#if your not brave enough send someone else.. gosh darn

[tinyspacetovent]

Jeongwook is a better person than me.. I would've slap hyeongjin at the end

[acelezz]

“L is For Luna” (Part 2): A Saluna Fanfic

Title: L is For Luna

Summary: When Luna finds a love letter in her locker, she hopes that it is her crush Sam, but is doubtful. With the help of her ten siblings, Luna will find out whether her dreams of being with Sam will ever be a reality or not.

Part: 2

Author: L-is-For-Loud-House

Fandom: The Loud House

Ship: Saluna (Luna Loud and Sam Sharp)

Timeline: A few months after “L is For Love”

Genre: Fanfiction/Romance

Word Count: 1,746

...

“Clack, clack, clack!” The sound of Luna hitting Lori’s blue high heels on the white dresser in Lori and Leni’s room went.

It was now 3:00 in the afternoon and all of the Loud siblings had just gotten home from school ten minutes ago. They all had been gathered into Lori and Leni’s room by Luna for a Loud Sibling Meeting. 

“I hereby call this meeting to order!” Luna announced.

“Lisa, can you read the minutes from the last meeting?” Lori asked the 4-year-old prodigy.

Lisa then proceeded to whip out a piece of paper which was a review of their last meeting. “Alright. Item one: It was resolved that in the matter of Lynn’s football-”

Lisa was then interrupted by Luna ripping the paper from her hands and crumbling it up into a ball. “Sorry, we don’t need to hear that today, Lise.” Luna then chucked the paper into the trash can. “Alright, so you’re probably all wondering why I gathered you all here today.”

“Whatever this is about, it better be good!” Lola hissed. “I was in the middle of practicing for my next pageant!”

“And I was in the middle of writing a new joke!” Luan added.

“And I was just about to go play in the mud!” Lana chimed in.

“And I was just about to read my new Ace Savy comic!” Lincoln exclaimed.

“And I was just about to paint my nails with my cute new nail polish!” Leni stated.

“And I was in the middle of writing a new poem!” Lucy announced.

“And I was just about to go outside and play some soccer!” Lynn whined.

“Poo poo!” Lily cried with annoyance.

“Ok, I get that you all want to go back to whatever it was that you were doing,” Luna told her siblings. “But this is my one and only voice. So listen close, it’s only for today. And I promise that this won’t take long! Alright, I gathered all of you in here to talk about this!” Luna then revealed the love letter that she got earlier on in the day at school to her siblings.

All of them groaned.

“Ugh, not this again!” Lola groaned.

“Luna, don’t you remember that sending love letters is Mom’s thing for Dad?” Lori asked. “You should probably give that to him so he can see what she wrote for him!”

“No, dudes, this letter is actually for me! I found it in my locker this morning!”

All of Luna’s siblings gasped.

Leni then ran up to Luna and gave her a hug as she squealed, “O. M. Gosh, Luna! Congrats, little sis! This is totes exciting!”

“Thanks, Leni,” Luna chuckled as Leni let go of her.

Leni then gave Luna a nudge. “So are you gonna tell us who it’s from?”

“I-I don’t know...” Luna then unfolded the letter and showed what had been written on it to her siblings. “Whoever wrote it signed it as ‘Your Secret Admirer’. So I need all of your help to figure out who it is.”

Lori then let out a squeal. “Ooh, I bet it’s Sam!”

The rest of the siblings except for Luna then let out a teasing, “Ooo...”

A slight blush came across Luna’s cheek as she nervously rubbed her arm. “I don’t know dudes. I’m really hoping that it’s Sam, but she’s way out of my league.”

“Are you kidding me?” Lincoln asked. “She totally likes you!”

“Well she definitely does as a friend, but I don’t know if it goes any further than that.”

“Well, who else could the letter be from?” Lynn questioned. “She always wants to come over and jam with you like five out of seven times of the week!”

“Yeah, and the way that she always looks so happy whenever she’s commini-gay-ting with you!” Luan teased.

“Luan!” All of the Loud siblings shouted.

“Wow, that joke certainly did not get BI you guys!” 

The 14-year-old comedienne hen broke out into a fit of laughter while all of her siblings groaned and facepalmed themselves.

“But, Luna, despite her terrible jokes, Luan does have a point,” Lori began. “Remember that Luan, Leni, and I all go to the same school as you so we occasionally see you in the hallway with Sam. But we all know how important spending time with her is to you so we always let you two be. But all three of us have seen Sam walking in the hallway with other friends or by herself and she always seems to be the happiest whenever she’s with you.”

“Really?” Luna queried.

“Totes!” Leni agreed. “Her smile is always like ten times bigger whenever she’s with you!”

Luna smiled at the thought of Sam’s gorgeous smile. “Well, I always did think that she was a naturally happy gal. But you guys do have a point that I have no clue how she behaves when I’m not around. But I’m still not too sure if the letter’s from her, dudes.”

“Why? Is there anyone else that we should know about, Luna?” Lola asked, grinning.

“No, as of right now, Sam’s the only one out there that sends a million butterflies into my stomach. While I do have something for Mick Swagger, it’s not the same thing. I really look up to him and I think that his music is rockin’, so he’s just a role model to me. No one else has the same effect on my heart like the way that that Sam chick does. But what if there’s someone else out there who has been crushin’ on me and I just have no clue because we’re either not close or they’re just excellent at hiding it.”

“Well, it seems like you wouldn’t have a clue if anyone had a crush on you since you’re clearly oblivious to the fact that Sam likes you back!”

“Yeah, I do not enjoy feelings such as the ones that you have described and even I can see that Sam is attracted to you,” Lisa agreed.

“Maybe she’s just attracted to me as a friend,” Luna said, clearly in denial.

“Luna, why do you keep on disagreeing with everything that we’re saying?” Lana asked. “Did something that we don’t know about happen between you and Sam?”

“Nothing bad happened. But I did tell her about the letter.”

“And what did she say?” Lincoln asked.

“Well, she didn’t say whether it was her or not. But she did agree that it’s a bummer that the letter is signed anonymously. But this when we were walking to our first period classes and she had to go to chem. But, she did hug me and told me that she was excited for me right before she had to go. It surely did ignite the butterflies in my tum-tum and had me surprised because she ain’t much of a hugger. But then I figured it was because we’re really good friends so she’s just really happy that I got a love letter.”

All of the Loud siblings let out a squeal.

Luna raised an eyebrow. “What?”

Luna’s siblings all giggled at her.

Lori then put a hand on her short-brown-haired sister. “Luna, you have no idea how literally oblivious you can be sometimes. Sam was totally the one who wrote that letter! She’s probably just too nervous to admit that she was the one who wrote the letter, just like how you’re too nervous to admit to her that you’re the one who’s been sending her all of those love letters! Say, didn’t you tell us that you had a similar reaction when she told you about the letters that she got?”

Luna’s cheeks turned a deeper shade of red as she let out a chuckle. “Yeah, I did. Man, were the butterflies soarin’ when she mentioned that. I nearly almost lost my cool. But yeah, all I said was that I really hoped that she figured out who sent them to her.”

“Yeah, so she probably likes you back and figured out that you were the one who wrote the love letters, but like you, wasn’t 100 percent sure. She’s probably too nervous to ask you so she’s trying to find out if she’s right by returning the favor. And like I said, like you, she’s too nervous to admit that she was the one who wrote the letter so she’s trying to hint her feelings towards you like doing sweet and romantic things that she normally doesn’t do, like hugging you.”

“Wow, Lori, you sure do have a point there. But still, dudes, what if we’re all wrong? How can I find out that it’s her for sure?”

“Well, my advice from a few months ago still stands accurate,” Lucy answered. “Since Sam, um I mean the writer, is clearly shy, you need to give Sam a signal to let her know that you’re interested. If you receive a second letter soon after, then she’s clearly the author.”

“That’s a great idea, Lucy, but I don’t know if I’m brave enough to do that,” Luna admitted. “I’ll probably just chicken out.”

“That’s it!” Lola yelled as she hopped off Lori’s bed. “I can’t stand to see you act like this!” Lola then grabbed Luna by her shirt and pulled on it, bringing Luna’s face right down to hers. “You need to woman up! You think if Sam can’t admit that she wrote the love letter and if she’s not a touchy person that she wasn’t apprehensive when she hugged you?”

“Well, she didn’t seem like it,” Luna answered.

“Well, she probably was! Same people are just better at hiding things like that than others! But she did it anyway because she’s brave and because she really likes you! That probably took a lot out of her so now you’re going to muster up all of the bravery that you’ve got and return Sam the favor by sending her a darn signal!”

Lola then let go of Luna. Luna gulped as she stood upright again.

“Sam is coming over tomorrow, correct?” Lola asked.

“Yeah, she’s coming over so that we can jam out with my new amp,” Luna replied. “She told me that she would have come over today, but she couldn’t of because she had to go to the Royal Woods Diner after school with her family to celebrate her dad’s birthday.”

“Perfect. You can give her your signal then.”

...

(Part 1) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7)

...

Check out “Lincoln’s Concert Catastrophe”!

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6)

[swipestream]

The Mist: Surprisingly, Pretty Good. Okay, I’m Lying.

Fear. Bad. Storytelling.

It’ll probably shock none of you that the recently-launched and recently-cancelled The Mist TV show sucked. What may shock you is how thoroughly ghastly the suckage was. It permeated the whole show, and came in three varieties: entirely superficial suckage, suckage in central concepts, and suckage in execution.

(Spoilers below. Like you even care.)

Let’s start with the superficial suckage. The first episode of Spike TV’s Maine monster show throws out an array of virtue signals, enough to rival the light from several dozen Las Vegas casinos. There’s the small town teacher who loses her job for teaching Sex Ed against the wishes of the small-minded small-towners she lives among, the small-town Sheriff who covers for his Captain of the Football Team jock son after he’s credibly accused of drugging and assaulting the daughter of the fired teacher, the bisexual guy with heavy makeup who’s targeted for a beating by a bigot, the innocent Middle Eastern man who’s accused of terrorism by a racist jerkhole, and many more I don’t have time to go into. It’s like someone had a control board wired up to every single virtue signal IN EXISTENCE and his boss said “Hit ’em all.”

The thing is, all the many virtue signals are misdirects. Normally they’d indicate a plaster saint, a character who’s just more noble, virtuous, and gosh darn better at everything than everyone else. And yet, if you stay with the show—and Heaven bless your stupid blinkered stubbornness if you do—you find out there are two (count ’em, two) innocent people in the entire town, everyone else being some variety of scumbag, murderer, or psycho—even the people you’d think would end up as saints (or are the apparent main character).

The aging Leftwing Earth-worshipping Baby Boomer former hippie chick whose husband is casually abruptly brutally murdered by some random dude in the pilot? Absolute psycho. The bold, brave feminist Sex-Ed-teaching former teacher? You better believe it. The Goth bisexual assault victim? TOTAL PSYCHO. Everybody, the whole town, both sexes, all races, all sexual orientations, every single person in the entire village is a scumbag, murderer, or psycho. Sometimes all three.

It’s enough to make one cynical about small town America.

Which leads us to problems in the conception of the show. Contrary to what people say, all story ideas are not created equal. Some are good, some great, and some just plain awful. Great ideas tend to stand out no matter how terrible the rest of the material is, shining like solitary diamonds in a bucket full of dung. Bad ideas, in contrast, tend to propagate throughout a work of fiction, tainting everything else with their awfulness, like vomit in a wading pool. The Mist was built atop a pile of awful ideas.

The original Stephen King short story and the 2007 movie (a decent work fatally marred by one of the most nihilistic endings I’d ever seen until now) featured the titular mist descending upon a bucolic New England village, bringing with it a panoply of bizarre and unearthly monsters who proceed to terrorize the town. There’s no indication of what caused the irruption of the monstrous beasties—other than some half-hearted gestures towards a mysterious military project named Arrowhead—and no sign that they’re intelligent or coordinated. They just are. The scenes of the humans having to deal with basketball-sized almost-spiders, forearm-sized not-quite-mosquitoes, and creatures so massive they tear up the freeway just by floating past… well, they’re the only reason to read the story. (Heaven knows the stock characters straight from Stephen King Central Casting aren’t anything to write home about.) The 2017 show, however, threw all of this out.

Instead of an invasion of Lovecraftian creatures from elsewhere in space-time, THIS Mist features a fear-generator. The clouds floating about town intuit your deepest fear and, in thirty seconds to a minute (one of the characters timed it), it materializes out of the mist to attack and probably kill you. This makes for monsters that are COMPLETELY LAME. Leeches. Dogs. Somebody’s overbearing mum. Random hostile homicidal people. A literal dead baby. (Not a joke.) A figure made out of black smoke. A moth that kills a guy by crawling inside his mouth, giving him a moth back tattoo, and sprouting giant moth wings from his back. And the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who appear but briefly, in silhouette, kill somebody, then disappear.) LAME MONSTERS IN A MONSTER SHOW RUIN THE MONSTER SHOW.

Moreover, the mist-born monsters are barely featured in the 10-episode series. The first trailer for the show made it seem like Spike’s answer to The Walking Dead: a bunch of survivors, walled up in various places about the town, fighting off an invasion of monsters. The Walking Dead, for all its flaws, was at least a zombie show that featured ACTUAL ZOMBIES. They appeared—sometimes out of thing air—ate people and were chopped or shot, then went away until the plot needed them again. They MATTERED.

The monsters of The Mist—again, the focal point of both the short story and the movie—barely make an appearance. All the above creatures count for, at most, 30 minutes of the 10-hour series. Oh sure, characters run through the mist, stare out at the mist, and refuse to venture outside into the mist, but the actual monsters in the mist are almost never seen. People killed in the mist pretty much always die offscreen. A MONSTER SHOW WITHOUT MONSTERS IS A LAME MONSTER SHOW.

The mist itself is also a problem. It’s simply too thick, too obscuring, too easy to get lost in, and too lethal. As the central obstacle / challenge / opponent of a continuing series, it sucks. It makes interesting shots impossible—you can’t see up into the mist to catch a glimpse of a skyscraper-sized thing striding past, tearing great gaping holes in the ground, collapsing buildings with a casually placed limb, you can’t see people running for their lives from some malefic threat, nor can you see the slow but steady advance of some new threat marching towards the last bastion of human life in the beleaguered town. Last, but not least, people can’t respond to the mist.

In the story and movie, people made plans. They utilized the tools available to them and made weapons to fight the monsters with. The utter lethality of the mist in this show means people can’t effectively scavenge for food and weapons, nor can they easily navigate the thick and obscuring clouds, nor can they fight back. All these things are the building blocks of an interesting series. Writers NEED them to tell decent stories. Yet the show makes all of them impossible.

Not that the writers of this show could tell a decent story anyway. The Mist is, as per the usual trend recently, less a series than a serial. One show leads directly into the next, and what plot there is gets spread out over all ten shows. Basically, it’s a ten hour movie. Now, ten hour movies can be done (I guess. In theory.), but not by the writers of this show. (Or Jessica Jones. Or Luke Cage.) Instead we get apparent plot movement that meanders back and forth for too damn long, eventually going nowhere. It’s long, tedious, and MEANINGLESS. In the end, a lot of things happen, but you just don’t care.

Somebody needed to send these jerks to TV screenwriting school. Teach them about a 4-act TV drama structure, mini-climaxes before commercial breaks, and A-, B-, and C-plots. When, and ONLY when, they master these basics (after having done it for a while), then we’ll give them a shot at semi-serial storytelling. LEARN YOUR CRAFT FIRST, MORONS.

Now all of the above is absolutely awful. But it isn’t the awfullest thing about the show. That, they saved for the series finale.

Our hero, the main character, has been trying to reunite with his wife (ex-teacher Sex Ed lady) and his daughter (little miss “got assaulted and then unknowingly made out with her half-brother”. No, really. Because there just wasn’t enough awful in the show.) Daddy dearest shows up at the mall to rescue them and—because of some wholly contrived and altogether stupid reasons—the people in the mall (about 50 or so panicking small town people who’ve been neighbors with them for decades) throw the lot of them out. Into the parking lot where he has a car warmed up and waiting to drive away. So he drives away… then rams the vehicle into the front doors of the mall, letting the mist in and ensuring all 50 of their neighbors meet grisly ends in the mist.

People scream. Blood flows. Lots of people die.

Your hero, ladies and gentlemen!

It’s an ugly and pointless ending, even more nihilistic than that of the 2007 movie, and reveals our main character to be a total and utter murdering psycho. Because THAT’S the kind of hero audiences root for.

The Mist is absolutely awful, beginning to end. If I was thrown out into the mist, my greatest fear would materialize as a small, featureless room where they force me to watch this series over and over and over again.

Jasyn Jones, better known as Daddy Warpig, is a host on the Geek Gab podcast, a regular on the Superversive SF livestreams, and blogs at Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery. Check him out on Twitter.

The Mist: Surprisingly, Pretty Good. Okay, I’m Lying. published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi