#like genuinely just switching a few words to make it specific to the new context

[bigcryptiddies]

I think people need to reacquaint themselves with what the meaning of stealing an idea is

You have to have come in to contact with the specific thing they claim you are stealing, and you had to have had the conscious memory of that thing when you make your own

[freakinator]

I've been wondering for a long time. How would you characterise Wemmbu? How he seems in your eyes, your opinion of the guy. I hope I don't sound weird or crazy.

aw dw anon its okay to be curious ^^

regarding my characterization of wemmbu, while there is a lot of consistency in how he acts since hes an improv rper and therefore generally just acts as a polished/exaggerated version of his own self, there are still a few differences in how he acts depending on what smp hes in

general: smarmy, quite pathetic but tries his best to hide it until he literally cant anymore, opportunistic, petty, truthful in that kind of way that makes you doubt him, not quite black and white thinking but can switch up fast when someone does something that presses his buttons (doesnt necessarily trigger when someones just being mean, its specific kinds of things -- mostly has something to do with pride and trust), has a desire to be on top of things but whether or not he indulges in that desire depends on his overall plans and the kind of server hes in, silly but in a lowkey way as in like he presents himself as a normal person which works but only if you dont look closer, lowkey cringey in that uwu kinda way (affectionate), good at one-on-one yapping esp if hes confident & knows more about the situation than the other person but starts to crumble if its either him vs a group or if hes genuinely not confident about something, willing to sacrifice so much just to achieve his goals whatever they may be

kings smp: more opportunistic and a lot more willing to lie & manipulate & betray, crab mentality very high but he holds it back since indulgin in all of it at once isnt very good for his plans

challenge smps: like kings smp but even More willing to lie & manipulate & betray, has a stronger crab mentality since the whole point of the smp is to win and he really wants to win and he knows he wont be seeing these ppl in this context again anyway so hes willing to do whatever it takes even if it means betraying his allies, << does Not apply to team challenges btw he will be very loyal until hes given a reason to betray such as believing the others are betraying them first

lifesteal smp: had a good grasp of what it means to be a lifestealer right from the get go but has struggled a bit in figuring out what that means for him exactly so he still has a bit of that new guy stench if you get what i mean (this characterization becomes less and less prominent the later in the timeline it is), has been very loyal thus far and is more than happy to point that out, average level of lifestealer aggressiveness, i like to parallel him with zam mirror-style due to them having opposite thought processes but coming to similar conclusions (pic below of unfinished draft ive had for ages cause idk how to word my thoughts regarding this properly other than 'the vibes')

unstableverse: very obvious mirror parallel to zam that i honestly wouldnt be surprised if it was on purpose, kinda hard talking about his motivations and character devoid of context regarding zam considering he spent 4 out of 5 eps as a major character (even when he isnt actually there lmao) and wemmbu spent 3 of those 4 eps obsessing over him but i will try my best, can be a bit of a stalker but only if he really cares about whatever it is the guy hes stalking is doing/potentially doing, no empathy (affectionate), generally doesnt care that much about individual players but when he gets attached he gets Attached for better or worse, zeroes in on his goals even to his own and others' detriment, a lot more pathetic than in other smps or at least has a harder time hiding his patheticness, also may just be me but i think hes more pessimistic?? not entirely sure tho

overall i think hes pretty neat! pretty cute and silly but also devious and mischievous, if i could shake him in a can i would

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary335

8/20-21/24

tuesday - wednesday

watched ernst lubitsch's film 'the doll' today.

insanely cute movie... not a lot to say about it because it's a comedy, not to say that there's not a lot to say about comedy but it's a very lighthearted thing that's kind of funny about women, but it's more funny about people being funny about women, the joke seems to be that ossi is really incredibly sane, and everyone else, from her father who creates lifelike dolls for men, to priests, to normal men, they don't know how to see women as people, except some do, which leads to scenes where the humor is about how free she can be briefly, as she doesn't have to pretend to be a doll. the end of course is the man and her get married for real and love eachother actually, under no falsehood, total truth, it's funny how the male lead is such a doofus, genuinely fearful of women, seeming to be afraid because too many women are 'improper'. it doesn't seem to be a way of seeing the film has, lubitsch seems to be fond of women who are in some sense liberated though one can question how far that really goes (never are they far from men, even if they are perhaps... i don't know if free is the right word so much as doing a few more things than you'd imagine), and it's not like this is the point but it's interesting to think about that in context of the period, i do think this film does make an odd point of illustrating how strange men can be about women, in a way that does feel ahead. also, a way it's ahead is its humor... it's just actually really quite funny slapstick stuff and strange situations.

but really what i'm mostly feeling is insane and inspiring, are some of the shots, specifically there's a couple very intense shots of mouths where it's a series of shots all put together in one frame, of people babbling, and then another where it's a thin rectangle frame of two people talking closeup. very inventive editing stuff there! i want to see more like that. makes the stuff man ray did in the starfish more interesting honestly, to see something similar used at an earlier point for odd visual comedy, it does get at something about being around too many people. it is genuinely affecting when separated from the comedy context i think. i ought to get those bits, as well as the bits of ossi dancing from this movie, and see if i can use them for a video at some point.

otherwise today... i started work on a new song, and i got the tone down of one track a little better, imo. all looking up!! i'm excited about this new one, i think this will be the actual ep opener, feels right for that cuz it's a bit of a bait and switch almost, with how i want it to end... gotta do more tomorrow.

did not edit the writing today, and tomorrow's errand day so it's unlikely i'll get to it but i should at least think about it a bit more, that'll be good actually, just think about it, ruminate on what's there, if i can i guess. unless the heat gets to me in the car... bleh...

onto the final story in dennis cooper's book, the one i just finished, gold, is almost impossible to write about here! upsetting and sickening a bit and also really poignant in the ways only dennis can achieve, really horrifying stuff about acts we tend to imagine/assume are unknowable, and even in their being written, even in the internality given to these people doing them, they're still full of/pregnant with the impossibility of even beginning to know why, they just do, it's like the only way they can imagine going forward, impulses from masses of lonely planets, ugly radiowaves only broken equipment seems to pick up on. then there's this quality of, this is all that can happen, too, a strict math at the same time as the impossibility. it's the strictness of law, money, need, intercut against why it was even there in the first place... crop circles almost?

final bit today:

i was listening to this earlier, a truly perfect piece of music, always stops me in my tracks when i hear it, the acid bassline is so beautiful, how it evolves over the course of the song, just this bubbly thing inside your ears, it feels super physical, it's an architecture in space without weight or shadow.

i have to sleep now...

so,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kachinnate]

,,,,okay i know i just said i wasn’t going to talk about the deh movie but actually yeah imma talk about it for just a sec bc y’all actually make me legitimately distressed sajkfndsmjkgds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLQ_A0H1otc i dont have the braincells to do a shot by shot analysis right now but here’s what we’re lookin at

under a readmore because ghhhhhhh

firstly, let me lead with this: yes, from what we know, there’s a lot of things wrong with this movie. 

the worst, in my humble opinion, being the bts treatment of the (very few) actors of color, and the lack altogether of any production team members of color. that’s something that should be acknowledged, talked about, and fucking dug into especially at the current fucking period of time we’re living in. it’s unsurprising, but disgusting nonetheless, and it set this movie up for failure from the very beginning. i’m a white person so by no means so i feel inclined or like i have any authority in saying what one should feel wrt all of that, however i will say if there’s to be a boycott in not watching this movie, that should 100% be the reason why. it’s fully poc’s choice whether or not to forgive the production team or give this movie a chance for the irredeemable shit it did in regards to handling the movie’s production. the movie imo definitely doesn’t deserve their forgiveness, but again, that is not for me to say. 

there’s some little things too that i can’t fully think of off the top of my head - like, the whole making larry connor’s stepdad thing fucking irks me, for example, but, like...... listen.

if you know me like at all, you know my favorite word is nuance.

so, i’m going to say it outright: the way you people are approaching this three minute trailer shows literally.... none?? no nuance ??? is it no-nuance november over here or ???? like i’m begging you i’m BEGGING YOU to put aside your pre-determined prejudices against this movie and like stop pretending to be a renowned film critic for ten seconds because it’s really not as outright fucking abysmal as you are saying!! and also it’s possible to have opinions that aren’t completely fucking polarized to one side because guess what, the deh movie? a piece of media! what is the shit y’all are constantly preaching about having the ability to consume media critically ? because you’re trying to cancel a fucking trailer based on the contents of the trailer alone !!!!! hello !!!!!!!!

media is bound to be problematic. if y’all were as quick to judge any movie as you did this one, guess what you wouldn’t be watching any movies like ever <3 

anyway lets get into the parts that are probably going to get me cancelled lmao 

ben platt - listen. LISTEN. listen i know he’s too old to be reprising evan we ALL know he’s too old to be reprising evan i’ve heard this same argument since the announcement was made we get it we all know. haha he’s a grandpa yes bestie ur so right ur so funny wow. i do agree that we should’ve maybe had a not-ben-platt evan moment but here’s some things to keep in mind: the arguments of “oooh ABF is right there !!!!!!” 1. who’s to say he was available? 2. the environment of a movie is so, SO much different than that of a musical -- as much as you wanna pretend you know everything from just a trailer, there’s no way of knowing what scenes were added that might’ve made the movie like.. idk possibly more intense story-wise not even COUNTING the fact that just inherently a movie set is different than a musical one? like yes ben platt might be just being used as a device but that’s probably not the sole and only reason. Also, if i see One (1) more comment about his FUCKING HAIR 😃 first of all it’s not that deep like... if you’re so distracted by an actor having their hair different that’s on you, but going as far as to call it bad or distracting or being like Vehemently a way about it? y’all i know it’s most likely not your intention but that is literally just ben platt’s natural fuckin ETHNICALLY JEWISH hair sajknfgkjds!!!! i’m not the first to make this point, but like dsjnfkjdsg!??! y’all are being so mean about it and for WHAT? again, maybe not intentional, but it reads as like high key Very antisemetic and you should.... maybe not 😳 be that way

connor. the thing about a trailer is that they don’t show you all the scenes because they want you to come see the movie. right? can we agree on that? all the connor scenes in the trailer had SEVERAL hard cuts, omitting a lot of the scene -- like the computer lab scene! we see the beginning of it, there’s a VERY obvious hard cut, and then he’s running out! in my opinion my first watch through of this trailer i had a very like “:// hmm all these actors feel a lil like dry”, but man oh man the comments ive seen about connor. holy shit guys. this boy gets 7 minutes of stage time in the actual musical, and the whole thing is we DON’T KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT HIM. not to burst your bubble, and i by no means hate connor, i love me some good connor lives fics and stuff, but everything we write with connor being alive? that is !! speculation on our part !!!! those are headcanons and us using the little context we have!! connor doesn’t have any significant development IN THE SOURCE MATERIAL that is being adapted into a movie !!! you 1. can’t fully judge a character with already limited screentime in a 3 minute trailer, 2. can’t really call what connor has canonically in the musical as in depth character development !! what is his arc then !!!! he pushes evan, goes to the computer lab, has an outcast loner kid moment, gets upset, takes the letter, DIES. sorry stans, that’s just how it is !! and, AND, everything in between, all the idiosyncracies, that depends on the actor playing connor! speaking of, you know who the actor is playing connor in the movie? that’s right, colton ryan! so, i don’t know, maybe... have some trust in the process, in an actor who ALREADY has played connor on broadway???? and also trust that you will get more connor content then u are seeing from a 3 minute trailer!! dhgnijsdg and some of the comments on like his appearance specifically? like are you really made that he doesn’t have long hair?? they kept his nails and his rings but nahhh the hair was apparently a MUST HAVE (even though like.. not all connor actors on broadway always had/have long hair but w/e).. REGARDLESS. tldr on THAT , the movie would have to do a pretty shitty job if they want to take something from someone who doesn’t have much to begin with and i think y’all are being extremely harsh on this point 

jared. honestly i’m a bit worried too about the like... name change, because it does have the potential to be taking out some representation, but... they did change the name to fit the actor’s ethnicity? it’s a really [hmm] topic because, again, from a trailer and from what we have been told we don’t KNOW a lot of the context, but i think it’s important to remember that uh.. jewish people aren’t just? always white ?? there’s a possibility they changed the last name to fit with the [ethnicity] while keeping him jewish?? ofc there’s the possibility that they Didn’t and ... again hm that’s its own thing altogether but just reiterates the point that you can’t knock a whole movie just based on the trailer. you can’t talk about things you know nothing about. 

alana. same thing as before, you can’t.... completely bash a character based on a 3 minute trailer. there was discussion about how she seemed ‘shy’ when talking to evan, which like.. maybe she is but also that scene was them talking in a library like if u actually take notice of what’s happening in the scene jdskngsd though i do share the general consensus with many others that she won’t get a lot of screen-time but that’s neither here nor there 😔 moving on

scenes and the setting. one of the things i was most like.. tentative about in regards to a switch from a musical to a movie was how they were like... going to do certain scenes? naturally, a lot has to be different when we’re going from a minimal stage set to an entire movie with like.. settings. there are going to be new scenes because a movie lends to have like, physical places that aren’t just [evan’s bedroom] and [murphy kitchen] and [implied school]. so new scenes, new conversations, slightly different pacing.. this is all to be expected right like are y’all geneuinely surprised here or ........

there’s a lot we aren’t seeing yet because this is a TRAILER. again i already mentioned this re: connor but like... again, y’all are making some Claims that just... fucking outlandish. there are so many moments in the trailer that are very obvious Hard Cuts. you don’t have all the information yet. you are angry at a tiny fragment of something that is confusing you because you don’t have all the context. is there a chance that some of this shit is just genuinely Bad? yeah but you really cannot 100000% say it with your chest and gauge it without seeing the movie and understanding what that scene is in context. lowkey uhhh saw some jokes about the zoe scene in the car and :’))) ? jesus? christ????

concluding thoughts because my brain hurts but like. you don’t have to like the movie. you don’t have to WATCH the movie. like all media if you choose to consume the movie you should do so with some CRITICAL THOUGHT. but, just like the novel (and i do not want to have any discussions about that i don’t care if you think it’s good Or bad that’s not what this is about) you guys are going in this WANTING to believe it’s bad and completely polarizing your thoughts on what this is going to be. yeah, maybe there shouldn’t be a movie. i genuinely think we could’ve gone without. but it’s just a piece of media, it’s not a progression like all your (musical is good, novel is bad, MOVIE IS WORSE OH NO) posts are suggesting. they are all just. different pieces of media stemming from a source. at the end of the day it’s just a fucking movie. if you already hate it so much, guess what? you don’t have to watch it! you don’t have to put so much needless fucking hate into a 3 MINUTE TRAILER. you can stop being performative and dissing it for its poor treatment of POC while then going on to make fun of ben platt’s hair and just targeting a different group like! please !!!

i’m not trying to be a fuckin’ advocate for this movie because there’s so much opportunity for it to suck, i do Not have high hopes for it, and i’m not even really sure i want to watch it (i bought the novel when it came out and have yet to read it, and i’m sure the movie will like.. elicit very similar vibes from me lsdngjkdsg like im just not uhhh feeling it) but y’know what? watching the trailer did not bring forth the fucking onslaught of hatred in me that apparently has fuckin posessed all of y’all and like djnsgjksdg plagued my dashboard for this whole evening. don’t come into my inbox trying to like.. argue with me about this (preemptively im turning off anon because i like i Can’t lmao) this is just like... a rant i needed to get out of me real quick. 

SO. tldr for now: have critical thought about shit you consume, there’s no ethical consumption under [the film industry], you can’t judge a movie entirely on its trailer, and y’all need to calm the fuck down 

[subtlereferencetomyinterests]

Hypothetically,

Ao3,   MasterPost

Relationships: Romantic Intrulogical, Platonic Logince

It is about! Damn! Time! That I wrote some Intrulogical! Also, y’all already know my stance on platonic logince,,,, guys they ARE best friends i’m sorry I don’t make the rules.

Warnings: Angst (with a happy ending). mentions of stuff like autopsies and nuclear explosions in the context of like experiments- they do stuff in The Imagination, basically. Panic attack (?). Hurt/comfort. Pretty heated kissing; It’s more intense makin’ out than I usually write but it isn’t anything explicit at all, don’t worry! ADHD Remus and Autistic Logan. Cursing- like So Much Cursing. Mentions of space, deep sea, etc. Food mention.

Word count: 6,769

There was a conundrum. 

A., Logan needed to use the Imagination. B., He could not use it on his own, considering that he was Logic. C., Roman was nowhere to be found. The answer to what was frustrating Logan at that moment would be all of the above.

To be clear, he didn’t like going into the Imagination. It was simply the only suitable place to perform his ‘experiments’. His very necessary, very distracting experiments. But, as stated, Roman was God-knows-where doing God-knows-what. 

Logan sighed at the door, as though it was the inanimate structure’s fault. The cracks gleamed obnoxiously bright, golden light pouring out from behind the door in a somewhat eerie manner. It was a nonsensical, unrealistic, completely insignificant place, and he wanted in.

Logan was contemplating asking Janus for help (lies took imagination, right?) when, out of nowhere, an arm was thrown around his shoulders. Literally an arm, disembodied and oozing sick-smelling blood onto the carpet. Ah. Wonderful. 

“Hello, Remus,” he pulled the appendage from around him, holding it at arm’s length (no pun intended, dammit). 

“Hi!” Remus took his arm back and reattached it with a disturbing crunch, a grin stretching his face. He sidled up to Logan, imitating the side’s stance in front of the door. 

“Can I help you with something?” the logical trait tilted his shoulder away from where Remus had pressed against him. 

“Not unless you’re willing to get really messy- but I can help you!”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re implying.”

The Duke rolled his eyes, promptly flinging the door to The Imagination open. An encompassing energy radiated into the common room, corrupting the usual neutrality of the space. It didn't last long before Remus grabbed Logan’s wrist and dragged him along through the entryway, movements as sporadic and fast-paced as everything else about the creative.

“It’s not very logical to just stand there staring at the door all day, in my opinion. I dunno what you need Imagination for, but whatever it is, I can help! My half is much more interesting, anyway.”

“Oh,” Logan blinked, narrowly ducking his head under a branch as he was pulled forward, “Thank you, I suppose.”

He politely didn’t mention that he doubted Remus’ capacity for helpfulness. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all. 

The door from the commons was quite a walk from the darker half of The Imagination, but at the pace its owner had them going they were there in minutes. The border was marked with tangles of densely thorned shrubbery, which parted for them, as if they sensed the approach. Logan just barely avoided snagging his shoe on one as they passed.

There was forest, twisted and shadowy, for only a minute. After that, they were in a city, with tall buildings and winding streets and dark alleys. Another switch, they came into what seemed like an amusement park. Nothing was consistent in theme, and none of the scenes held up for more than a minute or two. Remus shook his head and tisked. With a snap, a good portion of the ever-changing scenery was erased, leaving blank white space. The Duke turned to look at Logan with a satisfied smile. 

“Ta-da! What do you need?” 

Logan blanched for a moment, surprised at Remus’ willingness to completely delete Imaginings without a second thought. It usually took Roman ages to find a spot that he was okay with giving up on for Logan’s “projects”- which he always had thought was a little silly, seeing as he could bring it back when they were done. The change of pace was a pleasant one, though, so there was no need to dawdle for long. 

“I need a miniature fully-functioning model of our solar system. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Oh, totally,” Remus waved his hand and the request appeared suspended in the air, spread out to be the size of a dining table. All was accounted for- sun, moons, eight planets plus pluto- orbiting and spinning around each other. Imagination, by nature, had no real limits, but the detail was still a sight to behold every time. Logic smiled, surveying the set-up, before gesturing to the edge of their blank section.

“Thank you for the help, you may go.”

“May I now?” Remus conjured a seat for himself, staring at Logan with his chin resting on his hands, “You’re not even going to tell me what this is for? That’s just rude.”

Logan glanced up from the tiny earth he was inspecting, tilting his head to the side in confusion.

“You are welcome to stay, if you wish, but your brother usually leaves at this point. He says my experiments are-” he summons his notebook, “‘Bore-ifying’, which I assume is a portmanteau for ‘boring’ and ‘horrifying’.” 

“Roman’s a big baby!”

Logan shrugged, not disagreeing, and resumed his careful observation of the tiny model earth. Remus made no move to go, wheeling his chair even closer. The scientific side carried on before his new audience of one, hovering a hand over the little planet. Abruptly, it stopped spinning. Logan made a gesture with his hand that magnified the model significantly. 

The results were immediately catastrophic. Logan jotted a few observations down in his notebook, watching closely at the ways torrents of wind ripped up trees and buildings. In the back of his mind, he was faintly impressed by just how well-rendered ‘Dark’ Creativity’s earth was, down to the individual humans, brutalized by the storms. 

“Whoah, what the fuck?!” 

Logan looked up briefly to see Remus craning his head over the destruction of the stilled planet. His eyes were wide and bright with curiosity.

“Oh- I should probably explain. I come here, usually, to run some improbable scenarios as a sort of stress-reliever. Specifically, this one is what would happen if earth stopped spinning on its axis. As you can see, due to the earth no longer rotating at its usual speed, the wind would continue on at-” he cut himself off abruptly, sensing the beginnings of a ramble, “I’m sorry, I’ve been told that I have a tendency to ‘go off’ when a subject particularly interests me.”

Remus rolled his chair even closer, looking much like an excited animal (more so than usual, anyway).

“Well then, go off! Don’t leave me hanging! Is that really what would happen, just if it stopped?” He gestured enthusiastically to the way that the oceans had begun to crash against and consume shorelines. He looked interested- genuinely interested. 

Logan bit back a smile. He didn’t have to be told twice. 

 It was one of those particularly restless nights. For no foreseeable goddamn reason, Logic’s mind had become alight with enough half-formed thoughts and barely sensible ideas to fill a very, very weird book. The Imagination did wonders when he got like this, but it usually wasn’t two in the morning when he needed to use it. That wasn’t to say the circumstance was unheard of, but all times prior he could push the urge to investigate away with the reasoning that he could just ask Roman in the morning, and that the Creative side needed his ‘beauty sleep’, as he called it. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, was there?

Tonight was different. Logan could hear the occasional snap or tear or cackle from the room across from his. Remus’ room. 

It had been less than a week since The Duke let him use the darker half of the Mindpalace, and that was pretty much the only meaningful interaction they’d had in as many days. They weren’t close, Logan wasn’t even sure if they were friends (not that he was a good judge of that, given the first time Roman referred to them as ‘besties’ he had all but cried), but Remus was at the very least an option. He was also unlikely to mind, given that he was already awake and had exhibited excitement previously. 

Logan made up his mind after yet again failing to fall asleep. Quietly, he opened his door and took the few short steps across the hall, raising his fist. Remus’ door was open before his second knock. 

“Oh, hey! What are you doing, coming knocking at this hour?” he didn’t even try to whisper, accompanying his statement with an over-exaggerated wink. Logan didn’t waste his time trying to shush the side. 

“Good evening, I hope I’m not interrupting anything-”

“You know I don’t mind your ‘interruptions’, Twunk-y Megamind!”

“-But I was wondering if you would… Help me, again. I seem to be having a hard time getting to sleep, and I think that getting out some of my ideas could help.”

Remus’ face lit up dramatically. 

“Oh hell yes! Are we gonna blow up more planets?”

“Something like that,” he kept his voice monotone, disguising the relief and hint of pride at such a positive reaction. 

“Well, come on!”

Logan let himself be dragged into Remus’ room, barely having time to make note of the surprisingly organized layout before he was pulled through a sleek black door. 

“But you have to tell me about it,” he ordered, twisting them through narrow paths in his half of The Imagination. Logan suppressed a smile. 

“If you want to hear it, then I’m happy to.” 

Without warning, they stopped the breakneck pace that Remus moved at. The trait seemed appeased with their surroundings, though as far as Logan could tell it was just another piece of ever-shifting ominous landscape. 

Remus snapped his fingers. The scene remained intact. 

“Sorry,” he glanced around nervously, “Things get stuck in my head sometimes. Can’t get ‘em out. I’ll get it, I just-”

“It’s no trouble.” 

Logan rolled up his sleeves. He didn’t like using his ‘abilities’ much, as every side had some set of special skills, and all of them were much too ostentatious. But they were helpful, at times. He waved a hand, gesturing carefully so that he didn’t dismantle any more of The Imagination than was absolutely necessary. With a small stutter, the landscape shifted to a blank slate.

When he looked back up, Remus’ expression was not unlike that of a Cheshire cat.

“What was that?”

“I am Logic, therefore it follows that I am the antithesis to any Imagination creations. It’s very easy to erase them with just a bit of rationality.” 

“No clue what a lot of those words meant, but it’s still cool that you can destroy shit.”

Laughing was unbecoming, to say the least, and so the logical trait tended to avoid it at all costs. The snort that escaped him was entirely involuntary. 

If Remus noticed the noise, he said nothing about it. He was too busy bouncing from foot to foot, expectantly waiting for instructions. Logan cleared his throat of the outburst and clapped his hands together.

“Alright, let’s start with something simple…”

 At his request, Remus would construct immaculately detailed creatures, settings, and models, watching gleefully at the ordeals Logan put each one through. They tested various and progressively elaborate ways to sink populated cruise liners, they simulated the effects of falling from the Empire State Building, dissected approximations of obscure marine animals (a shared special interest of theirs, apparently), and any of the other unrealistic questions that occurred to the typically rational Logic. 

The only way to get such questions from his mind, he’d found out a long time ago, was deconstructing them one step at a time, to see them in their full ridiculousness. 

It was also, he was coming to realize, incredibly fun. 

Before the two knew it, the already late hour had turned unreasonable. Logan blinked owlishly at his watch, distracted from the tiny supernova that he’d created.

“Oh, I must have lost track of time,” four in the morning. Four in the morning! 

“Aw, does that mean we’re done?” Remus whined, yet he still began unmaking his small star system. 

Logan was suddenly very aware of the heaviness of his eyelids and a rubbery feeling in his limbs. God, was he tired. 

“I’m afraid so. I really should’ve gone to sleep hours ago.”

“Fine,” Remus dragged the word out with a groan, “But let me know next time you wanna fuck with space, or deep sea stuff, or anything like that.”

Next time. 

As much as Logan adored Roman, there was something very nice about having the more grim brother help him out with these experiments. For one, his creations were often much more accurate to the real world- likely because gore and destruction were that much more impactful when they were realistic. For two, he actually seemed to enjoy the work. 

Logan’s deliberation was brief. 

“I will.”

 As it happened, the night spent delving into dozens of ideas had purged Logan’s need to use The Imagination, for the time being. Clearly, Remus was not patient enough to wait for him.

He popped up, unannounced, in Logic’s room.

“Lo!!!”

The trait in question fell out of his office chair in a very undignified way. Not that there’s a particularly dignified way to fall out of a chair, but if there was, this definitely wouldn’t have been it. He ‘ate shit’, as the saying goes.

Out of pure embarrassment, Logan made no move to get off the floor.

“Hello, Remus,” he greeted, “How may I help you?”

The Duke laughed raucously, sprawling into the now-unoccupied chair and leaning over him. 

“You’re a riot, Dork,” then, added with glittering eyes, “Did you break anything?”

“No. Given that I am metaphysical, I’m not sure that I have bones.”

“I have bones!”

“Are they your bones?”

“They are bones and they are in my possession, yes.” 

Logan let the subject drop and repeated his first question. 

“Right, I forgot! I have an idea for an experiment!”

Logan thought that, despite his mild humiliation, it would probably benefit the conversation if he wasn’t lying on the ground, so he stopped doing that. Brushing mostly imaginary dust from his clothes, he shot Remus a bemused look.

“That’s nice. But I was asking you why you were here.”

The Duke’s face fell, almost imperceptibly.  

“I thought you’d wanna know, because of what you said last time. Isn’t this, like, a thing we do now? You know how shit works, and I know how to make that shit, and then you can tell me about it!” 

Oh. 

“Remember when you were talking about radiation the other day? You can’t just say stuff like that and then not expect me to want to try it out, so really this is on you. It’d be dumb not to let you in on it.”

Oh. 

He’d been listening to that rant? Moreover, he’d remembered it, and now had his own ideas and follow-up questions about it? 

Logan felt light-headed. 

“You’re probably too busy with work, huh? I guess my explosions don't have to be accurate, if you’re set on being boring,” Remus’ tone was nonchalant, but he was obviously lingering for attention. Logan then remembered that words are a thing, and people use them to communicate.

“No! I mean, yes- I mean, I’m not busy. I can join you, I- I’d like to, even,” the intelligent side heard a small voice in his head, his own miniature Virgil, screaming- what the fuck was that, get it together, Jesus, because he, despite what his fellow sides insisted, was absolutely nonfunctional when trying to form a friendship. 

Remus didn’t seem to notice or care much past his own cheer.

“Cool!” he, yet again, wasted no time in seizing Logan’s arm and yanking him away, “I wanted to see what would happen to animals and plants and stuff bunches of years after lots of radiation! Do you think they’d mutate? Get all twisted and fucked up so that they aren’t even recognizable as, say, a dog?”

Logan considered the question as he was led through the Mindpalace.

“Well, nothing would be able to live there at all. Additionally, anything within a little under a mile of the nuclear fallout- depending on a few variables- would be completely incinerated upon impact.”

“Like, flesh-melting incinerated?” 

“More like vaporized. The fireball would burn 10,000 times the heat of the sun.”

Remus went starry eyed, bringing them to a halt a mere five feet from the door. 

“I wanna see that,” he waved his hands around at their surroundings, “Can you do the white-out thing?” 

Logan, much less hesitant than last time, obliged. A small smile escaped him at the wondrous look on The Duke’s face. It was another form of expression he didn’t particularly care for, but containing his emoting was more trouble than it was worth by now. He couldn’t find it in him to care much either, for once. 

“Where do we start?” Remus prompted.

“You tell me. I will help you make it as accurate as possible, and provide any insight that you want, but it is your idea,” and he wanted to hear more about those ideas. Odd and violent, mesmerizing and clever. There was so much that he wanted to hear about, to talk about, to puzzle out together. 

Logan couldn’t remember the last time he’d had someone to share such interests with. Maybe, despite how deeply he cared for his ‘family’, as Patton called them- maybe it was never.

Remus chattered as he worked, disrupting the train of thought. Logan almost tuned it out- after all, everyone had grown perfectly used to The Duke’s rambling- but he caught himself. That was hardly how he should treat the side that was so strangely considerate to him, wasn’t it? 

Logan listened from then on. He began to add on to the conversation, corrections and elaborations and actual questions, because he actually didn’t know some of it. He didn’t regret the choice. 

By the end, Remus and Logan were sitting together in the smoldering ruins of their make-believe test town, exchanging notes for different variables they could use in the next trial. They only stopped when Logan was abruptly summoned away by Thomas. He excused himself, a bit apologetic, promising to visit again soon.

As he helped Thomas (with what really should have been a simple task, honestly), Logic wondered briefly about the origins of the hollow feeling that grew in his chest. Something distracted, longing, and unfamiliar. 

And then the oven caught fire, and the only thing he felt was annoyance with the man that he was somehow a component of. 

 So, that was that- Logan and Remus were friends, now spent regular time together, and shared interests. By all accounts, it was a simple and obviously positive development. 

But then there was Roman. 

“What’s wrong with my work? You’d really prefer whatever edgy 12-year-old DeviantArt account nonsense that he thinks up?”

Logan set his book down with a sigh and looked over to his doorway, where Roman stood with his hands on his hips.

“Come in, Roman, and thank you for knocking,” he snarked. The Creative side made a vaguely sassy noise, trotting right in and flopping backwards onto the bed. Without closing the door, the monster.

“I thought that building your Weird Science contraptions was our thing.”

Logan made a show of standing up and manually shutting his door before responding. 

“You don’t like my ‘contraptions’, as you call them.”

“Yeah, but I still made them for you! Because we’re friends, but I suppose you’ve forgotten all about that!” 

He really should have expected the melodrama. And yet, Logan had lived in a delusional world where he didn’t care about the most Extra being on earth.

With an eye roll, Logic dropped down beside Roman on the bed- though he wasn’t half as flamboyant about it. 

“I can have more than one friend.”

“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be your favorite! We’re supposed to hang out together! Do the friendship bracelets I made mean nothing to you?”

He flung his arm across Logan’s chest, a ‘friendship bracelet’ clearly visible on his wrist (a loose usage of the term, given that it was a solid gold band with inlaid sapphires, because of course it was).

Logan held up his arm as well, showing that his (silver with inlaid rubies) was still very much in use, despite his distaste for jewelry.

“We hang out plenty. It wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings by spending time with your brother. My reason for doing so is that he seems to take active enjoyment in building and learning about these things with me. He also makes very good conversation, in regards to the more, ah, eccentric experiments.”

Roman tossed his head to the side to watch Logan with narrowed eyes. After a pause, he linked their arms at the elbow. 

“Yeah, you would think that. You’re secretly just as much of a weirdo as him.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Oh please, I can barely keep up with a word that either of you say,” Roman headbutted Logan’s shoulder in what was likely another of his odd displays of affection. He let his head rest there for a minute, a rare instance of peace before he inevitably resumed talking. 

“Anyways-”

“Anyway,” Logan corrected.

“Anyways, if you nerds wanna talk about your weird, creepy experiments, then I guess that’s fine. But he isn’t allowed to co-opt anything else that we do together that we both actually like- no making fun of movies together, no Crofters jams, and no poetry-slash-rap battles.”

“Of course not, Roman. You will always be my favorite person to disagree with.”

“Love you, too,” Creativity bumped him again, then sat up to stretch. Logan snorted a laugh and considered shoving Roman off the bed, watching as he raised his arms up and straightened his back. Before the trait had the chance, unfortunately, his friend was already standing. 

“Leaving already? Weren’t you just going on about spending time together?”

“Nah, that was all I wanted to yell at you about for now. I’ve gotta go help Pat with dinner.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you.”

“Thanks, I won’t.”

“I hate you.”

“Ditto.”

Halfway out the door, Roman threw a glance over his shoulder.

“Oh, and whatever you two end up doing, do not give me the details. Please.”

Okay, finally, that really was that. Friendship established, blessings given, the end. A simple symbiosis.

Logan was thinking about the practical uses of medieval torture devices? Remus. He wanted to see exactly how long it would take your average healthy adult to succumb to drowning? Remus. Logan wanted to just rant, about anything and everything, his brain moving a mile a minute? Remus. They spent an inordinate amount of time together. 

Occasionally, when he didn’t even have the energy to converse, he would sit down with a book in the commons when he knew Remus was there and let the trait’s never ending word-vomit wash over him. It was an odd sort of intimacy, but that fit within the theme of their dynamic. Like he said, simple symbiosis. 

And that was when the not-very-platonic fondness grew. And Logan, to his own surprise, allowed it to. 

After deep consideration he had seen no reason not to; Remus wouldn’t judge him, not ever. It put a name to the hollow longing that occurred whenever he, eventually, had to get back to work and part from their talks. 

He hadn’t sorted out what to do about the feeling yet, but he felt no urgency. 

Logan’s book lay forgotten in his lap, that morning being one of the quiet ones as he reflected on his unfamiliar emotions. It was almost nice, letting such affection curl up in his chest and settle there.

His contemplation was broken by a sharp jab to his shoulder.

“Are you listening to me?”

He tilted his head at Remus.

“Sorry, I got distracted.”

“What were you thinking about?” his eyes lit up, very obviously hoping for it to be something disgusting. Logan glanced away, given that he didn’t even like eye-contact in the best of circumstances. 

“Nothing important. You have my attention now.”

Remus rolled his eyes with a huff, apparently genuinely irritated. 

“Well now I forgot what I was saying.”

“Let’s backtrack: what were you talking about before?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s fine, we can talk about something else.”

The irritation had grown to something unrecognizable to Logan- frustrating, given how closely he tried to study body language. He felt a stab of guilt as Remus stood up from his spot.

“It probably didn’t matter. I’m gonna go annoy Janus.”

“Oh,” Logan’s voice was small, “Alright, then.”

He was already gone.

That was… concerning. Not to mention bewildering; Remus didn’t just pass up opportunities to talk! He didn’t just leave, not even when he wasn’t wanted! Logan really hadn’t thought his zoning out would earn such a reaction. 

But he was far from perceptive about emotional problems. There was no way to know if it was anything to throw a fit over. For all he knew, it was just an off-day. He couldn’t always expect his friend to be rambunctious and energetic, even if that was a big part of his personality. 

The issue would likely resolve itself.

 The issue did not do that. It did the polar opposite, speeding from mildly concerning to downright frightening at a whiplash-inducing pace.

Remus barely asked questions and almost never offered insight, as he usually did when they spent time together. In fact, his contributions had become rare and unenthusiastic enough that he could have passed as neurotypical, however disturbing the thought was. And that was when they did end up spending time together, which was becoming less and less often, much to the dismay of one significantly smitten smart side.

Something was very clearly wrong with Remus. Not the demented, destructive, mildly endearing and unhinged sort of wrong. It was the wrong sort of wrong.

Logan was hesitant to confront him outright. After a couple weeks of careful consideration, a more subtle solution occurred to him, as he idly flipped through a very graphic murder-mystery late into the night. Something bloody, and awful, and very much Remus’ taste. He set the novel down, knowing full well that his friend would be wide awake as he made his way across the hall.

“Remus?” he knocked at the side’s door, wearing a smile much wider than he usually liked. He was more than willing to express exuberance, if there was even the slightest chance that it would be infectious.

The door decidedly did not fly open. Rather, after a good deal of wrapping at it, Remus slowly pulled it back and poked his head out.

“Oh. Hey.”

Logan didn't dwell on the concern that reaction brought. He had something that would cheer Creativity up, of that he was sure.

“I have a test tonight- it’s going to be very messy,” he began, searching the impulsive trait’s eyes for any signs of interest. There was the slightest glint, but not much more. 

“So, you want me to make stuff for you?” His speech was monotonous. 

“Yes, that was the idea. It’s going to be gory.”

Hardly a reaction. All Remus did was open the door the rest of the way to allow Logan inside. Clearly, he had underestimated just how poorly his friend felt.

“Alright, I’ll set it up for you. Just don’t take too long, I was actually hoping to use my part of the Mindscape today.”

Logan nodded, very taken aback. He couldn’t ignore the slight hurt at the cold, dismissive tone (the irony of that wasn’t lost on him).

They stepped foot into The Imagination and immediately Remus stopped, destroying whatever had been in front of them- which was usually fine, it was just how he operated, but normally out of enthusiasm, not apathy. Maybe this was more than could be fixed with some blood and guts.

“What do you need?”

Logan conjured a tiny notebook, giving a tentative smile. Still, he was giving this plan a shot.

“Operating table,” one appeared before him, sleek metal with rolly legs, “A standard set of surgical tools,” he looked up to gauge Remus’ interest, but his expression still hadn’t changed as he continued to create, “A human corpse, and then we can get started.”

With a wave, a perfectly generic body fell onto the table, but Logan’s attention remained on The Duke.

“Great, have fun, let me know when you’re finished.”

Logan faltered, watching him turn to leave.

“You- you aren’t going to stay and do this with me?”

“You want me to?” Remus crossed his arms over his chest and fixed Logan with a gaze that could (figuratively) wilt flowers.

“I- Yes? If you aren’t at all interested right now, then I can save this experiment for another day?” Yeah, this wasn’t working, but Logan had no backup.

“No, no, don’t wait for me, you’ve already got everything you need, right?”

“I mean- technically, yes, but it- it wouldn’t be the same.”

Remus cackled, sounding quite like the cartoonish villain that he often acted as. It hurt to listen to.

“So that’s what this is about! Let me just fix you up, then!” 

He snapped, and a blank humanoid form appeared at his side. It tilted its faceless head curiously at Logan, who recoiled.

“Not good enough? Is a hunk of nothing too unrealistic for you?” he snapped again, and the being suddenly transformed to match its creator exactly. 

Nearly exactly: it wore an enthusiastic grin, eyes wide and sparkling, rather than the steadily building fire that raged in real-Remus’ eyes. It spoke in a disgustingly cheery tone.

“Wow, tell me more! Show me that again? What happens when you do that? You’re just so interesting, Lo!” 

Remus watched the creation, a look of one part pride and a million parts resentment.

“Is that what you want? It’s just like me, but without any of the hassle of being another person that you have to deal with! And this one, you really can get rid of whenever you want, isn’t that great?”

Logan looked between the two, a fearful understanding creeping up his spine. There was something he was missing here, wasn’t there?

“No,” he muttered, half to the fake-Duke and half to the real one. 

“No?” Remus spat, circling his mirror, “No, of course, you’re so right. This isn’t nearly enough.”

He made an elaborate gesture, and about a dozen more Creativities appeared, surrounding them. Logan stumbled back from them, nearly tripping on the operating table that they’d previously made. When he looked up, the real Remus was approaching him with an expression that fought its way between guilt and indignation. It was all at once heart-wrenching and frightening. 

Logan tried to right himself, tried to look unaffected and certain of himself, as he raised his voice. He would not let this go a step farther, despite his confusion.

“Stop,” and with that, a wave rocked across The Imagination, and all was erased. In the aftermath he stood before a teary-eyed Remus (just the one, though), uncharacteristically looking like a stiff wind would knock him right over.

“What’s wrong? I gave you what you wanted!”

Logan reeled.

“Why would you think I wanted any of that?” 

“You wanted an experiment, I gave you one! You wanted a willing audience, I gave you twelve! But I guess I just get everything wrong, right?”

“You know that isn’t true,” Logan felt choked, his words clumsy. It was foreign and horrible and disgusting, but he’d trudge through it all if it meant fixing whatever he’d done wrong. It couldn’t have just been him losing focus once? Could it? 

“Oh, of course, I do just enough to be useful. So I’ve got that right; I’m a good utensil. Is it so much to ask that people would care about me, not just what I can do?” he posed a rhetorical oozing with vitriol, but it quickly evaporated into something much more desperate, “What if it’s my fault? It was my idea, I wanted to help. I don’t know why I thought you’d care past all that, did I give you a reason to? I can’t remember. It might make more sense that way, if I were the problem, wouldn’t it?”

Logan was running out of time to fix this, watching Remus curl in on himself, barely keeping from falling to the floor. He had no clue how The Duke had reached the conclusion that he didn’t care about him! They spent nearly all their free time together: sitting next to each other just to have the company, throwing each other tricky and often troubling questions to answer, constantly toiling away at things in The Imagination. Sometimes, they didn’t even need to talk, they just worked together in rapt silence; Remus did the creating and Logan arranged his work just so, and- Wait. Wait. Wait.

Logan didn’t need to talk, or touch, for that matter. Perhaps it was a mistake to presume the same for such a needy, affectionate, boisterous side? 

No, not perhaps, it was a huge mistake. A major fuck-up, if you will. 

He’d thought, if the blunt side had needed such comforts, surely he would initiate it? He hardly shied away from anything, except, well. 

Except. Feelings. 

God, he was the dumbest smart person in the world.

“Oh, Remus…”

The Duke’s head jerked up, continuing his back-and-forth of desperation and rage. 

“I don't need your pity!”

Logan sighed, twisting the end of his tie in frustration. 

“That isn't what I'm offering,” he took a breath before continuing, linking the words together so it would come out right. “I'm so sorry, I didn't take into account how you would interpret our interactions. I thought it was obvious that I cared for you, that I didn't need to say it outright. Clearly… I was wrong. So, if you need more than what I previously expressed- which I'm now realizing was very little in the eyes of someone who is not me- then I am happy to provide that for you.” 

Remus was shaken, a good deal of his ire slipping away. Whether that was good or bad remained unclear.

Before it could be overthought, Logan crossed the remaining few feet between them and brought his arms around The Duke in his loose approximation of a hug. The trait froze, but he didn't pull away. 

Physical affection, check. 

“I value your companionship more than I'm entirely sure how to verbalize. You understand me in a way that most others don’t seem to. While your ability to make detailed creations is very helpful, it is hardly the only thing I appreciate about you. 

“For one, you make me laugh. A lot. More than I'm used to. Additionally, you can easily match the pace with which I speak, or change topics! And, you are so much smarter than you make yourself out to be,” Logan finished the spiel with a smile, genuinely proud at his ability to articulate such… sentimental things, with relative ease. Words of affirmation, check.

He snapped back to attention when Remus brought shaking hands up to Logan's chest. For a moment, he worried that Remus would shove him away. The fears dissipated when all he did was bunch the front of Logan's shirt in his hands and hold on tight. 

“Do you mean that,” his volume was low, “Or do you just want me to calm down?”

Logan tightened his grip around him and, following a motion that he'd seen Patton employ many times to great success, he rubbed up and down his back.

“I understand that it might be hard for you to trust me, but I promise I'm not lying to you. I would have to be pretty awful to do something like that, wouldn't I?”

Hesitantly, Remus nodded against his collar. A good sign, but there was one thing left he had to say. 

“And- If you need further convincing- then you should know. I love you.”

Remus stilled. He then unfisted his hands from Logan's shirt. It was an anticipatory second before he threw his arms around the logical trait and finally returned the hug. His hold was crushing, and it was the most comforting thing that Logan had ever felt. 

They were okay.

“I'm sorry I-” 

Logan didn’t let him finish the apology. 

“Don't be. You didn't know how I felt, because I hadn't communicated it in a way you understood. That is hardly your fault.”

Remus nodded again, remaining much quieter than he’d probably ever been in his entire existence.

They held each other for longer than either would like to admit, speaking softly. 

“Thanks,” was muttered against Logan’s shoulder. 

“Of course. Just so you know, I'm more than willing to do this again whenever you need reassurance.”

“It might be a lot,” his tone was turning more mischievous, more him, “Are you sure you can handle that?”

“Absolutely.”

Logan hardly minded having an opportunity to gush about Remus to Remus. Not to mention, the physical affection was even nicer than he'd imagined it being. And oh, had he imagined it. 

Remus' face returned to his usual ever-present zeal, and he ended their hug to bounce in place. 

“Great! I'm good now! We can get on with that autopsy you wanted to show me- there better be buckets of blood!”

Logan shifted his weight. 

“Maybe we should save that for another day.”

“Oh,” Remus' face fell the smallest bit, “Okay.”

Logan was quick to amend:

“By that I mean, I have something better in mind.”

 Remus curled himself up in Logan’s lap, his eyes barely focused on the TV as the side carded his hands through his tangled mop of hair. Final Destination 3 played on the television (he had assured Logan that they didn't need to see the first two, and he was mostly right), serving as an excuse for the two to drink in each other's company. 

It was right in the middle of a particularly graphic rollercoaster scene that Remus took Logan's hands from his hair to hold them, twisting around to face him.

“Is something wrong, Remus?”

“You told me you loved me,” he stated blankly. 

“Yes, I did.”

“I didn't say it back!”

“No, you didn't,” it hadn't been the most important matter at the time, really. “You don't have to say it. It's perfectly okay if you don't feel the s- Mmph!”

Remus smashed their lips together, holding the sides of Logan's face (disrupting his glasses in the process) and pulling him forward harshly. 

Logan, for less than a second, was floored. And then Remus tilted his head to deepen the already heated kiss, and the situation properly clicked. Logan reciprocated, slightly uncertain in his movements, wrapping his arms around the other’s waist. 

Remus smiled against him. He nipped at Logan's lower lip with sharpened teeth, eliciting a very embarrassing yelp. Logic let his lips part in response as his thoughts grew fuzzier by the second. 

The (somewhat clumsy) open-mouthed kiss lasted right until they absolutely had to break, separating for air. Neither moved very far, letting their foreheads rest against each other and all but panting for breath.

“I love you so fuckin' much, nerd,” when Remus spoke, their lips brushed ever so slightly, “Just so you know.”

“I picked up on that, yes.” 

“A little clarity never hurts, right?”

Logan chuckled at the reference to his own sentiments, but the sound was abruptly cut off when Remus kissed him properly again. 

When they broke apart, he explained how 'stupid-cute' that laugh was. And Logan, only half-joking (since when did he joke at all?), said that he’d have to do it more often.

Banter came easily to them, despite the raw undercurrent that still laced their conversation. Although, neither of them had ever found it difficult to talk; talk about the first thing that came to mind and the last thing that would come to anyone’s mind, talk about exceedingly simple nonsense and topics so intricate that they wound up sounding like nonsense, just talk.

So things would stay mostly the same. They would ramble to each other when no one else could stand to hear such disturbing things. They would sit, working side by side, running through plans and ideas and results at rapid-paced speech. They’d speak, and they would listen, when even their closest friends couldn’t manage such patience.

Only now, sometimes the rushed words might turn soft. Now, all that ranting might be more substantial than anyone would at first see. Now, they’d still listen, but leaned close together, gazes impossibly fond.

But then, on occasion, they would find that there were things far more fun than talking to do together.

@shrimp-crockpot

[rigelmejo]

Unrelated completely, regarding listening reading method:

I am genuinely so excited to test the listening reading method out wholeheartedly. When I looked up the method, few people were trying it with Chinese, and of the people I saw a lot were beginners with less vocabulary than I have which I think both made the task harder for them and made their progress look different than I imagine mine will.

For example, in my first attempts using listening reading method, I noticed I picked up a TON of words I could already read, and a TON of phrases I could already read but didn’t properly “chunk” until I heard them aloud. Whereas the beginners tended to document picking up entirely new words, and not understanding much of any paragraph for the first several chapters. Whereas again, because I had more vocabulary, my first chapters I listening reading method did I heard a TON of individual words/followed the main gist, and it took several chapters for me to start finally understanding full phrase chunks and sentence chunks together. I 100% think the listening reading method can work with mandarin, I just think since few people have tried it and shared the experience, I’m going to find out how much it can improve someone’s mandarin myself...

I saw people who did listening reading method with german, and Dutch, who like the creator of the method ended up going from 0 to B1-B2 listening and sometimes-reading* skill in 3-5 months (reading skill tended to depend on how much they focused on the actual text during target language audio/target language text portion). The people with the most success usually already had a foundation of several hundred or a couple thousand common words, and had seen some grammar summarized beforehand (both of which I have already done with mandarin). I’m extremely curious how far the listening reading method can take my reading skills specifically - since the method mainly improves listening, and reading is simply affected a bit as a consequence of picking up new words/reading target language text along with the audio during one of the steps. With Chinese I suspect I’ll have to do more Hanzi learning, and reading-only work like intensive reading, to supplement my reading skills. However I already do a lot of intensive reading, so maybe that will keep the skills relatively even.

I do know that only couple dozen hours of listening reading method already boosted my listening skills a TON. So listening reading method definitely improves listening skills, as it is intended to. The actual method suggests learners listen read through an entire novel in a week or two, then do another novel etc, at least 3 novels though potentially more - and redoing some novels again from the start if desired. For my kind of novels - like Guardian by Priest, that means 106+ chapters, 800+ pages, 30 minutes audio a chapter (53 hours for the English text-chinese audio portion, another 53 hours for the Chinese text-chinese audio portion, and lets say half as many hours to read it in English 26.5 hours). So that is 132.5+ hours to listen read to Guardian. The listening reading method assumes you do a few books, so let’s say around 3 books, 396 hours (roughly 400 hours). Well... no wonder people saw such improvements! 400 hours of listening to comprehensible input in a European language will get an English speaker quite far into learning. Most European languages according to FSI take around 600-750 hours for an English native speaker to learn. Listening reading method would fill a huge chunk of those hours, and if you focus on the reading portion too, then that should definitely at least be a solid foundation into B1 I can imagine.

Listening reading methods creator also tends to do these in 6-12 hour reading bursts per day - which I absolutely never do because I’m lazy and unable to focus on things for too long usually without switching things up. But like I’ve mentioned, even me just doing maybe 12 hours of listening reading method so far, in small 30 minute to 2 hour chunks, has been enough to make noticeable improvement in my listening comprehension. If someone is already intermediate and just wants to improve their listening skill, I think they’d see fast results like I have regarding their listening skill dragging up closer to their reading skill level.

When I read the listening reading method creators website, they sounded like 10 hours was about how long it took (for beginners in a language) to start parsing individual words and recognizing them, 30 hours to start hearing word chunks and phrases they could understand, and 60-100 hours to start comprehending a majority of the words.

I am therefore very curious what my rate of improvement will be. I do feel chinese study using the listening reading method at least for listening skills will see similar levels of improvement. I’m wondering if my listening skills will improve a bit faster, since I’m already past the “progress at 30 hours” mark expectations wise - I can hear many individual words, can hear many sentence chunks/phrases, and just struggle to follow some full sentences and catch brand new words until I’ve heard them several times. I do very much want to completely go through Guardian with this method - for many reasons lol. 1. Because I’ve been wanting to read it in english and I’ll have a chance to use that for study which is cool, 2. Because I’ve been wanting to read it in chinese and this makes it doable/more comprehensible for my current skill level (aka following along to the audiobook I will read at a less slow pace/comprehend more since the English will be fresh in my mind, compared to if I just read it extensively on its own), 3. Avenuex made a beautiful audiobook I adore and I’ll have an excuse to listen to it while actually comprehending everything since I’ll have the English and Chinese novel to look at while o read! So... once I’m through Guardian, I’ll be able to answer for myself what over 100 hours of progress doing the listening reading method produce, how well it works when using a book with a more complicated/high vocab style - which is sort of priest, reading challenge wise, and the kind of novel the listening reading method creator recommends using. Also, I’ll have read Guardian! ovo)/ and I will have read a full priest novel, so I’ll have picked up words by my favorite author that will hopefully make other priest novels easier to read (the same reason Tian Ya Ke may be helpful).

———-

Another thing people who have tried the listening reading method suggest doing first (particularly if studying a language much different than your native language, but for any language tbh). The creator of the method suggested: knowing a few hundred to a few thousand common words, and having looked at a grammar guide or overview prior. That’s something anyone who’s already a bit of a beginner, to low intermediate, probably has done or is doing. In addition, some people who have done this method suggested using something like sentence audio flashcards (in English and target language audio) and listening to them a few times, repeating them, until one felt comfortable with them. Generally common word/grammar ones, and you could do “listening reading” with those sentences too (reading them while listening to the audio). This would serve as a primer to learn the basics comfortably before going into listening reading novels. They suggested doing yjis would make the method work better - they got to B2 in Dutch in a handful of months of intensive listening reading by doing this beforehand and they think it helped a lot. While I think it’s not necessary, I do think of listening reading is hard, then getting a basis beforehand as a beginner and/or covering a easier basics common language material first will help. I use the Chinese SpoonFed Audio files which basically amounts to the same thing but no reading (if I used the flashcards still, it would include reading). So I do have some sentences/phrases/words I have a good listening foundation for already. Also, as mentioned, I do read, so for many common words and Hanzi I already can read them. I do think this advice is very good for beginners though, if they want to see noticable results sooner (versus 30-50 hours into listening reading before they start learning significant amounts - basically it just means they’d do 30-50 hours prestudy instead of basic common words/grammar, to make the listening reading initially less difficult). A total beginner could dive right into listening reading (just like my chaotic self first started to try to read Chinese knowing 500 words and brute forcing mdzs and guardian a few paragraphs at a time), it just means it’ll feel more difficult at first for a while, and they’ll be mostly learning basics for a while first before they build enough of a basis to comprehend more. Which is fine. It all just comes down to how much incompréhensibilty can you personally tolerate without giving up. The creator of the method? Can tolerate a TON. Me? I can tolerate a brutally large amount, surprisingly, but usually I need to comprehend had least the main idea and that’s a minimum of like 40-60% depending on which parts I’m comprehending. Most people will feel it’s unbearable until they can comprehend at least 80-90% (and I certainly PREFER material I comprehend that much of). And most people ideally are comfortable once they understand 95-98% (think reading a book in your native language with some unknown words you can figure out easily from context, or graded readers made to feel this easy with around this many unknown words for you to figure out in context, or maybe manhua/manga/comics once you’re a pretty decent intemediate level in a language etc).

[jippy-kandi]

Digimon Adventure: 2020 – Episode 1: Tokyo: Digital Crisis! (Review)

Thoughts on the first episode of the Digimon Adventure reboot series.

Disclaimer: I just want to make it clear that I’m watching and reviewing Digimon Adventure: 2020 in the context of it being a children’s anime -- because that’s what it is. By design, it’s obviously going to be “dumb” to the mind of the average adult. But that’s OK, because it’s for kids. And for a first episode aimed at children? It was pretty good.

The opening credits were 99% Taichi and I don’t like it if it’s permanently going to be this way. But I’m hoping that it will change to perhaps be character-centric to the person being “highlighted” in a particular episode, going through all eight kids, until there’s a permanent one where all eight are equally in it. I also hope the same for the ending credits.

I noticed that Angemon and Angewomon were missing from the opening credits, whereas the other digimon evolutions are shown. So I assume they’re following in OG Adventure’s footsteps and doing the whole “special angel” evolution reveal? I’m OK with that. It seems really interesting how they’re setting up Takeru and Hikari to be included this time (as they were both missing in the ending credits with the other five standing opposite Yamato . . .).

Both the opening and ending songs are fine, but I prefer the original songs, especially Butter-Fly. You are missed, Kouji Wada. <3

The art and animation of this series is really good. Toei Animation are really putting money into this series. I’m impressed.

I have mixed feelings about how they chose to introduce the characters. On the one hand, I think utilising just two characters is great to really highlight them to the audience and not overwhelm them with too much information. But on the other hand . . . I think introducing all eight characters in the first episode would make it appeal to more kids, because they can easily identify with one kid and keep watching the series. But a kid might watch this first episode, not like Taichi or Koushirou, and just switch off from the series completely. But I think what they went for is probably best for how they plan to introduce the characters (particularly regarding what they have in store for Yamato being a lone wolf who joins them later).

Taichi was a bit too generic to me. But, it’s only the first episode, so this isn’t a real criticism -- I’m sure he’ll be fleshed out as the series progresses. He also seems more responsible than OG Taichi. And while I do like his new voice, I think Toshiko Fujita was a lot better; she managed to convey more personality in her voice.

Koushirou was actually quite “cute”. But I’m not sure I totally like that he’s being portrayed as shy . . . he never seemed shy to me in the original series, but just a kid who was super absorbed in his own tech world. But his shyness did make him more endearing? I’m just not used to it so I find it a bit unsettling. But it does “humanise” him more and thus makes him more relatable, rather than just a distant tech nerd, so I guess it’s a positive? I also really like his voice.

I am liking the Taichi/Koushirou friendship a lot. You can tell Koushirou is going to completely idolise Taichi for making him feel included and “useful”. And let’s be real: Koushirou has always been the most underrated character when it comes to popularity, relative to actual impact on the plot, because he’s actually the one who solves almost everything and he doesn’t get nearly as much credit for it as he deserves in the fandom. It’s nice that they’ve spotlighted him with Taichi in this episode.

So apparently Mimi’s family owns a conglomerate because they made both Koushirou’s tablet computer and Takeru’s hat? I always thought the weird “TK” scrawled on his hat was for his name (TaKeru or T.K.), but apparently it’s for TachiKawa! Wow, Mimi is insanely rich this time around (moreso than the first). Princess indeed!

Takeru’s design is so freaking adorable. I still think his clothes are a bit off, but his face is so adorable! And I didn’t really think that of OG Takeru. I mean . . . I guess he was kind of adorable, but not overwhelmingly so like this one! He hasn’t said one line but, OMG, the cuteness. *SQUISH*

Did anyone notice that in Takeru’s room, there is a poster of an ASTRONAUT? OMG I loved that! What a nice throwback to Yamato’s future career in OG Adventure (and thus to the 02 epilogue!). I can imagine reboot Yamato idolising astronauts and influencing Takeru into liking them, too. Awesome Easter egg there!

So the Crests are showing up right from the start. No rehash of finding the Tags and Crests, then! (Or will they find the physical forms later?) I really like how different from OG Adventure it already is, while keeping touches of the old as well. Toei have done a good job with mixing the old and new so far. Keep it up!

I thought Taichi’s meeting with Agumon was super cute and quite “realistic” with Taichi reaching his hand out to “pet” Agumon! Though Taichi is obviously more courageous than the average person, because uh, I would be afraid that dino would bite my hand off, lol.

I thought Agumon’s evolution “sequence” to Greymon was really cool, but at the same time, I did miss an actual evolution sequence like the OG one. It’s probably just nostalgia making me feel that way. I can accept this new version though! It feels very “updated”.

It was very fast-paced compared to OG Adventure. I’m not sure I entirely like that Agumon evolved so easily and so quickly to Greymon in the very first episode, but it also didn’t seem to hinder the episode. But where do they go from here? What do they have planned to pad out this series if things happen so quickly? I’m intrigued to find out!

Oh, remember how I said less than 24 hours ago that I might not even like reboot Yamato? Yeah, well . . . throw that idea out the window, because the dude had two seconds at the end of this episode and HE ALREADY WON ME OVER lmao. He had NO LINES and was still the highlight of the episode for me. My attachment to him is insane. (Of course, I’m hoping he doesn’t turn out to be a super douche, lol.) I like that he was “chosen” before Taichi and was in the Network before him. What have you been up to in there, Yamato?

While I LOVED the ending credits, as I said before, I hope it changes to be central for each specific character (going through all eight kids), before there is a permanent main ending that includes all the characters equally. I really don’t like how Toei Animation seems to forget that there are EIGHT CHARACTERS and not just two. Come on, Toei, do the right thing!

But . . . let’s talk about the ending credits. IT WAS AMAZING. It characterised Yamato so much without him saying a word. I love that he’s still a lone wolf, that music is still a big part of his life (a bass at 11!), and that his love for Takeru is still so genuine. There was also a pivotal scene where it shows Jou, Mimi, Taichi, Sora and Koushirou standing together, and Taichi smiles at Yamato, who hesitantly steps forward to join them. I loved that! It made me think about the discarded plot where “Yamato might’ve separated from the group entirely” -- it seems like this is a reverse version and I can’t wait to see it play out. The scene that inspired that discarded plot idea was when Yamato decides to fight Taichi, and Sora yells at him to stop -- and I just loved her reactions to him throughout that arc. Especially because, if Taichi had turned on the group, I think Sora’s first instinct would be to conk him over the head -- but she gives Yamato a massive pass and then supports him to separate from the group to find himself. My Sorato thoughts are already swirling about how Sora will react to Yamato in this reboot! Will she hate him at first? Will she ask him to join? Oh my, they haven’t even interacted in this reboot and I’m already shipping them, lmao. I hope Sorato still have a connection in this reboot!

Overall, I liked it for a children’s anime. And I never would have watched it if it wasn’t a reboot with the original Adventure cast, as I have only seen a few episodes of Tamers, Frontier and Savers . . . and a few seconds where Yamato shows up in Xros Wars, lol. I’m not interested in Digimon, I’m interested in the Adventure cast. So I’m really glad this reboot exists! I’ll happily watch all episodes of this series because it’s more of my kids goddamnit. XD

Oh, and I just want to apologise that even though the episode was focussed on Taichi and Koushirou, I used screenshots of Yamato and Sora for the episode post . . . I’m sorry, I’m a Sorato blog! XD;

I think I will do a weekly Digimon Adventure: 2020 “review”, because the episodes are only 20-ish minutes long and it’s easy enough to consume and write about. And even if I might not have a lot to say about a particular episode, I can still spam Sorato screenshots, lol. :P

I can’t wait for the next episode! Because: YAMATO. <3

[letsperaltiago]

don't blame me, love made me crazy

Written upon request for #58 from the 101 fluffy prompts-list:

"We’ve become the clingy newlyweds you always complained about. "

Read on ao3 

Every like and reblog is appreciated <3

Also, tried to just... slowly approach smut and idk I’m so scared!! Send help or inspo! 😅🤧

“What was that all about?” Amy complained to her husband as she closed their front door behind them and kicked off her shoes prior to neatly lining them up by the door. Behind her trailed Jake who automatically copied his wife’s actions looking at her with an equal amount of wonder as he didn’t hold the answer for her question. “We didn’t do anything out of the ordinary?” she threw him another question meanwhile her jacket was removed as well, hung on its designated crook to reveal the flowy, burgundy, flower-patterned dress she’d been wearing for the evening at their friend’s house.

“I don’t know, Ames,” he tried to calm her down, which was always easiest if he didn’t make a big deal out of it – when he was calm he had a better chance of rubbing off on her. But alas it had been very clear from the moment the subject had been brought up at the dinner table that Amy was not going to let go of it until resolved: a stubbornness, a will to succeed that Jake deeply admired and loved but also, at times and in some certain contexts, had his apprehensions about.

“Are we that horrible to be around as a couple?” from where Jake had his back turned on the living room as he took off his leather jacket, he could hear Amy slump down onto the couch loudly flaunting her disappointment in what they’d been told tonight.

It, of course, had occurred to them both that they were married. Very much so: everything from all the meticulous planning of the big day to it being completely butchered by a bomb threat to then still getting married in front of the precinct? Oh yes, they were definitely so very married. And they both adored this new take on their love to the moon, probably even further, and back. But at tonight’s monthly Nine-Nine family-dinner, the first since their wedding in May, they’d suddenly been made aware of the fact that the newly attained degree of their relationship had reached a whole new, very specific kind of vibe: They were told that it made their “already borderline sickly affectionate affinity even more intolerable” (quote Rosa) and made them “professionally and personally challenging to be around when together” (Holt’s addition to the matter at hand).

“I’m sure they didn’t mean it like that,” he slumped down, joining Amy on their couch before instinctively slinging an arm around her shoulders both as to comfort her but also by sheer selfishness, because not touching Amy Santiago at all times was a crime. She, just as him not being able to resist her spouse’s touch, leaned into it placing her head in his shoulder. “You know Holt and Rosa. They have their ways of handling emotional subjects, but they never truly mean to hurt or upset anyone.”

“Maybe…” she huffed but her husband’s attempt at convincing and comforting her didn’t seem to be quite enough. She needed the thrill  and satisfaction of a solve, which meant she needed to treat the matter at hand like an open case – an investigation. She abruptly sat up straight automatically causing Jake’s arm to slide off of her “… but I’m pretty sure we didn’t go overboard with anything?” Amy turned her head to look behind her expecting an answer, but her still leaned back, somewhat disturbingly unaffected husband, looked at her with raised eyebrows and discreetly amused eyes. You’d think he’d worry more than he appeared to do, Amy couldn’t help but think…

“Honey, I know you have this need to control everything, which 99% of the time is both admirable and adorable, but right now you’re just riling yourself up about something that isn’t that deep. They all love us and in the end they just want us to be happy. Even if we get a bit lovey-dovey at times,” he confirmed his little explanation with a warm smile.

“I don’t give a hoot, Jake!” Amy exclaimed totally disregarding Jake’s actually pretty reasonable words. “We’re going to run through every second of that dinner and pinpoint every couple-y interaction we’ve had!” She got up and ran towards her little library/office-room.

“We?” Jake questioned mid-yawn, trying to follow her with his eyes until she disappeared into the other room, left behind surprised by his wife’s sudden initiative. A initiative which he appeared to be have been dragged into.

“Yes,” Amy yelled from the other room. “We’re going to write down every single couple-y thing we did at dinner tonight, from the second we walked into Terry’s place to the time we left, and prove that we aren’t that bad!”

Mostly just wanting to give into the tiredness and desire to just go to bed and cuddlee with his wife, but also knowing he wanted to stick to Amy’s side for this, hopefully keeping her tendency spiraling a bay, Jake tiredly rubbed his eyes trying to push aside the incoming feeling of exhaustion. And as if on cue, the second he lied down stretching out on the soft material of their couch, Amy marched back into the living room with notebook and pen in hand. When she sat down on the floor abreast Jake’s head, between the couch and the coffee table placing her appliance on the surface before her, Jake then noticed how she’d pulled her before lose, casual waves into a high pony tail – she nor the magnitude of Amy’s mission was to be messed with.

“Okay, so…”

From his admittedly relaxed and not as intensely engaged position Jake could, by an inch over her shoulder, catch a glimpse of the now open notebook where Amy’s elegant handwriting was preparing a neat list to be filled, appropriately titled List of reasons why we’ve been  “too much”.  Jake chuckled to himself allowing his eyes to rest just a bit, sneak closed, as he of course would stay awake with Amy but physically couldn’t fight his body’s tiredness entirely. Being there physically would surely be good enough.

“Okay, so we arrived at Terry’s house, separately, very important to note…” she scribbled down before continuing, “…since you worked a bit later, thus came directly from work with Charles so we couldn’t have possibly done anything there…” Amy started scribbling down until Jake chimed, or rather muttered, in himself.

“But since I’d missed you for those few hours after you left work, I walked directly over to you and kissed you in front of everyone before saying-“

“Hi, beautiful wife…” Amy finished his sentence quoting the moment from earlier by memory with a defeated voice upon realizing this wouldn’t be a moment in her favor. She quietly wrote it down not feeling like further commenting. “Okay, but that isn’t uncommon for us… or just any couple in general!”

“I know, babe,” Jake yawned.

“So no reason for them to be upset about that… Anyways, then we stood in the kitchen while Terry and Charles finished cooking dinner, had a glass of wine… Pretty innocent if you ask me-“

“Until we touched glasses and toasted to our 23 days as husband and wife before sharing another kiss,” Jake added sheepishly earning himself another discontent grunt prompting the sound of scribbling.  

“Whatever… Let’s move on…”

And thus they did indeed manage to run through every moment, every second, every turning point of the night while Amy dutifully and neatly as always took notes and, internally, realized that she hadn’t really been aware of a lot of the amorous moments between her and Jake - they sort of just happened, naturally, like a consistent love-pattern. Taking up multiple pages of the notebook, the list clearly reflected this, but Amy still seemed somewhat in denial. Or at least right up until she added the final period to wind-up her final bullet point: J jokingly grabbed A’s butt while yelling “Wifey-butt!” when walking to the car after dinner.

“Oh my god…” Amy complained as her body hopelessly slumped back against the couch where Jake was still resting while also being very much dedicated to his wife’s project dismay, since he was the one who 9 times out of 10 would remind her of forgotten moments, stolen kisses and loving gazes she’d forgotten about.

“I can’t believe it,” she twisted her torso as to look at her husband behind her genuinely expecting a horrified expression matching hers alas instead being met by tired, adoring eyes and a grin that was impossible to hide when his wife’s despair upon realization was this cute.

“Why are you smiling?” she frowned mostly frustrated by the situation but also confused by her husband’s lack of shared sentiment.

“We’ve become the clingy newlyweds you always complained about,” he mumbled the side of his face pressed against one of their throw pillows. “It’s cute. That’s all.”

Amy immediately felt defensive about the accusation, mostly because she knew he was right but that wasn’t exactly the expected outcome when she’d set up this little private investigation of her. “I have not complained about-“

“Oh, you’re so cute when you try to disguise the truth, babe,” he kept grinning. If there was one thing Jake loved it was teasing. Something he loved even more? Teasing Amy Santiago. And something he loved even more? Teasing Amy Santiago when she was in a miffy mood.

“I’m serious! When have I ever complained about a bit of PDA ever? People can do whatever they want,” she had now fully switched, made a 180 turn, in her seat on the floor and looked directly at her husband with a challenging demeanor. Jake was not about to let an opportunity of this greatness like this slip away that easily: he was definitely going to get the most out of it.

“I know it’s hard to face the truth,” he said nonchalantly, definitely playing her, meanwhile he switched to lie on his back as he let out an exaggerated yawn and laced his fingers together behind his head as extra support – and also to look that more pleased with himself and the situation.  “But the Jake Peralta boyfriend gone husband-experience can do these sort of… crazy things to a woman. It’s totally cool, honey, if you’ve just been unconsciously swept away by the rush of having me as your husband. It’s out of your control and that’s okay.”

As well as Jake knew he could push her buttons Amy knew just as well, if not even better, that there were many ways to knock Jake off his cocky perch. This, suddenly, was much more important than what anyone thought of them, or her trying to solve the matter, because them being those clingy newlyweds she always complained about meant she always had her husband wrapped around her little finger. Perhaps, she had to admit, it was hypocritical of her to think like this, when she’d been the one whinnying about random couples’ #twomonthsofmarriage-posts on Instagram (Like, who cares about your two months of marriage, Karen?), and the one to roll her eyes upon overhearing some random woman mention her husband 23 times during a 5-minute conversation at their local coffee shop: she was now that annoying Instagram-couple and coffee shop-woman, all in one… A supreme-annoyingly clingy-wife.

But coming to the realization that, perhaps, she was a hypocrite was her learning from her mistakes, right? That was a good thing.

Either way she didn’t really care because, from where she was still planted on the floor before him, Amy could physically feel her brain have a change of attitude as it shut out any previous doubts and anxieties about what other thought of their marriage, their way of loving each other, and instead replacing it with the sudden brutish need to, first of all, shut Jake up, and second of all, rebel against exterior opinions about them.

She was definitely turning to her annoying newlywed-ways to make her husband shut up.

“I guess,” her before frantic tone was now suddenly completely gone and replaced by a sultry, confident tone matching the new-sprung darkness in her eyes. “But then this…”

Jake’s before tired demeanor was swallowed along with his pride the second his always beautiful, and also incredibly hot wife, pushed herself off the floor and mounted the couch to straddle his hips, more precisely the exact area where he knew she knew there would be no opposing her, with the sleek movements of a lioness sneaking up on its prey. It especially threw him off even further when she repositioned herself, innocently pretending to ‘just get comfortable’, thus applying just the right sultry movement and amount of pressure to this most vulnerable area.

“I guess this…” she made sure the ‘s’ was clearly hissed directly into his ear as she, leaned down over him, slowly bit by bit, started to build him up by allowing her hips another grinding motion thus sending electricity through his entire body, before rounding off her pending taunt, “… is not in my control either then.”

There were no to make it past Jake’s gaping lips, all caught up in tangles in his suddenly very dry throat, although the hitch in his breath in reaction to the movement of her hips couldn’t’ve escaped her in a million years. She had him right where she wanted him.

“Is it?” she taunted again unbending her torso back up to sit up straight.

His hands which had before been resting carefree behind his head escaped its spot finding a new home on her waist, gently tracing up and down its curves like a potter shaping soft clay into artwork.

“Ames,” he whimpered upon the sensation of feeling her hands being placed on top of his to guide them downwards, past the narrowest part of her curvature, and fixed on the fullest part of her hips – where she wanted them to be. For now, that is. By instinct, being very familiar with his favorite kind of handful, Jake’s fingers dug into the fabric-clad flesh not caring whether or not he’d leave marks: her uniform would surely cover it in the morning.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can control it when you’re around me, husband,” she definitely felt his body quiver at his still somewhat new title and, God, how sinful of a meaning that simple word had suddenly gained in the moment. Having fulfilled their duty of guiding him to where she wanted his touch, Amy’s hands made their way off of his before torturously sliding up his torso to play with the first, top button of his dark green flannel – one of her favorites on him… and, of course, off. Meeting her secret expectations his hands reacted to her undressing him by sliding his hands down further behind her to then, instead of her waist, grab the curve of her ass, additionally allowing himself to pull her abdomen into a soft motion against him in the desperate need of the friction she’d already given him a foretaste of. Pride was not a thing he contained much of around Amy Santiago-Peralta: was he going to let her make him unravel at the seams so easily? Absolutely. Would he be down for whatever direction she planned on taking this in? Without a doubt, even if it meant just making out followed by some cuddling, although he was currently rock hard and internally praying that she wouldn’t stop the course of things any time soon.

Her fingers popped the last button of his flannel, and with a simple look, she wordlessly ordered him to sit up straight, which he dutifully did, thus allowing her to push the fabric off of his broad shoulders before proceeding to abandon it on the floor. It might’ve been her favorite flannel on him but she liked it even more on the surface of their carpet. Thinking that she had full control of the situation, Amy was definitely startled at the sensation of Jake’s teeth taking a bite into the sensitive skin of her neck, the extra tender area right beneath where her jaw met the side of her throat and whether it was what he’d set out to do or not, he surely extracted a long, deep sigh from her now, between the fondling and the bites, much more agitated body. Seemed as if Jake Santiago-Peralta was back on track after being knocked off his feet for a moment, and though she did immensely enjoy having the upper hand, there was something about Jake fighting his way back to dominance that undeniably had her body feel some kind of way.

She obviously couldn’t, it being physically impossible, see it for herself but oh how she could feel the way her husband’s teeth and lips were painting colorful love-bruises on her more than usual tan and crisp skin (Thank you very much, 2 week honeymoon in Mexico). Although, before her mind could wander off to create a mental top 5-list of most effective ways to hide said up and coming hickeys, her awareness shifted to the feeling of her husband’s purposive hands grabbing the skirt of her dress, pulling it up to bundle droopily around her waist, and earning him a tiny hitch in her throat to be felt where his teeth were still attached to her.

All the teasing, the control she’d gained in counter to his cockiness, had with the snap of the fingers dissolved into the shameless abandoning of herself, giving in to the fervor he so powerfully incited within her.

“Stop worrying,” he slowly ran his hands up under the bundled material before redirecting his hands back to hold onto the soft pulp of her ass, this time the only barrier being the fabric of her panties, earning him a tiny squirm telling him she slowly began to unravel at the seams – just for him. His lips targeted a new area: hers. “You’re my wife. I’m your husband. No one gets to decide what can and can’t do.”  

As if to enhance his point, making sure she wouldn’t forget anytime soon, there was a brief moment where he drew back just a few inches to look directly into her eyes with passion still burning in his. Meanwhile one hand had left her behind and instead purposefully grabbed her jaw, making sure to keep the grip somewhat soft as to not hurt her but still firm enough to make sure she would look back.  If he hadn’t had a certain agenda in mind he would’ve let the image before him bring him to his knees: Amy, messy hair, swollen lips, dark eyes, ruffled and barely holding on dress. But he had to stay firm and focused. His hand didn’t let go of her jaw and she dutifully complied deeply turned on by the discourse of the events and this persona Jake had chosen to bring out. Usually she loved having the upper hand during sexy timez, but somehow, seeing how Jake was handling her when her mind was spinning out of control, his sudden craving for dominance came like a blessing in disguise.

His lips crashed with hers, and being distracted like she was by his mesmerising dominant persona, it took her by both storm and surprise thus not being able to hold back a pure, honest moan holding so much pleasure. Only the way his fingers teasingly traced the lace on the edge of her panties could come near taking her attention away from what, in the moment, felt like her life’s hottest kiss.

“Understood?” he breathed into her lips barely able to with the lack of air in his lungs. She nodded grasping desperately at the soft white fabric of his undershirt.

“Good,” he growled, pleased by the newfound wet fabric between his wife’s legs meaning he was certainly doing something right: he had her exactly where he wanted her, both physically and mentally, and he had his now slick fingers as proof.

“Now,” he continuously toyed with the fabric, feeling up her heat before slowly edging the pantie as far down as her bent legs straddling him would allow. “You’re going to rip that list out of your notebook… ” his lips slid away from hers redirecting to nibble on her ear lobe. “Then you’re going to throw it out… ” a kiss to the shell of her ear followed behind, setting up his final act of persuasion. She was so far gone under the influence of his touch that she didn’t even care to disagree with having to throw out 20 minutes dedicated research, ink from her favorite pen and quality paper from one of her best notebooks.

“… and then your husband is going to take you to your bedroom and fuck you so hard you’ll forget the others even said anything at all. I’ll make sure you never complain about being newlyweds ever again.”

[squeeneyart]

Breathe in the Salt - Chapter 8

AO3

Beta read by @thesnadger who constantly drags me away from the passive voice.

Martin makes a decision.

The research team makes a plan.

Communication ceased once Martin began his ascent, and with every step he felt more and more like an idiot. This was some sort of evil trap, and now that he had fallen into it the thing had no more reason to talk to him. All it had to do was wait for him to reach the top. And he would go, if only because of some natural connection to the sound of his own voice.

This is what he got for talking to himself through objects. How often had he spoken aloud to those silent walls, secure in his belief that no one could be listening? If he returned from this misguided venture intact, his words would remain safely on paper, where no one could snatch them.

Martin could still turn around, but then he wouldn’t know what it was. From then on, he would have to sit in the lighthouse, forever convincing himself that sound just ‘traveled weird here’. If he wanted to keep his job, Martin would have to face whatever it was and not let it scare him out of a good paycheck. And if the thing turned out to be a long-dead person reaching out for help, then turning around at this juncture would be a horrible trick to play.

Above all, the others had come here to figure out what’s going on. He and Jon had agreed to work together, and Martin had no intention of slacking on his end even if he wasn’t exactly an equal in this field. So, he climbed the stairs toward the unknown creature luring him upwards with his own stupid voice. Then, he paused.

“Yes,” he said, waiting for the sound to fade. Nothing followed after it. “No.” After a moment, he started walking again. He noticed immediately that his footsteps were deadened. “Oh, um, thanks. I-I figured those would be useful for whatever you’re leading me to. May I ask some questions?”

“Yes.”

Martin took a deep breath. “Am I safe going up to the top?”

He didn’t receive an answer until his voice had ceased to echo. “No. Me. Okay?” The sound ended with Sasha’s upward inflection.

“Oh. Well, um. That’s not okay? Or not very encouraging?”

“Me. Okay.” Only his own voice rang out this time.

“You… okay… You are okay? You specifically are safe?”

“Yes.”

Martin sighed in some small relief. “I guess I have no choice but to take my own word for it.” He chuckled. The close space amplified his discomfort. “I knew already that upstairs wasn’t safe anyway, so dumb question on my end. You… are you the lighthouse?”

“No. Now.”

Martin found himself at the top of the stairs. The room looked as he had left it. “Okay, I’m up here. Are you gonna, I dunno, show yourself?”

A long silence followed before he got a response. “Please? Questions?”

“What do you-Oh. Oh, you need more words. Okay, um… Are you a ghost?” Another moment of silence.

“No.”

Martin deflated. He had been rather hoping for a ghost, if only because he had some context for them. If this wasn’t a ghost… “Sorry if this is a rude one, but are you a person?”

“Yes. Me. Yourself?”

“What? Yes, I am? Obviously, I- wait, can you see me?”

“No. Me. Yourself?”

There was something Martin wasn’t getting. He let out a frustrated grumble. “Okay, look, you’ll have to keep it to simple yes-or-no answers. I know it’s difficult, but if you’re a person, then I’m trying to help.” No answer followed. He looked about the room. “You wanted me to come up here. Did you want me to look outside?”

“No. Help. Me. Help. Please?”

“I-” Whether the desperation was genuine or just leftover from his own voice, Martin’s heart was in his throat. “I don’t know how. You have to tell me.”

“Help. Me. No. Outside. Please? Questions?”

“I don’t know what else to ask!” His head began to throb with the barrage of words. “W-Why haven’t you spoken before?”

“Top? Happened. Top? Help. Me.”

Letting out a groan, Martin leaned back against the wall. “You just said I didn’t need to see outside! I don’t think I can even go up top? Unless there’s something on the panel that does it.”

“Before? Before? Before? Yes.”

“Now you’re making no sense at all. Shit, this isn’t working.” Martin eyed the stairs.

“Working. Yes.”

“No, it’s definitely not.” Martin pinched the bridge of his nose, letting the word be absorbed by whatever he was speaking to. “Maybe I’m not the person for this. Hell, maybe you’re not even here.”

“Me. Here. Help me. Please? Yourself? Working. Before?”

Pressed against the wall, he sank to the floor. The ache in his head had developed into a full migraine. “Just- just be quiet.” The word filled the room, then subsided. No sound came after. “I’m… I’m sorry. I am trying, but talking to you hurts. It feels like my brain is going to split in half.”

After a few minutes, at a lower but still head-splitting volume, he heard himself speak. “Yourself? Outside? Lighthouse? Me. Here. Okay?”

Martin groaned. The thing was trying to comfort him. He was so incompetent, his own disembodied voice was telling him to take a breather. He dropped his head onto his knees. “No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. Let’s… let’s try again. Did you want me up here for something outside of the lighthouse?”

“No.”

“Okay… Is it in another room of the lighthouse? Downstairs?”

“No. Here.”

“Is it… shit, I’m stupid, is it the panel?” Martin pushed himself off the floor, straightening himself out.

“Yes. Yes. Panel.”

In a few strides, he was standing in front of the many switches, dials, and pulleys. Everything was in order, just as he had left it the day before, except- “This was messed with. Tim, he asked me about it, did he…”

“Yes. Top. Happened. Panel.”

Top. Top happened. Out of habit, Martin twisted the misaligned dial back into place. “You there?” The reverberation on the final word didn’t stretch on as expected, and he received no answer. He turned it back to where it was.

“No. No. No. No. No. No. Please.”

“Sorry! Sorry, I wanted to see if- Sorry, I won’t do that again. Right, okay, um-” He examined the panel, willing himself to have a sudden epiphany of which button did what. Everything was as unmarked as before. “Okay, okay. Question: when Tim messed with it, why didn’t you say anything then?”

“Then? Think. Not. Working? Now. Working?”

Speaking of, Martin’s head was about to tear itself apart. “Okay, you couldn’t for whatever reason. Fine. I’m-” A buzzing came from his pocket. Tim was calling him. “Oh, shit, wait, let me take this. Sorry.” He pressed the answer button. “Hello?”

From the other end, he could hear Tim over heavy static. “Hey, it’s me. Bad news. No dice on the Lukas place, and Jon and Sasha are not happy about it. How’s it going over there?”

Martin paused for a moment, eyes glued to the panel. “Oh, y’know. Getting work done?”

“Great! We’ll be back soon to figure out your ghost problem. Also, wow, the sound quality is fucked just being outside of the place.”

“Yeah, there must be an area around that it affects.”

The sound from Tim’s end became more muffled, as if he had covered the receiver with his hand. After a bit, he said, “Oh, Jon wanted to reiterate that you should avoid contact until further notice. Don’t want you getting replaced by a doppelganger or something-”

Jon spoke from somewhere off to the side. “I never said-”

“We all know you meant it, though!” Jon mumbled something Martin couldn’t hear, then fell silent. “Anyway, see you in a bit!”

Martin’s throat ran dry. His voice came out hoarse as he responded, “Yeah, see you soon.” The other end cut off, and Martin quietly placed the phone back into his pocket. The panel loomed in front of him, making his blood run cold.

“Hello?”

He jumped, the tension in his muscles releasing like a spring. “Y-Yes, I’m still here. Don’t worry.” Keeping his voice even, Martin reached toward the dial and froze. “Hey. Do you promise you’re not going to hurt me? Or the others?”

“Yes. Please? Help.”

Swallowing hard, Martin grabbed the dial. “I’m really sorry, but I have to go. I don’t know who you are, but I’ll come back soon once I know more. I promise.”

“No. Please? Please? Help. Me. Help. Me. H-”

Martin turned the dial, and the room went silent.

--

By the time Tim, Sasha, and Jon returned, Martin was working on the front steps, doing his best to use an old clipboard as a flat surface. His hand was shaking too much to write, but it was enough to look busy.

“Tim said things didn’t go well?” he said, not lifting his head as the three approached.

Jon snorted disdainfully and sat on one of the lower steps to Martin’s left. “A person did come to the door this time, but of course the place we're trying to get into, some sort of storage building, is ‘only open to family members’.” Martin could see Jon using air quotes in his periphery. "Now I’m sure they ignored us yesterday and hoped we wouldn’t come back.”

Tim and Sasha sat on either side of Jon. Tim leaned back and settled his elbows on one of the upper steps. “I could’ve tried my usual method of entry, but the lady who answered us could’ve killed me with that look of hers. Froze my heart solid.”

“I don’t think anyone in that place would be responsive, no. Also, Martin?” She turned to face him. He kept his head down and raised his eyebrows. “Did anything happen when you went back inside? To grab your things?”

“What? Oh, nothing much. It… it did speak to me again. Said to go up.”

Sasha’s stare bore into him. “Martin… did you do what it said?”

Martin’s head shot up. “No! No, I mean, you all said not to, so I didn’t.”

“You’ve been avoiding eye contact, and when Tim called you it was full of static. Did you go upstairs?” she asked, her expression curious and composed.

Tim and Jon turned to stare at him in alarm. Martin’s eyes bounced between all three of them.

“I-I didn’t, I swear! It just-”

Jon raised an eyebrow at him, and Martin’s brain stumbled to a halt. Was there a point to lying? Why had he jumped to it so quickly?

“I… I thought it might be a person.” From there, he couldn’t stop his mouth from running off without him. “And they said they were a person, and I know what you said about me being snatched up, but I think they need help, and I think I know how to help them, but Tim’s call freaked me out so-”

“Martin!” Sasha exclaimed, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. It’s okay. We’re not mad.”

Jon grimaced. “Just-”

“Please don’t,” Sasha said, putting a finger up to Jon’s face. “It was… not a smart thing to do, obviously, but it’s over now. Come on. Tell us what happened.”

Glancing behind him, Martin let his shoulders sag. “I talked to them for a while. They don’t have a lot of words, but when Tim messed with the panel, it allowed them to communicate through the echoes.”

Sasha and Jon turned their attention to Tim, and Martin looked at him apologetically. Tim gritted his teeth and said, “Martin didn’t have any answers on what the things do, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to-”

“To what, fiddle with delicate instruments that help stop ships from crashing?” Jon asked, crossing his arms.

“Look, we all knew they probably had nothing to do with a big light spinning around! And I could’ve sworn I left it in its original position,” he said, looking up at the lighthouse with uncertainty.

Martin shook his head. “It’s a dial I’m not directly instructed to touch, and it was definitely wrong from what I remember. When I turned it to the correct position the voice stopped, and after turning it back, they seemed panicked? Like it was unpleasant to be cut off.” Martin felt his chest twinge in guilt.

“They said they weren’t a ghost, but they’re not the lighthouse, either. Not now, anyway? That part was unclear. They wanted me to do something with the upstairs panel, to help them somehow. I was going to try, but then Tim called and said the doppelganger thing, so I turned everything back to normal. They… they were really upset.”

Once Martin finished, the other three shared a long, intense look he couldn’t parse, then stood. Sasha said, “Give us a minute.”

He nodded, pulling his knees close. They walked off toward the cliff’s edge. They were talking animatedly, but Martin could hear nothing of their conversation. With no energy left, returning to work was a fool’s errand. The familiarity no longer brought comfort, and his thoughts kept returning to the panel he had worked at every day for months.

Had he been hurting someone this whole time? If so, did they just want his help, or did they hate him for what he had been involved in? Had Peter put him in charge of keeping something dangerous locked up? Is that why the list had to be completed every day? If he had failed it just once, would something terrible have happened? Or-

“Okay.” Martin shook himself out of the panic spiral and looked up. Sasha stood directly in front of him with Tim and Jon following behind. No visible disappointment or anger from her or the other two. That was a plus. “We have a plan for our next step. Hopefully, it will lead to some answers about whatever that thing may be.”

“It’s more of an idea than a plan. I will say, I argued against it,” Tim said, plopping himself next to Martin with a weird grin. “Also, my estimate was a bit off.”

“What?” Martin glanced at the other two in confusion. “What are you thinking?”

Sasha smiled the calm and confident sort of smile Martin knew was meant to be reassuring, but Jon’s sheepish look away all but undermined the effort.

--

With the voice temporarily silenced, Martin finished the rest of his day indoors and completed his panel list, bile rising in his throat as he did so. He left the dial untouched.

Sleep did not come easily that night. Between what had happened and what was to come, all the possible consequences clattered around his skull in a restless cacophony. He wanted a plan. A plan required information, which he wouldn’t be getting that night. There was no point in brainstorming when he had no idea what he would be working with. He couldn’t sleep without a plan. So he spent his night falling in and out of sleep, the line between thoughts and dreams melding into a slurry of stress.

He spent the next work day in a mental fog, split between completing his duties and planning for the night ahead. Supplies, meeting spots, goals, contingencies, crude drawings of the target, the three researchers were a blur as they plotted. At one point he was left alone as the others scouted their target location, and he fought the urge to run upstairs. There would be time for it, but not yet.

When they returned, Martin replaced his glasses to hide the fact that he had been napping at the kitchen table.

“Taking a break?” Jon walked in to hang up his jacket.

“Yeah, just a quick one. Lots of things to keep in my head today. How was the place?”

“Good. No real security as far as we could tell. It might as well be a backyard shed.”

It was said so matter-of-factly that Martin had to scoff. “Is this really something you’ve done before?”

Jon sputtered for a bit. “It’s not something we’ve made a habit of! It isn't as if I drove into town planning on this sort of thing! But sometimes there’s an abandoned flat or closed down shop, and we need to get into them. This place will just be a bit more… active.” Clearing his throat, Jon sat at the table across from him. “Besides, this matter calls for urgent action. If you have your doubts you’re still welcome to excuse yourself, but we’ve made up our minds.”

Martin sat for a moment, picking at his nails. “No. No, I want to help. Things are wrong here. I knew that before you all started poking around, but I’d lived with it so long. I guess I just got used to it?”

“But you told us, and that’s what mattered.” Jon took a deep breath. “I understand if you’re afraid, but I can promise that ignoring it won’t do anything. I’ve definitely tried.” He laughed weakly and rubbed the back of his neck, then settled himself. “These things don’t go away when you stop looking at them.”

Silence hung in the air after the final echoes faded.

Martin spoke again, slowly. “The things you study, are they all like this? All incorporeal and mind-bendy?”

“For the most part, yes. There is a subsection of… beings that I would consider more physical, more concrete, but they don’t generally fall under our group’s purview. I doubt we’ll be running into them. That particular category is notoriously hard to track down because they know it’s more difficult to hide in plain sight, if that makes sense. Things like the-” he waved a hand vaguely upward. “Like them. They can hide by staying quiet. Others aren’t so lucky. If one can’t blend in, it’s better to avoid people altogether.”

Before he could stop himself, Martin said, “Unless they could, I dunno, make themselves look like people!” His laugh was hollow to his own ears. What would possess him to even bring that up?

Jon stared at him as if he had turned inside out. “...I suppose, though I don’t think that’s a problem here.” Shoulders tensing, he leaned toward Martin. “Unless you’ve remembered something else? Something strange in town?”

“No, nothing. Just another thing to be irrationally paranoid about, I guess.” The lie went down smooth, and Martin cursed himself for making it necessary.

This seemed to relax Jon enough for him to back off. “Good. Best to focus on tonight. If things go well, we could have a resolution to all of this in a matter of days.” He lifted his hands, seemed to forget what he had planned to do with them, and laced his fingers together instead. “And don’t worry. We have everything under control.”

--

Martin returned home after swinging by the general store for extra food stuff and batteries. Dinner was a quick affair, and his mother did not require time outside in the clear evening. After she was settled for the night, he went to his room.

On his bed, he laid a flashlight, some old knit hats, a new first aid kid, and a crowbar he had found in the storage room. Once he’d shoved everything into an old backpack, he stared at his phone, willing it to give him a signal that everything was called off. By 11 pm, he had elected to take a short nap. A little before 3 am, he had changed into a jacket that softened his movements and was walking out the front door.

“This is really fucking stupid,” he said, starting his trek up the cliffside. This wasn’t his first time walking on the path after sundown, late work nights had seen to that. He appreciated having a proper flashlight to lead the way, rather than relying on the weak light of his phone. He would have to remember that for the future. Into the darkness surrounding him, he said aloud, “This is bad, right? I shouldn’t be doing this.”

No reassurance or agreement came from the night. “It felt so reasonable when they explained it, and now I’m trundling up to town with a crowbar. ‘We have everything under control’. How is this having things under control? We’re going to get arrested, maybe worse. Sure, yes, I’d like to know what’s going on, but-”

But he might’ve subjected a person to something horrible, and if he didn’t do something soon, it would eat at him until he died and became a lighthouse-haunting ghost himself. If he had to do something reckless and stupid, at least he had others with more experience in doing reckless and stupid things. Breaking into old haunted houses felt less intense than their current objective, but according to his co-conspirators the logistics were about the same.

He reached the treeline, turning off his flashlight before the brush cleared. The town was pitch dark under the cloud cover save for sparse corner lights keeping the night at bay. That, and the intermittent shine of the lighthouse that scanned over his head like a searchlight.

Martin took the long way around, keeping to the edges in an attempt to avoid anyone like himself that might be out in the dead of night. Before reaching his ultimate destination, he ducked into an alleyway where three figures sat against the brick wall. One of them, Tim if he had to guess, waved and pointed across the street, back toward the trees.

Through the dark, Martin could just barely see the outline of a short structure with a flat top, nestled into the foliage. Around the property was a wire fence, just tall enough to be worrisome.

The three stood, adjusting their belongings. Martin handed them one knit hat each. Jon grunted and put his on to cover all but the very ends of his hair.

In the tiniest whisper he could manage, Martin said, “I have to repeat that I would like to not be fired.”

“That could change depending on what we find,” Jon said with a smirk. “And I assume the regular vertigo isn’t exactly a thrilling experience.”

Martin crinkled his nose. “No, no it isn’t. Not that you would know.” Martin bit his tongue, shocked at himself.

Tom snorted, and Jon squinted at Tim in confusion. Martin’s mouth quirked up. He continued, swerving away from his bad decision. “Yeah sure, I’d like to not be dealing with it, but I’d prefer to get that fixed and keep my job?”

Jon gave Tim a suspicious glare. “Of course. We’ve taken every precaution.” He adjusted his gloves and focused back on Martin. “You’re more than welcome to not be involved in the act, but you’ll have to make your decision now.” Jon looked at him, waiting.

He had wanted a way out, and Jon had one for him. All he had to do was take it, but the thought made his tongue dry. They wouldn’t need him, not really. He would bungle it up and find himself in jail, or worse. “Is there any reason I should go in the first place? Me specifically?”

Jon thought for a moment. “You have your own questions. Are you prepared to go looking for answers?” He crossed his arms and held Martin’s gaze.

The sheer expectation in Jon’s eyes hit Martin like a truck, and Martin knew his response. “You know what, fine. Yeah, I’m going.”

Letting out a breath, Jon smiled. “Good. I’d expect nothing less after the stunt you pulled today.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘good to go’ all around?” Sasha asked, slipping a pack over her shoulders and eyeing them both.

Martin nodded, the red tips of his ears quickly hidden under a hat. He mentally addressed the circumstances that had led him so rapidly to the point of breaking into his boss’ family storage house. What day was it, Wednesday? Barely five days and he’s possibly robbing a place with these people?

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Tim smiled, his teeth shining. “It’ll be fine. Just follow their lead. I’ll be out here keeping watch so you idiots get out safe.” Despite everything, it was oddly reassuring.

As he snuck off with Jon and Sasha, Martin felt a ridiculous warmth in his chest. The situation remained the same, he told himself. They were climbing a fence in the dead of night, on their way to do something incredibly illegal. Being in a group referred to as ‘you idiots’ shouldn’t have made him happy in any way.

Well, fuck. It was nice to be included all the same.

[bltngames]

Review: Lloyd the Monkey 2

Back before TSSZ News imploded, I would often do write-ups for many of the games at the Sonic Amateur Games Expo (SAGE). SAGE is an annual online expo that I started all the way back in September of 2000. I personally ran SAGE for over a year, and remained deeply hands on for at least another two years as it continued to grow. The main focus of SAGE was primarily to showcase fangames, in particular Sonic fangames, but the event never limited itself to any one type of game. It's never been uncommon to see original games appear in the lineup -- especially now, given the modern indie scene. 

One such original game was Lloyd the Monkey, a bit of a strange game, written in Javascript of all things and run through a webpage. That by itself was notable enough to stand out from most of the games at SAGE, but Lloyd was also a completely original product created by someone who possibly seemed to be young and new to game development. Making games is no easy feat, especially when they’re written in Javascript and you’re doing tons of original artwork yourself. Taken as that whole, the game impressed me, even if it was more than a little rough around the edges.

Now we have Lloyd the Monkey 2, written in Unity. The developer, Noah Meyer, sent me a Steam key in order to review the game. Up top, I just want to say how I think it’s kind of brave to go all the way in putting the game on Steam and everything. It felt like just a few years ago, newer indie developers sort of had to work up to releasing their game on Steam, usually getting a few releases under their belt first. People view games differently when they’re asked to pay for them, and critics may not be so willing to let circumstances influence their review. It can be a harsh world out there for a beginner.

Lloyd 2 is a much bigger, more ambitious game than the first. Whereas the original Lloyd didn’t even have sound effects, Lloyd 2 introduces voiced cutscenes, some of which are full-on animated cinematics. Quality is about what you would expect -- I would assume the developer sought out friends and acquaintances to voice characters in Lloyd 2, leading to wildly varying audio quality due to differences in recording hardware. Lloyd himself sounds fine, but some of the other characters are a bit quiet, while others have clear background noise. Nothing I heard was unlistenable, however. 

The story is also a little hard to follow. Not much is done to refresh our memories as to who anyone is or what’s going on, we’re just kind of thrown into the middle of things and turned loose. On one hand, it’s nice that the story doesn’t slow the pace of the gameplay down too much. On the other, you’re given a map screen with different objectives to clear but there’s very little context as to what you’re doing or why. At one point I made my way to the end of a Power Plant level only to confront what appeared to be an evil monkey. Despite a whole cutscene involving a conversation between four or five different people, this evil monkey never seemed to say a single word. He just stood there in total silence with a sinister smile. Then I killed him.

I suppose maybe I missed something, however. With greater ambitions comes a number of unfortunate bugs in Lloyd 2, one of which happened not long after our monkey and his crew landed on planet Grecia. I entered what appeared to be a castle to talk to the Queen, but I think the game expected me to take a lower route, where I was apparently meant to overhear the Queen making secret preparations before my arrival. Instead, I took the direct route straight to her chambers, and triggered the cutscene with Lloyd standing in front of her while ominous music played, even though the camera was still clearly focused on the next floor down. I apparently still had some amount of control, because midway through her dialog I touched a teleporter that sent me to the game’s map screen before she was done talking. If that cutscene was meant to give context to what I was doing, I didn’t get a chance to see it.

That was one of the more harmless bugs in my time spent playing Lloyd 2. Harder to ignore was the fact that, within the first 30 seconds of getting control, I soft locked the game. Lloyd 2 opens with a short prologue section where you play as a man with black hair. If you decide to ignore the obvious and go left instead of right, you quickly run out of solid level tiles and begin falling indefinitely. Later areas feature invisible walls presumably to prevent this exact scenario, but for whatever reason they weren’t implemented in the prologue. 

For the most part, Lloyd 2 seems to be a co-op game. Many levels see Lloyd teamed up with an alien princess named Lura, with gameplay vaguely reminiscent of Mega Man X crossed with the tag mechanic from Sonic Mania’s Encore Mode. At the touch of a button, you can switch between the Swordsman Lloyd and the more projectile-based Lura… assuming your partner is still alive, I guess. While playing alone, your partner is controlled by artificial intelligence, but it’s incredibly basic and prone to accidentally committing suicide. That wouldn’t be such a big deal (considering Tails in Sonic 2 never acted in self-preservation either), but once your partner dies, they stay dead. Your only option to bring them back is to either restart the stage or hope another cutscene triggers, since they’ll magically spring back to life in order to say their dialog (though, again, usually only seconds before they fall back into the next death pit). 

This might not be much of a problem, depending on your viewpoint. There’s not much incentive to switch between Lloyd and Lura, so once you pick whoever you think works the best, chances are, you’ll just stick with them. You do unlock special team-up attacks after beating each boss, but this just reinforces the idea that Lloyd the Monkey 2 is meant to be experienced with another person holding a second controller, as most of the team-up attacks require both characters to do something specific that the single player artificial intelligence usually can’t interpret. Regardless, the team-up attacks never seem strictly necessary to progress, so they can be safely ignored if you’re playing solo.

I understand this is a pretty negative review I’ve written here. Lloyd the Monkey 2 aims high and tries to the best of its ability to get there. I assume it was a struggle to get even this far. Making games is hard work, and like any skill, takes practice to get good at. Just because this is Lloyd the Monkey 2 doesn’t mean Noah Meyer, its developer, is automatically an expert. I'm sure he's doing his best, and, quality aside, this game has a lot of heart put into it. This isn’t something cheap, quick, or lazy. It’s really, genuinely trying, and that matters. 

I’ve said a few times here and there that I see pieces of myself in the releases of Lloyd the Monkey, and I still see them here. I remember, for an early SAGE event, I was working on a fangame project of mine called The Fated Hour. I was probably already a year or two or maybe even three deep in the game by now, and after a lot of hyping up the community, this was their first chance to play the game. I spent months and months coding this iteration of my engine, and by my standards back then, it seemed like bleeding edge technology. I felt like I was going to blow everyone's minds. 

It was a mess. Few were impressed. Even worse, the game straight up didn’t even run correctly for some people. What followed was multiple patches, and even rebuilding some entire areas from scratch. My ambitions got the better of me and I unintentionally cut corners -- not because I was trying to cheap out on doing proper development, but just because I simply didn’t know any better. I may have done the best I knew how to do, but I was running faster than my body could keep up with and I stumbled.

When I see things like the missing invisible walls in the prologue, or how easily partner characters commit suicide by accident, I think back to that demo for The Fated Hour, and how I've been in this exact place myself. There’s even a side quest in Lloyd 2 where you have to track a floating girl as she drifts through a level -- there was a nearly identical set piece in The Fated Hour, where you were chasing a robot. It’s a very strange feeling to see something like that and think, “I’ve been here before.” Like looking through a window at a younger version of yourself.

It’s true that I stumbled, but I didn’t let that stop me. I learned by doing. I kept going. Three years later, a game of mine was featured on TV, leading to more than a million downloads. The mistakes of past projects did not weigh me down and I soldiered onwards, newfound knowledge in hand. 

So where does that leave us with Lloyd the Monkey 2, then. Well, it's not exactly a game to compete with Super Mario Odyssey, but given the circumstances in which it was created, I don't think that's necessarily the point. As a learning experience clearly made for the fun of its own creation, I think it's a success. And who knows what awaits in the years to come?

[ananalyses]

Remember that thing about eyes?

Specifically, Harukawa’s note on how checking how bright or dark their eyes are gives a guide to ‘a character’s mental state’, or how ‘tainted’ they are? The little passage suddenly jumped to my mind when rewatching the recent episode, and I dug out volume five of the manga again to read the afterword again, and while I can safely say it makes everything a bit more interesting, I want to talk about the arcade scene…

What I’d noticed was the little change from here:

To here:

In the afterword, Harukawa points to a few things that dark, ‘tainted’ eyes suggest (I’m referring to the Yen Press translation of volume 5 here, just because I have it to hand): that a character is dangerous, their ‘psyche’ is ‘stained’, they are unable to ‘go back’, and that Port Mafia members in particular have ‘deadened’ eyes. An exception to the rule, per se, is Kyouka, whose eyes grow brighter as the story progresses and her character changes. However, Dazai’s is also an unusual case, as his eyes seem to switch back and forth all the time. In the present timeline, it shows a very conflicted mentality, as he is genuinely trying to become a ‘good person’ who helps the vulnerable, but cannot seem to quite separate himself from his dark, tormenting past. Two selves exist and are meshed together in the same man, and play off of each other.

Still, even the younger Dazai occasionally hints at a similar internal conflict, between acting in the manner the Mafia has trained him to, the way his mind defaults to at this stage, and another, different instinct. I hesitate to say ‘moral’, since we know that the concept of right and wrong is fairly skewed to Dazai, but there’s something…else, in his mind, that pushes against Mori, against the Mafia. The anime has consistently drawn upon this little, telling detail of Harukawa’s, in adapting the manga, and it looks to be doing the same with the novels, but what changes in these mere seconds, in this encounter with the Sheep members?

In the first instance, Dazai takes his usual stance, of observing the situation, needling at both the two Sheep members and Chuuya to see how they might be manipulated in his favour - fairly typical Dazai, and the sort of conniving mentality we know Mori had instilled in him. His eyes are appropriately deadened.

Hearing their bickering, and in particular the young Sheep, apparently his subordinates, impressing upon Chuuya his ‘responsibility’ to protect them as a powerful gifted, despite their own recklessness, Dazai makes a decision. He contacts Mori, and has the hostages released, and certainly not thanks to his magnanimous disposition. He could have had any number of reasons for this, whether it was that the Sheep were an obstacle (which surrendering the hostages would solve), that he wanted to see how Chuuya would react with nothing else forcing him to assist the Mafia, or that he already could guess what Chuuya would do. Nevertheless, Dazai says “let’s go”, the Sheep get cocky and insist Chuuya come along with them instead, and - crucially - he refuses.

Which is where things get a little…odd. Dazai actually defends Chuuya’s decision, stating that how he chooses to use his incredible power is his prerogative, and his alone. He seems to imply the Sheep are insulting Chuuya’s ability to make his own choices, by trying to force his hand. As such he shows a degree of genuine respect for the latter as an individual, which has not been expressed nearly as clearly before now. It also puts that throwaway exchange before their fight with Lovecraft, about giving Chuuya the final choice on whether to use Corruption, into a whole new context.

Again, we cannot tell exactly what is driving Dazai here, but his eyes have a clear glimmer of light in them. Whatever it is, his reasons aren’t so cold, strategic…Mafia-like, perhaps. It might be real respect, a sense of camaraderie, even compassion, for a boy he’s found he can relate to (I think their games, in the arcade, and their ‘bet’, go some way to show this - it is childish play) or something else. But Dazai felt an unusual need to defend Chuuya.

And Chuuya goes with him. He is essentially free, and he still chooses to go with Dazai. They leave the arcade with that repeated shot of them walking side-by-side, contrasting the scene in episode 1, where Dazai is hopping along the raised wall, while Chuuya walks on the ground. This seems to be the moment their relationship became a ‘partnership’ between equals. Whether he left with the ‘Port Mafia’, or just with ‘Dazai’ I can’t exactly tell yet - but I hope the answer is on its way.

Also, another detail I noticed in Harukawa’s afterword was that brightness in the eyes indicates a character who has ‘been given a chance by the story to still “go back”. In other words, they are not too far gone just yet. Someone who still has that light:

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Hi, I was told by someone that I shouldn't use "NB" to refer to myself or others as nonbinary individual because "NB" already means "non-black". Is this, like... true? I always preferred using it over "nonbinary" or "enby"

Lee says:

The acronym “NB” does already stand for non-Black in some contexts, yes. But NB can also stand for non-binary in other contexts.

As someone who is both Black and non-binary, I’ve seen it used both ways and I’m usually able to figure out which meaning of the acronym is being used depending on the context.

Of course you should clarify how you’re using the term if the context doesn’t make it evident, but I don’t think that either group has exclusive claim over the acronym- it’s okay to use it to stand for either thing.

Take New Brunswick, for example. The postal abbreviation for the province is NB. Should we be throwing hands with all the people in New Brunswick and the post office because of that? 

There are lots of times when two communities independently come up with an acronym to describe something and it just so happens that those acronyms overlap. Does that mean that one group is “stealing” the acronym or shouldn’t get to use it? 

I get the old western movie vibes from this kind of conversation like “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” but in this situation we aren’t two groups of people in the same town fighting for space, we’re in two separate towns which have the different names but the same nickname, and one town is suing the other because they said they came up with the nickname first so they get to copyright it, and the other town says they came up with their nickname independently and it has a completely different meaning so they should still get to use it. And the people living in the two towns are just like “Ok we get it, it’s slightly confusing, let’s just,,, move on with our lives because neither town is using the nickname in a way that’s harming the other!”

[Edit: turns out there are two New Brunswicks, one in Canada which is where I was referring to and one in New Jersey that I forgot about bc... it’s Jersey... (I’m from NY so i legally have to say that) but this is actually a good example of exactly what I’m talking about y’all! Multiple things, same name, it’s okay!]

So if you think that the way you’re using the “nickname” (ie acronym) is confusing because you don’t think the context of the post makes it clear whether you’re referring to non-Black or non-binary people, just… spell it out as the words “non-Black” or “non-binary” to introduce the term. Then feel free to use an acronym if you’d like to. 

Enby is a shortened version of the word non-binary (pronounced “enn-bee” because it’s how you’d say the acronym NB) but there are non-binary people who don’t like being called “enby” because they feel it’s infantilizing for some reason. 

I guess maybe they see it as analogous to the childhood form of the gender, like girl/boy/enby versus the adult form of the gender, like woman/man/non-binary person, but I don’t really know because I also haven’t seen a big push for it to explicitly be recognized as an age-defined term that’s explicitly meant to be used for younger people and exclude adults so I think it’s just the connotation of the word (as mentioned in a 2014 post on our blog here).

Some people are proposing trying to create different abbreviations for non-binary instead of using the NB acronym or enby version, but of course then you run into the “nobody knows what you’re talking about” issue because there aren’t any standardized abbreviations the whole community is aware of and supports.

But yeah, as a Black non-binary person myself, I don’t think it’s honestly a big deal because it doesn’t hurt us in any way that I can think of. It’s not like NB is a slur or offensive word referring to the Black community that non-binary people have decided to appropriate as a self-descriptor for their own identity, it’s just a way to say the phrase “non-Black”. 

And while using “NB” to mean non-Black has definitely been a thing in both academic writing and community discourse, people haven’t been using it as a hashtag on a large scale. So nonbinary people dominating the content posted in the NB hashtag hasn’t erased our organizing or our conversation on the topic or suppressed our voices in some way because that was never a particularly popular hashtag in the Black community to organize with, so it isn’t like the non-binary community came by and “colonized” the tag.

The fact that a different community uses the same acronym to mean something else doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the ways that non-Black folks discriminate against and oppress Black folks anymore.

I do have to say I find the usage of both NBPOC (non-Black people of color) and NBPOC (Non-binary people of color) is more of a potentially irksome overlap as NBPOC is a tag that was used more often with the original race-related meaning, but overall I feel like there’s a lot of things that we could be doing to uplift the Black community (and to specifically support Black non-binary folks) that is a better use of our time than trying to put the genie back in the bottle with the gender-related NB acronym because it’s so widely used at this point and trying to undo that doesn’t actually provide a vast tangible benefit that I can see. So why spend our activism or mental and emotional energy fighting over this issue?

This is just my opinion, as one Black non-binary blogger, so I can’t speak for the whole Black and non-binary community in its entirety. But that’s the point; there isn’t a huge consensus on this topic in the Black community and one person can’t speak for all of us about what we believe because we have different beliefs! Some folks have strong opinions on the NB acronym on either side of the argument about whether it should be used, but even more people (like pretty much everyone else in my family IRL, especially the Black adults) simply don’t care or think it’s particularly important.

Saying “listen to Black people about Black issues!” is the right concept in a way- it applies when the majority of the marginalized group of people is on the same page about the thing, and it helps to recenter the lived experiences and need of the marginalized group in question instead of speaking for them or over them, but what do you do when you’ve got three different Black people who are all equally affected by the issue telling you three different things about the topic and then three more who couldn’t care less?

Sometimes you can look at the other opinions the person holds and see if what they believe with generally matches what you believe and see if they’re informed on the topic to decide if you think their opinion should hold more weight than the other people’s opinion, but there are people who will have great takes on a lot of issues but just don’t get it right on That One Thing, so what then? Usually people end up just listening to the Black person who is telling them what they already agree with.

Hypothetical: You’re not part of a marginalized group. Within the marginalized group, there are two groups of people, both equally affected by the thing in question, with one group of people asserting opinion A and one group of people asserting opinion B.

Assertion A says “X thing is harmful, do Y thing instead!”, and assertion B says “X thing isn’t harmful, and I have no issues with Y alternative either”, then I’d follow the wishes of group A if you genuinely can’t tell which situation is occurring and don’t know if the thing is harmful.

That’s because listening to group A means you potentially avoid a negative outcome whereas group B believes nothing negative will occur either way so you’re hedging your bets to do the thing that’ll create the least harm.

So if the alternative Y isn’t bad then it doesn’t hurt to switch to it and avoid potentially creating harm. But if group A doesn’t propose an alternative Y to the X thing, or there’s an issue with alternative Y that makes it problematic itself, then it gets confusing again.

Following that logic, if you’re NB (as in not-Black lol) and genuinely can’t figure out what you believe, when in doubt, you can just spell out the words “non-binary” and “non-Black” instead of abbreviating it because typing out a few extra characters avoids the whole issue altogether!

So even though I personally believe it’s fine to use NB either way and that the whole fuss is kind of silly when you put it perspective with the actual issues we should be advocating for, it’s fine if you want to use an alternative acronym or abbreviation to refer to non-binary people. (Followers, feel free to suggests alternatives that you’ve heard of!)

It’s also true that replacing the term “non-binary” with an acronym isn’t necessary in the first place; you can just write “non-binary” or make a shortcut on your phone (this will expand your acronym or abbreviation of choice into the entire term) if you don’t like wasting time typing.

[erinptah]

Super Drags review (tl;dr Show Good)

The post where I do my best to spread the Good News, that there exists a saucy gay drag-queen magical-girl animated comedy and everyone should watch it.

Okay, not everyone -- I'll give some caveats at the end -- but definitely a heck of a lot more people than Netflix has bothered to advertise it to.

Look at this! Why did nobody tell me about this??

What is Super Drags?

Fast facts:

It's a 1-season, 5-episode adult animated comedy series, released in November 2018

Here's the official page, with a free-to-view trailer

It packs more explicit, unashamed queerness into those 5 episodes than any other cartoon I can think of

The only possible competitor would be if you took the whole 5000-episode run of Steven Universe and pared it down to a supercut of Just The Gay Parts

This in spite of being produced in Brazil, which (in my broad understanding, as a total non-authority on the subject) is more oppressively, dangerously homophobic than the US

The original is in Portuguese

There is an English dub, fabulously voiced by contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race

It's wrapped in "for adults only!" warnings, not because the content is any less child-friendly than (say) your Bojacks Horsemen or your Ricks and Mortys, but because Brazilian authorities tried to get it shut down on the grounds of this much gay being Harmful For Children

It was (heartbreakingly) not renewed for a second season

Here's a promo video, in which the main characters (Portuguese, with subtitles) play Drag Race judges for Shangela, who ends up voicing Scarlet in English.

And here's a beautiful flashy music video of the big musical number! (Also Portuguese, no subtitles, but the melody and the visuals stand on their own.)

Plot and worldbuilding stuff!

The elevator pitch is "What if Charlie's Angels, but also drag queens, with superpowers, because magical-girl transformations?"

In this universe, all LGBTQ people have magical energy. The Big Bad is an evil magical-drag-queen nemesis who tries to drain our energy for her own purposes. It's like if Ursula from The Little Mermaid was a first-season Sailor Moon villain.

...sidenote, in case you were worried, the representation isn't "cis gay men and nobody else." There's a butch lesbian in the recurring cast, a genderfluid person (in that specific word!) as a one-off love interest, and all the ensemble scenes are wonderful collages of different races, body types, and gender presentations.

Our heroes also fight non-magical everyday homophobes, who get written with scathing realism.

The moment I knew the show wasn't pulling any punches was in the first episode, where a newscaster complains about being Silenced by the Law of Political Correctness, then chirps "however, we have a special guest who is thankfully above the law!"

According to the reviews I've found from Brazilian viewers, it's also pitch-perfect when it comes to local queer culture, community dynamics, slang and speech patterns, even memes. All of which flies right over my head, so here's a post (with no-context spoilers) about one viewer's favorite details.

The handful of reaction posts on Tumblr have a dramatic split between "Brazilian viewers fiercely defending the show as culturally-accurate, uplifting, and brave in a terrifying political moment" and "American viewers complaining that the show is problematic because it's a comedy about drag queens with no perfect role models and lots of sex jokes."

As the Super Drags tell their nemesis (and this is also in the first episode): "How dare you try to turn the LGBTQXYZ community against each other? We do enough of that on our own!"

In between missions, our girls work sitcom retail jobs and deal with other everyday problems. All of which are written in amazingly nuanced and thoughtful ways for a show that also features "defeating an orgy monster with a lip-sync battle."

Detailed character stuff!

Our heroes are Color Coded For Your Convenience!

The Super Drags themselves go by "she" in-uniform, and a lot of the time when out of it. Like the Sailor Starlights, only more so. I'll roll with that.

In blue: Safira Cyan, or Ralph by day, an excitable college-age kid who's built like a football player and squees like a fangirl. (She's an anime fan in the original, and for some reason all the otaku references were replaced in the dub, but you can see them in the subtitles.)

Ralph lives with her younger sister (they play video games together!) and their dad, comes out to them mid-series, and is very shippable with another young guy who starts out reciting the homophobic beliefs he was raised with but whose heart clearly isn't in it.

Safira's weapon is a classic magical-girl wand that casts protective force-fields. Which are shaped like condoms. Because of course.

In yellow: Lemon Chiffon, aka Patrick, the oldest of the group and generally the smartest/most strategic. In most cases, the other two treat her as the de facto team leader -- unless she pushes it too far.

By day she's a single guy with thick thighs and thinning hair, who has some body-image insecurities on the dating scene. And this show has Things To Say about unrealistic beauty standards within the community...not to mention, about masc guys who look down on anyone too flaming or femme because straight people disapprove.

Lemon's weapon is a fluffy boa that can be used as a whip or a lasso, especially when there's a bondage joke to be made.

In red: Scarlet Carmesim, also Donizete, the loudest and most aggressive teammate with the most cutting insults, who refuses to suppress that attitude in an attempt to appease racists. (But will give it a shot when trying not to get fired.)

Donny still lives in her religious/homophobic mom's apartment, and I'm pretty sure it's because neither of them can afford to move out. Her rock-solid sense of fierce self-confidence is the reason it doesn't bring her down.

Scarlet's weapon is a fan that she uses to throw shade. Yeah, you knew that was coming.

The Charlie to these angels is Champagne, who runs operations from a cool magitech compound and breaks the fourth wall at the end to petition for viewers' support in getting a second season.

...we let her down, folks :(

So here's a thing. The show never draws a sharp line between "people who become drag queens because it's a way they're driven to express themselves as gay men" and "people who become drag queens because they were trans women all along." That's consistent with how South American LGBT+ culture works. (Again: best of my knowledge, not personally an authority on this, etc etc.)

Many of the characters, including Champagne, never describe themselves in ways that translate to one of our sharply-defined Anglo-USian identity categories. And I'm not going to try to impose any English labels on them here.

But I can say (in contrast to Safira, Lemon, and Scarlet), Champagne never switches out of her "drag" name/voice/presentation, not even in the most candid off-duty scenes, and still has the same bustline when naked in the tub. Make of that what you will.

You Should Watch This Show

If you have a Netflix subscription, watch Super Drags!

If you ever do a Netflix free trial month in the future, make a note to yourself to watch Super Drags!

It's one of their original productions, so there's no risk of missing your chance because the license expired. But it's absolutely not getting the promotion it deserves. Which means potentially interested viewers won't find it, which means Netflix will think there's no interest, which means they'll keep not promoting it...etc etc etc.

No idea if there's any chance of getting it un-canceled, but maybe we can at least convince them to release it on DVD.

And the sheer gutsiness it took for a group of Brazilian creators to produce this show in the first place -- that deserves to be rewarded with your attention.

In spite of various anti-discrimination laws that sound good on paper, the country has serious problems with homophobia, transphobia, and anti-LGBT violence (warning, article has a violent image which is only partly blurred).

Maybe the creators could've gotten a second season if they made this one softer, less sexually-explicit, more restrained...but honestly? I bet that wouldn't have helped.

Consider Danger & Eggs, an Amazon original cartoon. It was made in the US, thoroughly child-friendly, and restricts its LGBT+ representation to things like "characters go to a Pride celebration...where nobody ever names or describes the quality they're proud of."

And it didn't get renewed past the first season either.

(Note: it had a trans woman showrunner and a queer-heavy creative staff, so I blame all that restraint on executive meddling, not the creators themselves. The showrunner even liked the tweet of my review that complains about it.)

So there's something very satisfying about how Super Drags went all-out, balls-to-the-wall (sometimes literally), all the rep explicit and unapologetic, packing every 25-minute episode with all kinds of queer content that would be censored or muted elsewhere -- but here it's exaggerated and celebrated and just keeps coming.

(...as do jokes like that, and I'm not sorry.)

Okay, there are a few legitimate reasons to not watch this show

Some caveats.

None of these things are Objectively Bad Problems that the show itself should be shamed for...but maybe they're genuinely not your cup of tea.

It does have actual Adult Content beyond "the existence of gay people." This show loves to swing barely-clothed cartoon genitalia in your face. There is, as mentioned, an orgy monster. If that kind of humor is going to bother you too much to appreciate the rest of the show, give it a pass.

I wasn't kidding about how realistic the homophobes are. Opening of the first episode has a guy trying to murder a busload of people while shouting slurs at them. If that level of hatred on-screen is gonna crush your soul, even in a show about sparkly queens flying to the rescue with dick-shaped magical weapons, don't push yourself.

Any fiction with this much crossdressing and gender-transgressing is going to hit some trans viewers in a bad way. Because trans people are such a broad group, with so many different experiences, that Every Possible Trope Involved pushes somebody's buttons. (See also: "some trans readers complain about a storyline that turns out to be drawn from a trans writer's actual life experience".) If this show goes does gender things that turn out to be personally distressing for you...or even just distressing for this specific time in your life...don't feel obligated to keep watching.

It has aggressively-sassy queer characters making jokes and calling each other things that are affectionate in-context, but would not be okay coming from straight/cis people. If you can't wrap your head around that, go watch something else.

Other Than That, Go Watch This Show

For all its big heart, big ambitions, and big gay energy, Super Drags is tiny enough that I've binged the whole show 2 times in the past 2 weeks. Thankfully, it's highly re-watchable -- lots of fun background gags and subtle foreshadowing that you don't catch on the first round.

(Pausing one last time to appreciate that a show with elements like "the high-tech robot assistant is called D.I.L.D.O." can be subtle at all, let alone be this good at it.)

I've also paged through all the fanart on Tumblr and Deviantart, looked up the single fanfic on the AO3, and started brainstorming plans to request it in Yuletide next year. Someone, please, come join me in (the English-language side of) the itty-bitty fandom for this ridiculous, glittery, over-the-top, fabulous series.

[the-god-of-nihon]

Writing Idea: It’s called an AU pt2

Future Jaune cleans up, shows off his middle-aged man bod, then has a long story time with Ozpin. Also his semblance comes in real handy.

_______________________________________________________________________

As his three teammates went about their business, getting dressed preparing for their day. Team RWBY coming and going out of JNPR’s room as they did the same. Jaune sat on his bed engrossed in watching them do tasks he hadn’t seen them do for years. A stab of sorrow pierced through him; this was all so familiar, but far away in his memory.

“Jaune?” Pyrrha called out to him as she brushed her hair, “the shower is free if you want to clean up.”

He looked at himself, at his ragged clothes, and the dirt on his skin, “yeah that’s probably a good idea.” As he pulled off his shoulders the remains of a cloak, revealing attached at his left shoulder a metallic arm. Clean, not pristine, but clearly better maintained than the rest of him.

“Jaune! You’re a cyborg!” Nora rushed over to him taking his mechanical arm in her hands and examining it in wonder.

“A prosthetic . . .” Ren trailing after her, eyeing the appendage noticing an engraving of a rose on the shoulder plate.

“You lost your arm.” Not a question, but a statement Pyrrha had halted her brushing as she stared at the arm as Nora handled it, “when did you lose your arm?”

“Around 10 years ago,” he said simply, the image of Nora messing around with Jaune as he tolerated her antics was nothing new, but the context left an uncomfortable silence in the air. “Guy’s it’s really not that big of a deal, given our career path it’s pretty par for the course.”

“Right. You’re right. Apologies I shouldn’t have stared,” Ren quick to apologize went back to straightening out his bed.

“Do you need help taking your clothes off?” Pyrrha asked genuinely concerned, eyes still on the mechanical limb.

“Why Pyrrha I never thought you’d be so forward,” Jaune teased, almost immediately grimacing. Although nobody noticed, as Pyrrha turned red like a tomato, sending Nora giggling back onto her bed as Jaune waved apologetically, “thanks for the concern, but I’ve had this thing long enough to know how to handle it.”

After the first hot shower in who knows how long, Jaune was feeling better than ever. Trimming his beard from extremely shaggy, to sort of shaggy, and tying his long hair back in a ponytail.

“Jaune we borrowed some clothes from for you to wear until your clothes are clean.” Pyrrha called from the other side of the door.

“Thanks, “Jaune replied as he wrapped a towel around his waist and opened the door. Something his team had clearly not expected when they all did a double take at the sight of his topless form.

“Jaune, lookin good!” Nora whistled at Jaune, then pretended to root around in her wallet, “how much to lose the towel?”

“Nora!” Pyrrha again beat red, shoved the borrowed clothes into his arms, and rushed out the open doorway.

Jaune raised an eyebrow, and looked at Ren for some clarification as if he being topless was something unusual.

“For someone with your aura, you have quite a number of scars.” Ren returned Jaune’s look before going back to examining the scars scattered over his torso.

“Well you know me, never know when to quit,” Jaune said as he slipped the large shirt, and pair of pants on, “ran out of aura few too many times, but I learned my lesson. For the most part.”

“We have classes soon, will you be okay alone, should we stay?” Ren asked placing the book he was reading in his lap.

“Don’t skip on my account, those are valuable lessons Oobleck and Port are giving you.” Jaune gave a derisive snort, smirking as he waved them off.

“Okay, well just behave yourself, and we’ll be back in a few hours.” Pyrrha calling out as she was exiting.

“I’m not a puppy. I’ll probably go finish telling Ozpin about my timeline, then take a walk around campus. Haven’t seen this place in nearly 20 years after all.” Jaune smiles fondly, then laughs to himself, “You have fun with Oobleck, maybe tell him I’m absent because I got switched with an alternate universe version of myself, see how he reacts.”

“Will do!” Nora piped up giving a salute before marching out the door, Ren in tow shaking his head.

Jaune stretched out with a groan, and then went on his way to Ozpin’s office. His memory was reliable enough, though he could have sworn the carpet had been a different color. Jaune stopped in front of the elevator up to Ozpin’s office, “maybe I should take the stairs.” He sighed as the opened the doors, and stepped inside, “Up, not down. Not down.” Jaune clenched his eyes shut when the walls suddenly felt like they were closing in, and counted until he reached the top floor.

“Ah Mr. Arc, you are looking much better now,” Ozpin sat at his desk, a bundle of papers in front of him. Glynda standing to the side, turned to see Jaune, her eyes catching onto the mechanical arm.

Jaune face slightly pallid approached Ozpin’s desk, taking a few labored breathes, before smiling. “It’s surprising what a shower and shave can do to a bum,” Jaune quipped resting his good hand on the back of a chair.

“Please sit,” Ozpin motions to the chair infront of him, moving the papers in front of him to the side, “I’d like to hear more about the world you come from, is that alright?”

“I can only tell you what I know,” Jaune points out as he settles into the seat, declining the offering of a beverage, “where should I start?”

“Of course, of course,” Ozpin sips from his mug, “as for where to start, how about from the beginning.”

And thus Jaune recounted his life’s story all the way up to the Vytal Festival, Glynda growing somewhat agitated as the story droned on.

“Mr. Arc, while I appreciate learning about my students, that was not quite what I meant,” Ozpin adjusted his glasses, and filled his mug again.

“You did say from the beginning, you need to be more specific,” Jaune smirked, feeling a little self-satisfied. Although he flinched when Glynda raised her crop in warning, “okay okay, sorry. Now onto the Vytal Festival.”

Jaune explained what knew, and what he’d seen, it was all very normal. Students everywhere, food stalls, fights, camaraderie, and youthful exuberance. He spoke about how nearing the finals of the tournament Pyrrha became unsure on herself, and came to him with some questions he hadn’t understood at the time, how she’d seemed so distraught. Honestly it made Jaune a bit happy to see Ozpin and Glynda subtly shift when he told them how worried he’d been about Pyrrha. Then came the first match of the finals, Yang against Mercury Black, when Yang had been tricked into being disqualified.

“So then the matches after that were pretty standard, no maiming or over the top violence,” Jaune gesturing as he spoke, “but then Pyrrha went up against Penny Polendina, a huntress-in-training from Atlas. Who we found out was actually an android.”

That got their attention, Ozpin’s eyes grew wide and he hastily set his mug down, while Glynda uncrossed her arms and stepped forward, “An android? As in a robot?”

“From what Ruby told me about her, Penny was the first artificial human ever capable of generating an aura.” Jaune spoke recalling Ruby opening up about another friend she had lost in the Fall of Beacon, “ask Ironwood about it, he helped make her.”

“Yes, I’ll be sure to do that,” Ozpin sat back into his chair, fingers entwined in front of his face, “continue please.”

“Well Pyrrha killed Penny,” Jaune stated simply, “due to her unstable emotional state she lost control of her semblance, which made Penny’s own weapons turn against her.” Jaune clasped his hand together and rested them on his knees, “and that- that was the start of one of the worst nights of my life.”

“Do you believe you were sent back to divert these events, Mr. Arc?”

Jaune spoke quietly shaking his head, “I doubt it, I was in the middle of nowhere before I woke up here, not exactly near any singularities or mad scientists secret labs. Besides if the whole multiverse thing has any standing, it wouldn’t matter what I did here, it wouldn’t change my future. I don’t know how far back, but at least the events of the Vytal Festival had been orchestrated by someone, the person who is hunting the maidens.”

The sound of a mug being dropped could never be so sweet, as the contents of Ozpin’s mug spilled across his desk. “I’m afraid I do not follow Mr. Arc.”

“Don't’ bullshit me Ozpin,” Jaune sat forward, slamming a hand on the desk, “I know about the woman in the vault. I know that the woman in the machine was a fairy tale maiden with magical powers. I know you’re planning on choosing Pyrrha to take her place.” The three sat in silence, Jaune hoping to whatever gods there may be that this was a timeline where all that was going to happen, and he hadn’t just made an ass of himself.

“Yes, you are correct,” the headmaster sighed, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe up the mess, “where is this going Mr. Arc?”

“You die.” Jaune looks Ozpin in the eye, “well kind of, given later events.”

“I die?” Ozpin inquired casually as if he hadn’t just been told of his own demise.

“Sort of. A woman named Cinder follows us down to the vault and kills the fall maiden. Partially my fault, I was supposed to keep guard.” Jaune exhales and rubs his neck, “but to allow Pyrrha and I to escape you stay to fight her, and lose. You ended up in the head of a young boy named Oscar, but we didn’t find that out until later.”

“Ah, I see.” Jaune had never expected to see Ozpin, as well as Glynda, at a loss for words.

“After you lost to Cinder, Pyrrha took it upon herself to stop her,” Jaune’s gaze fell to the floor, “you can guess how that went.”

“I . . . am sorry, Mr. Arc,” Ozpin offered remorsefully, Jaune nodded back.

“But due to that, Ruby activated her Silver-eyed warrior powers,” Jaune continued, lacing his fingers behind his head, “I guess there was some kind of magical power bargain sale I missed.” “But that sent Cinder running, and froze the giant Grimm Dragon that had taken a perch on Beacon Tower. Oh yeah, a giant Grimm dragon came out of a mountain, and started dropping grimm juice all over the city.”

“Gods,” Glynda breathed out, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“I got launched into Vale, so I’m kind spotty on what exactly happened for the stuff I missed,” Jaune cupped his chin, “Yang lost her right arm, and went back to Patch with a comatose Ruby; Blake got stabbed and disappeared; Weiss was taken back to Atlas; Sun and his team went back to Mistral; Ren, and Nora came back with me, Beacon was destroyed with a monster frozen on the tower, and Vale was devastated but still mostly standing.”

“What of the other kingdoms?”

“Well the CCT was taken out in the attack, so we didn’t have any contact with them afterwards.” Jaune leaned back in his seat, expositing events after the Fall, “I didn’t find anything out until Ruby, Ren, Nora and I made it to Mistral almost a year later. But Atlas closed its borders, no trade or dust shipments to other kingdoms. Mistral & Vacuo were largely unaffected, or that’s what it seemed.”

“A dust embargo? Closed borders?” Glynda adjusts her glasses a sharp look to her eyes, “for what reason would Atlas cut them selves off like that?”

“Well the CCT didn’t go down until after video of Atlas androids and mechs attacking the people of Vale was transmitted to every kingdom.” Jaune tilted his head, and closed his eyes as he went on, “they were wary of the other kingdoms suspecting them of being involved in the attack.”

“So obviously the thing to do is stop all outside contact and not answer any questions,” Glynda crossed her arms, her mouth in a displeased frown.

“And you said that Mistral and Vacuou ‘seemed’ unaffected?” Ozpin inserted himself back into the conversation.

“Well Vacuou was a mystery until much later, but as it turns out Professor Lionheart was in bed with the enemy.”

Ozpin stilled, “such accusations are grave Mr. Arc, the headmaster of Haven Academy is a trusted personal friend.”

“Not an accusation, just saying what happened in my timeline,” Jaune shrugged, then turned his to return Ozpin’s stare, “he thought by aiding Salem, that he would be spared.” His expression turning neutral, and cold, “in the end he died, a fool and a traitor.”

 Ozpin and Glynda exchanged looks, mulled the thought over for a moment. The older man pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, “I suppose the possibility should not be completely put off the table.”

“After Beacon & Vale, then it was Mistral’s turn. The kingdom was brought down from the inside, and from there it was just race to keep the kingdoms standing.” Jaune gaze lowered to the Beacon emblem on the side of Ozpin’s mug, “we just kept going from place to place trying to stop Salem and her ‘Council of Evil,’ but in the end we were just playing catch up. The seeds for their plans had been sown years in advance, for kids like us, who didn’t even finish their first year of training. We didn’t have a chance to begin with.”

“You never struck me as a defeatist, Mr. Arc,” Ozpin cleaned his glassed before placing them back in place.

“I’ve always tried very hard to hide it,” Jaune grinned, but his eyes weren’t playing along, “all the kingdoms fell, at least from a governmental standpoint. Whatever citizens and huntsmen remained were scattered to the wind. Our group joined up with anyone else we could find and tried to reclaim some of the ruined cities. But in the end none of us could rebuild a kingdom.”

“Is that it?” Glynda seemed agitated, hands on her hips, “you lose, and give up?”

“If only it were that easy,” Jaune replied to Glynda with resignation, “No any still living civilians, and huntsmen are either trying to live out in the wilderness, or made their way to Amity Base.”

“Amity Base? As in Amity Coloseum, it still existed even after all that?”

“It was actually one of the few things still functional, the left over huntsmen organized to set up there, and turned into a mobile base, and refuge for anyone seeking shelter.” Jaune smiled at the memory, “converted the thing to solar, stocked up on supplies, and it’s been the closest anyone has gotten to rebuilding a society, outside of temporary shanty towns.”

“What had you been doing at that point Mr. Arc?” Ozpin noticed Jaune hadn’t mentioned himself in all this.

“Oh, I was around for all that, I was part of the group that reclaimed Amity, and did a lot of searching for survivors to send back there,” Jaune’s expression fell as he went on, “up until around ten years ago, we directly went up against Salem’s lackies again. The first time in a while, it was bad, but we were stronger than we were as kids.” His hand went up to his left shoulder, “we got some of them, and they got some of us. Nobody lost, but sure as hell nobody won. That was when I lost my arm, and what remained of my team.” Jaune’s face fell, “and . . .”

“And?” Ozpin looked at Glynda out the corner of his eye, who nodded, “is everything alright, Mr. Arc?”

“Fine. Just bad memories,” Jaune didn’t seem particularly emotional, mostly just tired. “Long story, short. I was around doing things, until I wasn’t. I haven’t been back to Amity in a while.”

“You left?”

“After that battle I felt it better to go,” Jaune continued, “I had a feeling I wasn’t the only one.”

“What did you do after that?”

“I had a prototype prosthetic arm bolted onto me, got a new weapon, and went anywhere other than Amity, just searching. I figured I’d either find what I was looking for, or get killed by something,” Jaune shrugged, a good-natured smile on his face for such a morbid thought.

“And what was it you were looking for?”

“Survivors to send back to Amity, any leftover huntsmen that could help, the Maidens, supply caches, my family; if any of them are still alive.” Jaune crossed his arms, and slouched in his seat, “just about anything I can find really, I’ve spent the last ten years doing that and haven’t set one step back on Amity since.”

“Did you find the Maidens, or your family?”

Jaune jaw set in a line, “Nope.”

“And you have been gone for ten years, you said?”

“Around ten or so,” Jaune rubbed the back of his neck, “If I find any resources, or supply storages, I send the location back to Amity. If I come across survivors I try to escort them to safety, so I’m kept busy at least.”

“You do not return, but act in its interest, why?.”

“What else would I do?” Jaune laughs softly, “It’s just about the only thing left to fight for. And even if I don’t go back, there are still things I care about there.”

“There are?”

“Yes.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Not particularly.”

A silence settled, as everyone in attendance understood that this conversation had come to an end. Ozpin stood smoothly, and offered his hand to the younger man across from him.

“Well that was an enlightening experience Mr. Arc. Regardless of whether or not events in this world will go the same way, what you said has given us quite a bit to think about.”

“Yeah well, it felt kind of nice to talk to someone for a change.”

“And if you are ever in need of someone to listen, we are here.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, haven’t had these kinds of luxuries in a long time, I’ll be sure to take full advantage,” Jaune chuckled as he stood up, leaning forward to shake Ozpin’s hand.

“If you need anything please tell me,” Glynda offered as she placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Well actually, there is one thing . . . “ Jaune intentionally drifted off, before fixing Ozpin with a look, “take me to the Fall maiden.”

The interior of the elevator felt smaller with more people in it, Jaune tried to focus on the sound of his own breathing.

“You believe that your semblance can heal her?” Glynda was rightfully skeptical, glancing at Jaune out of the corner of her eye, arms crossed in front of her.

“Heal? No. My semblance enhances the natural capabilities of aura, from what I know, the Fall maiden had part of her soul ripped out of her body along with the maiden powers. Jaune still had has his eyes closed, “with part of her gone, and the constant pull of the other half of the maiden powers, her aura probably can’t recover enough to stabilize her.”

“So you believe if you can amplify her aura enough, she will start to recover on her own?” Ozpin sounded as dry and mundane as always, but there was a tint of curiosity to his voice.

“I don’t see any harm in trying.”

Ozpin hummed, his lips pulled into a small pleased smile.

“Are you alright, Mr. Arc?” turning to face him Glynda her head tilted concern coloring her features.

“Fine.” Jaune said a bit too snappish, taking a deep breath. “Fine, sorry. I’m just bad with small spaces.”

The elevator lurching to a stop as the final ding sounded, and the doors open to a massive, dark hallway at the end of which stood a peculiar machine. The walk towards the end of the room was silent, the sound of footfalls and clicks of cane and heels echoed off the walls eerily.

Jaune breathing steadily once outside the confines of the elevator, couldn’t help to think how Pyrrha felt walking these same areas for the first time. The memory of how Ozpin had led her down her, how he imagined she must have felt in those moments. It made his stomach turn.

Ozpin and Glynda came to a halt before him, looking at Jaune expectantly.

Stepping forward, gazing through the frosted glass of the pod on the left, his gaze fell onto the figure of the women inside. How long had she been in there? How aware is she? Has she just been in eternal torment since she’d been attacked? Jaune’s chest clenched at the thought, he’d get an idea soon enough. “Can you open it?”

Fingers dancing across the console Ozpin had the pod open in short order, a chilled air spreading out from the source.

Coming as close to the pod as he can, Jaune reaches in to take the stranger’s hand, the cold stiff skin making it almost seem as if she was already dead. But he could feel it faintly, her aura, her soul. Reaching out to it with his own, he felt the connection take hold, almost desperately the other aura latched onto his, suckling at his in an effort to live. Rather than resist, he pushed his aura forward allowing the woman to take all he had to offer. He felt her fear, and anxiety. The pain, the burning hunger. All of it subsiding as he fed her his aura, the shine of his semblance enveloping both of them, and filling the dark, underground vault with warm light.

“Astounding.” Speaking for the first time since they had arrive, Glynda standing in awe of what she saw, pressing her clenched hands against her chest.

The headmaster in contrast staring silently at the display fluctuating on the console, but rising nonetheless, daring to hope. Pressing his lips into a thin line, eyes darting over to and fro, hands clenched white on the edge of the console.

A groan, a small groan rising out of the throat of the once comatose woman, her body shifting slightly for the first time. Her eyes opening just a crack, looking into the blue eyes of the man holding her hand.

“Welcome back to the land of the living.” Jaune softly whispering to her, smiling in what he hoped was a nonthreatening way.

The woman attempting to speak, but her throat too dry, having gone too long without use, croaking out sounds instead. Her eyes beginning to tear up, squeezes his hand with what little strength she has.

“It’s okay, you’re going to be okay.” Jaune taking her hand in both of his, beginning to hum a soothing tune, as the woman’s eyes drift shut again. He continued until his aura gave out, slouching slightly with exertion, the woman’s chest rising and falling steadily in a slumber.

“All vitals are green and staying there; she’s stabilized.”

“I don’t believe it.” Glynda moving to Ozpin’s side to examine the console along side him. “She’s really- she’s going to be okay.”

“She’ll need time to re-acclimatize to having her aura at full, I imagine having gone so long without, it might be a shock to her system.” Jaune standing a bit shakily, but stepping away from the pod without issue, looking at the sleeping woman with a small smile. “I’m no doctor, but I’d recommend she take it easy for a while. You probably shouldn’t take her out of the machine, until we can be sure her aura is capable of regenerating on it’s own.”

“Of course. I-” Glynda turning on her heel, to face Jaune with a look of elation, before straightening herself out, “Yes, we’ll be keeping her closely monitored, and while notify you if your services are needed again.”

Ozpin back still to both of them, hunching over the console like some kind of buried treasure.

Jaune wasn’t sure he’d heard a thing he had just said. “Well, I’ll be around.” Turning towards to elevator, with a wave.

Glynda’s voice halting his progress calling out softly, but carrying impossibly well across the massive room, “Jaune, thank you.”

Jaune smiled at her, before he moving to the elevator, and he raising his hand to lightly slap his face thinking, ‘still not a dream,’ to himself. Inside looking down at his good hand opening and closing it. The dings of the elevator resonating deep in his ears, pressing his eyes shut, and clenching his fist. Inhaling deep, deliberately keeping his breathing steady as the elevator continued upwards.

[rigelmejo]

 2 more thoughts regarding the massive immersion approach:

Flashcards and Massive Immersion Method

while i’ve seen some people who do it insist that its about moving AWAY from flashcards/srs grinding, and only doing that in order to make it easier to immerse... i am not sure that’s how it ends up in practice. i’ve read comments by some people about how immersion should be where the a lot of the progress is coming from. But on the other hand, from my view, even the immersion eventually involves a lot of sentence mining (you making srs flashcards from immersion, to study). And the creator of the method, Matt, seems to think a good indication this method will work for you is if you have a decent tolerance for flashcard grinding. 

Also, on a more practical level, he thinks structured study is very helpful for your learning and is part of what helps you learn faster. He thinks a combination of immersion (both reading and pure listening) starting early on and regularly, with structured study to help you learn first very useful things to you (common words, writing system, grammar patterns, eventually words/grammar in the things you specifically want to understand) helps support your immersion efforts. Structured study in his plan is srs flashcards and sentence mining - although I personally think you could also substitute ‘structured study’ for textbooks, word lists/flashcards/podcasts you pick based on your needs, basically any material where you’re actively studying and reviewing instead of immersing. Now I mainly agree with this point, as much as I don’t like structured study of any kind any more then much anyone else. It really does help make immersion more tolerable, and more effective, at least for me. Structured learning is kind of like scaffolding you put on yourself, or floaties before diving into the deep end. It gives you things you can grab onto more easily when you immerse, and help you remember more effectively the things you pick up as you immerse. It’s probably why most language learners, no matter what structured study methods they use, do more then ONLY listen/read in the language with absolutely nothing else being done (a lot of polyglots on youtube seem fond of making word lists with example sentences which sounds a lot like a more chill non srs sentence mining method, a lot of articles i’ve read of learners going for basic ability to speak/read go for using frequency lists and grammar guides early on as their base to learn from - which is what i tend to do). 

Anyway... basically, as much as I’d love if massive immersion approach had less flashcards... it doesn’t appear (to me) to have any less flashcards than AJATT or 10k sentences methods. Maybe it does, but once the sentence flashcards go into the thousands it all seems like an Awful Lot to me. On the upside, I would again like to mention there is at least one example of a guy named Chris who did the massive immersion approach for japanese for 18 months and got to a good reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and speaking level, who did the kanji flashcards and 2000ish frequent words in sentences and grammar example sentences in the beginning, then mostly did not sentence mine after. Here’s his interview about it. During, and after those initial flashcards, he immersed, looked up words occasionally (and did not always make flashcards of new words). He tried to switch to a monolingual dictionary halfway through, which seemed to help him. And he didn’t really study/immerse more than 1-3 hrs a day, with the heaviest ‘dedicated’ time in the earlier months when he grinded through the Heisig kanji flashcards. He’s a good example of a ‘less flashcards in the sentence mining’ version of the approach, that seemed to work out fine for him. So burning out on flashcards, and eventually doing less of them and primarily immersion/looking occasional words up, is a possible way to do the massive immersion approach. And I think this might be the way some people are viewing the massive immersion approach who say the flashcards are really just needed to push you to get into immersion easier - perhaps they’re also people who used less flashcards once the immersion part became more comfortable for them. 

---

Immersion

A second note: I really do want to reiterate again how much effort I do think this method takes. From an outsider’s perspective, to me it initially looked kind of ridiculous until I actually looked it up. Because all i saw were learners making targeted videos about Only one element of their studies (so it was helpful in a specialized way, but i wrongly thought that video’s tips would be about ALL of studying the language lol). So I kept seeing videos insisting you need to immerse immerse immerse and you’ll learn super fast! But like of course, these learners were also doing studying from sentence mining and grammar example sentences and I just did not know that. 

About immersion: it really does help though. At the bare minimum, you should try it some time just because it will REALLY reaffirm your goals in the language. Or it will help you set goals, if you aren’t sure what those goals are. It is also a real fast way to actually check if you’ve 1. made any improvement, 2. are lacking in any areas you’d intended to make improvement (and therefore you need to fix your study plan to address this), 3. what you immerse in might help you realize what you really want to prioritize learning first. It also gives you a dose of reality, to see if you’re worse or better than you thought you were. It gives you chances to PRACTICE what you’ve learned, which will help you remember that info and recall it faster, and get you more comfortable so it’s easier to use that info you know the next time you immerse etc. It puts you into real material you want to eventually be able to engage with, so you can actually see how you’re doing in the language up against more realistic use of the language (versus textbooks and learner made material that is probably on some level tailored to either be easier or focus on some specialties a bit more than the real world which focuses on all kinds of things). 

In French, I unintentionally ‘immersed’ in reading from the first few months, and I fully believe that boosted my ability to comprehend the language immensely. I really genuinely did not put that much effort into studying french. I took one well made beginner semester in college, most notably great because our teacher focused on pronunciation, speaking often, learning a ton of regular verbs and conjugations, and learning basic ways of saying past/present/future tense immediately (which broadened what we could talk out in a tremendous way - especially compared to any other beginner course I’ve ever taken). I studied one 300 word list, then sort of studied a 625 and 1000 word list, none of them with flashcards - just looking at and reviewing somewhat regularly. And I read... a lot... especially in the beginning when it was super hard. I read and looked up a handful of words (only ever handfuls, cause I’m lazy). Eventually, I read and rarely looked up words, because I’m lazy and context guesses were enough to me. Eventually, I speed read through a beginners grammar guide in english. Then an intermediate grammar guide in french. My listening suffered cause i rarely ever practiced that, but when i do practice it the skill builds up pretty fast since i generally know most words i run into now. If I went back to french, it’d mostly be a lot of listening/shadowing immersion (shows, and comprehensible input youtube channels), and then having lots of convos to boost my speaking/writing abilities. French... genuinely was SO hard in the beginning. But I think immersing very early got me through the “doing this for more then 5 minutes FRIES my brain its so HARD” stage within a few months. 

I think whenever I put off immersion... that just delays when i’m gonna feel that frustration. And its not fun to feel that frustration, but its expected because there will always be some difficulty as you get adjusted to it. And when you’ve studied for over a year? It really sucks to feel like you’ve made progress, only to try to read simple captions on pictures or headlines and website links and understand NOTHING. That’s what happened to me in japanese - I didn’t try to read real stuff for a year, and when I finally did I was pretty crushed that outside of the most basic school/daily life discussions, I couldn’t comprehend anything. Even though in my studies I’d flown through my textbook materials. I should also note, for languages ‘more difficult to learn’ for an english speaker, yes its going to take longer or more study hours to comprehend the same as one could in a ‘less difficult’ language like french. So immersion hurt that much MORE cause I knew even less then after a year of french, even with more hours of study, and immersion was so much harder. It was super demotivating. But in retrospect, I should have just pushed through and planned my goals according to what specifics were making that initial push SO HARD so I could fix them and make my life easier. I eventually did, but I would have loved that kind of clear focus on what I needed to do with my goals BACK THEN.  

Because of how my French versus Japanese studies went, when I started Chinese I just immersed right away. A great thing about studying chinese, is at the time I was super into their storytelling and works, and the chinese world has a HUGE amount of incredible works AND a ton of them are easy to access. It’s super easy to immerse in chinese! (I imagine similar is true of english). In French, I only really was invested in french history books, so I didn’t dive into reading much unless it was just those or ‘informational’ stuff like news. (Thankfully french took less effort to improve in). In Japanese, while I’m into some very specific creators and works, I’m actually not really that into anime or manga. And the stuff I am into, I need to grind though goal-focused study to actually finally be able to comprehend enough to immerse in (it took 2.5 years to even scratch the bottom of ‘maybe’ for trying to do that, since I didn’t immerse early on and build my comfort in being able to immerse). I started trying to read in Chinese early, just because I was like “well i did it in month 3 in french so WHY NOT do it with chinese too, it helped my french a ton!” And, well... it did help my chinese a ton, and still does. 

It’s also been... way harder every single step of the way then french ever was. And I’m so glad I did it with french first... I built up some tolerance at engaging with materials i only 50% comprehended in french, I built up reading skills with that kind of difficult material, and I had experience seeing that comprehension level noticeably improve every few months. So in chinese, I started with like 20% comprehension and it HURT my brain. But I expected it to be harder than french, and i expected any foreign language to start off well below the comfortable suggestion of ‘98%’ for reading for pleasure. On the upside, it helped me set goals I needed FOR the goal of reading super early. It helped me practice parsing how hard chinese was going to be to comprehend, super early. And I think the difficult comprehension curve for immersing in chinese, compared to romance languages for english speakers, might be why a lot of learners on forums insist reading in chinese took them 2-4 years to even start graded readers. And why many of them say its taking them 20 minutes to read a page, or they ‘pre-study’ with flashcards for like 1 hr a day when they read, etc. While I’m sure those approaches work for them, I think in a way its also kind of a matter of When do YOU want to do those things? When do you want to face that super-intolerable low comprehensibility curve? 

Because it will be a few phases: first it will be brutally intolerable, then you’ll get used to seeing a huge amount of incomprehensibility and not getting so bothered by it even though you still don’t understand much, then you start comprehending a bit more each time (possibly aided by some other study methods/reading strategies etc), you feel relieved the comprehension is getting EASIER (even though its only like 60% now that feels WAY less brutally frustrating then 20% did!), and the process continues. You basically first get used to tolerating how brutally incomprehensible it is, how much lower than 98% comprehensible it is. Then every step after feels like achievement and relief because it just keeps getting easier. And by the time you do get to a decently high comprehensibility, it feels fantastic and much easier. No matter when you start immersing, it’s going to progress like this. So if you go from ‘comfortable 98%ish percent comprehensible textbook sentences and flashcards, or podcasts, and comfortable comprehension in your own language mainly’ to ‘dropped into native material in your target language where you just definitely are not 98%, maybe 80-90% at best?’ Its still going to feel brutal. 

In a big way I do think it’s partially just a matter of when you want to face the brutal beginning of the comprehensibility curve. Do you want to tackle it early on in the learning stages, in the first couple years? The upsides are, you will only feel like its easier over time, so once you’ve studied more, your immersion also is getting easier. So study progress lines up better with how comprehension progress ‘feels.’ The downside is, of course, you face a brutal challenge that feels insurmountable early on. That could cause you to give up. And because its actual native content in the language - realistically you are NOT going to be able to comprehend as much as you can in your own native language in a year. It’s going to start a low comprehension level, and you aren’t going to be able to just quickly bring it up to comfortable 98%ish comprehension level. It’s still going to take years of study for that. So part of the process genuinely is getting more okay with accepting lower comprehensibility in your target language, and learning to not let that frustrate or demotivate you, learning to not get upset, learning to let go of trying to absolutely always understand everything perfectly, and instead learning to notice milestones in your own personal progress. Learning to appreciate an improvement from 20% comprehended, to 50% comprehended, to 70% comprehended. Instead of super angry you’ve studied for months, only to still be struggling to comprehend - because it will definitely still technically be a struggle at least until you do hit those 90%s in comprehension. So it could be demotivating to think ‘oh yeah, I’m gonna be fluent in a year!’ then you immerse early on, and realize that you may not actually to able to comprehend this target language as easily as your native language in a year. But it definitely grounds to back to reality. On the upside, even if you waited to immerse, you’re probably going to hit this difficult comprehension experience for at least a few months - so you’ll eventually get the reality check. It’s just when do you want to experience it. Early on - so you can use the experiences to both practice and focus your goals on what YOU specifically need? 

Or after studying for years - finally getting practice, and now needing to possibly readjust a lot of your long-used study methods because they left some noticeable blank spots that are now impeding your ability to comprehend what you want to comprehend? There are of course benefits to waiting to do immersion until later - you’re less likely to quit studying the language, if you’ve already been studying it for years and are dedicated. Depending on how good your study plan was, you might be starting out at 70-90% comprehension of materials, instead of 20-50%. Which means your difficulty curve might take less time to power through, and be more tolerable depending on if you can handle moderate incomprehensibility more than significant amount incomprehensibility. I don’t know... I tried to do immersion later on with Japanese, and while I definitely won’t give up, it was also such a huge difficulty curve that I had to replan my study methods to fill in all the blanks before I was ready to try immersion properly. I think with chinese, where i started some immersion early on, i would have been SUPER ready to give up and quit, if I didn’t have my french experience telling me ‘just stick with it, it always starts hard and gets easier over time, chinese will just probably take longer to make progress with than french did.’ 

I only pushed through with immersing in chinese early on, because I KNEW the same study methods worked for me in french so I was going to use them again. And I adamantly tried to just tell myself it wasn’t that hard. I had a chinese teacher in high school, he was great, and one of the things he did was never treat anything as hard. He didn’t act like tones were hard, he just gave us an example and had us repeat him. He didn’t act like hanzi were hard, he just wrote vocab, gave us the pinyin, then told us to write it in our notes - and write only hanzi in tests and homework and classwork. Bam, that’s it. No insistence that we had to use mnemonics to ever learn them (although mnemonics would’ve helped speed it up probably in retrospect). No insistence anything was hard, it was just how the words sounded and were spelled, so we learned. He had a class of 40 kids who were rambunctious and many of whom didn’t pick chinese and just got put into the class, and he still managed to teach well enough that most people passed just fine. That class was fun, and not any harder then any other class. I think one part of the reason was how he treated nothing as overtly difficult or challenging, just another thing to learn. In comparison, I’ve had a japanese class where things WERE taught as very difficult to learn, and i think that intimidated me and demotivated me (along with the myriad of language study tip sites that really hammer home how ‘hard’ japanese is). Realistically, they aren’t necessarily hard, some languages just take more study time then others to cover the same ‘ground’. So anyway, whenever I study chinese, I just remind myself its not any harder then french to learn - it just takes me some extra study time. And I really think this mindset has made tackling both immersion and even just studying vocab much easier to me. I don’t see new words made of characters and freak out, I just think ok ‘this sounds like X, looks like this Y, do I need to do anything extra to remember this?’ Then come up with some mnemonics or examples of it being used etc if it will help me remember it, then move on. With chinese I really... mostly tackled studying the same way I studied French (but BETTER, because I practice speaking, writing, and listening MUCH more in chinese then i ever did in french). But like... I did not study the hanzi with Heisig or anything - and I do think in retrospect, I should, since I think it’ll make new words a bit easier to remember. (I remember new words way easier when I already know each individual character from other words - I don’t need mnemonics for the meaning or the pronunciation when I already know the characters that spell a new word so I can speed up learning it). The only extra thing I did with chinese was listen to tones in the beginning, some tone explanations, and listen to the audio of new words (so i can better remember the tones, so i can have better listening/speaking skills then i did in french). Overall, my progress was not too bad for just diving into chinese with the same overall study method. I managed to learn 1000 words and all the characters in them without heisig etc. (Although, genuinely, shout out to the Tuttle Learn Chinese Characters - 800 characters book, because the mnemonics include pronunciation, help a ton, and I learned probably 500 characters from that book starting out that served as a helpful foundation in studying chinese). 

I did not ever try to go the route of ‘study with only pinyin first.’ I know some people think learn to speak first, read/write later, and it is easier. But like? Reading’s always my main goal baby. Everything else is a secondary goal, so there was no point to me putting off characters and real reading. Plus? In chinese??? Knowing how to read helps with shows SO MUCH cause nearly every show has mandarin subtitles!!! If you can read some basic mandarin, picking up words and some phrases from shows gets so much easier! Also, like my chinese teacher did not treat them as overly hard, I don’t want to treat characters as overly hard either. Pinyin is very good to know for typing, and for learning tones/seeing how to pronounce words. But I didn’t want to use it as the only thing i could rely on, any longer then the minimal necessary amount of time I needed to. Also, my lacking listening skills in french really hammered home how important it is to listen to pronunciations ALL THE TIME and especially when learning new words, so I try to make sure a majority of my chinese study and immersion materials have audio I can listen to. I try to learn most new words with audio, since pinyin is not the same as me hearing how to actually say it and recognize it. 

[pynkhues]

Say Dean did give her the necklace. Out of all the horrendous things he’s done to her, why would she decide to wear it tho?

Well, assuming that he is the one to give her the new necklace, which Istrongly suspect he is (although I’ve been wrong before!), I think there are afew reasons she’d wear it. And hey! I’ve had five or six asks since 2.08about Beth and Dean’s relationship, history and age gap, which I had a fewdrafts of, so I’m so sorry! I’m going to highjack your ask to combine/answerthem all! Hope that’s okay. 

Putting all myheadcanons and theories aside (at least for the first half of this post haha),let’s just talk about what canon has established about Beth and Dean and theirrelationship over the last 18 episodes. 

This is like, verylong (seriously 2,800 words), haha, so I’m putting it under a cut to save all your feeds. 

The Marks’ Family ValuesWhile 2.08 clarified a few things about the way Beth, Ruby and Annie wereraised, there’s still a lot that we don’t really know, so let’s look at what wedo know: 

1. Beth as a youngteenager crashed her mother’s car out the front of Ruby’s house with her kidsister in the passenger seat because there was no food in the house, and theirmother wasn’t getting out of bed. The implication, from Annie’sdialogue “She just really likes it there” is that this is not a new thing.(2.08)

2. Annie was areckless kid and had a broken arm during a time it’s implied she and Beth were neglected.(2.08)

3. “You knowwhat my mama used to say? You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” – Beth(2.01)

4. Beth played pianofor six years after her parents dropped $$s on it, despite changing her mindand wanting to play violin, which on its own I think can be written off as generalchildish indecisiveness, buuuut I think means a little more than that in thecontext of everything else. (1.05)

5. Beth worked heronly legitimate job in highschool at the Dairy Queen. (1.03)

5. Annie used to gethigh and was sexually active in highschool, and had gossip/rumours spread abouther. Their mother came into the school to address it and, it’s implied, madethe situation a lot worse, causing Annie not want to do the same to Sadie with Sadie’sbullies. (1.04)

6. Then Annie gotpregnant in highschool. (mentioned multiple times)

7. Beth has alwaysbeen the one that Annie has called to bail her out of trouble (mentioned a fewtimes).

9. Beth had postpartumdepression with at least one of her children. (2.05)

The Boland Timeline

While we haven’t gottenconfirmed ages of the characters, we do know that Dean is, at the very least, ayear older than Beth, although I think it’s more likely around three yearsgiven the way it’s framed in the episode. SO. 

1. Beth meets Dean atschool when she’s either a freshman, sophomore or junior. He’s a senior. It’sat a point in time where we know her mother is bedridden and Beth spends a lotof time looking after Annie (she even took Annie to Ruby’s father’s funeral,which I think says a lot as to how much Beth – and by proxy Ruby – were lookingafter Annie). (2.08)

2. Beth and Dean havebeen married for 20 years during S1, so that puts them likely at gettingmarried when Beth is somewhere between the age of 20-22. (mentioned multipletimes)

3. Somewhere in thistime period, Dean takes over Boland Motors from his father (one of the photosin the screensaver Dean’s looking at in 2.04 looks like it’s from a grandre-opening, and Beth’s holding a baby boy, so it looks like this could bearound the time Kenny or Danny is born) and Beth becomes a stay-at-home motherand a housewife. Dean also has full control of their finances, and Beth is onan allowance that he also controls. 

4. Kenny has hiseleventh birthday in S1, so Beth would’ve been in her late twenties when shehad him. 

5. We don’t know theage gap between the rest of the kids (and in fact, those age gaps have obviouslychanged between S1 and S2 lol) but it looks like Jane is now the youngest, notEmma, and that Beth and Dean hadn’t had sex in the two years before gettingpregnant with Jane, and then that they hadn’t had sex since she was born until2.06, which seems to be about five or six years. (2.05 / 1.05)

6. Beth had postpartumdepression after at least Emma (it was the specific given reason as to why theyhadn’t had sex in the two years before getting pregnant with Jane), although Ithink the implication is that it was with more of the kids than just her.

7. Somewhere in allof this, Dean had multiple affairs. He says four, but the implication fromAmber is that it’s more than that, and then I think Beth basically confirmsthat when she says “Dean’s slept with half of Detroit” later in the episode.Plus Dean being a pathological liar isn’t exactly a secret. (2.05)

8. Beth finds out hesleeps with Amber in 1.01 and that he’s mortgaged their house three times andthat their savings are gone. She kicks him out, takes control of theirfinances, and robs Fine & Frugal. 

9. Dean tries to winher back a few times - first by appealing to her pragmatism (and I’ll beexpanding on this shortly) - by talking about how they’ll both be worse offfinancially if they separate - before telling her that she’s the love of hislife, then by showing up unannounced to mow the backyard (a traditionally malehousehold job), then by using Kenny’s birthday wish that they were backtogether to try and guilt her (another point I’ll be expanding on shortly!)

10. Cut to Kenny’sbirthday party. He implies Beth’s having an affair with Rio (lols for so manyreasons), they fight, Beth insinuates that she’ll be filing for divorce soon(”You’re still my wife” “Yeah, I’ve gotta get on that.”) and Dean drops TheCancer Lie. Beth is obviously upset, and lets him move back in, but he’ssleeping in Kenny’s room. (1.04)

11. Dean doubles down on the cancer lie by bribing a doctor to tell Bethhe has prostate cancer, but he also covers for her when Turnerfinds the Boland Motors car the girls stole from the lot. He then confronts herabout it in a very paternalistic way (”Why don’t you get a job?” “Sit down!”“These people prey on good, innocent people” “I’m sorry I yelled at you, buteverything’s going to be fine. I’ll take care of you.”). Beth plays along inthe moment, but Dean changes the locks without telling her (and also doesn’thelp her bring the grocery bags in which is sooo telling), reveals he’sswitched hours with a guy at work to be around to ‘protect’ her, and Bethfinally stands up for herself “You have no idea what I’ve done or even who Iam”. (1.06)

12. Dean asks her ifshe’s doing it for the kids. She says yes, and he says it’s all he needs toknow. It genuinely seems to comfort her in the moment. It’s one of their fewnice scenes and I think shows what they were like when they were at their verybest. (1.07)

13. Rio shuts down,Beth is back on an allowance. She tries to get a loan, but their credit hasn’trebounded enough and they still have too much debt. Dean solves the problem bymoving the botox via the doctor he bribed. Dean won’t tell Beth how he did it,but she’s grateful enough to end up coming clean about what she does for Rio.They have their second nice moment. “You don’t deserve anything I did toyou.” + “I think you’re incredible.” (1.08)

14. Dean obviouslyfeels like he and Beth are getting back on track, and is annoyed that Annie’sliving with them temporarily. He builds Beth a craft table with hiddencompartments to hide her fake cash! (1.09)

15. Dean tries toorganise something for their anniversary, which Beth doesn’t agree to rightaway, but does later in the episode when he tries to help her after realisingshit’s going down in the crime world. Dean gets into a car accident whilechecking out another woman, Beth finds out he lied about the cancer (like thatgrenade was never going to blow, Deansy), he came home, Rio shoots him to getback at Beth, but not before revealing a certain degree of intimacy and trustbetween the two of them, which Dean clocks instantly. (1.10 / 2.01)

Then Season 2happens, haha.

So let’s talk about Beth & Dean

I’ve said it a fewtimes before, but when it comes to Beth, we’re ultimately watching somebody whohas been disempowered and disenfranchised for a really, really long time tryingto reclaim a sense of identity and control over her life. Even before 2.08, wewere looking at that through the sense of her marriage to Dean where she had noreal independence. Her entire life was dictated by decisions that he made forthem, personally, professional and financially, and a lot of the first half of Season1 was devoted to her realising exactly how many of those decisions had been bad ones. As the series went on, she reallydid start to gain a sense of financial independence (which is incredibly important)as well as a sense of her own identity and agency, only for that to becompletely crippled again across that four episode arc - 1.09 through to 2.02 –firstly by thinking Rio had played her for a fool (the empty truck), then Rio firingher, then realising that Dean hadplayed her for a fool again (thecancer lie), and then her plot to put Rio away falling apart, Dean being shot,and her realising that she was newly indebted to both of them.

I think what 2.08contextualised was that Beth has never really been allowed to explore who sheis, because there’s always been somebody she’s had to look after. She’s alwayshad dependents and she has lived a life of constant compromise, making her incrediblypragmatic and sacrificing of her own needs and wants. The episode establishedthat Beth spent most if not all of her adolescence caring for Annie and theirmother, married young, and then spent her entire young adult life looking afterDean and their four children.

Likely the appeal ofDean was that he was older, gave her attention in a way that seemed to ‘see’ herat a time where her needs were neglected at home, and likely popular – he’s goofyand fun, as the show’s establishedmultiple times, which I think would be more likeable at that teenage age, and Ithink he probably appealed to Beth as a way out of a troubling home situation.At the end of the day, the show has established pretty firmly that Beth is, whenit comes to her and her own, a survivor. And when I say survivor, I don’t meanthe badass, action heroine sort of survivor - I mean the desperate, do-what-she-has-tosort of survivor. She has an uncanny ability to lie and perform to get herselfout of situations, and also a tendency to sacrifice her own happiness for thoseshe loves. I think when it came to Dean, for a very long time, Beth sacrificedpower and control for a security and safety that she hadn’t had growing up,first for herself (and likely in part for Annie too), and then for her fourchildren.

And I think Dean, priorto the start of the series, had never truly been challenged on any of thecontrol that he wrought over their lives. He’s your classic embodiment of whitemale privilege, and I think he has all the baggage that comes with that,including a firm belief in gender roles, a heady sense of entitlement, and asubconscious expectation that things will usually work in his favour. The factthat he started dating Beth when she was so young, that he inherited BolandMotors from his father, and the fact that he blames Beth’s postpartum depressionfor his affairs too I think drasticallyemphasises that. We talk a lot about the power play between Beth and Rio, butBeth and Dean, since 1.01, have been in a power play of their own – Beth in herdesire to break out of their traditional roles, to ‘steer the ship’, and toreally put her family in a more secure position in life (something she realisedDean was incapable of doing), and Dean in his desire to keep them in their traditional roles, to ‘steer the ship’, and tokeep the status quo (I mean, hell, the fact that he was checking out anotherwoman on his way to his anniversary dinner with Beth in 1.10 says a lot about exactly how little he wants things tochange).

In what is typical ofpeople who are nurturers/carers or have been forced into nurturer/carerpositions in their life, Beth also seems to feel guilt to a disproportionatedegree, and in a way that often seems to cancel out any other emotion,including her anger. This is established pretty early in season one in smallways - her snipping with Annie then immediately back pedalling when sherealises Annie might lose custody of Sadie, with not being able to throw Kennythe birthday party he wants, with her telling Dean about what she does for Rioafter Dean offloads the botox, and then reiterated in big ways this season -nursing Dean after he’s been shot, crawling into bed with Kenny after he gotcaught binge eating at school, going above and beyond to get the dubby backafter Jane feels neglected, I’d even argue that the whole situation with MaryPat has partially been fuelled by guilt for putting Mary Pat in that situationin the first place when she’s a widow with four young children.

And I think Dean knows this! He has guilted her so much across the course of this show, often in a way to deflectfrom his own shortcomings or to ultimately playher. He gaslights her all the time,and she often doesn’t even realise it, which demonstrates, to me at least, howoften he’s done it over the course of their 20+ year relationship. The wholething about the cancer lie in the first place was to back her into a corner,which he succeeded in doing. He guilted her about being at Boland Motors andaway from the kids. When Jane went missing, he immediately blamed her and guilted her for her involvement with Rio(instead of………you know……….looking for his daughter), in 2.08, he guilted Beth for checking on her moneybefore untying him after he’d tried to organise a hit on her partner and gottenher robbed blind in the process.

And when the guilt and the manipulation stopped working, he did thething he knew she couldn’t ignore (and that would hurt her the most) which istake the children. Beth is, like I said earlier, a survivor and a sacrificer whenit comes to her and her own. There’s no way she won’t give up everything togive those children what she didn’t have – a mother who she could rely on. I thinkDean’s ultimatum won’t just be about them either. I could be wrong, but I thinkhe’s going to tell her that they have to try again as a couple, and I thinkthat’s what that necklace is going to be about (seriously though, if he givesit to her as a part of the ultimatum, everything about it symbolically is acollar), and she’ll put it on for her children, and I think it’s all honestlygoing to push her over the edge in a really big way before the season’s over.

I’ve mentioned this in other posts, but I think Beth fully was intendingto leave Dean before the cancer lie, but then she needed to care for him(again, a manipulation I think Dean knew would work because of Beth’s historycaring for her mother and Annie), and then the shooting (same reason, plus theadded bonus of her having caused it). Since then, I think she has almostcompletely emotionally divorced him – having sex with Rio, taking over BM,checking on the money first, not letting him back into her bed – is all verytelling of this, and I think she had likely had her pragmatic hat on and waswaiting until she could feasibly balance all the pieces in her life on her ownbefore filing for divorce. Of course, that’s now blown up with Dean holding thechildren essentially hostage.

And look, do I thinkDean loves Beth? I do actually, in his own way. Do I think Beth loves Dean? Ithink she did, but like she said to Ruby – Dean’s not a soulmate for her, oreven a partner. Beth and Dean should’ve maybe briefly dated in highschool andthen broken up, but they’re both in too deep now, and I don’t think anythingshort of a bullet or an arrest is going to easily disentangle them.