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felassan · 4 years ago

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Dragon Age development insights and highlights from Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

Some really tasty factoids here.

Cut for length.

Dragon Age: Origins

The continent of Thedas was at one point going to be named Pelledia, a name initially floated by James Ohlen

“Qunari” was a temporary name that ended up unintentionally sticking, much like “Thedas”

Mary Kirby wrote the Landsmeet. To this day, nobody understands how it works, except possibly her. If she’s “really really drunk” she can explain how it works. There’s as many words in it as Sten’s entire conversations put together

Concept art for Thedosian art - as in in-world art - draws heavily on Renaissance-era portraiture, the Art Nouveau movement, religious styles and media like stained glass, and favorite pieces from the golden age of illustrations in the early 20th century

Andrastianism in-world (art-wise) is depicted in wildly different methods depending on who in-world made the art in question. “One religion, 3 different lenses”. There’s the Chantry take, the Orlesian take and the Fereldan take; each with its own different interpretations, different mediums and different stories

The stained glass images were drawn by Nick Thornborrow for DAI, to decorate religious spaces in that game “and beyond”

irl Viking art influenced Ferelden

Greek and Italian art influenced Orlais

The book also had other insights into and anecdotes from the development of DAO, but I’ve transcribed them recently as they’re essentially the stories DG has recently been relating on the awesome Summerfall Studios DAO playthrough Twitch streams. (On those streams he provides dev commentary while Liam Esler plays through DA. The ones with DG are currently once every two weeks. Check them out! Here’s a calendar where you can check when the next one is) Instead of repeating myself I’ll just provide the link to the first transcript. From there you can navigate to the subsequent parts. Note these streams are ongoing. At this point I will also point you to a related post which is cliff notes of the Dragon Age chapter in Jason Schreier’s book Blood Sweat and Pixels.

Dragon Age II

DAO had the longest development period in BioWare history. In contrast DA2 had the shortest

Initially DA2 was going to be an expansion to DAO. A few months in EA said “Yeah, expansions like these don’t sell very well, so let’s make it a sequel.” So it suddenly became DA2 and they had to make it even bigger, although they still only had 1.5 years of time in which to do this

Production of DA2 officially lasted only 9 months, and at the time the team was still supporting live content for DAO! They finished development that January after the design team crunched all the way through the holiday period that year. Then it went to cert 9 times

The limited time they had is why the story takes place mostly in and around 1 city, and over 7 years (so it was temporal, rather than over physical distance, because a more expansive world would have taken more irl time to make)

They had no time to review even the main plot. Mike Laidlaw pitched the idea of 3 stories taking place at different points in the PC’s life, tied together by Varric’s recollections of events. DG rolled with this and made 1 presentation on the idea. This presentation was then approved and off they went

As they were writing DG realized that there was going to be no oversight and that everything was going to be a ‘first draft’. “Because nobody had time.” He sat down with the writers and said “Look, here’s the conditions we’re working under. A lot of what we’re putting out is gonna be raw. We’re not going to get the editing we need. We’re not going to get the kind of iteration we need. So I’m going to trust you all to do your best work.”

Looking back, DG has mixed feelings on DA2. “A lot of corners were cut. The public perception was that it was smaller than DAO. That’s a sin on its own.”

Despite this he thinks DA2 has some of the best writing in the series, especially character-wise. The DA2 chars are his favorite

The pace with which production progressed may in some ways have helped. “When we do a lot of revision, we often file away [as in buff off] some of the good writing as well. Somehow DA2′s whirlwind process resulted in some really good writing”

The pace meant chars landed on the writers in various stages of completion. For example Isabela was fairly defined due to appearing in DAO. In contrast Varric at the start was just that single piece of widely-shown concept art

Varric was conceived as a storyteller not a fighter. His skills are talking and bullshitting. Hence the question became, so what does this guy do in combat? The direction was to make him as different as possible to Oghren, so not a warrior. He couldn’t be a dual-wielding rogue in order to differentiate him from Bela. But you can’t really picture this guy with a bow. “For a dwarf, it would probably be a crossbow. We didn’t have crossbows, or we only had crossbows for the darkspawn. And they were part of the models. We didn’t have a separate crossbow that was equip-able by the chars. They had to like, crop one off a darkspawn and remodel it. And that became Bianca” (quote: Mary Kirby)

“Dwarven mages are exceedingly rare.” [???]

If DAO was a classic fantasy painting, DA2 was a screenshot from a Kurosawa film or a northern Renaissance painting. (Here Matt Rhodes was commenting on art style)

John Epler: “In any one of our games, there’s a 95% chance that if you turn the camera away from what it’s looking at, you’ll see all kinds of janky stuff. The moment we know the camera is no longer facing someone, we no longer care what happens to them. We will teleport people around. We will jump people around. We will literally have someone walk off screen and then we will shift them 1000 meters down, because we’re fixing some bug.” John also talked about this camera stuff in a recent charity Twitch stream for Gamers For Groceries. There’s a writeup of that stream here

Designing Kirkwall pushed concept artists to the limits of visual storytelling, because it has a long history that they wanted to be present. It was once the hub of Tevinter’s slave empire, so it needed to look brutal and harsh, but it also then needed to feel reclaimed, evolved, and with elements of contemporary Free Marches culture

The initial plan was for DA titles to be distinguished by subtitles not numbers, so that each experience could stand on its own rather than feel like a sequel or continuation. (My note: New PCs in each entry make sense then when you consider this and other factoids we know like how DA is the story of the world not of any one PC). Later, DA2′s name was made DA2 in a bid to more clearly connect the game to its predecessor. For DAI they returned to the original naming convention. (My note: so I’d reckon they’d be continuing the subtitle naming convention for DA4)

DA2 was initially code-named “Nug Storm”, strictly internally

The Cancelled DA2 Expansion - Exalted March

This was a precursor to DAI

It was meant to bridge the gap between DA2 and DAI

It focused on the fallout from Kirkwall’s explosion, with Cory serving as the villain

Meredith’s red lyrium statue was basically going to infest Kirkwall and it would end up [with what would end up] the red templars taking over Kirkwall and essentially being Cory’s army

To stop him Hawke would have recruited various factions, including Bela’s Felicisima Armada and the Qunari at Estwatch, forcing Hawke to split loyalties and risk relationships in the process

It was meant to bring DA2′s story to an end and end in Varric’s death. DG was very happy with this because all of DA2 is Varric’s tale. The expansion was supposed to start at the moment Cassandra’s interrogation of him ended in the present. “And we finished off the story with Varric having this heroic death.” It tied things up and would have broken many fan hearts, something BioWare writers notoriously enjoy. But between a transition to the new Frostbite engine and the scope of DAI, the decision was made to cancel EM, work any hard-to-lose concepts into DAI, and in the process save Varric’s life. DG has talked about the Varric dying thing before

Concept art for EM explored new areas previously not depicted in the DA universe, with costumes that reflected next steps for familiar chars. Varric was going to war, what would he have worn? With Anders, if he survived DA2, the plan was to present a redeemed Warden

A char that vaguely resembled Sera in DAI was first concepted for EM. This fact was mentioned near this concept art (see the female elf) and this concept art of Bethany with the blond bob

The writers sketched out plans to end it with Hawke having the option to marry their LI. This included alternate ceremonies for party members like Bethany and Sebastian if the player opted not to wed. There was even a wedding dress made for Hawke. This asset made it into DAI (Sera and Cullen’s weddings in Trespasser). The dress can also be seen in DAI during an ambient NPC wedding after completing a chain of war table missions

The destruction of a Chantry was explored in concept art as it might have happened in EM. This idea ended up carrying over to the beginning of DAI. (My note: Lol, the idea that DA2 could have had 2 Chantries being destroyed in it 😆)

World of Thedas

Sheryl Chee and Mary Kirby started with “a disgusting little dish called fluffy mackerel pudding”. In the middle of DAO’s busy dev period one of them (they can’t remember who) found a recipe online for this, scanned in from a 70s cookbook. “I don’t understand why it was fluffy. Why would you want fluffy mackerel pudding?” MK says. “We loved it so much we included it in a DAO codex.”

This led them to create more food for Thedas, full recipes included, like a Fereldan turnip and barley stew from MK and SC’s Starkhaven fish and egg pie. The fish pie became Sebastian’s favorite. “To me it made sense for it to be fish pie because a lot of the Free Marches are on the coast”, SC says, “It was something that was popular in medieval times, so I thought, let’s make a fish pie! I looked at medieval recipes and I concocted a fish pie which I fed to my partner, and he was like ‘This is not terrible’”

For WoT the whole studio was asked to contribute family recipes which might have a place in Thedas. SC adapted these to fit in one Thedosian culture or another, including a beloved banana bread that localization producer Melanie Fleming would regularly bake to keep the DA team motivated. “Melanie’s banana bread got us through Inquisition”

DAI

It says part of DAI takes place in or near the border with Nevarra [???]

This game was aimed to be bigger than DA2 and even DAO in every conceivable way

The first hour had to do a lot of heavy lifting, tying together the events of DAO and DA2 while introducing a new PC, new followers etc in the aftermath of the big attack. DG rewrote it 7 times then Lukas Kristjanson did 2 more passes

DG: “Our problem is always that our endings are so important, but we leave them to last, when we have no time. I kept pushing on DAI: ‘Can we work on the ending now? Can we work on the ending now? Can we do it early on?’ Because I knew exactly what it was going to be. But despite the fact that it kept getting scheduled, whenever the schedule started falling behind, it kept getting pushed back... so, of course, it got left til last again.”

“The reveal of the story’s real antagonist, Solas, a follower until the end, when he betrayed the player”. “Solas’ story remains a main thread in Inquisition’s long-awaited follow-up” [these aren’t DG quotes, just bits of general text]

Over the course of development they had 8 full-time writers and 4 editors working on it. Other writers joined later to help wrangle what ended up being close to 1 million words of dialogue and unspoken text. While many teams moved to a more open concept style of work for DAI, the writers remained tucked away in their own room, a choice DG says was necessary, given how much they talked. All the talking had a purpose ofc as if someone hit a bump or wall in their writing they would open the problem up to the room

As writing on a project like DAI progresses, the writers grow punchier and weirder things make it into the game. This is especially the case towards the end of a project (they get tired, burned out)

Banter and codexes require less ‘buy-in’ (DG has talked about this concept a few times on the Twitch streams) from other designers. DG liked to leave banter for last as a reward because it was fun. Banter begins as lists of topics for 2 followers to discuss. These may progress over time or be one off exchanges. One banter script can balloon to well over 10k words. “The banter was always huge because we were always like, laughing, and really at that point, our fields of fucks were rather barren, so we would just do whatever”

The bog unicorn happened pretty much by accident. It was designed by Matt Rhodes and was one of his fav things to design. They needed horse variations and he had already designed an undead variant which was a bog mummy [bog body]. irl these are preserved in a much different way to traditional mummies. When someone dies in a bog their skin turns black and raisin-like. The examples we know of tend to have bright red hair for whatever reason. It’s a very striking look and MR wanted to do a horse version of this as he thought it’d be neat. 5 mins before the review meeting for it he had a big ‘Aha!’ moment, quickly looked up a rusty old Viking sword, and photoshopped it through its skull like that was how it died. “And I was like, ‘I just made a unicorn. Alright, in it goes!’” It got approved. “So we built the thing. It fit. It told a little story”

With the irl Inquisition longsword, one of the objects they tested its cleaving ability on was a plush version of Leliana’s nug Schmooples

The concept art team explored a wide variety of visuals for the Inquisitor’s signature mark. It needed to look powerful and raw but couldn’t look like a horrific wound. In some cases, as cool as the idea looked on paper, they just weren’t technically feasible, especially as they had to be able to fit on any number of different bodies

Bug report: “Endlessly spawning mounts! At one point during development, Inquisitors could summon a new horse every time they whistled, allowing them to amass a near infinite number of eager steeds that faithfully followed them across Thedas. “You could go charging across levels and they’d all gallop behind you,” Jen Cheverie says, “It was beautiful.” Trotting into town became an epic horse siege as a tidal wave of mounts enveloped the streets. Jen called it her Army of Ponies”

The giants came from DA Week, an internal period when devs can pursue different individual creative projects that in some way benefit DA. They also had a board game from one of these that they were going to put in but they didn’t have time. It’s referenced though. It was dwarven chess

Josie’s outfit is made of gold silk and patterned velvet, with leather at her waist. She carries “an ornate ledger” and she has “an ornamented collar sitting around her neck, finished by a brilliant red ruby, like a drop of Antivan wine in a sunbeam”

Iron Bull’s armor is leather. His loose pantaloons and leather boots give him agility to charge

On DAI in particular, concept artists took special care to make sure costumes would be realistic, at least in a practical ‘this obeys the laws of physics and textiles’ sense. “While on Inquisition, we thought about cosplay from a concept art perspective. Given how incredible a lot of [cosplays] are, I now am not worried about them. In fact in some cases in the future I want to throw them curveballs like, ‘All right, you clever bastards. Let’s see if you can do this!’”

2 geese that nested on the office building and had chicks were named Ganders and Arishonk (it wasn’t known who was the mom or the dad). Other possible names were Carver Honke, Bethany Honke, Urdnot Pecks, Quackwall, Cassandra Pentagoose, the Iron Bill, Shepbird, Garroose, Admiral Quackett, Scout Honking, HChick-47 and Darth Malgoose

Bug report: “The surprising adventures of Ser Noodles!” DAI was the first time the series had a mount feature, meaning this had a lot of bugs. A lot of the teams’ favorite bugs were to do with the mounts. There was a period of time where the Inquisitor’s horse seemed to lose all bone and muscle in its legs. They had a week or so where all quadruped legs were broken. It was a bit noticeable in things like nugs and other small beasties but the horse was insanely obvious. “The first time we summoned the horse [for this] and started running around, the entire QA exploration room just exploded with laughter.” Its legs flapped around like cooked fettucine, leading testers to lovingly nickname it Ser Noodles. At galloping speeds the legs almost looked like helicopter blades, especially when footage was set to classic pieces such as Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries

For DAI the artists were asked questions like “What would Morrigan wear to a formal ball? Can Cassandra pull off a jaunty hat?”

On DAI storyboarding became the norm. John Epler: “Cinematic design for the longest time was the Wild West. It was ‘here’s a bunch of content, now do it however you want’, which resulted in some successes and some failures.” Storyboarding gave designers a consistent visual blueprint based on ideas from designers, writers and concept artists

Quote from a storyboard by Nick Thornborrow (the Inquisitor going into the party at the end of basegame sequence): “Until Corypheus revealed himself they could not see the single hand behind the chaos. A magister and a darkspawn combined. The ultimate evil. So evil. Eviler than puppy-killers and egg farts combined.”

A general note on concept art:

In the early stages of any project, before the concept artists are aware of any writing, they like to just draw what they think cool story moments could be. It’s not unusual for the team to then be inspired by these and fold them into the game as the project progresses

– From Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development

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misskittysmagicportal · 4 years ago

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can i request something to do with the thing about vincent having tics while giving oral or just vincent giving oral general i love the way you write things

I Think We're Alone Now

(Vincent Rhodes x Fem!Reader)

Warnings: language, talk of mental health, fem!receiving oral

A/N: With the pandemic keeping you and Vincent apart, he was glad that being alone didn't mean being lonely.

Vincent Rhodes didn't tic as bad or as much in his thirties. He wasn't cured. He didn't take medicine that made them magically go away. He took meds for his anxiety, and the “cure” was still going to therapy with Dr Rose. He didn't go daily or weekly or even monthly anymore. He managed every other month. Sometimes, perhaps, every three to four months. Yet it took twenty-five to finally accept a cliche: Tourette's wasn't Vincent, Vincent simply HAD Tourette's.

Don't worry though, cunt is still his favorite word.

Vincent also did all the things he told Marie he wanted to do. He finished school and went to college online. He found himself rather good at computers and a job that required the bare minimum of human interaction. His Tourette's was under control, but his social anxiety never seemed to be. We digress!

He had a job, and a place to call home that wasn't a treatment facility or a hoarder’s house bogged down by sadness and alcoholism. Vincent didn't find it shameful that his father bought him a condo. He and his roommate had an agreement to pay utilities and work on the re-election campaign.

Vincent finally had a dog. A dog he had to fight for because his roommate had.. Rituals. Rituals that also weren't as bad as they used to be thanks to the same therapy and right medication. Just like you can't get rid of Tourette's, Vincent couldn't get rid of Alex either. That was his first, and really only, friend. As tumultuous as they started out, if you survive a road trip with two neurodivergents, you're pretty much bonded for life. Alex was sometimes more work than their dog.

Vincent and Alex did things in their late twenties and early thirties they never thought they'd do. They went out. They dated around. They had awkward sex and one night stands that the two of them could finally laugh about. Vincent could hide, or save his tics from popping up during his dates. He could even manage to hold them off when he had sex. He was relaxed and focused on the woman beneath or above him.

But then he would spasm, or twist and pop his mouth. He would unintentionally squeal or swear, call her names or flip her off. Instead of understanding Vincent, or talking to him, whoever the girl of the moment was would leave and never come back. Fuck her, Vincent would think. I can't help that I have Tourette’s; she can help being an asshole.

-----

There could not have been a worse time in anyone’s life for you to meet quite possibly the single hottest guy in your neighborhood. At least, you thought he was in your neighborhood. You kept running into each other at various stores to the point you found yourself quoting an old movie from college.

“Are you stalking me?” You boldly questioned him one afternoon as he pondered Mcintosh versus Fiji apples. “Because that would be super.”

The man jumped. Then to your shock, he spasmed almost violently. His neck twisted to the left as his hand held on to his chin and yelled out, “Brown haired cunt! Grass licking big tits.”

You laughed. It wasn't malicious or in jest. You were nervous and stunned. Still you replied, “Normally a guy has to date me for a while before he calls me a cunt. Now as for grass licking? That was only once, but I was high and we were playing truth or dare.”

He stared at you, mouth agape. A violent spasm rocked his body again like an aftershock. It caused him to excessively blow a dark curl back from his forehead several times before his body relaxed and he appeared to sink in on himself. Embarrassed. A pink hue spread along his cheeks and angled jaw as he gazed at the apples again with large green eyes.

“You ok? I wouldn't say I've got big tits. They're more like medium sized. Unless you were talking about the melons.” You held up two cantaloupe in front of your chest. “I’m y/n”

Again with the mouth open staring. Then he came to, “Vincent. I've never had someone react to Arthur that way.”

“I'm from New York. That was a Saturday night in the village. Who’s Arthur?” You looked around. “Are you being held hostage? Scream cunt for yes. Vagina for no.”

Vincent laughed. It was almost a giggle that you weren't sure was a laugh or his thing. “Arthur is my Tourette's. He's the clown who shits in between my thoughts. My tics. You scared the piss out of him.”

“You named your Tourette's? You can't do that, they never go away once you name them.”

Vincent rolled his eyes, “ DAMMIT! I'll take away his bowl of food and dog bed too. Maybe I'll finally be cured!”

You didn't want him to think you felt something was wrong with him. “Mostly with all of this, I meant I keep seeing you around. Thought I'd say hi.”

“How about we exchange phone numbers, and you can say hello more often?” Vincent cocked an eyebrow.

“Bold of you to assume calling me a cunt is flirting! But you got it out of the way now instead of down the line. Give me your phone.”

He obliged and you put your number in. As you handed it back you joked, “Should've told me you had a much sexier friend.” You indicated Alex on the phone’s wallpaper.

“He's gay.”

“Damn! Lucky for men. Anyways, I work most days. Don't know how long with everything happening out there. Call me sometime?”

Vincent twitched and wolf whistled. He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, but promised he would nonetheless. But then pandemic happened, so all you had for the next six months was your phone

-----

You met Alex and learned his rituals and empathized with his panic to follow or abide by heath guidance. His OCD aggravated by everything going on. Vincent couldn't even go for a run without his friend completely freaking out, so he just didn't. Their balcony was it for fresh air.

You took tours of each other's apartments. Had dinners and breakfasts together. Shared what books you were reading and watched movies together. Vincent teased you about your fat, lazy cat and you did likewise over his ten pound shih tzu. Although, you admitted, it was because she got to share a bed with him.

Somehow in month 5 you were roped into a three way phone call with his dad. Senator Rhodes and Vincent seemed to have an easy relationship, but you were filled in later that it was anything but for a very long time. So you turned the tables one night, and introduced him to your entire family.

Forgetting about his Tourette's, because you had really grown used to it all. To the tics, the whistles and excessive use of the word cunt (Pandemic drinking game, Vincent’s idea) that his biggest episode since you met stunned not only you but your clan. Vincent had buried his face, you were terrified of your mistake. But you got it from somewhere.

“Sure you ain't from Brooklyn, kid?!” Thank Christ for meathead brothers.

“This is dating right?” Vincent asked after their dinner. “Pandemic, COVID, for now dating. Even though,” he paused to twist his neck, “One of my coworkers has uh, dick appointments all the time?” He snapped a finger several times and shouted something about a whore and syphilis.

“Hey! Tell Arthur to fuck off. Sexual liberation. She's not a whore, she's in her twenties!” Vincent laughed. “Are you nervous about something? Usually the bedtime part of our phone calls are the least tic-ish.”

“Wanna have sex?” He was straightforward.

“Right now? Facetime sex?” You scrunch your nose but more to be cute than creeped out.

“Here. Alex is asleep. Come over? We've been isolated for months.”

“God, I love you.”

“What?” Vincent laughed. “Are you sure about that?”

“I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

-----

Vincent opened the door and implored you to take your shoes off at the door. You expected nothing less as you complied and followed him in the stillness of the apartment to his bedroom.

The moment the door was shut, Vincent was on you before you could even adjust to the dark. Only street lamps from the neighborhood below showed through as his mouth consumed yours.

Your tongues at war with each other as the two of you scrambled to undress. Your lips broke apart long enough to throw shirts over heads and step out of flannel pants or yoga pants. Then they crashed together again as Vincent let his hands splay out the length of your back and shoulders.

Your one hand ensnared by his messy hair. The other under the waistband of his boxers and over his ass. You drew his body to yours to melt into. His erection strained and throbbed against your hip as you hungrily pushed your tongue as far inside him as you could.

The both of you eager like teenagers shot with adrenaline. Anxious and hoping Alex caught you as Vincent twitched and his shoulders shrugged up to his ears. His fingers fumbled with your bra made worse by his tics. Tics that frustrated only him; you reached and undid it for him. Your breasts were free for him to look at.

Vincent attempted to choke back his words but failed. “Tit fucker,” a sour look on his face as his eye involuntarily clamped shut, “huge nipples.” He swallowed his lips, mortified.

“Hey!! They make up for yours being the tiniest nipples I have EVER seen on a dude.” You took Vincent’s hand. “We can slow down if you want. I don't know what's up, do you tic like this every time you have sex?”

The two of you laid side by side on his bed, hands traced over inches of bare skin. Vincent was silent for a while as he let his fingers trail over you, his lips not far behind.

“I don't. I'm usually too focused. The last time I loved someone, it fell apart immediately. It's making me anxious.��

You held his head to your body with a tenderness. “I loved you first, didn't I?”

His mouth made its way amongst your breasts as he gently laid you on your back. His lips warm on your stomach and hips that he exposed by tugging your panties down over your knees and off. Vincent laid down between them and almost nuzzled his nose in your soft pubic hair before his tongue dove inside of you.

Your hips rocketed up into his mouth as you grabbed the back of Vincent's head. He licked and sucked on your sex. Small tics caused him to push his tongue and lips in further than before. They closed in on your clit. His tongue attacked it with a lapping motion that you could only bend to, helpless.

Vincent was insatiable, his mouth in a frenzy. Your fingers caught up in the sheets as the sensation of his mouth on your clit spread along your body. Now your words were a shock as they came screaming out into the quiet of the bedroom.

“Tongue fuck me! Faster!”

Instead Vincent looked up at you with a grin, “I see Arthur came to visit.”

Tag: @robertsheehanownsmyass @slutforrobbiebro @super-unpredictable98 @magic-multicolored-miracle @sean-falco @elliethesuperfruitlover @bisexualnathanyoung @bwritesstuff @firstpersonnarrator @rob-private

#robert sheehan #vincent rhodes #vincent rhodes x reader #vincent x reader smut

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j-the-wanderer · 3 years ago

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A great bit of fear comes from that which must exist. That which humanity cannot avoid or dodge, the inevitabilities of human evil. Of course, it is less human evil, than it is human curiosity, which drives the science which drives the evil. Market studies that lead to capitalist expansion which leads to the many ways our entrepreneurs have slapped together to make production meet demand. The pursuit of science becomes the development of weapons, to be released upon the people either intentionally through sale or unintentionally, through the unfortunate mistakes, negligence, and perhaps, discoveries of others.

Regardless, in the universal human craving in the discovery of, or pursuit of value, the goal reaches above humanity, not from explicit evil, but from negligence. From ignorance, perhaps, which we believe can be thoroughly cured via a further dose of curiosity. Humans are endlessly curious of that which a human can be, and are intent on using themselves as the foundation of their art.

Maybe the horrors of war? Derived from an ideological conflict, or from economics? Yet this cannot wholly be blamed on market forces and core cultural differences. A war of religion, of ancestral right to land and resources, regardless stems from curiosity. What might one excavate from the land one’s ancestors claimed hundreds of years ago? For many, the question instead, is what can one excavate from oneself?

All human conflict, all human knowledge, indeed, all human evil may originate from curiosity. What happens if I do this? How do I solve one problem or another? Can I stop a fight, or gain from starting one? How would I win?

All the way down, perhaps, to and beyond, the borders of ethics. How much can pain shape a person? Is this right to do? Am I saving a life by ending one? Does one prolong pain by prolonging life, or indeed, does one ease pain by ending it?

"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." - Mary Shelley

"Okay, Doc, but, that's still messed up, though." Sevens was unimpressed.

The old man adjusted his glasses. "You understand, that my full potential is in the work that I do, therefore, and indeed perhaps in all progress, sacrifices must be made."

"I took down a crime family with subterfuge and assassination techniques that they taught me. You unethically cloned stem cells so you could do half a million twin-studies for your freak mutant experiments." He did not even spare the old doctor a glance from the work he was doing, as he polished a glass from the Pullman drink car they had restored. "We are not the same, and I am insulted by the comparison."

"In terms of net gain and loss, we are similar monsters indeed. I have possibly created far more life than I have ended, and though I bent it to my bidding, you have destroyed-"

"I have created more life in rescuing my brother than you ever have in your facility. Variety is the spice of life, quality over quantity. A bunch of identical twins who failed to live for even 2 months, from a test tube that I'm sure you forgot to check and maintain in the process of double-blinding, is just cruelty and waste, of life, resources, and time."

"Any scientist would kill, to have the resources I had, the sample I was able to use."

"And you did. And it wasn't worth it. I suppose the difference here is that I did, and it was. But let me make a new deal, here:" Sev leaned on the bar towards the frail old man, so the doctor could get a good look at his face through his spectacles, from the mechanized wheelchair he was sat in. "You shut up about this whole 'we're not so different, you and I' thing, and I make sure the next drink I serve you won't be your last."

He laughed at this, "You can't kill me, and you know it!"

"No, but I can stop being your bartender."

The emotion drained from the old man's face, from a smug superiority to surprise. Where he once sat upright and proper, to deliver a speech and present his debate, now, slowly and silently, he sank back into his chair. He'd come to value a nice drink as he reviewed his research, and he'd soon taken Sevens' presence and talents for granted. In fact, in his self-absorbed, obsessive pursuit for an ally onboard this train, Doc had not prepared any other topic for conversation.

He had been prepared for a debate on philosophy and ethics, on the depths of human nature and psychology, and he had been soundly defeated by a whiskey glass.

The car then fell into an extended silence, interrupted occasionally by the clinking of glasses as the hitman stored his newly-cleaned glassware and retrieved another to polish.

#keep reading #drabble #sevens #doc #it's long so i put a tag where the dialogue begins

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capricornus-rex · 4 years ago

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Hey Hon! I know you’re cramped with requests and the “Old Friend, New Family” story so feel free to do this one whenever you’re ready! No rush! ☺️💖 Cal not knowing the reader has arachnophobia so when they go to Kashyyyk and are attacked by a huge, albino Wyyyschokk, she freaks out? To the point where she’s completely out of her wits, panic mode on FULL, and just scared to death? I have arachnophobia so when I had to play Kashyyyk, it was the worst experience of my life ;////3////;

Honestly, those spiders always give me the creeps and make me shudder ;;A;; Also, so very sorry for not publishing so soon! :( But good thing I just brought home my newly-fixed laptop today!! <3 I hope I can make it up to you and everyone with the fics. I’ll try my best to really keep publishing. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on quitting. Why would I? ;3 I’m having a blast with everyone here!!!

“In the Face of Fear” | Cal Kestis x Reader

Summary: Kashyyyk has its own charms and surprises, but what if one of those said surprises rear its ugly, unpleasant head right in front of you in the form of a spider that’s the size of a boulder?

Tags: Arachnophobia, Wyyyschokk, Matriarch Wyyyschokk, Kashyyyk, Arachnophobic! Reader

Also in AO3

Next: Part 2 | Masterlist

1 of ?

You and Cal finish off the last wave of Stormtroopers.

The partisan informants were right about the Imps getting into the forest to find Tarfful’s home village—which also doubles as a hideout for the Wookiees and a handful of partisans now led by Mari Kosan after Saw had left them.

“Good thing they haven’t come close to the hideout itself,” Cal commented.

“No,” you scoffed a chuckle. “They have a lot to go through besides us.”

Beneath your snarky, roguish facade, you clench your fist as you fight off the chill travelling down your spine when you catch the cluster of hatched Wyyyschokk eggs glued to a tree trunk. Cal spotted your grimace, you’re not taking your eyes off of those empty, shattered shells.

“You sure can’t stop looking at them,”

“I want to, but… Oh, I don’t know,” you shrugged.

“Come on, let’s get away from them. Those hatchlings could be close,”

“Heeeey!!” you whined, he laughed in response. You playfully tackled him from behind as he walked ahead of you.

It was a tedious trek to the hideout village—but that’s its advantage—both Jedi had to cross paths with a few more creatures before getting to any of the watchtowers or huts. You’re just secretly thankful that you haven’t run into any Wyyyschokks yet—most especially the albino, which happens to be the rarest of its kind.

You tread the forest with more caution than care, your eyes pan from tree-to-tree—searching for signs of eggs and webs—and Cal was quiet about noticing your anxiety. He knew you hated it when your phobia is being pointed out in some way, though he figured you’d like to talk about it just to vent it out.

For someone who isn’t familiar with the terrain of Kashyyyk, it can either be mesmerizing or downright frightening. It goes both ways for you. It becomes the latter when you and Cal stumbled upon a wrong turn due to the labyrinthine layout of the forest. Cal realizes his mistake and attempts to solve it.

“Hey, Cal, are you sure you saw a marker in a tree hollow?”

“I think so,” he replied, with the doubt evident in his voice. “Okay, I really think we took a wrong turn.”

BD-1 politely cut in and flashed the holomap, both Jedi navigated with their eyes, occasionally pointing at patches of land and tracking their would-be path.

“I think we cut across this upper level of the forest, there should be—”

You could’ve sworn you heard something shuffle behind your backs. Your abrupt turning unintentionally cut off Cal in the middle of his explaining.

“[Y/N], you okay?”

“Did you hear that?”

A pause. He listened in on the silence.

A simple rustle of the flora simply heightened your senses—mostly propelled by fear—and then the thing that neither of you noticed before has caught your attention.

“[Y/N], honestly, are you alright?”

You didn’t answer, you kept scanning the area and knew completely well that something isn’t sitting right with you.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you sighed, and stepped forward. “I’m just jumpy, that’s all—”

“[Y/N], BACK AWAY!!!”

Too late! By the time Cal had noticed that you were walking into a literal trap and tried to get you out of it, he was pushed back when the most enormous and most brightly-colored Wyyyschokk both of you have ever seen pounced on you. It had been patiently waiting for either of you to step on its web trap on the ground—and you went right into it. The creature entrapped you with its legs as thick as tree roots, you wriggle helplessly as you couldn’t take your eyes off of its multitude of bulbous, full black eyes, and its mandibles foaming with bile—hungry for flesh—twitch and flick above your bosom.

You let out what ought to be the loudest scream your chords could ever produce; once out of breath, you inhale and exhale rapidly. Your throat goes sore from the shouting that it stings whenever air would enter your windpipe.

The words are dislodged in your throat—you wanted to scream for help but cannot—your voice renders itself absent in your mouth, and only the silence brought upon by the sheer horror of this monster’s overall appearance, and in an uncomfortable closeness with you too.

Cal ran up to it, leapt, and drove his saber into its plump, jiggling hind abdomen. It screeched—a shrill, piercing wail that left a high-pitch noise in the ears—and turned to the offensive against Cal. That was your signal to get up, but the terror had paralyzed you; instead, the entire scuffle with that gigantic Wyyyschokk happened right before your eyes—just like with the eggshells, you cannot look away no matter how much you want to, the longer you look the more materialized your fear becomes. The redhead succeeded in a series of parries to disorient the creature.

“[Y/N], get to the high ground!”

His warning fell on deaf ears. You’re still stuck in staring at the spider, with your back against the wall.

“Bee-beeee, triiiillll!!!”

“I know, BD, I know!”

The little droid warned Cal that you were still frozen stuck in harm’s way, and he needed to think fast to get both of you out of this mess. He cleanly blocked the Wyyyschokk’s incoming wave of attacks, searing its fangs and hairy legs with his lightsaber upon parrying—and while the creature was distracted by its wounds, Cal fished out a flashbomb. He turned his heel to you before the area would be engulfed in bright light in a matter of a split second. He snatched you by the arm, pulled you up, and that woke you from that frozen trance of fear.

“We gotta move!”

The Wyyyschokk thrashed and erratically scampered left and right in search of its prey, you and Cal were making your escape through a pinch in the wall; the enemy tried to catch up but you had already squeezed through the end, its pointed legs jerked as it fitted through the crack, desperately trying to claw either of you just for a scrap of meat.

Life was still flashing before your eyes even after the Wyyyschokk gave up its pursuit. Your heart pounded louder than the Wookiees’ war drums, so much so that your breath cannot keep up with the pulse anymore, and your limbs have returned to its jelly-like state after you crawled your way out of the wall.

He noticed the rapid, sharp breaths that you take. There was also a wetness glossing over the surface of your eyes.

“Are you hurt?”

You couldn’t speak, still shell-shocked by the assault, and slowly shook your head as a response. The tears persist.

“Come on,”

A single touch—gentle and slight—was enough to make you jolt. You were ceaselessly apologetic. For what, exactly? Cal patiently waited for you to calm yourself and eventually helped you. When he thought you were ready, he held out his hand for you.

Slow and steady—Cal took the lead again, and he made sure you were okay along the way. Eventually, you did reach the hideout, but the trauma still hasn’t left your system and you have no idea how to get it out. A partisan was out there to greet you, but the first thing he acknowledges is the horror in your blank stare.

“Is [Y/N] alright?”

“Not really, we just stumbled upon the biggest Wyyyschokk we’ve ever seen,”

“Wait, does this Wyyyschokk happen to have brighter colors than the rest?”

Both Jedi exchanged glances, trying to recall the appearance of the monstrosity, and then the two of you looked at the rebel again; though, it was Cal who did most of the conversing.

“Come to think of it, yeah, it was a bit more vibrant than the others,”

“Oh, well,” the partisan scratched the back of his head, evidently reluctant to break it to you. “I think you guys just met the Matriarch Wyyyschokk.”

Your spine reduced to jelly again, goosebumps pelt your skin as a chill coated your shoulders, your eyes widened so much that they’d almost pop out of your sockets!

“I’m sorry,” you blinked several times, almost comically. “Run that by me again, soldier?”

“The Matriarch Wyyyschokk. Their mother. The mama spider.”

“I know what ‘matriarch’ means! But good gods, those things have a mother?!”

“Well, how do you expect to be so many of them wandering around without one?” the partisan shrugged.

“That’s just spectacular,” you say half-heartedly.

“Just steer clear of its den,”

“Thanks, we’ll remember that!” you whined.

Your hysterics still haven’t died down by the time both of you and Cal waltz through the network of bridges to start a little tour of the village.

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normadeathmond · 4 years ago

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the spanish princess ep 2 thoughts

I’ve been enjoying all the reaction posts so here’s mine (spoilers included):

- I’ve had kind of a revelation this week regarding The Spanish Princess. This show is basically the modern day version of those dubiously accurate medieval historical chronicles. Not only do we have extra supernatural elements (the cuuuuurse, prophetic dreams), but we also have the contemporary authors’ personal biases inserted all over the place, and the addition of mythical stories about the heroes (Catherine fighting at Flodden this week). For some reason, this has made me a lot more forgiving towards the show. (it probably also helps that my fave Maggie B is dead now, so I don’t have to worry about them shitting all over her anymore, and I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to any of the other historical figures depicted)

- erm wtf, did anyone else catch that scene with Maggie and Edmund de la Pole in the previously on that we’ve never seen before?? I guess this plotline was supposed to be included in episode one as well, which probably would’ve helped it feel a bit more developed and less like something they suddenly remembered had to be tied up from last year. The whole sequence of Edmund being reintroduced and killed off in less than five minutes was very rushed.

- I’m glad baby Henry’s death hasn’t been totally forgotten, but do we really need so many grief-stricken sex scenes between these two? These are supposed to be the years they’re deeply in love, let them have some happier sex

- ehh I’m not sure that Catherine’s big reveal to the council actually changes much. A very early pregnancy, possibly with a girl, doesn’t really make the line secure. I think the focus should have been on Henry’s own desire to prove himself in battle, which would also have added to the humiliation when Catherine successfully defeats the Scots while his military exploits fizzle out.

- I really like General Howard, Peter Egan is fantastic (albeit a bit too polished for a grouchy, uncouth soldier type)

- “and now this book is closed” - god I hope so, bc I hate Maggie’s plotline from last year. It was interminable watching her whinge about how unfair it was that the Tudors suspected her of plotting against them because she had always been the most loyal person ever, as though she was suffering from some kind of selective memory loss about literally being a spy for the Yorkist rebellion in The White Princess. ffs Maggie can be either a completely innocent woman unfairly maligned by the Tudors or she can be a badass Yorkist rebel, not both.

- it seems her memory problems are back this episode because she goes storming off to complain to Catherine about Edmund de la Pole getting his head chopped off, conveniently forgetting than she was also heavily involved in his plot and her family is only out of the Tower thanks to Catherine interceding for her with Henry. Catherine was 100% in the right here, Edward of Warwick was innocent whereas Edmund de la Pole was a fully cognisant adult who spearheaded a revolt to take the throne (and likely would’ve had both Henry VII and Henry VIII killed if he had succeeded), so the idea that she’s suddenly heartless because she apologised for the former’s death but not the latter’s is ridiculous. The whole scene, including Maggie’s kids’ ‘whoomp here she goes again’ reactions, unintentionally have her coming off as rather hysterical.

- hopefully the rest of her story this season focuses on her mending her relationship with her sad silent son instead and possibly getting her leg over Thomas More

- ahhh Lina’s face when Catherine bitchily says she’ll be having a girl. Catherine’s not going to be able to stop herself from lashing out at her now that she has twin boys.

- first the clothes comment last episode, now they have Ursula saying Charles may not be good-looking but he’s rich as fuck. I guess she’s being set up as a gold-digger.

- is it just me or does the Anne Boleyn’s actress look a little bit like Charlotte Hope? The dress they had her in when Henry returns even looks like something Catherine would’ve worn in season one. I’ve no idea why they’ve brought the Boleyn girls in this early though – are they going to be sent to France then come back later? Henry still has to make his way through Anne Hastings, Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn before he gets to Anne. The episode summaries make it look like his infidelities won’t start until episode four so he’s going to have to have a new girl every episode to get through them all.

- I’ve kind of come around on the whole Catherine-in-armour thing. Frock Flicks wrote an interesting article this week where they pointed out that while historically battle armour for women did not exist and women very rarely wore armour, depictions of women in armour have been around for a long time and would have existed in the Tudor period. In this pseudo-historical retelling of Catherine’s story mythologizing her as a warrior queen, it does make sense to carry on that visual tradition and have her armoured up.

- Unfortunately I think they did kind of undermine the visual impact of the armour on screen by focusing on it so heavily in the promos for the season. Possibly it wouldn’t have affected a casual viewer so much, but anyone who’s followed the show’s promo cycle has been seeing pictures and clips of Catherine in the armour for weeks now, and when she entered stomping down the corridor in her full battle gear it didn’t blow me away like the first look at that outfit should have done.

- I know this series is never going to have the budget of Game of Thrones, but Flodden was a disappointment, from the rousing speech (“mothers are warriors too, amirite ladies?”) to the battle itself. You can tell they really wanted this to be their big epic action sequence and unfortunately it felt underwhelming. I remember the battles in TWQ/TWP being much more impressive, for what was probably a similar budget.

- as soon as I saw how heavily pregnant Lina was this episode, I knew a birth/battle juxtaposition was coming. I get what they were trying to do with the whole ‘childbirth is women’s battlefield’ theme, but the attempt to fake-out Lina’s death fell flat - there’s no way they were killing her off. (I’m not sure why she was giving birth in the hallway, with apparently no midwives, but it was inadvertently hilarious watching Maggie - the only one with any childbirth experience - try and talk her through it while the other three were basically no help at all.)

- also everyone being like “omg Princess Mary you can’t possibly be at the birth” felt so out of place given that Meg and Catherine were both hanging around a battlefield at the same time

- on the one hand I did like that Catherine didn’t end up being some amazing warrior just off instinct; she’s almost immediately pulled off her horse, staggers around looking confused as fuck and then is shocked when she actually kills someone. But on the other, what was the point of all the warrior queen build up if she barely even does anything useful on the battlefield? (also why did they have her kill someone who looked so much like James?? I’ve seen several people think she killed James herself and I thought that too until he was shown being taken down afterwards - it was needlessly confusing)

- JAAAAMES. I’m so sad he’s gone. Georgie Henley knocked it out the park this episode, especially in her big mourning scene. Although given how sweet he and Meg were this episode, and her comment about him being her best friend, it just makes the punch last episode seem even stranger.

- I’m so sad we were robbed of seeing Catherine try to send James’ corpse to Henry as a victory gift and have to be talked into sending just the coat. If you’re going to make her ride out in armour let her keep her savage penchant for gruesome war trophies!

- oop, Catherine absolutely fails to sell the lie that she’s pleased about Lina’s two boys, and Lina can definitely tell.

- with Maggie B gone, Wolsey is the new evil religious cockblocker in town!

- I would like twenty more scenes of Lina and Oviedo being cute and bitching about their work days thanks

- I like Catherine defending Howard to Henry. It would have been nice if there was more time to show the development of a begrudging respect between those two.

- overall I found this episode disappointing. The big sequences weren’t impressive in the way last week’s were and there weren’t enough character moments to make up for that. I’m still looking forward to the rest of the season though, especially Meg, Mary and Maggie’s storylines.

#the spanish princess

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fightmeyeats · 5 years ago

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Let’s Make it That Deep: Thinking about the Surveillance State, Racial Politics, and Humanity in Terminator: Dark Fate

This week I watched Terminator: Dark Fate, which carries forward from the second Terminator film, Terminator: Judgement Day (1991), wisely ignoring everything that happened in movies 3-5. Dark Fate is set in the year 2020 and follows Dani Ramos, humanity’s new hope to survive the future robot apocalypse, as she, Grace (an augmented human from the future), Sarah Connor, and Carl (a T-800 model terminator) fight against a Rev-9 sent back in time to kill Dani. Overall, to quote my sibling, the movie “isn’t a literary masterpiece,” but it is fairly enjoyable--especially if you’re thirsting over the main leads. However, because I have a feral academic-garbage brain I also wanted to spend some time unpacking what I saw as the film’s three major discourses: surveillance/technological inevitability, race politics, and human exceptionalism. These are fraught discourses, often represented in contradictory and confusing ways over the course of the film, but I think it is generative to sit with them and to try to work out what messages are intentionally and/or unintentionally being conveyed through the movie, as well as what the potentials and limitations of these messages might be.

Spoilers ahead.

i. Surveillance & Technological Inevitability

Before getting into the content of the film, one thing which may be useful to consider is how the movie previews shown in the theater before the start of the movie contextualize reception and engagement with the actual story Terminator: Dark Fate tells. There were quite a few trailers before the movie--enough so that one patron a few seats down in my row loudly commented “is the movie going to start now or what??” as yet another trailer started playing, the majority of which were either for war or horror movies. The two in particular I am interested in discussing are The King’s Man (2020) and Midway (2019), and the way that they both glorify and justify the imperialist/security state. The King’s Man trailer, for example, positions the titular agency as being an “independent intelligence agency” which essentially is able to actively “protect” people while governments fall short. In between clips from the film, title cards read "witness the rise...of the civilized," a shockingly open and yet seemingly unconscious connection between the King’s Man narrative and British colonialism/imperialism. Immediately following this trailer is one for Midway, a WWII moving centering on the aircraft carrier USS Midway immediately after the events of Pearl Harbor, which a character in the trailer calls “the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the US”. The reason why these trailers are important to keep in mind is because they implicitly respond to some of the anxieties articulated in Terminator; if Terminator films speak to fears of technology and surveillance, these trailers argue that really technology, surveillance, and military power are all important aspects of “civilized” nations, necessary for security and safety.

This actually ties in immediately to the opening of Terminator: Dark Fate, and the death of John Connor which can be interpreted, in one sense, as a failure of surveillance. This actually specifically made me think of Inderpal Grewal’s article “Security Moms,” and the rise of the neoliberal female citizen subject as an agent of security through motherhood in the post 9/11 U.S. The “security mom, essentially, is a “conceptualization of women as mothers seeking to protect their innocent children - a figure that is not so new in the history of modern nationalisms, or even American nationalisms and racism” (Grewal 27). Much like the King’s Man trailer suggestion that private intelligence is better suited to save lives than governmentalized intelligence, “neoliberalism suggests that the state is unable to provide security and thus it disavows its ability to protect all citizens”--only in here, it is the figure of the mother rather than a private agency which becomes the new and better fitted agent of surveillance, always watching for enemies in order to protect their children (Grewal 28). In a voice over, Sarah Connor tells us that she “saved three billion people but [she] couldn’t save [her] son”; a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) model Terminator which had been sent back before Skynet was destroyed and continued carrying out orders “from a future that never happened” walks right past Sarah and shoots John. While Sarah leaps in to action after she recognizes the threat, she is unable to stop the T-800 from killing her son in seconds. This might actually be a key difference between Sarah Connor and Grewal’s “security mom”: while security moms are a largely a post-9/11 construction of neoliberal/nationalist motherhood, Sarah Connor was a successful security mom in 1991, constantly vigilant and constantly surveilling her surroundings for concealed enemies who could kill her son. In the post-9/11 era, Sarah Connor’s belief that the apocalypse has been averted causes her to believe that she and her son are safe, resulting in inadequate surveillance/vigilance and her son’s death. Much like the framing of Pearl Harbor in the Midway trailer and 9/11 in real life, disasters happen because of failures to appropriately surveil.

Technological state surveillance itself is reflected in strange ways in the film, which seems to be at once critiquing and accepting constant surveillance. Sarah Connor keeps her cell phone in a chip bag to avoid being tracked and tells Grace and Dani that they will not last without her help because they are not aware of the constant surveillance occurring at every traffic light, every store, every gas station, etc--information the Rev-9 terminator chasing Dani will certainly have access to. Terminator: Dark Fate expresses fears of technological abuse/control and surveillance, but constantly frames these fears as the failure of the government to control these technologies--the threat isn’t what the government will do or is doing with these technologies, but rather that these technologies are uncontrollable or might be used by enemy agents. While one could argue that the fear being expressed here is actually a critique of the existence of surveillance technologies--that technologies exist for a reason and will do what they are programmed to do--this framing overwhelmingly still imagines a kind of governmental neutrality, where the threat is the located exclusively in the technology itself, not in those creating and using it. Here I also want to emphasize that while in Judgement Day there’s a deeper critique of the military industrial complex and the role of private corporations, in Dark Fate it appears to be the government alone engaged in constant surveillance and the technologies which result in the robot apocalypse, with the role of capitalism largely obscured from the connection between the new evil AI, Legion. In this same vein, while it seems that Legion is built as a weapon by the government, but we do not even explicitly know which government--again, the threat isn’t government construction of Legion (although Sarah does comment “they never learn”) but rather the technology itself.

In the original movies, Skynet was a defensive surveillance software--but this is no longer science fiction; as Edward Snowden revealed/confirmed in 2013, constant mass surveillance is a real thing, and there are real ways people can avoid it (using VPNs, encryption, covering webcams, anti-facial recognition makeup (called CV dazzle), wearing disguises, etc). Despite this, and despite Sarah Connor’s awareness of constant surveillance, the characters don’t do much to avoid surveillance and just as Sarah originally predicted, the Rev-9 easily tracks them through governmental surveillance apparatuses. In the same way, surveillance and the technological abuse/carelessness which bring about the robot apocalypse are largely imagined inevitable. While there is a constant argument for agency and the idea that people can and must make choices in the present moment that determine the future, nothing is done to disrupt surveillance in the present moment, and the future seems to be unstoppable. While we can certainly think about the switch from Skynet to Legion, and the way this articulates a different set of social concerns and anxieties in 2019 than in the late 80s/early 90s, stopping Skynet delays but does not prevent what seems to be, from a material standpoint, the same future. In this same vein, when Grace dies so that Dani can use her power source to destroy the Rev-9, Grace tells Dani “we both knew I wasn’t coming back”; this frames her death as predetermined and fixed. Similarly, at the end of the film Sarah tells Dani she will help her to “prepare”, implicitly suggesting that the future cannot be prevented--further legitimizing the reading of the Skynet to Legion switch as an inability to meaningfully change the future. This brings us to the line used both in Judgement Day and Dark Fate: “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. While this line seems to suggest that we have agency and can make choices that change the future, the inability to actually enact change might instead lead to a counter reading of the line: is it that we make fate, or that the fate we get is the one we “deserve”?

ii. Race (& Gender) Politics

There’s actually quite a bit to think about in terms of the racial politics of Terminator: Dark Fate. One the one hand, we can certainly think about the underlying savior discourse and the transition of this role from a white man to a Mexican woman. There is some fairly heavy handed Christian symbolism involved in John Connor as the white male hero—John’s initials parallel him to Jesus Christ, and Sarah comments “let her play Mother Mary for a while” when she thinks Dani has become the new target because a son Dani will someday give birth to will be the new savior of humanity. Sarah also comments that Dani isn’t the threat, it’s her womb. I want to go two directions on this comment: first, while it of course turns out that Dani is the hero herself, the idea of Latinx wombs as a threat is intricately tied to U.S. immigration policies and histories of eugenics, with the imagined threat being to the preservation of the (white) nation, so to here articulate the idea of Latinx reproduction as a kind of weapon to protect humanity is to offer something very different from a discourse of salvation through white reproduction/motherhood. Second, this line offers a kind of meta commentary on the way the previous movies claimed John as the savior (despite Sarah’s own heroism) to convince viewers that Dark Fate is more politically aware than previous Terminator movies, since Dani is the one destined to save the world (which of course ties back into my previous discussion of the unresolved tension between fate and agency), not her son and not a white man.

Moving beyond the switch in hero, one of the main things I want us to consider in thinking about the racial politics of Dark Fate is the question of collateral damage: while it’s nothing unusual to see large amounts of collateral damage in the background of an action movie, here this damage seems to be located exclusively in the Global South (specifically Mexico). Most (but not all) of the destruction is disassociated from individual people--for example, in one scene the Rev-9 drives a bulldozer down the wrong side of a freeway, crushing or crashing into numerous cars which obviously have people inside, even though we do not see most of them. Scenes of damage or interactions between populations and the Rev-9 in the U.S. do not result in death the same way that they do in Mexico/along the border. When the Rev-9 is knocked off of a plane after take off and crashes into a backyard in Texas, for example, he picks himself up and apologizes to the white people barbecuing in the yard for destroying their shed before continuing on his way. Similarly, when he flies over a military base which is actively attacking him, he ignores them and continues his pursuit of Dani without fighting back. While in both of these cases, one might argue that this is connected to the Rev-9’s obsession with fulfilling his mission without needing to kill anyone who is not actually preventing him from reaching Dani, a) this is a work of fiction so someone decided that the Rev-9 could fulfill his mission with minimal collateral damage in some spaces but not others, and b) in the final fight at the dam, the workers simply disappear when the fighting begins, removing them from any risk of becoming collateral damage.

Although there are action scenes throughout the movie, the last scene to involve mass violence against background characters is in the detention center. Before I get into the discussion of collateral damage/background character death at the detention center, I want to start by discussing border crossing and the representation of the detention center more broadly. There are some ways in which Dark Fate does attempt to address the violence involved in detention centers and U.S. immigration policy, but overwhelmingly it falls short. One of the ways we see this is in the actual crossing of the border and the way that it’s not particularly difficult or dangerous for Dani, Grace, and Sarah to cross. Certain popularized images of border crossing are deployed in ways which might suggest this is an authentic look at what it means to cross borders without documents (Dani, Grace, and Sarah ride on the top of a train with other migrants, which I suspect draws from the documentary Which Way Home, and Dani’s uncle, a Coyote, helps them cross the desert and enter the U.S. through a tunnel under the border wall), however the way these images are used as a shorthand undermines the danger undertaken/violence experienced by real undocumented migrants as the result of U.S. border policy. Riding the freight trains, called El tren de la muerte or La Bestia (the Death Train or The Beast) in real life, is highly dangerous and many people are killed or suffer serious and long term injuries as a result, and although we are told that Dani’s uncle is a good Coyote who gets people across safely (and he is of course helping his own niece), crossing the desert is extremely dangerous and many people die. Representing this crossing in maybe 10 minutes of screen time makes it seem easy and safe, obscuring the very real dangers faced by migrants in real life. Similarly, in the detention center border patrol agents are represented as apathetic but not particularly violent/dangerous, and the depictions of the cages migrants are kept in do not come close to reflecting the overcrowding experienced by the people who are being imprisoned in detention centers in real life. Furthermore, the imprisoned migrants do not have speaking roles and become non-agentive; the real suffering of undocumented migrants becomes nothing more than a setting, offering no significant or useful critique of U.S. border policies/politics. This brings us back to that question of collateral damage in the detention center. After Grace breaks out of the medical room she was being held in, she unlocks all of the cages and detained migrants begin to flee; although I have seen this described in some places online as her “freeing” them, escaping migrants become a distraction which aids in Dani, Sarah, and Grace’s actual escape from the detention center and the Rev-9 which has caught up with them. While most of the violence is enacted on border patrol agents rather than migrants (which is good), the Rev-9 does kill/harm some of the migrants who block his path as they attempt to escape, and the only border patrol agent we can identify as a speaking character to be killed is the Black woman who was pointedly apathetic to Dani’s pleas for help during the intake process. Most, if not all, of the other border patrol agents with speaking lines at the detention center are white, and seem to be framed as almost more sympathetic; the medical personnel fixing Grace’s wounds, for example, notices the metal interlaid in her body and are horrified by “what’s been done to her,” viewing her as a victim to be sympathized with. While one of the guards insists “we call them detainees” when Grace escapes from her handcuffs and demands to know where the prisoners are being kept, which offers an attempted commentary on the linguistic obscuration of violence and white apathy, we again must come back to the fact that the white medical guard is left unharmed while the Black guard is very pointedly killed.

We might push back on this overall interpretation by thinking about the ways that in real life people of color can become complicit in systems of white supremacy which will ultimately harm them while continuing to overwhelmingly protect white citizens, as well as the way that the Global South so frequently is a site of collateral damage, and experiences the displaced violence of the Global North. However, what I want us to think about is that this kind of intervention is useless when it is left latent, and overall only feeds into the constant racialized violence which plays out in movies and television programming. Furthermore, I want us to think about James Cameron’s comment about Judgement Day when he said that the T-1000 looked like an LAPD officer because “the Terminator films are...about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are”. While some have argued that Dark Fate picks up this legacy by making border patrol the villains, and the Rev-9 does clearly represent a military/border patrol kind of threat, the Rev-9 is also always a person of color. The base appearance, played by Gabriel Luna, is a man of color, and every single person it transforms itself to look like (which we are told kills the person being copied) is also a person of color. Because of this, there is a way in which the critique of border patrol is divorced from white supremacy and people of color become part of what is imagined as the threat.

iii. Thinking About Humanity

Finally, this ties into the discussion of humanity and the idea of human exceptionalism and purity articulated throughout Dark Fate. As with much of what I have previously talked about, this is a frequently contradictory kind of discourse which simultaneously broadens and constrains the idea of what “humanity” is/means. One example of this is the way in which augments and terminators that grow a conscious queer the boundary between “human” and “machine.” When Sarah demands they shoot Carl in the face to see what he “really is,” Dani insists “I don’t really care what he is”; through this there seems to be, on some level, an articulation that there’s more to being “human” than literally being a human being. Furthermore, these characters are queer in multiple dimensions--Grace is a very butch, very queer feeling character, and while I don’t want to say that the reformed murderous robot said Ace Rights, Carl’s character does push back against the heteronormative coital imperative by through his relationship to Elisa and his adopted son Mateo, which offers a model of meaningful romantic partnership and family commitment which does not involve biological reproduction or sexual intimacy. However, despite these queer potentials, we are constantly pushed back towards a privileging of “human” through frequent assertions that Grace is human (not a machine, just augmented), that augmentation is unstable (Grace’s frequent metabolic crashes and dependence on a cocktail of medication to keep herself going), and Carl only has the approximation of a conscious and cannot love the way humans do. Furthermore, Carl and Grace both die, suggesting that this queering of the human/machine boundary is untenable.

So what does “humanity” mean in Dark Fate? Ultimately, it seems to mean protecting the vulnerable and being willing to sacrifice yourself to do it. During the final confrontation between Dani, Sarah, Grace, and Carl, the Rev-9 says “I know she’s a stranger, why not let me have her”; Sarah responds: “Because we’re not machines you metal motherfucker”. While I obviously think the film offers a confused message on agency and that we need to be critical of the racial politics of the film, this ties into what I think (or what I would like to think) the movie hoped to say about border patrol and detention centers: we need to do better by refugees and undocumented migrants. It doesn’t matter whether we know someone, whether we imagine they are deserving or undeserving, what it might or might not cost us to do the right thing; we can choose, in this moment, whether or not we step up and fight against the detention of undocumented migrants, whether we resist ICE, whether we advocate for refugees. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

#terminator dark fate #terminator #dark fate #critical race theory #neoliberalism #essay #review #spoilers #i am white #as always i wrote this in one mad go & will fix any errors as i find them #also as always pls feel free to respond & engage

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homenum-revelio-hq · 5 years ago

Photo

Welcome to the Order of the Phoenix, Nutteh!

You have been accepted for the role of MARY MACDONALD, with your requested faceclaim change to Imogen Poots! I really loved the way you brought Mary to life! I could tell through your application that you truly understood what this version of Mary Macdonald, a character who often gets pushed to the side, is all about! I’m so happy to see you embracing her dark parts. I am so excited to have you as part of this roleplay!

Please take a look at the new member checklist and send in your account within 24 hours! Thank you for joining the fight against Voldemort!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME: Nutteh

AGE: 26

TIMEZONE: CST

ACTIVITY LEVEL: I work full-time, but one para interaction per week is more than doable. When I get into something, I get really into it.

ANYTHING ELSE: No.

CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Mary MacDonald

AGE: 20

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY: Cis-female, she/her. She is bisexual, if she had to identify herself, but truth be told the idea of placing her heart in anyone's hands - be they male, female, or anything in between - is a daunting proposition.

BLOOD STATUS: Muggle-born

HOUSE ALUMNI: Gryffindor

ANY CHANGES: I'd like to change her FC to Imogen Poots, if possible. She has a slightly softer look than Emma Mackey, but there's an underlying darkness - a potential for darkness - that I think is important for Mary's faceclaim.

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

PERSONALITY:

Mary MacDonald is good at “soldiering on.” She is adaptable, capable of flexibility when it means a better chance of achieving her goals. A hectic family life prepared her for such a thing. Navigating the streets and slums of Glasgow at a young age made her a direct-line thinker; when the only goal was survival, it was hard not to be steadfast in one’s endeavors. The Sorting Hat debated putting her in Slytherin for that reason, which is perhaps why she’s so close with Alice, but it’s not a trait that makes her particularly gregarious. She finds it difficult to be a devoted and dependable friend when she is wary of people’s intentions, and Mulciber’s attack only exaggerated that part of her psyche. It’s unfortunate, as her splintered relationship with her family has left her in desperate need of real friends. Always a worrier, Mary is used to thinking ahead; but, after she emerged from her fifth year with that long, nasty scar across her cheek, she was convinced she’d grown soft. Her need to be one step ahead of everyone else has morphed into a kind of high-functioning anxiety. She and fear are close fellows and she hates it, but at this point she has become quite good at using it to drive her.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY:

Mary was born in Glasgow, Scotland to eighteen-year-old newlyweds Richard and Ruthie MacDonald. The pride of Mary's young life came from pointing at her parents' few grainy wedding photos - "That's me!" she screamed, jabbing a finger at her mother's swollen belly, straining beneath her wedding dress. Her elder brother Adam, however, was a more concrete installment; he stared blankly at the camera from his perch in Ruthie’s arms, not at all moved by the joyful occasion. Love ruled the MacDonald household - it had to, as they didn’t have much else. Two more children followed - Patrick and little Holly - and Mary knew nothing but family. All six MacDonalds lived in a three-bedroom flat above Ed’s Bakery, a rather seedy establishment with an owner whose heart was far bigger than he let on. Richard built ships and worked long hours, and Ed employed Ruthie downstairs. Mary’s childhood was filled with the scent of baking (and sometimes burning) bread, and it was spent leading hodge-podge football matches in the back alley. Underneath it all, though, was a kind of dutiful sobriety; she wanted to be like the other children at her muggle primary school, seemingly carefree, but there were things to be done and things to be taken care of at home and she didn't know how to not care.

That was why it was so jarring when her Hogwarts letter arrived, accompanied by a witch with square spectacles (who, it can be noted, took quite a liking to Ed’s biscuits). Mary’s magical abilities revealed themselves late and subtly; footballs seemed to do exactly as she willed them during games with her siblings, and any spats she had in Ed’s shop mysteriously set the baked goods to burning. The news that she was a witch, however, was somehow less unfathomable than the idea of being away from her family for nine months out of the year. She was used to being surrounded by them, by focusing only on their well-being and their survival; she didn’t know how to have thoughts that didn’t include them. Ruthie and Richard were proud and very supportive of their daughter’s new endeavor - at times, perhaps too supportive. Mary would never admit it, but she agonized over their eagerness and enthusiasm for most of her first year. Were they glad to be rid of her? Were they happy to have one less mouth to feed? She missed them and her siblings something awful, but as time went on she made peace with the anxious squall in her head. To this day it’s unclear, but if her mother and father did want to get rid of her she doesn’t blame them. Their family was a loving family, but it was also a hectic one; as Mary grew older and wiser (or perhaps more cynical?), she became inwardly critical of her parents. Why have so many children if you don’t have the means to care for them? She used to believe love was enough, but when her little brother Patrick was sent to prison for robbery shortly before her graduation, she wasn’t so sure. Perhaps this was why her relationship with her family, once so strong she could scarcely think of anything else, faded. It was gradual, but she was engrossed in a new world while they stayed engrossed in theirs - they had to. They taught her hard work and flexibility, but they both intentionally and unintentionally taught her to protect herself. Despite Richard and Ruthie’s example, Mary learned how to dodge missteps, how to keep from acting rashly and damaging any chance of her own survival. Of course, the more sinister and dire the war becomes, the further she strays from self-control.

OCCUPATION:

Mary was fifteen when she was attacked; she was fifteen when she was left panting against the wall of a third-floor corridor, clutching her face as portraits screamed and gasped around her. She was in the thick of her O.W.L.s when Mulciber, a boy two years her senior, unleashed his prejudice upon her, and she only wished he’d done it sooner. If he’d had the sense to do it before she started studying, she would have known what to say when asked about career choices. The attack had done everything it wasn’t meant to do; instead of silencing her, it made her bolder. Instead of making her shrink away from magic, it spurred her on, adding fuel to a fire she’d been allowing to smolder inside her.

Upon graduation, however, Mary was at a crossroads. She wanted desperately to be an auror, but the Ministry was beyond corrupt and she knew better than to expect anything from it. She idled, working odd bartending shifts at The Leaky Cauldron whilst scanning the Prophet behind the bar. That’s where Dumbledore found her, and his proposition to join the fledgeling Order of the Phoenix wasn’t one she had to think much about. Still, it wasn’t making her any money - organizing against dark wizards wasn’t a job, especially the slow, hum-drum way the Order went about it. As good as she was at getting by with very little, she needed something more.

The first time she heard his name was during an Order meeting, said with an air of discomfort and slight distaste. He was one of those radicals, one of those militant rebels who found murder a perfectly good way to deal with Voldemort’s regime. Both confirmed and suspected Dark Lord followers were turning up dead all over Europe, and Mary’s skin prickled. The Order did not endorse him, but she met with him in secret; if anyone were to find out or ask her about her current employment, she’d maintain that she has to make a living somehow. It’s an excuse that doesn’t quite fit, but working underground as an assassin, for lack of a better word, keeps her out of the public eye and in a stream of steady income (sometimes more than steady, and in Mulciber’s case, sometimes out of the goodness of her heart).

ROLE WITHIN THE ORDER/THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORDER:

The speed with which she rose through the ranks came as a surprise, though not to Mary. It was poetic, really - a muggle-born barrelling her way into the “inner circle” - but she didn’t allow herself to think about what it all meant. Every now and then she wondered if her recruitment was meant to be more of a statement than an actual tactical move, but in the end it didn’t matter. If it started as a statement, fine. If Dumbledore recognized the need, the hunger for revenge eating her from the inside out, that was fine too. How she got there wasn’t as important as what she was doing now that she was here, and Mary clings to that thought. She isn’t blind to the Order’s setbacks, but she is comforted by all they have done - all she has done. After the attack during her fifth year, she often wondered why Mulciber didn’t kill her. He had the chance, didn’t he? Why hesitate? Well, she didn’t hesitate, and sleep comes quicker now than it has in years.

SURVIVAL:

Preservation is a strong instinct for Mary - she’s good at surviving. Glasgow was in a period of economic decline while she was growing up in its underbelly, and she learned how to avoid trouble, how to avoid being robbed (not that she had anything of value). This was why, as much as Mulciber’s attack drove her forward, it also shocked her and gave her self-esteem a firm shove backward. How did he sneak up on her? Why didn’t she expect anything? Why wasn’t she ready for him? Since then she has worked hard and resolved to be more prepared, more perceptive; it seems all well and good, but she has heard the term “trigger-happy” thrown around more than once. As much as her vigilance has helped her, it’s also made her somewhat of a liability.

RELATIONSHIPS:

At this point, Mary’s relationships with the rest of the “inner circle” are strained. She’s been successful so far, hasn’t she? So why do these men (save for Alice, and what the fuck is that all about?) seem so keen on dismissing everything she says? She’s taken Death Eaters down before, likely more than her peers know, but they’re so focused on outwitting and outmaneuvering the opposition that they’re forgetting the merits of just going for it. That’s why the methods of the newest recruits have her straining to hear their conversations, glancing sideways at them as she heads for “inner circle” meetings. Dorcas, Emma, and Benjy are people of action, and Mary respects that. It’s only a matter of time before she offers her help, especially if things keep slogging along like they currently are.

Her relationship with her family is all but nonexistent. It’s been a year and a half since she saw her parents, and Adam doesn’t write to her anymore - that stopped before her fourth year. The distance became too great to bridge with friendly letters, and now Mary doesn’t know how best to do it. Besides, she doesn’t have the time, and sometimes she feels that the farther away she is, the better it is for them.

OOC EXPLORATION:

SHIPS/ANTI-SHIPS: I ship Mary/Chemistry. It's hard to know exactly what her relationships to other characters entail at this point, but if accepted I am happy to discuss those in depth with my fellow players.

WHAT PRIVILEGES AND BIASES DOES YOUR CHARACTER HAVE?

I suppose Mary has had the luxury of seeing the muggle and wizarding worlds as two separate entities. She isn’t totally naive - she knows muggles aren’t immune to the unseen war raging among them - but given her experience as a muggle-born with a more or less indifferent family, she can’t help but see a stark line between the two. So far her parents and siblings remain unaffected, and that makes it difficult for her to understand the plights and fears of her fellow muggle-borns, especially ones with strong, lasting familial bonds.

When it comes to wealth, she has a gigantic chip on her shoulder as well; she appreciates the Potters’ and McKinnons’ generosity, but she never allows herself to stay at their estates for long. Seeing the sheer scale of their fortunes sometimes makes her sick, nevermind that they’ve been nothing but kind to her.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO?

I'm looking forward to dabbling in Marauders' Era again. It's been ages, and there might have been some light peer pressure involved in my applying at all. But now that I've done it I'm really excited! One thing that I think always turned me away from Marauders' Era was the fact that there was a concrete endgame. We know what happens to these characters, so exploring the bits in between seemed silly to me. Now I'm starting to understand the draw, and I think this roleplay being AU is opening a lot of doors and making me feel less constricted.

PLOT DROP IDEAS:

I’d really like to play with Mary’s questionable occupation. She has focused on targets with stark, black-and-white, obvious loyalties to the Dark Arts so far, but I think it’d be fun to have her confront a gray area - perhaps being sent for someone who is good and does good but doesn’t set themselves firmly against Voldemort? Perhaps someone within the Order? I want her job to become a source of contention within the Order if/when the other members find out.

ANYTHING ELSE? Nope!

#homenumaccepted #marauders era rp #harry potter rp #harry potter rpg #harry potter roleplay

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years ago

Text

14x05 watching notes

filed under: episodes that demand a written apology from the writer

Morning, I opened the episode to check it worked and the first thing on screen was dead Maggie, so I guess skip the preamble, let's get rid of that D:

Meredith is going to look after Maggie. Who so far this season has just been the human representation of the :o emoji

Er, she's not going to look after us, after the THEN card we abruptly drop into Dean having his beach retirement chat with Sam

A lingering reminder of how Jack would help - if he had his powers - but Sam asks "then what would we do" and cut to Dean being Michaeled. At this point I can't tell if we need to remember 13x23 for Reasons or if they just don't trust us to remember the recent history of the show at all and are catching up people who might have dropped by to see how their favourite guest star, Maggie, is doing.

I mean I love her but she isn't the headliner normally :P

OH GOODNESS SHE'S THE COLD OPEN GIRL. Maggieee no. She looks so scared. Why are they sending her hunting on her own??? She is a smol scared bean who was not prepared for the apocalypse and surely must be able to find other off-the-radar jobs for a person from another universe in this world that don't involve throwing herself at monsters!

She's wearing pink trousers for a stealth mission at night. She makes Sam's orange jacket look like camo

Also she's recording herself... Maggie... What are you doing........ hon......................

I have adopted her, but it turns out I have another stupid child among my many, many stupid children and just once I wish they didn't turn out like this :P

So she's like, attached a go pro to herself to record her hunt for... training purposes? reporting back to Chief? because she's become an adrenaline junkie after all the time she was nearly eaten by supervampires?

MAGGIE

Gad dangit

He was slow moving and you heard him behind you. Swing first, ask questions later, when it's a growling noise in a dark crypt.

Has anyone been counting the apocalypse world peeps because I'm pretty sure they're relying on us not to recognise them because they're a crowd. At this point we almost certainly have like 50+ distinct individuals instead of the 25 they purportedly rescued.

I say this because I feel like some of the white guys from the original batch appear to have metamorphosed into a more diverse group

Sammy setting homework.

Sorry, not Sammy. The Boss.

Dean comes in to observe class.

Sam immediately sheds all his confidence and goes back to being Sammy. He does seem to have a slight layer of scruff more, or maybe it was just that he was looking particularly clean-shaven last episode out of shock

Dean offers to get him a camp counsellor whistle, and Sam gets even more awkward about hunter check ins. I can see this feeding itself here, with Sam blustering and getting weird about his position of authority in front of Dean, and Dean who is both latching on in a brotherly way, and lashing out in a recently emotionally maimed Dean way, but can't yell at the apocalypse peeps they rescued and graciously allowed to stay because, you know, Michael destroyed their world, so taking it all out on Sam... Unfortunately, Dean being the wounded, irrational party, it's down to him to realise he's being a lil too harsh on Sam OR Sam to stop rising to the bait.

In this case, I would say the ball is firmly in Sam's court, not because he's at any particular fault for instinctively reacting like the needled little brother when big bro wanders in snarking at his attempts to do his job, but because he is the one behaving like the adult already in this scenario when he's facing the AU peeps and being The Chief in a natural way where he's thriving in the environment, and crumpling immediately in the face of this one random element is a clear part of his growth and maturity arc. As it is he's feeding Dean's reaction a LOT by getting embarrassed and changing his behaviour and not standing his ground and continuing to act like a mature adult, and giving Dean the little brother teasing opening he feeds off in the dynamic.

In other scenarios this could flip with Sam doing his best and Dean being a dick who's seeking an opening and trying to get Sam to crack and in that case it would be all on him to correct his behaviour, but in this case, I'm leaning Sam being the problem despite the appearance, because he crumpled just to hear Dean coming up the steps, never mind how it went from there. He's acting ashamed of being the leader, because he knows it's emotionally infringing on Dean territory, as he sees Dean as a natural and more rightful leader, and doesn't recognise his own strengths and skills being applied in spades here; his self-confidence immediately is put under the microscope when he knows Dean is there, and it topples his precarious house of cards of self confidence.

He has also put himself in a position of managing Dean, coming in last episode all, alright champ how's it going? and had a success by a country mile with getting Dean to leave his room, open up, and have some fun, and that's not even comparing it to the same time last season when in 13x05 he completely failed at the same task. He has been working gently on Dean to help him, but he can't when it comes to getting Dean used to having the AU peeps around and accepting Sam's new job there, if Sam acts like it's something to be ashamed of and is too horrified by usurping Dean to focus on letting his instincts talk and continuing to blatantly be a wonderful leader.

These AU peeps are also seeing their venerated war hero general just crumple into an insecure mess as soon as his brother walks into the room >.>

Sam gets coffee, turns into coffee!Sam (Lizbob's on the record favourite character in the entire show), finally snaps back at Dean about how many hunters he's keeping track of right now when Dean stops needling in a funny way and asks about Sam's health - of course, now it's all built up into Dean bothering Sam so instead of being a nice request, Sam snaps.

It's possible that while Sam now runs the hunters, delegating to Mary and AUBobby and even Dean if he'll accept it, to help keep track etc, will really benefit in the long run.

Slick way to work where Cas and Jack are into the same breath as where Mary and Bobby are - rugarou, which is code for off screen case - and throw it all out there as plot and ongoing character work AND the requisite where is Cas comment to keep fandom happy.

God, I haven't even gotten around to what I meant to say immediately that Sam dropped down into his codependency seat at the table and Dean is unintentionally mirroring 9x13's final scene of all the many times they've been around this block - off the top of my head but as someone who has been keeping a very close eye for a very long time, I can't think of another significant instance where Sam was sitting and Dean was standing while it got heated.

Of course 9x13 was working very hard to show their divisions, while of course here Sam is just sitting in his Dean Is Upsetting Me chair and Dean's not sitting at the table which just means not engaging with Sam on his level in a very literal as well as metaphorical way - in character, that's a body language dissonance as well as making Sam look up at him. In staging terms, it carries the weight of years of directorial and acting decisions about how to portray the brothers in crisis that I've been noting in case of a pattern.

"Yeah, but a war isn't hunting" good grief Sam is making their entire lives sound even worse than ever given they grew up in this and now he's listing off all the stuff they need from the perspective of being the Bobby. I mean, when they say they were raised like soldiers, they're adding in the fact they do zillions of almost completely unsupported 2 man raids into hostile territory with limited gear or recon. The recap at the start, showing them going in to fight the werewolves with an angel and a nephilim on their side, was an easy hunt for a reason and not just because there were 4 of them :P Without that, no matter how many hunters they accumulate, it's always looked like a losing battle because many of these things you'd want to call the national guard on if civilians could be alerted to the danger.

See, Dean is acting needle-y but as soon as Sam gets an unnerving alert on his phone he's concerned and asks who it is - remember last episode where he was like don't know don't care about the guy Sam was Bobbying from the car? - and when he says "maggie" ... well, they're all clearly protective of her in particular D:

Oh good, the body cams thing was a Sam innovation and therefore a good idea and we can pat his head for it

Bobby never had that and I bet he'd have LOVED to keep track of his peeps that way.

The other hunters meet up on the last thursday of the month to watch the highlight reel from Garth Cam, BYOB, popcorn provided

Nyooom

This shot should win awards for the fuckin horrifying perspective that I, as a non-mountain-dweller, can barely comprehend that it looks like the sky but then you keep on looking up and there's trees in there. Is this something people in big countries are used to? I mean I've seen my share of mountains in Scotland and they're way too cramped to fake you out like that.

You have to understand that in my town, wedged between two cliffy cliffs, the entire old town is like 500ft wide at best before more cliff. There's only 2 directions - up and towards the sea :P You don't need fancy camera tricks to contain everything... I'm getting agoraphobia just looking at this. I mean I don't think it's intended to cause existential horror but mission accomplished.

Dean getting morbid talking about how having a private cemetery would be nice. I mean, they practically need one behind the Bunker after all this time, wherever the final resting place is of at least Kevin and Charlie's bodies as well as anyone else who died in and around there who wasn't dumped in the sewer like Ketch was :')

During day this place isn't half bad, with its whimsical overgrown look, the slanting fence of the bridge to cross to get there, the jungle closing in around the little plot...

But remember, Dean. Beach holiday. Eyes on the prize, man. You and the rest don't get to hang out behind the Bunker for eternity at least until you're all old and earned it.

Dean defends knowing what a walker from the Walking Dean is... in 12x15 he was playing with a Negan bat which I assume he still has somewhere, washed off and placed in the armoury :P Sam is at least being a bit more authoritative here in the sense of reeling off info as the Chief in charge of Maggie's fate and knowing her mission etc...

Honestly this makes me feel like the dynamic of Dean drives, Sam rides shotgun can mature too, in the sense that Dean is no longer taking control from Sam - back in season 10 that was very heavily used as part of their toxic dynamic and there's definitely shades of season 10 dynamics on the chopping block around these parts - because Sam needs all the extra time to manage his army from the road, with his hands free to check the phone and read up on everything, while Dean is free to drive and be Dean.

Sam being all I FAILED SHE IS DEAD at every turn and Dean being all "hey check it out, drag marks! :D" "but no blood!!! :D :D :D"

As a student of analaysisisign things I have no idea what was just implied by Sam and Dean being called back to the surface followed by the sound effect of spooky cold breath, a wonky focus on a statue of a bearded dude and smol cherub, and then being interrupted by a 1900s gardener.

Apron plus hat seems like Michael coding but god knows what it means.

I bet they're actually talking to a ghost but he's so busy just defending the ancestral land that he's passing as a real alive person and it's one of those completely harmless cases where the ghost just lurks around protecting the land, doesn't go vengeful, and wards off people who hang out there... Not that he had much luck with the drunk teens.

1900s gardener stands outside, unable to go into the house, surveying it with a weary eye.

The garden is completely and utterly overgrown, almost like no one has gardened it for 100 years, even though there appears to be a gardener on the property.

*rubs chin*

1900s gardener gives them one last suspicious look before wandering back to work, significantly enough that we see it with a whole separate shot

what is his deal

why is he dressed like that

Does Meredith feel guilty for MURDERING JOSHUA and side note, can we really trust that it was him who got murdered. Maybe he's in retirement dressed in an olde timey shirt and waving antique gardening implements at Sam and Dean for kicks.

Considering they improv'd the line about the HPS it's very lucky that Mobby came up with that line - I guess showing how they think alike and all

"Just wish you'd checked in with the main office," Sam bobs his head, like, "ME", "before you came out here..."

Yeah, here's the Sam and AUBobby leadership conflict I was hoping for :P

Mary asks for a mo and shepherds Sam out in particular, leaving AUBobby and Dean to handle the architect digest subscriber. She's all momsy with her handling of him, and Dean and AUBobby are left to do the awkward small talk - we know AUBobby really doesn't have it as his strong suite, even though it was Bobby's, like in 6x21 where he was the only one to ever say sorry about your mom to the guy. It also means they have to do the blathering while trying to work out any supernatural history on the property in character, while Mary and Sam are designating themselves the ones who can get to the heart of the problem and handle it like the profession adults. I like the implicit trust/respect bond that gives here.

I mean she has it with Dean too I would think but she's spent more time with Sam lately and it's important now to show she's grown such a bond with Sam, as it's been 2 whole years of her being back before they could begin to properly bond due to various issues.

"It was her first solo hunt and she was nervous" listen Sam and Dean are like 1000 pounds of muscle and "fuck you apocalypse" experience and they hunt together. Maggie was smol and wore pink trousers.

Is. Is smol.

God. I'm turning into Sam.

Lol conspicuous blood transfusion bags. Nice gig, to drain peeps and get a nurse to apply the blood directly to you. Is he a vampire with an olde timey set up?

Maggiieeee

stealing her boots is just mean.

Does she have pink plaid as well as pink trousers?

My god how did they let her out of the house? She's too cute and innocent for this world.

Or her previous world.

Can we shunt her along one more world to one which doesn't have this much monster trouble even, as she's clearly still not found the AU which suits her best.

Heee Dean knocking the mantelpiece and saying the house has "good bones" like he's an expert on houses

The question is, has he watched a lot of junk reality TV about house refurbishment, or is he just faking on the fly

I have not watched enough aforementioned junk TV to call this one

Oh, nope, the daughter validates it by saying her grandpa used to say it. Dean has watched enough TV to pass

Ooooh AUBobby having a go at Sam for his shoddy leadership of letting Maggie come here when she had no idea what was up.

I'm guessing the help over text messaging may have been a bit more backseat hunting from AUBobby, but he didn't try to STOP Maggie, or tell her to wait while he and Mary dashed up here.

In any case, here's the conflict of leadership I've been waiting for since before the season began :') Unfortunately, Sam shaved off his beard before going toe to toe with AUBobby, so he takes the first round by default of bristliness, as Sam ceded some portion of control back to Dean on Dean's return and this has made him weird and jumpy about acting like the chief in front of his peeps, and now AUBobby's taking the opening.

He has such a power stance that Bobby never had

Shoulders back, beard out

Dean defends Sam like when is anyone ready to hunt, because from their perspective of course they were as smol-seeming as Maggie and CONSIDERABLY younger when they were plunged into hunting. She's a grown adult! She can handle it! (she may or may not be a mirror to Jack, who is consumptive, and therefore betraying some sort of inherent unreadiness to hunt and a requirement that the smols among you be protected rather than forced to grow up too young and go hunting as a rite of passage, just as Sam and Dean were given their first beers barely in single digits by gnarly hunters)

"A real leader would have seen that a mile away" Yeah AUBobby is too used to leading his peeps - perhaps he liked a semi retirement where Sam was the leader and the world seemed safer and they could hunt like the old days...

Mary mediates, splitting up the team in the only way that makes sense, hoping that Dean can defend Sam in absentia (and thus be forced to confront that Sam IS a good and thoughtful leader and to stop mocking him and start defending him) and she can comfort Sam and build him back up as the Chief.

Dean goes on such a face journey about this whole thing, from feeling weird about AUBobby to bad about what's going on with Sam to just worried about Maggie and very much taking on that blame for sending a smol out into the field, especially as he has recused himself from responsibility to these people - while fairly taking a mental health break from the frontline as well as competing with how Sam already got there... Anyway that was like 18 distinct facial expressions each with a story and it's too early in the morning... I JUST got my cup of tea and it's still too hot to drink so Jensen's defeated me this round

Sam gets comforted by another trenchcoated figure

"Don't listen to Bobby" "maybe he's right" shush.

"THIS IS WHAT HE WAS BORN TO DO"

ILY Mary. She's coming in fresh on adult!Sam, she doesn't even have the feelings about him as she does to smol scared 4 year old boy Dean, especially if we account for postpartum depression making it hard for her to bond with him as per the entire metaphorical structure of the show from episode one to present. Now she's getting to spend time with him - and especially as her only significant time with him BEFORE this was 12x14 aka Bobo's ode to Sam's leadership round 1... Yeah, she sees Sam as this giant gangly admirable leader guy she happens to have birthed.

"Bobby can't see that... not the only thing he's been missing lately."

Good grief, Mary in the trenchcoat has been making the eyes at AUBobby all Michael-hatted up and being ignored and rebuffed from her sparkling heart eyes. I wonder what this is a metaphor for, Ms Meredith Mixtape "know who you love" Glynn.

Also, Mary feeling comfortable to innuendo her crush on AUBobby to Sam - it really is an adult relationship and respect and emotional trust that I feel never in a million years could just pop up between her and Dean.

Oh boy, this scene is still going.

*Hides behind the secondhand embarrassment cushion* Sam goes there, like, not going to mention it but you - he sounds less bumbling than he has at other points... Sam's awkwardness factor can shoot through the roof to the point where in 3x04 where he attacks those guys and then is like "have a nice day" when they're not demons? I kinda want to reach through the screen and strangle him with my bare hands before he does it just to spare myself seeing it. Also the gifset of that has been on my dash all week, and it predisposes me to loathe Sam's awkwardness. Please god let us get through this in one piece.

Mary is too busy being wistful to realise her son is an awkward bumbling moose who is all misplaced stammering words and wonky legs spinning for traction when he's out of his depth.

Aww now Mary is getting to talk about her deal... She thought she had something good going with AUBobby but since they've been back he's been "hunting all the time and won't take a break not even for a second" - the ole bury yourself in hunting to avoid facing trauma or feelings thing. Of course AUBobby may be struggling with the weight of the world he left behind, the people who he couldn't save there and not knowing what has happened to them. There's a lot to unpack with him that hasn't been explored on screen and a lot of it is casting him as behaving in a Dean-like way, while Mary is the "I'll just wait here then" to his coping mechanisms.

"There's something on his mind, and he doesn't want to talk about it"

Aforementioned trauma, OR a pun about him being possessed by Michael

yeah I'm harping on it as a half-joke half-kinda want to have it on the record in case I'm right :P

"Bobby's not open like your dad"

Mary, you do realise how that sounds to literally everyone else, right? We KNOW you're practically from a 3rd AU aka the past where John was practically the mirror AU to his future self

Unfortunately, Mary is the only person in the room who ever has that particular story, which sucks for her

Anyway Meredith has reached some sort of characterising level with these people that I am just in pure awe of

"Not like your dad when I knew him"

"Bobby's got walls. Big ones"

I do think it's funny that Mary has essentially ended up crushing on a man who is a John-like parallel to the anti-John mirror that Bobby was, who of course had his own Karen who he was a different person with, who was a Mary mirror, and .... yeah

it's an interdimensional timetravelling wife swap

It makes Destiel look straightforward

Part of Meredith's skill here is not just accounting for every angle, but also juggling this nonsense

Anyway Mary doubting she can get through AUBobby's walls and be the person who has to do the emotional labour to get the guy she wants - if she's ready to put herself out there again

this is NOT a conversation to have with Dean in a million years. Even Sam takes a mo

"I shouldn't be talking to you about this!" she giggles and she and Sam smile and set off again, all touchy feely.

Sweet.

Anyway there's another dynamic in these woods.

"You think I was too hard on your brother back there." "He's doing his best. He's doing better than his best." Funny way to phrase it but yeah, Dean can see Sam's levelled up and his new best is this new levels of responsibility and good leadership overall.

LOL at how terse that conversation was. Dean points out that Sam could do with a hand running things, makes fun of the beard, no offence, and cut back to Sam and Mary

Sam explains Karen to Mary, to give her an idea of what might be AUBobby's backstory too.

"he never had any children?" "no"

Scuse me, that's the line that makes me BAWL every time I watch it. HE DID SO, YOU FOOL. IT WAS YOU AND YOUR UNGRATEFUL BROTHER

I am writing a letter of complaint to the management

"Whatever your Bobby" - oh dear, AUBobby is now "your" Bobby, like, they found him first but he's now Mary's :p

Sam is now full on giving Mary relationship advice about how it's worth it to move past those walls and give him a go if she really cares about him.

Has he ever had this chat with Cas, or is this just practice

"Cas, wait, I really appreciate you came to me with this but I am getting killer deja vu for a second here..."

Mary finds a disturbing firepit, Dean finds a creepy hunting cabin. This is about to be a barrel of fun

AUBobby... Don't just run off. Poke Dean and POINT AT THE THING YOU'RE FOLLOWING

... Dean, also, have some awareness in your peripheral that AUBobby just legged it

Again, way more athletic than our Bobby was

That's a human hand

Are those real IDs or hunter IDs

Oh it all came from one wallet, with the same pic on them all, so yes.

"Not one of ours" but part of the wider network/family nonetheless. His bearded look recalls Asa Fox, and there's the unspoken discussion again about sharing resources, if ALL hunters shouldn't be pulled into their network and the word spread that the Bunker is at least a resource, that Sam is there to be the hub even if they aren't all part of the centralised AU hunter squad, and Sam starts Bobbying in earnest for this world as a whole.

Of course they'd never have sent Maggie somewhere that a seasoned hunter had already disappeared.

Dean finally realises AUBobby is gone, and immediately gets jumped, with rather less warning than Maggie had.

I like how the man has had time to dress up in a suit from his sick bed, if indeed that is the case

monsters in suits

Well that's new

Well in 13x14 Meredith wrote Gog n Magog who were a fake out full of sand... Now this monster is a fake out full of ash?

Cut to: Old man still in his hospital bed, definitely not attacking people in the flesh

Oh dear, his daughter hearing something in the house while earnestly getting on with dealing with his estate makes me pretty sure she's not in on anything and she shouted them out of the house in genuine grief-stress, which I already wasn't particularly doubting.

The ole dragging chains upstairs ghost trick, which I honestly wish I could say I have never heard for myself but the ghost next door is not my problem, Victorian walls keep them contained, and honestly if you've been following the saga on random incidental comments on my blog I'm really only inclined to believe in ghosts for the humorous fake hysteria of a moment's entertainment but the odd noises next door late at night really have been going on long enough and yesterday some folk moved in so, you know, first act of a horror movie setting up mere feet away from me, the disinterested neighbour scowling at all the evil poured into the walls of that house by careless landlords and human suffering I witnessed firsthand caused by it >.> Anyway. Unlike this woman I stayed right in this spot instead of wandering around trying to work out where that noise was coming from, because I'm in the house with the wacky backstory where weed dealers sawed through the support beam in the roof and the front of my room collapsed shortly after we moved in :P

I'm sorry, but if a ghost opens a door for you ahead of you in the hall, my advice is not to immediately go up to the door and go in

SUPERVAMP IN THE ATTIC

She does an admirable duck and cover maneouver, only to realise he hasn't chased her. Huh.

Michael's super vamps are super weird.

"You're not crazy" Neil the nurse immediately straightens up and eyeballs Sam a lil harder.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

PS where is the ghostly gardener in all this because he wasn't the supervamp so

this is like a murder mystery puzzle but all the bits are so utterly wild... Dead hunter, Maggie being drained for the "stroke" victim who is also attacking people in a suit while made of ash... supervamp in the attic who won't follow her out of the room she found him in

I mean in all this has no one gone back up to the attic where a supervamp is apparently just LIVING?

He's currently just chilling there while they have this conversation

he's just, like... waiting for them????

Dean walks in mid-crisis "You hunt monsters?!" "oh good you told them" He does like when things are all quick and easy and right to the point.

Last episode he cheerfully told Dirk that hatchetman Jordan was coming for them, while Sam blustered over telling Sam even when the EMF was SCREAMING that there was a ghost right in the room with them and the display cases were freezing over.

With Mary's influence at least, Sam is happy to get into telling the full story

"Wait time out, there's a dead body on our property?"

THERE IS A SUPERVAMPIRE IN YOUR ATTIC

BIGGER PROBLEMS

Dean is entirely brushed down... Like... He must have been brushing ghost ash off of himself all the way back to the house.

Sam invokes 8x08 right after I was talking about Fred. Dangit, Glynn.

I feel like Sam is sort of making a jump here, but on the other hand the house isn't under ghostly or vampiric shutdown. The father is here, unconscious, so perhaps projecting and I guess if Sam is wondering how he could be doing it, then astral projections may make sense to some degree... Working out how it all ties together is going to be another huge step though. I know the sell for this episode was partially nightmares and dreams, and we have Maggie in a djinn-like trap and the old man both a sleeping Bobby from 3x10 and also a possible Fred Jones projecting it... The supervamps are something that Dean would have brought here, and "walkers" from the Walking Dead is something the boys could have brought. Which means the other hunter could have been murdered by his own trauma... idk. Why am I trying to piece it together now?

watch the episode, lizzy

LOL the daughter just reeling off her dad's "workaholic with textbook narcissistic tendencies" while also herself clearly being the offspring of such a person (is the manifestation of her dad her own trauma?) and hey no doubt that description of the father might come to bear on some of the father/power figures in the episode. Definitely not what Sam is though he's among the mix - perhaps a dark warning of a guy who works himself to death like this and becomes entirely self-absorbed in the process, but Sam just took a minute to advise his mom's love life so he's hanging in there with his sense of self for now. In the sense that a dark arc doesn't seem to be looming for him in such a way as red flags literally followed pre-Mark Dean around.

Okay took a LOT of me yelling at the screen but they FINALLY realised there's an unresolved vampire in the attic situation and Sam's going up to check

Meanwhile Mary has been separated out in this cursed property to have her own side-adventure with AUBobby

Lol the daughter downs some anti-anxiety medication with whisky while Dean sits behind her tuning his knife in a rather grim melody. What a scene.

He also has his foot on an armchair like the total troll he was raised as

She goes off on one and Dean immediately likes her

"Thanks dad" "no love lost between you two, huh?"

T stands for terrible father

"I get it" "not here for a heart to heart" *pause* *launches into a John Winchester Metaphor Of The Hour rant

"But my MOM" *Dean looks up, eyes all vulnerable* "Depression runs in our family" oh booooy

So she found her mom and Dean saw his mom consumed by fire in a way that is still scarring him TO THIS DAY (re: 13x01 nightmare) and this is our first Mary parallel of even a dead mom but one with a personality, and her own problems... Not the temporary insanity of drowning her children like Constance Welch in 1x01, but a woman who had depression and a husband who wasn't there for her... In 14x01 Mary and Sam's discussion revealed how much she was doggy paddling on the surface of all the awful that's happened to her, but this is our real notable parallel to discuss a family history of depression running through Mary's side of the family, which goes not just for Dean (who, like, really has anxiety himself) but also all of Mary's issues, including in 12x21, begging Ketch to kill her at a lowest point before they got her to entirely retreat into herself.

Glynn still out for Dean's blood: "the most ridiculous thing is... I worshipped him when I was a kid" Dean is feeling like she took that machete and shoved it in his stomach, as she sits there swigging whiskey and telling him how he feels. "Didn't know any better. He's the only family I have left."

"Can I give you a little advice?......... let it go." Oh Dean :')

Emerging from his cocoon, still mostly trapped in there but I think that's a bit of a wing poking through.

"The past is -" *forcefully stops himself from saying "in the past"*

He talks about it as baggage and how every single day he tries to let it go and leave the baggage behind. God he's strong and amazing and working so hard to be the best version of himself.

Oh my god who builds the hall up to the attic as part of the crawlspace? This is horrifying on an unnecessary level and I'm writing into that architecture magazine to complain

This is the creepiest attic. Who KEEPS these horrifying mementos. Give them to a thrift shop for a hipster to buff up and turn into a conversation piece in their living room.

Okay, blood bags and a girl in chains (explains the clinking) are a bit weirder than average.

"Sam... it's here" "What?" "It's heeeere" Sam how long have you BEEN in this business?

File this under your panicky first aid to Stuart last episode

Sam got ashed just like Dean did. Hm.

It also looked like one of the crazed hunger vamps from apocalypse world more than one of michael's supervamps maybe? It's really hard to keep track of all these :P

Oh my god AUBobby has a son, who was murdered by angels. This is terrible D:

Something about the immediate moment of him wandering in... When Bobby went off earlier I was thinking of 7x11 where he saw his younger self. This approach seems almost more like 6x04 and Crowley seeing Gavin for the first time.

Anyway this is of course another way to twist AUBobby around on himself - he managed to get a son, maybe Karen wasn't murdered by a demon, maybe he had a different wife. Whatever it is, it gives us a version of Bobby totally different from ours and also in how he will relate to Sam and Dean - not as the sons he never had, but if he's thinking of young men in the fight...

Oh no AUBobby just got stabbed... Er... is this a nightmare or is he just dead?

Is AUBobby really going to -

That's more impressive than breaking a crypt scene mental wall to save your loved one. Then again, original flavour Bobby once stabbed himself in the gut to save Dean so I guess he takes a lot of pain for his loved ones, and honestly gathering the strength to pull a knife out... Maaaybe nicer than putting it in???

The fact this is all going down with angel blades as well.

I swear to god... Meredith, don't make me watch AUBobby stab a vision of his own son to complete the loop with our Bobby stabbing Karen.

"I'm sorry"

*WhOMph grey ash everywhere*

Kinda takes the pure angst out of it at least :P

Dean gets a better look. "You're giving him a transfusion?"

Yeah, there's some fuckery at work here, sir. The nurse seems a lot less flustered answering this one which is almost as suspicious as someone who has been non-flustered suddenly getting flustered

Dean regrets saying "make me a sandwich before he is done asking. Which is the only reason I forgive that request :P Remember in 1x06 where he was bossing Sam's friend around to get them a beer and a sandwich so they could talk in peace about shifters? God. She KNOWS about monsters it's just that he wants to ask a sensitive question here.

Or punch the nurse in the face over the comatose form of her father.

A nod to her that it's a ruse gets her in on it, though. Female!Dean who is a different mirror than Dirk (though still messed up by a father) gets on his wavelength.

AAH He remembered the djinn thing!!! Dean's memory is so good and I love him and he's the best and also Meredith is riffing off 2x20 which is actually illegal, I literally have that written down here in the rules and regulations. Although it does give me my opportunity to remind us all of Dean's long speech about why does he have to be the one to save all these people to John's grave when he was thinking he had to go unwish stuff.

Sadly he didn't show up with a knife tipped in lamb's blood so let's see how this goes.

Oh my god the djinn's literally thought Dean was Michael the whole time. I have to rewatch now >.>

Well, not now, but.

He thought Michael was testing him, and would be back to give him an upgrade, and now he's waxing poetic about the untapped potential of djinn. We're back at season 6, with the hunter compound vs a monster army, except this time the monsters aren't a reaction to the nonsense of angels, they're the direct work of the angel stepping into the place of Eve as the experimenter, his grace vs her black goo. I suppose the weirdness out here is the djinn flexing its muscles with projecting hallucinations.

And I guess that means it hasn't affected Dean except the generic ghost of Mr Comatose over there (apologies to Cas) which I'd assume is part of the generic set up for killing hunters as it was what got Maggie too.

The question is, is that Maggie in the attic, or a nightmare for Sam. Wouldn't she be djinned too?

"Because of him - because of YOU - I can bring those nightmares into the world" well that's a weighted line >.> Dean's guilt for saying yes, for these things done with his face. Literally bringing nightmares into the world.

Which does at least confirm that the nightmares so far have been external and we're not IN a dream which has been worrying me.

On the other hand that means AUBobby really did get stabbed that badly.

"I highly doubt you have a knife dipped in lamb's blood" I TOLD him.

you can't just kneecap the djinn

"I am curious, what are YOUR nightmares"

Literally pausing it because Meredith is absolutely horrible and I hate her and she keeps being mean to my boy Dean and I can't handle this and I don't want to know

(I am curious. What ARE his nightmares?)

Er excuse me did he just prod his way into finding Michael still in there

Because the other option is that Dean's mind is so utterly scared and scary with all he's been through he literally just out-nightmared a nightmare machine by force of personality.

"You don't know my family"

Keep the one liners coming

I'm easily placated by them

Cut to: the next morning. He offers his double a chance to get her apology from her father, and books it.

Nyoooom back along a CONSIDERABLY less horrifying shot of the same sort of landscape

Maggie's back! Everyone loves Maggie. She is the adorable mascot of these people.

Keep the cute pink bunny back at home maybe

Dean gives Sam some affirmation about being the leader of his people.

Now Sam needs to not fold immediately the next time he sees Dean seeing him do something leadery. Deal?

Mobby H/C

You know he's vulnerable not because he has his shirt off, but because he has his hat off.

These "angel wars" in the AU sound pretty formal.

You know, it would probably be PRETTY HARD to get the average American to fight a war against angels until it's way way waaay too late.

I mean, case in point: we call where they come from, "apocalypse world"

"Hunting" "it ends the same." "No." Mary F Winchester puts her foot down. No it ends bloody speeches on her watch! All she has is her optimism but damned if she won't use it!

"I don't know any other way to live" "Then we'll find one"

You are doing a good job and you can save all these dumb guys from themselves.

DEAN TALKED TO MAGGIE. HE'S HELPING. HE WENT AND LEADERED HER FOR SAM.

Now have a beer, bro

"She learned from the best, huh? :)"

":)"

Awww Mary comes up with AUBobby and they're taking a vacation. Let AUBobby go fishing or something. Good lil Cas parallel Mary fixing her broken warrior with a Donna cabin adventure.

...

Do you not worry a lil about what is out there? Donna comes prepared with a flamethrower.

""relaxing"" """vacation"""

Anyway best reason ever given on the entire show for a set of characters not to be in the next couple of episodes, second to "Cas is taking his son out to teach him to hunt some more"

Bobby has a clean new formal black mourning cap to deal with fresh memories of Daniel

Sam getting the leadership baton from a representative of Bobby who he may see more as Bobby than perhaps he ought. AUBobby says he's not sure he ever had it in him to be a leader, while our Bobby was the undisputed best at what he did and as much as he may have complained, his competency is what Sam is now emulating.

Mary being "allowed" to go by Dean. "if you need anything... ANYTHING..." *grabs his shoulder and shakes him* You're starting to turn into the mom in a movie who leaves the kids behind and without supervision they throw a wild party to rebel against you stifling them. SO not the dynamic, but that's the licking a thumb and pressing down a stray bit of hair type momming she's doing all of a sudden.

"Go. Be happy." :')

HUGS FOR THE BOY. That's 2 whole onscreen dean hugs this season.

Aww Dean talking to Garth :')

Sam and Dean in synchronicity, talking to ALL their hunter network, not just Jody plus the AU peeps

Though. Sam has implemented a buddy system.

Dorky camp counsellor that he is.

Dean should get him a ceremonial whistle for Christmas.

"Move on from what I - from what we - from what he did"... Dean. Buddy.

Go lie down.

That's some of the most intense blurring of self ever, between Dean's guilt, whatever made the djinn scream in horror to delve his head, and his symbolic blending with Michael as the Michaelsword...

"Starting to feel like myself again... almost..." shakes his head and starts heading out to go watch more movies, sad that halloween is passed so no more slashers on every channel

"We'll work harder" "how, you sleep 3 hours at night" "then I'll sleep 2" *Dean gives him the NO look*

Well there's a great representation of how their issues mess themselves up and they carve away their sense of self and their health for each other.

Seriously. What did the djinn SEE. What nightmares are in my boy's head? Oh god I'm stressed.

What happened to the 1900s groundskeeper, Don?

#14x05 #season 14 spoilers #my stuff

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sebeth · 6 years ago

Text

Legion Of Super-Heroes #13

Warning, Spoilers Ahead…

“State Of The Universe” by Keith Giffen, Tom & Mary Bierbaum, and Al Gordon

The issue opens with the continuation of the Shakespeare – Persuader brawl.

A few children in the pediatric wing of Quarantine worry over Shakespeare. Garridan, the son of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad, comforts Ivy: “He’s gonna be all right, Ivy. I just know he is. My dad says Legionnaires are real strong. Like they’re real, real hard to kill.”

Garridan is dressed in an adorable version of Colossal Boy’s silver age costume. I wonder if Gim is Garridan’s favorite Legionnaire?

Speaking of Gim, he has arrived at Quarantine and is working with the Science Police to find a way to evacuate patients near the Shakespeare/Persuader brawl.

Gim and Kent unintentionally tag-team the Persauder, causing his capture.

A great introduction for Richard Kent Shakespeare and a nice way to touch in with Garridan, Gim, and the Persuader.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a more of this mature, self-confident, and comfortable in his career Gim.

The Persuader is the second member of the Fatal Five that we have seen in this volume. We’ll see more members later on.

In orbit above Earth: Circe has been called to task by the Dominators – they want damage control, they want results, and they want it now: “When we gave you effective control of Science Police Earth, allowed you to shape Earthgov’s public relations strategy, we expected results. It is time for you to demonstrate that our faith in you was not misplaced…Madame Circe, when you procured the services of Dirk Morgna, you assured us the Earthers would believe anything the ex-Legionnaires told them. We are now holding you to that promise.”

The Darzyl System: Mano, another member of the Fatal Five, reports to Starfinger that the Persuader has failed in his assassination attempt.

Starfinger isn’t happy. It’s not a good day for criminal overlords.

Back to Quarantine.

Science Police Chief Gigi Cusimano credits the Persuader’s arrest to Kent Shakespeare: “If you ask me, the Legion is sorely missed.”

Gigi was a supporting cast member in the Legion’s Baxter series.

Gim offers Kent a lift to Toonar. It’s as close to Winath as Gim can take Kent: “That is, if you’re ready to turn in your scrubs to get back into a Legion uniform.”

“To be honest, I couldn’t get out of here a moment too soon. Once I heard the Legion might re-form, I’ve just been counting the days. Of course, some of the kids out here…it’ll just tear out my heart to leave them. I haven’t even worked up the courage to tell them yet.”

A spying Ivy is devastated to hear Kent’s plans to leave.

An isolated farm on Khundia: a confused Jo deals with an equally bewildered Khund: “You don’t look like a Khund yet you are not a master. You are soft-looking like a Khundish girl, but you have the voice of a man.”

Only a Khund would think Jo, of all people, would have a feminine appearance!

Jo appreciates the wife of the Khund man making a stew for him. The Khunder officer states the stew appreciation is another clear sign of Jo’s brain damage.

Two Dominators, without the trademark head discs, land on the property. Jo uses his ultra-speed to rapidly leave the property: “Bloody liberty! Dominators! I didn’t recognize them without their head discs! A couple of Khund cud-chewers I can handle. But the Dominion? This is getting real weird!”

Jo muses to himself: “Khunds and Dominators together?! Cats and dogs maybe, but Khunds and Dominators? I must be on the Frontier…some world on the fringe of both spheres of influence, maybe? Or maybe U.P. Intelligence is out to lunch, Maybe the Khunds and Dominators aren’t the blood enemies they’re supposed to be. Where the blazes did Roxxas send me?”

For those unfamiliar with the Dominators: Dominators are a caste-defined society. The size of the red dot in the middle of the forehead indicates their status in the society. The bigger the dot, the higher the status. If a Dominator, doesn’t have a dot, he would be the lowest of the low in the society. A dot can be surgically made smaller or scraped off entirely if the Dominator has lost status in his society.

The Toonar Spaceport: Kent remembers his farewell conversation with Ivy. He attempts to reassure her that he loves her and will be back. It doesn’t go well and ends with Ivy stating: “I hope you die on your first mission.”

Children, so dramatic!

Deep space: Laurel curb stomps some Khunds. She deeply regrets not being on Winath during the battle with Roxxas. “If only I’d just stayed on Winath in the first place instead of running back to Zirr every two days to see how Lauren is doing. Baby daughter or no, I can’t ever forget my responsibilities as a Legionnaire.”

Laurel faces the modern dilemma of many women: motherhood vs career.

The Collingwood Inn on Gnogg: The bald head prosthetic Tenzil shoved on Brek’s head during his Earthgov trial is not coming off. Brek is quite put out and wants it off ASAP.

Tenzil: “Well then, I guess there’s only one thing left to try, now hold still!”

“Ow…ow! That’s my hair, you moron!”

“Hey! What’s going on in here?”

“My god! He’s eating that man’s head!”

“It’s okay! It’s okay! I’m a senator!”

“I’m a senator” is Tenzil’s defense for all of his shenanigans.

Winath: Rokk researches options for the new Legion’s headquarters: “There just isn’t enough room on Brande’s planetoid. And we couldn’t risk bringing down an attack on the U.P. Council, so we gotta stay clear of Weber’s World. But by the same token, we sure as heck gotta get off Winath before someone else attacks the plantation”.

Garth interrupts – he and Rokk were supposed to get in a round of links.

“So what’s the big headache? You need a new headquarters? How’s that a problem?”

“Things aren’t so simple anymore, Garth. The Legion doesn’t have the kind of friends it used to.”

“Well, you’ve still got one friend you can count on. Consider your headquarters problem solved.”

“You don’t mean here? We really couldn’t stay.”

“No, no…I’ve got something a little better suited to your needs, Rokk. Trust me.”

Before Garth can reveal the location of the new headquarters, he spies Furrball (Brin) in a hallway: “Hey, look who just wandered in! I guess Kono’s going to be relieved!”

Brin wanders past an arguing Querl and Celeste: “I’m fine! So I have a tendency to glow green. So what? Green’s a lovely color. You should appreciate that more than anyone.”

Kono encounters Brin: “There you are, you big stupid furball! What the Nykx do you think you’re doing, disappearing on us for days like that? I don’t know whether to hug you or kick your stupid butt to Tombor.

Violet overhears Kono’s dressing down of Brin: “She can sure dish it out! Wish I had her brass when I was that age. But I didn’t come down here to admire out latest Firebrand. I’ve been putting this off long enough. It’s time to take care of business.

Violet enters the room and asks Rokk if he “has a sec”. Garth hastily excuses himself.

If you haven’t read the “5 Years Later” series, Rokk and Violet’s home planets, Brall and Imsk, went to war during the five-year gap between the Baxter series and the present series.

Violet voluntarily joined her planet’s military during the war, Rokk was drafted.

Imsk’s military scientists created a doomsday weapon to use against the Braalians. Violet served as the chief of security during the project’s development. Violet protested the actual use of the weapon.

The weapon is deployed. Rokk is onsite at the weapon’s deployment at Venado Bay. The weapon strips Brallians of their native magnetic abilities. It also causes death and dismemberment.

Rokk loses his abilites and is badly injured and deeply traumatized in the immediate aftermath of the weapon’s deployment. Violet is also there – she is deeply appalled at the carnage she witnesses. Violet recognizes Rokk and approaches him.

The badly injured Rokk does not recognize Violet and lashes out, causing her to lose an eye and suffer facial scarring.

Violet is imprisoned by the Imskian military for her protests and refusal to take back her criticism of the weapon and its deployment.

Rokk and Violet both suffer long-term PTSD from the events of Venado Bay and the war in general.

Back to the present day.

The duo awkwardly attempts to start a conversation.

Rokk begins: “Look, Vi, I know you’re upset. And you have every right to be. All those months you spent in prison, protesting Venado Bay, and I didn’t even have the courage to thank you. I don’t know what my problem was. I guess I was afraid you’d never forgive Braal for attacking your planet. Or forgive me for so blindly obeying Braal’s lousy leadership.”

“Rokk, don’t…I’m the one who should be apologizing…I’m the one…who helped kill all those…god.”

“’C’mon, Vi. It’s gonna be okay.”

“I told…I told myself I wasn’t going to fall apart like this…”

“You’re entitled.”

By the end of the conversation, both Rokk and Violet are crying.

One of my favorite moments in the series. Neither Rokk nor Violet magically healed their PTSD or emotional trauma but they’re on the road to healing.

Kathoon: A heavily pregnant Lydda is reading a letter from Rokk: “You know, Lydda, that woman has never forgiven herself for just doing her duty. Did I mention the scar she has over her eye? Vi told me she got it over her eye? Vi told me she got it at Venado Bay. She say’s she’s never having it removed. She never wants to forget what happened there. What she did. It just made me want to keep hugging her until the whole thing disappeared forever. But I guess Venado Bay will never go away. It’ll always be with us. Both of us.”

It’s safe to assume Violet didn’t inform Rokk that he caused the scar. Violet correctly assumed the revelation would only add more guilt to the emotional turmoil caused by Venado Bay.

The “hugging” line adds another dimension to Rokk’s character. Starting with the 5 Year Later series and continuing through the reboot, the three-boot, and the retro-boot, Rokk has been portrayed as the serious, no-nonsense, all business leader of the Legion. It’s nice to see a sweet, comforting side of Rokk.

The letter continues: “Now that we’ve finally nailed Roxxas, I’ve got to get going on the arrangements for Blok’s memorial. Brainy says it’s too soon to make it a double ceremony so we haven’t completely given up hope on Jo yet. But damn, it’s hard to get over Blok. I guess I never realized how important he was to us all until he was gone.”

Rokk ends his letter with “It really is happening. Uniforms, headquarters, roll call. The Legion is officially back.”

Lydda excitedly yells “All right!”

The next few pages consist of a Brande Industries Memo from Marla Latham to Reep Daggle.

Volume 1: Disposition Of Known Universe

Currently the known universe is divided into these political entitites.

1) The Khundish Empire, 32%

2) Independent, unaffiliated, disorganized, 29%

3) United Planets, 24%

4) The Dominion, 9%

The memo states Khunds have conquered Lallor, Sklar, Tsauran, and Rann.

The Dominion is in a state of collapse “as worlds on the fringe continue to achieve independence”.

The memo notes the Dominion’s attempt to enslave the now-decimated Daxamite race and the “alleged secret domination of Earthgov”.

The extent of the Dark Circle remains unknown but may be as large as the Khundish empire.

Volume 2: Growing Threats

1) Mordru

2) Glorith

The memo notes the “destruction of magic at the conclusion of the Mystic Wars have proven totally erroneous. While the greatest known nexus of Magic was destroyed with the old Sorcerers’ World, many known ‘sympathetic points’ remain, most notably Tharn, the new Sorcerers’ World, as well as Orando and Venegar.

Volume 3: The United Planets

1) Current operations include “directing traffic, organizing defense, and enforcing the rules of the Recovery Initiative”

2) Compliance remains low, U.P. membership is still far below pre-Collapse levels

3) U.P. Militia has gained respectability as a barrier to Khundish encroachment

4) The critical blow to the U.P.’s collapse was the secession of Earth

5) The United Planets and the Science Police have relocated to Weber’s World

6) The corruption of Science Police Earth has undermined the credibility of all S.P. agencies

7) Organized crime has flourished.

8) Molock Hanscomb (Starfinger) of Darzyl is the most powerful figure in the underworld.

9) Leland McCauley III has emerged as the richest businessman in the United Planets. Rumors suggest that Leland McCauley IV has wrested control of the business from his father.

Volume 4: Earth

1) “With poverty and paranoia flourishing on Earth in the wake of the Great Collapse, that planet has lapsed into a period of uncharacteristic xenophobia and acquiescence to authoritarian rule. It is now alleged that the population has been manipulated and covertly ruled by the Dominion.”

2) Resistant forces have opposed Earthgov since 2990.

We end with an interlude featuring Glorith and the Time Trapper.

The Trapper informs Glorith of the “timelines that proceeded yours…what you owe me.”

He further reveals that “Mon-El obliterated my form, not my essence. All that was destroyed were my works.”

The Trapper and Glorith are referring to events that took place in issues #4 – 5.

Trapper continues: “I’ve seen how you performed my acts, lived my life to frustrate that poor fool Mordru once again. How you’ve become the new Time Trapper…but understand this, without me you can lose everything.”

Trapper issues the traditional “without me, you will fail but together we can rule the universe” speech.

Glorith rejects the offer, devolves Trapper into protoplasm and absorbs his essence. I don’t feel bad for Trapper as he did the same thing to Glorith in the Silver Age.

Glorith decides now is the perfect time to conquer the universe.

A great issue that wraps up the previous plot lines and sets up future storylines. The issue is a terrific example on how to handle a large cast – we checked in with 14 Legionnaires and 5 sets of villains.

#Legion Of Super-Heroes #Cosmic Boy #Ultra Boy #Lightning Lad #Shrinking Violet #Colossal Boy #Kent Shakespeare #Brainiac 5 #Glorith #Time Trapper #Dominators #Khunds #Starfinger #Timber Wolf #Kono #Celeste Rockfish #Night Girl #Matter-Eater Lad #Polar Boy

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imaginedilestrade · 7 years ago

Text

One of the boys.

Summary: You live in the middle of London with four boys; Greg, Sherlock, John and Mycroft. It was never going to be easy, especially after falling for the silver haired DI...

Warnings: swearing, Dolores being a general pain in the arse (but she will never change 😅)

A/N: Ahhh thank you to everyone who's enjoying this series fic so far! 😁 I love writing it! I hope you all have a fantastic week! ❤️

Missed the last part? Catch up here

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Chapter 4

——————

You walked out of the kitchen and joined everyone in the living room. You sent Greg a thin lipped smile as you sat across from him and Dolores on the other couch with Sherlock. You noticed the consulting detective tweeting away while John pressed play. You noticed Mycroft's absence, you knew he'd be in his room. "What are we watching?" Sherlock asked, eventually putting down his phone.

"'Why him?' Mary recommended it, she said it was quite funny."

You sat back with your legs perched up on the sofa, Sherlock sat in a similar fashion. Throughout the film your eyes wandered from the screen to Greg and Dolores, she was constantly draping herself over him and trying to catch his attention, you didn't even feel your lip start to sneer at the sight.

Your phone vibrated in your pocket and you took it out. A text from Sherlock.

From Sherlock: Your mouth might not be saying anything but your face certainly is.

From Y/N: Yeah? Well would you like to know what my fist has to say?

From Sherlock: I'd rather not...but if you'd like to converse your fist with Dolores's mouth to shut her up I wouldn't hold you back.

You smiled and tried to hold back your laugh that was bubbling in your throat.

From Y/N: STOPPPPPP! You're going to make me laugh and the film is at a serious bit! You know, the film we're supposed to be watching instead of texting!

From Sherlock: What is this film even about anyway?

From Y/N: No idea! I haven't been able to watch it because somebody *cough* you *cough* has been texting me. But to be honest I'd rather be watching Blue Planet 2.

From Sherlock: Me too. Attenborough' s voice is incredibly soothing.

From Y/N: Want to watch it in my room? We can get away from the face sucking monster that's sitting across from us?

From Sherlock: Sounds good. Grab some drinks.

You got up off the couch and stretched a little "I'm going to call it a night guys, do any of you want a drink before I head into my room?"

"Meeeeee!" Dolores droned out the word and stuck her hand up, giggling.

You raised a brow and turned to John "Isn't she a bit drunk already?" John shrugged and you let out a sigh before heading to the kitchen. You took out a few bottles from the fridge and placed them on the table in the middle of the living room. Dolores flew for them. You looked up to Greg and sent him a thin smile before heading to your room.

Greg glanced back and watched you disappear into your room. His brows knitted together seeing Sherlock follow you in with a bowl of popcorn. Greg turned back to the screen but wasn't focusing on the film, his face was starting to contort with...jealousy?

"You alright Greg?" John noticed and Greg snapped out of his thoughts.

"Hmm? Yeah, I'm fine!" He forced a grin. John didn't look convinced but didn't mention it again.

Greg's head turned back to your door again and every vein in his body flooded with jealousy again.

---

"Look at that fish!" You screamed out in awe "It has a clear head! You could not make this shit up!" You squeaked and took a swig out of your bottle before crunching a mouthful of popcorn.

"It is quite remarkable and-Oh my god! Look at that shark!" Sherlock almost burst with excitement, causing you to giggle.

"This is way better than watching the film...and Dolores." Sherlock uttered and you nodded in agreement "On the subject of her, what do you think?"

You rolled your eyes "Why does everyone care what I think of her? John asked me the same thing earlier! As long as Greg's happy that's the main thing." You kept your eyes on the screen and avoided Sherlock's burning gaze. "Stop..." you sighed and shut your eyes.

"Stop what?" Sherlock asked, trying to be completely innocent.

"Giving me that creepy, sympathetic, concerned look. Please don't worry about me. Like I said; I don't care."

Sherlock opened his mouth to say something along the lines of 'but you do care, stop lying to yourself and everyone else' but he didn't. He saw you yawning, he knew you were tired and he didn't want to aggravate you right before going to sleep.

As soon as the show ended, your head hit against the pillow and you were out like a light. Sherlock placed your covers over you and took away the empty bottles and popcorn bowl, he turned off your light before shutting the door over. He didn't even notice Greg glaring at him as he popped into the kitchen before returning to his own room.

Greg was stuck on the couch with Dolores sleeping on top of him. She fell asleep halfway through the movie and now all Greg was watching was the news. John had went to his bed as soon as the film finished.

Greg carefully moved Dolores so he could get to his own bed, he grabbed a blanket for her and left her be.

---

"You're up a bit early aren't you?"

You smiled at Mycroft as you entered the kitchen at half four in the morning.

"Couldn't sleep thanks to snoring sleeping beauty over there..." you trailed off in a quiet voice and looked over to her before returning your focus to a smirking Mycroft "Plus I wanted to see you off, as usual." You softly smiled at the suited and booted man in front of you who had a suitcase by his feet.

"That's very nice of you. My car should be coming shortly to take me to the airport."

You nodded and jumped slightly hearing a single loud snore as Dolores inhaled a gasp of air. Your eyes wandered over to her again and Mycroft followed your gaze.

"You don't have to worry about her," he whispered.

You let it a small groan "Why does everyone think I worry about who Greg dates? It's his life he can go out with whoever he wants!" You unintentionally snapped. Mycroft lightly shrugged and you apologised.

"Apology accepted, but I'm serious. Don't worry about her."

You thanked him with a smile before a car horn disturbed the both of you. "Enjoy Washington!" You embraced him in a quick hug. Mycroft didn't hug back, he never did. "I packed a packet of haribo starmix in your hand luggage because I know you love them and that you kinda hate airplane food. I also got the packet with the most gummy hearts in it because I know they're your favourite."

"You're very thoughtful..." he walked to the door and you saw him out.

"Yeah well I'd do the same for all my boys," you smiled to yourself and opened the door for him. Mycroft stepped out onto the landing with a half smile on his face. You leaned yourself against the doorframe "Tell me when you land. You know I always worry."

"I will, I'll see you soon. Don't have any house parties while I'm away..." he warned with a stern look.

You raised a brow "Don't you start any wars because I just cleaned out my room the other day. I don't want my efforts wasted!" You retorted back with a smirk.

"I'll try my best," he sarcastically grinned "Goodbye and thanks again, Y/N." you waved him off before shutting the door back over again. You decided to head back to bed and squeeze in a few hours sleep.

Your eyes struggled to open, they were almost adamant in staying shut. When they did open again you noticed it was approaching half eight in the morning, a tired groan escaped your lips as you got up out of bed. You opened the door and found John frantically rushing up and down the hall to get ready for work.

"Morning Y/N!" He chirped.

"Morning John, I'm going to make some tea. Do you want a cup before heading off to work?" You asked whilst making yourself one.

"Oh yes please!" He tied up his shoes and you poured out the boiling water in to mugs. "Sleep well?" He asked taking the cup from you.

"Not really..." you breathed out and looked in the direction of Dolores "All I could hear was snoring."

John nodded with a smirk "Me too." You rested your bum against the worktop as you sipped on your tea. John was on his phone, you assumed he was messaging Mary giving her an advanced notice that he'd be leaving soon and would pick her up on the way to the doctors surgery.

"You needing a lift to work?" John asked, not removing his eyes from his phone screen.

"Nope, I've finished my press statement so I don't have to be in today, no meetings or anything either. I might help Sherlock if he has a case."

John let out a snort of laughter "Who's more demanding? Sherlock or the prime minister?"

"Sherlock, hands down!" You giggled.

"Morning..." a sleepy voice appeared out of nowhere.

"Morning Greg," both you and John spoke at the same time. You automatically made Greg a cup of tea and he took it from you with a thankful smile.

"I'm sorry if Dolores kept you up," he grimaced slightly.

"It's alright," you assured, not wanting to upset him "How is she getting home?"

Greg sighed "I can drop her off before heading into work, I should probably wake her up..." he hummed. "Can you two help me?"

You sent John a wry glance out the side of your eye before you both let out a defeated huff of air under your breaths and placed down your tea. You followed Greg into the living room and he gently tried to wake Dolores up, after a few sleepy grunts and groans, she began to wake. Greg dashed to the kitchen to grab her a glass of water while you and John attempted to get her off the couch.

"Bath-bathroom..." she grumbled while hunched over.

"What did she say?" John asked before a loud gagging noise filled the room.

You let out a gasp before both you and John released your grasp on Dolores, making her fall back on to the couch.

You shut over your eyes and remained frozen on the spot next to John. "Please tell me that didn't just happen..." you asked in a quiet tone and grabbed onto his arm.

"Yeah," John groaned "It did."

"What's all the-" Greg arrived back into the living room "-noise...?" He uttered out and you opened your eyes again. Your left leg and John's right leg was covered in sick.

"I'm showering first!" John quickly waddled to the bathroom.

"No!" You groaned and tried to catch up with him but he landed to get there first. "Expect payback John Watson!" You banged your palms against the door. You sighed and rested your head against the door.

"Y/N I am so, so sorry!" Greg was genuinely completely and utterly mortified.

"It's fine..." you muttered and suddenly the bathroom door opened. You barged passed John and slammed the door shut, almost tearing off your trousers. When you got into the shower you pressed your forehead against the cold tiles and let out a long, disappointed sigh.

——————————

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fragmentsofchaldea · 7 years ago

Note

This isn't really a question related to Fragments, but one that is Fate-related: Why do you (personally) feel that Sieg is a Gary Stu, if you do? I hear that buzzword get throw about a bit and people claiming he is or not. Personally, I never saw it that way and thought he had a decent character arc considering what he started as and it made him relatable. Powerwise maybe a bit, but even there he spends most of his time losing his solo fights, which is the opposite of a Gary Stu.

Apologies, but this needs to be rather typed out compared tomost things. I post. I advise anyone interested to take the time and read it completely, as usualfor my work, to understand my full (rather neutral as always) viewpoint onthis. I won’t be addressing this any further.

I’ll add the keep reading divider so it doesn’t flood your timelines. It also contains heavy Apocrypha spoilers the anime hasn’t reached yet, so you’ve been warned.

There’s been a lot of messages about this, such as, but not limited to:

To start out with, first, a fun fact. You ask 12 differentpeople what a Mary Sue is and you will get 12 different answers. The term has definitelybeen thrown around more than a football on spring recess, so it’s fair to saythere are many ways to interpret it. As an example, TV Tropes has many specific sub-types of Mary Sues, like Canon Sue, who is a Mary Sue that happens toactually be a canon character (since Mary Sue is supposed to pertain to fanfics only).

=====================

Since the questionpertains to my viewpoint on Mary Sues and the sub-types, we’ll start there:

They may have unbelievable powers and abilities. At acritical moment, they might get second winds to help them defeat theoverwhelming antagonist in a comeback of the century. Maybe they could turnpeople’s otherwise near-unshakable beliefs to their side, turning enemies tofriends. They might also have absolutely no flaws, get the girl/guy, areimmortal, have a tragic backstory or an uplifting one, and many more. Now whatdo all of those have in common?

My answer may surprise you, but I see those as just possible indicators. Despite what manybelieve that claim to be these days, just because a character has those traits doesnot automatically make them a Mary Sue/Gary Stu. Still, the more indicatorsthey light up, the more likely it is they are one, but they’re not the trueindicator in my eyes. So if that’s so, then what is it?

It’s simple: The character manages to warp the story/plotaround them through their actions and needs. The level of offense increaseswith the quantity and inconceivability of the acts in question.

=====================

Now, on to my view onSieg and why I personally define him as a Mary Sue… or Canon Sue since wereally should get specific and correct on these labels. (Heavy ApocryphaSpoiler Warning)

Sieg starts off as just a homunculus with great magicalcircuits who Avicebron is interested in making Adam’s core. Wanting to be free,he uses his magic circuits to break his tank and escape. He’s too weak to doany real escaping though, but Astolfo finds him and hides him with Chiron. Sofar there’s nothing wrong.

They escape, but then Siegfried’s master throws his usualtemper tantrum and winds up doing Sieg in. Siegfried steps in and gives Sieg hisheart, forcing him from the battlefield but giving Sieg another chance at lifeand some currently unknown newfound powers. However, there’s still only hintsat the moment. A fan favorite dies early in order to act upon his own desire tobe a hero of justice by his own decisions, and it justhappened to be Sieg to be saved by him. Again, still passable.

Truth be told, the first indicator is during the Black vsRed clash on the fields outside Trifas. He winds up getting himself killedagain, but Frankenstein’s noble phantasm unintentionally jump starts his heartagain in her attempt to simultaneously take out Mordred. An attack at fullpower that kills Frankenstein, charged with a command seal, hits Sieg but windsup rejuvenating him instead. It also gives him access to both her noblephantasms (Blasted Tree & Bridal Crest) somehow. Things are getting fishy.

At this point indicators start stacking up for me. He’snecessary in key moments in order to help stronger, actual servants take downdangerous enemies (NP Adam). Jeanne, thanks to Laeticia’s own feelings, windsup falling for him with often argued rudimentary build up since many thinkAstolfo wound up building a relationship better. We could also add the third save by Chiron when Sieg went to stop Jack. He gets saved a fourth timefrom death thanks to Astolfo and Achilles (indirect). But again, these are alljust indicators that the plot may be forcefully trying to keep him alive orcentralize him as the subject of interest.

The finale is where I consider it confirmed. (Final warning for big Apocrypha ending spoilers)

There were probably some other points I’m missing but I’m trying to be quick about all this and not write an entry that would rival a fragment. After my searches for info on Apocrypha’s ending though, this is what I found.

Sieg, who is has precursory knowledge or wisdom of how thereal world honestly works, manages to convince Amakusa to stop his actions.Amakusa, who has been planning this for decades, who has seen true human brutality inhis past life, was convinced by the homunculus to stop afterhis wish is already being granted by thegrail. Technically it can be argued Amakusa is on his last legs at this point after stopping Jeanne’s La Pucelle, but it was the execution of this that was bothering. Sadly a lot of Apocrypha is great ideas with controversial execution.

It doesn’t end there. Sieg is also capable of stopping it as one of the last standing,by using its energy to fully boost his transformation into Fafnir, forcing the greater grailinto the reverse side of the world, and thereby negating the wish. By doing so,he accomplished his main goal of saving the homunculi while also preventinghumanity from being affected by Amakusa’s wish (There’s no humans in the reverse side). As a small bonus later on, Jeanneis able to travel from the throne to the reverse side of the world to reunitewith him in a “End of the Dream” esque ending.

Sieg is a rather plain (aka, not overblown) Canon Sue becausethe plot went out of his way to grant him second chances, power ups, and successes against manygreat odds. However, compared to themore blatant and true Mary Sues people hear nightmare stories about, I think Siegis honestly rather tame which is why people still argue for or against this label.Higashide did take steps to soften the landing by having things feasibly connect,like Achilles giving Astolfo his shield or by having Fran/Astolfo/Sieg gettingdesperate to defeat Mordred (some of many examples), so he doesn’t wind up anoutright abomination who bends reality to his will with every breath. It was really only half way through volume two that it startedflipping some of my switches.

Canon Sue or not though, I personally believe that’s just atack on to the real reason he’s disliked. I would also like to amend a previousstatement by being more specific: The animosity usually comes from the west.

Honestly, I believe the reason there’s such a strongmajority that dislike Sieg is because he appears so rather ‘tame’ and underdeveloped in a warfilled with very vibrant personalities.Hell, Apocrypha suffers from a massive case of character bloat and then everything just starts flying. Sieg, who is rather stoically pure(understandable because he’s new in the world), straightforward, and haslimited background potential just winds up looking lackluster next to Mordred,Kairi, Fiore, Amakusa, etc but still winds up being the central character.That’s where most of the distaste likely comes from, and Canon Sue qualities justamplifies the hatred for many.

Final Note: As I saidin my post, I will find him a challenge to write, but personally, I’m actuallyfairly neutral on my view of him. He just wasn’t intriguing to me, so hedidn’t really swing either way on my pendulum even if I consider him a CanonSue. That said, when did being ‘not intriguing’ stop me from writing somefragments on others who meet that criteria?

P.S. – Thanks for the vote of confidence from many of you!

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deserviing-a · 5 years ago

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verses

after your laughter / there will be tears ( pre-bridge )

any thread that takes place before the brooklyn bridge incident when gwendolyne is twenty. she is generally a freshman/sophomore/junior at empire statue university, working towards a bachelor of science in biochemistry. she lives with her father for the most part, and takes an active interest in feminism and politics. her freetime is spent with her friends ( peter / mary jane / flash / harry ) at the coffee bean, campaigning for local/state politicians, or at all ages night clubs.

gwendolyne generally doesn’t any heroes during this time, and her opinions on them are that they are good people, but their world is very distant from her.

oh don’t fail me now / put your arms around me and pull me out ( post bridge )

any thread that takes places in a universe where peter saves gwen, similar to the “ what if? ” issue. superhero life becomes more normal for gwen, but she still focuses primarily on her studies. she graduates with her BSc, and moves on to graduate school to obtain her masters degree in biochemistry. clone shenanigans still happen, but usually starts later in gwen and peter’s life ( pm for more details ). gwen’s feelings towards the clones are a mixture of responsibility and guilt, and the event changes her feelings towards cloning and makes her very anti-cloning.

after graduating, gwen begins working as a research professor/teacher. most of her research focuses on genetics. during the civil war, gwen generally tends to side with captain america especially after sue storm joins him. after civil war, i don’t generally view one more day, brand new day, superior spider-man as being canon. gwen does leave new york for a few years though, traveling to seattle to get away from superheroes after her life is constantly put in danger. if clone conspiracy happens, it normally happens while she is in seattle and she doesn’t take much of a part in it. she later moves back to new york city, after the events of “ go down swinging ” to resume being a research professor/teach at esu.

this verse is ship dependent, and gwen can be shipped with characters besides peter. i normally view them as having a daughter in her second year of graduate school, and their daughter’s existence does influence gwen’s decisions, but it isn’t required.

let me go ‘cause you are just a shade of what i am / not what i’ll be ( clone conspiracy )

usually set in 616/verses where gwen dies. the “ soul ” in the “ reanimated ” body of gwen stacy is her original soul, meaning it is very much gwendolyne stacy and not just another clone. but gwen comes back to a world where she is largely forgotten, and where most of her friends and family are dead or have moved on from her.

instead of returning to new york city after the events of clone conspiracy, gwendolyne instead chooses to stay on the west coast ( particularly seattle ) to figure out who she is, and what she wants to do with her second chance at life. she holds no ill will towards peter or mary jane, and instead of going back to school she works with research scientists who focus on genetics.

well my heart is gold and my hands are cold ( earth-617 )

after the spider-gwen of earth-65 saved her from being thrown off the bridge by norman osborn, gwendolyne stacy of earth-617 decided to become her own hero. at first, she dropped out of school and worked as an independent detective, wanting to help the innocent in any way she could without powers. her detective prowess became widely known throughout new york city, painting a target on her back.

protection from those who would try to stop her came from miles warren, albeit unintentionally. during his attempts to clone gwen, miles discovered that peter parker was spider-man, and he created radioactive spider isotopes in order to try and replicate these powers in other clones. the experiment backfired after he exposed the isotopes to the lizard serum and accidentally created a symbiotic lifeform.

when gwen and peter tracked warren down to confront him, the symbiote bonded with gwen as it could feel her negativity and rage. gwen became gwenom, and nearly killed warren as a result. it was the clone that warren made of her, joyce delaney, that stopped her from killing him. her fear of what the murder would turn gwen into reminded her of the spider-powered gwen she had met years ago. remembering how the symbiote had fed on the spider-powered gwen’s rage and anger, and how it had nearly led her to murder, gwen stood down and controlled the symbiote.

with her newfound powers and abilities, gwen went to the reed richards of e-617, and together the two of them created a wristwatch for multiversal travel based off of her dna. this watch allowed her to travel to other universes, and after many many universes, gwen realized that the day spider-gwen jumped off the bridge to get back to her own universe was the day she should have been thrown off it and killed.

angered at the cruelty, and how unfair the multiverse was, gwen decided to take destiny into her own hands. wanting everyone to know who she was, she and the symbiote created a costume similar to the outfit she wore on the day she should have died, and they became detective gwenom. her goal was simple:

prevent gwen stacy’s from dying, recruit other spider-women, and prevent warren from cloning her.

detective gwenom spent decades working behind the scenes, saving gwen stacy’s and protecting them from professor warren, or preventing him from cloning her altogether. those she could not save, she mourned. those she could, she protected.

along the way, gwenom learned of the web of life and destiny, and the role of spider-totem’s. despite this knowledge, she often avoided such things, viewing it as prophetic “ bullshit ” that was the reason why so many versions of her were dead. she did meet once or twice with the master weaver, and was aware of the inheritor’s. her priority though, remained saving the gwen stacy’s of the multiverse.

when the gwen stacy of e-65 became a spider-totem, gwenom watched her closely and even worked with the master weaver to manipulate her into certain situations, most notably the cloning and carrion virus situation on e-616. she later interfered with gwen’s wristwatch, causing her to go back in time to e-617 so that she would not murder murdock.

with the web of life and destiny gone, karn dead and the inheritors no longer a threat, gwenom wanders the multiverse and gives help where needed. she knows that one day, the web will come back and her hope is to help change it so that the destiny of gwen stacy is no longer to die.

#verses #save #let me go ‘cause you are just a shade of what i am / not what i’ll be ( clone conspiracy )#well my heart is gold and my hands are cold ( earth-617 )#after your laughter / there will be tears ( pre-bridge )#oh don’t fail me now / put your arms around me and pull me out ( post bridge )#long post

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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7 Epistolary Time Travel Stories

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Here are some of our favorite TV shows, books, and movies that tell a time travel story through letters, radio, and DVDs.

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The epistolary novel—that is, a story told through letters—dates back all the way to the 1400s in the earliest versions of the form, counting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as famous examples.

But what about the first time travel narrative told through correspondence? Could it have begun with a short story in 1959—or might one theorize that the epistolary time travel story will exist, has always existed, throughout the timestream? That certainly feels like the case with Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s new novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, featuring a pair of transdimensional pen pals.

At any rate, the form lends itself to a twisty story filled with predestination paradoxes created by the scratch of a pen or the typing of a key—literally writing the future, or the past, into being. And even as the method of delivery evolves from a traditional letter to more creative interpretations of communication, the connections forged on the metaphorical page remain as compelling. From a magical mailbox inspiring a meet-cute to rival time war agents leaving love notes across time, these seven stories prove that every time travel story has at least two sides.

“The Love Letter” by Jack Finney

Delivery method: writing desk with hidden compartments

What’s the story?

In 1959, bachelor Jake Belknap buys a seemingly simple desk from a secondhand store, it having been sold from a nearby Brooklyn brownstone. But when he happens to sit down at the desk on a particularly existential night of wondering if he’ll ever find someone to love, what does he discover but a secret hiding spot, and a note inside?

read more: 10 Ridiculous Time Machines in Fiction

It’s not so much a letter as a cry for help, from one Helen Elizabeth Worley in 1882. Charmed by her open-ended salutation (“Dearest!”) and moved by her own desperate longing, Jake impulsively writes back, validating Helen’s every forbidden thought. With the convenience of his vintage stamp collection and knowledge of a nearby post office that was still standing in the 1800s, Jake is able to reach Helen across seventy-odd years. After just a letter or two, they both believe themselves to like the other person enough to potentially fall in love… if only they could meet.

Pen pal paradox?

There are only so many hidden compartments in one desk, however; and once each is opened, Helen cannot place anything else within it. Jake doesn’t realize this until there is one compartment left, so he implores her to send something worthwhile. Instead of the long love letter he expected, however, he receives simply a photograph of her, with the inscription I will never forget. And when it finally occurs to him to track down her grave, he sees her true final missive to him, hidden in plain sight: I never forgot.

Successful delivery or return to sender?

Helen’s gravestone is a nice little touch, but that’s all we’re left with in Jake’s telling. Unlike other stories on this list, we don’t get a sense of how opening himself up to Helen’s love actually changed him for the better. Then again, there’s always the Hallmark movie version.

Frequency

Delivery method: ham radio broadcasts during the aurora borealis

What’s the story?

Over time, the definition of epistolary stories has broadened to include other forms of communication—from newspaper clippings to voicemails to, in this 2000 film’s case, hitting just the right radio frequency to reach across time and space. In 1999, cop John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) finds that his dead father’s old ham radio starts broadcasting during a rare solar flare. On the other end? His dad, firefighter Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), in 1969, the night before his death.

Pen pal paradox?

It’s easy enough for John to warn Frank of his impending fiery doom so that he makes it out alive. But then details in 1999 start changing: instead of John losing his father to fire, his mother is murdered by a serial killer, and Frank is still fated to die in 1989 from (irony of ironies) smoking. When his father’s old friend assigns John to investigate the cold case of serial killer “the Nightingale,” he uses his knowledge of the past and his father’s action in the past to try to save his mother.

Successful delivery or return to sender?

Like The Lake House, this epistolary time travel movie tends toward the cheesy (they get you with the ol’ “past injury influences present action” bit), but Caviezel and Quaid foster a tender father-son dynamic that makes it worthwhile. While the movie was adapted into a 2016 CW TV series of the same name, with a female lead no less, it only lasted one season.

The Lake House

Delivery method: magical mailbox

What’s the story?

The Lake House feels like the urtext of the epistolary time travel story, despite the fact that it came out only in 2006—likely because of how it so commits to the delightfully cheesy conceit of a time-traveling mailbox through which doctor Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) and architect Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) exchange letters.

read more: Bill & Ted 3 — Everything We Know

Ostensibly both tenants of the same idyllic lake house—not to mention unintentionally sharing custody of an adorable dog—they soon discover that they exist exactly two years apart, with Kate in 2006 and Alex in 2004. Though it takes a few back-and-forth notes to be sure that neither is pranking the other, their status as time-crossed lovers becomes cemented once Kate predicts both the dog tracking pawprints through “their” house as well as a surprise cold snap. There’s also the nifty mechanic of watching the mailbox flag go up and down when the other receives a letter.

Pen pal paradox?

Aside from saving them a hell of a lot on postage, the TARDIS-like mailbox can transport more than just letters: a thoughtful scarf from Kate, an annotated map of Alex’s favorite Chicago spots that lets them share a walking tour, a copy of Alex’s father’s posthumous memoirs on the day of his death.

read more: Sandra Bullock Was Almost Cast as The Matrix's Neo

Their correspondence, in rambling letters and impatient quick-scribbled responses, both creates paradoxes and fulfills time loops; the movie seems to play fast-and-loose with time travel rules about how much you can change the past (like planting a surprise tree) versus fitting into the established fabric of time.

Despite the rom-com’s often overbearing earnestness, there are some clever moments, like when Alex charms his way into Kate’s birthday party in 2004 and even kisses her—a fond but vague memory for her that sharpens only after they’ve been writing each other for months. But if they’re so head-over-heels for each other, then why doesn’t Alex show up for their dinner date in Kate’s present?

Successful delivery or return to sender?

Watching this at a sleepover in 2006, the twist of “one of us is dead in the other’s timeline!” was still fairly unique in time travel stories, or at least what teenage me had been exposed to. Now you can see it coming a mile away. The Lake House’s big reveal comes on so suddenly, and gets resolved equally quickly, that it’s difficult to really key into the emotional roller coaster of the last ten minutes.

read more: Toy Story 4 — How Keanu Reeves Became Duke Kaboom

That said, on a rewatch the solution is deceptively simple: just wait. As a teen I was scratching my head thinking, “That’s it?” but, as an adult, I see how begging someone to go through linear time is the greatest request you can make in a time travel story. Still, this is a movie to be giggled at over wine, not to actually be taken seriously.

Doctor Who, “Blink”

Delivery method: DVD Easter egg extras courtesy of a transcript

What’s the story?

In one of the new Doctor Who’s most memorable (and quotable) episodes, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) encounters the Weeping Angels in then-contemporary 2007, after they trap her friend Kathy in the past. When Sally tracks down Kathy’s brother Larry to share her condolences, she instead discovers that he has been following a most peculiar phenomenon: odd Easter eggs of a man having a one-sided conversation, spread out over 17 DVDs… all of which Sally owns.

read more: Doctor Who Season 12 to Feature The Judoon

When Sally places the disc in a DVD player, she finds herself “talking” to the Doctor (David Tennant) despite the fact that he has recorded this video while trapped in 1969. In some cases, having seen the Easter eggs before, she can anticipate the Doctor’s next line; in the most baffling moments, he seems to respond to her exclamations as if they are actually conversing. In the Doctor’s case, he’s reading from a complete transcript, despite the fact that this exchange cannot happen until Sally plays her part in 2007.

Pen pal paradox?

“Look to your left,” the Doctor says—an ambiguous line that Larry, with all his rewatching, has not been able to decipher. Until Sally does so and sees Larry himself, who has printed out the Doctor’s lines and is writing in Sally’s half of the conversation. After defeating the Weeping Angels, Sally runs into the Doctor and hands him the completed transcript, telling him that he’ll need it.

Fittingly, this is the episode that coined the series’ description of time travel as “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.”

Successful delivery or return to sender?

That sentence may have gotten away from the Doctor a bit, but this episode is a brilliant riff on the epistolary time travel story.

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

Delivery method: taxi cab

What’s the story?

In the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, Beijing taxi driver Wang Jun discovers an unsettling anonymous note in the visor of his cab: “I watch you most days.” The letter writer, calling themselves Wang’s soulmate, explains that, even though Wang may not know them in this life, the two of them have been intertwined in six reincarnated lives over the past one thousand years.