vdg's gun is out! He sees a blood trail leading from kyle bristow's front door, which is oddly even and symmetrical, but stops abruptly at the end of the walkway. He runs in, gun out, and sees that someone's murdered kyle before he got the chance. Rough day for vdg.

Kyle was murdered by being beaten to death with an ugly bookend he had on the mantelpiece. Vdg wants to give this case to the actual police, but avery says that raven proved he was the hacker (because it's not like the hacker could be his wife, because girls don't know computers) so there's a cyber element to this case so it belongs to the csis cyber. Kyle apparently had two phones, one of which was a burner phone with heartmate on it. Far be it from me to judge a cheater, but if you're going to cheat on your wife, why not use your real phone and hide the app somewhere? It's way less suspicious than just having a whole other cell phone. The heartmate phone has some very angry messages from tracy, with the positively incriminating messages of “DUDE. UMMMMMMM – you're MARRIED????? WHAT. THE. HELL.” and “You lying, cheating bastard. Is this some sort of sick game????? You're gonna pay for this. I could seriously kill you.” so they conclude that tracy is the murderer. Then we see tracy with blood all over her hands flashing back to the crime scene.

Intro at 11:26, although really we could stop here.

the definition of the week is cyberstalking. It's like stalking, but cyber! Thanks, csi, we needed that one spelled out for us.

raven and krummy are calling people up about the revenge porn. Krummy's entire interaction goes “I'm pretty sure this is your photo. Yeah. There's a naked photo of you online. No, this is not a prank. I'm an agent with the FBI. Hello? Ehhhhh well.” you got your typical-krummy-asshole-behaviour in my trying-to-deal-with-society's-objectification-of-women! Do they not have some sort of civilian-facing staff who could be doing this, instead of getting the best hackers in the world to waste time doing a job they're not qualified to do?

Raven is stressed because tracy, and krummy goes over to help, but raven takes the first opportunity to talk to literally anyone else. Unfortunately, that means van der geek, who tells her that tracy probably did a murder because she used to be an alcoholic. JUSTICE

for those who are interested in a sweet krummy cosplay, you can get his shirt here.

tracy leaves her motel room. How did she get a motel room? She has no money. Club guy is waiting outside, and follows her in his car after she turns her phone off. Once she's out of the area, he calls the police again to say that he found a murderer!

meanwhile, brody is explaining online dating to DB. Brody refers to the burner phone as kyle's sidepiece phone, and DB clarifies “side piece phone? You're saying that tracy was brody's mistress?” for any square old white dudes who may be watching. Kyle and tracy had been talking for a month, and she had been asking to meet for weeks. They then go over the messages we've already seen, because the episode needed padding. It turns out that kyle had also told tracy he was starting to fall in love with her, and DB goes “without ever meeting?” and brody goes “welcome to the world of online dating.” I mean, like, as someone who has dated online, it's a lot more likely to get unsolicited dick pics than love confessions, but hey, whatever, i've never been on heartmate. Nelson explains how tinder works, and then uses a girl as an example of how the app documents how often you cross paths, without noticing that the app also says she is literally 10 feet away from him. Db tells him to heart her, because apparently it's cool if the whole cybercave is a hotbed of fucking. Db is not into online dating, and tells brody that he's more into waiting for serendipity to strike. Brody asks if serendipity is an app. Get it? Because he's young! And they only know the apps and how to disappoint their elders!

raven is getting interviewed by the detective on tracy's case about how they found the murder weapon in tracy's hotel room, and she gets mad and says tracy was framed. She also lies about brody being in her apartment. Apparently they found tracy's fingerprints all over the crime scene. Raven leaves, and The detective then gets mad at avery and says that she needs to pass the case onto the police, because there's a clear conflict of interest on the cybersquad. We're supposed to think he's the bad guy for this. Avery says that it's clearly a cybercase, because it involves a computer, and that regular cops can't solve it. You know, it might help if there was another cybersquad, because apparently being on the cybersquad means that you will need to help solve cases that are directly related to your coworkers. Then again, I guess another holodeck that they never use would be a big investment.

The csis cyber legal guy tells avery that she needs to get on garth rizzo so he can close the case file, because if garth rizzo gets arrested for non-revenge-porn reasons, that means he can start lobbying for stronger revenge porn laws. That's… that's not how things work. You can still push for somcething to be illegal, even if the guy who does it hasn't done any other crimes. No wonder the legal guy is so chill about everything that happens in the cybercave, he doesn't actually know how laws work.

meanwhile, in the cybercave, we see that the only time that kyle's real phone and his burner phone were in the same place was at his house during the murder. They figure it out by tracking the data points on the heartmate app on both phones, despite the fact that kyle supposedly didn't have heartmate on his real phone. That, and the fact that he types in lowercase on heartmate and using proper grammar with his wife, mean that the phones were used by two different people. They have to prove it with science, though. DB yells “Microbials” and runs the fuck out of that joint.

meanwhile, raven is telling a woman that her photo has been used as revenge porn. “i took that photo years ago,” the woman says, as a photo comes up in which she looks exactly the same, down to having the same makeup and hairstyle. It looks like she took the photo hours ago. Anyway, revenge porn is still bad and raven promises to hack the devices.

db is using everyone's unique face-germs to prove that the burner phone hadn't been used by kyle. “microbials are a new identifier, as unique as fingerprints.” Wait, why can't they just use fingerprints? That's still a thing that exists. Anyway, the germs are different, so the burner phone wasn't kyle. Glad we finally solved that mystery that the viewers have known the answer to since the beginning of the episode. Avery concludes that all the data from the sidepiece phone was all “cyberstaged.” we have a word for that, avery. It's “staged.”

club guy, meanwhile, is calling tracy's mom, pretending to be a detective. He asks where tracy is, and her mom tells him that she sent her a money transfer. What a garth rizzo.

at the cybercave, they're narrowing down who the catfisher was. They refuse to use the word “catfish” for some reason. They use the data from heartmate instead of the regular cell phone location data for some reason. He was following tracy around a bunch, so they triangulate the heartmate connections that aren't with tracy. Avery looks at his fake profile to psychoanalyze him because she hasn't done that in a while. “he chose kyle's photo. A handsome man, because our target has low self-esteem about his own appearance.” or because you don't catfish with ugly people, you dingbat. Some rando drops by a tablet that says kyle didn't do the hack, but that the hack came from a computer at a frame shop. Looks like tracy was FRAMED YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH. nobody makes that joke and it’s upsetting.

at the frame shop, they confirm that the hack was made from the employee computer and that he used a photo of kyle that he had brought in to have framed. They could have compared the schedule that they got from the heartmate matches with the employee schedule and catch their guy, but this episode still has a solid 20 minutes or so.

Wait, why would you catfish with someone who lives in the same town? That's asking for your mark to go up to the person in real life if they see them around and try to start up a conversation. they do realize that, like, there is a whole internet with pictures of pretty people on it, right? Here's my human lie detector analysis- this guy is bad at his crimes.

raven is stressed about rizzo and tracy, and has some emotions like “what if i'm wrong about tracy?” this loses some impact because we know objectively nobody in the cybersquad is ever wrong.

Tracy drops by the convenience store to get the money her mother sent her, but the transfer was cancelled- sorry, cybercancelled. She only has ten dollars in her wallet, and asks how much a sim card is. What a coincidence, it's exactly ten dollars! When she goes out to put the new sim card in her phone, however, club guy puts on a baseball cap and goes to talk to her. Oh, no, he slashed her tires and she has no access to money and he's offering her a ride!

She gets in his car, and he starts getting weird about meeting at the club, so she turns on the phone with the new sim card.

Cut to Brody and Raven, who are hanging around the cybercave. A computer beeps nearby, because they've been tracking tracy's heartmate profile. As raven helpfully explains, heartmate will keep tracking you even if you get a new sim card! Wait, why would she spend her last ten dollars on a new sim card, then? That's not even something that really plays into the narrative. Anyway, Brody goes to call VDG, and raven gives him this look which I guess is supposed to be concern but comes off more as “wait, vdg? Do you want her to fucking die?”

club guy, meanwhile, is getting all weird. “so, how's your boyfriend? Must be nice to have a boyfriend? Someone you can trust? Because he isn't a LYING LYING SLUTFACE? Have you ever heard of the red pill?” luckily, the cops track her down and bring her in and she looks completely freaked despite the fact that, you know, she's at least 10% safer in prison. 20% if VDG isn't allowed in.

tracy gets interrogated by avery. She says she didn't kill kyle, but she doesn't remember anything because she blacked out and she keeps seeing images of his body on the ground and lots of blood, so, like, not the most watertight of cases. Avery tells her she was catfished, without ever using the words “catfished” because we can only use one new term this week and we needed cyberstalking spelled out to us. She pulls up a picture of all the guys who work at the frame show, and tracy points club guy out for us. Turns out his name is holden. She doesn't mention him going all serial killer on her, which I think is a relevant detail in a murder case. Turns out holden was catfishing for weeks to find out that tracy likes amy schumer, tupac, and watching tv in her Pjs. Tracy is completely shocked that a guy on the internet who she has never met and who didn't send any more pictures besides his propic is not who he says he is, because she grew up in an amish community or something, I guess.

avery tells the legal guy that tracy clearly didn't do it. It's clear that she was drugged and holden got a hotel room, took her unconscious body there without anyone noticing, and planted all the evidence! Wait, how did he get the hotel room? Most hotels won't let you use someone else's credit card to check in, and she was out of it. If she even had a credit card- she seemed pretty convinced that the ten dollars was her last. Did he get the room with his own credit card? How did that not come up in the investigation? He then sent the messages from tracy's phone after taking her from the scene, which can be easily verified as false given that heartmate tracked the time she was at kyle's house and presumably also tracks the time messages were sent. But, like, they're not going to do that for some reason. I guess that's giving up.

avery goes to ask nelson and krummy if they have any evidence that tracy didn't do it, and they don't, because she was at kyle's place in the window of his time of death. Avery yells enzymes and runs out with db because talking is for the pre-cyber era.

It turns out that db's got an experimental testing method to test the enzymes of kyle's muscles so that they can determine the exact time of death, and it's proven that tracy didn't do it. Avery then goes to db and is like “wait how experimental is this?” this was your idea, avery!

yay, tracy's free now. Raven comes out as an fbi agent to her, and she's chill about it. Tracy gets a new phone and laptop that are completely hackproof, and they give her a hotel room. Hurray!

meanwhile, van der geek is driving his daughter, michelle, home. He Is a bad enough dad that she asks “why didn't grandpa pick me up from school? Is he okay?” because it's completely unthinkable that vdg could do some gotdang parenting without his dad being dead. Vdg, being a good comforting person, tells her, “yeah, it's cool, he's just asleep.” she asks if they can get ice cream because it's friday and grandpa always got ice cream on fridays. Wait, what? The club night was explicitly on a friday. Then, when tracy met with raven, it was also a friday. The next day was when all the stuff after that happened- we know because VDG told raven that the murder had happened yesterday. And this is the day after that, which means it's sunday. Is michelle trying to trick her dad into getting ice cream? You're gonna be a great cybercriminal someday, kiddo! Hack time itself! Anyway vdg starts crying and michelle comforts him and it's very heartwarming, but we never know if they do get ice cream.

in comes the legal guy, to point out that the enzyme thing isn't going to fly in court. Yeah, if only they had an exact time for all of tracy's movements and proof that the messages were sent from her phone later. Anyway, avery's all “it's not recognized now, but it will be in the future! There's real science to back it up! You know I do things in an unconventional way!” he still gets mad because they let her out on this experimental evidence, instead of the real evidence that exists. Like, I can't stress this enough. There is evidence that, at the very least, she left the area way before sending an “alright i'm walking in the door now” text. That should at least shed some doubt on the story.

tracy is walking down the street, and gets a text on her new hack-proof phone about how she looks good in blue but she should be wearing an orange jumpsuit. Turns out holden found her anyway! She calls raven in distress, and raven is all “that's impossible!”she goes to krummy, who explains that holden was actually tracking raven, and he followed raven into the fbi, and then used a cell catcher to get tracy's number. That sounds wrong but whatever, i'm not a tech guy. He's got a fake heartmate profile by the name of brad, so raven calls tracy up to let her know not to contact anyone named brad and to just stay in the hotel room. I mean, like, tracy, don't pick anyone up on heartmate. Now is not the time. I don't care if you want to show off your swanky hotel room.

tracy is bad at listening. She opens up a new heartmate account by the name of “amy” and tells “brad” she wants to meet for a drink in 20 minutes. Wait, what? Why? Why would you do that? You're under police protection! You don't need that! Holden accepts, because, yeah, he's spent a month tracking this chick and has finally stalked her down to her hotel room, but might as well take a break to buy a shitty margarita for some rando heartmate girl at 3 pm. You've earned it, holden.

Tracy also steals a box cutter from the hotel lobby on her way out, which is fucking rude. Luckily, avery comes in to let them know that tracy never checked into the hotel, and raven opens up all the heartmate users' locations to figure out that tracy made a fake profile.

so they track down holden, which is easy enough and I don't know why they didn't do that earlier. Tracy's plan was to just walk, like, ten feet behind him and then stab him on the street, so raven stops her from stabbing him and holden is under arrest and tracy isn't going to jail for anything, even though she was just about to try and kill a guy despite being pretty much safe from him. Hurray, all the people we're supposed to like are gonna be okay!

Avery says “let's get tracy home” despite the fact that, you know, tracy doesn't actually have a home. Raven asks how avery found her, and it turns out that avery slipped one of db's tracking pacifiers in the pocket of her jeans without her noticing. Has whoever wrote this episode ever worn women's jeans? You're not getting a penny in those shitty pockets without being able to feel it.

in the elevator, avery talks to vdg about his dad and he says he's real sad. Then she goes to talk to db and chides him for doing the enzyme thing, despite the fact that it was her idea. Avery, you're a bad boss. They talk for a bit about how the infamous garth rizzo is still at large, so I guess that the season villain is gonna be a guy who has not yet done any crimes. Then db mentions he keeps getting push notifications on his phone. Turns out brody created a profile for DB on soulmatestop.com, against his express wishes! It's not even a free site, it's just on a free trial period! DB's username is “dollabill” and brody and krummy go “DOLLA BILL YOOOOO” and it's…. this show is bad, guys. They make comments about db's virility and he says he's not comfortable with the situation and the show fades out on this blatant workplace harassment. Catfishing is cool when you're a good guy!

So, the tumblr site crashed the first time I wrote this out, so I had to rewatch the episode to make the commentary again. And you know what? This is a boring-ass episode. No wonder it took me a year to get to it. At least it had some half-decent basic social commentary, wrt entitled dudes. I guess they had to get all the good good social justice shit out there before the next episode, because that's the black lives matter episode and, guys, it's not good. It's a bad time.

Logging off the cyberweb, see you soon.

#csi #csi cyber #csi cyber recap #csi cyber recaps #cybertime for cybercrime #cyber with bobbie

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cupkayke · 8 years

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Cupkayke Rewatches/Liveblogs Boueibu!

Season 1, Episode 5

Hokay! Moving right along- and surprisingly I actually have a lot to dissect in this episode! (Well, mostly about a couple of key conversations). This ep is where we get introduced to the Press Society fuckers and the boys start to pick up on a base level that their monster fighting might have a bigger purpose- although most of that is glossed over in favor of focusing on the lack of privacy.

Thanks again to those who keep commenting on/reblogging my liveblogs! I come to love this community more and more each day, it seems like. You all rock <3

THAT GODDAMN FISH I FORGOT THIS WAS WHERE HE WAS INTRODUCED

And from his first moment on screen I remember thinking he was going to be significant

And they aren’t concerned about the censoring?

Like that isn’t normal in real life, dude.

Ominous scene is ominous - I have more on this later~

Animation callout here- I could even notice Atsushi’s eyes scanning the pages here. A+ detail.

I agree En- I hate the rain with a burning passion. Makes me just want to nap. (Again- I have a strong feeling that En is my spirit animal)

Again noticing the color-coordinated cups lol- @nardaviel 8D

ATSUSHI WITH THE SASS AGAIN- similarly to Arima, why did I not notice how much fucking shade Atsushi throws (mostly towards En) the first time I watched this series? He has the best lines lol.

AND EN IS JUST LIKE ‘ORLY?’ LIKE HE ISN’T SELF-AWARE.

Not quite compliments there- but what does En say?

HE CALLS HIM “MY ATSUSHI” AND COMPLIMENTS HIS ENGLISH OMG I AM DEAD

Like... is there any doubt that they’re boyfriends at this point? Or at least getting there? Lol

Side note I just noticed that while En never wears his tie he keeps it in his jacket pocket at all times... c’mon En if you make it a point to have it on you why not just wear it?

I apologize in advance that I am basically screencapping this entire conversation but I am going to over-analyze it to death because A) My graduate degree is in English and B) Linguistics is fascinating. SO BUCKLE UP KIDS.

On this note- at first, I agreed with Io wholeheartedly that ‘naive’ and ‘sensitive’ are not considered compliments in English-speaking cultures and was a bit confused as to how they could be in Japanese.

However... then I thought about it again, and taking ‘naive’ as its definition of ‘innocent’ and ‘sensitive’ as its definition of ‘sympathetic/empathetic’, then the former can be seen as neutral, rather than an insult, and the latter can be seen as a compliment. So... culture differences are fascinating.

But definitely gut reaction is that you do not want to be called naive or sensitive in English so...

The way Ryuu says this makes me think he’s heard that phrase directed at himself on more than one occasion lol- which is probably why he brings it up.

Atsushi’s definition, however, is not one I commonly would think of when confronted with ‘naive’. It more to me means ‘childlike’ or ‘ignorant’, because ‘careless’ is a deliberate action, whereas ‘ignorant’ is simply passive.

I have no reason for this screencap other than that I melted at Io’s English. Adorable- and I get the feeling from his pronunciation that he’s definitely got top marks in English.

Though it makes sense that he’d be pretty fluent in English due to his business transactions.

Then the fact that he pointedly directs this at Ryuu is hysterical for other reasons.

Well, Ryuu, you kind of had it written all over your face when you brought it up that you were thinking of a phrase that had been directed at you~

Love Io’s sutble teasing here, too haha. Look at his face.

Ryuu is so earnest in his defense of himself lol

But the word he chooses here- ‘guileless’- is interesting because when I went to the dictionary page for ‘naive’, ‘guileless’ is one of the synonyms

So they’re all basically meaning the same thing here, however- ‘guileless’ has a more direct definition of ‘honest, sincere, & straightforward’, which does describe Ryuu pretty well.

His demeanor in this entire scene as an example, and the phone call with a potential girlfriend we hear later (which is hilarious for other reasons) definitely contains that tone.

And Io continues with his gentle ribbing lol

The camera cuts away before we see Ryuu’s reaction but I would imagine he pouted at Io after that

In general, aside from the language discussion this scene just shows how the boys interact with one another beautifully and asdfgjlskjf;lkj they’re all so cute

En you just keep setting yourself up for Atsushi’s shade lol

Ummm Yumoto you okay?

That is not convincing me that you are okay at ALL

I LOVE THE PEANUTS REFERENCE

Smol fluffy child stop being creepy you are molesting an innocent creature

Like seriously I don’t care how cute you and Wombat look here it’s UNSETTLING

Yumoto says ‘feel so fine’ in English- but this one I’m stumped. I haven’t heard that used as a phrase, before. I mean, I get his meaning... does he perhaps mean to say “that feel good feeling?” Idk... I guess it can be said multiple ways but that particular phrasing seems weird to me

MOLDY TEACHER

Uhhhh I don’t think it works that way, Wombat

Psssssh En just gave Wombat the ultimate diss- you almost feel sorry for the poor pink creature

Side note- Press kids are creepy as hell

And then they don’t give a shit when Wombat falls THREE STORIES- or is it 5 stories?

Io how do you have such a calm face saying that- Atsushi looks like he’s about to shit himself with panic

No explanation other than their expressions are hilarious- NOW Io looks panicked

From their first like 3 seconds onscreen I immediately hated these assholes. Well, I suppose the smol asshole. The other one is just... there.

Also, how the fuck did they get up to the club room so fast from taking pictures down below just moments before???

Binan’s website is sophisticated as all get out like whoah

From this monologue, I get a couple of things;

1) Kinosaki’s hair is stupid

2) I feel like his true calling was drama club but he got stuck with newspaper/website instead

3) He just REALLY rubs you the wrong way with how he talks out of his ass like that- it makes me wonder exactly how much they know ahead of time about the DC

Like, if I remember right, it’s revealed later that they knew about them (because the fucking fish- Hireashi- is apparently their club mascot???)

But it isn’t clear at this point if they actually know their identities, or if Hireashi just told them about CIDE2 but didn’t tell them right away about the DC’s identities and Kinosaki just kind of deduced on his own that they should probably investigate the club that does nothing because they’re kind of suspicious now that this cosplay group thing has shown up

...but I suppose it makes more sense in hindsight that they’re in on the entire thing and they’re just trying to see how the DC react- their real purpose here instead of getting a story is getting better ratings for CIDE2

Regardless-

I agree, Yumoto

En once again picking on Yumoto.

Sometimes I get the impression En’s just doing it in a teasing, good-natured way and then at the same time I get the impression that En just barely tolerates Yumoto in the earlier episodes.

Hm. I can’t tell.

I wonder if this line is just more bullshitting on Kinosaki’s part or if he’s actually hinting at something here.

And now I can’t tell if Kinosaki just simply DOESN’T NOTICE Tawarayama is technically DEAD or he KNOWS because of the stupid fish and is blatantly ignoring it just to see how far the DC will go to get him the fuck out of there lol

Either way, he’s succeeding in freaking them out

Evil reporter is evil (THOSE EYEEEEEES)

I love their expressions here- and then the way they all look at one another, expecting someone to come up with a plan to get the annoyances out of there

Like idk it’s super cute how Ryuu and Io look at one another and then En and Atsushi look between each other and Yumoto and Yumoto just looks up at his senpais like “ummm”

And it definitely WOULD be Io who’s the one to come up with some loopholes or a ‘logical’ point about press responsibility in an effort to scare Kinosaki off

I have a feeling he’s well versed in these things because business

I sometimes have a hard time remembering he’s like 16/17- he acts MUCH older than all of the others.

Not quite sure what he’s implying here- though it’s definitely an interesting line if you take into account that he likely knows all about the DC and their true identities as the Battle Lovers

Perhaps he’s alluding to the fact that they should use their interviews with him to make themselves look better to CIDE2′s audience, which would be really interesting because potentially he’s operating under the assumption that the DC know they’re being filmed. Which is plausible because Hireashi could have told them anything.

Or on a more local level, it could be him wanting the DC to take him up on his offer to improve their position in the school (although I get the impression that some of them are already pretty popular as is? Ryuu definitely but potentially En as well)

Maybe he has heard rumblings of the conflict between Atsushi and Kinshirou and knows that the DC is on thin ice with their status as a club so he’s offering them a favor to make Kinshirou hate them less?

Oooh looking at him from these angles he’s a bit more likeable as a character

But this is all still speculation so I most probably am wrong.

En goes from adorable to annnoyed in .2 seconds flat lol

Snerk- he points out so easily that En an Atsushi are always together.

Everyone knows they’re boyfriendssssss

This conversation is a bit telling- definitely a lot more so than when I first watched it.

En doesn’t like talking about himself. He says as much in his next line, although it’s a bit sutble;

Give me some questions that are easier to answer.

I can read this scene as En nearly admitting that he doesn’t find himself remarkable- or he’d have to think about it a little harder if Kinosaki wanted a better answer.

Talking about himself doesn’t come naturally- he doesn’t think of himself as anything special, or he has a hard time thinking about what does make him special.

Talk about a pointed question

Io just ignores him lol

Though that’s a bit on the nose. Io definitely finds the whole Battle Lover thing bothersome

Although that contradicts my headcanon that Io is secretly super into it even though he isn’t at first lolol

Money is SRZBZ

RYUU I HAVE A FEELING THAT’S NOT HOW YOU FLIRT WITH GIRLS

Though there is his self-described ‘guilelessness’ lol

Guys... stahp

Fffffffft RYUU WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WHY DOES IT SOUND LIKE A VIBRATOR

I’m sorry I can’t picture anything else that he could possibly be talking about. Nope. Can’t do it. My mind is trash.

Though I have to say this is probably some of the worst foreshadowing. It was like the writers were like ‘shit we’re halfway through the episode and we haven’t foreshadowed what the monster is going to be here let’s let Ryuu talk about it suggestively’

Upset Pink isn’t getting laid tonight

Meanwhile Atsushi is still trying to rival Arima to be the Sass Master

I can’t with Tarawayama and Wombat it’s so silly

And all the kids have just ACCEPTED that their teacher now carries around a pink plush wombat that sort of seems alive all the time

Yumoto bby that’s not how you get to college...

WHAT THE FUCK GUYS THAT’S SO CREEPY

AND NO ONE EVEN NOTICES

That was the quickest exposition for a loveless character

Like seriously, 2 lines, a Zundar Needle and a sassy line from the CC

At least they all realize it’s just Kurosaki who is annoying. Tazawa just snaps pics in the background.

Wombat has spent too much time on Tumblr. I’m sorry I had to

Wombat’s Kansai accent cracks me up

So basically you’re admitting that Tawarayama is dead-dead and your ‘technology’ isn’t doing much?

WOMBAT! Is that anything to say to the character who’s mother is mysteriously absent? <.<

Nice callbacks!

NAKED HANG OUT

Tho why the fuck does he have a camera in the onsen?? INVASION OF PRIVACY MUCH?

SERIOUSLY HOW DO YOU NOT NOTICE HE’S DEAD

Wombat’s pissed and firing back the nonverbal sass at Atsushi

Another line supporting the “Press society knows too much” idea- it’s as if he was clued in on what to listen for~

Wombat’s little anxious dance is like wtf

I like how imaginary Yumoto is covering his shorts all ashamed lol

Is this Yandare simulator?

No srz tho Yumoto is savage af and everybody’s like “WTF”

Self aware “we are in an anime” joke featuring genre/time period awareness

I think someone on staff just really wanted to draw Ryuu like that lol

About here is where I realized I really liked Tazawa’s design- his ponytail is super cute

Yumoto is a very convincing actor in a pinch

Attempt at badass poses isn’t very effective when you all are naked

Side note I just realized they all tie their towels in the same manner- is that a cultural thing or are they all simply right or left handed???

Or is it just a lazy animation thing? hahaha

I swear Tazawa only has like 3 lines but he’s adorable AF

Also... he’s got a point

Ryuu does have a point

Because how else will we know that we’re true magical boys???

Okay, so I’m not a huge fan of the ‘remote control monster’. But I suppose its symbolism is twofold;

1) It directly represents the micro-conflict of the episode, the DC having their image controlled by the Press Society

2) It leads the way for the DC to put two and two together and realize that the monsters are being controlled by someone (although I feel like that’s obvious because they’ve been... y’know... members of their school spontaneously turned into monsters? Like that doesn’t just happen)

Idk tho I wish we’d gotten a smidgen more about this student; but I suppose the actual conflict is the one going on with the DC

This line made me giggle hysterically but I just realized how big of a culture gap there is because I have never even SEEN a bidet toilet. The quick google search I ran indicates they’re fairly common in Europe/Asia? Like WTF America you’d think we’d be more hygienic.

I love when they use physical violence lol it makes it more serious

It also serves a dual purpose in knocking annoying monsters down a couple pegs

ONE HIT KO

Srz though Yumoto that was epic

Though there definitely wasn’t much of a point for the others to be there which I know is a stab at the typical magical girl genre trope of the main character being OP’d but on the other hand that’s so frustrating that this happens ALL THE TIME

Like once is funny, the entire series playing it as a running gag is old

Though I wonder if we timed all of the monster encounters in this show if this one would be one of the shortest lol

But seriously though... this show HINTS at being a much deeper magical boy show and then it just subverts everything by having Yumoto be OP and they talk their way out of ridiculous, potentially DANGEROUS situations

Like exhibit A)

Like this COULD BE REALLY SCARY. Cliche remote control monster with the ability to control real people!

He could have ALL the battle lovers fight one another! Or like what’s hinted at happening- have Yumoto do the love attack on his friends!

Like it’s not outside the realm of possibility for Yumoto to fire a shot at the others. They could have dodged, and having him resist the control is a great tension device, but then-

DEUS EX WOMBAT

Like... so disappointing. Boueibu your narrative needs to go up a notch.

And this is where my crunchyroll app fucked up and couldn’t buffer anything over 240p long enough to take screencaps, so I’ll just summarize the last couple of points;

The monster before it turns back into the student is self-aware enough to exclaim that he was being controlled by someone else’s will- which is enough for the DC to pick up on the fact that the monsters are being controlled. I mentioned it earlier but I suppose it bears repeating that these poor boys aren’t necessarily too bright lol- or they just aren’t thinking too hard about the surreal monster thing.

The scene back at the onsen doesn’t have much- I just thought it was funny that Kinosaki was scared of Gora with his giant axe.

Kinshirou’s typical arrogance was typical; a bit more of his irritation towards anything having to do with Atsushi’s new crew but nothing major here with their characters.

And then the last scene- Kinosaki’s line about ‘our initial report went well, huh?’ and then the shot of Hireashi is an example of foreshadowing DONE WELL and not played for laughs. That definitely confirms that those two are in on the whole CIDE2 thing and are acting as agents for the TV network. Makes me wonder how THAT conversation happened- like those two probably would have been WTFing over a TALKING FISH.

But anyway! Another episode that’s a bit deeper with character development than at first meets the eye, and disappointing shades of what could have been a magical boy show that played at the tropes but ultimately subverted them. Sigh. I suppose this is what fanfic is for... and thusly I continue my research gathering!

#cupkayke rewatches boueibu #cupkaykey rewatches boueibu #boueibu #boueibu meta #binan koukou chikyuu bouei bu love!#binan kōkō chikyū bōei bu love!#binan high school earth defense club love!#Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu LOVE!#Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!

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thestanceyg · 8 years

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greennonmonster replied to your post “This morning I found I had woken up in the night and written this on a...”

Darcy/Spencer amnesia short? Temporary amnesia, perhaps painkiller induced after an accident ala hollywood style? Darcy's been in an accident, hurt but not seriously (jane, erik, the avengers and the team are bribing their way into Darcy's room) Spencer's there of course and it takes a little while for Darcy to realize that the hot, smart and nice unfortunately married man is her husband? idk i think i need some romcoms tonight :)

So....this took a while. I’ve had some serious block, and working on this helped. It’s not the madcap comedy of errors I wanted, but I hope you like it anyway.

Also, major love to whichever author it is that uses the characters from Scrubs whenever they need medical personnel. I borrowed that because it’s awesome. I will edit this with credit if someone knows who I mean. I wish I could remember the name but I keep coming up blank. Sorry!

Darcy’s head was fuzzy. She had been hungover and woken up with cotton mouth, but this was more like cotton mind. She moved to sit up, but gentle hands pressed her back down.

“Let me move the bed for you,” a soft man’s voice said. She turned to take a look at him while he played with the bed controls. His hair was in disarray, his clothes a little wrinkled, but she couldn’t help but feel a fondness for the man wearing a cute button down and cardigan at her bedside. She was, apparently, in a hospital, but she had no idea why.

“Are you my doctor?” she asked the man. It would be weird for a doctor to be sitting and waiting for her to wake up, but also absolutely something Stark might make a doctor do through the power of money.

“Kind of?” the man said with a little wry smile that drained off his face to be replaced by a little bit of a crinkle between his eyebrows. “You don’t know who I am?”

She shook her head “no,” and felt a dull thudding at the action. “What happened to me?”

“You were in an accident,” he said slowly. “I should call for the doctor, and then I can explain.”

He pushed the call button on her bed and then went to the door. He opened it a crack, and Darcy could hear him talking to someone on the other side.

“Fine. Yes, you can come in if you can get the doctor here in the next 5 minutes,” he whispered just loudly enough before shutting the door and sitting back down. “What do you remember? Maybe I can fill in the, err, missing parts.”

She sat for a moment. What did she remember? “I remember heading out for coffee,” she finally said. “I had an order list and was going to that cute place down the block.”

“Do you remember who you were buying coffee for?”

“Of course,” she said instantly, but then realized she couldn’t.

“It’s okay,” he said smoothing the sheets in front of him. “You did go to get coffee, and there was an attack by what I think you would call the ‘villain of the week’. The Avengers dealt with it, but the coffee shop, and you, were caught in the crossfire. The building partially collapsed and you were trapped. You hit your head pretty hard and needed some stitches on your legs. Your ribs are bruised but not broken.” He paused. “Do you know what today is?”

“Tuesday.”

He shook his head. “It’s Thursday. You’ve been out for a while. We were worried you weren’t going to wake up.” His voice trembled just a bit at the end, and she wondered why he was here. Did he feel responsible? Had he been there when she was hurt? Had they been flirting at the coffee shop and this was some kind of While You Were Sleeping shit?

“Who are you?” she asked as the door opened.

“Darcy, glad to see you awake and coherent,” Dr. Cox said. “I’d love to run some tests and see if I can get you out of my hair, so let’s get to it.”

“She doesn’t remember who I am,” the man said before he stepped into the hall to give her privacy.

Dr. Cox turned his eyes back onto Darcy. “You don’t know who that man is?”

“No. Should I?”

“How about answering me this: do you want to know him?”

“He’s adorable.”

“That sounds like a yes. Here’s the thing, sweetheart, you can’t go quite yet now that I know there’s some amnesia going on because, yes, you should know who he is, so why don’t you try to hit it?”

She wanted to throw a pillow at him, but instead narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying I should hit on him for your own amusement?”

“God no. I don’t need any more awkward sexual tension in my life. I just think it might be good for your memory.” As he started looking over her vitals and doing some physical exams, he kept up the chatter. “So how far back can you remember? Because maybe this is my chance to fix all the things in your life.”

“I just have…holes?” she said, not sure how to explain it. “Like, I know that I live in New York. I know that I was getting coffee, but I’m not sure who that man was, or, oh my God, I don’t know what my job is. Do I still work for Jane?”

He clucked and shook his head no. “I’m going to need to consult with the others, but I think you’re missing a lot more than you realize. You haven’t lived in New York or worked with Jane in 3 years.”

Darcy stared at him. “But….”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to figure it out.” And with that he left the room.

Darcy slumped back against the pillows. Three years. That was practically a lifetime. Apparently she didn’t live in New York, or work with Jane, and there was something with the man whose name she didn’t even know. The door popped back open and Jane’s head poked in.

“D?”

“Hey Jane,” she said with a small smile.

“Oh thank god you know who I am,” Jane sighed as she came in. “Spencer wasn’t sure if you would.”

“His name is Spencer?”

Jane gave a tight smile. “Yeah. It is.” She took the empty seat next to the bed. “I made him go shower and change. Tony was going to come say hi, but instead he’s talking to Dr. Cox. There was a chemical aspect to the attack, so they’re trying to figure out if it affected… things. But how are you?”

“Sore, apparently missing three years, but otherwise okay.” She put away the mystery man’s name and the fact that Jane knew him well enough to boss him around for later. She didn’t know where to even start. “How about you? You look pretty tired there Janey.”

“I’ve had better days,” Jane allowed. “I’ve been remotely monitoring my data while sitting here worrying about you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve messed up your work.”

“You haven’t,” Jane rushed to soothe. “I would just be monitoring anyway. I have a team that’s in the field doing the readings. Besides, you will always be more important than work. You’re a person. My person. Science will always be there for me, but I just found out you might not be. I’m allowed to worry and use numbers as a distraction.”

“Dr. Cox said I don’t work for you anymore…”

“He’s right. You moved to DC for an incredible opportunity that Pepper offered you.”

“So I’m in DC?”

Jane’s face fell a little. “Yeah, you live there. But right now we’re in New York in the medical wing of the Tower.”

Darcy tried to decide if she wanted to ask the next question. “And Spencer? Who….who is he? To me?”

Jane pursed her lips. “That’s not for me to say,” she finally got out. “I can’t imagine…if the roles were reversed, it’s just not how I would want to figure it out? I can’t decide if it would be better to remember or if it would be better for him to tell me? I don’t know Darce, but as your best friend, it’s just better if it’s not me.”

“But, there’s, like, a thing between us, right? I mean, why else would he be camped out at my bedside?”

“Do you want there to be a thing?”

“You sound an awful lot like Dr. Cox.”

“And that wasn’t an answer.”

“Yes? I mean, I don’t really know him. Or, rather, I guess I don’t remember that I know him? But, yeah, he’s super cute.”

Jane smiled and the door opened again. It was Tony followed by Dr. Cox.

“Welcome back to the world of the awake, Lewis,” Stark breezed, “we’re going to take you for a little brain scan to see if there’s something in there that will help shed some light on this.”

“He really just wants nudie pics of your brain,” Dr. Cox said with a huge smile.

Darcy rolled her eyes, which hurt a tiny bit.

“C’mon Lewis,” Stark said patting the seat of the wheelchair he had pulled out of the corner. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Jane helped her move from the bed to the chair, which wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be, though her legs were a bit shaky from lack of use the past several days. “Wait,” she said as they started to wheel her out. “What about Spencer?”

“I’ll tell him where you are,” Jane said returning to the chair she had been sitting in. “Go have your close-up.”

“Did you remember the doc?” Stark asked. Darcy studied him for a moment. He was curious; not joking.

“Err, no,” she said. “Doc?”

Tony shot a look at Jane who just shrugged. “He’s got degrees,” was all Tony said as he started pushing again.

The scans were long and boring. When they were finally satisfied, Darcy was exhausted and ready to sleep some more. Dr. Cox assured her this was normal since her body was still healing. It was the least sarcastic she could remember him being. Tony let Dr. Cox take her back to the room so he could start analyzing everything. While it should have taken less than five minutes to get from one room to the other, Darcy nodded off before they made it back to her room. She woke up when the wheelchair stopped, though her eyes were still heavy. However, she was still able to see that the chair next to the bed was once again occupied by the mystery man. As soon as she was settled back in the bed, Dr. Cox beat it out of the room with assurances he would be back once he knew something.

“You came back,” she said to him sleepily.

“Of course I did.”

“That was nice.” He just smiled. “Are you going to be here when I wake up?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“Yeah, I think seeing you before I fall asleep will give me good dreams.”

“Then sweet dreams, Darcy.”

“Thanks Spencer,” she said, just catching his look of surprise before she drifted off.

Sometime later she awoke to a room that was mostly bathed in darkness. As promised, Spencer was still at her bedside, his hand curled on top of hers as he slept at what had to be an uncomfortable angle. She took a moment to just look at him. He wasn’t as disheveled as he had been when she first woke up, but he was dressed very similarly. He was wearing fresh clothes, a blue shirt that had previously been white, a brown sweater that had previously been blue. His hair was still a mess, but it wasn’t as unruly as it had been. A few strands had fallen into his face, and she wanted to push them out of the way. She wondered if they were that close. She looked down at his hand, long thin fingers softly covering hers. She flipped her hand over so they could be palm to palm. Something tickled the back of her mind but stayed firmly behind the veil. He stirred at her small movement.

“Darcy?” he asked groggily.

“Hi Spencer,” she whispered.

“You remember my name?”

“No. I’m sorry. Jane told me.”

“It’s okay,” he said as he fully came awake. He stretched, and then looked down at his hand holding hers. “I’m sorry,” he said, moving it away.

“Don’t,” she said, fingers closing on his wrist. “Please? It’s just...there’s something there? I feel like I should remember this?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

His hand relaxed back into hers and she could practically feel the happiness roll off of him. He pushed his hair out of his face with his other hand and she noticed something glitter in the light. A ring.

“Are you…” she tried to think about what to ask. He could be married. He could just enjoy rings. Would the her she couldn’t remember be with a married man? He was patiently waiting for her to finish her thought. “Are you in, uh, a legal contract of the romantic variety?”

His lips quirked up at her phrasing. “Yes, I am married.”

Oh god. She was the type of woman to be with a married man. She wanted to be disgusted with herself, but she also couldn’t fault her taste. But she was a homewrecker. And he was probably a monster of some sort to be cheating on his wife.

Her emotional turmoil must have shown on her face. “I can’t be sure what you’re thinking, of course, but I’m not cheating on my wife.” Maybe he was a widower? That was a lot more palatable. He was young for it, but it happened. She relaxed a bit. They might not even be together. Everyone seemed to be hinting that they were, but then Dr. Cox had also said he was sick of awkward sexual tension. Maybe they were in a strange friendship stage while he finished grieving and this was some sort of special moment that would make him realize he was or wasn’t ready to be with her (if she could just remember him). “Darcy,” he said, pulling her from her thoughts, “of course I want you to remember, but I can wait for it to happen. And if It doesn’t, we’ll just figure it out. I’m pretty sure there was some romantic comedy you made me watch that had just this as a plot line. I’ll reenact it for you if I have to.”

She kind of wanted to make him do that even if she did remember. Also, interesting that he was willing to reenact a romantic comedy for her. She needed to consider what that meant.

He squeezed her hand. “Don’t get upset about it. That won’t help.”

“I really need to pee!” she blurted out. Because she needed to, but also because she wasn’t sure what to do with this conversation while so much was going on in her mind.

“I’ll, errr, call the nurse. Unless you want me to help you…?”

“I think I can make it if you just help me up.” He helped her to her feet and shadowed her to the attached bathroom. Once she was behind the closed door she took a deep breath and calmed her mind. She still didn’t know what was exactly the deal with her and Spencer (Dr. Spencer?), but it wasn’t homewrecking, and he seemed into her. (Unless her amnesia addled brain was misinterpreting that too. Is that a thing that could happen?) She looked at the neat row of stitches on her leg while she peed. They were three lines total, maybe 20 total stitches, and the lines were already starting to heal. She washed her hands, splashing her face with some water too before trying to finger comb the mess that was on her head. Ugh. Being in a hospital was hell on your looks. It said a lot that he wasn’t turned off by the serious bird’s nest that had been constructed atop her head. When she saw Jane again, she would have to ask for some shower products.

When she opened the bathroom door back up, Spencer leapt from the chair to help her back into the bed. “You should be sleeping in a bed. Being in a chair while I sleep has to be miserable.”

“You asked me to be here,” he said simply.

“You’re too sweet to be real,” Darcy sighed. “How did we meet?”

He chuckled a bit and ducked his head. “At a coffee shop. I recognized you from you from a paper you had presented at a symposium I attended two days earlier. You were very nice to me. Even bought my coffee and asked me to sit and chat. We talked until both our phones started ringing to remind us we had actual jobs.”

“I don’t know what my job is,” she said with an annoyed frown.

“It will come back to you. You’re very good at it.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. I want to remember. I don’t want to have to be told.”

He sighed, taking her hand in his again. “We don’t know if this is permanent.”

“If it is, then you can tell me.”

“Deal.”

They sat quietly for a moment while his thumb idly stroked her hand. She yawned and he readjusted himself in the chair. “Are you going to stay?” she asked, looking at the chair.

“Unless you want me to leave.”

“No! No. That’s not what I meant. It’s just, that chair doesn’t look very comfortable.”

He looked around the room. “I don’t see any other options.”

Darcy looked around too and then scooted in the bed. “Here,” she said making room. “It’s not huge, but it’s better than that chair.” She didn’t have an IV, and removed the monitor cables when she had woken up. She patted the empty space she had made. “Unless we’re not that friendly,” she added when she saw he hadn’t moved.

“We’re that friendly,” he said slowly. “It’s just, I don’t want to jeopardize your recovery at all.”

She blew a raspberry. “You won’t crush me. Get up here, Spencer. Spencer whose last name I don’t know.”

“Reid,” he said as he stood up. “My last name is Reid.”

“Well then, Spencer Reid, I’m Darcy Lewis and I’d like you to join me.”

He gingerly joined her on the bed, trying to take up as little room as possible. She noticed that he was trying not to touch her much, though she wasn’t sure if that was him attempting to be a gentleman or if he just didn’t want to touch her. At the moment, she was too tired to care.

“Goodnight Spence,” she said softly as her eyes started to flutter shut again. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” he said as she lost the fight with her eyelids. She thought he had maybe kissed her temple, but it was too soft to be certain.

The next morning she was awoken by soft but insistent whispering. She wasn’t ready to open her eyes yet. She could tell it was Clint and Jane, but she didn’t know if she wanted to face them. Instead she rolled tighter into the warmth at her side. In the back of her mind she knew it was Spencer, that this was something she had done before, but the thought wasn’t pushing its way forward enough to be more than a dream. However, she knew the moment he woke up too when his hand tightened around her side and then pulled away. She whimpered a little at the loss.

“Will you guys be quiet?” he whispered. “She needs her sleep.”

“Sorry Dr. Reid,” Clint said without a hint of actual sorrow at all.

“Clint, I’ll tase you,” Darcy murmured.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Spencer complained, completely shifting away from her. “She’s awake.”

“Are you sad because she needs more sleep or because even with amnesia and being unclear who you are she still groped you in the night and we stopped that?”

Darcy heard Jane smack Clint. “Thanks Janey,” she said finally twisting and opening her eyes. Her ribs gave a groan of protest, but luckily she hadn’t actually fully turned to her side in her sleep. “Can I help you?”

Clint held out a Starbucks cup and a card. “The team feels pretty bad about you being here. They sent me because they knew you’d remember me.”

Spencer took the cup and card from Clint, getting out of the bed and moving the bedside table over her before placing both items on it. She sniffed the cup. “My favorite,” she said with a smile. “But am I allowed to have it?” she asked before she let herself pick it up.

“Dr. Cox said yes,” Jane said.

“Perfect.” She grabbed the cup and took a big sip. “So good,” she hummed before picking up the card. Inside was a little note from every Avenger plus a Starbucks gift card. “Do I….Do I know all of you now?”

Clint gave a pained smile. “Yeah D, you do. That’s why It’s me and not Steve or Nat.”

“I’m on a first name basis with the Black Widow?”

“Yeah.” Clint looked very uncomfortable.

“I demand to see her then because that is SO AWESOME.”

Jane laughed before holding out a bag. “Clint brought coffee, but I brought all your toiletries.”

“Jane, have I told you lately that you’re my favorite?”

“Well, I’m no Natasha.”

“Doesn’t matter. Favorite.”

“After your coffee, I can get nurse Carla to come and we can get you in the shower. Maybe that will help you feel like yourself again.”

“Thanks Jane. Apparently my life is super cool. I just need to remember it now.”

A few hours later Darcy was getting out of a shower that had seriously been life affirming. She felt more like herself than she had since any moment when she had woken up. She carefully shrugged on the clothes that Jane had grabbed, smiling at the oversized Land of Enchantment sweatshirt and loose jeans that reminded her of crazy times in the desert. When she came out of the bathroom, the room was empty. She frowned. Where was Spencer?

A noise at the door drew her attention. Spencer was in the hall with a man that was older than him. If they looked alike at all she would have thought they were father/son based on their body language, but the man was shorter and very Italian, so that seemed unlikely. The man saw her, smiled, and patted Spencer on the shoulder.

“Oh, hey Darcy,” he said turning. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

“Just sore, but feeling much cleaner than I have in quite a while.” She waved to the man. “Hi person I’m guessing I should know.”

“You’re taking this much better than I would,” he said. “Dave Rossi. I work with Spencer.”

“Well, nice to meet you Mr. Rossi. You look like a nice guy. So hopefully I’ll remember you. Also, by any chance do you know how to French braid? You look like someone that had sisters or daughters.”

“You should be asking Spencer,” he said with a sly smile. “He’s got magic hands.”

Spencer rolled his eyes but said, “I can braid your hair if you want.”

“I’ll let you get to it then. I’ll tell the team you say hi.”

They both said goodbye and then moved back over to the bed. “This will probably work best if you sit behind me on the bed,” Darcy said, climbing on to sit. Spencer quietly joined her, sitting on his feet, knees straddling her hips. His fingers got to work and Darcy felt that tickle at the back of her mind again. “Have you done this for me before?”

“I have. Do you remember?”

“No,” she sighed. “It just feels right.” He continued on quietly. It didn’t feel right. Something was off. “Why is this wrong?” she finally asked.

“Wrong?”

“It doesn’t feel totally right. The braiding feels right but the quiet doesn’t.”

“Usually when I braid your hair you want to tell me about your day.” She could hear the smile in his voice, but she couldn’t decide if it was from remembering the past or her realizing something wasn’t right.

“Do you braid my hair a lot?”

“Only when you’ve had a long day and I’m actually home. Almost always after I’ve come home after a long case.”

“Case?”

“I work for the FBI.” He held out his hand and she automatically plucked the hair tie from her wrist and dropped it into his hand. Huh. Apparently her body remembered this.

“Do you like it?”

“I do.” He started to pull back, but she placed a hand on his knee, stopping him. When she was sure he wasn’t going to move away, she scooted until her back was against his chest and relaxed into him.

“This feels right too,” she whispered.

She felt him rearrange himself, unfurling his legs and adjusting the bed so he could lay back against it. He curled his arms around her, and held her as she drifted off to sleep once more.

She didn’t sleep as long this time. She could tell because the room wasn’t much brighter than it had been, even though it was a sunny day and daylight was pouring into the room. In the corner of the room, Natasha was leaning against the wall, watching her.

“Do you remember me?” she asked. Darcy shook her head no. She could have been mistaken, but she thought Natasha’s shoulders slumped a bit. “But you remember Dr. Reid?”

She shook her head no again, then added, “But my body does. He braided my hair, and it felt like we had done that before.”

Natasha nodded and slid forward, holding out a bag that Darcy hadn’t noticed. “Maybe this will help. There’s something from Pepper and I in there as well as something that I took the liberty of picking up for Dr. Reid.” She felt Spencer continue to breath softly beneath her. He must still be asleep. “You two are cute together, so remember him, please.”

Darcy leaned back with the bag in hand. Before she could respond to Natasha the woman was gone. She carefully upended the bag on her lap. There was a brown paper bag as well as a small, wrapped box. She picked up the box first and tore the paper off. Inside was a coffee mug with “bitches get stuff done” on it. It had been dipped in glitter and the words were in a gold foil. She loved it, but couldn’t think why Natasha and Pepper would give it to her. Though, it didn’t feel odd to get the gift. She put those thoughts aside and looked at the brown paper bag. This must be what she had picked up for Spencer. She carefully unfolded the top. A yellow carbon copy receipt fluttered out along with a small plastic bag. Inside it was a ring. She opened the bag and pulled out the ring, holding it carefully between her fingers. It was familiar to her. She twisted it to look at it some more when Spencer’s hands took it from her. She didn’t realize he had woken up. He gently took her left hand and slid the ring onto her ring finger. It slid right on, fitting perfectly.

She looked down at her hand and then twisted to look at him. “It’s mine?” she said so softly she wasn’t sure he could hear her.

“It’s yours,” he agreed, his own voice cracking a little. She could see the tears rimming his eyes but not falling.

“Because I’m yours.”

“Because you agreed to take me on, on a purely trial basis,” he corrected with a small smile that caused a few tears to drop.

“Because I’m yours,” she said again, more sternly, but with a sense of wonder. She placed her hand on his face and wiped away the rogue tears with a sweep of her thumb. “I’m sorry I forgot.”

“I can help you remember.”

“Does remembering involve kissing?”

“If you want it to,” he said with a half laugh. That’s all she needed to hear. She stretched just a bit to press her lips to his, her eyes fluttering closed while she allowed her body to remember what her brain couldn’t.

Kissing him felt like coming home. It felt natural and comfortable. Every time he moved, whether his hands to hold her or his tongue to taste hers, it felt right. She felt safe. And she knew that even if she never remembered, it would be okay because her body would always know. She would make new memories with him if that’s what she needed to do. But she really wanted to remember the old ones because he seemed rather fond of her, and she wanted to know what she had done to make him feel that way so she could do it again.

A throat cleared behind them.

“So I guess you remember him now,” Dr. Cox said with a shit eating grin.

“Nope,” Darcy said, eyes smiling. “But I did follow your excellent advice to try and hit it.”

“Well, we need to do some blood tests, but we think we know what caused the memory loss. It wasn’t an interesting chemical cocktail that we think we’ve isolated. And once we know that you do, indeed, have the indicators, we can counteract it.”

“Good,” Darcy said with a smile. “Though I was just getting excited about making him recreate all our favorite memories together.”

Spencer kissed her hair. “We can still do that. Maye it will help you never forget them again.”

She was going to be fine. Her husband was going to help make sure that happened. And wasn’t that the best possible truth about who he was to her?

#greennonmonster #darcy lewis #spencer reid #prompt #fic

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