#just the championship story

[noctilucous-sunni]

i love kaveh but

his little robot suitcase (mehrak) is the cutest thing ever

IT MAKES LIL FACES

and therefore

i am not only going to pull for kaveh but

i am also going to pull FOR HIS SUITCASE ITS ADORABLE

look at this and don’t tell me it’s not cute

[billdenbrough]

fundamentally disinterested in the recurring discourse about kevin's drinking that aims to a) make it his Specific Problem To Focus On And Overcome when it is a crutch and coping mechanism to get him through a Much Bigger Problem (emotional fallout he can't square with by himself, culture shock, trauma, loss of his extremely wildly co-dependent relationship w riko, losing the structure of the nest, mourning a future he was meant to have, processing a grave injustice, anger and fear and desperate grief, all of which is his Actual Specific Fox Problem) while he builds himself back up, and b) thinks that even if it is a problem (more on that later), it's the foxes' problem to deal with.

like. it's just not.

yeah, he doesn't drink until he meets them. they gave him that habit, and in traditional terms, they're (the monsters specifically) a 'bad influence'. but these are the foxes. this is kevin day, son of exy, whose meteor is crashing spectacularly through no fault of his own. there are no traditional terms to be found here. the framework for it literally doesn't exist. neil comes into the foxes with more conventional expectations—appalled at the athletes' substance use, his horror at matt's trip to columbia, his steadfast and early repeated stance that none of the foxes should let andrew treat them the way he does, and certainly not nicky—and tends to engage with them less as the series goes on and he folds himself into the foxes. the thing about the foxes is that they've all been in pits deeper than they are tall. and some of them got a helping hand on the way—erik, andrew's extreme intervention methods, stephanie walker—and wymack was always waiting for them on the other side, ready to throw down a rope, but all the foxes dragged themselves out of their own holes. often not alone, often not without assistance, but at the end of the day, they have to do it.

there's that line neil has about aaron in that scene that got deleted when the timeline shifted around, when he thinks about how aaron got this far in life on his own, surviving on willpower and sheer desperation. that applies to aaron in a way that's a little more acute than some of the rest of them—boy who doesn't let the foxes in bc of andrew, boy who doesn't let nicky in bc he doesn't know how, boy made of flinching and seeking an escape and grieving the one who hurt him—but is broadly true for the foxes en masse.

this isn't to say the foxes can't help each other, but it's not their job. it just isn't. they'll keep kevin alive, keep him safe, keep him flanked and contained within their ranks. they'll fight tooth and nail in this battle with him, fight to get him to that championship game, fight to get that trophy in his hands. but that's all they've agreed to. that's all they're responsible for, in this covenant they've made with him. he says they can make this happen, and they're going to get him to that final game, but it's up to him what state he's in when he gets there.

like. they're foxes. they've been triaging their whole lives. they hate each other and they hate everyone else more. they're the kids with their backs up against the wall. half of them are addicts. i don't think kevin is comparable, personally; he's getting through a horrific situation with a coping mechanism. that's not the same thing as battling yourself to stop using. but that's not really the point of this. what i'm getting at here is that to the foxes, it's easy math: kevin who can lean on vodka and andrew and wymack and the foxes to stay upright when he's not ready to stand on his own two feet is still a kevin who is standing. a kevin with one less piece of scaffolding to lean on is a kevin who falls over, a kevin at risk of complete collapse, a kevin one phone call away from running back to the master, a kevin one crucial loss away from not ever making it back to himself at all. they're triaging. this is low on the totem pole of things they have the room to care about. they very much have bigger problems, both individually and even just kevin-related. if alcohol makes seeing the boy he knew best in the world and moved in tandem with his whole life and who destroyed their entire legacy and his entire life in one move — if alcohol makes facing that boy easier to stomach, then, fuck, why would they take that away? they're foxes. they've all got their demons. this is what kevin needs this year and a half to let him face his, that's all. they can understand that. it doesn't have to be pretty, as long as it keeps him in the fight. that's the priority.

i think there's absolutely space to explore this in fic and art and fandom in a way that maybe does explore it as a Problem, both that it's an active problem for kevin & that it's something to explore other foxes helping him with (there's a t&n fic that i've been gnawing at the bit to read for months that seems poised to explore this premise, and that's super up my alley)! i just think we're in different territory when we're talking about the series—and its characters and dynamics—in a conversational rather than transformational way, and end up talking about this like the foxes are responsible for kevin's choices. i love kevin day. i read these back at the start of 2015 & he's so dear to me that loving him was the blueprint for how i feel abt kageyama. but it's been pretty weird to see how the conversation has been translating Loving Kevin Day into... thinking the foxes are doing wrong by him with respect to this in actual canon. like that's just not how it operates there

[marella-art]

Just had to take a few minutes to doodle this, it's so cool to be able to see them win their first cup ever! 🐀

[rickybaby]

The Guardian// Lucille Clifton The book of light: “climbing”// The Players’ Tribune Listen to the Honey Badger

[creatively-cosmic]

POSTGAME

Red has won the championship. A prequel of sorts to the greater story of Missing Numbers. Told from Blue's POV.

CW: Suicidal ideation.

-

Before he got any closer, I made a grand effort to compose myself, puffing my chest out and shutting my eyes in what I hoped looked like a cocky expression, rather than me holding back tears.

“Well, I THOUGHT I hadn’t made any mistakes raising my Pokemon. But darn, I guess you’re the new Pokemon League Champion…”

I sneered at him, “Although I don’t like to admit it.”

I stuck my hand out, offering a shake as if to officiate yep, you did it, you’re better than me, good job in the way that I’d seen grown-ups do on TV. He just stared at it, still looking like someone had died, not like he’d just done the greatest achievement any Pokemon trainer could ever hope to do?

What an idiot. I couldn’t understand why he cared so much. It wasn’t like HE was hurt by any of this. He should be ECSTATIC. 

He opened his mouth, as if somehow this warranted him using his words. Before he could, though…

The door opened behind him.

If my stomach had already dropped, well. Now it was digging itself a grave.

[batsplat]

reading your post about vale and marc mind games bc it came up on my dash and thinking about your point about how athletes like vale must convince themselves of certain things but also know the truth. and i guess with vale’s insistence that marc was never a fan of his, that he tricked him, that everything was a lie, when there are videos from marc at age seven naming vale as his hero, videos from him at age nineteen talking about collecting vale’s bikes, etc, things that would appear as “proof” i wonder if there’s some difference between what vale has convinced himself of and the (apparent) reality/truth that exists. obviously there is no way of knowing and it’s imo harder to figure out the “truth” of an emotional and personal situation that both parties were deeply hurt by than a sporting one. but it’s interesting because in 2015 the personal and sport elements were intertwined too

(x) hm yeah, I love the subjectivity of the whole thing, how it's all founded so much around these 'emotional' truths... there's this kind of fun tension where in late 2015/early 2016 both 'sides' are attempting to prove they're right with data, hrc is promising press conferences to present conclusive evidence, everyone's waving around sheets of paper with telemetry and obsessing around helicopter shots... but you won't actually be able to prove anything one way or the other, because this isn't something that can actually be 'proven'. this is about minds and it's about hearts - you can't find conclusive evidence for what's in either of them. that doesn't mean studying the events is pointless... but it can only ever tell you so much. valentino's initial allegation was couched in the language of facts, he wanted his audience to believe that you could read marc's intentions in a few numbers. but even if marc had wanted to sabotage him, you never would have found that in those numbers... and at the end of the day, valentino was using those numbers to tell a much bigger story

this is the difference to, say, qatar 2004, right? because if you're concerning yourself with what 'really' happened at qatar, then you can find a 'truth' of sorts - it should be possible in theory to know whether sete gibernau was involved in valentino's penalty or not. how that penalty came to exist is knowable. you can still do with this information what you want, argue about what sete was attempting to achieve with his actions, argue about what valentino knew or did not know and what he chose to do with that information - but the central 'conspiracy' is one that is based on real events. what marc wanted of valentino that year, the full spectrum of possibilities from completely innocuous to ragingly malicious, is not knowable in a similar way. even marc and valentino themselves won't completely understand their own intentions that year... nobody is knowable even to themselves, right? they've narrativised this to death and back in their own heads, including what happened in the races themselves... marc and valentino both going over the events again and again, in argentina, in assen, in phillip island, in sepang, in valencia... thinking about what they did, what the other did - the level of reflection that can obscure as much as it reveals. even isolated racing events that should be relatively straightforward are still essentially ambiguous, and continue to be enthusiastically debated to this day. the protagonists hold diametrically opposed views, and even there we can only guess at what they really believe

I'll include the autobiography bit again because it really is a bit of a banger

obviously, the context itself is a different one (and if you want to read more about 2003-05 then. well here you go). but it's such a good description... especially this bit

But then again, we riders always say all sorts of things. Sometimes we believe what we say, even when it sounds crazy, other times we’re just being hopeful and, still at other times, it’s all an exercise in self-delusion. We try to convince ourselves of something, because ultimately, every time you step on the track, words don’t matter, and it’s just you, the bike and your opponents.

"at other times, it's all an exercise in self-delusion". you don't say! "we try to convince ourselves of something"... valentino does have a reasonable understanding of his own working process, I think. it's very true what you say about the intertwining of the personal and the sporting processes, and this post contains some speculation about how valentino may have also changed in how he approached interpersonal relationships to his rivals over time. if you buy into this theory, you have a shift to the purely 'professional' rivalries with casey and jorge, where he was fairly conscious and deliberate in manipulating both that dynamic and how he felt within that dynamic. giving himself a target was all well and good, but it's all part of the game, all about attempting to get a competitive edge over his new challengers... it took a bit of a perfect storm for that friendship with marc to even be possible in the first place. maybe marc and valentino would have always ended up enemies - but not in every universe do they start out as friends

of course, the main story valentino ended up telling himself was that marc was out to destroy him. now, this is very much the topic for another post, but it is broadly reasonable to argue that marc approached his rivalry with valentino differently than he did any of his others. it's also not stretching things too far to suggest that marc was perhaps a little more focused on valentino than was competitively reasonable, that he seemed to take defeats to valentino particularly poorly... further into grey areas, was marc deliberately messing with valentino specifically? did he want to beat valentino at all costs, knowing he was pushing things, knowing it might cost valentino the title? where we get into even murkier territory is the question of what marc's preferred outcome for the title that year was, and whether he was really as disinterested as he said he was. it is just around up until this area where you can still more or less get to in a reasonable way, without too much delusion required - where the theory jumps off the cliff edge is by proposing that marc was deliberately orchestrating the phillip island race in order to hand jorge the title. that bit does not work. in a way, though, it's just the conspiratorial scaffolding for an emotional truth. this 'truth' that valentino felt very strongly is that marc had it out for him. once he was convinced of that, he basically just... arranged the facts to suit this narrative, but really the phillip island thing was a lot about having something a bit more 'solid' to grasp onto. it is where he makes the leap from 'malice' to 'conspiracy'. then, he blows shit up at sepang, and obviously from then on you do have marc essentially strengthening this narrative within valentino's mind. that's where we make the step to self-delusion, right...

that being said - the childhood hero thing. "is it true that he’s been my fan? is it true that he had a poster with me in his bedroom? I would like to check." now, in all honesty, I do think valentino knows marc was a fan. this is just my personal read, but to me that line was meant to twist the knife in, rather than being completely literal. the contentious bit, right, isn't that marc at one stage was a valentino fan, it's what this means. what valentino is asserting here is that this stance of marc's, where marc still claims a particular fondness for valentino as a result of how he's always been a fan of valentino, is fundamentally dishonest. valentino knows for a fact that just having a poster of someone in their room isn't enough to stop a rivalry from eventually going sour. let's bring in another autobiography excerpt:

The funny thing is that a few years earlier, when I was fourteen I had had a poster of Biaggi in my room. It was one of many posters on my bedroom wall and it showed Biaggi on the Honda 250. Nothing strange in that: he was Italian and I supported all the Italian riders. Besides, he was an aggressive rider and I always had a lot of respect for those riders who went on the attack. But, back then, I did not know him personally. It was only when I started to listen to his interviews and read what he said in the papers that my opinion changed. With Biaggi, no matter what happened, it never seemed to be his fault, there was always something wrong with the bike or the tyres. I thought he said a lot of things that I believed simply couldn't be true.

the thing is, almost all of these riders are going to have someone on their bedroom wall - and if you're marc's age, there's a pretty good chance that someone is going to be valentino rossi. it's not even valentino's first experience with a feud starting up with someone who had once been his fan... look at casey, who repeatedly said he was a fan of his, had admired him - yes, obviously, completely different degree to marc, but the point is he still publicly said it before that rivalry turned ugly. and jorge who was both a valentino anti-fan and a fan and was kinda actively weird about the whole thing. valentino made reference to this himself in 2010 when those two and him started sniping at each other when he was out with the leg break, saying that at least they were being honest now. like... in blunt terms, if you're valentino rossi, you do kinda expect most people to be a fan of you. so many of these younger riders have some childhood photo of themselves with valentino floating around. marc wasn't particularly special in that regard. the fact that he was a valentino fan isn't why valentino felt so warmly towards him. it wouldn't have been enough in itself for valentino to treat him in any way differently from his other rivals. valentino's been in this game for too long to get sentimental over that - at the end of the day, you need to ensure you're thinking about your rivals in whatever way you need to in order to give yourself the best possible chance to win. the posters weren't the reason why valentino lowered his guard around marc. so, keeping all that in mind, would it really be thar=t hard for valentino to believe that marc was at one stage a fan of his? seriously?

there's also this from uccio in that infamous 2016 interview:

if even uccio implicitly acknowledges the poster bit isn't fake, is valentino really not going to believe that marc had a poster of him at some stage?

now, this isn't the same thing as arguing that valentino had an accurate understanding of how marc felt towards him. it's entirely plausible to say that, yes, he wasn't being entirely literal about the childhood bedroom stuff... but he also didn't get what that hero worship actually meant to marc. you can be a fan of someone and you can be A Fan, and marc was A Fan. this wasn't just a reference point for marc... this was someone he deeply admired. someone he very much idolised. it's not just 'a poster', right - showing valentino marc's childhood bedroom probably doesn't achieve that much. it's something that valentino just interprets differently... to him, this doesn't mean anything in and of itself. which he's broadly right about - except he wasn't entirely aware of what level of fandom marc was actually operating on

so, why does he say it if he's not literally doubting the existence of any posters? first of all, he's just trying to be cruel here. he knows why it stings, right - he's calling the very foundation of their relationship a lie. marc had this pretence up the whole time, and now valentino is finally forcing him to drop it. marc's being dishonest - and how better to argue his case than by saying not even the posters were real? the second reason is that it's an act of erasure. I talk in the sete post about how he does this with that rivalry... most noticeably by excluding sete almost entirely from his autobiography. here, valentino takes a slightly different approach over the years, but as the other feud with deep interpersonal repercussions it's broadly coming from the same playbook. this is the most radical way you can cut ties, right... you can argue the bond never existed in the first place. if it was all just a lie, then the relationship isn't just over - it was never really there. it's the most brutal and complete way you can burn your bridges. marc isn't just denied valentino's friendship... valentino isn't allowing him to be his fan. he's attempting to erase the continuity between them entirely, how marc isn't just his successor in literal terms of his results but also in the more abstract sense of how he modelled himself after valentino. it's this bit that indicates the finality in valentino's decision perhaps better than anything else. this is the end, in all the ways that matter most

[imperatorrrrr]

having only recently really delved deep into the Nico/Nolan lore and obviously already in deep with the Nico/Jack stuff.

I need fic about the Nolan - Nico - Jack of it all. How does Jack feel about Nico’s Nolan romance? How does Nolan feel about Nico’s new golden boy?

(and how does poor Jesper Bratt feel because he’s lived through all of it)

[watercolor-hearts]

Soooo... Rosquez cardiophilia drawing?! 🤔👀

[sadgirlautumn]

Support group for girls who want to write but don’t want to research the topic they’re basing their story around

[franinconverse]

Trying not to be mad at the WWE/AEW landscape right now...

[silentreigns]

I remembered when this first dropped and I was like "oh Mercedes might have their shit together next year if they're so confident Lewis is sticking with the team". But now that we know what we know, the writing was on the wall for months. Those mfs didn't configure Lewis into their long term plans for the new car regulations! And everyone with a braincell sees how stupid and out of touch the higher-ups in Mercedes are!

[voidendron]

...It would appear I have more NPC clones than I thought I did.

oops.

the Exarchs are MINE, bioware, mine I say

[soul-sand]

charlie doodle :]

[silverslipstream]

Five Red Lights

The sun seems to crack the Adelaide Street Circuit right open, until the ground is nothing but a blur of heat-hazed tarmac, lurid sponsor decals and the endless blue-white dome of an Australian summer sky. It's thirty-four degrees in the shade. Yet, somehow, this searing heat can't hold a candle to the frisson of excitement that seems to set the very breeze alight. Confetti drifts from the grandstands; the sound of horns circles almost lazily over the baying crowds.

On the grid, the final preparations are underway. The cars glisten and shimmer, each one surrounded by crews of engineers and technicians. Scantily-glad 'grid girls' stand in front of the cars, cheering and waving to the crowds. Each one carries a placard with their respective driver's name, nationality and starting position emblazoned on it.

As the countdown to lights out continues, the team personnel scramble off the tarmac, leaving only the drivers and their machines. Twenty-six of the finest racing drivers on the planet, bodies and minds honed to the perfection of a singular purpose. It takes a special kind of person to be able to strap themselves into an F1 car without fear. You have to be almost insane in your self-belief, yet fighter pilot-like in your calculations, your mentality.

Most of all, you can't think about it for a second. Nobody in their right mind would strap themselves to a 200-mile-per-hour carbon-fibre tub and battle twenty-five other cars, inches from death every second of every minute.

It's a Roman gladiatorial battle in technicolour, and Adelaide is its Colosseum.

The excitement reaches a fever pitch. A brilliant scarlet light blinks on, the first of five. By now, every car's engine is screaming at 14,000 rpm, a crescendo of noise and heat and flame eighteen thousand horsepower in the making.

A second light blinks on. Gloves tighten around steering wheels and pistons pump fiercely, unburnt fuel hissing and popping in a rush of flame.

Third light. The commentators' excited chatter has given way to bated breath. Even the team radio sets are silent. Every synapse of the drivers' brains is focused on those lights, waiting for all five to glow - then extinguish.

Fourth light. The hairs on the ends of 120,000 spectators, and millions watching around the globe stand on end in anticipation. Sixteen races, fifteen countries, love, hatred, speed, glory: it all comes down to this.

Fifth light. On the grid, off the grid: every heart under the Adelaide sun beats as one.

Then the lights are are out, and with a shrill roar, the cars launch off the line, hurtling towards Turn 1. It's a race that will break hearts, pop champagne corks and decide destinies.

[superconductivebean]

#361

SPEAKING OF GWENT.

Have I mentioned that Sharp and my girl Wright's relationship's hugely based on the vibe I get from Geralt and Ciri; them from the 3d game, specifically.

snowball fight!

[bobmckenzie]

every time I think about the backstory I made up for Danny and Becky's mom I have to laugh... the hoops I went through just so I could say they weren't in love with each other... 💀💀💀