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viridiave · 3 years ago

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NARUMITSU <ATTEMPTING TO READ THE SUBTEXT PLATONICALLY>

*Wrote all this some time last month so I might be off- really really off- also full disclosure I too am a Narumitsu shipper- this is just me giving myself a bad time doing the impossible and having fun XD

-I am going to fail sooner or later. Looking at you, Bridge to the Turnabout.

FIRST GAME >Turnabout Samurai -Yep. We're jumping right in with 'unnecessary feelings'. I'm going to be put on a stake for this. -This is going to become the main argument with any and all homoerotic subtext present in the first game- that it was unintentional. They didn't actively start making it gay until the second game, and even before then the producer for the games had to warn the development team not to try and insert these themes for fear of getting it wrong and lose the fanbase they'd accidentally caught the eye of. I can still create arguments for why this specific, hilariously meme-able line could be read romantically of course- but as far as the game development team at the time was concerned this interaction was never meant to be read as romantic. -Unease and uncertainty are... very valid feelings for Edgeworth to feel at this very moment and as much as I'd like to joke that he was feeling uncertain about his sexuality after seeing his childhood friend as an adult, this line was really just likely meant to lead up to the conclusion of Turnabout Goodbyes and Edgeworth's character arc for this game. His perfect win streak had just been shattered in a case prior. In this case, he was meant to persecute the lead actor of his favorite show- and in some ways his helping the defense can be taken as his biases getting the better of him. His sense of justice and his entire worldview is about to be overhauled, and I can see how he would regard this budding doubt in himself as an unnecessary (heh) distraction from what he believes is his true purpose in life.

>Turnabout Goodbyes -Edgeworth wanting to keep him away from DL-6 has its own section mostly because of how stubborn he becomes when it comes to Phoenix's insistence in particular. It's clear that this stubbornness is a front, I will concede with that- but there are merits to his initial reluctance in accepting Phoenix's defense. It's evident that Phoenix himself has grown over the course of the game so far, but in both of the times that he faced off against Edgeworth in court, his victories were... a tad bit contrived. For instance in Turnabout Sisters, Phoenix really only wins because Mia was being channeled and blackmailed White as he was about to leave the stand. Turnabout Samurai is a little better- but had him rely on quite a lot of coincidences (proven later to be substantiated) that surfaced during the trial. This is nothing to say of the deeper reason Edgeworth has over dissuading Phoenix from taking his case ("You in particular I cannot ask to do this.")- where I can make an argument for his pride and/or concern over Phoenix's career as an attorney. The stakes are relatively high here as well- if Phoenix fails, Edgeworth is incarcerated, Manfred von Karma goes free, DL-6 goes cold once again with no hope of getting re-opened, and everything that Phoenix has been working towards as an attorney would have been in vain. DL-6 is a case that has ruined many lives- it'd make sense if Edgeworth himself felt as though it would be a waste of time and effort to take this case because of how convinced he was of murdering his own father prior to Gourd Lake. He'd grown up for the past 15 years with a nightmare and a death sentence over his head- I wouldn't be surprised if he simply gave up and accepted that he was going to die at the hands of his prosecuting mentor. Even if he were acquitted for the murder of Robert Hammond, his perceived involvement in DL-6 would have thrown a wrench in his freedom- any lesser attorney would have given up on that. And this is unloaded BEFORE Phoenix tells him about the true reason as to why he became an attorney. -Phoenix's insistence to defend Edgeworth in this case can easily just be read as platonic- his complete, unfettered faith in Edgeworth's innocence is heavily influenced by that class trial, for better or for worse. While I'm perfectly happy to imagine that Phoenix's attachment to his idealized version of Edgeworth grew into something deeper sometime in the fifteen years that he hasn't seen him, I do believe that Phoenix in particular really is just that much of a sentimental person. This is to say nothing of his nature as a defense attorney- and what little time he's managed to spend with Mia has taught him that unbridled trust in his client is what gets him through the day, and he's putting it to practice here. Edgeworth was what he has been working towards the moment he decided he would practice law- as Phoenix at this point in time still believes that he could do no wrong despite seeing what Edgeworth is truly like in court. -Cutting into the meat of Phoenix and Edgeworth's shared past, I made a point earlier to say that Phoenix's perception of Edgeworth as a person is idealized. Every memory that Phoenix has had of Edgeworth prior to the events of the first game were from their childhood- and they had 4-8 months (plus one year if we're generous with the retconning some of the official art gave us) MAX to develop a friendship so strong that Phoenix makes major life decisions just to meet with this man. The fact that this time spent together was ENOUGH for Phoenix in the first place is... really hard to skirt around. To quote Dan from GameGrumps "this is something that you would only do for someone you're trying to marry" and if one of them was a woman I guarantee this ship would be canon already. But then again- since this is Phoenix Wright in particular somehow I can believe that he really is just that sentimental- and that isn't always a bad thing. He'd managed to save Edgeworth twice with this conviction after all. When Phoenix sees Edgeworth, he doesn't see a demon prosecutor, he sees his childhood friend who aimed to become a shining example of justice following in his father's footsteps. They address how shaky his foundations for becoming an attorney were in the Phoenix Wright Files once actually- going through a mini-existential crisis because he'd become an attorney with the main goal of saving Edgeworth from what he'd become, and now that he's accomplished that he's just kind of... lost. Edgeworth himself manages to pull him out of this, though. -man that hurts my case a lot actually but to be fair I was banking on failing -I just didn't expect it to happen so early even with the first game -in fact ESPECIALLY with the first game -though I cannot for the life of me wonder how I can come up with a heterosexual explanation for why the buildup towards Edgeworth telling Phoenix and Maya about his nightmares reads so much like a stunted love confession. I'm serious- just read any high school shojo manga ever. You'll find that it hits a lot of the same beats.

>Rise From The Ashes -It's in this case that we observe some of the consequences that the intial upheaval of Edgeworth's worldview in Turnabout Goodbyes causes him; distrust in the enforcement of the law. Not exactly the time for him to be dabbling in another, meme-able brand of unnecessary feelings. Several things like the Prosecutor's Office's relationship with the Police Department starts to waver with the murder of Bruce Goodman, and this becomes the final nail in the coffin for Edgeworth's worldviews and values as a prosecutor. His and Phoenix's teamwork in this trial becomes prevalent- the story behind the King of Prosecutors award represents this best despite it's currently incomplete state. The backstory behind this award paints an ideal of justice in the courtroom wherein the truth comes out as a result of the efforts of contradictory forces. A broken halberd that can cut through any shield (the prosecution) and a broken, unbreakable shield (the defense). Read as representation the text becomes something of a metaphor for the ideal justice that manifests itself in the best parts of Edgeworth and Phoenix respectively- the duality of their opposing professions rather than something that is limited to their relationship. -The same argument that I've used for Phoenix's unwavering belief in Edgeworth's innocence in Turnabout Goodbyes can be used for this case as well. -Though Edgeworth still goes M.I.A for a year after this case, it does grant his disappearance a bit more context as to why exactly it is that he left- and I'll be taking a tiny liberty with this and apply the interpretation that the Miles Edgeworth Files grants us, and that he left in order to better himself and grow as a person, a prosecutor, and as a friend to Phoenix Wright. It's... difficult for me to want to read this as anything but romantically-charged because the narrative beats are NOT lost on me (the dialogue makes this especially hard. send help.)- there's a possibility that Edgeworth at this point in time realizes the value in having a better, more functional dynamic with the one defense attorney who he considers a true equal in court. This dynamic will allow for less chances to encounter missteps and errors in any verdicts handed down in court, and if Edgeworth is to pursue his ideal of justice- Phoenix Wright is undoubtedly essential to this endeavor. The aftermath of Rise From The Ashes is indicative of this newfound goal of his- the symbolism behind the old King of Prosecutors award and the two halves of the evidence list certainly helps this case. -<"It seems all you do is worry about me." -Miles Edgeworth, Rise From The Ashes> For good fucking reason Edgeworth. You were accused of murder and have implicated yourself on the stand for DL-6 just a few months ago- and if the Investigations games are anything to go by, you're more of a danger magnet than PHOENIX is. I had to say it. The first Investigations game takes place over the course of 2-3 days and the sheer amount of shit that Edgeworth had to deal with in between that interval truly makes me wonder how Phoenix Wright ended up with the title of danger magnet. And THIS time- Edgeworth's car becomes a crime scene because his corrupt superiors needed a convenient way of transporting a corpse. There's VERY good reasons to worry about the livelihood of Miles Edgeworth. -Okay I... can't believe I forgot about the chessboard. Here's the kicker- the one we see from his office isn't even the only one he owns. I... legitimately cannot give you ANY purely heterosexual, platonic explanation for why Miles Edgeworth has THREE (THREE. I CANNOT OVERSTATE THIS. HE HAS T H R E E OF THESE FUCKING THINGS. GOOD GOD. HE CAN'T BE ANY MORE EXTRA.)(there exists a similar, portable set in the Investigations games- and he has a new set by the time of Dual Destinies) sets of custom-made chessboards with personalized, highly-specific red and blue designs made purely to depict his rivalry with Phoenix Wright. I fold. I give up. I forgot about the chessboards I wAS NOT EXPECTING TO FAIL THIS E A R LY- -You know what the real kicker is with Rise From the Ashes? The main argument that I have introduced back in Turnabout Samurai does not apply here. Rise From the Ashes was made as a DS-exclusive case and did not exist in the original GameBoy version of the Trilogy. Which means if there is homoerotic tension written in for this case (and there happens to be a lot. the chessboard is proof enough.), then we can safely assume that the writers at this point were well-aware. So yeah- maybe don't feel TOO bad about the unnecessary feelings line- because ever since then the writers have been playing off of that and it SHOWS. -Is there really a point to this I'm just- everything is stacked against me tryna interpret this platonically -Like I know I make a point to say that a romantic relationship isn't the end-all of all relationships because this franchise LOVES pushing the Found Family dynamic and I'm an absolute sucker for that -good god by the time Dual Destinies rolls around I'll probably just give up and happily say they're happily married -that's literally what they act like don't even pretend

#narumitsu #wrightworth #ace attorney #gyakuten saiban #phoenix wright #naruhodou ryuuichi #miles edgeworth #mitsurugi reiji #i'll probably write more once school blows over #so have the first game for now #trust me i tried #maybe i'm just not an anti-shipper and that's why i failed #uh feel free to set the comments on fire #but like civilly #we're all here to have fun okay #even if fun means shipping

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unmaskedagain · 5 years ago

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Gabriel Agreste Must Die

I have no idea what inspired this but I just thought this would be funny. It Salt towards Gabriel. So enjoy. Warning Gaslighting ahead

Nino never thought that, out of everyone in the entire world, he would be the one to figure out Gabriel Agreste was Hawkmoth. Granted, it wasn’t like he had done he any searched or used any expert detective or journalism skills. No, instead he had been hanging out at Marinette’s; getting his butt handed to him in Ultimate Mecha Strike III. Alya chilling as she scrolled through her phone. Chloe, who they somehow managed to become friends with, was taking selfies in Marinette’s newest design outfits.

Nino knew it was because the blonde had proven herself to be a good hero and loyal ally. So when Marinette, the new Guardian now that Fu was gone, that more permanent heroes were needed, she brought in Chloe, along with Nino and Alya. It was then that Ladybug and Chat Noir revealed their identities to them and to each other.

It had been one hell of a shock. But they all became really good friends. Though any crushes the original heroes had died. It turned out Marinette thought of Chat Noir as a brother. And Adrien just couldn’t see Marinette in that light. It was for the best. Alya had been pissed about the love square thing.

That had been over a year ago, and the heroes had all become really good friends; banding together against anyone (Lila or Gabriel) who tried to tear them apart.

They had been talking about the recent akuma attacks, when Nino got a text from Adrien apologizing for not being able to hang out.

“Adrien can’t come,” Nino glared at the screen. “His dad’s got him working late.”

“Again?” Alya asked. “He does know what child labor laws are right?”

Chloe scoffed, “Like he cares.”

“Still, we should do something,” Marinette frowned as she rapidly pressed buttons on her controller. “This isn’t right.”

“Like what?” Nino asked, already gracefully accepting yet another defeat. “He’s Gabriel Agreste. He’s as big of an asshole as Hawkmoth; and I didn’t think that was possible.”

As soon as he said those words, something just clicked. Everyone in the room suddenly paused as they processed the words in their minds.

Nino slowly put down her controller, “It’s not possible, is it? That level of asshole-dom can’t possibly be reached by two different people in the same city, at the same time, in the same universe. There’s no way.”

“Even my mom left once Gabriel took power,” Chloe added. “And she’s a total bitch but she knew that Paris couldn’t handle both a Queen Bitch and the King of the Assholes fighting it out.”

Marinette’s eyes narrowed as she considered everything they knew about hawkmoth and Gabriel Agreste, “When did Adrien say he last saw mom.”

“Three years ago,” Chloe answered. “Sometime near the end of January, I remember. It was before Valentine’s day as I had been planning yet another amazing party.”

“Alya, when was the first akuma attack?” Marinette asked.

“One sec, I’ll look,” The glasses-wearing girl said and as she frantically researched. When Alya was done, she looked up at them with a dark expression on her face. “February 4th, three years ago.”

“Gabriel has a book on Kwami,” Marinette told them. “He uses it for ‘inspiration.’”

After that, suddenly they were recalling all the little ‘coincidences’ they overlooked involving anything Agreste related and Hawkmoth; it all added up to something no one could deny.

“Gabriel is Hawkmoth,” Alya whispered stunned. “Adrien’s dad is Hawkmoth. We always said Gabriel was a monster but damn, really?”

“What do we do?” Chloe asked. “What can we do? Hawkmoth is too powerful; especially with Mayura on his side.”

Marinette nodded but there was a thoughtful look on his face, “Hawkmoth is strong but Gabriel is human like the rest of us. He has his flaws, his weaknesses; cracks in his facade.”

“Mom always said Gabriel was nuts,” Chloe said. “On the edge of his sanity. One good push…”

Marinette shrugged, “If we can’t defeat the villain…”

“…Then we break the man behind the mask,” Alya smirked,

Nino growled, “Gabriel Agreste Must Die.”

…

The next day after school; the heroes met up again at Marinette and sat Adrien down to talk.

It turned getting Adrien on board with the plan was difficult. He wasn’t hard to convince him that Gabriel was Hawkmoth, though it did take a while for him to stop throwing up. However, there was thing the blond boy wouldn’t budge on…

“You’re not killing my dad!” Adrien told them.

Nino nodded calmly and folded his hands on his lap, “I get where you’re coming from, dude. I totally do,” He told his best friend. “But hear me out. Your dad? He really sucks.”

Adrien shot his friends an incredulous look, “And you think that’s a good enough reason to kill him?”

“Well, yeah,” Nino shrugged. “I mean we talked about this before.”

Alya pushed her ex-boyfriend turned one of her bestie out of the way, “You’re dad is a megalomaniac magical terrorist that’s been destroying Paris, turning people into monsters, and killing innocents. Sure the damaged gets reversed but the victims, who aren’t Akumatized, still have to deal with the freaking trauma.”

“There are support groups for it,” Marinette said. “People remember dying; drowning, burning, crashing; it’s terrible.” She sighed, “However, we can’t just murder someone. It’s wrong.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It would be wrong not kill him,” Chloe told them. “The amount of time and effort it would save us is nearly too much to count. And the amount of relief all of Paris would feel knowing he was gone is out of this world. We can stop SO many people from getting hurt if I call my mom’s guy Fredro, and Gabriel has a little ‘accident’.”

Nino shot up, “See! Chloe agrees,” He shot a victorious look at Alya and Marinette.

Alya snorted, “Chloe thought burning Gabriel at the stake was good idea.”

“What?!!” Adrien looked at his oldest friend, shock on his face. “What?!!”

Chloe shrugged, “There’s no such thing as a bad idea. And It was a suggestion..”

“A good one,” Nino added. “And why does it sound like your mom has a hitman on speed dial?”

Chloe scoffed, “Hitman? Don’t be so crass. Fredro is former MI6. My mom used to work with him. He’s so good even Shield only had the slightest idea he exists.” She looked at her childhood friend with a softest expression anyone had ever seen on her face. “No one would ever know. If you want, he doesn’t even have to feel like a thing. Gabriel goes to sleep one night, and doesn’t wake up in the morning. It’ll look like a heart attack. Trust me, my mother only works with the best.”

“I have a lot of questions about your mother,” Alya said. “And what type of work she did with a former MI6 agent. But we’re gonna circle back to that. That fact is, Adrien, it’s up to you.”

“He’s your dad,” Marinette agreed. “Plus; its two to two. Me and Alya who don’t want to go to prison. And the two psychos who are more than willing to.”

Nino huffed and moved to stand next to Chloe, “Well, I’m feeling a little called out right now.”

“I told you we should’ve just handled this last night,” Chloe crossed her arms. “Just the two us. Ditch the Halos at home,” She motioned to Marinette, who didn’t like the idea of killing, and Alya, who didn’t want to make the choice with Adrien’s approval. “Bury that asshole alive.”

“Nah, they’d have known it was us,” Nino shook his head. “The second Gabriel doesn’t show up for something he’s supposed to, Marinette’s knocking on my door. I’m always a suspect. Gabriel nearly got killed by a falling headlight during a fashion show in New York, and Alya still gave me suspicious looks for days. Jerk’s literally on the other side of the world, and I’m still the primary suspect.”

Chloe looked contemplative, “…Didn’t you say you had a cousin in New York?”

“You a cop?” Nino asked. “No? Then stop asking so many questions.”

Adrien sighed, “I’m sorry, guys; we can’t kill my dad.”

Alya nodded firmly, “Then option two. We’re rip apart his sanity, destroy his reputation; tear apart everything that makes Gabriel Agreste, Gabriel Agreste until there’s nothing left except the miserable, sorry excuse for man and father, that he really is.”

“Oh but I’m inhumane?” Nino glared. “I was just gonna cut the breaks in Gabriel’s ride. Take him and Nathalie out at the same time. But, yeah, sure, breaking him to the point where he’s ripping out his own hair and locked away in a padded room is a noble cause as any.”

“And yet we’re the evil ones? Really?” Chloe rolled her eyes. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s gaslight the bitch.”

Adrien looked up at the ceiling just so freaking done with world. “What we do first?”

“Your dad’s a total control freak,” Alya said. “We got to make him feel like he’s losing control.”

Marinette looked over Adrien, “You’re gonna need tight leather pants, chapstick… And how do feel about piercings?”

“That they look like they hurt!” Adrien protested.

Chloe shoved his shoulder, “Beauty’s pain, woman up!”

“Why do I need chapstick?” Adrien whined.

“You can’t make out with Scott with dry lips!”

“Make out?” Adrien’s face turned bright red. “And who’s Scott?”

Nino shook his head, “You’re asking a lot of questions for someone who was against the Murder plan.”

It turned out Scott was Marinette’s cousin. His mom Melissa was Tom’s half-sister. He was handsome tall sixteen-year-old with olive brown skin, curly dark brown hair, and a crooked jaw. When Adrien met him he was wearing a leather jacket and big happy smile on his face. Adrien couldn’t stop looking at him.

He had come out as bisexual to his friends months ago but had only briefly experimented with Luka in the kissing department. Marinette had stumbled upon and quickly squeaked, turned red, and scampered off. Though Adrien did have to deal with her grumbles about having dips. To which Adrien replied, “You snooze, you lose.”

Scott was with a brown haired, pale skinned, gangly guy, with lots moles and a rather pretty redhead.

“Oh come on!” The pale guy complained when he saw Adrien. He looked at Scott. “What leprechaun did you sacrifice so that you got the fucking luck in the world? First the Disney princess Alison, then badass ‘she could stab me and I’d thank her’ Kira, and now Apollo’s freaking love child. No! It’s not fair.”

“Dude!” Scott complained. “Stiles, you’re dating Derek.”

Stiles suddenly looked really smug, “Yeah I know,” He smirked. “But this isn’t about us. This is about all the other Scotts and Stiles’ of the world who are still growing out of their loser stage. Give them a chance, bro.”

The redhead rolled her eyes, “Hi I’m Lydia!” She introduced to the young heroes. “The loud moron is Stiles. The moron who’s been drooling since he saw you is Scott.”

Scott reared back, and started to quick wipe his mouth, “Man, am I drooling?”

“A little,” Stiles shrugged. “I just thought it was moon thing, you know?”

Lydia ignored them, “I love your dress. It’s an MDC, yes? Up in coming designer, so chic!”

Marinette smiled, “Thanks. It took forever to design this.”

The redhead paused, “You designed?” She looked stunned for a moment before glaring at Scott. “Is your cousin MDC? Did you not tell me your cousin was MDC?”

It was a little hilarious how quickly Scott stepped back in fear of girl a foot shorter than him.

“About why we’re here,” Alya decided to intervene before blood was drawn. “Adrien, this is Scott. He’ll be your boyfriend for as long as he’s Paris.” She looked between Scott and Adrien and smirked. “And I have no idea who I should congratulate.”

“Me,” Scott let slip as he stared at Adrien in a daze.

Pictures of Adrien Agreste making out with Scott were everywhere an hour later. Adrien tweeted his response, “I’m Bisexual. So what? To quote Taylor Swift: You need to Calm down.”

The tweet was the first thing that made Gabriel realize something was very, very wrong.

Adrien went home and was met the angry expressions of his father and Nathalie. It was time for step to.

Before either could yell at him. “I quit,” Adrien said. “No more modeling. No more anything I don’t want to do. This is not up for debate. I’m not asking. You can’t make me. And if you try to take me out of school; my friends will public with all the evidence of all times you broke child labors. And if you think I’m bluffing, a copy of the evidence was sent to Nathalie’s email.” He gave them hard looks. “You will go to prison. Try me. It’s over,” Adrien told them but didn’t add that it was in more ways that one.

He walked passed them; only sparing a glance to see the stunned looks on their faces.

Adrien knew his father wouldn’t back down. This was only the beginning.

Unfortunately for Gabriel, he would be far too busy putting out the fires of his burning empire to have any time to rein back in his son.

During the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, an anonymous user *cough Alya* released videos of Gabriel verbally berating his employees for the smallest things, and firing them. It was not a good look.

The Gabriel brand took a hit. The first of many.

Over the next few weeks; Gabriel found himself forgetting things. First he found a box of imported silk that Nathalie swore he called her himself to have her order, and he saw the call logged in his phone but for the life of him he couldn’t remember making the call. Then it was scheduling meetings, ordering lunches or coffee that he couldn’t remember doing. Then he forgot where put things.

For example, one time Gabriel swore he took out his sketchbook from his briefcase and sat it on his desk and left for a meeting. However, when he returned, it wasn’t there. And He nearly went raving mad trying to find it. Only for Nathalie to take it out of his brief case.

The suit he had laid out for him the night before would be an entirely different color than the one he remembered putting out but then Nathalie would tell him that he ordered her himself to have it pressed.

It was little thing and big little just slightly out of place that started to grate on his nerves.

“The stress,” Nathalie told him. “It’s getting to you. Perhaps a vacation is in order”

“I’m fine,” He waved her off. “How is the plan to pull Adrien back in?

Nathalie frowned, “Nothing. He’s still going strong with his boyfriend, a young Scott McCall. Every time we try anything, a new video of Adrien, uh, at work, is released to the media. CPS and the police knocked on our doors three times already. Next time, I fear, they may take him. Amelie Graham de Vanily has been spotted in town, speaking with several lawyers. My sources say she will attempt for custody if CPS deems you unfit.”

“Nothing of the sort will happen,” Gabriel sneered. “I will not lose my son; not to my sister in law, and not to some American boy. Tell Adrien, we will have dinner together. I will talk some sense into him myself.”

That was his plan at least.

However, Gabriel found himself waking up in the morning, in his pajamas, utterly confused. “Nathalie, when did I go sleep?”

She looked confused, “Around midnight, sir. You had dinner with Adrien, and then had to rush off to take a call from Audrey.”

“I… had dinner with Adrien?” Gabriel asked. “Are you sure? I don’t remember. And I didn’t talk with Audrey, did i?”

Nathalie suddenly looked very concerned. “Sir, I was there. Adrien and you had a lovely conversation about his school and him going back to modeling. Adrien decline. You tried to protest but Audrey called. You two argued for an hour. I was there the entire time. You really don’t remember?”

No, Gabriel didn’t.

A week later, after a series of incidents. One of which apparently he had ordered Nathalie to take him to a salon and walked out with blue hair, but couldn’t remember when he woke up the next day. And swore he hadn’t.

“I’ve scheduled a meeting with doctor,” Nathalie told him. “We’re going to get you looked at, okay.”

It was the first of many, many doctor visits. Until one day Adrien came home and His aunt was there with Nathalie. They told him that his father went on a little “vacation” for a while.

It turned out the vacation was a very luxurious mental institution.

#ml fic #ml salt #gabriel agreste salt #marinette dupain cheng #adrien deserves better #adrien agreste #alya sugar #nino sugar

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padawanlost · 4 years ago

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Hey love your content.

Just wanted to ask you something. There's a claim I've seen coming up in fandom a few times now that Obi Wan knew Luke would bring his father back to the light and redeem him. That he even planned as much and this is supposedly evidenced by his not killing Vader in A New Hope and telling Luke to face Vader but not kill him in Return of the Jedi

I'm not convinced, but can you offer a more conclusive answer rebuttal or whatever.

I’ll be honest with you, this is the first time I’ve ever heard such theory so I’ve no idea where it came from or what arguments are being used to support it. All I can show you is the OT itself. The movies make pretty clear that Obi-wan and Yoda were preparing Luke to kill Darth Vader, and that Anakin’s return was something considered impossible until that point.

Because I don’t keep track of DisneySW, all the evidence I provided is strictly based on the original canon, as developed by George Lucas. So if Disney retconned something, I won’t be able to help :)

That being said, that theory doesn’t make much sense to me, sorry. For Anakin’s redemption to be part of some Obi-wan’s master plan, the character would have to have an impossible foresight into everyone’s involved past and future. For Obi-wan to be able to manipulate people and events to push Anakin’s into going back to light, he would first have to understand why Anakin fell in the first place. And if there’s one thing Episode III makes painfully obvious is that Obi-wan was nowhere near Coruscant when Anakin made his fatal decision, nor was he aware of the circumstances that led him to it. Everyone who knew what truly went down were either dead or his new worst enemies.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Obi-wan’s (alleged) ‘master plan’:

In Episode IV, we have Obi-wan openly lying to Luke about where he came from and dueling Vader (literary to the death). Not exactly the actions of a man who wants the son to save the father’s life.

In Episode V Obi-wan tells Luke not even Yoda had the power or skill required to see into the future of Han and Leia. Considering they were captured by one of the most even being in the galaxy, it wouldn’t be that hard to guess their future did not look pretty.

Luke: But, Han and Leia will die if I don't. Obi-Wan: You don't know that. Even Yoda cannot see their fate.

The idea here is tied to an important concept in SW: free will. The characters are fundamentally free to make their own choices. Anakin, despite being manipulated by Palpatine, ultimately made his own bed. This is true to all of them. Palpatine’s ‘master plan’ wasn’t about controlling people into doing what he wanted, it was using their own nature against them. He nudged them into the making poor decisions, he never stripped them of their agency.

Obi-Wan: It is you and your abilities the Emperor wants. That is why your friends are made to suffer. Luke: That's why I have to go. Obi-Wan: Luke. I don't want to lose you to the Emperor, the way I lost Vader. Luke: You won't. Yoda: Stopped, they must be. On this, all depends. Only a fully trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor. If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil. Obi-Wan: Patience. [...] Obi-Wan: If you choose to face Vader, you will do it alone. I cannot interfere.

Unless you see Obi-wan as a manipulative, cruel person who wants an untrained Luke to face two of the most powerful beings in the galaxy alone for his own personal, secret plan, I’d say the movie is pretty clear in showing us that neither Yoda nor Obi-wan want Luke to face Vader at that point. If the plan was to get Luke to going, wouldn’t have been easier to just let him go instead of creating an huge argument about it? Hell, they are willing throw Han and Leia under the bus to keep Luke from leaving. If that wasn’t shady enough now we are supposed to believe that was part of an even worst scheme involving pretty much everyone?

Yoda: Told you I did. Reckless, is he. Now... matters are worse. Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope. Yoda: No. There is another.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like using Luke to redeem Vader was their ultimate goal here.

There are some pretty big holes in that theory in terms of character development and narrative structure. I know everyone loves the idea of Vader and Obi-wan having some badass duel in ANH but the truth is Vader had spent the last 20 years training and killing pretty much all kinds of enemies imagine while Obi-wan mediated on Tatooine as grew shockingly old for his age.

As proven on Mustafar, raw power only takes you so far. Anakin has always been much, much more powerful than Obi-wan but in the end Obi-wan won because of skill, training and discipline. Unfortunately, for Obi-wan, he didn’t get much training in his isolation. He couldn’t have because he was in hiding! If that wasn’t enough, the EU confirms that Obi-wan sacrificed himself to allow Luke to scape. There was no secret plan.

Obi-Wan risked a glance through the hangar’s open doorway and saw four stormtroopers guarding the Falcon. He also sensed that Luke was nearby. Hoping to cause a distraction that would allow Luke to board the Falcon, he attacked Vader more vigorously. The noise of clashing lightsabers echoed into the hangar, attracting the stormtroopers’ attention. With his peripheral vision, Obi-Wan saw the stormtroopers leave their stations beside the Falcon and run toward him and Vader. He continued his attack on Vader, and several exchanges later, he sensed Luke’s movement and knew his plan had worked. He risked another glance into the hangar to see several figures racing for the Falcon’s landing ramp: the droids, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Luke, and — Leia! Obi-Wan hadn’t known that Princess Leia was on the battle station, but he recognized the girl in the white dress from the hologram that R2-D2 had displayed. Obi-Wan did not believe in luck or coincidences, and seeing Luke unwittingly reunited with his twin sister, he knew that it was not a tractor beam that had brought him to the battle station, but the will of the Force. His fleeting glance also registered that Luke had paused behind his friends. Luke stood a short distance from the landing ramp and was staring straight at him, gaping. Obi-Wan realized there was only one way Luke, Leia, and the others would escape the battle station alive. He smiled as he looked away from Luke, then closed his eyes and raised his lightsaber up before him. Darth Vader did not hesitate to strike. [Ryder Windham. The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Imo, this theory ruins the character of Obi-wan by making him pretty much omniscient and way more powerful and manipulative than he was in canon. Obi-wan wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t palpatine level of manipulative either. He had no ‘grand plan’ beyond using Luke to kill vader and save the galaxy in a desperate attempt to save the galaxy.

On top of that, let’s remember that Obi-wan had no hope left for Anakin. He did not believe Anakin could be redeemed after Mustafar. If you do not believe md, believe George Lucas.

After the first complete take, Lucas and McGregor discuss when he should say each line: “As you watch Anakin slide down, how about if you take one step forward,” Lucas Suggests. “For a moment, you think about it. Your first impulse is to save him – but then you realize you can’t”. As the takes multiply and the actors find their rhythm and emotions, the scene becomes more and more powerful. Christensen yells “I hate you!”. McGregor says, “I love you. But I will not help you”. Lucas explains that what Obi-wan’s really saying to Anakin is: “Your were our only hope and you blew it. Now we don’t have any hope”. Take. After Anakin implores Obi-wan to save him, George asks Ewan to say “I will not…” softer, almost to himself. Take. “After he burst into flames,” Lucas directs, “it’s as if you’re talking to a dead person. To a piece of toast”. He suggests, to drive home this point, that McGregor change the words in the script to the past tense, “I loved you.” The actor acquiesces, but points out that his subsequent line would have to change to “But I could not help you.” Lucas agrees, and Tenggren alters the script accordingly.[ The Making of ROTS]

Another thing that George is very clear about is that Luke is the one who redeems Anakin.

It really has to do with learning. Children teach you compassion. They teach you to love unconditionally. Anakin can’t be redeemed for all the pain and suffering he’s caused. He doesn’t right the wrongs, but he stops the horror. The end of the saga is simply Anakin saying, I care about this person [Luke], regardless of what it means to me. I will throw away everything that I have, everything that I’ve grown to love - primarily the Emperor - and throw away my life, to save this person. And I’m doing it because he has faith in me; he loves me despite all the horrible things I’ve done. I broke his mother’s heart, but he still cares about me, and I can’t let that die. Anakin is very different in the end. The thing of it is: the prophecy was right. Anakin was the chosen one, and he does bring balance to the Force. He takes the ounce of good still left in him and destroys the Emperor out of compassion for his son. [ GEORGE LUCAS - THE MAKING OF REVENGE OF THE SITH; PAGE 221.]

This brings us back about what I said earlier about narrative structure. This is Luke’s story. Obi-wan is the mentor, that’s it. It’s Luke’s actions, Luke’s choices. To suddenly reveal that everything happened was the result of Obi-wan’s plan would be narrative equivalent of a slap in the face. We watched Luke’s hero journey only to find out his journey was a lie and his choices weren’t really his own. How disappointing!

Not only that but redemption comes from within. Even if Obi-wan had planned for everything, Anakin would need to WANT to change. and knowing it was Luke’s selfless actions that drove Anakin into killing Palpatine, suddenly finding out an ulterior motive behind Luke’s actions (beyond the character’s own goodness) would diminish the weight of Anakin own choices.

But, again, Obi-wan couldn’t have planned for Anakin to return to the light because he didn’t even believe one could be redeemed after such evils.

Obi-Wan’s spirit was invisible but present when Luke arrived in the Endor system, where the Empire had constructed a new Death Star battle station. When Luke surrendered to Darth Vader on the Endor forest moon, he listened as Luke maintained his belief that a remnant of Anakin Skywalker remained within Vader and had not been entirely consumed by evil. Luke urged his father to let go of his hate. Vader said, “It is too late for me, son.” Then he signaled to two stormtroopers to escort Luke to a waiting shuttle that would carry them to the Death Star. As the stormtroopers moved up behind Luke, Vader added, “The Emperor will show you the true nature of the Force. He is your Master now.” Luke stared at Vader for a moment before he said, “Then my father is truly dead.” Obi-Wan’s spirit wished he had convinced Luke of this fact earlier. [Ryder Windham. The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Even as they fought, Obi-wan didn’t believe Luke could save Anakin. It was only after witnessing Palpatine’s demise he started to realize what it meant.

Obi-Wan knew that Vader would never help, and he felt almost overwhelmed by a sense of dread. Luke would soon be dead, and Vader would remain the Emperor’s puppet. In fact, Obi-Wan was so convinced of Vader’s nature that he was stunned by what happened next. Vader grabbed the Emperor and lifted him off his feet. [Ryder Windham. The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Had Obi-Wan’s spirit not witnessed Vader’s action, he never would have believed it. Vader, the same monster that Obi-Wan had left to die on Mustafar, had sacrificed himself to save his son. And suddenly Obi-Wan realized where he had failed. For unlike Luke, Obi-Wan had not only believed that Anakin was completely consumed by the dark side, but had actually refused to believe that any goodness could have remained within Vader. [Ryder Windham. The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Btw, in ROTJ, Obi-wan doesn’t try to talk Luke out of killing Vader. In fact, the oppositve of that happens:

Luke Skywalker: There is still good in him. Obi-Wan: He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil. Luke Skywalker: I can't do it, Ben. Obi-Wan: You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Darth Vader again. Luke Skywalker: I can't kill my own father. Obi-Wan: Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope.

Star Wars, at its core, has a very simple message about love and the power it has over people. in the end, the good guys won because they were good, not because they were being guided there by some powerful guy. In the end, it was love that won the war and saved the day. Everyone’s love. Luke’s love for Anakin, Anakin’s love for Luke, Han’s love for Leia, etc. Selfless love makes better people and good people do good things. It’s not about manipulating actions, people or even knowing everything. In fact, I’d say it’s the appositive.

Luke didn’t know he could save Vader, but he tried anyway and that’s what makes him a hero. It’s the not knowing but having faith in someone out of love, faith they can be better than they are. That’s what saves the world. It’s not knowing everything and still acting out love and compassion.

Anyway, I honestly don’t know where this idea of Obi-wan knowing Anakin’s future and planning for it came from. But I do know it’s not supported by the movies, the EU or George himself.

#ask #englishlady #what if #obi wan kenobi #sw meta #meta: fandom #txt #meta: anakin #meta: obi wan

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babygirl06301 · 4 years ago

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SPN S1 Review

I honestly have no idea if this post is about to be hella long or moderate, but I feel like a lot of my feelings got aired out when I was reviewing each individual episode, so I’m just gonna dump the rest of my thoughts that I’ve jotted down while watching this season here. This is basically gonna be me saying, “Wow, this was interesting,” or, “This is similar to/different from later seasons because…” These are all coming from notes on my computer, so they’re half-baked. Nothing too fancy or analytical, but I’ll be doing one of these for every season.

Random thoughts:

I don’t like the monster-of-the-week, episodic format that much, and a lot of those episodes this season felt average in quality for me. However, when you don’t have much else to focus on besides an arbitrary goal of the boys finding John to kill something they know nothing about, it isn’t so bad. Filler episodes suck more later because they’re often completely disconnected from the main story, which isn’t the case for most filler episodes in this season. Plus, the main stories later have more involved goals for the season than this one did, which made the filler episodes later more annoying. For example, if Sam and Dean want to hunt a Tulpa at a haunted house because John is off doing something somewhere, that’s fine. Kill the time. But if Sam and Dean really need to figure out a way to kill God, like, now before Chuck decimates every fleck of existence he’s ever created, maybe don’t waste my time with an episode about a wood nymph, you know? If the stakes are higher, then the quality episodes shouldn’t appear with less frequency. All I’m saying.

The tone, acting, and writing of these characters is so different. Like, when you know a show intimately, these kinds of differences between one season and the next are natural to you. It’s not like I wasn’t aware that the boys looking for their father feels a lot fucking different than the boys having a kid, but when you actually let yourself be aware of how much the show has changed, it’s kind of crazy. Like, if I just think about it offhand, I’m like, “Yeah, this is Supernatural.” But if I break the fourth wall a bit in my mind, it’s like, “Damn, I really did watch these characters and their actors mature for fifteen years, didn’t I?” Crazy.

There are so many episodes that end with the Impala driving down the road. Like, an aerial shot of it. And if the very last scene isn’t that, then it’s probably the scene right before the last scene. Until the last few episodes, that is.

I don’t know why I’ve written this down, but it’s easier to remember episode titles in season one because you can match it to the creature without having to remember the plot. Like, “Oh, the Wendigo episode.” I’ve also said in this same note that the folklore plots died out later on in the series, which is true.

A quote from my notes: “The show really does feel better with Cas, huh?” Look, I’m not gonna say that the S1 finale didn’t slap, because it did. However, I will say that Cas can brighten any episode up, so, had he been in the series from the beginning, the season finale may not have been the only S1 episode to slap. Not that there weren’t other episodes that were good, but you know. Also, this isn’t to say that Cas should’ve been around the whole time because him coming into Dean’s life when he did was exactly perfect.

They do this later, too, but a handful of episodes in the early seasons will be like, “Here’s a girl. Now, one of you Winchesters, go bond with her this instant.” And it’s weird? You don’t need to bring a girl in just to make googly eyes at one of the boys? You could just give her the story she was supposed to have but minus all the flirting?

So, Sam is meant to be the central character for the first five seasons, right? Yes, Dean is supposed to be his equal; yes, he went to Hell and had that whole storyline; yes, he’s Michael’s vessel, but it was always really about Sam, you know? Sam was the one who had the connection to the biggest, baddest thing imaginable (at the time), that being Lucifer. Sam was the one chosen for Lucifer. Sam was the one with the psychic abilities and the one to drink demon blood and the reason Dean sold his soul. Dean is obviously a main character with his own story, but Sam was meant to be the special one, yeah? But even so, Dean is such a beautifully complex character because he wasn’t special. You can see that, even in S1—that his specialness came from his lack of central focus. It’s almost like the plot was saying, “Sam,” and Dean went, “I’m gonna cause problems anyway,” and that’s awesome. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I just feel like Dean is the most interesting character in the entire series, and he wasn’t even the one S1 picked out as special.

Sam’s psychic abilities seemed a lot cooler when you didn’t know as much about them. Like, yes, Sam having those abilities for the purpose of housing Lucifer is cool and all, but it felt so much more mystical when it just seemed like something Sam could do for some reason. Not that that would’ve been a better payoff than what we get—it’d be stupid for the story to say, “I know a demon chose you to be the vessel of Lucifer himself, but the psychic thing you can do? Just a coincidence”—but it’s some food for thought.

John is barely fucking there even though his existence permeates the entire fucking season. I thought he was so much more present than he was in this series. They treated him like they treated Cas. “We said his name a few times, that’s good right?” No. No, it isn’t.

I hate the pattern the episodes have in S1. It goes: location name, bad thing happens in said location, Sam and Dean talk about said thing, they go to said location, they research and maybe flirt with some random girl, they fight, they drive away in the Impala. Like, nearly every episode is like that.

Without demons in the mix that often, the tone of S1 is really different when you compare it to every other season.

Dean is a lot more emotionally vulnerable in this season. I mean, he’s not sitting down with Sam to talk about his feelings all the time, but his emotions are definitely closer to the surface. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that he hasn’t had to emotionally shut down to protect Sam yet. Obviously, he represses things because of the way he was raised, and because he had to raise Sam; however, he still had John to lean on at this point. So, he hadn’t developed that habit of hiding his feelings and leaning on no one but himself yet as he did when he lost John. Because of that, he was able to be scared and tell Sam that he was afraid of losing his family and stuff like that. He becomes a way darker character in after John dies, and he more or less only leans fully on one other person for the rest of the series, albeit in a different way.

John saying in 1x21 that he wants Dean to have a home after Azazel is killed is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. For one, because John is aware that he deprived Dean of a real home, and by extension, is aware that Dean is damaged because of that. But also, it’s sad because Dean has lived 26 years of his life up until now without ever having a home he felt safe and loved in.

Dean running from a potential fight with Azazel in 1x22 is super interesting because he’s fighting to be a part of his family rather than simply fighting for them to be saved. Dean doesn’t want to die, isn’t willing to die. That’s something that definitely changes later. Big time.

Filler episode rate:

By my count, which admittedly might be wrong, there were 7 episodes that were primarily main story episodes this season and 15 monster-of-the-week/filler episodes.

Now, in the early seasons, it isn’t as easy to separate the filler from the main story because almost every episode will deal with character conflict that’s tied to what’s going on with the main story. However, I called it a filler if the primary plot was just a random hunt. For example, I called “Scarecrow” a filler because, even though Meg was introduced after Sam and Dean have a big fight, the main plot is hunting a god.

My bottom 5 episodes in order:

These next two sections are based on my ratings of these episodes from my reviews of every episode. I’ve just ordered them, with one being my least favorite/favorite episode this season.

5.) 1x07: Hook Man

4.) 1x03: Dead in the Water

3.) 1x02: Wendigo

2.) 1x13: Route 666

1.) 1x08: Bugs

My top 5 episodes in order:

5.) 1x14: Nightmare

4.) 1x06: Skin

3.) 1x15: The Benders

2.) 1x21: Salvation

1.) 1x22: Devil’s Trap

My top episodes for Sam:

This section and the next will just be me bringing up some good points of development for Sam and Dean throughout this season. I mean, of course they develop almost all the time, but these episodes are some of the best/most interesting. At least, in my opinion. If you want to read more about my reasons, check out my reviews. Just search for “spn s1 reviews” on my blog.

1x05: Bloody Mary - Sam’s psychic abilities got alluded to for the first time during this episode, but it also told us how much Sam blamed himself for Jessica’s death.

1x10: Asylum - Sam’s resentment for Dean is voiced, and though he’s under the influence of a ghost while he talks about Dean, some of it is supported by development in other episodes this season.

1x14: Nightmare - Sam bonds with Max over their shared abilities and pasts. We also get to see that Sam initially related his own trauma when growing up to Max’s, even though he acknowledged that Max had it worse at the end. It’s an interesting point of development that Sam saw his upbringing that way.

1x19: Provenance - Through Sarah being a part of this episode, Sam reveals that he sees himself as dangerous because the abilities he has has put the people he loves in danger in the past.

1x21: Salvation - Sam reveals that he’s willing to die, and by extension, risk his family to get the job of killing Azazel done.

1x22: Devil’s Trap - Sam has to choose between losing his family through getting his revenge or losing his chance at revenge to save his family.

My top episodes for Dean:

1x06: Skin - Dean’s abandonment issues are touched on for the first time.

1x09: Home - Dean shows fear when faced with returning home and dealing with the trauma of what he went through the night Mary died.

1x12: Faith - This is the first episode that we see a serious internal conflict in Dean about the worth of his life, which is interesting, because we can see in later episodes that he doesn’t want to die. However, his attitude in this episode seems to suggest that he doesn’t see his life as valuable.

1x18: Something Wicked - Honestly, this isn’t my favorite episode in the world, but it’s the first flashback episode of the series; in it, you’ll see the reason behind Dean’s feelings of responsibility regarding Sam.

1x21: Salvation - Dean insists that nobody will die to kill Azazel, showing that he wants to be a part of his family rather than just saving them.

1x22: Devil’s Trap - Dean shows a darker side of himself in an attempt to get John back, and his fears of being unneeded by his family are revealed as well as his fears of losing his family.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for this season’s review. I’ll rate this season in my series review that I’ll write once all this is over, but my impressions right now are that the first season of Supernatural was all right. It didn’t necessarily walk in a straight line, but it still felt like there was a definite destination. And, on top of that, the season ended in one of the most banger ways an SPN season has ever ended. The monster-of-the-week stuff has made most of the episodes this season ones I would probably not revisit, but S1 is definitely still special.

We’ll see if this changes later, but for now, my rating (and average, based on my ratings in my reviews) for S1 is ★★★☆☆.

#spn season reviews #spn s1 reviews #supernatural #spn #dean winchester #sam winchester #john winchester #mary winchester #jessica moore #castiel #azazel #meg masters #destiel #spn s1 #spn s15

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dismas-dumbass · 4 years ago

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Mom says that a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach.

-The Haunting of Hill House

Hackett Siblings wanted for some absolutely chaotic drama!

CW: suicide, ptsd, mental trauma, death, substance abuse

henlo, welcome to the ad where i lose my shit cause i’ve lost control of my life. anyway! i have the idea for a rather messed up group of siblings slightly based off the Haunting of Hill House show. The basics are that there’s a large house, there’s a large family, something reaaaallyy rreeaally bad happens to the family when the kids are young that have fucked them up for the rest of their lives, fun stuff like that! obviously the situation is more subtle/personal rather than what goes on in the show [i’ll try to be vague due to spoilers] but i think it’s still something that can be rather creepy~ pretty much 95% of the info presented in this version of the ad is rather flexible and flimsy and i definitely don’t mind working with y’all to make it something amazing!! also, no knowledge of the show is needed whatsoever but just be a tiny bit careful if you do wanna see it/don’t like being spoiled mostly just due to the fact that with the themes that will be in the ad the show will probably be discussed as well!

a loooootttt of the details aren’t set in stone btw! i’m pretty much outlining my thoughts and the general concept but things may/will change and things will be added/subtracted as more people contribute to the idea!

if you have any questions or even if this strikes your fancy you can contact me on discord [mine’s dismas#9766]! if there’s more than one of ya then we can get a group chat going so that way we can see what ideas we all have for this! i can’t wait to write with y’all! <3

Backstory

alright, so the gist is that the Hackett family used to live in a rather big and fancy house. why they were there is up in the air so here’s a few suggestions: A. like the show, their parents were fixing it up. now, whether that means they’re going to sell it right after or live in it is open since both angles are rather interesting! B. they inherited it. from who? who knows! could be a relative that one of the parents knew, could have been random. it’s just a harmless house right? it might be good for the family! C. they just moved there. weird house for a good price? why not! it might be fun!

whatever the reason, the siblings were in the house for some time. whether they’re natives to Dyrne or outsiders is open since all of the concepts can cover those possibilities easily! there’s no strict timeline yet as to how old they were when they were in that house but more than likely the youngest [twin] siblings were no younger than 6 so make of that what you will with the age ranges~ i would say that they were in that house for about a year or so? technically not too long in their lives but enough to cause lifelong damage?

their parents were good people. they had their flaws obviously and raising literally seven kids was an undertaking but they managed fine enough. mostly through the power of having the older siblings taking care of the younger. but even then they were loving parents. their father was a bit of a mess but well-meaning [think: one of the little siblings learned a swear word from an older one and their father tries to track them down, shouting throughout the house ‘get your ass in here now or else you’re grounded!’] and their mother was more organized yet didn’t hesitate to create a tiny bit of harmless chaos every once in a while. they loved each other, they loved their kids.

now, obviously, there’s the subject of the house itself. what’s the history behind it? that’s definitely left open due to the very reason why they’re there. but there’s probably something wrong with the house. physically? spiritually? mentally? whoever walks those halls won’t exactly be coming back out the same, that’s for sure. And that’s sort of what happened. the official story was that the Hackett family lived in the house for year, doing whatever, and then a fire broke out which caused the death of their mother. the rest of the family was able to escape and the father gave the testimony that it was an electrical fire -when investigated, he was proven innocent of any wrongdoing.

so what’s the actual story? It’s a bit of a mish mash of weird memories, mostly. it’s not really known whether the house is actually alive alive or if its history is just a horrible set of coincidences of bad stuff happening to people. the actual night was a blur to the siblings, all of them being ushered out of the house by their frantic father and herded into the car. when they asked where their mother was their father didn’t answer so they were just left crying after their missing mother. they didn’t even know that there was a fire even though maybe one of them said that they smelled smoke. they didn’t find out until one of the officers at the scene talked about it. for whatever reason, each and every one of them were silent on why they were brought out of the house by their father.

it’s still something they don’t know about.

to be fair, it was almost a partial relief to be out of the house. as i mentioned with the family they were held together well enough and were loving but things started to change when they moved to that house. slowly, surely, they started to encounter strange happenings, feel strange things, and started to view each other differently. what exactly happened to each family member is left open since they mostly don’t speak of their experiences except for the youngest. even their father, who may have experienced quite a lot, was tight-lipped about what happened to him, especially on the night of the fire. the experiences changed them, messed with them, and caused them to splinter and falter and break. after the death of their mother there was obviously quite a few years before everyone split up but they eventually did, going off to do their own things with their own scars hidden beneath their lies. some moved away, some stayed, but they still stayed in touch in some fashion. just not enough to be considered personal anymore.

what brought them all back together was the death of their father not too long ago. The poor man must have been consumed by guilt of some sort and took his own life, leaving his children behind to deal with the aftermath. they still never got any secrets from him nor any answers so all that’s there are feelings of confusion and loss. where the story begins is the revealed news that all the siblings are going to be living under one roof -in that house. the youngest daughter, for whatever reason, decided to purchase their childhood home back and has been in the process of restoring it. the reason why each sibling decides to go along with this is up in the air but the end result is the same: all seven siblings, plus any other family they may have, are now living in that house again.

Siblings

all the siblings except the one i’ll be playing are not set in stone! i’m going for a redheaded family sort of feel so the face claims i’ve put for each of them are something that i prefer but! tbh i’m super flexible and and at the end of the day it’s not a dealbreaker to choose someone else~ since i don’t wanna restrict folk’s fun over a fc choice! overall the sibling's interactions between each other are not that amicable -some may try to cooperate but old wounds come up and oftentimes a fight arises. they still have their weird traditions such as drawing straws if they need to do something and nobody wants to or they all fall silent at the same time [not often, obv., since they're mostly shouting over each other] that cause people on the outside to look at them strangely. at the end of the day, they can't escape the fact that they are siblings and are from the same disturbed family.

beliefs as well are varied and open! none say that they believe their youngest brother whenever he tries to convince them of what happened at the house though whether or not they believe that inside their heads is another matter entirely~

also! don’t feel as though you have to base your characters off any from the show! it’s just a nice start-off point and if you’re inspired but it’s definitely not a requirement whatsoever!

tbh a lot of the siblings aren’t fleshed out a lot & what happened to them in the house is also open so feel free to go wild!! i mean it; you can add as much as you want so that you can create a character that you’ll love to write for!

Eldest Son- 51. Toby Stephens.

being the eldest, he was the one to usually look after the younger children if their parents needed to do something. he built up a sort of protector complex where he has to make sure that he knows where all the other siblings are at all times. he fails constantly, of course, since he can’t even manage to have one of them listen to him. still, he feels responsible for all of his other siblings and takes it personally when he can’t get something done for them. he has his flaws, obviously, in that he tries to say that his way is the right way and can be as stubborn as an ox so despite his best intentions he clashes with some of the other siblings. this may be why none of them tend to listen to him.

Second Son- 50. Tony Curran.

He is one of the quieter siblings, preferring to be by himself when not needed. It isn’t that he dislikes his siblings; he just likes to be alone rather than among them. he’s kind and thoughtful so whenever one of the others needs help he’ll try to be there but besides that don’t count on him being somewhere on his own. Actually, it may be difficult to count on him in general because he loses track of time often and before he knows it he’s two hours late to moving some furniture for someone. this is probably the reason why he tends to be by himself -he doesn’t seem to grasp the passage of time as others have.

Eldest Daughter- 47. Sarah Rafferty.

she’s cruel. not absolutely cruel but cruel enough. she likes to poke and prod her siblings and see what sets them off. she thinks it’s funny and likes to observe the aftermath of her machinations. she likes to claim that she’s just bored but in reality she’s absolutely insecure herself and wants to bring others down to feel better about herself. don’t tell this to her face because she will absolutely try to turn it back on you and make you out to be the bad guy while she is the victim. also, don’t try to get revenge -she’ll just be more inclined to do something worse to you.

Second Daughter- 46. Amy Adams.

she’s neutral towards, well, everything. she kind of just exists and she doesn’t like that. not a lot of passion, not a lot of purpose. maybe she tries something daring once in a while to feel something but comes up short. it’s difficult for her to emotionally connect with others in a deep way and oftentimes she finds herself alone. she doesn’t like being alone, though, since being alone means she’ll be alone with her thoughts and she hates that. If she can even feel that properly, anyway. she’s not emotionless in the sense that she is sociopathic but her difficulty feeling things has caused her to have a sarcastic and thorny exterior towards anyone she meets, fueling her involuntary self-isolation.

Third Daughter- 43. Jessica Chastain. Reserved for spooky spice

she's the face of the family. the most energetic. the most chaotic. the one to threaten to break someone's kneecaps if they dare harm her siblings. she'll give a show-stopping smile and then tell you to eat shit afterwards. due to the minimal age difference she always had to watch the twins and therefore she is close to them, especially Thomas. some joke that she's actually Thomas' twin -she can sort of just sense whenever the youngest Hackett is in trouble. she's not happy about anything seeming messy, of course, so she spares no second to chastise anyone [including Thomas] about what they have done wrong. her status among stardom cannot afford any blemishes so catch her changing the subject whenever an interviewer brings up the fact that her younger brother is a drug addict. trust her, she knows. she knows all too well. and maybe her motivation for buying up the Hackett siblings' childhood house was to try to get Thomas some actual help after he failed out of rehab for the umpteenth time. their father's suicide may have just reinforced her decision to go forward with this.

Twin One- 42. Michael Fassbender.

maybe he’s one of the most normal. maybe’s he’s the most normal. maybe he has to be -his twin is an absolute trainwreck of a human being and his family is an equal amount of mess. maybe he’s just good at saving face and hiding the damage caused by the house [and maybe by his siblings]. some days, he sort of forgets that he’s a twin and that said twin is a drug addict. when they were young they were close though he would often play kind of cruel tricks on his younger twin such as locking the door to the basement after daring Thomas to go down the stairs, leaving him in a room alone with the lights off, and things like that. he grew out of it, matured, and tries to ignore the fact that he may or may not have been part of the reason why Thomas is the way he is now. he's too focused on being a professor at the college to fully see the cries of help his younger twin is showing.

Twin Two Thomas Hackett- 42. Michael Fassbender. Taken by Dismas.

so you’re asking me if i have a problem. i probably do. the youngest of the Hackett family; he’s probably one of the most heavily affected by the events at the house. for those familiar with the show think a combination of inspiration between Luke and Eleanor Crain, but also with even more issues maybe as well as none of the siblings being on his side whatsoever on anything. he had quite a few strange encounters ranging anywhere from encountering something in the basement when he was locked in one time by his twin to being trapped in a room with so much noise that he passed out for hours. now, figure, he’s a young kid when all of this happened [probably around 6 or so, could be a tiny bit older] so he doesn’t know how to deal with any of this. this really fucks him up. on top of that, whenever he told his family, none of them ever believed, further fueling the feeling of being unwanted. he was probably the closest one to their mother, being the youngest and the most vulnerable of the children, so he was absolutely devastated when she perished in the fire that fateful night. he blamed his father, thinking that he did something to her and tried to hide it with said fire. he never stopped believing in that, nor in the experiences he had in the house, and it pretty much ate at his soul. not only that but nobody still believed him so he always felt useless. he developed a bitter and angry attitude to try to hide this but the wounds were never able to be covered for long and so he eventually turned to drugs to soothe his pain. obviously, it never fully did so he just fell deeper into the rabbit hole. he dropped out of high school and started to do all sorts of jobs and favors in order to get his next fix, oftentimes winding up being arrested for petty crimes. he earned a bad reputation around town and the only reason why he didn’t face too much jail time is due to one of his siblings always bailing him out. wash, rinse, and repeat.

nowadays he goes between being sort of okay and having his own place to being absolutely drugged out of his mind and having to crash at a sibling’s place if they’re local -mostly his twin or the youngest daughter of the family. he’s failed out of rehab recently which may have been one of the reasons why the youngest daughter decided to purchase and fix up their childhood home; so that he can have a stable over his head for once and maybe recover from his habits. little does she know, or maybe care, that the house was the reason for his down spiral in the first place so he is not thrilled whatsoever to be stuck in the same building with all the same people who did not believe him. he hates it here.

Other Ideas

this is pretty much going to be only the possible family of the siblings woops but with the house being rather large there’s a ton of room for more than just the siblings themselves and more than likely some of the other siblings are going to be in some sort of relationship unlike Thomas. now, of course, maybe not all of the spouses/partners/children live in the house after all but then again they might! i have a few small ideas:

the loyal partner- this partner is loyal to the sibling they’re married to/with, always making sure they’re alright and making sure the sibling is well taken care of. maybe even spoil/indulge a little too much the whims of the sibling. they may seem a little more oblivious to the chaotic dynamics of the siblings and the strangeness of the house. they just think that everyone needs to get along and everything will be okay! except it’s never that easy and they probably just look foolish for suggesting that.

the angry partner- they hate it in the house. all the fighting and the tension and the drama; they think it’s a bunch of bullshit. they especially think all the spooky~ stuff that apparently happened in the house is all bullshit too and won’t hesitate to call anyone out if the supernatural is even entertained. they just want to live their life in relative peace with the sibling they’re with

the mediator partner- they may not necessarily believe in the unbelievable -in fact, their career hinges on finding out why people process stuff the way they do [ex. a therapist or psychologist]- but they still try to see all angles. they’re typically the one trying to quell the arguments between siblings and trying to see why the siblings feel the way they do about things (and about each other). they’re curious, however, about the house itself and may start poking around in the wrong places to try to discover the truth.

[one tiny suggestion! perhaps the mediator partner is married to Thomas’ twin brother and they have a kid with the face claim of Reece King? ;^; he has slightly similar facial features to Michael Fassbender + i think it’d be sweet if the partner tries to see why Thomas is fucked up the way he is and maybe even begins to sympathize/believe him after they start to figure stuff out?]

Plots

alright! so the obvious plots are going to be the interactions between siblings~ their personalities may give a hint to who they do or don’t get along with but in all honesty they all have bad enough blood with each other to have issues one way or another. so! drama! one of those ‘if you leave them in a room for long enough they’ll find something to fight about’ type of things! they do love each other -really, they do- but their experiences in the house changed them forever and there’s no gaining that back. they can only move forward.

they’re already living in the house for a short period of time [maaaybbe a month? a few weeks?] so they’re all settled in and dealing with the presence of each other and it’s not going exactly swimmingly for obvious reasons. maybe some try to cooperate with each other? others not so much. there’s plenty of fighting and slamming doors and shouting and leaving the area/the house to cool off. on more than one occasion Thomas has already stated that he’s leaving for good and going out on his own. he never follows through with the threat -he can’t. he’s as tied to the house as everyone else is and now he can’t escape. but you get the gist. it’s going to take a while for them to see eye to eye with each other. if they ever do, anyway.

future plots to explore are, of course, up in the air but they can deal with the siblings learning more about each other, learning more about their parents, and learning more about the house. and, of course, learning more about their town as well! Whether things start to get better or if they down spiral even further is going to be rather interesting to see~

for initial threads it could be fun [in a morbid sense] to do a past one where they’re attending their father’s funeral since that was kind of actually a shitshow. imagine all the siblings, with their awful traits, having to deal with the death of their parent and just in terrible pain. so, what else to do than to cause issues with each other and create quite a few commotions? obv. when the sibling’s personalities are solidified we can discuss this further! overall the first types of posts will be their interactions with the site plots, the town itself, and between them when they’re at the house so there’s plenty of room for drama!

#thirdeyerp #wanted ad~#wanted to do this before the dev stuff woops #have an absolute disaster of a family #pls love them kthxbaaaiii

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marlahey · 4 years ago

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@rochey1010 going back and forth in long-winded replies seems like unnecessary effort for both of us so I hope you don’t mind another text post as I fully articulate my thoughts. as I’ve said before, you’re obviously entitled to your own opinions, but you’ve now seemed to make a lot of assumptions about me a fan/viewer/general consumer of media that I feel like I should clear up. you’ve also made some further claims about the show I’d like to pick up for discussion. If you want to speak further please feel free to respond but of course don’t feel obligated. This’ll be the last public post/reply I make and we can go back to ignoring each other in the tags!

Well i love Eliott/Lola's friendship and i have an upcoming post on that as i said in other posts. I love lola too but i'm sorry i didn't just start watching this show because lola was invented and there's a w/w love story. I've been here for seasons and carried over from OG. I have investment in eliott for personal reasons (mental health) and elu because duh. Their stories have been long running too as i said. And you don't have to be a main to set up a plot/arc. The things between them have been set up since S3 with minute par minute talk, S4 and Idriss, S5 and the cheating perspective, and now S6 and Lola friendship. That is intentional. Do you think it's a coincidence that Lucas talked about pansexuality and eliott having more choice in S5 and suddenly Eliott has a friendship with a girl. That lucas abandonment issues haven't been resolved and are now coming to the forefront because of this friendship? That max has stated that Eliott feels he can save someone from a darkness he himself went through, that eliott himself was sorta saved from the shadows by Lucas. That neils/david specifically stated that this character can help someone even though he has bipolar disorder. That with Eliott's arc there is a focus on his SKAM. That we now have new info about it serving the season. If you understand writing. These things aren't put there for fun. They are there to imply/hint/foreshadow events actions to come. That there is a character now on the show with Lola basically female eliott. Do you think these are all coincidences. This plot we are seeing has slowly been set up not just since S3 but actually heavily developed starting in S5. And that if you now go back and watch S5 you see our main players being set up for this plot e.g dasille relationship, daphne's ED, Eliott and his individuality, Elu trust/insecurity issues, Eliott's art and it tying into seasonal themes, Lola herself and her outlier persona etc. I don't know whether you are but there are many fans have migrated over from espana just for this season. But you have to understand there is a long term fanbase here that love Eliott, are invested in him and have been waiting for more of his insight. We are now getting that and we will talk about him. He's a hugely popular character as is Lucas and their love. I love both and i will talk about both. Sometimes i won't talk much About lola and talk more about eliott, sometimes i'll connect them and discuss their relationship, sometimes i'll make a post about just about lola, daphne, tiff, benny, movie references as i have. But this is my blog and i'll post what i want to post. You don't have to read any of this stuff. The tag is a big place, just scroll by. As for the theories- just theories. And in my theories i believe these characters are going to make mistakes, fail and grow e.g. lola self Destructing again but being her own hero by the end, eliott and lola being dragged down like lucas said but showing the strength of their friendship by the end, lucas being proven right but also proven wrong by the end. Like i said specific dialogue now being used is not just there to fill the script e.g. "and i have lucas. I can't lose this" "i think one of you may bring the other down" and eliott is heading for a rock bottom as is lola. Again just my thoughts. 👍

While I find it odd that you seem to be gatekeeping the skam france fan community, to be clear I have seen the entirety of three iterations: og, france, and austin. I believe I started OG during s2 or 3, and have seen Fr and Aus from the beginning. I’m not as interested in other versions as I’m very familiar with the plots/characters by now. I’m partial to france as a bilingual canadian as it’s nice to exercise that part of my brain; I’ve also studied/lived there briefly and have some very close friends from france so that amplifies my enjoyment. I’m also bisexual, so I also find this ‘only here for lola + w/w’ when you yourself admit to being emotionally invested in the show’s most dominant queer ship dichotomy very awkward. to be honest, I think many skam’s fandoms tend to fixate on the esak ship and their season. friends have seen other iterations and confirmed this for me. it happened with elu as expected so I was really unsurprised when maya was introduced and fandom immediately put a lot of their investment into shipping two characters of the same gender. nearly every fandom in general does this: teen wolf, glee, supernatural to name a few – even harry potter. I’m not really a fan of the romantic subplot in lola’s season. she is not elliot 2.0 for so many reasons; she’s her own person and she doesn’t need a romantic partner to be a compelling character with a compelling story. that being said, I liked elu’s season. I particularly love maxence’s elliot; he’s my favourite even. I was thrilled to see him onscreen however briefly after S3 every time he appeared. now he’s finally his own person outside of his relationship with lucas and I couldn’t be more pleased to see that. I’m not sure how idriss and elliot reconnecting after the attempted kiss falling out plays into lucas’ insecurity or their relationship. it’s perhaps a reminder of his bipolar disorder or the fact that he clearly had friends/relationships before lucas, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant to the season at hand. the biphobia discussion with arthur preceeding lola’s introduction as the new main is not proof that lucas’ supposed abandonment issues are founded in any way, or that he even still has them when we meet her. by insisting on it, you’re perpetuating the harmful idea that any bi or pan person will be tempted to cheat or leave (physically or emotionally) when presented with literally any person whose gender opposes their current partner. this is something that skam fr had literally left unaddressed for so long even with representation in alexia and elliot, and I was so thrilled when it finally came up. it’s very uncomfortable that you’re now using that important conversation as apparent proof that lucas will be abandoned or betrayed, inadvertently or not, by his pansexual boyfriend. I know that daphné was meant to be s6′s main and skam fr wasn’t given the rights by og’s creator. so it makes sense that she/her relationship/struggles feature heavily in her sister’s season. I’m personally thrilled cause I love her and lula is a wonderful actress. that being said, not everything is foreshadowing. not every single interaction or conversation will return to further plot or character. sometimes storylines are just resolved or dropped and awareness raised is just awareness raised. sometimes it’s wonderful and sometimes less so. I understand writing. I’m saying this as a literal former english teacher (ignoring capitalization for aesthetic lol) and assistant in film/tv post-production with an MA in media studies. “Lucas, you have nothing to worry about, it’s not like that between us.” “I know, he explained it to me.” I’m not sure how much clearer the literal show can be about this issue. spoiler or not, it’s been made abundantly clear that lola and elliot are not romantically involved. even more importantly and I’ve said this on my blog before, you’re allowed to have intimacy with someone without forcing it into a defined familial or romantic relationship. it doesn’t mean that someone’s partner should necessarily feel threatened or abandoned and says a lot more about that person’s insecurity than either individual in the friendship. we’ve also already discussed how much I dislike this turn for lucas’ character as elliot’s apparent MH saviour so it’s not worth repeating again. as for elliot saving lola, well he literally did that already. I’m not sure what you mean by lucas ‘being proven right and proven wrong’ by the end, but you’re obviously adamant that something will happen. I have also seen maxence’s interview a few times. I’ll not argue with the ‘lucas saved elliot from that shadow’ because it literally came from the actor’s mouth, but maxence doesn’t say he can save anyone else from their struggles, but help them and I think that’s a really important distinction. this whole saving idea doesn’t seem healthy at all, especially as lola and elliot grapple with their mental health. it seems like people want to see a ‘rock bottom’ (whatever that means) for them both and it makes me a little uncomfortable. addiction and MH struggles should not have to reach a breaking point in order to be considered resolved or cathartic; they don’t even have to be resolved, because they’re not a plot device. they’re a reality for so many people. the show does a good job of not romanticizing them but some of the things I see in the tag are just... yikes. as for his ‘dark’ side and the less than happy elu moments, I’d argue that maxence may have meant literally punching out what’s his face to save lola and the subsequent argument(s) with lucas, since that interview came out just before ep 4. but there’s still several eps to go so I could be totally wrong. who knows. it’s your right to theorize on your own blog of course and it’s not my intention to be mean. I’m just trying to further the discourse in a respectful way. I do feel that you may put a little too much stock in what’s literally said/seen and assuming a lot in the unseen gaps, rather than considering a broader context. to wrap up though, lucas is free to have this (however hurtful) fear, just as you’re free to believe it’ll for sure come to pass. I dread seeing either lola or elliot spiral out, but as 2020 has taught me, I very rarely get what I want lol. thank you @cakepleasee for helping me sort out my thoughts!

#skam france #skam fr #elu #lola lecomte #elliot demaury #whew this is a whole ass novel

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jungle321jungle · 4 years ago

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Blood Letters

Writing letters which are not meant to be sent can be therapeutic, at least that is what people claim. Logan thinks it is to an extent, but he finds the subject matter of the letters to be of far more consequence.

Or, Logan dreams about murder.

Taglist: @hells-missing-a-goat @angels-and-dreams @ollyollyoxinfree @gattonero17 @chumo-cookie @dreaming-always @anxiety-ismy-name @mrbubbajones @janustheliar @hogwarts-my-love

Ao3 - Masterlist

Note: Lots of blood and death mention things of all sorts

~~~~

Blood Letters

Dear Janus,

I am writing this letter which is addressed to you in order to sort out my own thoughts. Patton recommended this method to me in order to “get out my feelings in a positive way”. He claims that writing a letter addressed to myself or no one at all with all my thoughts is nearly on par with saying them aloud. Roman agreed and then recommended burning the letters upon completion to get rid of any trace of my problems. However, Patton suggests I keep them. I am still not sure which I will do (I had also asked Remus who only suggested I set myself ablaze), so I will decide upon finishing. Oh, and before I go further, I do apologize for how disjointed this letter will be. I am told that the less structured and closer to a stream of consciousness I am, the better. This has yet to be proven.

Now, I have chosen to address this letter to your Janus rather than myself, given part of my issues seem to stem from you. I assure you, that I am not blaming you in any regard. I am entirely to blame for my own compulsions, and I accept that. But I hope that by addressing the concerns between us that lie solely in my mind I can expel them entirely. Quite frankly I do not expect much from this, intrusive thoughts are not such a simple concept after all- but I have not told my friends the ongoings of my mind. I do not wish to concern them, nor do I wish to seek professional help for multiple reasons. For one I do not have the time nor money, I spend much of time working to pay for my grandmother’s nursing home bills, also I-

It occurs to me that I have been prattling on about my reasons for writing the letter as opposed to writing how I feel about you, so I shall commence doing so.

Given this letter is not intended to be read I have no need to sugar coat my words.

I am in love with you Janus, and more than that- I want to see you die.

I am not partial to the method of your death. I have had dreams where you suffocate, drown, bleed out, and more- all of which were as spectacular as the last. In the first dream you and I had been walking down the street with our friends. The group hadn’t been talking about anything of true value to my knowledge, but I do recall the way it ended. You and I had fallen to the back of the group, walking in silence. And I did not see why it was that you lingered when we crossed the street- but I did turn to see you take flight once the car struck you. For a moment I was filled with nothing but fear. My heart was racing, and despite being a dream I was struggling to breathe. Upon waking I assumed my reaction was because I saw someone die. But after the second dream where I watched you bleed out and suffocate after your throat was slit, I understood that my heart racing wasn’t due to fear, it was something closer to intrigue. And from there my feelings have only grown more intense.

Whenever I see you Janus- or dream of you- I fall for you even more.

I am not sure what else I can say in this letter, so I suppose I shall end it here. I am still unsure what I will do with this short letter, but I suppose it is not that important.

Yours,

Logan

~~~~

Dear Janus,

I hadn’t intended to write you a letter again.

After I wrote (and kept) the first, I found the dreams and urges decreased greatly. And I was happy to feel a “normal” love for you, but now weeks later I found they have returned in full force and I am not entirely sure why they have. Perhaps it was on account of me spending more time with you. I greatly enjoyed our trip to the mall. I am not one to believe in fate, but I think it is a wonderful coincidence that we both happened to run into each other. And I think it speaks yards that you suggested we shop together. As we did, I found myself staring at your face so often when you weren’t looking. I think I stared so much that if I held any artistic talent I think I could sketch every ridge of your face and its scars with accuracy, and still not hold a candle to your general beauty.

I wish I had artistic talent, if I did I’d render the versions of you I see only in my mind.

Your eyes wide and terrified. Maybe with burst blood vessels. I can’t help but wonder what you’d look like with your scars open. So many times I have wanted to ask you how you got them- I want you to explain to me every detail. Well enough that I can picture it myself and savor every moment. But I know if I ask I would push you away. And that’s the one thing I can’t do. I won’t jeopardize my chance at seeing you. Because at this point I’m not sure how well I’ll fair without you.

Yours,

Logan

~~~~

Dear Janus,

The dreams are back.

This time you fell from a building. Your limbs bent at strange angles with a vacant yet shocked looked in your eyes. It was beautiful Janus. More so than your face alive.

I can’t explain the beauty I see that no one else ever can. But I wish I could.

Yours,

Logan.

~~~~

Janus,

It’s the middle of the night. 3:41 am according to the clock on my nightstand.

You were dead again. That’s nothing new. What was new however, is that this time I was the one who killed you.

I’m not even sure how- or why.

I’m still tired yet running on adrenaline, I can’t make sense of my own thoughts. All I know is that I saw you lying in a pool of your own blood, and I was holding the knife.

I need to get some air.

Logan

~~~~

Janus,

It’s only been a week. And I killed you again.

I used a baseball bat. I watched your body lurch with each strike.

I continued even after I knew you were dead, because each time I hit you it seemed the blood sprayed about you like a frame of red. With your beauty pictured in its center.

I wonder what it will be next time.

Logan

~~~~

Janus,

I’ve never told you that I’ve been to prison, have I?

It was years ago, not long after I came out, my father had kicked me out and my grandmother took me in. She had been waiting for me outside of my job, and when I exited the building I saw two men look at me before they ran off. They stole her purse. She was injured and she told me not to go after them, so I didn’t at the time. But I tracked them down. I only did eighteen months for two counts of assault. I probably would have done more had I not caught them they were attacking some other old woman. It was only eighteen months, plus time in jail awaiting sentencing, but it’s not something I wish to repeat. I don't want to lose my freedom.

Just as I don’t want to lose you.

So why do I dream of your death- of your murder?

Why is it that killing you is both what I want and what I fear most?

Logan

~~~~

Janus,

You gave me a hug today when the group all said goodbye.

And when walking back to my car, Virgil teased me for liking you. I wasn’t aware that anyone knew that I cared for you. He told me to ask you out, but I’m not sure I deserve that much. But when I told him so he didn’t understand. I made no effort to explain because I can’t expect him to.

I can’t expect anyone to understand the fact that when you hugged me, I had to ensure my hands went around your torso and not your neck.

Logan

~~~~

Janus,

In my dreams your blood has texture.

It is thicker than water, but I can’t quite identify what it’s viscosity reminds me of. But there are also small bits to it. Bits is the wrong phrasing. I am not sure what the proper word is, perhaps chunks? No that seems wrong as well. Whatever the word, I believe it is a result of your tissue mixing with the blood. This is only conjecture though, the dreams never last long enough for me to figure it out.

One thing I do I know however, is how white your bones look in contrast with the blood. They appear like porcelain- no like beautiful white pearls. They’re luxurious, and priceless.

Logan

~~~~

Janus,

I should leave.

I should go elsewhere. Somewhere far away where you are not within my reach.

But I shouldn’t leave my grandmother. I go visit her every other week. She looks forward to those visits.

Do I have to pick between the two I love?

How does a person do that? No. That’s not the right question. The right question is why am I leaning towards you?

Logan

~~~~

#10

Janus,

I don’t know how far I should go. Where is far enough that I don’t see you when I close my eyes? Because no matter what you’d always be a distance away. And if I travel somewhere there is always the risk that I will take the journey back here.

Where is far enough?

Right now I can only think of one place where I cannot hurt you, but while I know I could take your life, I am too much of a coward to take my own.

Logan

~~~~

#11

Janus,

You seemed annoyed when I cancelled our plans leaving you to see the movie with Remus alone. But I don’t know if I could sit for two hours beside you, without wanting the light in your eyes to dim. I couldn’t go. Not when I’ve already found a new job and a new place to stay.

I’m going to leave for your safety. So I can’t jeopardize it now.

I hope you enjoyed the film.

Logan.

~~~~

#12

Janus,

I leave today. I have not told anyone where I am going. And I’m sure my sudden disappearance will come as a shock to our friends, but that is the least of all evils.

It took months, and it took me till today- the day I am leaving- but I have finally decided what to do with all these letters. I can only hope it is the right choice.

I am sorry Janus.

I am sure those are words you do not wish to hear- or read. But they are true. I am sorry, who I am and whom I’ve become. And at this point it might sound strange, but even so I wish you happiness and life. I wish you life.

Perhaps more than I wish for you death.

Logan.

~~~~

“You have a package.”

“Who from?”

“I dunno.”

He gave a frown as he took the package. It was a small box, a bit smaller than a shoe box and in neat handwriting on top was his name and address but the name on the return address had been rendered unreadable. Maybe something had spilled and scratched it in transport. He stood from his seat, and moved to the kitchen setting the box on the table before retrieving a knife to open the box. When he had, he found envelopes inside- each one bearing his name and a number on the front.

“Did someone send you a box of letters?”

“I’m as confused as you are, Virgil.” He dumped them out, his eyes scanning until he found the envelope marked number one. The letter inside thankfully didn’t seem long, but it held the same neat scrawl. “Dear Janus, I am writing this letter which is addressed to you in order to sort out my own thoughts...” he trailed off his eyes scanning the lines in confusion- before he froze. He read it once. Twice. Three times, before Virgil had snatched it from his hands.

Janus could hear his heartbeat drumming in his ears, and he felt bile rise in his throat- but even so he reached for number two.

“It’s sick,” Virgil said finally, throwing the last one down the table.

Janus didn’t reply as he reached for the closest one- number seven- but Virgil put a hand on it stopping him.

“Don't. Reading them once was bad enough.”

Janus moved his hand away as his eyes drifted to the ceiling above him- but on the whiteness of it he could only see the words he had read. He closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. But now he could almost hear Logan’s voice.

“I used a baseball bat... Your blood has texture... A frame of red.”

“I know we joked that Logan left without a word because he got into trouble but...” Janus trailed off as he took a deep shuddering breath, and when he spoke again his voice was barely above a whisper. “He’s going to come back, isn’t he?”

Virgil didn’t reply, but Janus could hear as he moved about the room before he finally spoke. “...I’m calling the police.”

“And tell them what?” He demanded, looking back to Virgil. “Tell then that someone I thought was my friend actually dreams of killing me? To tell them that he’s now vanished into thin air? He could be anywhere Vee. Anywhere!”

Virgil didn’t reply but he turned so Janus couldn’t see his face. “I’m calling.” He didn’t bother to say anything more, he only took a step out of the room as he dialed, leaving Janus alone.

Alone with the letters.

Alone with his thoughts.

Alone with his fears.

And alone with the hope that Logan would never come back.

#jaz's oneshots #blood #gore #tw blood #tw gore #murder #death #character death #tw death #tw character death #love letters #pining #loceit #one sided attraction #unrequited romance #unrequited pining #unrequited crush #tw suicide #suicide mentions

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aeyolia · 4 years ago

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Chapter 9 - Erik

“But why is her name Pearl?!” Erik exclaimed.

“Because all of them are named after gems. We've been through this.” she laughed, shaking her head at him. They were five episodes in and that was the thing he couldn’t let go of.

“But that's the thing a pearl isn't a gem! A pearl is a composite of Aragonite and conchiolin. Gems are solely minerals with no organic compounds.” he sighed, pushing a hand through his hair. The door rang, catching his attention. Most likely, the pizza they ordered not to long ago.

“You are putting too much thought into this.” She sat up and went to answer the door. He watched as she walked away, a small smile playing on his lips. He knew he was being ridiculous, but he needed to zero in on something other than the fact he was in nothing but boxers and a robe, alone with Anya. She had insisted on throwing his clothes in the dryer and now was regretting telling her okay. Well half way regretting. He couldn’t say he didn’t enjoy the pink that had found her cheeks when she saw him come back out barely dressed. His phone buzzed for about the tenth time and he decided to finally glance at it. They were mostly from Jess and the team wondering where he was. Another text sent at that moment.

Tatertot: Is Anya okay? Rumors are spreading like wildfire about her right now. And your coach is pissed.

Golden Boy: She's fine. How did you know I was with her? Was it Landon?

Tatertot: Let's see if X = Rumor about Anya losing it + Erik getting the urge to skip (both of them missing)

Tatertot: X= Erik is with Anya.

Golden Boy: Must you be so annoying?

“Is everything alright?” Anya asked walking back in the room, pizza in hand. Erik shut the ringer of the phone off and placed it back in the pocket of the robe.

“Yeah. Just my teammates looking for me.” he lied. He didn't want to but he figured it be best if she didn't know there were rumors spreading about her. He wanted to protect her from that. “Apparently, me skipping was a bigger deal than I realized.” he shrugged moving over so she'd fit easily next to him. She climbed up on the couch, sitting on top of crossed legs.

“People don't like change. It's a proven fact. Skipping a class is one thing but the entire day? Your fan club is probably losing its mind.” she teased him.

“My fan club?” Erik asked opening the box up and taking out a slice and handing it to her.

“Oh please, don't act like you don't know. I've been there two days and I know.”

“Know what? I'm genuinely lost here Sterling.” he pushed, feigning obliviousness.

“Come on, you are way too smart to be this dense. I KNOW you know how much everyone loves you. Everyone thinks you're attractive, talented, smart, the whole package.” she spoke taking a bite of her own slice. Erik watched her and she scrunched her eyebrows together. “What?”

“So...everyone thinks that huh? Even you? ” he asked trying to hold back a grin. She rolled her eyes in response, but the flushing of her face gave her away. “Well I'm not all that golden you know.”

“Oh yeah? Name one thing.” she said pausing the show and turning to face him.

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.” he offered.

“Deal. You first though.” she egged on.

“Okay. You want to know what I'm actually really bad at?” he said putting the pizza down. “Romance.”

“Way to tell the truth.” Anya rolled her eyes.

“I’m serious!” Erik played with the arm of the sofa, as he spoke, “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had girls interested. Hell, even guys. I've taken a few out here and there for like dances, formals...prom was a must.”

“You were Prom King weren't you?” She interrupted, trying not to smile.

“NOT the point right now” he said rolling his eyes.

“That’s not a no.” She giggled making the teasing more endearing than annoying. He smiled.

“Really though. I just never met that person you know? And I didn't want to just lead anyone on. My life is busy. I never have any idea what I'm doing. People call me the Golden Boy. The All-American Dream. But it doesn't come without work. I barely have free time. I didn't want to ask someone to deal with that without really knowing that I liked them. Without knowing it be worth it.” he stopped talking, waiting for her reaction.

“There's nothing wrong with waiting until you find the right person.” Anya replied, taking his hand. “You put the care of others before yourself. You sacrifice yourself to live up to people's expectations. So you're not perfect? Doesn't make you any less Golden. In fact, it makes you a diamond.”

“Is this about to be a Steven Universe pun?”

“No! I'm being serious. Diamonds form after extreme amounts of pressure. And real, raw Dqiamonds have flaws. And yet we still think they are beautiful.” she explained. “See? I know a bit about geology too.”

“I never doubted it for a second.” he smiled back. “So, what about you? Is there a guy waiting for you back in New York?”

“Well, no. I had a boyfriend once but, we broke up pretty quick. Most people steer cleared from me. ” she sighed softly. Now she was the one who was nervously playing with the couch.

“How come?” Erik asked, turning to give her his full attention.

“Well, when I was younger, weird things used to just happen to me all the time. I'd wake up at the docks every morning. My dad even used to lock my bedroom door but it didn't matter. And I couldn't ever tell them how I'd end up there because I'd be sleeping. And then things of coincidence always happened around me. Pipes bursting or windows shattering. Eventually, people just avoided me. Not that I could blame them. Then one day it all just. Stopped. I thought it was finally over. I could be normal. But then I moved here and it’s starting again.”

“And that's why you freaked about the dreams.” he said and she nodded solemnly. “You were worried we’d reject you too.”

“I’m sorry I don’t mean to be so this.” she began to tear up, and Erik’s heart crumbled in his chest. No wonder she reacted the way she did. Something like that could be traumatic for anyone.

“Hey, no tears.” He said, wiping one stray drop one from her cheek. “I know what it was like to feel alone, we all do. Even with my family, as close as we are, I always felt like I'm still catching up. Like I must work ten times harder just to fit their perfect family image. Xander's basically a single parent to his siblings. His parents work their asses off all day and night. And Jess well...she's an orphan. A victim of a failed system. We all have felt alone. We all have our demons. That's why we're so close. The worst things about our lives, they are what keep us together. Being a little different won't push us away Anya.” Erik stroked her face lightly with his thumb. “We’re your friends.”

“You've only known me two days Erik.” she said eyes closed, face leaning into his hand.

“Yeah, but it feels like longer doesn't it?”

Anya nodded and opened her eyes. Erik swore his heart skipped the moment their eyes locked. A thick air of tension now laid between what once was an innocent conversation. God, he wanted to kiss her. Correction. Every nerve in his body was fighting the urge to kiss her.

“Anya...” he spoke her name softly, one thumb rubbing across her cheek.

“Yes?” she answered, and his eyes flickered to her lips and then back to her eyes. Those damn aquamarine eyes stole every piece of reasoning and logic he had.

“Would it be okay, if I-.” He stopped talking when she nodded, moving closer to him. Their mouths connected and Sparks flew in every direction, and the world disappeared around them, along with all of their worries, thei troubles and their problems. She made him feel like none of that mattered. It was a small yet warm kiss. Erick honestly never knew a kiss so innocent could be so intimate and electrifying. Their lips were moving in perfect sync, his hands feeling her waist. He pulled her closer, the kiss deeper, more passionate.

He intended to just kiss her once, take things slow. But when she didn't move away, the kiss grew hungrier, desperate. She moved to straddle him fingers running down his spine, pulling him closer until there was no space left between them and she could feel the beating of his heart against her chest. Erik's fingers ran through her hair, causing it to cascade down around her shoulders.

God she was beautiful.

He wanted to slow down, but he couldn’t. No girl ever, would ever, take his breath away that she had. It was petrifying as it was mesmerizing.

The doorbell rang, snapping them out of their passion infused state. They separated their lips, foreheads pressed together as their chests rose and fell, lungs begging for oxygen. The bell rang again.

“I should get that.” she finally said, a smile on her face, lips red and swollen.

“Or we could ignore it?” he smiled back, pulling her back to him. Emboldened by the rush of hormones running though his system he began to kiss her neck and shoulders. She sighed, one hand running through his hair before gripping it and pulling his head away from her body. The bell rang again and Erik let out a frustrated groan. Anya giggled, placing one last kiss on his cheek before untangling herself and walking towards the door.

Erik laid his head back on the sofa, taking deep breaths as he regained his composure. Never had he ever been pulled so strongly to a person. He hoped she didn't think he was lying earlier. That he was just trying to make a move on her. Because that wasn't the case. Anya was different. He knew it the moment she saw her.

The creak of the door echoed and he heard Anya gasp. He quickly sat up to peer into the foyer.

“We decided to skip in solidarity...and bought apology donuts! Please say you don’t hate me?” Jess' voice echoed down. “I'm sorry we pushed all that on you. It was stupid...Can we come in?”

Anya looked over at Erik who shrugged in return. Your choice. He mouthed.

“Well...how can I say no to apology donuts?” Anya smiled. He watched as Jess jumped happily into Anya’s arms. “Okay, okay! Come in.” She took a step back and in walked Jess and Xander.

“We weren't interrupting anything were we?” Xander asked, one eyebrow raising at Erik who suddenly realized how this looked. He pulled the robe tighter around him.

“Not at all. My clothes are in the dryer. Pipe burst remember?” He explained, a nervous chuckle escaping his lips.

“I'm sure there was. “ Jessica smirked and Anya's face turned red.

“ANYA was introducing me to the world of Steven Universe.” Erik changed the subject.

“Help yourselves to the pizza.” Anya said, taking a seat next to Erik. He lifted his arm up and without missing a beat she snugged against him. It made his smile grow into a full-on grin.

“Oh no...they’ve imprinted.” Jess said falling to the ground dramatically. “I can see what's happening. And they don't have a clue. They'll fall in love and here's the bottom line. Our trio's down to two!”

She and Xander continued to quote the Lion King earning a hard pillow toss from Anya,

They all laughed, Anya catching them up on the show.

And just like that it was like that morning had never happened.

#chapter #chapter 9

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Missed Classic: Trinity – Is This the 50s? Or 1999?

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last time out, I explored the strange mushroom forest that I was dropped into after the end of the world. This “wabe”, as I think it is called, is a strange place set in the shadow of a gigantic sundial and includes giant bees, an impossible flower garden, a cottage with game design notes, and a half-dozen mushrooms with little doors. But this isn’t The Smurfs: each mushroom appears to have been created by a nuclear detonation. As I closed out last time, I finally worked out how to control the movement of the “sun” overhead to drop shadows on each of the doors. I opened the first door and was dropped back into reality, somewhere and somewhen.

This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I’ll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.

Ray Palmer seems like such a nice guy.

When I walked through the mushroom door in my previous post, I arrived in a rickety room filled with equipment that I do not understand. The white door remains open and I can use it to return to the mesa in the wabe, but then it closes immediately after. No amount of resetting the sundial opens the door again so I assume there is no way back. Will I only get one shot at each doorway? Is there a way to know what order I have to take the doors? I hope Mr. Moriarty won’t be too evil about this, but I am prepared for a lot of saving and reloading.

The equipment that I stand next to is radioactive and obviously a nuclear bomb, but I’m not positive which bomb it is. Climbing down the scaffolding, I find myself in a large room with aircraft hangar-style doors. They are too heavy to open, but there’s a button nearby so it’s not much of a puzzle. A second button activates an intercom speaker and a voice informs anyone listening that it is six minutes to detonation. I’d better hurry! I open the doors and head out onto a tropical island. Thanks to the manual’s history lesson, I guess that this is the H-Bomb explosion in 1952. The documentation just says a “remote island in the South Pacific” and I was fairly certain that was Bikini Atoll, but a quick Wikipedia search informs me that the first test was actually on nearby Enewetak Atoll.

Focusing on the present, I notice that the tide is coming in. That voice in my ear sniggers that “Gnomon can tether tide or time.” Whoever he is, he’s less clever than he thinks he is. We start exploring from our vantage point on the south of the island. To the west is a second island with a single coconut tree. Thanks to a mob of attacking crabs, there is no way to get to that island or its lone tree. To the north is an “extension” of wood leading off the island, described as being like a six-foot in diameter drinking straw connecting the facility to someplace offshore. It’s too high up to climb and I do not see a way to access it from the hangar shed. While exploring, a shark follows me around the island, but when I reach the eastern shore he reveals himself to actually be a friendly dolphin! That’s cute, but… er… he’s going to die pretty soon.

R.I.P Flipper. None under sea were smarter than he.

Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be much to do here. After a time, I notice that the western island has sunk under the tide and only a single coconut remains floating in the water. There is no obvious way to fetch it but it screams “puzzle” and must be important for something. I eventually work out that the dolphin is actually incredibly intelligent and fetches the coconut for me when I ask. I break it open with my axe but find only coconut milk inside. What did I expect? A priceless gem? The “milk” leaks out quickly and I restore so as not to lose it. Could that be “good enough” for the potion at the cottage? The magpie said that we needed milk, honey, garlic, and a lizard. Surely, this vegan substitute for milk isn’t “good enough” for a magic potion, is it? With nothing else to do and the timer ticking down, I leave my paradise to its fate and return through the white door.

I do some fast Googling to learn that the island was called Elugelab; the blast destroyed it utterly, leaving only a 15-story deep crater in the ocean bed where an island once had been. The wooden “straw” led to the nearby Teiter Island which survived the blast. There doesn’t seem to be any real-world counterpart to the tiny island with the coconuts; as a tidal island it’s not likely to have appeared on any maps and Moriarty may have just made it up.

When I return to the “wabe”, I immediately try the coconut milk in the potion and it seems to work! I’m not sure how that counts, but I have three ingredients now. I need to find a lizard.

Princess Peach has seen better.

The Mushroom Kingdom

With my first trip out of the way and the knowledge of how to open the doors, I take stock of the rest of the portal toadstools:

The first is in the meadow where I started. It doesn’t open again now but presumably led to Kensington Gardens.

The second is the toadstool at the waterfall.

I cannot find the third. I suspect that it is near the boy blowing bubbles and possibly somewhere I need to fly to if I can work out how to gain altitude. Or perhaps the boy is sitting on it?

The fourth is the one that I just explored on the mesa.

The fifth is in the garden behind the magpie’s cottage.

The sixth door is on the moor far to the east of the map.

I cannot find the seventh, but I expect that it is probably wherever the ferryman takes you.

My guess is that Mr. Moriarty is clever and has made each of the toadstools independent so that you can take them in any order. I therefore try the second one next and am immediately proven wrong: it leads out into Earth orbit with no spacesuit and nearly instant death. Nukes in space? There must be a way to survive there to do whatever I need to do, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the means yet.

The death scene at least offers some hints as we arrive, dead, at the ferryman’s river. This time, we have a coin and use it to board the boat to the great beyond. Other than that, I don’t glean any further hints how to cross without dying so I restore and try the next mushroom.

As a kid, I visited the Psygnosis offices in Cambridge. It was amazing. By coincidence, I later worked in the exact same office long after they had moved out.

Mother Russia

I take the fifth door next and arrive in what appears to be an elevated shack on the Siberian steppe. It’s cold and gray and someone is speaking in Russian on the loudspeaker. Google fails me and has no idea what “dyevianatsat minut” means, but Infocom was likely using either a nonstandard (or simply outdated now) romanization. My guess is that they meant “devyatnadtsat’ minut” (девятнадцать минут) or nineteen minutes. Plenty of time, right?

I climb down from the shack and immediately step on a rodent underfoot. In fact, the ground is mobbed by hundreds or thousands of creatures all racing to the northeast. They “look something like hamsters, with long brown fur and beady eyes”. Should I follow them? Or see where they came from? I try heading “upstream” against the tide of creatures, but Russian guards kill me so that’s not the way. I follow them instead to discover a cliff edge where the rodents are jumping off in apparent mass-suicide. Only then does the game tell me what you already figured out: they are lemmings! Of course, lemmings don’t actually jump off of cliffs, right? That’s just an urban legend spread by an old (faked) Disney documentary?

At the cliff, I discover a single trapped lemming in a fissure. I rescue it but it quickly bites my hand and disappears into the mass. If I release the magpie, I can grab it and then stick it in the cage. Is that a good trade? Do I need the magpie for anything? Remembering back last week, I did not get any points for it (only for the cage) so maybe not? Also, lemmings are not lizards even if they have the same starting letter, and even if the potion took coconut milk instead of cow’s milk, that would be too much of a stretch. I find nothing else of interest on the tundra. I even jump off the cliff once but just drown in the frigid Arctic water. Once there is nothing left to do and the countdown is presumably getting close, I head back through the door.

Doing some real-world research, I learn that I wasn’t on the Russian steppe after all: the Soviets did their nuclear testing at a site in Kazakhstan. I was close enough though since that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and Moriarty would likely not have seen it as a separate country. The test site was 100 miles west of Semipalatinsk (now called Semey) and the region sees many health problems thanks to all of the tests performed there. There doesn’t seem to be any real-world analogue to the cliffs as the nearest bodies of water I can find to the test site are frozen lakes around 25 miles to the northeast according to Google Earth. Am I looking too deeply at this? Absolutely. I’m procrastinating writing the next section.

A spoonful of sugar helps the deep existential dread go down?

Hiroshima

The sixth door is my only remaining choice, located on the moor just north of the ferryman’s river. Stepping through, we find ourselves in midair and falling fast. Unlike in the space section, we have a few turns to experiment before we land with a splat and I have an idea what to do: open the umbrella! Doing so slows our descent enough that we land safely in a children’s sandbox. Writing this section is choking me up, so I’m going to pause by just giving you the room description:

Playground, in a sandpile

A set of children’s swings move back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child’s sandpile. In the pile, you see an umbrella, an axe, and a birdcage.

We know what’s about to happen and it’s devastating. I gather together my things and discover that I can really only move east towards the shelter without being caught. Inside is a disgusting and rough hewn bomb shelter, filthy and smelling of urine from the people that had to relieve themselves while waiting out the terror outside. It’s an awful thought. There’s a spade on the ground which I pick up, but otherwise there’s nothing else to do.

I leave and discover that a girl is now playing in the sandpit. She spots me and nearly runs to her teacher, but then she spots my umbrella and her curiosity gets the best of her. I can tell that she wants it, so I hand it to her and she runs off into the shelter to play. Could she be the scarred woman in London? Do I even want to consider that?

There is still nowhere else that I can go safely, but seeing folded paper cranes in a nearby school window gives me a thought. I follow her into the shelter and hand the girl my unfolded origami crane from the beginning of the game, the one that gave me the message to go to the Long Water by 4 PM. She folds it back into its original crane shape and I gain three points. It glows with a strange energy. I return outside and the crane grows into a giant living paper bird. I climb on its back and it takes me up to just outside the white door, still suspended in midair, where I can leap off and through. Whew!

From a game perspective, that was an interesting segment and very much “on rails”. If I had not brought the paper or umbrella with me, I could not have progressed, plus it was really only two rooms that I had to move back and forth between to advance story segments. More than any other section of the game except perhaps the first near-future in London, this paints a human face on the misery of the bomb. Honestly, this section wrecked me and I needed to take some time off from the game. I’m really not cut out for reviewing this type of emotional experience. This game hurts. I don’t even care that I don’t know if that was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I’m done and need to move on.

“You can either look at things in a brutal, truthful way that’s depressing, or you can screw around and have fun.” – David Spade

Calling a Spade, a Spade

With no more toadstool doors to explore– I haven’t found the third or seventh and the second one kills me immediately– I resolve find places in the wabe where my new items might be useful. I still have up a spade, a lemming, and an open coconut. It takes some experimentation, but I’ll skip my failures and move straight to the good part: I can open the crypt in the cemetery!

Using the spade, we pry off the lid to see the corpse of the “Wabewalker” (me?). This was well-hinted since I was told earlier that I needed more “leverage” to move the lid and a spade is certainly leverage. I had hoped the grave would be empty, but instead I look down at a “great missionary or explorer” in his final rest. I hope this game does not go all Infidel on me. The corpse is wearing a burial shroud, a bandage around his head, and two strangely colored boots: one red and one green. Like any good tomb raider, I strip the corpse and take all of his stuff. His mouth hangs open once the bandage is removed and I discover a silver coin inside. Fare for the ferryman? The boots each have a strange (but empty) recess at the tip of the toes. Do I have to hide something in them? With the corpse thoroughly desecrated, I’m nearly halfway through the game: 49 points!

While exploring, I also get the brilliant idea to float the Bubble Boy’s bubble out through the “space” doorway. Amazingly, it fits! The bubble immediately freezes to create a protective shell and that somehow keeps us from dying in the cold vacuum of space. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the bubble and the white door drifts rapidly away from us. After a time, a satellite comes closer and then departs again without letting us do whatever we are supposed to do. There is briefly a Star Wars-style laser destruction of a missile, but nothing to do except wait it out and die. There are still things that I am missing before I can conquer outer space.

What happened to the other five stories?

Desert Island Decameron

I wear all of my burial clothes and the ferryman lets me on the boat! He takes the silver coin as payment (but not the London 20p one) and deposits me across the river. There is no entrance to Hades or two-headed dogs, but there is a small island with the expected toadstool on it. When I arrive with the seventh symbol set on the sundial, I emerge into another rickety shack next to a large metal ball covered with wires.

There are voices outside and if I leave prematurely, I am killed– more on that in a minute. But if I explore the room first the voices eventually leave. I use that time to try to open the bomb via an access panel that I discover on the side, but no dice without a screwdriver. I even try using the London coin, but it doesn’t fit. A book sits discarded on the floor, the Desert Island Decameron. Doing some Googling, I discover that it is an “unconventional anthology of humor”… a strange thing to find in a room with a giant bomb, but perhaps one of the guards needed a little light reading while he considered the hellscape that he was potentially helping to create. Inside is a bookmark with a poem on one side and a diagram scrawled on the other. I get four points for reading it so it must be important, but the only part we can “see” in text is the legend: “RD=DET, BL=POS, ST=INF, WH=GND”. My guess is that we are looking at a wiring diagram and an explanation on how to defuse the bomb. In any event, it’s useless without the panel being opened.

Once the voices are gone, I exit and climb down the ladder. At the bottom is a padlocked box… and our friend the roadrunner! He’s finally back in his natural habitat and seems happy to see me. He even drops the ruby at my feet! I pick it up to gain a few more points and from this moment the roadrunner follows me around. I cannot open the padlocked panel, even when I try to smash it with the axe or spade. Letting the lemming go doesn’t help either and I do not see any lizards here.

I’m going to pass on delving too deeply into my explorations of the New Mexico desert for now, except to say that we only get a few turns before we die and even with successive restores I do not find much of interest. I suspect that I am here before I am ready; maybe I find a way to slow down time? Maybe by defusing the bomb at the beginning, the test is delayed by a few minutes and I can explore further before dying?

Perhaps more importantly, this is the message that I get when I inevitably die:

All at once, the desert around you disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar hear that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.

The real Trinity test, which I am certain is where this gate has taken us, did not nuke the state of New Mexico. It was relatively modest as far as later bombs were concerned and so something must have happened to change history. Have I finally stumbled on the plot of the game? Did someone or something interfere with the Trinity test to make it even deadlier than before? It’s a great twist if that’s what happened and I am eager to see how the game continues.

For now however, I am stuck and have a few open problems to solve:

I have yet to find the third toadstool. I thought it was by the Bubble Boy, but since we use the bubble to go to space I was probably mistaken. I will have to search for it since there’s something I missed someplace.

I do not know what to do with the wight, either to help it or kill it. Could the crypt’s skeleton key by the solution to the lock in New Mexico?

I do not know what to do in space.

I do not know what to do with the magnetic meteorite.

I do not know where to find a lizard. It seems most likely to be in New Mexico, but I doubt it given that even if we find a way to reopen the doors, I don’t seem to have a path back across the river to the main part of the wabe.

I did manage to get 70 points, but I’ve reloaded now to before crossing the ferry so I will have to get some of those again.

Time played: 2 hr 15 min Total time: 7 hr 25 min

Inventory: bag of crumbs, small coin (20p), silver coin, red boot, blue boot, bandage, burial shroud, credit card, wristwatch, birdcage with lemming, broken coconut, and silver axe. (Not all being carried at once.) Score: 70 of 100

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-trinity-is-this-the-50s-or-1999/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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wizzardblizzard · 5 years ago

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hey does anyone want a bit of a klance wip i’ll never finish

honestly its waaaay too ambitious and convoluted, but i still really love it and want to share a part.

this is a bit from a fic i was writing where time works the same in the quantum abyss as it does for the rest of the universe, and keith is actually gone for two years.

The Blade of Marmora doctrine does not allow room for regret.

It’s Keith’s mother who explains this to him, early on in their mission through the quantum abyss, while huddled together awkwardly on the back of a space whale. He thinks maybe it’s lucky that their reunion just so happened to coincide with this trip, a convenient way of catching the two of them up on the years they’ve missed without actually requiring they make the choice to talk. Bubbles of memory fill the gap, visions of Keith’s life that he’s not yet comfortable sharing or knowing. Krolia lays it all out in front of him, in clear words and god given temporal flashbacks, and Keith is helpless to do anything but listen. With all of his and Krolia’s life expressed in this way, and curled the way they are, Keith feels all eighteen years of his abandonment issues and anger hover in the small space between them, shaken up like a bottle of soda and incapable of being released in the face of Krolia’s impossible circumstances and selfless ambitions.

Keith’s not really at the cuddle stage with Krolia yet, not really at the cuddle stage with anyone in his life, but cold nights on the space whale don’t allow for personal space.

“Something you need to know about the time I’ve been gone is this: in order to keep moving forward I had to... “ Krolia pauses, staring deeply into the meager fire they managed to build before the frost settled in. “I had to tell myself I had no regrets, that leaving you and your father was the best possible decision. But the truth is that it was impossible to know.”

She shifts, straightening her legs from their curled position and recrossing them. The movement presses them further together and Keith tenses, fighting the urge to pull away.

“The Blade doesn’t really give you time to think about all of that,” Krolia continues. “Which I guess is a good thing, in a way, because it meant I didn’t spend all of my time missing you.”

Keith glances at her, sidelong. He wonders at her ability to just...say things like that. He doesn’t know if it is a trait that’s exclusive to her, or if all moms are this open and honest. He spares a moment to wish he were back on the castle, back home, so that he could ask Shiro or one of his other friends. He thinks Lance would know. He talks about his mom a lot.

“But it was also bad,” Krolia says. “It was bad because it didn’t allow me time to miss you. I would operate on autopilot, fighting and killing and...every so often, I’d take a break and step back. I would think about all that I’d missed, all that I was missing. It was like an open wound that never healed, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to heal.”

She turns to look at Keith, and her eyes are wide and dark in the light of the fire. He’s noticed by now that her eyes are familiar to him, though Keith doesn’t know why. He’s pretty sure he’d been too young when she had left for him to have any memory of her. He wonders again if this is a mom thing, if something deep inside of him knows her, something unconscious. He wishes again for Shiro. He doesn’t know how this works.

“Living under the Blade...it works,” she says. “If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have. They are thousands of years old, but only because to be a member of the Blade of Marmora, one has to give up on ever having a family. If you allow room to make connections, you have room for regret, and then your life becomes more than the mission.”

“What I’ve been doing, these passed eighteen or so years...Keith, that wasn’t living.” She turns to face Keith, reaching forward tentatively to grab Keith’s hand. “When I was with you and your father, I was truly living.” She squeezes Keith’s hand, and her hand is warm through his gloves. “I never wanted this life for you.”

Keith pulls his hand from hers, scooting back and away. “So what does that mean?” he asks, some of his anger escaping. “You’re...disappointed in me? That I joined the Blade?” He feels the weight of his knife at his back, his awareness of it burning through the thick armor. “It’s because of you that I’m here,” he says. “That knife...it was all that I had, for the longest time.”

Krolia shakes her head. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.” She pauses, moving away. The cold wind immediately occupies the space between them, and Keith wraps his arms around himself.

“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she starts, curling forward over herself. “You, and your dad. I would stay awake at night thinking about it, figuring out what I wanted to say and how I would say it.” She looks back at him, mouth set in a line. “What I always came back to was this: I have regrets, Keith. There’s so much I wish I could have done better, or differently. But family? That isn’t one of them.” She presses forward, bridging the gap once more. Her hand is the lightest touch on his tightly folded arms. “Once you have something, you hold onto it. That’s how you live with no regret.”

Keith moves away from her, scooting even further backwards. Unbidden, thoughts of his friends at the castle come to mind once more. He’d had something like a family, once. He’d left, just like she had. Unlike her, however, he knows his family hadn’t resented him for it.

She sighs, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her arms on top of them. “That’s what I wanted to say,” she says. “Nineteen years of planning. I know you don’t owe me anything, but please...consider my words.”

And with that, she turns away from him, laying on the ground with her back to the fire.

Keith finds that he isn’t ready to sleep just yet, cold so far away from the fire and buzzing from the conversation. He considers it. He thinks long and hard about what she had said, about how she’d had something, and she’d let it go.

“But what does it matter?” he thinks, burying gloved fingers in the grass beneath him, feeling the distant vibration of the creature below, moving further with each moment. “It’s too late, now.”

***

It’s been a while since Keith’s had his world shaken, upended and twisted on its axis. If he thinks about it, does the math, it’s been just over two years.

The girl is familiar, but at the same time she isn’t. Her coloring is off, her skin is too pale, her hair isn’t pale enough. Her eyes lack the steel of the eyes Keith knows, the set of her shoulders is not quite as straight.

Keith can tell that she’s lost a lot in her life, he can see it in her eyes, and in the downward turn of her mouth. She’s strong, he knows, and yet he can’t help but feel disappointed that Romelle isn’t Allura.

Then, she opens her mouth, and Keith feels dread start to build, hot and heavy in his gut.

“Lotor?” he asks, clenching his fists. “You mean Emperor Lotor? The ruler of the Galra?”

Romelle recoils, her hands covering her mouth. “He is emperor?” she asks. ��But he...our colony--”

“You’re saying he’s been harboring Alteans this entire time? That he knew, when Coran and Allura--”

“Keith,” Krolia says sharply. He closes his mouth, feeling vaguely ashamed. It’s been a while since he lost his cool like that. But, then again, it’s been a while since he’s talked to anyone that wasn’t his mom or his dog.

As though summoned, Kosmo steps up and pokes at Keith with her nose, prodding at him until he scratches behind her ears. He takes a deep breath, running his fingers through her fur. Usually, her calm, steady presence is enough to soothe him, but Keith can feel his heart beat in his throat, his panic rising with every word that leaves Romelle’s mouth.

He says, “We need to go back.”

Krolia eyes him warily before looking back at Romelle. “You’re absolutely sure of this?” she asks, the pinnacle of professionalism. “Lotor has in recent times proven himself as an ally to Voltron, the legendary defender of the universe. You are certain he is responsible?”

Romelle nods, and Keith does his best to swallow his panic. He’s better than this, now. He’s not so quick to jump blindly to action. His friends are strong and smart, he’s sure they’re fine.

The three of them make plans to leave, to investigate the mysterious other colony, and Keith does his best to avoid losing his composure. He doesn’t let himself fall to the barrage of worst-case scenarios running through his head, or the looming weight of his guilt over taking what amounted to a two year camping trip with his mom while the rest of the known universe was busy fighting a war. He’s better than this. He’s spent two years training with his mother to be better than this. His friends are capable, they’ve proven that they are perfectly able to function without him. It’s selfish and arrogant of him to think otherwise.

He avoids his mother’s pointed looks, grasping at the fur at the nape of Kosmo’s neck. They’ve lasted this long without him, they can wait for him and Krolia to come up with a plan.

***

He’s wrong.

***

Krolia holds out an entire week before she asks, and even then she dances around it.

“You haven’t told me anything about your friends,” she says, nonchalant. “I know you’re a part of Voltron, but that’s all.”

Keith grits his teeth, focusing his gaze on the ground in front of him. They’re looking for sufficient shelter, not knowing how long they will be adrift on the space whale before they’re through the quantum abyss.

Or at least, they’re trying to. The quantum flashbacks are getting annoying. Keith is tired of them. It’s hard enough having to scavenge for food without having to wade through the memory of a spelling test Keith took in the third grade. Well, that and other memories.

“I told you about Shiro,” Keith says, hacking at a branch with his knife. He does so viciously, probably more violently than the quantum space tree warrants. “And Adam.”

(A distant part of his mind snickers at “quantum space tree.” At some point, he’d taken to adding “quantum” or “space” to the front of things. It’s silly, he knows this. But his life doesn’t really allow much room for silly things, anymore. He’ll take what he can get.)

“Yes, the men who helped raise you,” Krolia says. “But what about the others?”

Keith huffs, stopping and turning to face her with his arms crossed. “You can just ask,” he says. “I see them too. I don’t know why there are so many with--”

He’s interrupted by the distant sound of a flash, the force of it rustling through the trees, bright white peeking through the leaves like film being overexposed. Keith sighs, and waits for it to pass.

It’s Lance again, because of course it is. You’d think Keith hadn’t lived eighteen years before knowing the guy, with the frequency the abyss likes to throw him in Keith’s face.

It’s another silly, embarrassing memory, one that Keith would probably feel fond of if his mother weren’t right next to him watching it play out. He’s still not sure what kind of image he wants to present to her, and the flashbacks aren’t really giving him a choice about it.

The space around them erupts into color and sound, and Keith almost covers his ears against it. He recognizes where they’re at, though he has trouble parsing when exactly it had been. It was sometime before Shiro had gone missing, so Keith had still been flying the red lion.

Krolia eyes the street they’re on curiously, taking in the neon signs and flashy costumes. Keith can feel the distant bass of loud music through the soles of his boots. “Muskagan?” Krolia asks, turning back to Keith.

“Space Vegas,” Keith says, frowning and crossing his arms.

It’s at that moment that the door to a nearby bar bursts open, and Lance stumbles out. “Space Vegaaaaas!” he cries, raising his fists in the air triumphantly. The collar of his blue and white baseball tee is all stretched to shit, and it’s clear why when Keith himself comes staggering out as well and collapses against him, eager fingers grasping at Lance’s shoulders in an attempt to stay upright. Behind them, a large, gelatinous alien leans out of the doorway, yelling in an untranslatable language at their backs and waving a wobbly fist at them.

Keith is laughing, so loud he can be heard over the bustle of music and people on the street. His cheeks are very red, and he can’t seem to stop from tripping over his own feet.

Krolia hums at his side, obviously torn between disapproval and fondness at seeing Keith so happy. Keith can feel his cheeks start to heat up.

“Lance,” Past-Keith breathes, between laughs. “Lance, no, stop...Shiro said--”

Lance wraps one arm around Keith’s waist, pulling him up and forward. “Keith,” Lance says, and Keith had been too drunk at the time to fully register it, but their faces were awfully close together. Past-Keith’s cheeks flush darker, and his eyes are wide with something close to adoration. Keith feels his stomach twist. “Since when have you ever listened to anything Shiro told you to do?”

Past-Keith laughs again, high and bright.

The two of them make their way down the road, stepping together like they’re participating in a three-legged race. They bump into people and roadside stalls as they go, laughing through their apologies. They look happy. Keith can’t even remember what they were planning to do that Shiro disapproved of. He remembers that they had gotten in an insane amount of trouble for sneaking off during the royal banquet the other paladins had been attending, and that he’d taken out his anger and embarrassment on Lance, who hadn’t talked to him for three days afterward.

The two of them disappear around a corner, cheering loudly at whatever they see, and the memory starts to fade. Once it’s gone, Keith takes a deep breath, revelling in the sudden silence of the forest around them.

Krolia doesn’t say anything for a moment, searching Keith for a reaction. Keith looks at her, then looks away, sighing and running a hand through his hair.

“We were supposed to be at an event at the Muskagi palace,” he says. “Lance convinced me to sneak out.”

“Lance?”

Keith glares at her, and she does her best to look innocently curious. “You know who he is,” he says. “He’s in like, every single memory.”

“I’ve seen him,” she admits. “But I don’t know him.”

Keith huffs, and starts moving through the forest again. “What else is there to say?” he asks. “He’s the blue paladin.” He pauses. “The red paladin now, I guess. He’s an idiot.”

“You seem to have spent a lot of time together,” she says.

“We didn’t,” Keith lies, kicking at a small log laying across their path. “I...We didn’t get along, not really. Not at first. I don’t know why it keeps showing him.”

Krolia hums, eyeing him knowingly. Keith can feel his face grow even warmer.

“I think we’re coming to the end of the forest area now,” Keith says, surging forward. “Maybe we’ll find a cave or something.”

Krolia nods in acknowledgement, allowing for the poor subject change.

Later that night, after they’ve actually managed to find a shallow cave and set up shelter, there’s another flash. It’s after Krolia has already fallen asleep, so Keith experiences it alone.

It’s Lance again, sat hunched over in his seat on the castle’s bridge. Keith can see the slump of his shoulders as he reaches forward and pulls up the star map.

Keith turns to his left and sees himself, hovering awkwardly in the doorway. After a moment, Past-Keith bites his lip and makes the short trip to Lance’s side, dropping down sloppily onto the arm of Lance’s chair. Keith watches as he places a tentative hand on Lance’s back.

Lance’s shoulders heave in a huge, shuddering sigh. The air around them bursts into shimmering light, the Milky Way Galaxy cradling them in a tent of stars.

Keith watches as his past self slowly moves his hand, rubbing back and forth along Lance’s broad shoulders. Lance tilts, slowly, until the side of his head is pressed awkwardly into Keith’s hip. The two of them sit there, silent, until the memory begins to fade.

Alone once more, Keith lets out a wobbly sigh. He leans back against the wall of the small cave and presses the palms of his hands against his stinging eyes. He thinks he knows why the abyss keeps showing him memories of Lance.

#klance fic #klance #this fic had so much going for it #angst! temporary character death! time travel!#lance actually using his sword!#the other paladins realizing how badly theyd treated lance!#scary clone shiro!#but alas #its so involved that i know the time it would take to write it would really best be used on my original stuff #so you get this #i really love the writing here tho #voltron #long post

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dukeofriven · 6 years ago

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Captain Marvel Didn’t Need A Subplot About Sad Familyman Pain: A Very Late Captain Marvel Review

So I finally saw Captain Marvel last night (like a week ago now but it was the Tuesday before Endgame came out and then this sat in my drafts folder for days and days) - yep, down to the wire almost - so I’ve obviously missed all the Super Important Captain Marvel discourse that Tumblr prattled on about: still, I’ll add my thoughts to the pile.

An incredible cast with great chemistry can do nothing to fix one of the blandest scripts since Doctor Strange, which at least had imaginative vistas and unusual set design to carry some of the story-telling weight. Captain Marvel is possibly the worst-looking Marvel film: at the very least I am confident it is probably the worst-edited, and unquestionably the worst-lit film in all the Marvel canon. Captain Marvel almost consciously doesn't seem to want you to see anything in the movie, going out of its way to shoot scenes at night, in boring and dark spaceships, and in sandstorms at night on dark planets. Lousy fight choreography, coupled with rapid-fire edits with lousy coverage, made the film’s frequent hand-to-hand combat scenes visual nightmares. The worst offender is probably Danvers’ escape from the Skrull ship, in which basic shot-to-shot continuity is lost. The action becomes a literal blur as an anarchic assembly of seemingly-random coverage is cut together to create a confusing mess of movement. A fantastic late-film aerial dog fight and an incredibly powerful 'gloves come off' space sequence make the movie's last twenty minutes its visually strongest, but can't repair the damage done by the previous 90 minutes of blur and uncertain scene geography. (Rogue One has this exact same problem viz. rear-loading the entire movie onto the last twenty minutes.) The movie is at its best when it chucks the undeveloped plot out the window and just lets characters talk to one another, revealing their warmth and great on-screen chemistry, making otherwise forgettable dialogue work through great delivery and comedic timing. This is how most MCU films work anyways: good-to-great actors take weak dialogue and make it work through talent and charm. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any dialogue in the MCU that’s good for reasons other than excellent delivery: Marvel doesn’t seem to care much for writers who have a grip on the craft of dialogue.

The moment the plot reasserts itself, which usually means pretending that anyone cares about Jude Law's one-note bad guy, anything good about the film disappears. There's the bones of a great movie here hampered by incredibly poor framing decisions. Rather than reduce the flashbacks to five-second bursts of mental confusion, a better version of the film would have had two parallel stories A) Carol's quest to become a great pilot while fighting against prejudice and B) A present-day fight to regain that past. As is, the film makes the pretence that it has a feminist theme about overcoming patronizing men, but in practice this is introduced through jumbled flashbacks at the start of the film, essentially dropped for the rest of the run-time, and suddenly re-introduced at the final moments with a triumphant declaration of "I don't need your approval." Had the movie spent any of its middle running time acting like Carol was being patronized by anyone, this might have carried more weight. However, perhaps unwilling to make Nick Fury seem sexist in any way, Carol spends most of the movie surrounded by completely supportive people who do nothing but tell her how great she is. A single shitty stranger on a motorcycle with four lines of dialogue does not a 'triumph against chauvinism' narrative make. Even Jude Law's villain seems to be holding Carol back largely out of a need to follow orders and make sure her brainwashing was working - not out of any chauvinistic impulses. You could make the argument that the brainwashing is an analogy for the way patriarchy brainwashes women into accepting false limitations, but the movie isn’t that subtle: it wears its themes on its sleeve. Besides, you don’t get the sense that the Kree are doing anything out of gender motives - frustrating given that neighbouring franchise Guardians of the Galaxy has proven time and time again that you can still fo Asshole Space Chauvinist without detracting from the heroism of the leading female. (Well, sorta. Guardians 2 does this much better than 1). Part of the problem is that Jude Law spends most of the movie on a ship waiting to get to Carol and having exposition-only phone calls. We get very little sense of Carol's relationship with him outside of the opening punch-up in a dojo - and the weakness is reinforced by Law’s character insisting only that Carol isn’t ready yet to do various things. This could work - there’s more to sexism than blunt and obvious HURR DURR WYMINS CAN’T DO THINGS declaration, but the the narrative repeatedly demonstrates that Jude Law is correct. It takes the whole movie for Carol to learn how to take her own breaks off. Which is a serious problem when she confronts the villain insisting he’d been holding her back. Not... not really, Carol. At no point in the movie did you seem like you were holding back because Jude Law’s voice was in your head telling you you weren’t good enough. You didn’t do X, Y, Z things because you just didn’t know how to do them, and you needed more experience. Jude Law spends the whole movie... not being wrong? It’s an issue. So when Carols stands there and says ‘I've never needed your approval” or some-such it’s great on a thematic level to see a female superhero so utterly reject the so-called necessity of some kind of male mentor (and if nothing else everything Carol learns in the film she learns on her own) - but it’s nonsense in the context of the film itself, where Carol spends most of it ignoring anything Jude Law says to her and doing her own thing, It weird to have her reject a man who has power over her - when he has had no power over her since the pre-credits sequence. She doesn’t listen to him at all the moment they go on their first mission. And, again, despite the text of the movie that framing suggest that Jude Law is not wrong about her not being ready to do the Light Thing until she was ready to do The Light Thing. A better movie would let Larson’s great chemistry with Lashana Lynch sing. I was so hyped going into this movie because Larson was quoted as saying that the “real” relationship of the movie was between Danvers and Rambeau but it’s... it’s not. Maybe in the script Larson originally filmed, maybe it felt that way on set, but if that was the case then it’s completely lost in the edit, where Rambeau has a nice through-line about regaining her place as a pilot but whose relationship with Danvers is mostly relegated to being another “no you’re super great Carol” hype man. Her best scene - where she and Carol sit down and she says how hard is was to lose her best friend - is undermined by some of the most mawkish music ever inflicted on a Marvel film; all the power of the acting marred by a track that sounds like it came out of All My Children. In a better movie we’d get to see Carol live her life as a woman triumphing in a sexist airforce - half the movie should be flashbacks that build to that fatal, final flight. Danvers and Rambeau meet and crush on one another, mutually crush on Annette Benning (because god-damn), fly planes, fly better than anyone else flying planes, and do karaoke together to forget all the shitty airforce dudes in the lives who resent their good, good plane flying. This shitty people might have identities as villains and maybe do double-casting with Jude Law so we can see the parallels in her old life and her new life instead of pretending for an hour that Jude Law is her friend - like hell, movie, we’re not stupid, that’s not a shock. You cut between those scenes and modern Carol - and you do Good Writing Stuff like make New Carol a different person than old Carol: more timid, more cowed by the brain washing, more subservient to this guy who feeds her approval and virtue. You know - the stuff you do when you want to tell a movie about gaslighting like actually feature gaslighting. And we, the audience, who can see old Carol and how incredible and tough and take-no-shit she was, stare at the screen with burning eyes, hating Jude Law’s guts and waiting for the moment Carol beats his shitty ass into the ground and smooches Rambeau. And we see that Carol come back - fighting and clawing against this brain chip. And maybe the Supreme Intelligence could actually be in the movie as a villain like the movie seemed to want, instead of a brief cameo at the start of the film and then a baffling return at the end as some kind of ‘final boss’ that we don’t give a damn about because they sat out the entire movie. The film should come to a head with the crash of the experimental jet coinciding with the moment Carol remembers it in the present - maybe we take it a step further and use that great Skrull framing device at the start of the film: the past and the recent present align in the actual-present in the Skrull machine as Carol both remembers her old life, realizes the Skrulls are just trying to help her, and wakes up. Her eyes Do The Thing and she leaps out the back of Rambeau’s plane and blows the Supreme Intelligence’s armada up (not Ronan, because nobody gave a shit the first time why would you introduce a nobody like this instead of the person you want to be the Big Bad in your movie?) like a badass just like she does in the current film and then beats the shit out of Jude Law for some serious emotional catharsis. A casualty of this would be less screen time for Samuel L. Jackson. Who gives a shit? This is Carol and Rambeau‘s movie not Scary CGI Plasticine Jackson and Really, Really, Really Scary CGI Plasticine Clark Greg’s movie. You might get less Ben Mendelsohn too. A shame but, and I can’t stress this enough this should be a movie about Carol and Rambeau and Anette Bening. Ben Mendelsohn’s need to reunite with his loving wife and daughter has no place here. Did not need a subplot about manpain.

Or, conversely, if you want a movie about a totally badass female superhero kicking ass then cut out the gaslighting plot entirely. Make a different movie. Go the Iron Man route where Tony Stark is allowed to be an egotistical badass throughout and nobody ever patronizes because we don’t write movies about men that way. Just do the same for Carol (but not literally, because Ant-Man already did “Iron Man But Again” and it sucked). Really: you want to write the great feminist superhero movie? Don’t make it about a woman’s struggles against shitty men. Just make it about an awesome woman doing awesome things and stop making The Woman’s Superhero Movie be defined by her relationship with A Man’s World (see also Wonder Woman and almost every period piece about a female character ever made). Stop Othering the woman in her own movie! Finally, Captain Marvel has one of the most generic and instantly forgettable scores, a problem with Marvel generally but actively noticeable here as scenes with good acting are ruined by saccharine music like a bad soap opera. Captain Marvel is a mediocre and forgettable film, another in a long line of movies I got hyped for as some kind of ‘feminist masterpiece’ and discovered a lot of the same old shitty, lazy superhero tropes with the clunky addition of what a boardroom of executives think constitute feminist themes according to their quantitative marketing data. I will say for the eight year old girls out there it was a powerful movie and they were inspired seeing a woman superhero and I won’t take that away from then or pretend it’s not great. But they could and deserved a much better version of this movie - one in which that unquestionably glorious fuck-shit-up scene where Carol smashes through a battle fleet like it’s fucking paper because fuck you I am the biggest badass this franchise has ever seen Thor got punched by a star once who cares watch me atomize a dreadnought with my face! was matched with the same level of care elsewhere in the picture - so when Danvers lands and beats the stuffing out of Jude Law we’re not struggling to remember his character’s name which I haven’t successfully done once this entire review. I have yet to see Endgame but I have high hopes that - much like Paul Rudd and Benedict Cumberbatch - once out of the confines of her own under-written movie Brie Larson will get a chance to really shine, because we don’t get to really see Carol Danvers until that one great ship-smashing scene and that’s a pity. We should have had a chance to know the Captain Danvers of the USAF and to be able to mourn her even as we celebrated the emergence of the new Space Badass Danvers - who isn’t the same person, who can’t be, but is something greater than before. (For the record this isn’t a bad movie. It really is just a mediocre one. It’s far, far from the MCU’s worst film. That would be - despite my biases screaming ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ - still probably Thor: The Dark World, which you likely forgot existed again.)

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1-800-fiction · 7 years ago

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Bodyguard

Fandom: Marvel Request: “Can you write one where Bucky isn’t cleared for missions but he wants to be useful for something so steve and Tony decide to put him on body guard duty for Tony’s daughter? She has a stalker that they haven’t been able to track so she needs protection even during her college classes. Buck thinks she’s gonna end up being a spoiled snotty rich girl but she ends up a total sweetie pie and they fall for each other.” - @purplekitten30 Word Count: 1755 Author's Note: Probably one of the longest fics I’ve written. Hope you enjoy it!

"I want to help" Bucky begged. Steve sighed in response. "You aren't cleared, Buck" Steve said for the millionth time. "There has to be something!" Bucky continued. Steve pinched the bridge of his nose to think. "I'll find something for you" He said before turning and walking away. Bucky felt relief, knowing that he was on the right track to righting his wrongs.

--- "He really wants to help, Tony. Is there anything at all he can do?" Steve asked. Tony scoffed at his request. "Please, Tony" Steve pleaded. "You know what he did to my parents," Tony said sourly. "Let him make it right" Steve pestered. "Make it right? He killed my parents" Tony argued. Steve was not in the mood for an argument. "He was mind controlled by Hydra. You know that" Steve barked back and Tony sighed in frustration. "Fine. I'll find something" He said angrily before walking away. --- You walked peacefully down the path through the Forrest, admiring the view. The trees were a bright green feature. The wind was soft against your skin. You loved the smell of the salty sea mixed with the forest. You heard a branch snap behind you, too loud to be a coincidence.

Over the past week, you had that feeling like you weren't really alone. You hadn't seen anyone so you tried to brush it off. Your heart raced as you turned around. You thought of worst case scenario. You knew it wouldn't be but you were proven wrong when you saw him. A man wearing all black came running up to you with a knife. A scream left your mouth as you ran for it. The man was still hot on your tail despite your screaming for help. The man really wanted to hurt you. Your heart felt as if it was going to burst out of your chest.

You throat hurt from your harsh breathing. It was only until you got out of the forest that people started to appear. Your screams alerted people to you and the man stopped chasing you. He turned and ran the other way. You felt faint as some people came up to you asking if you were alright. Tears threatened to fall but you kept them in. After you had calmed down you took a cab back to the tower where you lived. You were on alert the whole ride.

Once you arrived at Stark Tower you quickly paid the driver and ran inside. You were overcome by relief as you entered the building. It was an overwhelming feeling. The tears you held back from before started to free fall. You were happy to be alive. "Y/N?" Tony called out. His happy face turned into worry when he saw you. "What happened to you?" He gasped. He was focused on your arm. You looked and saw blood dripping. You hadn't even noticed. Without a word he took you to the medical room to get you patched up. Your arm stung once the doctor started to clean it. You hissed in pain. "Y/N" Tony growled, waiting for you to answer. You looked up at him, thinking of how you would tell him. "Someone attacked me" You replied. His face lit up. "What?" He screamed. He started to panic which is what you didn't want.

“Its fine” You assured him but he shook his head.

“You were attacked, Y/N!” Tony said again. You sighed.

“Yeah, he didn’t before” You argued back, instantly regretting it.

“What do you mean before?” Tony raged. You bit your lip; a nervous habit of yours.

“I think someone has been following for a while” You admitted, breaking eye contact with your father. Instead of yelling at you, he sighed in disappointment.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He embraced you in a hug.

“I didn’t want to make a big deal out of nothing” You mumbled into his shoulder. He pulled back, looking at you.

“I lost your mother, Y/N. I can’t lose you too” He started to get teary-eyed.

“I’m sorry” You apologised.

“I’m going to hire a bodyguard to look after you until I catch him, alright?” He ordered. You nodded, despite not wanting a shadow lurking over you even if to protect you. You needed your space but to please your father, you agreed.

“Come with me” He took you by your arm and lead you up to the elevator. You hissed at his touch and he let go.

“Sorry” He apologised after realising he had grabbed your sore arm. Once you arrived at your designated floor, he lead you to the lounge where some of the Avengers hung out.

“Bucky” He called out. A man with long brown hair and what appeared to be a metal arm, turned around to face you.

“You wanted to help? Come on. I have a job for you” Tony informed him. Bucky shot up and followed you out of the room to a more private place to talk. There was an eager look in Bucky’s eyes. You were still confused as to what you were doing there.

“Y/N, meet Bucky, also known as the Winter Soldier. Bucky meet Y/N, my daughter” Tony introduced. Bucky went rigid at knowing you were his daughter. You had heard of the Winter Soldier before. He was the one who killed your grandparents.

Your attitude started to turn sour.

“Bucky, you are Y/N’s new bodyguard. She is being followed so I need to you go with her everywhere until the threat is over” He ordered. You couldn’t believe it.

“What? He murdered your parents! Why would I even consider trusting him!?” You argued. Bucky tensed up and went quiet.

“He was mind controlled by Hydra. He wants a second chance,” He turned to Bucky.

“Don’t you?” He asked. Bucky nodded and avoided eye contact from you.

“Then it's final. Bucky is your bodyguard. I will brief you later tonight and you will start in the morning” You huffed and walked off. You knew you couldn’t fight him so you would just try and get away from him. Tomorrow is going to be fun, you thought.

———

You woke up early in the morning for your 8 am class. While you were getting changed you heard a knock at the door. You finished getting ready before opening the door.

You scoffed and walked past him, shoving his shoulder. He followed quietly behind you, giving you space. Once you got to the car park, you hopped in the car while Bucky went into the driver’s seat. Your panic started to rise. He must have sensed your intense fear because he gave you a guilty look.

“I’m not going to hurt you” He mumbled while starting the engine. When you arrived at the University, you hopped out of the car and tried to put as much distance between you and him as possible. It was that moment when you looked back to see the guilt on his face.

You felt pity for him. He was lost in thought, unaware that you were staring at him. You were trying to figure him out. All that fear and anger dissolved as you realised that he was too, the victim. The bell pulled you from your trance. You walked into class for another boring day of mindless work.

After four hours of school, you could leave. Bucky kept his distance but close enough so that if anyone hurt you, he would be there. Once you were safely in the car you turned to him. He looked back at you and you froze. You weren’t sure what to say. He gave you a confused look.

“A fresh start” You held your hand out and offered an awkward smile. Bucky was caught off guard and shook your hand with caution.

“I’m sorry” You apologised.

“Its ok” He replied. You knew it wasn’t.

“No. I shouldn’t have gone off at you like that. If we are going to be stuck together, we could at least be friends?” You asked nervously. You seriously thought he would say no after being so rude to him but he nodded.

“Ok,” He smiled. You punched his shoulder lightly in response.

“Come on, we are going to have so much fun,” You laughed

“Tony doesn’t allow me to have any friends besides the one who I've known forever” You explained.

“Yeah, that seems like Tony” You both laughed. The whole car ride home you made jokes and talked like old pals reuniting. ——— It had been weeks and Tony still couldn’t track your stalker. Although you were scared, you were glad it gave you an excuse to be around Bucky. You had started to open up your heart to him. He made you feel vulnerable and happy, and you didn’t want to let it go.

You knew deep down he wouldn’t harbour the same feelings as you did for him. As each day passed you grew happier but sadder.

“Are you ok?” Bucky asked from behind you. You came back to reality to find yourself chewing your nails. It was another nervous habit of yours.

“Yeah,” You said with no emotion. Bucky knew instantly something was wrong. You sighed, knowing you would have to tell him even if it meant ruining what you had. Bucky became increasingly worried when you didn’t look at him.

“Whats wrong?” He begged, wrapping his arms around your shoulders. You pushed them off and stood up from your bed and walked to the other side of the room.

“I have feelings for you” You blurted. You thought the world was going to come crashing down after your confession. The only thing that was crashing down was Bucky’s lips on yours. He caught you by surprise and you jumped back.

“I have feelings for you too” He admitted, entwining his fingers together. Once the words left his mouth something in you snapped. You ran back to him and pulled his face down to yours, embracing him in a passionate kiss. Bucky kissed you back. Your heart was racing a million miles.

You both pulled back to breathe and rested your foreheads on each other and chuckled softly. His smile made you smile. It was then you knew you wanted to spend the rest of your living moments on Earth with that man.

#mcu #marvel #bucky x reader #bucky barnes #winter soldier #captain america #steve #steve rogers #steve x reader

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thesportssoundoff · 7 years ago

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“The UFC Heads To Charlotte! Please Read? A little?” UFC on Fox: Jacare vs Brunson 2 Preview

Joey

Jan 23rd, 2018

The UFC returns to Fox with.....

I mean.....

Okay so this card isn't all that great. The UFC went all out to end the year and made November and December some big months. This Fox card is sort of a victim of that as well as the usual fact that Jan tends to be a thin month PLUS fighters tend to get hurt when it's cold and they tend to not wanna do a training camp around the holidays and etc etc etc. This show is a rather thin show but hey! I'll convince ya to care it because there are some fights worth keeping an eye on. Y'all ready?

Fights: 11

Debuts: 2 (Cory Sandhagen and Austin Arnett)

Fight Changes/Injury Cancellations: 1 ( Ilir Latifi vs OSP Cancelled)

Headliners (fighters who have either main evented or co-main evented shows in the UFC): 4 (Ronaldo Souza, Derek Brunson, Dennis Bermudez, Randa Markos)

Fighters On Losing Streaks in the UFC: 2 (Bobby Green*, Dennis Bermudez)

Fighters On Winning Streaks in the UFC: 4 (Gregor Gillespie, Derek Brunson, Joaquim Silva, Vinc Pichel)

Main Card Record Since Jan 1st 2016 (in the UFC): 18-10 Jacare Souza- 2-1 Derek Brunson- 4-2 Dennis Bermudez- 2-2 Andre Fili- 2-2 Gregor Gillespie- 3-0 Jordan Rinaldi- 1-1 Drew Dober- 3-1 Frank Camacho- 1-1

Too High Up- Drew Dober vs Frank Camacho

Okay so I feel bad about this because Dober/Camacho might be a fantastic fight. At 170 lbs, Camacho/Dober is one of those needed "THROW HANDS AND DO COOL SHIT!" type fights that you put on a card to guarantee an exciting fight where one dude is down to get finished. The problem is that both guys are sort of just there to be action fighters. Nothing is going to change for the winner or the loser, they'll always exist as mauler brawler types who have fun fights. This is a pretty good fight for action purposes but I just don't see main card on Fox. Sorry fellas.

Too Low- Kaitlyn Chookagian vs Mara Romero Borella

This to me would be a fine main card opener. No, it's not going to be a super action fight but Kaitlyn Chookagian vs Mara Romero Borella would be a solid fight with some divisional relevance. Give me this fight over two dudes swangin' on a main card filled already with dudes swangin'

Stat Monitor for 2018:

Debuting Fighters (Current number: 0-3): Austin Arnett, Cory Sandhagen

Short Notice Fighters (Current number: 1-1): 0

Second Fight (Current number: 1-3): Mara Romero Borella, Yi Jeon Kim

Cage Corrosion (2-4): George Sullivan

Twelve Precarious Ponderings

1- 185 lbs is sort of undergoing a bit of an under the radar renaissance of sorts. Robert Whittaker's emergence as a serious dude to know coincides with a heap of new talents being brought in at the weight class, namely guys like Eryk Anders, Oskar Piechota, Karl Roberson, Julian Marquez as well as the emergence of good fighters hitting their stride like Kelvin Gastelum, Anthony Smith, Gerald Meerschaert, Thiago Santos, Antonio Carlos Junior and Paulo Costa. Even with all of that being said, this is still a division that relies on about 6-10 guys to be headliners. Brunson and Jacare are two of those guys who will always be put into positions like this almost entirely due to what they bring to the table. They're known and in the UFC 185 lb class, they're almost always contenders to some various degree. The point I'm going for is that this could be the last chance for both of these guys because there's a heap of fighters under 30 who seem to be knocking on the door to the top of the division.

2- This is a weird sort of event where one of the guys is the hometown guy but you get the feeling that the other guy is the one they really want to build up. The UFC and Jacare reached an agreement on a new contract the day BEFORE he fought Robert Whittaker and so Jacare probably is earning more money now than he ever has before. He's a popular guy who has headlined in Brazil and could in theory be a continuous headliner in Brazil. He's reputable, fans like him and he's the sort of fighter who always seems to be one fight away from the title picture. It's easy to point out that he's lost to the guys in the interim title fight and got smoked by Whittaker but I wonder how much that matters at this point. It's in Brunson's backyard but I wonder if this is all about getting Jacare back into the title picture.

3- Brunson on paper is a pretty intriguing stylistic matchup for Jacare. It's grappler vs wrestler but Brunson hits hard enough to give Jacare reason to pause and avoid getting reckless. If it stays on the feet, I feel like Jacare is the guy with the more versatile offense compared to Brunson but the power is on Brunson's side. Jacare has been dropped and stunned in fights that extend beyond the first round recently and while he's still pretty quick for 185 lbs, I wonder if he's beginning to morph into one of those "Tough Dads" that makes middleweight such a wacky division.

4- Once upon a time not too long ago, Mirsad Bektic was expected to be in that mix at 145 lbs as a serious title contender. He had earned high praise as a prospect and did little in the UFC to disappoint from that regard even if you had concerns about how little he seemed to strike comfortably on the feet. Bektic's journey to the top was halted by Darren Elkins and if you're a prospect who loses at 135 to 155 lbs, you might as well fall off the face of the Earth. Since the loss to Elkins, Bektic has disappeared and might as well be redebuting at this point. There's so much to like about Mirsad Bektic that you're left to hope that he can recover from that loss even better. He got caught wrestling too much vs Elkins, gassed and then got finished when his wrestling abandoned him so it's not like it's a talent related issue I don't believe. Godofredo Pepey is the opponent and he's the right guy to test Bektic; active off of his back, more flash than substance on the feet, holes in the game that can be exploited and a real lack of wrestling savvy to not get taken down.

5- Speaking of "Once upon a time not too long ago", Dennis Bermudez once racked up a winning streak that featured Clay Guida, Max Holloway and Steven Siler. Since then? Well it hasn't quite been as pretty. Bermudez has always been hittable but he's always recovered well and been able to keep himself in the fight. Ricardo Lamas took advantage of Bermudez's slow starts and hittable nature, hurting him early and subbing him with a guillotine. Bermudez and Jeremy Stephens had a fucking amazing fight that ended with Bermudez being on the wrong end of the last knockdown, getting dropped and stopped by a Stephens flying knee on a sloppy takedown. Since then Bermudez has been more and more skittish as a fighter. He's still aggressive when he needs to be but he wrestles more, strikes less and seems almost cautious to the point of self conservation. He had the Zombie hurt and never stepped back on the gas en route to a stoppage loss and he never seemed to get out of the starting blocks vs Darren Elkins. Dennis Bermudez and Andre Fili are similar like minded talents who have struggled finding any sort of footing in the UFC.

6- Some might call Andre Fili inconsistent but let's be real; Fili has gone W-L-W-L-W-L-W-L-W in the UFC. Seems consistent to me, am I right?

7- Juliana Lima is not a fun fighter to watch compete by any stretch of the imagination BUT her vs Randa Markos is a really intriguing fight. This is a battle of two fighters who could exist on the back end of the 115 lb division and both have lost to the elite of the elites (Tecia Torres, Alexa Grasso, Carla Esparza and Joanna Champion to name a few).

8- Gregor Gillespie is a really intriguing 155 lber who is a bit too old to be a prospect (31) but not proven against top competition to feel like we know what he is in total. Unfortunately he's really not getting a fair step up with Jordan Rinaldi who is kind of a bottom layer of the division. Showcase fight for a big market.

9- Vinc Pichel vs Joaquim Silva is a REALLY good fight that is way too buried on this card. It's opening up the FS1 prelims but it's easily better than a collection of fights swimming around on the card above it. Pichel came back from a lengthy absence to flatten Damien Brown and his hands and wrestling skills make him a pretty intriguing 155er. Joaquim SIlva is a little basic for my tastes but he may be one of the best Brazilian "prospects" around. He's another guy we've seen tested before and he's passed those tests.

10- Bobby Green vs Erik Koch is such a battle between two guys who lose in spite of themselves consistently. I am ALL about this fight.

11- The featherweight division has won FOTN the past two shows to kick off 2018 so let's see if they can keep this going on with three straight shows. Bermudez vs Fili has an awesome shot to do it.

12- Any idea why fans have completely hopped off the Niko Price train? Seems totally weird given how good he was prior to his loss.

Must Wins

1- Derek Brunson

It's in his hometown against the highest ranked opponent he's ever faced. For MOST MMA fans, Brunson will always be the guy who loses to the best guys he faces. Machida could've been a guy you could rely on to turn that reputation around but alas alack. Brunson has improved a bunch since their first fight but has he improved enough to leapfrog Jacare?

2- Dennis Bermudez

Two fight skid, co-main event on Fox, opponent who stylistically matches up well with him. Bermudez needs this one.

3- Niko Price

Price finished Alan Jouban, Brandon Thatch and Alex Morono* to the point where it looked like the ATT product would crack the top 10 or so. Price took a step back vs Vicente Luque on short notice and then EVERYBODY forgot who he is. He's under 30 at 170 lbs with fight finishing instincts, length and pacing. The loss to Vicente Luque feels more like a roadblock and not an indictment of what he is.

Five Can't Miss Fights

1- Dennis Bermudez vs Andre Fili

2- Derek Brunson vs Jacare Souza

3- Gregor Gillespie vs Jordan Rinaldi

4- Bobby Green vs Erik Koch

5- Mirsad Bektic vs Godofredo Pepey

#MMA #UFC #Brunson #Jacare #Gregor #Rinaldi #Koch #Bermudez

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4jimin · 7 years ago

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change my mind

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook and Park Jimin; jikook/kookmin Genre: Fluff (a lot), college au, friends to lovers Length: 7k words; 3 chapters | crossposted on ao3 Summary: “I don’t do relationships,” Jimin spills in the fresh air of the fast food – a mixed smell of hamburgers, ketchup and french fries surrounding them. “I enjoy the conquest and the flirting part better. Relationships are always so boring and predictable. Not to mention most of the times fake.” Jungkook rolls his eyes and laughs, pretending he doesn’t feel his heart clench and slightly sink inside his chest. “You’re helpless.” Jimin smiles at him, and it’s almost unfair. “Call me realistic.” he corrects, taking a greasy thumb till his lips to clean it out of the oil of the food. He repeats the same action with the rest of his fingers. Jungkook has to divert his gaze, scared he might end up staring too hard. He snorts with a made up irritation. “I call you a pain in the ass.”

“Love means never having to say you're sorry”. It's written with white chalk on the blackboard hanging by the wall a few tables across him. It quotes “love story, 1970” in a smaller calligraphy right beneath the sentence. Jungkook dwells in the words for a while. He observes the vintage posters pending from the newly painted lilac walls around him with a forced interest, as he taps with long fingers on the plastic cup of cola he ordered. Bullshit, he decides. What is even supposed to mean? That you can't mess up because you love someone? Or that you can't say sorry, because if someone loves you they instantly forgive you, it doesn’t matter what you did? Either way, bullshit. People give too much credit for things just for being old. He sighs, the scent of fresh paint invading his lungs. It used to be baby yellow. The walls. Before the place was just a normal coffee shop and not a fast food with a coupled bookstore. “It's not going to work out,” Jungkook remembers Namjoon saying when they were passing in front of the place being renovated, “people will have greasy fingers from their hamburgers. How will they touch the books like this? The covers will be all disgusting after some time.” Jungkook just shrugged back then. He doesn’t really remember if he agreed or not. But, it turns out Namjoon was wrong. There is a glass wall separating the bookstore from the fast food, so the smell of french fries and cheddar won’t mix with the scent of newly printed copies and fresh ink – also, people has enough sense to clean their hands before moving to the books section, so, by far, the recent business seems to be going very well. Jungkook can’t decide if he prefers the prettier environment it became after the reform, or the calmness it used to have before the appealing design of modernity attracted an alarming number of people. Probably the calmness, since it wouldn’t take so long for Jimin to change a wrong order. The waiter had somehow mixed it with someone else's, getting the boy a double chicken with extra cheddar when he had asked for a steak with barbecue sauce and cream cheese. After opening his hamburger, Jimin had grimaced with the funniest – and maybe kind of cute? – nose scrunch ever. “I hate cheddar.” He stated, as if it wasn’t obvious by the utterly disgusted expression on his face. Another discovery for his on-making list of things about Park Jimin. “How dare you?!” Jungkook had brought a hand to his chest at the declaration, just for the sake of accentuating drama. “I trusted you.” He choked out in fake offense, hoping to hear the older boy's laugh. Unfortunately, he had been given only a faint chuckle followed by a roll of eyes and a “You're an idiot, Jeon. I'll be right back.”, before Jimin got up from his seat and disappeared on his walk till the counter, in search for the right order. They've known each other for five months now – not that Jungkook is counting, it just happened for them to meet on the exact same day the latest movie of Avengers was out, so it also just happened for him to have the day tracked in his mind. Coincidences of life. Anyway, it's little time – Jungkook knows –, and it was definitely not enough to deepen their relationship the way he wished – but, nevertheless, it's nice. They are past the awkward silences and the weird topic's conversations it has some time now, and it isn’t like they are the most intimate people in the world, but yeah, they have some intimacy. Enough that Jungkook has grown used to regularly tease Jimin about his height or – this one Jimin hates the most – his fingers. He bites the inner part of his cheek in order to repress a smile at the memory of Jimin cutely glaring at him with rosy cheeks when Jungkook told him he had baby hands for the first time. He tries not to think about it for too long though, scared he might blush just as hard as Jimin did that day.

There is a foreign song comfortably floating around the place. He is almost sure it belongs to Coldplay, or to a band with equivalent musical genre. It's nice, but he is growing impatient and his lunch is cooling down untouched in front of him – consequently losing half of the unhealthy flavor only a fast food could provide. He wonders if getting up to see how much longer it would take for Jimin to come back would be rude of him. Maybe it would. So instead, he chooses to open the (mostly useless) notifications on his phone. There's a message from Jin and another from his dad. The one asking if he has eaten belongs to Jin. Not that he is surprised. He smiles, typing 'yes mom' – because well, he is about to –, and decides to ignore the one from his father, which questions him when he is paying them a visit. His smile almost fades, but then he clicks on Jimin's icon, leading to their conversation thread.

Jiminie – 11:45 am why are you online u kid shouldn’t u be on class?

You – 11:46 am i am and stop calling me kid

Jiminie – 11:46 am ohhh seems like we have a rebel here lmao

You – 11:46 am shut up asdjk aren't you supposed to be on class too?

Jiminie – 11:47 am …

You – 11:47 am ;)

Jiminie – 11:47 am dont you ;) me !!

You – 11:47 am ;)

Jiminie – 11:47 am ugh

You – 11:49 am hey wanna grab some lunch after class? the fast food that reopened seems nice

Jiminie – 11:49 am the one across the street?

You – 11:50 am yea

Jiminie – 11:50 am do you like being with me that much? ;)

You – 11:50 am shit up look who's ;)-ing me now i just need company to eat

Jiminie – 11:50 am shit up

You – 11:51 am !! istg!!!

Jiminie – 11:51 am lmao meet me at 12:30 at the central gate

You – 11:52 am just changed my mind im calling someone else, you suck

Jiminie – 11:53 am yeah right

He didn’t change his mind. Nor did he call someone else. How could he, honestly? “Hey there.” Jungkook hears the voice he's already so familiar with, and smiles. “I'm back.” “Oh, nice,” he pretends to check the time on his nonexistent watch. “Just took you a lifetime.” “Shut up.” Jimin chuckles, taking his seat in front of the younger. “I decided to change my previous order.” Jungkook leans back on his chair, narrowing his eyes and tilting his head to the side. “No…” he drags the words out, disbeliefed. He had literally taken ten whole minutes to decide his order when they got there. Jimin giggles, following the same tone in a playful manner. “Yes…” The younger boy adjusts his posture, eyeing the other with something akin to incredulity. “How are you the most indecisive person in the whole entire world?!” he jokes, catching some fries from his tray, and shaking his head with a smile. “I just… like most things on the menu, okay?” Jimin tries to defend himself, sipping his orange juice from the straw. Hates cheddar and loves orange juice. Jungkook gave up on understanding him from there. “Except–“ he starts, already laughing, but is cut off. “Except the double chicken with extra cheddar, yes.” The older rolls his eyes, an habit he is very much attached to – almost as much as his uncontrollable urge of running his fingers through his hair. Jungkook is surprised he still haven't done it in, what? Three minutes? “You know, how fucked up is this?” Jimin drops the question, placing his elbow on the table to look at Jungkook with his face leaning on his hand. “The menu has like, at least thirty different hamburgers and mine got to get mixed with the only one I absolutely hate. I'd eat any other one.” Jungkook laughs at his misery, because they are past the phase where this kind of reaction could be read as rude. “I guess coincidences are really out there to bite us in the ass in our worst moments.” Jimin sighs, defeated. Jungkook shakes his head, shoving another portion of fries into his mouth. “Or perharps, you're just the unluckiest person in the world for the day.” Smiling, the older frowns, and unwraps his hamburger to take a bite. “What's this, a theory?” he asks after swallowing the food – because he's polite, unlike Jungkook, who speaks with his mouth partially full all the time. Not that any of them really cares. “What do you mean?” Jungkook doesn’t get the line of thought. “Like…” Jimin shifts on his seat to find a more comfortable position, “Do you think that there is a day for every person in the world to be the unluckiest?” Jungkook laughs, amused by how a random choice of words he made, aroused this kind of questioning on the boy. “Um, I don’t know? I've never really stopped to think about it, but maybe? It might.” He is about to remove the paper enveloping his own hamburger when an idea surges in his mind and lights up his features. “Oh! How about we do an experience?” “Experience?” Jimin smiles, never really able to not to when he is around the younger – because there is a thing about Jeon Jungkook that just keeps on impelling his cheeks to rose up and flush without his consent. It'd be frustrating if it wasn’t endearing. “Yeah, experience! You're our subject. If bad things enough happen to you today, then it's a proven theory.” He nods confidently. Jimin licks his lips before speaking. “I'm pretty sure every scientist out there in the world would be flattered by our revolutionary method of research.” They laugh, and Jungkook takes the chance to fully stare at Jimin – he is so pretty. However, the older's smile fades way too quickly, replaced by a sudden curious expression when Jungkook unwraps his hamburger. “Oh! Didn’t you tell me you were vegetarian before?” he asks, pointing at the food with a good piece of meat between the breads. Jungkook archs his eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “Oh? Do you remember that? It was like, months ago.” Jimin looks away, humming a sort of agreement and Jungkook almost thinks he sees the lightest of the pinks coloring his cheeks. “Ah…” he tries not to focus on it too much – it might make him delusional –, and concentrates on his response instead. “I don’t… You got it wrong. I'm trying to turn vegetarian. But fast food is kind of the misfortune of my attempts. And the meat here… Well, let's be honest, it doesn’t really tastes like meat.” The older giggles, sucking more juice from the straw afterwards. “But why did you decide this?” he licks his lips to catch some drops of the juice that accumulated on it and Jungkook has to try unusually hard to not stare. “Mhm, I…” he clicks his tongue in order to regain his focus and elaborate an answer, “I just… Don’t think eating animals is right.” Clever. Very clever, great job, Jeon. He facepalms himself inwardly. The problem is: he is always put on a challenge whenever he has to explain his ideals – he feels like he's pressured to convince the other person what he believes is right, and this, he just hates. Usually, because people tend to get defensive pretty fast, but also because he understands he can be wrong and that is okay for other people to not follow the same way of living as him. He just believes in what he believes and that's it. Jimin bites the corner of his lips, looking up thoughtful. “Yeah, but I don’t think anyone thinks it's right? I mean, don’t we just need it? As a vital necessity for our daily pack of energy as humans or something?” Jungkook decides to finally take a bite of his hamburger. “Not really. I mean,” he swallows, “of course it's important and it helps, but there are many potential substitutes. At least, for me it works. It doesn’t for everyone though. Some people really need it to survive, but since I don’t… what bad it does, right?” Jimin smiles, genuinely interested and Jungkook stupidly flushes. Seriously. “What made you get into it?” “Ah.” he bites his lower lip. It's not a topic he was expecting to talk about while they were eating. “It's a cruel system.” He stops himself when he is about to add an 'I think' in the end of the sentence. It's not an opinion; at least not this. It's the truth. “I kinda got disgusted of eating meat after watching a documentary about the way animals are treated in slaughterhouses. It's… unpleasant to know.” “Oh.” Jimin puts his lunch down. “I feel bad now.” “No, don’t feel!” Jungkook hurries. “I mean. Yeah, okay, you can feel, cause it's bad, but it's not like only one person can change the way this industry treats animals by not buying any more meat, so…” He explains. “I understand that, I'm trying to stop just because I truly feel disgusted now. I don’t enjoy the taste. Well, except for this. Fast food is my only weakness. And chicken nuggets.” Jimin nods and tries to lighten the atmosphere, changing the subject of conversation. “Oh! Just like soda to me.” Jungkook archs an eyebrow, ready to tease. “But you drink beer?” The older doesn’t answer, caught in a trap. “Seems logical.” He laughs hard when Jimin leans over the table to slap his arm. “Shut up.” He repeats for probably the tenth time that day. “It's addicting.” “I know. Even though it tastes like shit.” Jimin rolls his eyes, running his fingers through his hair and pushing his bangs backwards. Oh, there it is. Some strands get back on its place, but his forehead remains mainly exposed. It's a great sight. “Kid.” Jungkook rushes to defend himself. “M' not! Sayeon-noona is the same age as you and she agrees with me!” “Another kid!” Jimin accuses and laughs. Jungkook's scowl almost instantly disappears, as he gets busier being overwhelmed by the sound. “How is she, by the way?” How are you two?, he knows it's what it means. There's a sigh asking for allowance to escape from Jungkook's throat, but he reprimands it. “I guess we're really just friends, after all. We don't work out as a couple.” Jimin hums. “I'm… sorry to hear that.” “No, it's okay, truly. It's nice like this.” Jungkook takes the chance to sip another gulp on his drink, before asking, “What about you?” Jimin purses his lips to contain a smile, while shaking his head to the sides. His bangs move cutely, falling over his forehead again – almost calling for Jungkook's fingers to move them aside, so his beautiful skin can be fully on display once more. He swallows the urge, taking his hand to scratch his nape instead. “I'm the unromantic romantic type.” Jimin muses, and Jungkook frowns. “What?” he laughs, confused. “What do you mean?” “I don’t do relationships,” he states and Jungkook can almost feel his heart sinking at the words, but he pretends it's the ghostly sensation of the soda's gas on his throat. “Cause I enjoy the conquest and flirting part better.” The boy is suddenly amused at the reason. “Why?” Jimin clicks his tongue. “I like the nervousness of the unknown. The fluttering heart and the stomach's butterflies at the beginning. But that's it. I don’t like what comes next. The boredom of relationship, always so predictable and…? I don’t know, I don’t like it.” Jungkook nods understandingly, but not really agreeing. “It isn’t always like that, though, you know?” “Oh, please.” Jimin smiles. “You know it is.” “It's not!” Jungkook is smiling too, but he feels defensive, ready to stand for his point of view. “If your relationships are being predictable and boring, then you're dating wrong.” Jimin chews on a lonesome fry, before letting out, “Uh, I never dated.” He takes a moment to absorb the information. Park Jimin never… What? Jeon Jungkook is beyond offended. He stares at Jimin for a long second – mouth gaping for effect –, before playfully slamming his fist on the table with a fake angry expression, dragging the most gorgeous and contagious laugh ever out of Jimin's throat. He almost forgets what he is doing when the older squeezes his eyes shut and throws his head back, having Jungkook's own lips unconsciously quirking upwards into a giggle as he watches him. When Jimin composes himself again, Jungkook continues dramatically. “How can you possibly say you hate, with capital h, relationships, when you have never even once experienced one?!” Jimin shrugs, nonchalantly – yet, still with remainings of a playful chuckle on his features. “I just know.” “That's aburd. And impossible.” He emphasizes. “It is not!” It's Jimin's turn to stand for what he believes, it seems. “You have to agree with me that the flirting part is the best one.” Jungkook ponders for a second, just to sigh defeated on the other, already flashing a victorious smirk on his hyung's lips. “Well, yes, but only because I've been through a lot of shitty relationships.” “Jungkook… My dearest dear Jungkook… Let's be honest here.” Jimin closes his eyes while holding Jungkook's wrists for drama's sake, and then sighs even more dramatically when he blinks his eyes open to look at him again. “Every relationship is shitty.” Jungkook snorts. “Hyung! You're being very unfair and unconsiderate with every healthy and happy relationship out there in the world!” Jimin laughs. “Which is none.” “I'm offended.” Jungkook says, looking away with a pout and crossed arms, getting Jimin extra aware on his seat. “Wait, for real?” The boy eyes him, reluctant on his play. “No, but…” he lets his arm fall, already giving up on the act. “I mean, come on, there must be a relationship you look at and say, 'that's it, relationship goals'.” Jimin fakes a gag and Jungkook can’t help but chuckle at the sight. Fucking idiot. “Thankfully never.” “You're helpless.” “Call me realistic.” Jimin corrects him, taking a thumb till his lips to clean it out of the oil of the food. He repeats the same thing with the rest of his fingers. Jungkook diverts his gaze, scared he might end up staring too hard. “I call you a pain in the ass. Outch!” he complains when Jimin punches his shoulder – even though it didn't really hurt. “Respect your hyung, brat.” It's Jungkook's turn to roll his eyes – although, he keeps silent, eating the remainings of his now withered fries, and drinking the rest of his cola, hamburger already being digested inside his stomach. Jimin, however, is still on half of his burger, almost all of his fries out of the red container and scattered over his tray. “How do you eat so slowly?!” Jungkook asks, nearly shocked. Jimin answers him mouthful for the first time and Jungkook has to bite back a smile at his puffed cheeks. “Well, I'm sorry if I don’t eat like a starving tinasor!” Jungkook furrows his brows. “A tinawhat?” He swallows before speaking again. “Dinosaur!” The younger takes a hand to his chest, faking offense. “I don’t eat like a starving dinosaur! You're the one who eats like a slug!” Jimin rolls his eyes at him and sticks out his tongue. Jungkook has to chuckle in order to pretend he's not on the verge of melting. “You're so cute.” He lets out before his mind processes it. Well, shit. “I mean,” he tries to correct it, but just ends up pointing at Jimin's entire face. “Cute.” The black haired boy flushes so hard even his ears turn pink. “Shut up.” He mutters a second before taking the white straw to his mouth, the plastic turning orange when he sucks the liquid from the cup. He has such nice lips it's distracting. Jungkook misses the chance to tease him for blushing thanks to it. “Uh.” He forces a cough. “So.” And scratches the back of his neck, because it's terribly itching all of a sudden. Jimin's phone vibrating on the table saves him from the embarrassment and also from an awkward silence it was for sure going to settle on the table. The older takes the gadget on his free hand and presses the side button so the lockscreen lights up. “Ah!” Jimin groans, throwing his head back. Curious, Jungkook leans his cheek on the palm of his hand and asks, “What is it?” Jimin snorts, seemingly annoyed. “This guy.” He doesn’t look back at Jungkook to answer, busy trying to type something on the phone with a single hand. “I told him I didn’t want nothing serious, but now that we fucked he keeps on texting me, asking me to go out with him and shit.” The younger nods, and bites the inner part of his bottom lip, pondering what to say. He almost smiles, dying to tease with an “are you that good?!” – but ends up choosing the most secure option. “Why don’t you?” “Dates sucks. And the whole idea of going out already fades the conquest.” Jungkook furrows his eyebrows for probably the tenth time on the day – his never ending battle of trying to understand Park Jimin – and reclines on the backrest. “Um, no?” Jimin turns his attention back at him. “Um, yes?” He places the phone on the table. “I mean, if you're going out with someone it means the flirting is done, because well, the purpose of flirting is getting a date. Or getting laid.” He adds thoughtfully. “Which I already did. So now it means feelings are about to be involved, and no, thanks.” He emphasizes the last two words and takes another bite of his hamburger, chewing on it while waiting for Jungkook's response, who can only roll his eyes. “Ah, hyung.” He snorts, letting his head fall in defeat. “Why are you like this? Have you even gone to a date, at least? Or you just hate it based on nothing?” Jimin straightens his back, and acts as if he's very offended. “Excuse me? It's not based on nothing. I've analyzed it with my own eyes, you just have to look around.” And so, Jungkook does. Jimin watches him with something akin to amusement on his face. “Not literally, idiot.” “No, let's do this.” Jungkook decides, looking for a table with couple vibes. “There!” He excitedly bounces on his seat once, turning back to Jimin to make sure he is looking the right people. “Those two.” Jimin shakes his head in confusion. “What?” And with no further explanation, Jungkook simply gets up and gestures for Jimin to follow him. “Wh-what, Jungkook!” He quickly gets up when he realizes the boy intends to walk over to the two girls at the other side of the restaurant. “What the hell, are you crazy?!” He hurries to grab the younger's arm with both hands, attempting to pull him back to his chair. There are firm muscles bulging against his palms, but he ignores it with a gulp. “What?” he asks indifferently. “I'mma just ask them some things.” He has a calm expression on his face, as if he's not about to approach two strangers about their supposed love life. Jimin laughs with incredulity. “Yeah, not happening.” He tugs at the arm more insistently. Jungkook doesn’t flinch a centimeter. “What, why not?” Shining, big doe eyes winks back at him innocently and Jimin can’t decide if the he is naive or just dumb. “Um, because that's very impolite? And extremely invasive.” Jimin eyes the couple discreetly for a second. The girl with blonde short hair is leaning with forearms on the table, attentively listening to what the other is saying, and adorning a tender smile across her pink lips. Jimin can’t see the face of the one speaking, but her long hair lays on her back in soft bluish curls. They both seem very pretty. “You also don’t even know if they’re like… a thing.” Jimin finds himself turning his attention back to Jungkook just in time to catch the boy rolling his eyes. It's annoyingly cute. “Oh, please. Just look at them, of course they're a thing.” He doesn’t find much argument against that. He might have never allowed himself to fall in love in his life, but he does recognize a fluttering heart shinning through enamored eyes when he sees one. “Besides, what the hell do you think I'm gonna ask them?! Their sexual lives? No, thanks, Namjoon-hyung's story of his first time eating a guy's ass is traumatic enough.” A grossed out expression makes its way across Jimin's features. “Dude. Thanks for the unnecessary information.” Jungkook tilts his head to the side, smiling sarcastically. Jimin wants to punch it out of his face. With his mouth. Maybe. “You're welcome. Now come.” He's about to complain and step back when Jungkook suddenly grabs his hand and interlocks their fingers. The world kind of spins in a soft blur for a moment and his eyes instantly fall down to it – intertwined fingers clasped together; Jungkook holding firm and he loosely –, which gets his stomach to clench very weirdly. Oh, shit. However, he doesn’t have much time to dwell on how smooth, warm and soft Jungkook's skin feels against his, cause one second he's wondering how it'd feel pressed on his nape – or waist, maybe? – while they make out, and the other he's put in front of two very confused, unknown girls. He forces out a smile to the strangers after a second of hesitation, doing his best at crushing Jungkook's fingers on his, hidden behind their backs. “Hah!” the younger loudly gasps, startling the girls and pulling his hand away from Jimin's grip, quickly forcing a smile on his lips as well. Jimin hopes he felt a lot of pain. Jungkook takes the embarrassing moment to bow in greeting, so Jimin follows suit. “Hello, nice to meet you two. I'm, uh, I'm Jungkook and this is my friend, Jimin.” Jimin lightly leans his head forward again, a low mutter of something that seems “nice to meet you” falling from his lips. The two girls bow back uncertainly and stare at the both of them in silence. God. Jimin never wanted to deck someone in the face so bad – Jungkook, deck Jungkook, not the girls, for god's sake. Yet, he chooses to poke him with his elbow instead. For the time being. “Ah!” the idiot jolts, clapping his hands once in front of his body, obviously trying to come out with something to say. Jimin is sure he could bury his whole self in pure embarrassment right now. He's already blushing hard enough for the two of them anyway. “I'm sorry to, um, interrupt your meal, it's just that me– Me and my friend,” he reiterates, pulling Jimin closer and Jimin really has to manage all of his self control to not kill the boy right there. “We were talking about dates and we got onto a disagreement, so we're doing… research.” Jimin turns to look at him, a smile that says “I'm so going to murder you” hanging on his lips. “We are?” “Ah. Yes.” Jungkook laughs the threat away. “So, anyway, since you two seemed to be on a really nice date, we thought–“ “Oh.” The short haired girl's voice surges for the first time. She takes a hand to her chest and laughs, seemingly relieved. “Thank god, I thought you were trying to hit on us.” If Jimin's cheeks were flushed before, now they are the red of the flames in hell itself. The other girl also laughs, and gestures with her hand to the both of them. “I'm Eunji and she's Hyerin. But, um, actually… We're not on a date.” Jungkook snaps his head back just the slightest, surprised. “Oh.” He voices out innocently, exactly like a kid who just discovered the ocean is only blue because it reflects the sky. Jimin would find it adorable if he wasn't, you know, dying. “Ah, sorry, we thought– Well, that's not a problem, really.” Jungkook smiles. “Can you still answer our questions, though?” Jimin facepalms himself. Literally speaking. “Please, just say yes, so we can leave and I can kill him after this.” His voice comes out muffled, but he can hear giggles, which means it was audible enough. “Yeah, sure.” One of them say. Jimin finds out it's the one with the blue highlights when he takes his hand out of his face. Eunji, right? “What is it?” He finds himself curious, considering he also has no idea what Jungkook is about to ask, so he redirects his attention to him. “Ah, it's truly just one question.” The boy admits, and Jimin could easily mistake the way he is scratching his neck with nervousness. He watches Jungkook open his mouth once and then be caught in a loss of words, as if he is reconsidering what he's about to ask. Jimin doesn’t have time to say anything though – the younger is quick to talk again. “Do you think dates erase the whole meaning of flirting?” Yes, it's his immediate thought. He halfheartedly shifts his gaze from Jungkook's profile to the girls, so he can see their reactions. Hyerin is the first to answer – she has her head tilted a bit to the side in thought, with a pair of furrowed brows. Jimin feels a faint smile forming on his lips, because she's cute. “I think it depends? It's the first date? Second?” Eunji intervenes. “Why would that matter?” Jimin kind of knows why, but he doesn’t want to interfere in their path of discussion. “Well, if it's the first date maybe not, but if it's the sixth then probably?” He nods, as it was exactly what he was thinking. However, Jungkook doesn’t seem to agree beside him, if the way he keeps on changing his weight from a feet to another is anything to tell. “I mean, if you got to the sixth date, there's a high chance that you're, well, dating.” Hyerin concludes, and Jimin takes the chance to subtly glance at Jungkook, but the boy is still resolute in his opinion, it seems. Eunji is the same apparently, as she places her palm on the table and gapes at Hyerin for a second, almost offended. “Excuse me, but what makes you think couples can't flirt at all? My parents are married for 20 years and they flirt all the time!” “Yes, my grandparents too!” Jungkook decides to buy Eunji's fight, so Jimin steps in. “It's not the same.” Although, he is surprised as Hyerin says the very same thing as him in complete sync. They look at each other with open mouths, right before chuckling and high-fiving. “When you flirt with someone you're already dating, it doesn’t really hold the whole meaning of flirting, since the purpose is making the person whom you flirt with fall in love with you.” she concludes and Jimin almost thinks Eunji doesn't have any other argument to beat this one – except she does. “Well, but you can fall in love with the same person everyday.” And this seems to be the actual K.O., given how Hyerin intensely blushes, ducking her head down and Eunji smiles victoriously. So they're actually on a date, Jimin realizes with a smile on his face that warms all the way to his chest. Smart as ever, Jungkook doesn’t seem to catch on that, smirking at Jimin and quirking his eyebrows twice with a hidden teasing that says “see?”, since he thinks they won the argument. Jimin rolls his eyes just because. Hopeless romantics. “Anyway, in which context did this surge?” Hyerin is quick to ask in order to not let an awkward silence stretches on the table, but just after the words leaves her mouth she seems to realize how they actually sounded. “Oh, sorry, I-I didn’t mean to be rude or intrude, I was just curious.” “It's okay.” Jimin reassures with a warm smile, and when he is about to tell her and reasonably explain his point, Jungkook decides to be a dick and paint him as the shallow asshole by cutting him off before he even started talking. “He hates relationships. And he thinks dates sucks.” Jimin punchs his arm, embarrassed. “Yah!” His cheeks feels warm and the grin Jungkook gifts him with does nothing to ease it. “What?” he asks, rubbing the sore spot. “It's your own words! Do they sound completely heartless when I say it to other people?” Jungkook teases and Jimin purses his lips, focusing really hard on stopping blushing so he doesn’t make a fool of himself. “Shut up, I have plenty of reasons.” Jimin emphasizes and Jungkook mocks him by pinching his cheek in front of two strangers. Oh boy, he's dead. “Mhm-mhm, I bet you do, you red baby.” He coos. Oh boy, he's dead. “Oh, we have similar opinions,” Hyerin's voice snaps them out of their personal bubble, “but I don’t think dates sucks.” Jimin sighs. He is alone in this battle, apparently. “But you used to!” Eunji points an accusing finger at the short haired girl. She rolls her eyes, but there's a hint of a smile on her lips. “Well, but I don’t anymore!” Hyerin protests in her own defense. “Stop exposing me.” she mutters. “But what made you change your mind?” Jungkook asks, genuinely curious. “About dates, I mean.” “Well,” Eunji starts in Hyerin's place. “I guess she had to go through a series of many awesome dates, right?” They share an accomplice gaze and Jimin knows it's time for them to leave the girls alone again. “Okay, so. Thank you so much for helping with this idiot's “research”, I'm sure he'll make good use of it being a pain in the ass later.” The girls smile sincerely, politely bowing their heads afterwards. Jimin places a hand on Jungkook's back motioning for him to move back to their table. When he starts walking, Jimin takes a second to lean down a little and whisper so only the girls can hear him, “Enjoy your date.” Hyerin cheeks turns pink instantly, but Eunji simply waves at him, a loving smile adorning her features. “You too.” she whispers back. Before Jimin can clarify he and Jungkook aren’t on a date, said boy holds his waist and waves the girls goodbye over their shoulders. “Thank you!” the younger makes sure to give them his brightest smile. Jimin isn’t able to catch it in full hd though, because Jungkook’s hand on his waist is currently making the skin beneath his jacket tingle in a funny way. ”What did you whisper to them?” the boy questions when they are almost at their table. Jimin has to pull up a small battle with his brain to detach himself from Jungkook's touch so he can reach his seat. He waits for Jungkook to do the same to speak. “I told them to have a good date.” The boy in front of him seems very shocked, much for Jimin's amusement. He chews on a now very cold fry, waiting for Jungkook’s answer. “What– how rude! Hyung, they told us they were not on a date!” Oh god, was he still clueless? For real? Jimin swallows. “Jungkookie. They are on a date.” “Bullshit, they're not–“ he insists confidently at first, but as soon as he turns his body back to take a glance at the girls and spots their shy hands curling in one another, he gulps his previous words. “Shit, they're on a date.” “No joke, Einstein.” Jimin teases. “Now stop staring, they just stopped thinking we're weird and I'd like to keep that way, thank you.” Jungkook does as he's asked, but Jimin can see a hint of offense on his eyes. “They lied to us. Why would they do that?” He shoots Jungkook a face, and the offense painted on the younger's face only grows ten thousands bigger. He places a hand over his chest and almost chokes out, “Do we look like homophobes?!” Jimin rolls his eyes at the boy's innocence. “Jungkook, seriously, when you go out with someone of the same sex as you in an homophobic country, everyone around you looks like homophobes. I thought you would know that.” “Oh.” His face softens. “Right.” And then he smiles. “That's good, then, they form such a cute couple.” Jimin hums agreeing, finally finishing his hamburger with a last bite. His fingers are greasy, so he takes a napkin to clean them and when he looks up, Jungkook smiles a smile with no teeth that makes his cheeks plump up like two little red apples. Jimin knows that smile. He's seen it before. “What?” he asks cautiously, sensing an idea forming in the younger's mind. He's planning something. Something stupid, probably. Once, they were trying to chill in an ice cream shop with Taehyung. Jimin remembers the day was unbearably scorching – and even inside the refrigerated place, there were droplets of sweat forming on the back of his neck, turning the tips of his hair humid. They were talking and trying to distract themselves from the heat as well from the upcoming finals. The topic of the conversation was human beings physical limitations. Don’t ask him how they got there, they just did. Apart from the hot weather, the atmosphere was nice and cozy; their fingers and lips smeared with sweet, Taehyung being the messiest of the three – but that was no news –, and their voices occasionally overlapping one another as they shot random guesses of how much ice cream a person could eat in one sitting. When a mutual agreement – between Jimin and Taehyung – settled that 15 scoops was the limit, the table fell in silence. Jungkook wasn’t pleased. He stared at the older boys with a cocky wriggle of eyebrow and then smiled the way he was smiling now. Before anyone could even say a word, he called for the waitress and well, proved Jimin and Taehyung were wrong by eating twenty scoops of ice cream. Twenty. Jimin almost felt impelled to go and eat twenty one just because, but he wasn’t that suicidal. “What do you have on your schedule today?” Jungkook asks, leaning his head on his hand and blinking his eyelashes in a way it's kind of hard to stare at without getting a heartbeat to skip. A seminar to finish, dance practice for the upcoming performance and a good lay at night, he remembers. “Nothing.” he answers, “Why?” At that, Jungkook's smile grows so wide Jimin's heart clenches and it's awkward, because what the hell. However, he has no time to freak out since Jungkook is suddenly grabbing their personal belongings and shoving it all down his backpack. “What are you doing?” his voice sounds genuinely confused, just how he feels. “Come.” The younger simply gets up and says – as if it's very self explainable –, looking around the table and tapping his pockets to check if everything's there. When Jimin keeps his butt glued to the chair, Jungkook diverts his focus to him. “You're not coming?” he seems puzzled and maybe a bit taken aback, but that’s probably just Jimin reading his actions too deeply. “Coming where?” And that’s when Jimin has to hold back all his oxygen inside his lungs in order to keep a straight expression, because all of a sudden Jungkook places one hand on the chair's backrest, another on the table and leans down so fast his face is found just inches away from Jimin's. He almost gasps, but he knows his self control better, so he quickly finds his composure again. “To the mall.” Jimin's mind suffer an abrupt short circuit, because is Jungkook really planning on doing what I think he's planning to do. “I'm gonna be your cupid.” Oh. Well, he's not, but wait– “What?!” The younger straightens his column with a smile, hands hiding in his pockets. “I'll be your cupid.” He repeats plainly, something hidden in the way his lips curve at just the right angle to form a timid dimple. “Let's find you a date. That's the only way we can know who's right.” Jimin laughs with incredulity. “Would you go that far just to prove a point?!” That's when he sees a chance to tease. And he takes it. “Are you sure you're not just using this as an excuse to take me out?” He gets up, and even though Jungkook is taller, this time, the proximity seems to disconcert the younger. It lasts such a short second, though, just like it did with Jimin. Apparently, they're playing games and well that's Jimin's language. He smirks, and so does Jungkook. “It's not like I have to find an excuse to take you out, is it?” he whispers closer to his face. Jimin is left back shocked at the boldness, since Jungkook pulls away just as fast, switching his tone and consequently the atmosphere. “And of course I'm serious!” he steps backwards at the cashier's direction. “Let's go, it's gonna be new. That's the synonymous of exciting to you, right?” he turns around in order to walk properly and misses Jimin rolling of eyes at him, but Jimin's pretty sure it was purposeful. He rolls his eyes one more time, following the younger nevertheless – and it's not like he doesn’t realize the bothersome tugging at his chest, but he decides to settle on it being simple anticipation. Maybe Jungkook's right and new is really another word for excitement to him. Not that he is letting him know he's right. When Jimin reachs the boy at the front counter, Jungkook's money is already being handed to the lady behind the computer. “Yah!” Jimin reprimands him. “What are you doing, idiot? Told you it's my treat!" “Of course not.” Jungkook looks back at him. “I invited you, so I pay.” Jimin shakes his head, insistent – not like it's useful, since the woman is already giving Jungkook the change and thanking him. But no dongsaeng has ever paid for him – not even Taehyung. It's somewhat intimate, and it unsettles him. “I'm the hyung.” He says. “So?” Jungkook puts the money back on his wallet and then snorts. “Aish, stop being difficult, you're the only person I know who complains for getting free food.” There's a couple of young teenagers already waiting behind them to pay, so Jungkook bows for the lady who attended to him and walks towards the exit. Jimin follows suit, maintaining his lowkey sulking mode. “We're probably proving that theory right by the end of the day and I'm really the unluckiest person in the world today.” Jungkook isn’t sure if's he's more of pouting or talking. Either way, it's adorable. He fights the urge to squish his hyung's cheeks, and decides on bending down instead, putting them on eye level. “Don’t be like that…” he trails, entertained by the way Jimin's eyes widen slightly and his bottom lip is sucked inside his mouth. “You're spending the entire day with me.” He reminds him. When Jimin releases the flesh, it comes back a flushing red. “It's not that bad, right?” Smiling amused, Jungkook does exactly what he did minutes ago, and gives Jimin his back – instead this time, he does catches the elder rolling his eyes. Within the cutest pair of rosy cheeks coming along on the package. Too bad he misses the loving smile sprawling on Jimin's lips when he turns arounds.

#busanboysnet #armiesnet #btsmaknaenet #jikook fic #kookmin fic #jikook #kookmin #bts fic #bts

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