I watched Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes's Hounds Of Baskerville and it was great!!! So I, of course, made fanart ❤️ (I took, as always, a bunch of creative liberties while drawing them)
John deciding to blow off steam by subscribing to a cute camgirl's onlyfans account and quickly becoming the top contributor. a harmless way to relax, and spoil a pretty girl with gifts and money, the sort of thing he doesn't have time for in his personal life but craves. hungers for. pays for lingerie and toys, private shows and videos. eagerly devours any time she has to spare on him, but the more he gets to know her, the more obsessed he becomes. the more possessive. wanting. monopolizing all of her time so that she never has a minute to spare on others.
and then she sends him a birthday video. congrats on your fortieth, she whispers into the camera, wearing the ensemble he bought for her. a mould of his cock in her hands, a whim he decided to go for after she pouted at him for a few minutes about how she wanted to feel him inside of her. or a (not so) cheap imitation, anyway. it's good. so good. she's perfect. and all his for tonight.
but she makes a mistake. his kitten is so good at hiding her face, her features. keeping herself a mystery. but as she gives him the sexiest performance he's ever seen, she slips up. shows more of herself than she wants to.
wish i could say happy birthday in person, she winks at him through the cheap plastic of her mask. a fox. isn't she coy? but it's an invitation he won't turn down.
after all, it'd be rude not to give the cute little secretary that greets him every morning exactly what she asked for, wouldn't it?
I think often about the heavy irony of John laughing at Wake's name and mocking BOE's naming systems. BOE are trying to preserve lost Earth culture, but clueless of context, their fragmented merging of high and low culture comes across as silly to John (and us. But it's a noble attempt to preserve everything, even the stuff that wouldn't necessarily seem 'worth' saving. But what does John rename his friends? Pyrrha and Cassiopeia and Ulysses and Augustine. He also names almost everything after Earth culture, but it's literary/religious/historical 'high' culture. BOE is scrabbling to save everything possible, but John has the privilege of context and memory, and so he picks and chooses what's 'worthy' of being used or shared. Low culture is reserved for his little jokes with himself— though honestly, a lot of his references to earth culture full stop seem to be inside jokes at the expense of others. I doubt Cassiopeia knew she was named after the infamously vain ancient queen, for example. John also quotes things at people without explaining what he means, like when he quotes Shakespeare and Hans Christian Andersen at Harrow; he's not really sharing it, he's mostly using it to isolate the other person in the conversation, or make himself seem unknowable and superior. It's honestly very telling that when given the choice John will name most things biblically or classically. It does partially feel like he's desperately scraping to preserve something of his childhood and the home he destroyed (especially with the renaming of Gideon to the Māori translation Kiriona, but... well, he literally renamed her and made her into a walking corpse teenage soldier so :/), but when you look at how he deploys earth culture on the whole, it usually becomes weird and imperialistic and weaponised. He's not really preserving lost art, he's selectively using it for his own agenda, and he's often using the two biggest things that were ever co-opted by conservatives and imperialists, the classical world and biblical convention.
Why is it just a collective fandom thing that we all draw Leo Valdez in a shirt and suspenders? It’s not like Nico’s aviator jacket- like it only mentions him wearing that outfit once, and it mentions more times about his army jacket and how that’s his favourite outfit because pockets so what’s with the suspenders? Why have we all just decided that that’s his thing? Even in fanarts where everyone else is in their chb t-shirts, Leo’s always wearing a white shirt with suspenders. It has become synonymous with his character at this point, and it’s almost hard to recognise him in fanarts where he’s not wearing them. Why is nobody talking about this???? Am I going crazy?? SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE SUSPENDERS, GUYS????