#like she's actively starting fucking fights and its pissing me off

[doodlboy]

Every year

[stillfrownyclownlol]

Gonna throw up If I can't talk about them-

Bunch of Aiden analysis under the cut because he's just SO OBSESSED CODED AND NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT 😭 (I will be very weird about it)

The way it's so doomed from the start. He's already so fascinated by her. It's in the little jump he does when she sits in front of him, like a secret they're both in on, like her sitting in front of him is some obscure way of her inviting him into a conversation.

Why is he like this (not positive but not negative either)

He has such a cocktail of personality traits and, most certainly, mental disorders, and his own history that makes it so, when he's in love, that it WILL blow up in his face.

The fact that he's been homeschooled for his entire life- he has no idea. HE DOESNT EVEN KNOW. He doesnt realize that its not normal. of course he doesn't :( His parents obviously leave him alone for long stretches of time and he doesn't seem to mind this. He hasn't had the chance to develop his social skills at all-

It's why he's so, let's be real, creepy. Ash makes it very clear she's not interested and he just keeps worming his way into her life. He plots so that she'll go on the field trip, he follows her around, he goes to her fucking house on the first day. LIKE, HELLO? RED FLAG?

He's having evil thoughts here I swear 💀

And already so quickly after meeting her he makes Ash his priority. He asks to sit next to her, he engages and makes an effort to talk to her. Tries to joke around with her. Gives her a nickname. Touches her. He's so touchy.

And defends her!!! When Tyler gets pissed at Ash, he honestly goes off on him even tho he KNOWS Ash can defend herself- and he's so...dark about it. There's a threat hidden behind his words. He's MAD here, right? Tell me I'm not crazy, please-

He also very clearly has violence on the forefront of his mind 💀 He's the first one to actively attack the phantoms; not to defend himself, not to defend somebody else (well, he pulls Ash out of the way), but for fun. And he's disappointed when they don't scream. He's sadistic, he likes causing pain, it's something he relishes in.

I mean look at how he smiles!!! None of the other kids have such an...active ENJOYMENT in fighting the phantoms, but for Aiden, it's almost like he finds relief in it, some way to vent out his frustrations. He's eager for a fight, for a thrill.

That's how Aiden sustains himself, he pretty much operates under "I'm here for a good time, not a long time." Everything he does gives him a boost of adrenaline, no matter the consequences. He got into a fight? Eh, who cares about all the bruises, at least it got his blood rushing. Broke a bone while doing parkour or smth? Whatever, the way his stomach dropped when he was falling as totally worth it.

It's a very dangerous mentality to live with, obviously. He's an adrenaline junkie. He's an addict. More than anything else, Aiden wants something that makes him feel alive.

And what makes you feel more alive than love?

Like not to minimise or anything but he's known her for like. 2-3 months- and he's already SO scared of losing her. Like I just don't think he would have had this type of reaction with anybody else besides Ben. He would have absolutely lost his shit if Ash 'died'.

He's a straight up love junkie. He's obsessive. Nothing beats the high love can give you. It overrules everything else. If Ash (or whoever he's interested in) feels bad because of smth, he's done with it.

He LIKED dying. He LIKED the adrenaline rush. But he won't do it again. Not because he had some realization that he didn't want to die, that he still wanted to live and do things, but because Ash was upset. Because this, this rush of care from her part, the way she was so scared of him dying that she was shaking, nothing could fill the hole in his heart better than that. And now that he has a taste for it, he won't let go easy. He will keep on living- if it means Ash will be by his side.

Which is a very dangerous position to put her in. Ash already feels responsible for her friends, and she doesn't even know that Aiden has "put" his life in her hands, not that it's her responsibility, because it isn't, but she will certainly feel responsible if Aiden does something FOR her.

Like He's so fucking obsessed and he doesn't even realize it- like look at how he sees her 😭 THE HEAVENLY GLOOOOOOW, LIKE SHES AN ANGEL AND HE THINKS SHE CAN SAVE HIM. BABY SHE CANT, YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOURSELF.

He could spiral so fucking bad. He could do some absolutely heinous things. Because he just doesn't know. He doesn't know how to love truly, yet. For him love really is that rush of adrenaline, the knife carving out his heart, he could be putty in her hands, or her executioner. This love that can be so obsessive, that he NEEDS it to function, like its water, like its the air he breathes. Its a compulsion, a fixation, a longing that burrows into your very soul. Ash doesn't even know what she's getting herself into-

Godddddd, it makes me so sick/ pos, it's SO FUCKING INTERESTINGGGGGG. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.

I literally cannot function around this drawing 🫠

The. The hand. That way he's grabbing her. He's pulling her back. Towards HIM. like "this is mine. And I'm not sharing." And that little fucking look in his eyes, he just looks SO fucking pleased with himself. And Ash looks so...resigned. they're so doomed-coded, i love them so bad.

I don't know how I was supposed to NOT make a killer au, when he's just...like that around her.

Love is a wonderful thing. But love is also cruel, it is vicious, it is possessive and obsessive, and it will leave carnage in its wake.

Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You cannot stop thinking about another human being. -Helen Fisher

[sant-riley]

Okay yk what idc I got alot of thoughts of Puerto rican! Reader with the boys, I am not sorry, I need to get this out of my system. so I'm giving her the codename of Teddy :) sorry if that ruins the immersion!

General hcs/thoughts I have with the boys from mw2:

Ghost could destroy an entire pernil by himself. He actively looks forward to it every single Thanksgiving despite him literally not being American and thus doesn't celebrate it. "L.T, don't tell me you're going over to her house just for some pork." "Why yes Johnny, I am." He is not sharing with a single soul, he will break someone's fingers. (Teddy makes him his own at this point so the others can have a try)

Soap fucking chugs Coquito like it's nothing, bc technically it isn't compared to the stuff he has back home. At first he was apprehensive but now he usually goes home with a bottle. He will share but if he sees someone wasting it he will be pissed. It is hard as fuck to come by in Scotland if not the base.

Price very much enjoys the cleaning playist Teddy has, she told him how growing up that that was how her mom told her it was time to get her ass up and do chores. He finds himself playing it early in the morning while he does documents to wake himself up.

Everyone's favorite song round let's go

Soap's favorite - Suavemente

Ghost's favorite - Anhelo (totally not bc he danced with her to this one)

Price's favorite - Danza Kuduro

Gaz's favorite - La Vaca

Alejandro being surprised when he sees a short Hispanic woman with two big ass European men. "Tu con estos dos? de donde eres chiquita?"

Soap fucking pushes himself in and answers for her, a smug little smile from all the little Spanish he picked up. Ghost just rolls his eyes and tries to not groan. Soap being a showoff.

The solidarity between the Vaqueros and Teddy 🤝 different countries but there's alot to have in common.

Teddy cursing in Spanish at the top of her lungs and Alejandra and Rudy snorting. "You kiss your grandmother with that mouth?"

The boys have in fact danced with her when she's feeling homesick, each one. Soap and Gaz don't mind doing it in public where as Ghost and Price rather do it in their rooms/her room. Ghost and Price will say its good exercise but we all know the truth.

When fresh food is available, they'll ask her to make the food she eats off duty. It's different combinations of rice and beans, along with meat always.

Everyone fucking devours tostones btw. Literally they have to buy so many plantains to make sure everyone has their fill or there will in fact be a fight.

SHE MAKES THEM HELP MAKE PASTELES!! It's a whole assembly line. Christmas is a war zone in of itself trying to make the shits.

Ghost drinks Cafe bustelo straight out the machine. No one else can stand the stuff bc it's too strong.

When sofrito has to be made, everyone makes Soap cut the onions lmfao, the worst part of the entire process.

Everyone starts to saying spanglish around base, Gaz switching from English to accented Spanish is a interesting sight 😭 Teddy mocks him as if she isn't to blame.

THE WAY GHOST SAYS NUEVO IN RESPONSE TO LEAVING ALEJANDRO AND HE GETS FLAMED FOR IT BC THATS NOT HOW YOU SAY OF COURSE.

"Really? Nuevo? Do you know what that means?" "Oh for fucks sakes."

Okay I'm tired and my fingers hurt from typing all of this lol I'll add more probably at some point!

If you'd like to be tagged in future works, please comment under my rules that are pinned to my blog!

[hijinxinprogress]

YouTuber!Stephanie

Stephanie has a youtube channel (she 100% gives it a name like gotham_after_dark or bat_interpreter) where she follows Batman and mocks him, she definitely also makes content on tiktok and instagram

She’s recording fights with rogues and him interrogating questioning people and doing voice overs in a goofiest growl she can for batman but she also does voices for everyone else (it gets to the point where penguin puts a hit out and is actively trying to expose the youtubers identity bc steph does this terrible whiny british accent when she’s imitating penguin)

She starts her channel right after Bruce fires her from Robin and still does it to this day

Bc if she’s gonna get shit for not being Tim might as well go all the way right?? She’s just doing the opposite of what Tim’s doing or outright copying him depending on which would annoy them the most

Stephanie records batman dangling some guy off a roof for the 37th time this week while going “You said the cheese on the nachos at your restaurant was imported directly from Italy but I saw you…THIS CHEESE IS FROM A GROCERY STORE…in GOTHAM… do you know what batman does to liars??”

Batman’s chasing the joker? Again? Here comes Stephanie with her fucking camera “Joker baby, you know that fight with Cobblepot meant nothing to me” “You know what, Bats? Fight whoever you want!” “Why are you going to Cobblepot’s lair with a grenade launcher? Baby…?” “Well, if the wellbeing of fucking Oswald is sooo important to you, you fucking cheater ☹️ I’m gonna kill him” “HUH” Stephanie’s joker voice is pretty good but she stops when Jason follows her channel after admitting he watches it (however Damian gives zero fucks and edits in his scarily accurate joker impression and will break into Jason’s apartment at random to do his joker impression)

Stephanie’s Duke impression is just her making puns in a bad robot voice and Duke hates it sm bc she’s saying shit like “Don’t signal for backup bc I’m already Signal-ing this ass whooping” “The yellow is the Signal for you to run” “Hey hey hey, night time is when you do this stupid shit rn is Signal Time” “The sun is my Signal to be vigilant-y” “Setting off that alarm should’ve been enough of a Signal for you stop” (Dick made tshirts and Duke refuses to talk to him when he wears them)

You legally have to be a level 79 hater to be a vigilante in gotham so most of Steph’s videos esp after Bruce has pissed her off are just her shitting on batman in a terrible growl “Damn, I’m getting too old for this…my knees hurt so much” “Nightwing thinks he’s funny, asking me if I remember the dust bowl…mf I remember the fucking big bang” “I’m so good at this, I don’t think anyone knows I’m a vampire” “Bruce Wayne owns gotham general and can’t cure Alzheimer’s?? I hate that asshole, I don’t even remember where tf I’m going” “I wanted to be Spider-Man and now I’m this” “Ooh, I’m Batman and I hate fun, happiness, and joy” “Don’t do crime, be like me…perpetually bitchless and breaking kneecaps” “Some people need coffee for a pick me up but I just need to see a purse snatcher piss their pants” “I don’t actually meld into the shadows, I just have Apple Maps and it takes me the long way”

Batman’s fighting or arguing with black mask?  Stephanie has been waiting for this moment so every video with black mask is just her making fun of black mask to the point where there’s barely any batman slander “My real names fucking Roman so I had to go all out with this stupid ass costume…I’m not even a real gothamite, I’m from metropolis” “Sionis…I don’t care… you blew up thirteen hostages” “ITS NOT MY FAULT, OKAY?! Did you know you’re supposed to wash masks? Especially if you wear the same one everyday? Bc I fucking didn’t” “…Sionis…” “THERES MOLD ON MY FACE and this mask smells like ASS” “Everyone knows that, you moron…How do you think I found you? I can smell your stench from damn near two miles away…” “I’m like scary though right??” “No, Sionis, you just have poor hygiene…and issues” “Dammit, I’m like a dollar tree version of two face” “Not quite, what’s lower than that? Dollar tree is too good for you…don’t tell joker but Harvey’s way-”

Stephanie has a two hour video of batman grappling across Gotham just shitting on metropolis and sixty seven minutes of it is just Superman slander in a terrible growl

There’s short clips of cass suddenly disappearing or appearing out of nowhere before and after dismantling someone with the michael myers theme playing in the background (Cass does dramatic flips and landings every time steph records her)

When Bruce complains about the threat to their identities and compromising ongoing missions/investigations, Stephanie (who is purposely trying to piss him off) just looks him dead in eye and goes “Well, you’re not the boss of me sooo” so Tim gives a presentation and shuts down every single argument Bruce makes just to be contrary bc he’s a fucking asshole

Tim only has a problem with it when Stephanie and Damian start working together bc Damian  does concerningly accurate impressions and Damian keeps making Tim sound like a fucking idiot and it’s worse bc he can mimic his speech patterns (“I can’t do this anymore… I’m sad and pasty… Call the fifth robin, you know…the only competent robin…”) 

Like Damian’s repeating one of Tim’s caffeine concoction induced rants about bagels in Tim’s voice while Steph is growling at him to focus in her batman impression

When Tim brings his complaints to Bruce about Stephanie’s youtube account, Bruce cites Tim’s own argument back to him so Tim takes over editing and recording to be an asshole

[mjfsupremacy]

my baby is better than you, and you know it.

The person who asked me for this apparently doesn't exist anymore, but y'all can have it anyway. Hope it doesn't suck :)

Swearing, very vague descriptions of birth.

You can find all my other work here

*

You suppose you should’ve seen this coming. Banking on a child that was half him not making everything wildly inconvenient. You also supposed you should’ve seen it coming that the other half of your baby’s gene pool would piss you off so badly you’d send him to the other side of the country 3 weeks before your due date just to get him away from you.

Maxwell Jacob Friedman. Love of your life, baby daddy, giant gaping asshole.

Well, here you were, refusing to leave for the hospital, contractions 12 minutes apart and calling his phone over and over while you watched him on the TV.

You could see the rectangular shape in his pocket, you could see the panic deep within his eyes while he bantered with Adam Cole, and you could see the worry starting fill Adam the more he took in his friend.

You decided to switch tactics and you dialled a different number instead. Adam’s eye bug and his hand falls to the pocket in his jeans he keeps his own phone in.

His eyes cut to Max’s in panic and you can see that they’ve both put two and two together to equal baby. They both nod at each other resolutely and Max raises the mic to his mouth fishing his phone from his pocket with his other hand.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, you know me, you know I’m a scumbag who hates every place in this damn country, so believe me when I say there is no where better in America than LA Bay Bay!”

The crowd cheers and Max’s attempt at a cheap pop and he dials his phone. “But unfortunately, I’ve gotta leave the city of angels, there is no where the devil feels more at home.”

You see his name on your phone screen and you accept the call. “The spawn is making its decent.” You growl into the receiver.

“I’M HAVING A BAY BAY!” Max shouts to a ruckus crowd of cheers. “Screw you Sammy Guevara, my baby is better than yours and you know it.”

*

10 hours later you are cussing your way through another contraction, staring at the door and willing your dumb partner to rush through it. The nurses keep telling you to stop fighting your body but you refuse to listen even if you know it’s making you more exhausted trying and failing to keep the baby in rather than out.

When he finally burst through the door, you burst into tears and you relax (as much as you can while in active labour) for the first time since your waters broke.

“You are such an asshole, why are you such an asshole?” You cry, grabbing his hand tight. He listened panicked gaze takes in all of you while he mutters endless apologies. “I love you so much and if you tell anybody I’ll drown you.”

He meets your eyes and returns the pressure to your hand. “Were having a baby.”

“Mini brochacho how cool is that my dude?”

Your gaze falls to the door where Adam stands bouncing like a puppy, arms laden with gifts.

“YOU BROUGHT ADAM COLE ARE YOU FUC-“

*

“I made that. How fucking dope is that?” you sigh, finger gently brushing over your daughter brow.

“Hey! I helped.” Max whispers vehemently in response.

“Did you? I mean I don’t remember you collapsed against the toilet for five months, or watching you waddle places while you dripped sweat.”

“She’s not here without me too making a baby is 50/50 sweetheart.” He states grumpily, gently running his fingers over the tiny hairs above her eyes, tracing each spot after your own fingers.

You scoff, “The level of your help in the creation of this child is akin to my being the head chef in the kitchen and you being the guy who stirs the sauce so it doesn’t congeal. We are not the same, my love.”

“Besides,” You state confidently, watching her little nose crinkle (An exact replica of Max’s) “she’s not yours anyway?”

The nurse in the room dropped her clipboard with a clatter as Max sighs dramatically, “This outta be good. What do you mean she’s not mine?”

“Look, no hooves. Definitely no child of the devil.”

“Are you comparing our daughter to Rosemary’s baby?”

“No, I’m saying how not like Rosemary’s baby she is, keep up, good looking.”

“And here I was worried motherhood was going to change you.”

[redhoodedangel]

Okay, picture if you will…

Reader as the daughter of Lucifer Morningstar and Mazikeen…

In essence, a love child that Maze and Lucifer decided to train in combat…

When they come to Earth in LA, they decided to send her off to train with the best of the best on Earth, including Batman. There, Reader meets Jason and the two become friends, eventually dating…

Then, Joker kidnaps him after a mission at a school goes topside…

And Reader… goes… fucking… ape…

In the same way an animal goes berserk when their pack, mate or human is in danger, Reader goes twice as crazy… like Joker and Harley have some competition…

She starts using torture techniques, learned from her mother on anyone working for Joker or who sympathized with him… Looking for Jason for days and months on end…

Which leads her to Frank Boles…

In front of his wife and children, she forces the truth out of him without having to pull out a knife…

Joker is hiding Jason in the underbelly of Arkham Asylum to torture him…

Issuing a threat to Boles to not tell Joker she’s on her way or else, he’s a dead man walking, and wishing Mrs. Boles luck on separation/divorce proceedings (they gonna need it), she’s off to Arkham…

Once inside the belly of the beast, she immediately hears screams… and she doesn’t waste a second, ripping the heavy-duty door off of its hinges.

Joker has a branding tool with a ‘J’ that was still hot, Harley looking at her in shock and horror, and Jason, reddening eyes full of tears and pain with a newly branded ‘J’…

“Okay, now you’ve really pissed me off…”

(This GIF just fits… don’t judge me…)

Reader goes fucking nuts and Joker, for the first time, is genuinely terrified…

Like, he thought he could beat her up like Jason, but she managed to do the one thing that he thought impossible…

Making him feel pain without making him laugh….

It becomes clear to him that Reader is beyond human…

She was a living, breathing monster with the face of a pretty girl…

A monster fighting for her lover… and that lover was Jason…

Unlike Batman, love wasn’t her weakness… it was her weapons, the very tools she was using to deliver the same punishment he had placed onto Jason onto him…

Even Harley could tell she wasn’t normal in the slightest and actively stayed out of her way purely out of shock, for once thinking about her self-preservation rather than her clown-faced man-candy (if you can even call Joker a man or even man-candy).

With Joker nearly beaten to within an inch of his life, Reader is shaken out of her murderous stupor by a single broken word…

“B-Babe…”

Her eyes then turned towards the sight of her boyfriend, her Jason. The tape hanging off the corner of his mouth, skin stained with blood, tears and other copious substances. His eyes still pained and red now looking at her and pleading.

Without a second thought, she goes up to him and cuts him out of his bindings. Ensues a lot of tears and ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ and just a lot of emotional shit…

Then Harley pulls out a gun from Joker’s pocket and shoots her, ruining the special moment…

Only it doesn’t kill her… the bullet bouncing off her…

Y/N had always been careful around weaponry, as she didn’t know if she was invincible like her father or at risk of being destroyed completely like her mother. She had managed to get nicked a few times during fights…

But those were before she met Jason…

She realized what was going on as she shielded Jason from the hail of bullets and shrill angry screams coming from Harley…

She was vulnerable by herself, but impenetrable around Jason…

It was a strange reversal of what was going on with her father around his detective colleague, Chloe…

Without fault, she whips around and sets her sights on Harley, grabbing the gun, twisting and breaking her arm and destroying the pistol in the process…

Flashing her demon face, Reader says to Harley, “If either of you touch him again, you’re gonna wish I had sent you both to Hell just now…”

In the midst of this, Jason passes out from the pain of his untreated injuries. With her supernatural strength, Y/N picks up Jason and turns to leave, unfurling her black and green angel wings…

Boy, Batman was going to give her a hounding and her parents were going to be singing praises…

[jacksprostate]

Part 4 (with links to the other parts)

The first thing I do is, I talk to the man who takes my sheets, with his scrapdog ears and eyebrows, and I tell him: address him properly.

The word spreads on its own. I remember, before I was used to it, that knowing lilt. Sir. It’s still present. Take your pills, sir. It’ll be alright, sir. Take your time recovering. 

Mills starts cursing at the staff. We pass in the halls, he yells at me, tells me to stop them. He’s not their fucking leader. Call off my dogs.

I smile, too wide. They’ve never listened to me, not really. Especially not on this.

I can’t help you. 

Naturally, he hates this. 

The second thing I do is, I ask for photographs. News clippings. Marla’s dildo was large, questionable, encouraging of disorder, and a choking hazard. Slips of paper are much more tolerable contraband. I’m given free rein, like one of Zimbardo’s incentivized guards. It’s a psychology experiment in a psychology experiment, and my psychiatrist is playing Jane Goodall. 

It’s arts and crafts, and all the attendees are either bruised or braindead. There is no one stopping me. I glue all my collected pieces together into the rough shape of a heart, like it’s Valentine’s Day, and I turn to Mills, trapped at the back of the room. He hasn’t seen a shred of what I’m up to. 

Something to remember her by, I say. I don’t call him sir, because I never have. I wonder if he knows this.

I see him look, more instinct than anything from getting layers of paper shoved in his face, and I see how he clenches his teeth so hard his jaw creaks. He rips the collage of his wife out of my hands, and I can tell, he hates me. Real hate, like he wants death to fuck my body until it’s not even for the worms. 

He can’t bear to destroy it, and now I know every time he looks at it in his room, he’ll be thinking of me. Funny how that works.

The thing is; Mills actually didn’t try to kill me this time, so I think I need to take it up a notch. 

I cross the cafeteria just so I can spit in his food. I piss on his door and get the space monkey janitors to leave it for fifty-seven hours. In group therapy, I take a page from Chloe and monologue about how the last thing I’d like to do is get my rocks off chemically unhindered before the seizure medications they’ve got me on arrest all of my brain activity altogether. A nice nugget for Mills to report back to Somerset about my proposed psychosexual obsession. I segue into discussing how I met Tyler, on the nude beach, grit all across him as he hauled pilings and sat with his bare ass in the sand. It’s the most I’ve ever said about Tyler. The group minder scribbles on her sheet like mad as I describe Tyler’s wet, blond hair. His minute of perfection.

And he still doesn’t try to fight me. I know he wants to. He wants to shake me by my throat and rattle me and slam my head into the ground until it splits open like a rotten egg. But he doesn’t, and he looks torn. Like he’s guilty. Like Tyler could ever really feel guilt. 

This is one of the things I want to complain about when Marla calls me. 

She still does. More than when she was alive. But she says nothing, and I can’t break the silence. I sit there, orderlies watching as I say nothing, she says nothing, just a whole bunch of dead air between us.

Ghosts were always calling for Marla, at Paper Street. 

Now I’ve got Marla’s ghost on the line and Tyler’s ghost in the flesh, and neither want to talk to me. 

We get locked up in supervised one-on-one again, now with both of us chained and one twitch away from a new addiction.

I ask Mills, did you talk to her enough, that last week?

Do you think she knew you loved her?

Do you think she felt loved?

Mills asks for the sedation, this time. Polite about it, like he’s not seething. Like I can’t see how his eyes have been only half empty most of these days, since I’ve managed to fill him up with rage at me. Folie à deux, I want it so bad. 

I am Jack’s crippling sense of rejection.

My stupid psychiatrist, he lets Mills amble out of the room and traps me in there. 

I’m corralled. An angel on either shoulder. All the staff who aren’t from the Project have stopped laughing at my jokes. My antics have not gone unobserved. I’ve been given my time to rein as the world’s most entertaining lab rat, and now this localized god wants results.

“What’s your goal here?”

Isn’t it obvious?

“No. Tell me about what you’re thinking,” he says. I look at him, and I see him, for the first time. Not disillusioned, not holy. Just a sniveling doctor with a penchant for human experimentation and the funding to enable him. 

How horribly average.

He says, “I understand this is difficult for you, but we really need to know what’s going on if you want to have continued support in this manner for your recovery.” Play nice, or you’ll lose your favorite toy.

I say, this has never been about recovery. It’s time we faced that, isn’t it?

This man, so used to my religious apathy, has never truly had a challenge. He looks pinched.

He says, “Of course I want you to recover.”

And I laugh, and I point out that we both know those outside these halls are more interested in what’s wrong with me than any semblance of fixing it. 

You’re not getting paid to drain the swamp in my head. You’re here to keep it plugged up, decomposing. We both know this, I’m just acknowledging it. I laugh.

I tell this little god, he can write me up in all his little acclaimed journals.

But don’t come to me, saying I have to play your little games or you’ll take Mills away. We both know you won’t. The day I give up, the day I become a real vegetable is the day your cash cow keels over. You’re not going to punish me. Not really. You’ll take away my jello, my oats, you’ll put me on lithium and clozapine and valproic acid, but you don’t really want this to end. You don’t want me to get better. You want Tyler back just as much as I do. You can’t do shit to me. I have nothing to lose.

You have everything.

Tyler’s words, back home in my mouth. They’re mine now. I get up and the orderlies flanking me do nothing. I look down on this small, small man, and I think, he has never known a bigger fish. He doesn’t even know the hands that feed him.

I’ve hit bottom, I say, and it’s not you who holds the shovel. Be grateful I let you observe.

[catierambles]

Feral Instincts Ch.31

Pairing: The Rogue’s Gallery (Geralt, Syverson, Mike, August Walker, Walter Marshall) x Stephanie Daniels (OFC)

WC 1415

Warnings: Mentions of injury/torture

There were dark circles under her eyes when they walked into the hospital the next day, Stephanie wearing one of Walter’s jumpers that swamped her. August had pulled at her wolf, helping her heal, her injuries now more an annoyance than an actual concern.

She burst into tears when she saw Mike, running over to him, holding him tightly as his fingers wove through her hair, his lips moving over hers as he kissed her deeply. Albert was still unconscious, but scans showed healthy brain activity and he was breathing on his own. Spreading out next to him on the narrow hospital bed, she laid her hand over his heart, reaching out with her wolf and finding his. It was scared, curled in on itself, licking its wounds, but she felt as it felt hers and she gently coaxed it out of hiding, keeping it just below the surface. He breathed in deep, his heart rate spiking, and his eyes opened. They immediately settled on her and he began to sob, the smell of his fear sharp in her nose.

“He kept trying to get me to call you. To ask you to come back.” He said, “He would hit me, or cut me, when I refused. He ordered me over and over again, hurt me over and over again when I told him no.”

“It’s okay, sweety. I’m so proud of you. My strong Omega.” She said, pressing her forehead against his. “He’s not going to hurt you again. He’s not going to hurt anyone ever again.”

“Is he dead?” She just nodded and that made him sob harder, but out of relief.

Later, she stared at the Council rep from across the table at one of their local offices. They had called her in, ordered her, really. Sy and August wanted her to tell them to piss off, but she wanted to get it over and done with. They were standing behind her, arms folded over their chests, a male Alpha wall of protection. Even Napoleon was there, off to the side, having met them outside the building.

“We wanted him alive, Ms. Daniels.”

“Fuck you.” She said simply and he blinked at her in surprise. “He deserved to die.”

“A bit hypocritical, don’t you think? Based on your opinion of the Cleaners?”

“If Albert had died, if Mike had died,” Walter started, “And Jordan had been taken into police custody. He would have been charged with two counts of first degree murder while in the process of a felony, namely grievous bodily injury with the ultimate goal of kidnapping Stephanie. With the aggravating factors, i.e. his history of abuse, he would have been eligible for the death penalty. All the Prosecutor would have had to do was show pictures of the victims, how they were found, as well as Stephanie’s previous wounds and there wouldn’t have been a jury in this world who wouldn’t have decided to put a needle in his arm. The fact that Albert is a child, legally, would have only strengthened it. So don’t you dare call her a hypocrite.” Napoleon’s phone went off in his pocket and he answered it, still staring at the Council rep.

“Solo.” He listened for a bit. “Thank you.” He hung up, sliding his phone back into his inner breast pocket. “I had them run the Feral’s DNA through ViCAP in coordination with federal law enforcement.”

“Why would you do that?” Sy asked.

“Call it a gut feeling.” He said, shrugging, “It popped on about a half dozen unsolved murders across the country, his DNA found under the female victim’s fingernails. There were about a dozen more with a similar MO but no DNA. Guy liked knives and playing with his victims. Only one survivor.”

“Let me guess.” Stephanie said, “A wolf.”

“Good guess.” Napoleon said.

“She survived the attack, but in the process of her fighting him off, he got infected.” Stephanie said and he made an acknowledging sound with a nod. “Makes sense why he was able to hide his Feral status so well. He was used to wearing masks.”

“And he was batshit before becoming a wolf,” Sy said, “Not because of it.”

“In my professional opinion,” Walter said, “He probably targeted Stephanie as his next victim, but he felt what we all did and his wolf claimed her as a Mate, although she wasn’t a wolf yet. Deluded, but par for the course with Ferals. So instead of killing her, he dated her, but he couldn’t hide all the time, so he wasn’t exactly boyfriend of the year. She tried to leave him, so he infected her, probably thinking she’d be exactly like him and they’d be a bloodier Bonnie and Clyde. Cutting a swathe through the country until they were finally hunted and put down by a Tracker, possibly even by Geralt.”

“But he couldn’t control her.” Geralt said, “She ran away after he infected her, found Sy, and asked him for help.”

“And here we are.” Sy said, “Eighteen dead women, that we know of, and one attempted. Death penalty, Walt?”

“Many, many, times over. There would have been a fight over who got to do it.”

“I wonder,” Stephanie said, “How many victims there were after the DNA started coming back as wolf. Seeing as the Council likes to maintain their squeaky clean image. Wouldn’t shock me if they “took over” the investigations and swept it under the rug. No serial killer wolves here, no Sir. He didn’t stay in one spot, have one hunting ground, so you can't send a Tracker if you don’t know where to send the Tracker to.”

“Never heard anything about it.” Geralt said, shaking his head.

“Leon, what’s the technical term for it if it were to get out that the Pack Council was concealing the existence of a serial killer that turned furry? Not just from the public, but from the organizations that could have stopped him?” She asked.

“A shit storm, Stephanie, it’s called a shit storm.” He said.

“You wouldn’t.” The rep said.

“Fuckin’ try me.” She said, “Shit has to change. We’re not hiding anymore, we can’t act like we still are. I wonder how many women would still be alive if the Pack Council had worked with the Feds in tracking him down?”

“I’m putting Stephanie’s name forward as a candidate for Councilor.” Napoleon said, “There are a few wolves that are…past their prime that should have stepped down years ago. They have the majority vote. Replacing even one of them would swing the vote in favor of reform and cooperation. No more Cleaners, no more cover-ups.”

“What happened to me being naive?”

“I would call you more of an idealist.” Napoleon said and she snorted.

“Why would they step down?” Sy asked, “Old dudes in power like to stay in power.”

“I would very politely, and respectfully, let them know that stepping down is in their best interest.” Leon said.

“You’d blackmail a Councilor?” The rep asked.

“Absolutely not. Wouldn’t dream of it.” Leon said, “I would simply say that stepping down in the interest of reform is what’s best for everyone. Times are changing, and we need to change with them. If they stepped down in order to further advance relationships and partnerships with the human government and governmental entities, it would look best for them. Putting the interests of all wolves ahead of their own. What would be your first order, Steph? Hypothetically speaking.”

“Repurpose the Cleaners as Trackers.” She said, “After extensive psychological evaluations. Starting with this one.” She jutted her thumb over her shoulder at August and he scowled at her. “I’m joking. About you, anyway.”

“After that?” Leon asked.

“Meet with the heads of the Alphabet Mafia, lay everything out on the table. Full disclosure. Trust is a two-way street.”

“I like it.” Leon said, “Show them our hand and encourage them to show theirs in the spirit of cooperation. Anything else?”

“Ask me again when that’s done.” She said and he nodded.

“Also, if any of the Council tries to block her,” August said, “Or do some shady bullshit to take her out of the picture, we’re returning whoever is involved back in pieces.” His head tilted to the side slightly, “Starting with you.” The representative paled and Stephanie rolled her eyes.

“August, he’s just a lackey.” She said, “Don’t be a dick.”

“Just looking out for you, Princess.”

“Testosterone disaster.” She mumbled and Walter snorted.

[kadytimberfox]

Kady's Expanse (Re)Watch Blog

Episode 1.01 - "Dulcinea" (Pilot)

And here we go for my...fourth time I've watched this episode I think? It's a really wonderful pilot that does so much work with introducing you to the world, our cast of characters, and setting up the threads of the main plot and does it all perfectly in a very tight 45 minutes. It reminds me a lot of Deep Space Nine's pilot "The Emissary" which is similarly a masterclass in tight storytelling and how to properly kick off a new series.

And speaking of kicking off a new series, hey! I'm watching this show that I absolutely adore again and I'm going to take the time to spout my thoughts about it on the internet because that seems like a fun idea! I really enjoy thinking about media critically but I've never taken the time to write down my thoughts before. It's a style of writing I've always wanted to try so where better to do that than a Tumblr blog? I'll try to keep these Brief and Not Boring but no guarantees on either. Especially on this one. It's the pilot, after all.

I also want to keep this as light on spoilers as possible; again though, no guarantees. Also if you haven't seen this show yet just go fucking watch it it's so good.

Later in this post is a description of torture that happens in the episode. I marked it with a TW and formatted the text to make it distinct from the rest of the post.

With that out of the way, there's nothing left to do except pick apart this pilot!

---------------------------------------

Summary

We kick off with a bang (and then some more banging) as we see a young woman named "Julie" fight her way out of a locked compartment, explore the darkened hallways of her Completely Fucked Spaceship, and watch her friends get eaten alive by some evil blue space goop. Surely none of that will be important later.

Cut to the adventures of hard-boiled Belter detective Joe Miller and his new Earthling partner Dimitri Havelock. They're private cops for an Earth corporation who theoretically maintain order on Ceres Station in the Asteroid Belt, the biggest shithole this side of pretty much anywhere. They go to a murder scene and do basically nothing, antagonize and then arrest people minding their own business at a bar, and take a bribe to half-ass a health inspection. Y'know, classic cop stuff.

Back at the precinct, Miller gets an off-the-books job from his boss to find one Juliette Andromeda Mao, daughter of megacorp magnate Jules-Pierre Mao and coincidentally the spitting image of "Julie" from our opening scene. Apparently, her pro-Belter activism is starting to piss off dear old dad and they want her to come home before she embarrasses the family any further.

In the middle of his investigation, he finds out that those air filters he "inspected" earlier crapped out and poisoned some children. Instead of taking accountability for not doing his job, he decides to throw the sleazy air filter guy into an airlock and only lets him out after he promises not to fuck it up next time. And also to pay Miller double. I'll let it slide though because Sleazy Air Filter Guy is an asshole.

Back on Earth, United Nations Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala shows up for about five minutes in this episode. The only thing she does is torture a guy. End scene.

Meanwhile, the good ship Canterbury is on its way to Ceres with a big haul of space ice that the station needs to turn into water. Second Officer James Holden gets immediately promoted, much to his dismay, because his previous boss Mike Ehrmantraut went insane from being out in space too long.

Mystery strikes when the gang gets a weird distress signal from a ship called the Scopuli. Captain McDowell, probably having watched enough Star Trek episodes to know that this can't be anything good, decides to ignore it. Holden just can't stop himself from doing a good thing, though, and secretly reports the signal, officially making the Canterbury Legally Obligated™ to investigate.

He picks his away team (unknowingly also picking the people he's going to spend the rest of this show with) and takes a shuttle to investigate the drifting Scopuli, where they find everything shut down except for the beacon that brought them here. "Pirate bait", or so it seems.

Suddenly, McDowell advises the away team that a very scary ship has appeared out of nowhere and that they need to get the hell out of there. The gang gets back on the shuttle just in time for the mystery ship to fire not just regular torpedoes, but nuclear torpedoes at them. The torpedoes close to zero...and then continue streaking towards the Canterbury.

Holden tells McDowell to eject the space ice to form a protective barrier, but he refuses, apparently willing to die rather than lose his payday. The payday (and everything else aboard) is lost anyway, however, as the Canterbury erupts into the most beautiful supernova I've ever seen.

"She's gone. They nuked her. She's gone."

-----------------------------------

My thoughts

So this is where I actually have to do the analysis thing. Since the beginning of this show is split into three primary subplots that all deal with a different piece of the Julie puzzle (a narrative device that I fucking love, by the way), I'll divide things up by talking about each one individually because that just makes sense.

Before I do that though, I just want to briefly say that that opening scene with Julie on the Scopuli is just the perfect opening to this show. It immediately gives us a very brief glimpse inside the puzzle box that our main cast is going to spend all of this season (and most of this show) trying to open. It's quick, it's tense, it's completely terrifying, and it's unforgettable if you've seen it.

------------------------------------

Miller on Ceres:

And we follow up that perfect opening scene with a perfect choice for which of these three main threads to start with. The thing that's great about dividing up the characters like this is that each of them only has a piece of what's going on with Julie and the Scopuli, but no one has the full picture. Miller, though, gets the most information off the bat and is the only person in the main cast who's looking for Julie specifically, so it's only natural that we should start with him.

His story is also the inspiration for the title of this episode, "Dulcinea". For those of you who aren't big Don Quixote fans, it's a reference to Quixote's fantasy lover that he invents because he styles himself as a knight and, of course, every knight needs his damsel. He describes her in excruciating detail; she's royalty in a far-off land who is the epitome of feminine beauty, the ideal of Womanhood Incarnate--or his vision of it at least.

And the deeper Miller goes in his investigation, the more quixotic he gets with his idea of who Julie is. He's never met or spoken to Julie, but as he unravels her activities prior to departing on the Scopuli, he becomes increasingly obsessed with her, imagining what kind of a person she must be, picking apart every little detail and transposing it onto his vision of what her life must be like. I'm sure he would call it "being a good detective", but it's much more than that to him.

Throughout Miller's jaunt around town with Havelock, they banter back and forth, and through their conversations, we get a great sense of their personalities. Whereas Miller is the grizzled veteran who's had his morality thoroughly beaten out of him, Havelock is a by-the-book rookie cop who seems genuinely interested in learning about Belters, if only so that he can police them more effectively.

It's a very tried-and-true buddy cop pairing, but it works really well here. Havelock gets to be our audience surrogate for this story as we learn more about how Ceres and Belters operate.

This thread has the biggest worldbuilding burden out of the three and it pulls it off so well. We get so much about life in the Belt, the politics of the Solar System, the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA (who will definitely be showing up later), and the logistics of maintaining a huge population of humans on a space station. And none of it feels clunky or awkward in the slightest. It's exactly the style of worldbuilding I loved in "The Emissary" from Deep Space Nine.

Ceres itself also has huge DS9 vibes, and not in a good way. The set design team did such a good job making this place look old, weathered, and completely falling apart. Except, of course, for the nice apartment buildings where the cops, off-worlders, and everyone else rich enough to ignore the seedy underbelly get to live.

There are a ton of fantastic, evocative lines in this arc, but I think my favorite is Miller's deadpan proclamation that "There are no laws on Ceres, just cops." A perfect summary of everything we see on screen about how power is wielded in this place.

-------------------------------------

Chrisjen on Earth:

This is the shortest thread where the least happens, but it will grow into one of my favorites. We don't get too much additional insight into what's going on, but we do get two important things: 1) Chrisjen Avasarala is a stone-cold bitch who thinks the OPA are terrorists, and 2) the OPA are apparently trying to get their hands on illegal stealth technology, which doesn't help with the whole "terrorism" thing.

This links up to both Miller's and Holden's subplots: we know about the OPA from Miller, and the ship that eventually blows up the Cant was using Martian stealth tech. Of course, since Holden and crew have no idea about the OPA, they immediately start thinking that Mars is out to get them, which will continue to play into the story going forward.

!-- TW: DESCRIPTION OF TORTURE --!

Also important to note is that Chrisjen is getting this information through the most brutal torture I've seen on TV in a long time: forcing a Belter whose body can't handle Earth's gravity to stand for hours on end by holding him up with hooks under his arms. After Chrisjen goes on and on about his "weak Belter lungs and brittle Belter bones", she coldly turns around and tells them to hold him up for another 10 hours. "If he survives, call me."

!-- TW ENDS --!

Fucking ghoulish, and definitely not a good look for Madam Undersecretary's first appearance. You're gonna have to trust me now when I say that she becomes one of my favorite characters in the main cast. This is about as bad as she gets, but she continues being manipulative and cold-blooded for most of this show. That's just who she is. To me, it's part of what makes this subplot of scheming at the UN so engaging.

We'll be seeing a lot more of Chrisjen going forward, and she'll get much better. At the very least, she will stop torturing this guy. But only because someone will tell her not to.

-----------------------------------

Holden on the Canterbury:

If Miller's story shows us life in the Belt and Chrisjen's shows us the politics of the Solar System, Holden's thread is all about life onboard a spaceship, which is important because we're going to be spending a lot of time on spaceships. This is also the part of the episode that has the most CG and honestly it holds up really really well. I know it's less than a decade old and they probably got a lot of money for the pilot but still! It looks great!

I'll drop a brief shoutout here as well for the ship designs in this show. They knocked it out of the goddamn park with the Cant's design: it's a big, boxy, dull gray, ugly thing that looks designed to haul ice and do literally nothing else. Everything is so practical and, above all else, plausible. They look like humans from the near future built them and that's the highest compliment I can give them.

There are shades of the first act of "Alien" here as we are essentially dropped into the Cant in the middle of its mission and get to see the camaraderie and hierarchy between all the members of the crew. We also get to know more about Holden, and immediately he begins showing us his defining character trait: he wields a lot of authority and respect, but he hates being in charge.

We see this in the very first scene onboard the Cant when one of the ice haulers, Paj, gets his arm severed while working outside the ship. He seems completely unfazed by this, though, since the company will send him a prosthetic and he's been working for them long enough to get a really good one.

Not only does this happen often enough that the company just buys prosthetics as a cost of doing business, there are literally tiers of coverage depending on years of service. What an optimistic future this is turning out to be.

Paj pleads with Holden to make sure the company doesn't send him a "used" arm (a frightening thought), to which Holden replies with something that he will continue to say, in so many words, over and over: "I'm just another clock-puncher like you." Holden knows he has authority on the Cant, but all he wants to be is a clock-puncher, which he makes very clear to pretty much everyone he talks to, including Captain McDowell when he essentially forces the XO job onto him.

Later on, we get our first glimpse at Holden's other primary personality trait, that being that he is The Main Character and therefore the most kind-hearted soul that can exist in this cold, selfish world. He logs the distress signal they received from the Scopuli, thereby ensuring that they'll have to divert from Ceres (and lose their on-time bonus) in order to investigate.

He shares this privately with Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata before the shuttle mission, to which her only reply is to tell him to keep that to himself. Fair play, considering she was just talking about how she wanted to strangle the little fucking do-gooder before she realized it was her new XO. Excuse me, Acting XO.

Before the shuttle launch, we're briefly introduced to the rest of the away team: the aforementioned Naomi; her mechanic Amos Burton, whose defining character trait is doing whatever Naomi tells him to do; ship's pilot Alex Kamal, who we previously saw being an annoying blabbermouth on the Cant; and Med-Tech Shed Garvey, who sewed up Paj's arm and wants everyone to know that he does not want to be here. Yes, his first name really is Shed.

Most of this part of the episode is setting up what'll happen next so we don't get a lot of time with any of these guys, but we'll have time for some great character work in the coming episodes.

----------------------------------

And that said, what a great setup for what comes next! Nearly all of the people we just got to know on the Cant are vaporized by a mysterious ship, there's a cloud of space debris hurtling toward Holden's little shuttle, and we have a hell of a puzzle box to dig into. Did Mars blow up the Cant? Did the OPA? Why would either of them want to? What does it all have to do with Julie and the Scopuli? And what the hell was that fucking space goo??

Despite covering so much ground in this pilot, The Expanse makes it very clear that we've barely scratched the surface. And even though I've already seen this whole show and know where it's going, it took everything I had to not hit the "next episode" button.

I will be doing that very soon though because I had a blast writing this up and I definitely want to keep doing it! Apologies that this one ran so long -- I assumed I was going to write a lot with this being the first episode and everything but I had so many thoughts that didn't make it into this post. I'm sure I'll be refining the format as we go along as well.

If you read all the way to here, I'm genuinely flattered and I hope you have a wonderful day.

~ Kady <3

[sapphire-weapon]

The scene when Clive took Jill's powers came across kinda funny to me, it was like she was putting the idea out there for discussion and then Clive was already sucking the Eikon juices out of her before the words "are you sure?" had finished leaving his mouth. Like chill bro, maybe let her confirm it first.

It wasn't about taking her Eikon; it was about having and seizing the opportunity to be bonded as one with Jill. The entire scene was a metaphor for sex (which is stupid because they actually have sex for real after it's over, but I guess the devs wanted it to be as clear as possible without having to actually render and animate Clive pounding into her), which is why he's both overeager about getting started and also why he asks for consent several different times.

He did the metaphorical equivalent of pressing the tip of his cock against her hole and then stopping and going "wait, I want you to be absolutely sure, before I do this."

That's why Joshua is so fucking pissed off when Clive tells him that he took Jill's Eikon -- why he insisted that Jill didn't "really" consent; she just didn't say no. We, as the audience, know that that's not true and she actually truly did give her consent (it was her idea in the first place), but the whole thing is so sensitive and personal and intimate that Joshua has every reason to think that Clive actually took advantage of Jill. ("You knew damn well she'd never refuse you!")

He knew how much Clive wanted her -- has always wanted her -- and the idea behind the conversation is that Joshua's screaming at Clive for using "hey I might die" as an excuse to manipulate his way between her legs -- to use her instead of letting the relationship progress naturally with the two of them continuing to stand as equals. He's basically accusing him of pumping & dumping her.

It was such a weird decision on the part of the writers to frame it this way, though, because like...

Clive doesn't actually enjoy taking people's Eikon powers from them; it's not like he gets off on it normally. He actually resists it every single time it happens -- and, in Odin and Phoenix's cases, actively tries to fight against it and begs for it to stop. It's both physically painful and intrusive for him, and it alters and takes away something from both parties that can't be undone or given back (or, at least, that's what the game wants us to believe, until the end of the game happens and Jill still retains all of her ice powers and Dion can just control Bahamut again and w/e it's fine shut up plot and gameplay contrivances are happening).

This scene also happens right after Barnabas tells Clive that his purpose in life is to feed, and, the more that he does it, the more that he'll want to do it. So, it almost comes off as Clive hearing that and then turning around and going "you know what, he's right. Hey Jill--" before going right back to not wanting it/resisting it immediately after.

But FFXVI has a lot of problems with its storytelling like this, where the game sets something up and then it goes nowhere and is completely forgotten about and never mentioned again, so I mean.

You know, whatever.

[roachemoji]

NEW ST LIVE BLOGGING bc i lost my old thread lmao S1 06-08 (but not really i need to rewatch the end again)

Episode 6

OKAY im starting like halfway through ep 6 again

the AUTISM in the first 30 seconds of this episode starting up again lmao EL calling him a mouth breather because its the first insult she fucking hears??? Yea YEAH

GOD JOYCE IN A TURTLE NECK <- my mom (hold oni have to jump back up here because I completetly skipped the part about Jane and her mom and the connection to El and i feel like its a little too on the nose that thats who El is given how much ive seen and read about the fuckery and connections in this show so im waiting on that - unless it is just... that. AKJHD)

I LOVE DUSTIN SO MUCH WHY DO I NEVER HEAR ANYTHING ABOUT HIM LIKE WHAT THE FUCK

hes SO smart holy shit i mean they all are but his interpersonal skills are so JUST YEAH CALL THEM OUT CALL THEM OUT also his quiet "ok" when he pushes that theyre all his best friends UGH

is this the scene is this the i think im about to watch the thing i just OH MAN HE JUST CLOCKED HIM WHO STRADDLES A MAN LIKE THAT WHEN YORUE FIGHTING HELLO

damn

anyway sorry Johnathan and Nancy Platonic Soulmates Best Friends Forever im making them bracelets !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh man i was gonna mention the van that Lucas saw but i forgot also GOD DUSTIN IS THE ONLY ONE WITH FUCKIGN SENSE I LOVE HIM SO MUCH boys boys boys boys boys

I FORGOT HE PISSED HIS FUCKING PANTS LMAO

JUST PISS YOUR PANTS???? oh he okay yeah i though the was actually asking him to just piss his fucking pants

DUSTIN JUST SACRIFICING HIMSELF WHY DO I NOT HEAR MORE ABOUT HIM ACTUALLY

SO what would happen if Mike had like died what would happen if those kids had caused his death like wouold they have just ran and left Dustin or pushed him off or what like AKJSHDSKAJHD

IM SORRY THE SONG WHEN EL SHOWS UP IS SO FUCKING FUNNY

El exxperiencing PTSD so vividly breaks my fucking heart like girlie i understand i understan di do i reall really do god im so sorry BABY GIRL ITS OKAY AOOIASUDSKAH SHE OPENED THE GATE DAMN gonna like swaddle her or something god

im sorry the squad of white vans going to kidnap children is a little too on the fucking nose for me

---

Episode 7

real talk could El not just explode them what if El just exploded them i mean obviously theres OTHER consequences like... killing people BUt i mean.

SHE IDNT EXPLODE THE VAN BUT I MEAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT GUY IS PROBABLY DEAD SO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pausing to say something actually: How child abuse is depicted so far in the show is very scary to me in how real it feels. To be a kid in those situations, to not understand the power you weild because an adult as manipulated you into believing that you're helpless? That the only person you can rely on is them, even as they're actively harming you? Brenner being aware of the harm that El can cause him but believing so strongly in the hold he has on her and therefore he is above consequence, above harm? fucking yucky The scene of him giving her the potted flower made my stomach sink. Felt a little too close to home I know that themes of abuse are really prevelant in this show and Its really interesting to see how it affects people different but especially El, someone who'se pretty fucking clearly autistic and shows a lot of the same symptoms that i did post abuse? I thought i had more to say on it and maybei will as time goes on i just!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ough okay moving on --

LUCAS!!!!!!!!! APOLOGIZING and El saying she sorry too and ALL OF THEM APOLOGIZING YEAH THIS IS BOYS BEING BOYS BABEY THIS IS!!!! BOYS! BEING! BOYS!!!!!!!

WHITE WOMAN JUMPSCARE AGAIN

i cant wait to get to the part where i understand who you (POINTS AT EM) believe she is and fully feel whatever i should feel about her and what shes done or about to do or going to do in multiple timelines or what have YOU

Mikes dad makes me want to ram my head into a wall

and BRENNER is just fucking STABS HIM STABS HIM STABS HIM

Joyce is just :3c she just!! she <3

she can.... make you fly....... and...... piss yourself

the two super powers

OUHAKJSDH i forgot they think Johnathan killed Will jesus christ i hate these two so much and OUGAKSDH GOD THANK YOU FOR AKHSDAKJH FINALLY!! THANK U IK STEVE SHAPES UP AND CHANGES HIS SHIT AND GROWS THANK GOD BUT JESUS ITS ABOUT TIME HOLY FUCK

SPIT IN HIS EYES SPIT IN HIS EYES !!!! WISH U HAD GOD NOT THEIR DND SHIT HELLOW???

the Byers,,,,,,,,,, seemed so distant before like they didnt know each other or cared but god theyre so close theyre so so close and i feel that i get that

MIKES DAD AGAIN I WANT TO HES SO FUCKING STUPID if i were locked in a room with him id put on cocomelon

HOPPER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <3

THE BOYS ARE ALL SO SMART I LOVE THEM OS MUCH

El is just trying so fucking hard god the liek desperation and fear or failure and guilt that she just keeps carrying itS JUST!!!!

MR CLARKS LIL DATE NIGHT!!!!!!!!!!! do you ever use your teacher's autism against him and force him to info dump in the same of science.

watching them setting up the pool and knowing they probably just told them to figure it out while they filmed it <3 ALSO MIKE REALIZING HIS SISTER IS ACTUALLY COOL idk need more siblings being siblings

JOYCE IS MY MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

someone giving El the option to say no? to back out? to FEEL SAFE??? im going to lose my mind im gonan scREAM and cry and throw up!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i am BANGING MY FISTS On the TABLE

genuinely WAHT did barb do to deserve this WHAT DID SHE DO SHE WAS SUCH A GOOD FRIEND OH MY GOD

joyce joyc ejoCYCE JOYCE JOYCE fuck all yall shes my favorite character im in love with her

Do episodes that end in the upside down also not end with music @ em i cant remember this happening before bc i didnt write it down <3

---

Episode 8

LAST EPISIDE OF THE SEASON i went to get popcorn for this to pay full attention or as much as i could im goingin an dout of dissociating so bare with me i feel like im gonna have to rewatch the entire first season again bc i missed a lot but we'll get there in due time anyway onward and upward boys

OHH THE FIRST SCENE I SAW A PARALLEL TO EPISODE ONE!!! WITH JOYCE ON THE PHONE AND NOW YELLING AT BRENNER

god i love WHEN PEOPLE STAND UP TO BRENNER AND DONT BELIEVEHIS BULLSHIT

Hopper <333333

Johnathan and Nancy are my favorite best friends theyre jUST like GUNG FUCKING HO i love it

IM OAIUSDKAJHD NANCY AND HOPPER GOING FUCKING IN WHAT DO YOU MEAN ITS NOT GONNA HAPPEN yall keep underesitimating these people because you got your fancy suits and you think ou have control of the situation and then you get your ass handed to you SO IM waiting for his ass to be handed to him

do NOTTTTT DO NOT DO THIS TO ME WITH HOPPER DONT THROW ME INTO A FUCKING FLASH BACK!!!!!!! NOT LIKE THIS NOT HERE GONNA BITE

if i have to watch people cut their palms to get blood one more time im gonna STOP STOP IT STOP IT STOP oh my GOD LIKE... BAK O FYOU HAND? YOUR ARM? GIRL.

STEEVEEEEEEEEE are the lights gonna start blinking girl please pleas eplease srteve please can he help kill please bro Im HIS big brown eyes hello hwa the fuck

SO Tumblr deleted... everything after this and im kinda upset man i got like 20 minutes left in the episode not even and it just wiped out 90% of me going balls to the fuck wall about El exploding people's brains and how much i love Joyce Byers and how they gotta stopputting me through so much emotional turmoil when it comes to Hopper and his flash backs

I think im gonna rewatch the last episode to give a better genuine reaction bc i kinda spaced out at the end and dont super know whats going on now askdhj

[time-is-restored]

FINALLY got around to finishing 3x2, and i just have to yell abt my absolute favourite part of the way this episode framed roy and trent's relationship. because as trent admits, he started his career being intentionally antagonistic and edgy. but its not like the cynicism wore off over time - remember his first appearance in the press room?

i think that's what's so crucial about all the lingering shots on trent when ted calls roy away to admonish him. because trent has seen this before. he's lived it! he's watching someone's walls get torn down as ted - in barely a handful of sentences - pushes roy to approach trent as a human being, rather than a predator that needs to be scared off. much like ted forced trent to see him as a fellow human, rather than prey.

the moment they share after is quiet, and (as the punchline of the scene emphasises) they're hardly friends afterwards. but there is an understanding there, i think. roy opens up to both ted AND trent with a level of vulnerability he was actively fighting off, right up until that point - yelling at jamie, getting pissed off at an old colleague, and threatening the team w/ violence (which, look, i could be misremembering, but im pretty sure he hasn't done that in a while!). and yet, he talks openly (and fucking HEARTBREAKINGLY) about some really deep and troubling regrets he's experiencing. and trent just listens, like a friend, and specifically not like the reporter he had been when he was younger.

AND THE REASON I NEEDED TO WRITE THIS POST IN THE FIRST PLACE: the fucking head tilt roy gives trent, when ted is being silly with the eye fluttering! what a perfect way to represent their common ground! 'geez, this fucking guy, hey? can't believe HE'S the guy who keeps getting me to spill my guts.' 'i know. can't believe i quit my job for this.' <- they would both commit atrocities for this man.

tldr; i really hope we get even MORE awkward bonding moments between trent and roy, i think their relationship is SUCH a perfect microcosm for just how much good ted has brought into the lives of the ppl around him. esp since ted is clearly struggling to understand his worth atm!!!

(also, omg, the 'ah, ted got you too, eh?' thorough-line is even briefly shared between him and rebecca, in that 'yes.' 'love that.' exchange! pre-ted, she would've blatantly lied, and he would've skewered her for it. instead, she's completely open about her motivations, and he shows her genuine appreciation + amusement. friends!!!)

[dirthara-dalen]

I worked on this last night, way too late into the night perhaps but oh well what is a sleep schedule.

Most of this will be under a cut to avoid splattering spoilers all over peoples dashes. That section will include my overall thoughts as well.

Ok lets start with the non-spoiler lore updates:

Ligastar is in an active relationship with both Theron and Vilkas Vera (my main imperial agent).

After the events at the end of act 2 Ligastar starts to distance himself from the jedi order, has accepted his sith lord status and has a sith apprentice (Raz'lum) that follows him around during act 3.

Ligastar knew Master Orgus as a child given his mother introduced them after arriving at the jedi temple after fleeing dromund kaas. (I am enjoying working on their relationship in my fic wip)

So above is pretty much what i'm gonna share for now as i wanna keep some stuff secret for the fic i am working on. Now to the 7.5 stuff and how it affects his story! I do plan on making individual posts once two weeks have passed at bare minimum.

Spoiler thoughts + Lore below (warning it got a bit long):

To start, I loved the opening and just how annoyed we are. Lemme tell ya it fit perfectly for Ligastar.

The moment alone with Theron was very nice. I had hoped on my other characters who didn't romance them maybe their love interest would come out to say something but of course not :(

This moment right here does not help Ligastar's current feelings towards the republic or the order. He does feel somewhat personally attacked by everyone in the holocall. He really doesn't understand why they think he can really do anything. Due to his connection to Jeeta, Ligastar genuinely fears another mandalorian war. Shae going missing and dumping everything on him pisses him off.

I thoroughly enjoyed having Sa'har around more. Seeing her slightly more naive perspective was very interesting. Her drive to fix her mistakes really does resonant with Ligastar.

All of the slave stuff. Ligastar found the whole experience on Hutta extremely difficult. He sorta puts getting the shuttle off as his desire to free the slaves takes over given his former slave status. He does sort of regret letting Sa'har blow the barrels but his own emotions were affecting his own decision making at the time.

Finding the prisoners from Ord Mantell was a surprise to Ligastar but i totally saw it coming the moment i saw what the area was called. Ligastar knew the people would probably get angry at Sa'har but he wasn't going to allow it. He did escort them to safety as he felt bad for Petra knowing her sister was here partly because of him.

Matthew mother fucking Mercer go off!!! I love Matt as a va partly because i am a critter so the moment i heard his angry voice i knew we were getting a fight! 10/10 fight. I look forward to picking the diff options in regards to the holocron on other characters.

I was so happy to tell Arn there was no way the order was touching the holocron. In my own personal canon that holocron remains with the Starwing family and is one of the objects my oc Lee, Ligastar's descendant, cherishes due to its history. Also telling Arn that the people on the ship are going to Odessen and will be trained within the force enclave again made me so happy. To put it simply, after the events of this patch regardless of what happens in game, Ligastsar officially leaves the order.

After learning what Shae did, that she freed Malgus...he swears he will kill her the next time he see her. Partly due to being fed up with antics and partly due to a hidden desire for revenge he has harbored for years after learning about her role in the sacking of Coruscant.

Like i said before, after at least two weeks i will be making individual posts that go into more detail for his story.

Lastly....not ligastar related but um...that voice actor change. it's not bad but it was jarring despite knowing ahead of time.

[violentviolette]

its been almost 3 weeks now and I think trying to get meows back is driving me genuinely insane

we've seen her twice now but still haven't been able to catch her and she's using the dog house we put outside and filled with our clothes at night so she's not dead. but she is *definitely* avoiding us

driv thinks she must have gotten into it with maybe a deer or raccoon and is now too scared to come out whenever there's anything else around. because genuinely I spend 85% of my day sitting out back and so she absolutely knows we're here. I literally do nothing else at this point. I haven't played a video game or hung out with anyone or done anything other than just take shifts outside walking the woods. its all i do and all i think or talk about and i know ppl are tired of hearing about it and tired of me doing nothing but this but I feel like the second I start just going back to normal and doing normal shit its over and ill never get her back.

but it makes me think she has to be actively avoiding us but I dont understand why. driv says if she got scared enough she might not be sure its safe to come over but idk. I guess. I can barely understand human behavior let alone animal behavior so I have no idea at this point

if it weren't for these fucking dogs I'd be able to just leave all the doors open and then she could come back inside when no ones around

it also doesn't help that all they fucking do is bark. I think there's been at least once or twice where she's been outside a door but the dogs rush it and start barking like crazy before I get there

we got into a small fight over it because I've been saying for ages that we need to train them not to bark but driv insists its useful for them to bark at things outside the house. whereas I personally think it'd be more useful if they simply didn't fucking exist

idk. im just tired and pissed off and I would like to get my stupid fucking cat back so I can stop being filled with anxiety 24/7 and go back to having a life

[vyachki]

Jk rowling was not "cancelled on the spot" shes been spouting crap for years that pisses people off and naturally collected a large amount of haters. Her amateur writing and many strange plots in her books have been heavily scrutinized by critics. Extreme stereotyping, racism, homophobia, writing weird shit about children on twitter, the whole thing with the elves who loved being slaves is weird as fuck, aids metaphors etc. Everyone knows she's annoying. She's hated by transphobes ands trans people alike. Young people hate her and old people hate her. Harry potter fans hate her. Even many of the movie cast hate her. She's a bigot. She doesn't care about people like you. why are u falling over yourself to defend her honestly its so pathetic and we can see right through you. I'm sure you never really gave a crap about the books or who wrote them until you became a radical bitch. You just love her because she hates trans as much as you. That's all you have in common. Shes not a feminist, shes not fighting for anyones rights, she doesnt spread any important information or have any educated opinions. Her new books and movies suck. All she does is sit writing drivel and spreading hate which sounds a lot like you. No wonder you admire her so much. Honestly i bet if Kim Yo Jong or someone came out as a terf and a radical feminist u would all start fanning over her and convert to her ideologies bc u have no back bone or brain and the only thing u care about is worshipping ur chronically online terf cult, making up shit and hating trans people who have nothing to do with you. News flash! Your radical feminism isn't any more radical than what normal ass women have been talking about for generations. All the issues are already included in normal feminism, it's just the same except: you ignore big issues (especially those involving minorities and women of colour), act horrible and rude to everyone, isolate yourself and most of all, devote your existence to being transphobic. It's like a cry for help or something. You're ruining your life by being a bitch. and noone is going to feel sorry for you. Mental illness innit. 🤣 - Sincerely a happily married cis white woman. Get a life.

Oh my god this is so funny, did you copy and paste this from somewhere or did you really type all of this out for me?? I am blushing🤭

People will always have a lot to say about JKR and that's okay, she's a famous female author who owns a billion dollar franchise—people are going to talk shit on her name and some of it may be true, and some of it may not. With the way now that people deliberately skew what other people say (e.g. "JKR wants trans people deaaaaad!!!"), take a lot of shit you see from non-sources with a grain of a salt.

Regardless of the discourse & semantics you want to engage in, biological sex will still be real, women will still face sex-based oppression, and same-sex attracted people are still being erased in favour of "queer" activism. It is not hate to call that out. But it is very condescending to say all this to a detransitioned trans woman / homosexual man since I am still dysphoric, but I am not a victim nor will act like one because of it.

I made this blog to support detransitioners & same-sex attracted people, and to call out lies I was told by the trans cult during & after my transition. I really don't need "happily married cis white women" lecturing me about gender ideology that you never lived. Thanks though!

Sincerely, a "radical b*tch"

[aithne]

when you say things go sideways for Kathil Amell after pissing off the chantry, what happens 👀👀👀👀 what did she do (if its not a surprise) 😂😂

Ahahaha okay, so. This all sounds utterly insane, but it's one of the big climax moments of Old Roads, and I spent a lot of time building to it and I promise it makes sense in the moment. (Old Roads was also written largely between DAO's release and DA2's release, so it doesn't account for some of the lore in DAI. And this moment happens a long ways into the series.)

To make an extremely long story short, basically after 4.5 books' worth of fanfic plot and about...three years or so after the ending of Origins (I think), Kathil has VERY royally pissed off the Chantry. (She basically started a rival Circle of Magi in Orzammar, broke the Harrowing Chamber in Kinloch Hold so Harrowings could no longer be held, and then after a Seeker attempted to kidnap her kid she kicked the Chantry out of Vigil's Keep wholesale. They hadn't liked her much before that and after that they were blindingly pissed.)

So Kathil has a fair number of Templars on the doorstep of Vigil's Keep along with the Grand Cleric from Denerim. She chooses to walk out to meet them--leaving her partners and the rest of the Wardens behind the walls--because she has A Plan.

The Plan turns out to be to let the Templars hit her with all of the cleansings they want (since nobody is going to let a mage with her reputation anywhere near the Grand Cleric with her magic intact), and when they think she's completely helpless, she basically uses the arcane energy that's stored within the sword Spellweaver to temporarily remove the Veil and invite the spirit/demon/god Memory that lives beneath Vigil's Keep to put everyone present through the gauntlet of her own memories of learning she was a mage along with everything that cost her over the years--family, freedom, sanity, etc. This gives the Templars kind of a lot to think about, and they start to back off.

The Veil starts to reassert itself, which is fine and part of the plan. What is not part of the plan is the fact that every demon/spirit/whatever that Kathil has made deals with over the years is nearby in the Fade. They see her through the closing Veil, and surge forth.

Kathil, in a split-second decision of do not let the demon army invade Thedas, decides that it's her the demons want and she had best make sure that they can't get to her family and her people. She uses the last of the arcane energy within Spellweaver to propel herself into the Fade. The sword shatters, she goes, and the Veil seals itself behind her. Everyone left behind thinks she's dead.

Fortunately/unfortunately, Kathil has the shadow of Urthemiel in her head, which becomes dominant once she's physically in the Fade, and she basically spends a bunch of time as a tiny screaming thing inside of an Archdemon in the Fade.

Her family does eventually get her back, but that all kind of puts an end to Kathil's days of actively fighting the Chantry. She retires from the Warden-Commander post and heads out with her family, largely vanishing from public life.

For a while.

(Oh my gods, Old Roads is utterly bonkers. I always forget how bonkers it is. It was basically me going "fuck it I do what I want" with the setting.)