#max's mom is boss battle
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first dinners- o.piastri
summary: being jack wolff's nanny is a pretty sick gig... only when your boss (/ father figure) isn't trying to interrogate your new boyfriend.
pairing: oscar piastri x fem! reader
part one | part two | part three
smut so mdni pls! 18+
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Las Vegas rolled around and you two had been texting back and forth and had even gotten a coffee together. He really liked you. You really liked him. As the paddock filled with people, and all eyes were on the battle between Norris and Verstappen, Oscar sneaking glances at the Mercedes garage went almost unnoticed by the media. He won the race with a 20 second gap from his adoptive father, with both Lando and Max having their races ruined by an accidental oversteer on Max’s end meaning that Lando was down in P5 after having to get his front wing replaced, while Max got taken out by the damage, meaning the championship battle was technically still on.
Oscar finally found you as you stood beside Jack, watching as George lifted his trophy. Oscar sent you a wink to which you smiled and waved, taking some sweet photos of him being celebrated.
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When he texted you to come to his hotel room, never did he ever think you’d be sucking his dick as a congratulations. For being a virgin, you were mentally experienced, or something. There he sat, on the bed, your head between his legs as his brain short-circuited at the way you were sucking him off.
“Fuck,” he grunted, desperately trying to keep his hands to himself as he slowly lost control of his body. The mix of your mouth around his cock, the sound of you actually gagging on him, and your nails digging into his thigh made him want to cum right then and there, but he held off as long as he could, not wanting to end the night prematurely. “I’m gonna-fuck- I’m gonna-!”
And he came in your mouth. And you swallowed it. He looked down at you, a sultry smirk on your lips and he could’ve cum again. “You’re so fucking beautiful.”
You giggled. “Is that because I just sucked your dick?”
“N-no! I mean-” he stopped talking because you started laughing again.
“I’m kidding,” you smiled. “Thank you Oscar.”
He smiled, then pressed his lips to yours, pulling you closer to him. “Can I eat you out?” he mumbled between kisses.
You were taken aback, someone so shy and reserved happily asking you something so crude out of nowhere. “Y-yeah.”
“Yeah?” he looked at you through hooded eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Fucking beautiful,” he smirked, lifting you up easily as he lay back (for someone so skinny, he really was strong) and sat you straddling his face. “Y’gonna ride my face?” His hands gripped onto your ass, almost bruising as you whimpered at his nose meeting with your clit.
You didn’t answer, much too shocked and excited to speak.
He slapped your ass and it made you lurch forward, grinding against his nose. You moaned out. “Yes! Y-yes Osc!”
“Good girl,” he smirked, and then dove in.
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When you woke up with his arms around you and a sore but satisfied feeling between your legs, you smiled.
“Morning baby,” he smiled, noticing how you were finally opening your eyes.
“Hey,” you grinned, stretching.
“I hope you don’t think I called you here last night just to have sex with you, I really like you and I have for a long time and-”
“Oscar, I’m the one that asked to suck your dick, you’re the one who asked me to sit on your face, we both knew what we were doing.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I guess,” he took a deep breath. “So can I be your boyfriend?”
You smiled. “Yeah, you can.”
He pressed his lips to yours again.
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Was Oscar scared for his life while outside of the McLaren Motorhome in the Qatar paddock? Yes, very much so. Was he even more scared when George texted him, asking him to dinner with Toto, Susie, Jack, you, Lewis, and him? Yes, very much so.
He was terrified as he walked into the restaurant, a bunch of flowers in his hand, and his shirt was ironed. Oscar Jack Piastri had ironed his shirt. His mom would’ve been proud. When he saw Toto at a table for two, his face fell deeper into an expression of misery, and he somehow stopped himself from turning tail and running.
“Oscar!” Toto cheered, smiling like the Cheshire cat. “Come sit!”
He was being overly nice, but it was better than the other option, total and utter intimidation. “Hi Toto.”
He sat across from him, shaking his hand and placing the flowers beside him.
“The others will be here in a while,” Toto explained. “I just wanted to chat to you one on one. Congratulations on your win, by the way.”
Oscar nodded. “Thank you.”
“What are your intentions with Y/n?”
Oh. Straight into it.
“Date her?” he answered hesitantly. Toto sighed. Bad answer.
“Y/n is a very special person, in a lot of people’s lives. I don’t want to see you hurting her because-”
“Oh my god! Toto! What the fu-hell are you doing?” you questioned, rushing over to the two of them. Oscar sighed in relief, glad that you were here to save him from Toto’s torment. “I knew you would pull something like this!”
“Ich stelle ein paar Fragen, das ist alles!” (I’m just asking some questions, that’s all) he huffed, getting up. “Es ist kein Problem, ja?” (It’s no problem, yes?) he looked at a very confused Oscar who just stood and nodded. “See! It’s fine!”
“Toto, just let me live my own life, thank you very much. Also, I’ve known Oscar for much longer than you, and I can pick who I want to date, thank you very much,” you scoffed. You grabbed ahold of Oscar’s arm and he smiled, handing you the flowers he got you.
“You look gorgeous,” he whispered as you two watched Susie and Toto arguing over his over-protective tendencies, with George and Lewis joining in when they arrived.
“Thanks,” you smiled, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek. “I can’t believe you ironed your shirt.”
He chuckled. “Thought I’d try to make a good impression.”
“Well, Toto thinks you’re a great driver, and Susie likes you mum. Good impression made.”
He beamed at you as you chatted with Jack (who was holding your other hand) and made jokes about the situation at hand.
When the 7 of you finally sat at your table and the arguing stopped, pleasant conversation flowed, but then George and Lewis had their turn at interrogating Oscar.
"What's her favourite colour?" George asked.
Oscar smiled. "She doesn't have one."
"Favourite flower?" Lewis questioned.
Oscar just pointed to the bouquet of your favourite flowers he'd gotten you earlier.
"Favourite F1 driver?"
The entire table chuckled at that.
"Are we going legacy or current?" Oscar asked.
"Legacy, then current," George decided.
"Legacy; Rosberg, current, Hamilton," he smirked and the two men applauded.
"Right, good enough for me," George announced.
"If you hurt her, I'll push you off the track," Lewis smiled dangerously as he shook his hand.
"Gosh I'm so glad we live in the 1800s," you scoffed, teasing the men. They just rolled their eyes as Susie and Jack laughed at your joke.
When the end night concluded after one too many embarrassing stories about you, you walked out with Oscar’s hand in your left, and Jack’s in your right.
“Oscar,” Jack’s small voice rang out over the voices of the other people in the group. Oscar stopped and crouched down to hear him, and you snapped a quick photo, quickly putting it in your favourites. Your two boys. “I really like you, and Y/n really likes you. Please don’t make her sad.”
Oscar’s heart swelled at his words, getting acknowledgement from Jack? The highest honour. He nodded, smiling. “I’d never dream of it.”
Jack’s lips broke out into a smile. “Good!” and he skipped ahead and took your hand once more, Oscar following suit.
This really was the start of something great.
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navigation for my blog :) (masterlist)
#f1 imagine#f1 x reader#formula 1 x you#formula one imagine#oscar piastri x reader#oscar piastri#oscar piastri x you#formula one x reader#formula 1#formula one#mclaren#oscar piastri x fem!reader#f1 fluff#x reader#female reader#x reader insert#reader insert#x reader fic#x reader fluff#x reader fanfiction#fem reader#gn reader#f1#f1 smau#f1 imagines#f1 x you#requests#f1 fic#f1 fanfic#f1 fanfiction
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Changes chapter 43
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Series masterlist
After going back to the comicbook store, Sam found himself browsing the store daily. He talked with both Edgar and Alan, slowly but surely forming a friendship with them.
Sure, they were weird kids, but Sam had decided that after realising how weird his grandfather was, these kids weren't so bad. At least they wouldn't pretend to go to town, only to sit in the car in the garage and not go anywhere.
"So, you're back, hm?"
"Noticed anything weird about Santa Carla?" Alan gave him a pointed look, as if he wanted to convey a secret message or something.
Sam shrugged. "It's alright, I guess."
"Alright? City hall has been run by werewolves. And we're quite certain that the mayor is a-"
"It doesn't matter, Edgar!" Alan warned, noticing Sam staring outside.
"So you just think anything inexplicable is immediately supernatural?"
Both boys nodded, Edgar more enthusiastically than Alan.
"What if someone does a 180? Like, completely changes personality and all that?"
"Could be something," Edgar nodded, his voice gruffer as if he just reminded that that was his thing.
"Crap."
"What?" Alan looked at Sam.
"Somethings going on with my brother."
Both boys looked interested, and Sam began to tell them all that he'd noticed .
Lucy sat at the front porch, sipping a hot cup of tea. God knew she needed it. Earlier that afternoon, she had gotten a phone call from Max. The same Max who was her boss, and also the one whom she had been on a date with. He was also the man that she felt herself falling for, even though falling in love with your boss was never a good idea. That Max had called, and told her - asked, really, he was very polite - if they could have another date. He told her he had some things to tell her.
The second he had said that, a little ball of anxiety started to grow within her stomach. She had invited him over to her house, knowing that that would ease some of the stress - after all, this was her environment, and it was where she felt safest. Max had readily agreed and had then proceeded to ask if it was okay if he brought his daughter along. His foster daughter, who had been through something so bad that she lost her memory, who forgot her family and somehow had the exact same name as the lost daughter of her sister.
It was a coincidence, right? She couldn't get her hopes up. This was not going to happen.
It was a little after four when the phone in the comic book store began to ring. The whole afternoon, the boys had speculated about what could have happened with Michael. Sam hadn't really seen him in two days, but he knew that his brother started to act strange when he followed that girl. When he saw those bikers. They must have something to do with this, right?
Edgar had answered the phone, and after a short 'hm' he handed the horn to Sam.
"Hello?"
"Sam, it's Mom. Hey, listen, I've got a friend coming over for dinner tonight, and he's bringing his kid, and I'd like for you to be there."
"What friend?"
"Max, I told you about him, right? He owns the videostore."
"The guy that only works nights?"
"Yeah. So please make sure you'll be home by seven, alright?"
"Sure, mom."
Sam hung up, looking at his two new friends. "Michael started acting weird when mom got her new job. When mom got on that date. What if she's dating a vampire?"
It was quiet for a moment, panic on everyone's faces.
"Then we go to dinner with you and face the vampire ourselves."
"We'll unmask him!" Edgar grinned, "and rid the world of this evil!"
Sam nodded, quietly wondering whether dealing with a vampire meant one could still enjoy a homecooked meal. He hoped it did.
Sam hadn't known what to expect when his new friends had proposed getting ready for battle, but stealing holy water from the local church wasn't it. Awkwardly, the boys felt up their waterguns, interrupting a sermon going on inside. Sam was just glad that he had opted to stay out with the bikes - he would never live it down if it was him inside that church.
"So, what are we going to do with it?"
"Spike his drink. If he is a vampire, it should burn." Edgar replied, putting the three guns in his backpack.
Sam nodded. That made sense - somehow?
"We need garlic and onions, I think they can't stand those either."
"My mom has both at home," Sam offered, getting two appreciative nods. He smiled. Maybe it wasn't so hard to have quirky friends.
"Then all we need is stakes. And you need to practice," Alan turned to Sam.
"On what? And are we really bringing stakes to dinner?"
"Do you want to kill that vampire or not?"
Julie looked at her reflection in the mirror, pulling a bit on the dress she was wearing. It was a formal dark purple piece, and even though it was beautiful, it didn't feel too comfortable. With a hesitant sigh, she grabbed a black cardigan, leaving it unbuttoned. It was better, she supposed.
She wasn't normally this nervous, but since Max had told her that there was a chance that Lucy was her aunt. Since she realised that based on what Michael had told her, that Lucy was her aunt, she wanted to make a good impression. If only to show the woman that Max had been treating her well.
"Julie, we need to go."
"I'll be right there," she called back, turning the lights off. She frowned as she saw a silhouette outside her window. As she walked towards it, opening the glass, she could see David sitting there. She frowned.
"What are you doing here?"
"I've been told I fucked up."
Julie glared at him. "In more ways than one. Why are you here?"
"I want to apologise."
"You never apologise."
"The boy's forced me to make an exception."
She snorted, shaking her head. "So, you'll not even mean it then? I figured."
"Julie, come on now-"
"No. Max is taking me to meet someone, and I don't want my night to be ruined by you. So fuck off and have fun hanging out with Star." She snapped, not trying to hide her disdain towards the female half vampire. It was less than before, Julie realised, but she couldn't promise a complete lack of hostility towards the woman at any time soon. The others understood that Star and her heritage were a painful subject, but somehow David did not want to accept that.
"Julie!"
Max sounded impatient. Julie glared at David, not saying a word as she stomped out of her room and down the stairs, ready to go.
Next chapter >
#the lost boys#tlb#marko#david#paul#the lost boys 1987#dwayne#tlb 1987#star#the lost boys x reader#changes tlb#max tlb#michael tlb#julie tlb#star tlb
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Watching fnaf with parents
Mom: Is the sister the killer?
Me: She's, like, 8
Mom: So?
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Mom: It's all in her mind isn't it? Her imagination makes them real
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Me: Could you spend 6 hours on the night shift watching cameras?
Mom: No, that's how the monsters get you
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Mom: *about Raglan* That's the brother, isn't it
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Dad: *about Mike sleeping on night 2* Does this mean the game's so easy I can sleep through it?
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Mom: If he's not his brother he's the kidnapper
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Dad: I don't remember any kids in the place
Me: Oh they're there
Dad: Do you have to survive?
Me: Yeah, they're, uh, hidden
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Mom: *about Max* She deserves to die
Me: Cause she betrayed Mike?
Mom: That and who goes chasing after the scary thing?
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Dad: What happened to all the dead bodies?
Mom: They probably got ate
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Mom: Are they going to get Abby
Me: They don't hurt kids.
Mom: Oh
Me: Usually
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Mom: Is Vanessa a ghost?
Me: ...Vanessa has her own problems
Mom: Is she a ghost?
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Dad: I didn't know those things could walk across town
Me: Golden Freddy is... different
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Mom: Did they kill Aunt Jane?
Me: Eyup
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Dad: *sees the taxi* Uber?
Me: It's, like, the 90s
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Mom: The guy that hired him is the kidnapper
Me: What gives you that idea?
Mom: He always plays the creepy guy
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*Springtrap appears*
Dad: Uh-oh. Boss battle
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*Springtrap unmasks*
Dad: It is him!
Mom: That's what I said!
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Me: Could you imagine finding out the toys your dad gave you came from the kids he murdered?
Mom: Eugh
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Class of Villainy - Worst Fears
What could possibly send chills down the spines of these dastardly students? Well it’s time to find out.
Marinette: The fashionista is terrified of losing her fortune and the possibility of being killed by an animal. She always gets a little paranoid whenever she sees something reminding her of a dalmatian.
Adrien: Adrien is afraid of not being in control of a situation. To him, not knowing how to influence someone is the scariest thing of all. His biggest fear is losing his charm and being unable to manipulate others.
Alya: Not much scares this sorceress. Well... except the possibility of being turned into a creature or object with no ability to change back.
Nino: As a conman, Nino’s afraid of the law. He’s also scared of being mistaken for an actual fox, and being hunt down.
Nathaniel: The psychotic King of Wonderland is hard to scare. The only things that can spook him is stuff that is extremely mundane. Khakis or jazzercise videos, things like that.
Marc: The Poison King is deathly afraid of becoming “ugly”, or not being seen as the “fairest of them all”. He is also afraid of getting struck by lightning or being crushed by a boulder. The other thing that scares him is his little brother, Kiran, getting into danger. That’s why he rarely lets him out of his brooch.
Max: He dreads the chance that his machines and inventions will turn against him, even though he treats them with respect and kindness.
Kim: The hunter is terrified of heights, or falling from heights. He also works out everyday in the offchance that he somehow loses his strength. Being weak is a sin in his eyes. The last thing that scares him is somehow being killed by a beast.
Alix: The worst thing to her is fire. She’s had bad experiences with it in the past, just like her mother. Some of her villainous friends prank her by putting a lighter under her tail.
Juleka: The Mistress of Evil recoils at things that are light and happy (well... except for her darling Queen Rose). The only things that truly scare her are Rose being in danger, her mom or brother getting hurt, and being impaled. She may be evil, but she cherishes her loved ones.
Rose: As a murderous video game fugitive, Rose fears being deleted from the game, or losing her status as royalty. She also fears Juleka being hurt.
Ivan: Unlike the other villains, Ivan loves to be scared. That’s why he’s the Boogie Man, to taste the fear of his friends and victims. One of his favorite things is to be frightened by his girlfriend, Mylene, or his roommate, Denise. The one thing that always terrifies him is bunnies. So naturally, he loves to be near them whenever he gets the chance.
Mylene: Despite stealing voices on a daily basis, this sea witch is terrified of losing her own. Mylene has a highly inflated ego about it, thinking it is the greatest voice of all time. She also has a fear of harpoons.
Sabrina: Like Marinette, she fears becoming a lowly commoner. She also is afraid of her crocodiles somehow turning against her.
Chloe: As an aristocrat, the last thing Chloe wants is to lose her status. She becomes scared if she is not the boss of the situation, alot like Adrien.
Kagami: Kagami had a bad experience with fireworks in a past battle. Now she avoids them at all costs. Otherwise, she is fearless, which fits a terrifying warrior such as herself.
Aurore: The only kid in school without fear. Nothing can unnerve this loony weathergirl. Ivan has tried so many times to scare her in the past, only to get a psychotic giggle fit as a response.
Mireille: You’d think that as a young goddess of death, nothing would frighten Mireille. Well there are two things that scare them. The possibility of becoming mortal, and large bodies of water.
Zoe: Due to neglect from her siblings and parents, Zoe needs to have complete control and attention in a situation. If she doesn’t, it scares her.
Jean: The crab-human hybrid is afraid of being seen as boring. But that fear is small potatoes to the chance he is turned into crab cakes!
Cosette: The assistant is scared of falling into obscurity, or being attacked by predator hybrids. You can tell when it’s scared due to their bleats of panic.
Denise: As a gambling witch doctor, the teen is scared of somehow being unable to pay their debts to their friends on the other sides. They take solace in the fact that they know their villainous friends will find a way to bail them out.
Simon: He’s obviously scared of “sinning” in the eyes of God, even though he willingly commits evil acts all the time. They still fear the Lord’s wrath, and the chance they are sent to Hell for his relationship with Denise. He also fears fire, burning from the stake, or falling from high places.
Ismael: The King of the Savannah fears his subjects turning against him, or becoming hunted by those who mistake him for an actual lion.
Reshma: The first mate has had horrible memories of being chased by crocodiles. She fears the creatures and hates the sound of ticking clocks, because they remind her of Tick-Tock the Crocodile.
Lacey: Even though she is fourteen like everyone else, Lacey fears becoming old, which is why she seeks the magical Sundrop Flower.
And that’s everyone! Thank you to @msweebyness for coming up with the fears with me. Also thank you to @artzychic27 in general. As always, please reblog, reply, and ask about the Mirrorverse and the Class of Heroes/Class of Villainy AU. Production on the Marc crossover short is starting soon, so keep on the lookout for that.
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Top 5 Kills In The Lord Of The Rings
youtube
The one of the gate is Stefan his head is on the body of frodo. And these guys do that kind of thing most of you guys do though and he is not given lines he's saying it to you and people are giving him sight no he's got radar and he's plugged in and they're doing it because their creatures and he says he hates them so here's how we see and he can see them and it looks very weird his body is Lord sword and Lord sauron and that is my husband's character and he is controlling the body remotely and the max they want to see if there's signal and where it comes from and who's doing it and how it's done and if it's us if there is some kind of antimatter signal and stuff like that they say it all the time and they're trying to apply something to it when there's really nothing to apply so that's what they're doing it for and they're horrifying people with their experiments but we are controlling the island by doing it and it's coming up pretty quick and mom doesn't want to be bossed over by him and he says it won't be you it's going to be my niece and she says okay and really we do things that you want us to do and she says I've seen the movie and just fly around getting rid of people and we need that and it is going on like that there's a couple other things in the movie she says she kills him and really the body is just shriveled up and it is expended but it regains strength pretty quickly if people drop blood on it and it's so magical being body but not with Trump on it so that's one part of what's happening and they follow smog and he goes to New Zealand and disappears and shrinks it takes him a while to find him and I think that JC has left and it is an amazing story what really actually happens I'm is going to blow your socks off is a lot stranger than people think and gross as well moving forwards we have events going on here tonight and they want to announce them and so do we one of them is we have a huge huge group of morlock trying to get in at the two land bridges and a huge one trying to get in from Brazil and the islands and the giant one coming on a flotilla and the pseudo empire has to work cut out for them they're going to have a war here. Additionally
-there are some people who are getting removed and forcibly and it's really to stop them from running the war from inside and to get removed quite a bit but they're planning on trying to hold them and to move them around and that is what Cool hand Luke is . They do a few more things
-they're promising to ban people from here I'm trying to do it and they have an offensive
-up there in westborough and Timmy Doyle is up there and he is under fire and under fire a lot. He's getting attacked is getting attacked by large groups and it's going on now he's getting attacked by air and by space and he called his people in and he is going to war and he thinks the gauntlet is the property of JC and his close, is gold plated now it's solid gold and it's really hard it's near pure and the rest of these suit of armor is in Higgins armory no it was there though it was big and it was my husband's. A little bit different physique now there's a bunch of people looking at it no they're looking at what was there there's a huge number of people fighting to look at it a couple of things happening here
-there are a few people who do not understand what we're doing and they're evil and they need to be removed
+and the battle up there in Massachusetts is getting gigantic there's a lot of ships untold 100 million chips are out that we're going after me and they're saying it too the same they say the fleet was down to about 7 billion and now 6.9 billion and the more like you're trying to get to Massachusetts and the space battle is going to ensue momentarily and they probably will try breaking more away my husband says we have to be ready for a major group and they're getting ready several other things
-they are building up a large Force within Charlotte county and our dangerous to my husband and it needs to be moving or disbanded and they're working on it right now
more shortly
Hera Zues
Olympus
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January 23, 2024
Pokemon Sleep
Got a new Growlithe that had better subskills than my old one.
I remember I changed the graphics to low and fps to 30 when I first tried the game because I wanted to lighten its load when recording sleep. Realized I don't need to do that when I have the PoGo Plus+ so I set it back to max/60. Wow that makes such a difference. Even just cooking is so much faster, which is a weird thing to tie to fps.
Soda Dungeon 2
Forgot to put yesterday that I beat Dimension 7.
Beat Dimension 8 today. Sorta by accident too. Just put them on a grinding run and when I checked back they defeated the dungeon boss.
Slice & Dice
Starting to get pretty good at getting to the last boss on normal runs.
It's very much a game that is "the only health that matters is your last one." If no one is dying this turn then just reroll to go all out offensive.
Poison has been king for a lot of runs too. One in particular I got an optional blessing that gave all allies and enemies 1 poison at the start of a battle. Luckily that was a custom mode run and I had 2 healers and 2 defenders so cleanse was readily available.
Crazy combo 1: Put duel on the 10 damage death skill. Did 20 damage + res from a healer + redo skill available but won the fight before use.
Crazy combo 2: Triple shuriken on Venom + an Artificer. Venom gave a crazy amount of poison with the single uses and the left skill ended up doing 20 on the dragon.
Spoilers for Percy Jackson below.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Episode 7 - We Find Out the Truth, Sort of
Percy and friends go through a bed salesman to get to the underworld. Charon stops them and calls Cerberus on them. Grover gets eaten and Annabeth soothes Cerberus. Grover gets spit out and they fly up over the wall. In the forest beyond the wall, Annabeth gets caught up in regrets and has to pearl out. In the desert beyond the forest Grover almost gets flung into Tartarus by his flying shoes. They discover the Master Bolt is in the bag Ares gave them. They go on to confront Hades. Turns out Hades is pretty decent and after a discussion, find he's not behind this whole thing, he just wants his hat. Then after realizing Kronos wants out, Hades does want the Bolt after all. They pearl out without Percy's mother. Ares comes to fight.
Oh also there's snippets of Percy and his mom from the past. We also get a first glimpse at Poseidon.
I really liked this episode. It's always cool how differently various media depict Hades (the place. I like to think they're all correct at the same time. Hades (the god) was pretty cool too. Simultaneously can't wait for the next episode and bummed that it'll be the end of the first season.
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I'm cooking a 4.75 lb turkey breast for myself and maybe my cat. I am alleviated of any family holiday activities other than hanging out with my mom for a belated birthday this weekend. I cook turkey because it's a skill that I don't want to lose plus everybody loves leftovers. Hardest part is the thawing and getting the timing right. I had to pay for food service certification for that sushi job this summer that dissed me with the Karl Lagerfeld shirt on the clock then fired me. That experience was like an audition for kitchen nightmares. The sanitation certificate is pretty useful knowledge for your own home either way. It's two hours in a cold water bath per pound if you've refrigerator defrosted prior at 40 F. So Nine point five hours for it to be full defrosted give or take an hour by my clock. Not as hard as min maxing armor builds in Elden Ring. I started the volcano manor quest lines yesterday and kind of got my character up to level 129. There’s a lot of people in the Elden Ring universe who aren’t big fans of the Erdtree. I didn't realize I missed some of the Ranni quests and found the other weird underground city. The inverted castle mechanic is pretty cool. Straight out of Castlevania. You get a fair amount of larval tears down in the second city. Enough to respec generously if you need to. I've also been playing solo without a great rune and minimal spirit ashes so I'm now understanding just why all the mini bosses seemed impossible. You learn a lot through trial and error. How shield grease is pretty much the shit when it comes to blocking monsters that take up an entire arena. Everything has a trick to it. My biggest boss battle today will probably be the turkey. Though I may stop to take down the putrid tree spirit on my downtime.
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Friday Releases for September 29
Friday is the busiest day of the week for new releases, so we've decided to collect them all in one place. Friday Releases for September 29 include The Creator, Gen V, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and more.
The Creator
The Creator, the new movie from Gareth Edwards, is out today.
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abu dhabi part 2: still december 31, 2024.
lets continue
in any case.
lewis showed up serving cunt (though this might have been media day)
kevin magnussen was wearing short shorts
yuki was also serving
as was zhou
charles and arthur took a bike ride around the circuit ahead of fp1 in matching shirts and ugly baggy pants (again, i think this was media day. george and max really harshed my mellow and wrecked the media day summary sorry everyone)
they suited up together
and they did practice together.
and they had a grand time. they waved at eachother on track. they had fun. their mom even came to watch them.
charles finished the round in first. arthur finished the round in 18th.
and max handed his car over to f2 red bull driver isack hadjar. which was interesting because he had kind of accidentally confirmed in an f2 press conference in qatar that he had a seat in an f1 car for the next season
instagram
the following practice session was equally as insane. williams once again had problems and had to retire at least franco’s car. maybe alex’s too? i don't recall.
charles was given a 10 place grid penalty because his car had a battery issue that resulted in them needing to change the energy store. bad news for the constructors title for ferrari (remember theyre only 21 points behind mclaren)
charles and carlos did an insane sky pad interview
there were rumors circulating that charles and max were moving into the same apartment complex
the gpda posted a drivers photo of all 20 of them and george and max Just So Happened to be next to eachother in the photo, which apparently everyone found hilarious.
and apparently, it was the drivers themselves who insisted that george and max be next to eachother, and they all applauded after the picture had been taken.
max though may have effectively squashed the beef in a fanstage that he did for red bull when asked who he would have on his padel team and he said george
and of course, since mclaren were battling with ferrari for the constructors title, both mika hakkinen and david coulthard (the last two to win the constructors title for mclaren in 1998, before oscar and lando were even born) were present. and wearing matching outfits.
and now. lets review what weve had happen so far. at least the important things.
lewis hamilton is leaving mercedes after 12 years
max verstappen and george russell are beefing to hell and back
and who, pray tell is that the perfect summoning recipe for?????
that's right.
its nico rosberg.
the resident specialist in both lewis hamilton and on-track-battles-turned-into-personal-fights.
he was once again present at the scene of the crime because of course he was. and he had a whole lot to say. and he wasn't even wearing beige.
first, lets tackle what he said about max and george. because his lewis comments went so far off the walls i fear they might have broken them.
now nico was mostly hanging out with sky germany and i think sky italy and i, very unfortunately, do not speak german or italian, so im relying on translations that the good people of the internet provided.
anyway though, nico was seemingly on george’s side of this argument.
on sky germany before fp3, nico was asked his opinion on the dispute. here is what he had to say:
“Well first of all, I think we all want Verstappen and Russell starting next to each other in the race.” which is pretty on par for nico. he likes drama.
remember here too that nico stil has decent relations with mercedes, so he knows george kinda well. and he raced against max (back when max was small and even more of a terror, a la brazil 2016)
he was later asked about the event again on sky sports (english version) also pre fp3, this time in relation to the drivers photo that had just come out, and he said this:
instagram
now. this is a man speaking from experience. when he starts to talk about how the team bosses and the family get involved and all that, that is definitely a man speaking from experience here. he’s also waaaaaay too excited about this (but did you really expect anything less??? i think not)
back over on sky germany he defended george a little.
ralf schumacher was also around for this conversation and the two of them were talking about george stepping up to fill lewis’s role in mercedes (cause remember that lewis is leaving) and ralf said:
“[It] Seems like he [george] made it his mission to improve himself and stand stronger and harder, but it isn’t really authentic. I don’t buy it. I believed Max when he said that George knows what he wants and isn’t really straightforward and honest about it. That’s by the way what you keep on hearing from internal sources, that Geore changed his personality quite a lot and not only in a positive way and I think you can notice that based on his [george’s] comments [from the previous days media sessions].”
which is a pretty solid take on this, especially coming from ralf schumacher (remember that hes kinda controversial and sort of a hater, he was also the only schumacher present that weekend because mick (the mercedes reserve driver) was probably off hiding switzerland somewhere after his family got threatened yet again with more blackmail schemes. does it ever end.)
and nico recognized this, but also thought that he was kind of wrong:
“obviously you can understand George’s perspective. The rule is he has to stay over his minimum delta time and the other driver has to move over. That’s the basis of this whole thing.”
they also debated the now infamous line where george said that max supposedly said he was going to bash his head in. according to another sky germany presenter, Peter Hardenacke, “Netflix was filming the drivers parade in Qatar and was super close to the dispute between the two of them there. It was going on for three to four minutes and they had two cameras on it, but the sentence George mentioned about Max threatening to bash his head into a wall apparently wasn’t said.”
nico was having none of this. “No you should absolutely believe George. He wouldn’t make that up.”
peter pointed out that max had said that george had made it up. which nico was also having none of.
“Well, come on! I’m not so sure about that. It certainly happened. Pretty believable that Max would say something like that! I mean he’s the one that said in a press conference once that he’d headbutt the journalists if they kept rubbing him the wrong way.”
now i don't know what exactly nico is referring to here, this could have happened at literally any point in max’s career, but i don't doubt it happened.
nico also had some other things to say, to other outlets, defending george:
"We know Max always goes to the grey area and beyond. Max is incredibly aggressive in everything, and I think it's great to see George really standing his ground there."
and
"I think it's just George really wanting to stand up and hold his ground, which for me looks strong on him, because he's really sticking to his line, standing up to Max.”
and again, nico was vaguely terrorized by young max verstappen in 2015 and 2016. max actually won his first race in barcelona 2016 after nico and lewis both crashed into each other infamously on the opening lap. so theres a good chance that what nico is saying has some truth to it.
also though. people were saying that george put on that white race suit in qatar and Immediately got possessed by nico rosberg. the people, seemingly, were correct.
but now, onto the main event, sir lewis hamilton.
as i have said. sir lewis hamilton is leaving mercedes. hes been there since 2013. mercedes re joined the grid in 2010 (replacing i think brawn ??? the team that only existed for one year and yet somehow managed to win the championship) with german drivers nico rosberg and michael schumacher (who agreed to come out of retirement to drive f1 cars and vaguely terrorize his teammate again cause well why the hell not). merc was solidly mid field. michael schumacher retired for realsies in at the end of 2012 and in 2013 lewis hamilton joined the team. he had one championship title to his name from 2008, his second year as an f1 driver, while he had been at mclaren. then brawn won in 2009 and then 2010 started the years of red bull and sebastian vettel dominance. and then mercedes got their shit together lewis and nico battled for the title in 2014 and 2015 (but it was won by lewis) nico won in 2016 in the last race then retired a week later, notably without telling pretty much anyone (except his wife and maybe a few others but notably not lewis and toto) until about 24 hours before the prize giving ceremony and then lewis won again from 2017-2020.
of course, we all know that.
and without getting into the entirety of the nico and lewis debacle, ill give you The Short Version:
im also not fact checking this so. if i get things wrong. oh well.
nico rosberg is the son of 1982 f1 world champion keke rosberg. lewis hamilton was just a kid who liked driving remote control cars and his dad wanted something to do with him on the weekends. several things happened that we are not going to cover but eventually the two of them met during karting when they were young. apparently the both of them were outcasts in exact opposite ways (son of a world champion, child of color from low income background) several more things happened and eventually the two of them wound up as teammates when they were teenagers somewhere around 1998-2001 range. and they were apparently, according to legend and also themselves, best friends. they were essentially going around the world together as young teens chaperoned by usually nicos dad having what both of them have separately described as essentially the time of their lives. theyve both talked about having competitions eating pizza and ice cream and kellogg frosties and wrestling in hotel rooms (once nico ended up under a sink. no one knows how) and wrecking hotel rooms and learning how to unicycle and going to greece and being like hey man how cool would it be if we both made it to f1 and we were teammates???
ok. get the picture? good.
lewis, according to most accounts, was always the better driver of the two, but nico ended up getting an f1 contract first. at williams. in 2006. lewis was still in f2 (called gp2 then) (i think). lewis got his f1 contract at mclaren the next year in 2007. he nearly won the championship that year. nico still hadnt won his first race. or. been on the podium.
in 2008 nico got his first podium in australia. lewis was also on the podium. if you havent seen that video. oh man.
as i said, lewis won the championship in 2008. nico wouldnt win his first race until 2012 in china (he was driving relatively mid field cars though up until around then).
theres a lot of old videos of the two of them before they were teammates in f1 being well. for lack of a better term. best friends.
in 2013 they became teammates. and it started out great. they did a lot of weird ass pr for mercedes and seemed to be getting on well. and then in 2014 the car became competitive and they realized they could both win the championship and things went. downhill.
over the course of the next three years they essentially waged what the press dubbed a psychological war on eachother to try and win the title. no ones really sure the true extent. even then, the merc people (like toto) didn't really know what the fuck was going on and were essentially like. those two have history. theyre being insane about it.
things ive mentioned before on this post is that we know they used to share data between the cars with eachother and they stopped doing that at a point, there was something about an illegal engine mode, they would try to get eachother in trouble with the stewards, one year in monaco nico got accused of purposefully crashing in qualifying so lewis couldn't set a faster time than him and take pole (that was the infamous “were not friends” interview) ( i feel like ive already talked about this on this update) (i may be going insane). they allegedly had to both pay for the damages to their cars after they crashed on the opening lap of barcelona 2016 and sign a contract that they wouldnt crash into eachother anynore and if they did they would be the ones paying for it not the team. nico also did a million and seven weird things to cut weight to beat lewis in 2016. in the end nico essentially retired because he couldn't keep battling lewis for the title anymore because it was quite literally killing him. and its also been implied that he thought he and lewis could be friends again if they werent both racing (its widely thought that nico intigated most of the psychological warfare)
we don't know what the hell happened behind all the closed doors and im sure a lot of things were thrown out of proportion by the press but essentially. racing eachother for a world title tore them apart as friends. as it does most other people (prost and senna for example).
in their last press conference together. abu dhabi 2016. which i know ive referenced before. they were likely not speaking to eachother much at this point. but it was just the two of them in the press conference, they were going up against eachother for the win in the final race of the year. and lewis starts talking about all these good memories he and nico had together as kids. when they were karting. the fucking frosties. which aparently were the only thing nico could eat before that race because despite all the meditation and psychological techniques that nico had been practicing at that point he was still stressed as shit and even up until the last corner thought that he wasn't going to win the title. lewis said also in this press conference that it was a pleasure racing him and nico looks like hes going to cry and etc etc.
nico wins.
a week later, at the prize giving, he announces his retirement. effective immediately.
he had a wife and at least one maybe two kids at that point and most of it was framed i think as he wanted to have more time with his family (who he had largely ignored the last year to win the title) but he did eventually return to the paddock as a presenter for sky sports, invested in a bunch of green energy, did a ton of philanthropy and made a youtube channel where he did weird car things and mostly talked about how great a racer lewis hamilton was.
lewis in return kept racing. he won 4 more titles. he hardly ever if at all even referenced nico. much less said his name.
they live in the same apartment building in monaco. apparently lewis gets nicos kids christmas presents.
lewis claims they were not friends and barely talked before they were teammates at mercedes. nico says that in his heart lewis is still his best friend. yes, he really said that.
have they made up? no one knows. nicos not shy about talking about lewis at all. lewis mentioned him by name a few times this year.
and again, for the millionth time, i don't think they owe eachother anything, im just reporting the news.
in abu dhabi 2021 though, lewis said in an interview that he was a better driver and teammate than he had been in 2016.
a lot of their narrative is skewed heavily because nico is the only one that will talk about it. and theyre both incredibly unreliable narrators. we will most likely never know what actually happened.
tldr: they had a very public and very toxic breakdown of their teenage probably slightly homoerotic codependent friendship. and it haunts the narrative in ways the red string of fate could only dream of doing.
so. it only made sense. that nico rosberg. was present. for lewis’s last race. with mercedes.
god this has gotten so derailed.
the season ended fucking weeks ago what am i doing.
anyway. nico.
he did fp3 with f1tv. which was blessedly in english and also incredibly unhinged. because he is nico rosberg. again i ask, what did you expect???
first and foremostly, he went off on a tangent about the “every team needs a dream” campaign that mercedes was running. remember how i talked about that earlier and said it would come back?
well. here were nicos thoughts on the campaign:
“‘every dream needs a team’ i would've preferred reading 'every team needs a hero' or something cause we're celebrating lewis here, rather than every dream needs a team.”
crofty of course was like well. you know. you need a team to win and blah blah blah blah (which is true) but nico was still having none of it.
“...okay,” he said. “no i just think it's kinda about lewis this weekend.”
nico rosberg being insane about sir lewis hamilton? fork found in kitchen.
and lewis, a little while later, low and behold, came on the radio and asked "Need to remove this sticker on my... inside my cockpit, please." the sticker of course is the “every dream needs a team” sticker. and it was definitely due to visibility purposes but also. insane. cant escape the narrative, etc etc.
aside from lewis though, he did also have some stuff to say about fernando.
fernando had had a particularly shit day the day before (you know, the aston martin kinda sucks)
and he said over the radio that, “I think it's gonna be a good day. I have a good feeling”
crofty was impressed with this, saying that that was “a positive Fernando Alonso who yesterday declared this to be 'the worst car ever.'”
and nico, of course, also had things to say about that: “maybe yesterday somebody told him he needs to be positive, rather than negative”
but we will be hearing plenty more from mr nico rosberg later. right now, lets finally get to the main event: the race cars. because it was time for qualifying.
haas had been doing Pretty Freaking Well up until this point, and it was speculated that they could be spoiling the fun of some of the top teams. and there was also some hope for checo. albeit not a lot.
“we keep our fingers crossed and hope that sergio perez will add to his pole positions?....could this be his final start of red bull?” the announcers said.
because yeah. we still don't know who is driving for red bull next year.
but! yuki is doing a test for red bull during the post season tests next week.
but we will hear way more about red bull later. for now we have haas.
and on the topic of haas, martin brundle was on god giggling, live on air. “kevin magnussen up into p3, three tenths quicker than lando in the middle part of the lap!”
“what kind of rocket fuel are they putting in the haas tonight?” crofty added.
“the two haas cars are going to destabilize the top 4 teams,” martin said, absolutely giddy.
back to checo though, he had a lap that got deleted for track limits. he immediately went on the radio and was like hmmm i don't think i went off. (remember, a track limits in f1 qualifying needs to have all four tires go outside of the white line at the same time). after checo’s nagging, red bull called up to race control who got their glasses out and was like oh hm. actually. all four of his tires did not go over the white line at once. and so they reinstated his lap.
so now checo was back up to third position in q1. but he was still pissed because he had had to put on a new set of tires, wasting them, to try and gain back some positions. another class 1 mismanagement by red bull. “i told you!” checo shouted over the radio. “this is why we check!”
in any case. with a few precious minutes to go we had hamilton, franco, fernando, pierre and jack doohan (who is racing this weekend, in case you forgot) all in the drop zone.
pierre managed to go 5th.
all was looking good for lewis hamilton, in his final race with mercedes, until he was smited by none of other than kevin magnussen running over a bollards and knocking it onto the track. this bollard then went under lewis’s car, slowing him down tremendously. and he managed to only qualify 18th.
“that was bad man, jesus” lewis said.
“yeah, fuck lewis, that was bad,” toto agreed.
later, in his interview, lewis said “just my luck bit its okay…i was thinking maybe a podium is possible this weekend….cars been feeling decent…im trying to be present….cars been really different, its been pleasant to drive.”
and nico rosberg, who was over at sky italy, concurred. u know the whole. oh my god such a shock. so sad. his iconic partnership with merc. the greatest of all time! ending in 18th place :////
paraphrased, but you get the sentiment.
and that was not all that nico had to say about lewis during qualifying on sky italy. no. not remotely.
he was asked. to rank. his top 5 drivers of all time.
im not sure if he did it 5 to 1 or 1 to 5, but for dramatic effect we are going to do it 5 to 1:
5. verstappen
4. senna
3. fangio
2. schumacher
1. hamilton
when asked why he put hamilton as first on the list, he said, and i quote, “Beh, sì è mio amico.”
which, for us hooligans who don't speak italian, translates to:
“Well, yeah, he is my friend.”
i just. i have nothing to say here guys.
he also told sky italy, apparently, that he thought that lewis was robbed in 2021 (u remember, bs safety car call on last lap that lead to max winning the championship even though lewis had been ahead for the whole race) and asked the italian fans if they were ready to “receive” lewis.
but. back to qualifying.
and bottas, who remember is the only one currently racing who has not gotten points in 2024, was through to q2.
“probably not on your bingo cards tonight,” crofty said. and he was right.
the start of q2 was delayed so that they could put in a replacement bollard. which the commentators did Not understand because those are “only there if you're training people how to drive a race car….they don't really need it there.” still thought. the bollard went back.
and q2 started.
max was up in p1 at the start with a 1:22.998, which was pretty good considering that red bull was…well…red bull. remember the whole diy rear wing? yeah they were still having some issues. but the announcers were confident. “red bull might have worked their friday night magic” they said.
george then went second, eight tenths off of max. but then. replacing him for second was nico hulkenberg, in a haas, and going fourth was kevin magnussen, in the other haas.
that was short lived through, but it was still insane.
haas.
remember.
this team pretty much cursed themselves back at the start of 2018 when they forgot to tighten the nuts on their tires and they've been something of a flop ever since. they've also never gotten a podium. (nico hulkenberg has Never podiumed in f1 but that's a different story). in fact, the only time haas has ever been on the podium was this past year in f1 academy with their driver chloe chambers.
anyway, then the mclarens showed up and shot their shot for the top.
lando was .1 off of max, oscar was .2 off of max. but they were on old tires, max was on new tires.
instead of going again though, max hopped out of his car.
“i love when they do that,” ted said. “get out of the car, get a deck chair, get a mock tail, put your feet up max.”
max did none of those things.
but out on the track, it was charles’s turn to be insane.
“yeah,” he said over the radio. “that alpha tauri was over the limit” he said about liam lawson blocking him in the pit lane.
in case you need reminding, alpha tauri was the name of vcarb last year. it has been an entire season of them being called vcarb.
vcarb was not pleased with this:
and then, insanely. nico hulkenberg pulled out a p2. only .042 behind max emillian verstappen, four time world champion.
and pierre. was .088 off of max. in third.
and then charles! went fastest!
but! terrible news for italians everywhere! his lap time got deleted!
remember, charles and carlos are trying to snatch the constructors title form lando and oscar. cause theres so much happening, i know you might have forgotten that important detail.
anyway. q2 ended. yuki, liam, lance, charles and kevin were all out.
and this was especially bad news for charles because he had a ten place grid penalty for having to take that new power unit something or other. “not good news for ferrari or charles leclerc” because remember. theyre trying to win the constructors title.
upon being told about his deleted lap, charles said, and i quote: “no freaking way.”
and when they showed him getting out of his car, i want you all to know that my lovely roommate katya said this: “at least hes got that slut waist. like it all could be falling apart for him but at least hes got that sweet bodacious bod.”
insanely, bottas managed to get through again! “that's as fast as she goes!” he said over the radio. and well, he was going to need her to go a little faster cause he had one more round of qualifying ahead of him.
and, i know i havent been doing a good job of saying who is still in qualifying. here we go. competing for the top ten slots were:
carlos sainz of ferrari
max verstappen of red bull
nico hulkenberg of haas
pierre gasly of alpine
lando norris of mclaren
oscar piastri of mclaren
fernando alonso of aston martin
george russell of mercedes
valtteri bottas of stake
checo perez of red bull
and, in the words of zak brown, “this could be a wild qualifying”
and we started q3 with a stat: “nico hulkenberg hasnt been on pole since brazil 2010”
he started with a 1:23.4. which was half a second off of his best time in q2, but this time was done on used tires. so there was still time.
just then though, everyones attention shifted to max verstappen who had just pulled out the save of perhaps the entire century.
and i thought i had a clip of this somewhere hold on.
here we go
youtube
anyway. impressive to say the least. or at least, nico rosberg thought so: "Every other driver would have been in the wall there, by the way. That car was gone. That was some Max magic to save that."
and not only did he keep it out of the wall. he didn't even get his time deleted.
insane.
so. the positions for now were.
max. lando. carlos. nico. pierre. fernando. checo. george. oscar. valtteri.
oscar had been second, but he got his lap time deleted.
and lando was .04 behind max on used tires.
but, the announcers were reviewing oscars lap and thought “that’s perez territory,” meaning checo’s lap that got deleted earlier and then reinstated. and sure enough. oscars lap got reinstated.
he was back in p3.
checo went 4.
then bottas took 4.
then nico hulkenberg! took provisional pole!
“what!?” martin probably shrieked.
“that haas is sitting pretty,” crofty added.
but this was short lived because then oscar took pole. then carlos went second.
the lando took pole.
and so. at the end of q3. we had the following.
lando, oscar, carlos, nico, max, pierre, george, fernando, bottas and perez.
“tremendous! this is just what mclaren need!” crofty yelled. cause remember, theyre trying to win the constructors title.
“Tremendous performances from hulkenberg, gasly, bottas! where has that been all season!” martin added.
meanwhile max was “bemoaning a lack of balance” which explained his poor performance. as in. why he got out qualified. by a haas!
but this meant that max and lando had tied for 8 poles each this season. mclaren has now had three front row lockouts this year. and yuki has out qualified liam in every session this year that liam had raced in. (and yet yuki is not really in contention for the red bull seat).
the last nine races have been won here from pole position.
“this could be quite the race tomorrow night,” crofty said.
and down at the scene of the crime, interviewing our lovely top three, was james hinchcliffe.
lando was asked…some question that i did not write down. and he did not answer it because he got entirely distracted by saying hi to carlos. but he did say “i mean we gotta beat ferrari, that's the game. we wanna win i wanna win…we will be giving it everything we’ve got.”
oscar was a bit more put together. “bit trickier today compared to last night….great result for the tea,....p2 is still a good spot….we will do whatever we can to win the championship.”
and then we had carlos. who, remember, is in his last race for ferrari before he gets shipped waaaaaay down the grid to williams. “i think we made some good progress this weekend….still a race to do tomorrow (and we will give it everything)....i was phishing in qualifying header than ever…..as it might be my last chance for a pole or a win for awhile….i have not been very emotional this weekend because the focus has been so high.”
now though. lets hear from our lovely post qualifying show crew. will buxton. and i believe also james hinchcliffe.
and will started off strong with his take on going too slow in the pit lane:
“if i could make one rule chage it would be anyone who goes too slow in the pitlane? slap em to the back of the grid! im so serious! quit dawdling around in the pitlane and put your lap in”
aside from that, we had charles being twelve kinds of delusional. remember hes starting effectively last.
“im not feeling great…we are not in the strongest position tomorrow…i still feel everything is possible and i will try my best,” he said. “its going to be a very tough race tomorrow but everything is possible and we will keep pushing to the end”
he also told sky italy that “its seven more places to make up but i still believe” or something to that nature.
he said in another interview, upon being asked "is it impossible for the constructors now?"
“no, i still believe it. until the very end, the last turn, i believe it.”
will buxton said that ferrari should change everything that they could on the car and “throw the whole kitchen sink at it” because they have nothing to lose. (spoiler: ferrari did not do that)
will buxton also blew a kiss to max’s insane qualifying lap where he caught the car before crashing head first into the wall.
in his interviews max said three rather important things:
the first, about his car:
"will be putting the RB20 in a museum and never touching it again!"
the scond, about speculated rumors that he is going to retire because kelly is having a child (did you forget about that too? seriously what didn't this season have my god):
“No, I never considered taking a gap year in F1" he said. and he also pointed out that he does tenchically already help take care of a child, kelly’s daughter penelope (not max’s kid though, daniil kyvat’s (ex red bull driver. max actually took his seat and then also started dating his ex girlfriend kelly. why is this sport the way that it is) and i think that this was not even the first time that he said he wasn't retiring, i just don't know where the other interviews are.
and the third, about george:
“[we’ll] be fine, we have our disagreements now and now it's important we go on holiday, spend some time with family and friends and we go at it again next year!”
so. theyre okay now? maybe? no one is quite sure? though max did talk about george earlier with the paddle teammates thing and if i didn't include that earlier then well. i guess you will never know what im talking about :)
let’s move on though, to nico hulkenberg.
he said, “i was expecting a top ten result for sure…p4 is definitely more than i expected and hoped for…going to be a tight and tough battle for sure….hopefully we can have a happy end tomorrow night” referring to, being ahead of alpine in the constructors championship.
he also gave a rather enthusiastic and mildly threatening thumbs up:
and everyone was IMPRESSED with haas. they need 6 points to beat alpine, very hard to get in one shot for them this weekend, but theres a shot. as crofty and martin said, they had some insane rocket fuel or something in their cars this weekend.
“it is game on” said will buxton. even though haas though wanted both cars in top 10 and didn't get that. it was going to be tight with pierre off the line the next day.
another stand out of the session, as we know, was valtteri. “it felt very good…really enjoyed that one…really proud of the team as well,” he said. “we are in a good place…we are definitely in the position for me to get points this year [would be a shame if i didn't]” he was also starting in his best position of the year. p9.
and then. of course. mclaren.
lando said that “we werent really on the pace of the red bulls, [which] really made it [the 1-2] sweeter [and it was] definitely harder than we were expecting.” he also sais that “im here to win, i want to win tomorrow and ill do what needs to be done. im not going to be taking any unnecessary risks but im also not going to let people past.”
and well. that was great that lando thought that. because zak brown had some different ideas about the papaya rules that may or may not be necessary off the line tomorrow.
and once again, mr nico rosberg was there to put him in his place:
nico: “you gonna implement some rules there? off the start? like… ‘oscar don't attack until you're literally side by side’ or something like that? there must be some sort of rules like that right? for tomorrow?”
zak: “yeah, yeah. we’ll come up with some rules overnight. but…ahh…..no no the drivers obviously know exactly what’s going on so i don't think we’ll need to tell them anything i think they know what the, uh, plan is.”
nico, while making several very displeased faces and probably also reliving the opening lap of spain 2016: “ooooooooof! in MY EXPERIENCE *wild hand gestures* it DOES HELP *more wild hand gestures* if you do kinda give some guidelines! *even more wild hand gestures* just say so the drivers know what they need to do!
zak, laughing and totally missing the point: “alright i’ll say ‘i spoke with nico about it and in case it wasn't obvious you guys should be nice to eachother’”
nico: “i highly recommend that! highly recommend that!”
heres the clip of that, by the way. if you want to watch. its really quite something.
nico was also in the trenches fighting against his fellow presenter, danica patrick. you know, the ex female racecar driver who doesnt think women should be in racing whos also a trump supporter and jenson button’s mortal enemy?
well, jenson wasn't here this week (sadly) so. nico picked up the slack. he locked eyes with another presenter over her head at one point, as if to say, is this woman serious??
but back to will and james and laura.
will was excited about the race, as anyone would be. “bring it on,” he said. “i cannot wait. theres so many stories coming to an end tomorrow….this has been an unexpectedly fantastic season, an unpredictable one and i cant wait to see what surprises” are in store for tomorrow”
james was also trilled. “gone are the days where you can predict the winner from the qualifying results, we have a mclaren 1-2 but im not putting money on mclaren” and then he referenced charles leclerc’s insane stunt that he pulled in the final laps of abu dhabi last year. charles was running in i think p2 and checo was behind him in p3 (but with a five second time penalty) and george was in p4. in order for ferrari to beat mercedes in the constructors championship, george needed to finish of the podium. so, charles hopped on the radio and said that he was going to let perex pass him, give him the slip stream and hope to hell that checo could floor it fast enough to get five seconds clear of george and thus, take third on the podium and knock george back to fourth, thus giving ferrari second in the constructors championship.
it didn't end up working, but it was an insane attempt.
“still a chance someone bins it in the last few laps and we get a safety car,” will buxton added. and everyone sighed. because we all remember abu dhabi 2021. “and we know what happens in abu dhabi when we get that,” laura said.
“tomorrow is set to be a thriller, we’ve got a mixed up grid we’ve got a world title on the line, weve got mclaren in the driving seat, weve got ferrari hoping to fight back, weve got haas gunning for sixth versus alpine, potentially a vcarb if they get a stunning result. who know what may happen tomorrow,” laura said.
and with that. heading into the final race of the year, i give you, the constructors standings:
mclaren 640
ferrari 619
red bull 581
mercedes 446
aston martin 92
alpine 59
haas 54
vcarb 46
williams 17
stake 4
mclaren need 25 points to win. haas needs 6 points more than alpine to beat them.
drivers standings:
verstappen 429
norris 349
leclerc 341
piastri 291
sainz 272
russell 235
hamilton 211
perez 152
alonso 68
hulkenberg 37
gasly 36
tsunoda 30
stroll 24
ocon 23
magnussen 16
albon 12
ricciardo 12
bearman 7
colapinto 5
zhou 4
lawson 4
bottas 0
sargeant 0
but before we could line up, there was, unfortunately, a problem. and that was that nico hulkenberg had gotten himself, somehow, a grid penalty.
it was for overtaking cars in the pit lane exit.
everyone, understandably, was annoyed. including nico rosberg who apparently said that he thought they fia should just ignore it so that nico could keep his p4.
but they did not ignore it and he got his three place penalty. rip to a legend.
this did mean though that pierre was bumped up a spot (bad news for the haas alpine battle for p6). unfortunately, the graphic designer for alpine had already gone to bed and the social media admin had to take matters into their own hands
but for the race itself, you'll have time to tune in to part 3.
the 2024 formula 1 silly season and drama master post, part 2 (part 1 here)
Hello and welcome to ah fucking fuck auto caps fuck fuck fuck how do i turn off auto caps AHA there we go okay. take 2
hello and welcome to the great and very insane formula 1 2024 season drama post, part 2. if you are new here or are just looking for part one (which contains the previous 16 (?) races, the off season, pre season testing and everything else, that can be found HERE. (a word to the wise: open it in a browser, not the app, and preferably on a computer to avoid crashing. its fucking long).
what the hell is formula 1? car go fast. fastest cars in the world zoom around tracks at top speeds of over 300kph, piloted by the top 20 drivers in the world. it might not sound dramatic, but oh man. you will Not be disappointed. this post focuses on the drama, the insanity, the sheer what the hell how is this a serious sport. no legitimately. we've just about seen it all this year. grindr, dogs, watersports, ice cream brands, its all here.
the point of this post? to educate, to catalog the insane drama, and to just have a good time. people like to gatekeep this sport, there is also a lot happening. i try to make it easy to understand. again, probably best to start at the beginning of the post because it does a pretty good job of explaining things, which i began way back in january, and can be found HERE (again, shes long, be careful)
and, as usual, if you do not want to see this post EVER AGAIN, block the tag #saph explains silly season 2024
and a second caution, i assume this post will be getting long as well. including this one we have minimum 9 updates left!
anyway, those of you who have been following along the whole time, welcome back! i know we got a little delayed. and i know we’re on a new post, so lets just briefly take a second for me to explain what the fuck happened. first i had an anatomy test, second i work 2 jobs with fuck ass hours, third tumblr decided to stop letting me look at any of my drafts, fourth tumblr support ghosted me about the drafts issue and the post was half saving half not so i just decided fuck it, were going with post 2, electric boogaloo, and fifth, i decided to start typing this instead in a google docs so. many changes. if you're new here i am usually more on top of this.
but here we are. were back on street circuits. we’re in baku, azerbaijan, for the start of the last third of the season. 8 races remain, world championship titles are still within grasp of multiple people. the drama is dramaing. and today is september 22, 2024 and lets fucking go.
first and foremost, on account of the fact that this post is late (again, see above), were going to have to do a bit of a speed run. if you're new here, i promise that this is not representative of my normal dedication to the update post. and for those asking, yeah, ill probably compile it somewhere better than a tumblr post after its all said and done, but we don't have time for that now.
what we do have time for is the Off Week (and like some of the media stuff). and it was filled with silliness:
george russell decided to wear what can only be described as slightly ugly yellow short shorts with his taylor swift shirt that he got at the eras tour. this was baffling for several reasons, the main reason being that i don't think the internet knew that he was capable of wearing a graphic t shirt
fernando alonso got his aston martin valkyrie finally. in case you are unfamiliar, a valkyrie i think is the worlds fastest street legal car. he posted tweets about this that made it seem like he wanted to fuck the car. hilariously, the car broke down an hour later.
we also had the very thrilling conclusion to grill the grid. oscar won and he somehow managed to look more pleased about his grill the grid win than his first race victory.
instagram
nico rosberg went to the green awards and he wore a fantastically insane teal blue suit. yes i know hes not a current driver. but you all like hearing about him so ask and you shall receive. unfornunately i cant find a picture of it though
and also not a current driver is mick schumacher, but my roommate asked me to include that he was seen on his girlfriends instagram being bad at golf. like. exceptionally bad at golf. like he hit a tree 20 feet in front of him.
also playing golf was lando norris. except he managed to look like try bolton from high school musical 2.
he also talked about the world driver championship with his friend max fewtrell while they were playing golf. unfortunately i lost this link in the sea of technical difficulties, but the gist of it was that he was saying that there is still hope for him to beat max in the championship (hes about 60 points behind right now). lando doesnt usually talk about the championship because he doesnt want news outlets to paint him as “desperate” so this was interesting
charles leclerc had an insane off week. first he rear ended someone in monaco. then he spoke at a yacht conference. he was not scheduled to speak at said yacht conference, he was there doing something else and they were like hey you're cool people know you, heres a microphone. he alsp ended up on a weather channel while promoting a karting event he was doing for the jules bianchi foundation (his god father, the one who died during the f1 race in japan 2014). he also changed his instagram pop and re centered it because some random tiktoker told him it matched his aesthetic better.
oscar piastri posted a photo of himself sitting in the cockpit of a plane and then promptly deleted it. because he posted it on 9/11. for anyone who doesnt know what that is, that was when some terrorists hijacked commercial planes and few them into the world trade centers in nyc and the pentagon in washington dc
max verstappen also posted a plane pic with himself and lando norris, but he did not delete it.
we also had the return of daniel ricciardo’s jpg instagram account, which is kinda like a finsta for photos that hes taken. i think lando started this a few years ago.
heading into the race week we certainly got a weird ass batch of pr. including but not limited to:
lewis hamilton was back on top and slaying in the fit game. as was yuki.
lewis hamilton also exposed george russell as listening to katy perry pre race. katy perry and taylor swift (this was after he claimed that he liked listening to old school rap music.) though, lewis then started singing wrecking ball???? confusing vibes all around
george was not off the hook yet tho because some intern definitely make him say skidibidi toilet or whatever the thing is idk, i might be gen z but im not insufferable, okay? actually george in baku was just all kinds of unhinged
george and alex also got up to something, what it is no one knows but it is clearly something
max pulled up to the paddock de aged about 10 years. picture one is of him in baku in 2015 (i believe he was 17) and picture 2 is this year. no i am not kidding.
and franco walked into the paddock telling everyone about argentinian mate (which is a drink, not a friend)
and max shoved a microphone out of the way so everyone could gossip
instagram
then of course, we had some slightly more relevant drama
haas announced that ollie would be replacing kevin at baku. in case you forgot, kevin magnussen received a total of 12 penalty points over the season so far, which means he gets one race ban. how did he get the points? well he was mostly wreaking havoc on everyone else so that his teammate, nico hulkenberg, could drag his car into the points. lets all remember the time in saudi arabia where he managed to get 20 seconds of penalties by basically driving like a mad man just to make sure that nico could keep his position after he pit stopped. anyway, nico was kind of pissed about the race ban situation and said “maybe the guidelines for F1 penalties need to be reviewed as the stewards ‘want to get involved’ no matter the contact.”
in any case though, k mags was out. and ollie was in. we’ve seen ollie before. notably he subbed in for carlos sainz at the saudi arabia gp when carlos had appendicitis. he managed to get points as well. since then, he has been announced as a haas driver for 2025 and is now subbing in for k mags (haas, later in the week called him a super sub. clearly no gen z person read that over.) he can do this because ferrari has a haas engine so they share reserve drivers.
adrian newey finally got employed. i know! i can hardly believe it either! but he did! and youll never guess where!
ferrari? no that would be too obvious.
mercedes? nah
williams? no too much of a shit show
aston martin? ding ding ding! just the right amount of shit show!
that is right. newey is going to aston for 2025.
apparently he was offered a “good package” according to himself, which i assume means pay and also the fact that lawrence stroll made him a shareholder? stakeholder? whatever its called. in the team itself. basically he has a lot of power.
he said that he always wanted to work with fernando and lewis. and he couldn't do both. and aston had a better package than ferrari.
fernando looked positively evil during all the announcement pictures. and called the team "definitely the team of the future" and for those of you who don't know, fernando is positively evil. hes just been stuck in a shit box and we havent seen very much of him, but man does he know how to evilly slut it up. so that will be fun to see.
by contrast, people said that lance was not excited enough. and well. lance 1. has resting bitch face and 2. never really looks excited about anything. also he lives in a world where take your child to work day somehow became his job. (his dad owns the team).
lewis hamilton was asked what he thought about adrian not going to ferrari, and here's what he had to say:
"i feel like, while I have mentioned before that it would be an honor to work with adrian, i have been privileged to work with two championship winning teams that didnt have adrian."
mclaren announced pato o ward would do FP1 in mexico. who is pato o ward? hes one of mclaren’s indycar drivers and one of the f1 reserve drivers. he is incredibly charming and definitely runs his own social media as seen here:
mclaren Also claim they figured out who their number 2 driver is and they claim its oscar. i say they claim because the statements were a lot more complex than that. essentially, according to andrea stella, the priority is to the team first, then lando and then oscar. so they didn't outright say that oscar is the number 2 driver and i am willing to bet real money that this is because mr mark webber, oscars manager, has something in oscars contract that prevents him from being a number 2 driver. this is of course because mark webber was one of the most infamous number 2 drivers in f1 history to none other than menace war criminal sebastian vettel, who in their time as teammates, managed to win 4 back to back world champions. or, top to bottom if you're mrs darbus from high school musical.
lando was asked about this and he said that yes, the team does support him. though he would not expect oscar to give up a win for him and that it is more complex behind the scenes. i suppose we will see if there are any papaya rules coming out this weekend….
and oscar said "i think the main point is its not purely just going to be me pulling over for lando every single race, because thats how none of us, including lando, wont want to go racing, if we feel that someone has done a much better job on a weekend, whichever way it is, we want that person to be rewarded."
max verstappen commented on the mclaren situation as well. which was funny mostly because red bull has one of the most defined number 1 and number 2 drivers of any team. he said "you look at it form oscar's perspective, he is closer to lando than lando to me. they have to deal with that."
and allow me to put on a tin foil hat as we are about to talk about the future of the red bull seat. because all i have to offer here is a baseball hat and a red bull can.
a long time ago we talked about the red bull cans. the ones that red bull makes to promote f1. at the end of last season red bull put max and checo on the red bull can. this season at the start it was just max on the red bull can. well. now checo has reappeared on the cans too. and i will tell you what i think this means. it means that checo is not getting swapped this season, which was a possibility for awhile.
but! there is more!
daniel ricciardo made an instagram post this week. and it was very interesting. but most interestingly he was wearing a red bull hat.
which he does occasionally, no big deal really. he did race for the for several years, he technically does currently. BUT then he showed up TO THE PADDOCK wearing the red bull hat.
which is Big Interesting. usually you show up in a statement outfit or wearing the team kit. and daniel is not a red bull racing driver. he is a visa cashapp racing bulls driver. they might be owned by red bull but they are Not the same team. so why the red bull hat. in the paddock. well, the rumor is that hes taking checos seat for 2025. and the rumor is that this will be announced before mexico. so checo can have a proper send off.
and with that. the baku lore.
theres a lot that has happened at baku. as i said its a street circuit. and i think its the fastest street circuit. but over the years theres been some notable events.
such as the great kimi raikkonen radio for gloves and steering wheel:
instagram
they gave mini kimi this week gloves and steering wheel in honor of that
the max and daniel crash in 2018 when they were running p1 and p2 respectfully
instagram
and of course. how could we forget. charles’s infamous “i am stupid” radio.
youtube
speaking of charles, he crashed again in fp1. not quite in the same spot, but nearly. he took a picture with the marshalls.
then in fp2 he rage quit, basically saying that the car sucks.
instagram
but he was back and better than ever in practice three because he managed to top the time charts. welcome back fuck ass ferrari.
some other teams definitely experienced the lows but not really the highs of baku during practice. like lance stroll who came on the radio to say “this is not a car” (good thing they have adrian newey now, right?
franco colapinto also cut his ear before practice on the neck strengthener stretcher thing that they all use and the team wanted to give him stitches but he was like no no no i need to be in the car in about 5 minutes im not doing that. so he jammed on his helmet and jumped in the car. he also crashed and when he went to the medical center he took off his helmet and there was blood everywhere and they were like no no no you cannot race! and he was like no! this is not from the crash! and then explained it and they let him do qualifying.
also im pretty sure? ollie bearman crashed? in practice? but frankly i don't have time to google it so whos to say.
but alas. qualifying.
i know i know this is kind of a shitty update. i promise ill go all out in singapore. i PROMISE.
so as i said. its a street circuit. high speed. 90 degree corners. and also windy as hell. we also had the dynamic duo of karun and harry in the commentary box.
max led the first practice, george led the second and i think charles led the third. or some order like that.
slipstream here is almost essential (slipstream: going behind another car to reduce the wind drag so you can go faster)
charles has the last three pole positions (first in qualifying) here in baku, but he has never won. by comparison, red bull have never had pole here but they have won.
and franco has never been to baku before.
i think that's all the exposition that we need here.
q1 started with max complaining about his car. “the car is jumping around like crazy on the rear axle” he said. despite this he was sitting in p3.
the mid field battle though….the mid field battle was heating the hell up. mostly because none other than franco colapinto, who if you will remember, has never been to baku before, had split the two ferraris. he was in third for the moment, .109 seconds behind carlos sainz and .159 seconds ahead of charles leclerc. we still had a lot of qualifying left to go, so this was probably not going to stay, but it was still insane. he was pushing insanely hard, nearly kissing the walls. clearly he had learned from his crash in practice.
the two mclarens waited until the very end of q1 to do their final flying push lap, and oscar made it through, but tragedy struck for lando.
lando was in the middle of his last flying lap, time was ticking down, and there was a Very Brief yellow flag on the track. now, according to rules, you cannot complete your flying lap if there is a yellow flag. so lando pitted and was stuck down in 17th and out of qualifying. this would be the first time that he was out in q1 since vegas last year (which if i remember correctly was also not his fault)
now though, of course nothing is ever that cut and dry. people thought that there had been a mis showing of a flag. yellow flag means that a car is stopped on track, white flag means that a car is going slowly on the track. and people thought that there had been a yellow flag shown when it was actually supposed to be a white flag (if there had been a white flag then lando would have been able to keep doing his flying lap) lando himself said that he had no idea what people were talking about because there is a light on the steering wheel that lights up when flags are called and he had a big yellow light. so it was clearly a yellow flag.
if you're concerned about lando being able to pull it out of the bag, id like to point you in the direction of the mexican gp last year where lando qualified 17th and finished 5th. on a track that was hard to overtake on. he can be absolutely insane when he wants to be. worry not gentle reader.
in any case. also out in q1 was daniel ricciardo, valtteri bottas, zhou guanyu and esteban ocon.
and notably, williams, who was on fucking fire this weekend as we already saw, finished q1 with alex albon in second (ahead of oscar) and franco colapinto in 8th. pierre gasly had somehow managed to also get into 4th. and nico hulkenberg was in 7th with ollie bearman in 13th. i told you the mid field battle was heating the hell up.
q2. everyone zoomed straight out of the gate. they didn't want to get lando norris’d. but, speaking of that, if lando managed to get no points in the race and charles managed to win, charles would overtake lando in the drivers championship. mark webber himself told this to charles, who was absolutely baffled.
in any case, charles was kinda suffering right now and that was because he was not getting slipstream from carlos to make his lap faster. meanwhile, carlos seemed to be actively trying to give charles the slipstream because he came on radio to say “he keeps missing the tow”
and amazingly, franco colapinto was 4 tenths AHEAD of alex albon. alex albon who had not been unqualified by his teammate once since the start of 2023. ex red bull driver alex albon. that alex albon.
max topped the times in q2, followed immediately by charles. insanely, fernando alonso managed to drag the aston martin to fifth. and franco was right behind him in 6th. by comparison alex albon was in 10th.
and from q2 we lost ollie bearman, yuki tsunoda (who has never qualified lower than 8th in baku), pierre gasly, nico hulkenberg and lance stroll. so yes, ollie bearman managed to outqualify nico hulkenberg. this is ollies second ever f1 race.
steaming on forward to q3.
we had, for review, in q3 the following:
both ferraris, both red bulls, both mercedes, both WILLIAMS (has not happened since vegas 2023), plus fernando alonso and oscar piastri.
right out the gate it was wild.
“red bull! theyve re found their mojo! or have they!” karun said. red bull were in 5th and 6th and not entirely sucking for the moment.
everyone did one flyer and then came out at the end for a second flyer.
here were the standings:
charles, carlos, oscar, george, checo, max, lewis, alex, franco, fernando
and everyone was making it to the line and all was going smooth until-
wait a second what is that
could it be! alex albon! with the air box fan still on his car! surely not!!!
oh but it was! and harry and karun were like oh wow so unfortunate for williams tisk tisk
meanwhile ted jumped on the radio to Loudly announce to everyone that this was insane and if i have time here i will put the rant he ranted cause it was Fantastic.
and what do you know i have time
so we had 3 minutes left qualifying and everyone was pulling out of the pits for their last flyer when oscar hopped on the radio to say
"the williams still has the air box fan in"
"oh what an error! disaster for williams!" karun and harry said. they speculated if the marshalls could get it or if the session needed to be red flagged. but alex threw the fan off the car.
and then they asked "ted have you ever seen that before?" and ted did not hold back:
"ITS A MASSIVE YELLOW FAN HOW COULD YOU MISS IT???!!! HOW COULD THE MECHANICS MISS IT???? I CANT BELIVE THEY WOULD MAKE SUCH A MISTAKE DOWN AT WILLIAMS! SUCH AN EXPERIENCED BUNCH OF GUYS AND GIRLS! WHAT IS GOING ON AT WILLIAMS OPERATIONALLY? HOW COULD YOU SEND A CAR OUT LIKE THAT?"
alex, obviously, got fined for an unsafe release 5k euros. he also had to throw the fan off to the side and got slightly covered in dry ice. he did not get to the a second flying lap.
franco did tho!
and here were out qualifying results:
p1: charles p2: oscar p3: carlos p4: checo p5: george p6: max p7: lewis p8: fernando p9: franco p10: alex p11: ollie p12: yuki p13: pierre p14: nico p15: lance p16: daniel p17: lando p18: valtteri p19: zhou p20: esteban
oh ho ho but we werent done yet. because pierre gasly got disqualified from qualifying. for failing fuel flow regulations. and lewis was going to have to start from the pit lane for changing his power unit.
everyone, and by everyone i mean oscar max and checo, pretty much said that charles was going to get pole no matter what, they knew this coming in and the best they were trying for was second
onto the race.
notably, this is considered a checo track. this was one of the three races that max did not win last year. because checo won it. its a track that he does well on, evidenced by the fact that he qualified above max in qualifying. so people were expecting big things from him.
and so, we head into lap 1.
charles managed to hang onto the lead. checo passed carlos straight out of the gate for third and max managed to pass george to take fifth. lando had managed to get ahead of nico and up into 13th. notably, franco held onto 8th and ollie was able to hold onto tenth.
someone who was not doing well was lance stroll, who came on the radio saying that he had a puncture. this was from contact with yuki. lance had to pit for fresh tires and was pretty immediately thrown to the back of the grid.
by lap 2 lando had managed to get past daniel and was in 12th, he was trying to get past yuki next, which he managed by lap 3. yuki also lost a spot to nico.
also slaying in the mclaren was oscar, who took fastest lap. then charles took fastest lap.
and lewis hamilton, who had started from the pit lane, was up to 16th. already. somehow. though he was displeased with the tires, sayig that “this tire is pretty bad” over the radio.
yuki meanwhile was clearly having a problem because he had started going very very slowly. thought the pit wall said that he had no problems. this would later turn out to be false but we will indulge them for the time being.
franco was STILL ahead of alex albon on lap 6. STILL.
lando on lap 8 managed to push his way into points positions, overtaking ollie bearman for 10th. though this was where things were about to slow down for him because in front of him were alex, franco and fernando, who were all very close together and would be hard to get past.
george was back in bad luck hell as a plastic bag entered his airbox. will he ever catch a break.
on lap 11 nico hulkenberg finally caught up with ollie bearman and passed him for 11th.
and max’s car was not working. to potentially no one’s surprise. “i have zero bite in the car” he said. and this was probably true because checo was a whole 6.5 seconds ahead of him. insane gap.
several pit stops later that i will not detail out because we simply do not have the time, alex albon ended up in 4th and lando ended up in fifth. and oscar was about to get undercut by checo.
“mojo seems to be back for checo perez” harry said, correctly.
mojo was back for him indeed. and now he was right behind lando.
and if you will recall, according to mclaren themselves, priority at mclaren is the team first, then oscar, then lando. but oscar was ahead of lando. so what did mclaren do?
they asked lando do hold up perez, but not compromise his own race.
remever a long time ago when i said mclaren wouldn't have any internal drama this season? man how i was wrong.
lando managed to hold up perez for around a lap or two before he got past. this was crucial because this was during when oscar was in the pits.
thanks to lando and the power of the papaya rules teamwork, oscar ended up coming out in 4th, only .706s ahead of checo.
mclaren are working together everyone! mclaren are working together!
meanwhile, turns out that yuki did indeed have problems because he retired on lap 17 with a hole in his sidepod from the contact with lance on lap 1. this was now two races in a row where he had had to retire for reasons out of his control.
several more people pitted. and eventually charles was back out in front, oscar was in p2. until he wasn't. no, he didn't dnf. he overtook charles! he was in p1! he popped out of nowhere! nowhere being 2 car lengths back and just flooring it to spring around charles like a little silly slinky! karun called it a “good, fair and robust defense,” which sounds like its descibing notes in wine. but this was not wine. this was the baku gp. and we were only half done.
ollie bearman was defending against lewis hamilton, holding on tightly to 14th place.
charles was still behind oscar and he could not get past, despite the fact that he was still very much in spitting distance. “they are pushing like crazy or they have more grip than us” he said.
carlos got past both lando and alex albon and was up into 4th
this brought max up behind lando. max was on 11 lap old tires and lando was on 24 lap old tires. but lando still defended like hell and managed to hold onto sixth. max was 0.632 seconds behind lando on lap 25 when he said that “my brakes are not working.” this was hardly a surprise. max has hated the car since china.
also experiencing technical difficulties was sir lewis hamilton. he was stuck down in 14th and was first told to do “everything you can do to get the surface temp down” of the tires. he said “im trying” then several laps later on lap 29 he came on the radio to say “are you seeing how i have to drive this thing?” “yes,” bono, his engineer said. “quite effective though.”
max was still half a second behind lando. mclaren faked a pit stop call over the radio to get max to pit. he did not.
but, george russell did manage to pass him. which was “not good for max’s world champion aspirations.”
this was also when ted very bafflingly said that “if i had a sofa in the pit lane i would be jumping up and down on it” im not sure what that was in response to.
meanwhile, ollie was still holding off sir lewis hamilton. and charles was trying to get oscar to pit again by lying over the radio. it was not working.
lando did a pit stop finally and came out a whole 15 second behind max. he was hoping to catch max by the end of the race. but it might be tight. lets go last lap lando.
“lando, imagine andrea on your shoulder saying ‘zero wheel spin’ in every exit,” lando’s race engineer said. if you're confused, everyone else was too.
10 laps to go and here were the order of affairs:
oscar
+.449s charles +1.865s checo +2.989s carlos +16.530s george +1.909s max +11.535s lando +9.715s fernando +2.589s alex +2.451s nico +4.667s franco +1.590s lewis +1.261s ollie +1.791s pierre +9.205s daniel +23.919s esteban +.789s lance +3.862s valtteri +3.631s guanyu
lando was determined. he took fastest lap on lap 43 and was 8.8s behind max
at this point, the leaders were starting to lap the cars in the back. “the back markers are starting to come up,” checo’s engineer said to him. “its going to get messy.”
“hold onto your hats and if you don't have one go get one and hold onto it” harry said. harry would turn out to be correct.
we had the top 3 all running very close to eachother, that was oscar, charles and checo and “welcome to the party carlos sainz!” who was now 1.2 seconds behind checo in the four way battle for the lead.
definitely not leading was lance stroll, who retired on lap 47 with a brake problem.
oscar managed to pull ahead of charles by 1.5 seconds, finally knocking him out of DRS range. so now it was a three way battle for second. and charles had “no rear tires. no rear tires at all.”
and, just like i said he would, lando managed to pass max on lap 49. he was closing the gap slowly in the championship.
“verstappen’s day goes from bad to worse,” harry said. because lando still had fastest lap, so he would score 3 more points than max. which is important if lando wants to beat max in the championship (though i think hes still like 60 points behind)
meanwhile! franco managed to pass nico hulkenberg for 10th! he was in the points!!!! at his second race!!!
but this was short lived because there was a crash! a big smackeroo! between carlos and checo!! checo was mad, carlos didn't know what happened.
what happened was that carlos was trying to pass checo but checo did not move over. it was deemed an equal fault accident. both of them were utterly confused at what happened and apparently spent 20 minutes in the medical center being utterly lost and aparently saying that sometimes this sport sucks. and! contrary to what several people said! checo did not bang on carlos’s helmet after the crash.
the crash actually caused chef's dad to have a heart attack. he is stable now.
and well. this clip of george from the post qualifying interviews definitely didnt age well:
instagram
but! since we were a matter of a few laps from the end, this meant that the rest of the race was finished under a virtual safety car.
which meant
OSCAR PIASTRI WINS THE AZERBAIJAN GP
and george inherited p3!
and on his own merit too! no safety cars, no team orders, no weird shit!
“yes!” he whispered over the radio.
he almost fell getting out of the car, then gave us all the “one moment” hand gesture before properly celebrating.
instagram
he also got driver of the day!
(this was marginally better than george russell, who said over the radio “i cant get any rubber (to pick up on his tires) all im getting is leaves”)
gunther steiner also hosted the post race interviews. which was interesting.
george said that the most difficult part of the race was “driving full gas into a wall of carbon fiber on the penultimate lap…the vsc should have come out sooner”
charles bashed ferrari because they didn't do any high fuel runs in practice.
oscar was entirely pleased. “i managed to overtake and hold onto it for the next 35 laps..one of the better races of my career.” and honestly, oscar winning a race straight after mclaren basically announcing that he was their number 2 driver is nothing short of hilarious.
and! mclaren was now leading the constructors championship by 20 points! for the first time in ten years!!!!
the top three had a moment outside of the car that was filled with baffled:
and oscar's engineer tom got to stand on the podium with him. he usually takes a selfie with oscar after each race he podiums at, but he was too excited to so george took this picture for them
(george also aparently demomished oscar in a game of uno on the plane, immediately humbling him)
george also shielded himself from the champagne on the podium
the cooldown room reacted to the crash in a very straight forward manner:
instagram
and very quickly cause its midnight and the singapore gp starts in 8 hours, the post race, speed ran:
-mark webber told off laura winter for thinking that oscar didn't have good tire management
-alex albon was “super happy, that's a lot of points for us” (williams finished in 7th and 8th). he cut his own interview short when ollie bearman arrived, saying “I can go, im happy to go” and then waving comically.
-williams was so pleased with this result they blasted everyone with champagne. and they overtook alpine in the constructors championship! this was also their best race finish all season
-(and a quick note, if youre going to really blame logan for being that shit of a driver here, please remember that the car he was driving was several rounds of upgrades behind alex's pretty much the entire time he was driving it)
-ollie became the first driver to ever score points in his first two races for two different constructors because the double dnf pushed him up to 10th place. he said that there was not much difference between the haas and the ferrari, the ferrari was just red
-franco continued to charm everyone and flirt with the reporters.
-they interviewed george and lewis and the camera had to be adjusted for george's height. it was comical and resulted in my favorite edit so far of the season (sound on)
instagram
-lando looked pleased and happy for once. he said about holding off checo that “i didn't hold him up i just had to cool my tires a little.” he was delighted to be leading the constructors for the first time in ten years and he defended alex albon saying “i struggled to get past alex for a while, which is common, alex doesnt make mistakes.” he also ratted on max for going to fast during the VSC and said “i didn't complain, facts were stated.” and to sum it all up he said that “im executing things well, i’m very quick…i’m not going to be the happiest guy, but i am never the happiest guy….car is performing well everywhere…some red cars behind us seem to be our biggest competitors right now”
-by comparison george insulted all of pirelli. the tire people. “pretty infuriating that it (the pace) changes this so much….its black magic, people who make the tires don't understand the tires…..for 20 laps we had a car not worthy of points and for 20 laps we had a car fighting for victory and the only difference is the tires.”
-lewis was notably upset after the race and walked through the paddock with his helmet on, not wanting to talk to anyone. but he did talk to franco and ollie and congratulate them on a job well done defending against him and racing against him. franco even fangirled over this on his instagram.
-charles was clearly upset with ferrari. he was so upset he posted a thirst trap.
-and oscar. oscar was very happy this afternoon. and his mom was there! she doesnt usually come cause it scares her, but nicole was there today!
-mclaren celebrated with a hell of a lot of champagne. both oscar’s wina and lando’s insane recovery, and the fact that they were leading the championship. red bull have been dethroned, at least for now.
-there was so much champagne that lando took off his socks to spray it. all seems well at mclaren.
-at least one thing is for sure, oscar had a better time here this weekend than last year when he got food poisoning and only ate four pieces of toast
and with that. we head into singapore. quite literally as it is starting in a few hours. again, i apologixe about this post. its a little sad, but the next one will be better. pinkly promise.
see you all soon!!!
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🎮the life and time of floribeth dalisay
aka flori's life if her life was a video game you could play* (*stylistically and narratively, think about horizon zero dawn, the lis games, dragon age and senua's sacrifice; the game would be 18 to 21+ due to mature themes)
the prologue doubles as a tutorial: it starts with a voice over, narrating flori's life and upbringing as well as hacking triad industries. this portion of the game is in first person pov (almost as if you are flori). after succesfully hacking triad industries (which is a gentle puzzle/brain teaser like all the hacking parts of the game) there is a small cutscene in which flori's phone lights up: it's an invite from sue carson.
part 1 has you steer flori like you'd steer aloy and max and senua. after you've put on your nicest dress, you can walk around your bedroom, as well as walk around the house and outside. you're able to interact with people like flori's mom and dad too. once outside, you are able to walk everywhere as this game is an open world one (albeit with a linear-ish story). at one point, though, you'll end up at the maple hollows graveyard where you meet derek machado, standing over paige billingsley's grave. this triggers the first interaction with choices. after you've talked with derek, he attacks flori (you) and flori (you) die with blood in her/your system. derek vanishes and you're headed into your first timed event: the transformation takes and flori wakes up in a shallow grave. you only have so much time to get her out of there before it's game over.
part 2 introduces the hunger bar. it starts with a regular mouth but it changes from a closed mouth to open mouthed and fangs ala this. there is a small cutscene in which flori makes it to the carson residence and has interactions with doug (her ex) before she goes to clean up. from there on out, it's time for your first (mini) boss battle as sue gets a deep paper cut and flori battles her thirst (but ultimately kills sue).
part 3 starts with a cutscene where flori finds her parents dead and her house turned over. the game then transitions from that cutscene to the (explorable) salvatore boarding school where flori meets the anti squad. emma tig gives flori (and the anti squad) missions / quests to complete, some of which take place in the town itself and at mystic falls high school (where you'll need to hack the computers and will have to do another brain teaser/puzzle). while you're at the high school, you have the choice to tell ethan and maya about derek, or not; you must also be careful not to draw attention to yourself; the hunger bar comes back into play here. the collectibles are bits and pieces of research on eastern vampires (vetala's, peymakilr's, asema's, aswangs, jiangshi's, riri yaka's etc.) and malivore, the dark dimension and such. in this part, you're also able to romance and flirt with several people, including jed; you are also able to feed off of them, if they let you. you are not beholden to just one love interest, either. the boss battle in this part is the siege of the salvatore school by triad in which you come face to face - if only for a moment - with veronica greasley.
part 4 has the player find out that flori's mother was selena harman and that flori's actually descended from a strong bloodline of witches. this part of the game digs deeper into the lives of the students and the life of flori too. the player finds out more about triad industries, and derek and finds out that to him, flori is but a link in the chain. derek is working together with triad, and with doug, joe and tami now, too, which the player finds out only after flori's being sent to maple hollows which is one of the final missions / quests of the game (either with or without jed and his sisters, depending on flori's relationship with him). the boss battle takes place within flori's mind after she gets subjected to a reverse headdive. the game ends with flori surviving the headdive and graduating from the salvatore boarding school with her friends and love interest(s), intending to make her way to chance harbor, where her mom used to live.
there are several endings: the good ending is flori living her best life with the li of your choice and the anti squad. the bad ending is her either getting captured by triad or her dying at derek's or the hunter trio's hands. there are also dlc's that build the world up some more including one that deals with no humanity floribeth and another one that takes the player into the night world, proper.
tagged by: no one, i just made this up tagging: you
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𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐎 : tell your parents you’re a failure.
max presses search. it takes him to some bogus article about accepting your flaws and how to let your parents hear your point of view from a fresh perspective
but you aren’t getting the point, max complains as he closes the tab. they don’t listen.
as far as his parents are concerned, there’s a 3-step track to success. respect your parents, go to college, and get a good job. well, there were flaws in all those if you asked him. first off - his mom commanded respect, which made the idea seem a lot less like a conscious choice and more so a compulsive obligation. second, he hated every minute he spent in college, and it had only held him back when practicing as a trainee. third of all, max knew more people with stable jobs who weren’t happy than who were, and he's definitely a passion over profit type of guy.
so why was he breaking his back to attend class when it was only bringing him down ?
max looks down at the list in front of him. there, in messy handwriting and in bullet points laid a list titled -
why i need to leave college before i make my brain explode and i can’t rap anymore.
i have to walk to school
it makes me tired during practice
mom will want me to stop being a rapper
dad will want me to be a business guy like him
i hate school
i have no college friends
i hate going to class
i sleep in class
i hate school ( again )
mom will want me to stop being a rapper ( again )
the idea of growing old, wearing a suit, and making people who weren’t as wealthy as him feel bad about himself made him feel sick. he wanted power, but ... a different kind. the better kind. the power to say “ jump ” and have the crowd ask “ how high, ” to have his intro play and make the crowd go wild, to forever imprint the entertainment industry with the name max choi. but there’s just one problem. max looks to the other list he’s created.
why i can’t leave college before i make my brain explode and i can’t rap anymore.
mom and dad
well really, his mother. he knows his dad took a gap year before starting university, which is something his mom hated for him to mention, despite being the truth. his mom had pushed him since birth to attend a school in the ivy league, and had irreversibly disappointed her when news of him moving to korea broke. fine then, plan b - attend one of the sky schools, the holy trinity of korean universities. max had opted out for a more local, and less competitive option. if it seemed he couldn’t make it any worse, being alone in a country without any guidance meant max could flunk classes to his heart’s content, his parent’s given tuition money being the only thing truly on the line. but even his dad, far less restrictive than his mother, put a certain emphasis on school for the social and economic status it “ inevitably ” gave you, in his words. moral of the story ? dropping out wasn’t an option.
well if that was the case, it seems max has once again danced to the beat of his very own, rebellious drum. because above the two lists lied another paper with the haunting words- acknowledgement of academic termination. in simpler terms, though ? holy shit. almost teasingly, they provided both an english and korean translation, just in case he wanted to break the news to his parents in his native tongue. how convenient. the notice acknowledged his decision to drop out, and informed him a notice would be sent within 24 hours for tuition financial options following the leaving of the university. his parents, paying his tuition, were inevitably going to find out.
the haunting word “ mom ” glows from his screen as he swallows his nerves. before he can do anything, he presses call. it’s now or never.
“ max, didn’t you get my call earlier ? ” she asks him, already notably irritated.
“mm, i did. i couldn’t pick up though. practice. ” he answers, a hushed whisper as to prevent anyone nearby from hearing.
“ you don’t practice at this tim- ”
“ i do now, mom. i have to do more now that future dreams is - ”
“ maxwell choi, don’t you dare interrupt me when i’m speaking. why did you call ? your dad’s still at work. ” ironic. and it’s max, for the hundreth time in my life.
“ mom i ... i ... ” he expects to feel nervous, scared, sad. and then, it hits him. this is a good thing. this means more time with his friends and his girlfriend, more time to practice, to explore the world around him without any restraints. this is what he wants. the list of why versus why not is so much bigger, so why should he feel afraid ? suddenly, he feels ... defiant. the type of defiance that always makes him feel good. he grins, and speaks as if he’s told her some great secret.
“ i dropped out. ”
“ of legacy ? thank god, i told you it wouldn’t work out. those trainees are all the same, delusional and not - ”
“ no, mom. ” the light that just emerged starts to dim. “ i dropped out ... of school. ”
silence. so much silence that max feels as if he’s not even in the room.
“ ... mom ? ”
he hears her breathing.
“ maxwell choi. ” her voice sounds like an engine, revving itself up. “ you have five minutes to beg them to re-enroll you in your classes as soon as possible, or tell me this is a joke. if you think i’m kidding, i swear to god, i’ll have your card frozen and number blocked before you can blink. and i’ll do whatever it takes to get you out of that training program, too. you won’t be considered a son of mine as a dropout, i swear to god. i dare you to test me. ”
holy shit.
beep. call dropped.
max looks to his phone, which has turned black. he feels like he’s going to pass out at any minute. he wishes he could say she had overreacted, that she never would think of doing something like that. but he knows his mom, and her tone is one that oozes with sincerity and threats. the idea of her following through makes him sick.
and yet ? five, ten, fifteen agonizing minutes pass, and he doesn’t do a single thing. he’s a daredevil by nature, but this is his first act of defiance amongst his true challenge - his mother.
#( and so the tale begins :: development. )#this is likeee part 1 of th#is it's too hard to fit it all into 1 thing ok SCREE#max's mom is boss battle
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God(hcs)
c!multiple x god!reader
notes: the reader will be the god of death to make it a little bit more spicy :). c!punz’s pronouns are he/they, i’m not sure about the others, but i know theirs. also why does ranboo take away my gender? /j
word count: 1,672
warnings: arson, violence, cursing, yelling, mention of death, voices in technos part, spoilers for wilbur if you haven’t watch tommy’s lore stream, revival for wilbur, making a religion, time travel, egg, prison, stealing, anarchy, playful name calling
Sapnap
so obviously y’all would be a great match :)
you have creative mode, so when sap would ask you to give him a lighter and tnt, you would GLADLY give it
also, can we talk about him being a nether hybrid
fire squared
like fires left and right, hide your mom and your children in your house lol /j
but besides the whole arson thing, you favor him above anyone else on the server
like if he asks for diamond blocks, well here’s a whole inventory of it, also, here’s some ancient debris and some netherite
if someone asked, you would probably grant them with poison and curses, just because you can’t be “unloyal” to snapchat 
wouldn’t be lonely anymore
Dreamwastaken
this duo is less chaotic, but chaotic enough where people avoid you
he still asks you for stuff, but most of the time, you don’t give him it because he annoys you too much about giving stuff
“hey y/n/n, can i pretty please get some emerald blocks.”
“nope bitch, get it yourself.”
but sometimes, you grant him some op shit, when it’s your good day
“because i’m being nice, here’s some diamond, now, don’t ask me again you little piss baby.”
“shut your trap y/n.”
“or what homeless teletubby, what are you going to do to a god like me?”
“you hang out with technoblade to much.”
Georgenotfound
maybe the least chaotic duo
you guys keep on relaxing and relaxing until the point where you don’t do anything
he barely asks you for anything, but only when it’s really really important, like a house or build
especially when he was building his little cottagecore house, he needed your godly presence to help
“y/n, what should the roof be made of?”
“i suggest brick, it makes it more aestheticy if that makes any sense.”
also barely any drama or tea with you guys
never arguing and never betraying each other is a must
Tubbo
also another least chaotic duo
literally help him with his bee farm, he will (platonically) love you forever
gotta be close to ranboo, that’s the rule
gives him SO much stuff, he’s a precious boi 🙄
also gotta be close to tommy, but not as much unfortunately
you help him pick out things for builds, like what material clashes with another, etc
“do you think that the wool and the netherite blocks look good together y/n?”
“nah, what i suggest is the wool with the gold, it looks perfect.”
sometiems, gotta put him in check because he gets a little ego built up
you definitely yank his horn a little too hard because of your IMMENSE STRENGTH
“OW, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT Y/N.”
“calm down sunny, you were just getting a bit over your head a little.”
Tommyinnit
chaotic duo like sapnap
snaps at anyone who annoys you and vice versa
you give him EVERYTHING, obviously except op and creative
he tries to persuade you to do something, but dreamxd wouldn’t allow it, since he is the main boss
“come on y/n, give me op.”
“no tommy, xd will kick my ass.”
“pweaseee.”
“no.”
you would DEFINITELY help him with the Big Innit Hotel, making the whole layout and color palette.
both of you have an intense hatred for ranboo, since he “stole” tubbo away from tommy
Ranboo
least involved in everything
just stay in the tundra and drink some tea, and you’re good for all of your life
helps him get netherite all the time so your boii can get the good stuff 😬
when he mines to get diamonds, he literally prays to you
“y/n, if you’re listening, please give me a 6 vein, i desperately need it for my collection of diamond blocks.”
and THERE IT IS
more than a 6 vein actually, a 12 vein
guess he needs to pray to you more
daily tea sessions, to talk about the good stuff, and NO, and i repeat NO skipping
threatening to flick water on him check ✅
Wilbur Soot
literally you spoil him
not to be angsty, but when he died and lost his last canon life, you revived him instead of Dream
now he’s practically at your knees
like he’s thinks that he owes you, but actually that’s the opposite
he was revived because you were lonely, and wanted your best friend back :(
prays to you when he goes to bed
“hey y/n, hope you’re having a great day, (platonically) love you.”
“love you too mortal.”
sometimes, to be at the peak of godness, you shower upon wilbur as gold to symbolize blessings, like zeus did before
“omg y/n, what are you doing?”
“i’m trying to bless you, shut up bitch.”
just saying, he would make a religion about you :/
Karl Jacobs
omg don’t get me started on this
first, you wouldn’t codone him going back in time
he would definitely forget your name a lot, so that’s why you hated it
“hey karl, how are you doing?”
“i’m sorry, but do i know you?”
ANGST IS TOO MUCH FOR ME
you were definitely the one to push him towards sapnap and quackity
this is also another spoiled boi
give him the entire world while you’re at it pwease
he wants a few diamonds, nope, give him a chest full of them
Quackity
why are there so much chaotic duos in here?
literally chaos times infinity
energy to the max
literally, did you take an energy drink
grants him every wish he can randomly think off
“can i get a bucket with lava and a fish in it?”
“weird choice, but ok man.”
gotta be close to sap and karl or he isn’t your friend anymore /j
helps with las nevadas a lot, and definitely tries to rig the machines so you get money
“hey big q, i got 10,000 dollars.”
“that’s impossible... y/n, did you cheat?”
“nooo 😊”
help him preen his wings, and he goes “I LOVE YOU, MWAH MWAH.” obviously in his mind 🙄
Awesamdude
definitely helps him maintain the prison
you both love setting up red stone contraptions and pistons and all that giz
“hey sam, do you know where the redstone torches are?”
“yeah, there behind the pistons in the back.”
also you helped build the prison, since he could do that by himself
“are you sure that lava wall will work y/n, your calculations seem inaccurate.”
“i’m sure sam, this will add some more security to this goddamn server.”
nerd squared lol
BadBoyHalo
wouldn’t condone the egg
you warned him multiple times to get away from its grasp, but most of the times he’ll decline
“i won’t y/n, the egg is the future.”
he still, even after all the advancements, even after everything, he tries to ask you to join the eggpire
“come on y/n, you’ll like being with us.”
“i don’t wanna be on a stupid egg side, like let me crack the egg, i wanna eat it and turn it into a omelette.”
he doesn’t like that joke :(
but before he discovered the egg, both of you were joint at the hip
sight seeing was a must
languages being thrown around everywhere, since you were the little language muffin
Punz
steals stuff from everyone
hide your stuff, because the punzo-y/n team is unstoppable
definitely they can be really stubborn and indecisive
like one day, he will be like, “i need gold blocks.” and the next, “nevermind, i need netherite actually.”
like hon, stop switching
also anarchy buddies
burning down forests and buildings are your guys’s specialty
when you give him gold when they doesn’t ask, his heart goes brrr and his brain goes, “pog pog, they’re so cool, lets hug them.”
Technoblade
now this is the most deadly duo in the entire Dream Smp
better not piss you guys off 😐
he’s the Blood God, and you’re the God/Goddess/God being of Death
so if some occasion where you need to battle someone, like Techno’s enemies, *clears throat and murmurs Quackity*, you will obviously back your boy up :)
help him with enchanting and potions and he’s set for life
also you got have to be close to the great Philza Minecraft since him and Techno are buddy buddy
anarchy squared
helps with the voices since you have some of your own
“so what you’re saying is that i need to pay attention to them?”
“yeah, when i first learned that the voices were in my head, i tried to ignore them, but that sucked. so what i did was try to distract myself with various tasks, and that sucked.”
“so what do i do, you’re saying that i should listen to them, but how do i do that when they literally shout at me.”
“just embrace it, obviously when they do their little chant of blood for the blood god, you have to ignore them.”
“you suck at advice.”
Philza Minecraft
so since both of you resemble death, him being the Angel of Death and you being the God/Goddess/God being of Death, y’all are fucking best friends, platonic soulmates if you will
death squared
watch out, because if you piss them off, prepare to d-
gotta be close to Ranboo and Techno, and obviously others who he platonically likes
he doesn’t need to ask you for stuff, he’s the fricking Angel of Death, but he will ask you to preen his wings :D
“ow, not there y/n.”
“oh shut up grandpa, let me do it.”
“I’M NOT OLD DUMBASS.”
Dream XD
two gods at once, damn there is so much chaos
left and right, you guys are noticed by everyone, like purrrr
y’all would be in some fancy shit, to show your power
you would get jealous of him hanging out with george
“why are you jealous y/n?”
“you’re hanging out with george to much, hang out with me please :(.”
gifts are a must, even though both of you have access to creative
#dream smp#mcyt#myct x reader#dream smp x reader#quackity#quackity x reader#sapnap#sapnap x reader#georgenotfound#georgenotfound x reader#dream x reader#dreamwastaken#wilbur soot#wilbur soot x reader#tommyinnit x reader#tommyinnit#dreamxd#dreamxd x reader#badboyhalo#badboyhalo x reader#louistommosnesquickmilk writes#louistommosnesquickmilk#philza minecraft#philza x reader#technoblade#technoblade x reader#punz#punz x reader#awesamdude#awesamdude x reader
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Serena sitting down and continuing her work on a semi-consistent schedule? I know, I know, kind of insane.
Anyways, let’s cut right back to the chase: We left last post with an in-depth understanding of the basic workings of the mechanics present in The Binding of Isaac, having categorised its combat system and understood how to maximise our advantages. We’ve learnt a few things about this game, namely, that it’s a heavily randomised rogue-like action game with a great emphasis on utilising resources in intelligent ways to min-max the advantages available to the player, and thus make combat easier to survive. Now, we’ll delve into how these mechanics are explored and elaborated on in the flash version’s greatest initial moments, and then lay witness to all that came after that. We might explore the ways in which the game’s scope and focus changed along its history, and finally explain Why Everything About The Binding of Isaac Pisses Me Off, at least gameplay-wise. So, without further ado, let us clear the basement’s floors, and proceed to what lurks below. Follow me as we jump down the trapdoor to the caves, and we discuss...
The Binding of Isaac (and why everything about it pisses me off)
Part Two: Repentant
After having utilised the resources available to us in the best of our ability for a few floors, we should be prepared to deal with the bosses lurking in the depths of the game or at least have some self respect in order to cut our losses and restart to save time. Since, in our case, we got a quality 4 item in the literal first floor of the game, I’d say luck has smiled upon us and the amount of painstaking work we have to put into surviving what’s to come is fairly minimal. So allow us to, instead, jump right into what’s next.
This is actually the boss I was hoping to get in Basement 1 last time, because (while I consider Monstro a better introductory boss with basic attacks) I feel like Gemini exemplifies the cooperation between chasers and clutters to great effect.
(Just a heads up, I had to hop on a different run to get some of these screenshots, namely this one of the Gemini fight and one later on of the Mom’s Heart/It Lives! fight, so I’m sorry for the inconsistency and for not having the funny laser beam in some of the following screenshots. Doesn’t really matter, but I figured some would be curious anyways.)
Gemini is a pair of parasitic twins composed by a tall, derpy looking guy with a visible wound (called Contusion) and a tiny baby guy that fires shots directly at the player (called Suture). They are connected via an umbilical cord of some sort, and their boss fight is fairly simple.
But it also serves to teach the player something a bit more important: clutters are there to make chasers harder. See how each boss has their own health bar? That’s actually from a mod, normally their health would be collapsed into a single bar, but each twin does have its own health. And the order in which they are killed affects the fight.
Contusion is a medium difficulty chaser that follows the player around. On ocassion, he will sprint for a short period and chase the player a bit faster, getting tired and having to stop for a breath after doing so for a few seconds.
Suture, on the other hand, is simply attached to Contusion, getting dragged around by him and periodically firing shorts straight towards the player when they enter his line of sight. While the shots he fires could be considered chaser-y, the fact that he fires them continuously even when Contusion is catching a breath after running makes him more of a clutter: an annoyance that aims to put the player in a disfavourable position in order to increase the general difficulty of the chaser’s actual directed attacks.
This boss, then, becomes a lesson on the cooperation between clutters and chasers during battle, which makes up the game’s battle system and only grows in complexity over time.
If Contusion is killed first, Suture goes from a fairly easy clutter to a high difficulty chaser with high health. He takes great knockback from Isaac’s tears and moves frantically, similar to level 2 flies, trying to chase Isaac directly. The fact that attacking him makes him move in unpredictable directions due to tear knockback and the fact that he can fly over obstacles that most characters cannot fire over without certain items, as well as the fact that room layouts containing Gemini are often full of rocks and other obstacles that make it harder for the player to get around makes him a surprisingly difficult fight for a single tiny fetus attacking the player in a fairly basic way, and makes him especially dangerous for newer players. Most new players will get this as Gemini’s second phase most of the time, as firing backwards towards Contusion while he chases you is a lot easier than actively going out of your way to fire at Suture during the first phase of the battle.
However, a knowledgeable player can do something else instead.
(Ignore the fact that I’m at half health. Paying attention to when would be a good time to take a screenshot while you’re being chased by a medium speed enemy is a good way to have your hearts cut in half, especially when you have only a single bad item.)
By killing Suture first, and leaving Contusion without clutter support, the fight goes from a clutter + chaser duo that transforms into a high difficulty chaser battle to a clutter + chaser duo that simply loses its clutter and transforms into a medium to low difficulty chaser battle. This demonstrates how the support of clutter enemies can greatly increase the difficulty of chasers, but also how chasers are the ones actually going in and putting in the work. Gemini’s main attack is getting chased by Contusion, and if he’s gone, then the main attack becomes a much more difficult chase by Suture which, unlike the one performed by his larger brother, has no pause. But if the player understands how attacks interact and how Suture’s constant shots force them to move around the stage, they can utilise strategy to make Contusion less of a risk by eliminating Suture first, and in doing so make the fight have an easier second phase too. The game even rewards players that do this: On alternate “Champion” versions of the boss that sometimes appear and replace the regular one, killing Suture first and Contusion second gives the boss a chance to drop red or soul health upon death, but if Contusion is killed first then Suture is guaranteed to drop nothing. This fight teaches the player how to manage a very basic duo by exemplifying how enemies amplify each other’s difficulty, and the next fight we’ll talk about will be the final lesson the player needs to learn about how battles in this game work.
Mom is a main story boss, meaning you will always encounter her during your runs, and she’s the final boss of the Depths (or Mausoleum, if you take the alternative path) chapter. She’s the fakeout final boss of the game, being presented as the final enemy the player must defeat, but upon killing her for the first time the Womb chapter is unlocked and the real final story boss of the (flash version of the) game, Mom’s Heart, becomes available. Mom, then, becomes both a test and a final lesson for the player, as their understanding of the game’s battle system will be tested by everything to come after her.
Okay, so, remember what I said about enemies being divided into chasers and clutters? That’s not entirely true: Chasers and clutters are actually types of attacks, it’s just that most enemies and some bosses only have one attack method. But mom, as a self-respecting story boss with a theme of her own, has several. So let’s break down each of them.
Mom’s main chaser attack is her stomp, so iconic that it’s even potrayed as her boss transition screen portrait and in some of the floor transition nightmare sequences. She will periodically grunt, after which a shadow will appear directly below the player, and then try to stomp down on the player with her foot. This attack does a full heart of damage, as opposed to the half heart that most attacks have been doing up until this point, but even though it’s dangerous it does not make an entire final boss fight on its own.
This leads us to her next attack: If Isaac is close enough to any of the four boss room doors present in her arena, mom can use her hand to reach out from it and attack. Since only mom’s foot, hands, and her eyes (which she can periodically stick out of the doors in the room as well) can be damaged, this measure serves to prevent the player from just running up to the eyes as they appear and firing at them up close without thinking. However, it also serves as a very effective clutter attack: Mom’s arena is full of rocks that hinder the player’s movement. While mom’s stomp attack will slowly clear the way if it happens to hit the rocks in the arena, at the start of the fight there will barely be any empty room besides the center of the arena itself, where mom will try to stomp the player, and the area immediately connected to the doors, where she will try to grab the player with her hand.
Now, for the next fight, we’ll see a boss that doesn’t teach the player, but rather challenges them, and it does this by turning the boss fight formula on its head.
These two attacks synergise nicely, limiting the player’s options and forcing them to act and think fast and strategically in order to clear the rocks impeding their movement and not get hit by the other attacks mom uses. However, again, mom wouldn’t be a final boss only with these two attacks, not even a fakeout final boss, so this is where her final ability comes in: Mom can actually summon other enemies to the stage.
The enemies Mom summons are quite over the place, but due to the role they serve during mom’s fight, I feel quite comfortable saying that they are clutters. They’re there to force the player to move around, coming from the doors around the walls of the room and moving towards the center, while also fighting them off in order to avoid getting cornered and hit by mom’s stomp attack. The player will need a solid damage stat in order to fight them off, as even though mom can only summon 3 at a time they still can very much overwhelm a player who got unlucky and didn’t try to make up for it via other means, but mom’s stomp attack can actually help the player with this, getting rid of the enemies attacking them. This fight, then, becomes a battle between the player and mom’s army of clutters, to clear them out of the way and make her attacks manageable to then be finally able to damage mom herself. It’s a masterclass on TBOI’s, again, fairly simple combat system, and utilises the resources available to it in the perfect way to make the most of the game’s strengths.
Mom’s Heart, or It Lives! if you’ve beaten it enough times (although the fight remains the same) is the final boss of the Womb, and the final main story boss of the original flash game (dear flash veterans, remember that Satan was added as a post-game boss in a later update). As the final boss in the game, mom’s heart serves less as a lesson and more as a test, challenging the player’s ability and minmaxing knowledge in order to present them with an unconventional final showdown.
Woo! Now that we’ve mastered the game’s combat system through various examples and minmaxed our way through the eight floors of the original game, with a little luck on our side we’ll be able to face whatever else the game is going to throw at us next! Surely no challenge shall be too great for our understanding of the game’s systems! Now let’s go and see what was added after the flash version!
Mom’s heart is somewhat strange for a boss, as unlike most bosses it barely has any chaser attacks (and only uses them in the later phases of its fight). Instead, it also summons enemies to her arena like mom, but unlike mom’s usage of her enemy summons to support her own attacks, mom’s heart mainly uses powerful clutter attacks to provide support for high difficulty enemies with long and short distance chaser attacks, making it harder for the player to avoid what would otherwise be not much different to a random string of unconnected rooms.
The challenge that mom’s heart brings to the table is something nothing else in the game does, because it creates difficulty by creating permanent support for chaser attacks that’s there until the fight is finally over. By making the player unable to defeat the clutter support first and fight the chasers last, mom’s heart is testing their ability to survive and their power to push through all of its enemies as fast as possible. It creates difficulty not by giving the player particularly difficult chaser attacks to deal with, but instead by taking chaser attacks and giving them an environment to thrive in, and within which they can do serious harm they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. This is the final test for the player after the final lesson that mom taught them, and it is excellently designed for that goal: a fast paced dangerous fight against an onslaught of chasers with permanent clutter support that won’t go away until the battle is finally over. It’s not difficult to see why these two are the final bosses of the original flash game.
For example... What’s that strange hole in the back there?
This, my friends, is the Blue Womb.
And this is where The Binding of Isaac starts to break.
The Blue Womb is a strange floor with barely any rooms. It contains two treasure rooms, four golden chests you can open for pickups (which you can actually look inside of thanks to an item in my inventory!), and a shop. It also contains a strange boss room, 2x2 rooms large. Alright, let’s get all we can out of these last few resources and look at whatever’s in there!
One first thing before we do: The Blue Womb can only be accessed by beating the entire game up until this point (that is, the Basement, Caves, Depths and Womb) in a single run under 30 minutes. That’s... kind of strange for a game so devoted to long periods of minmaxing followed by climactic quick showdowns against difficult foes, but not that strange. In Rebirth, the remake that all the new DLCs came out for, they added the Boss Rush, which you can get by defeating mom in under 20 minutes, so it’s not completely out of left field that they do something like this. The Boss Rush tests players’ game knowledge and their ability to come up with the most powerful build they can in the shortest amount of time possible, and rewards them with a climactic, fast paced, risky showdown against 15 waves of the bosses we’ve fought up until this point, so it also ends up being a very rewarding experience for those who have mastered the game and its deckbuilding mechanics, while also rewarding lucky runs with a fun optional battle that truly showcases the power they’ve obtained in order to get here. Surely this must be just like the boss rush: a fast paced battle to showcase the power of a build that could defeat mom’s heart in under 30 minutes! I mean, the boss room is even the size of the boss rush room. That seems like enough space for an onslaught of enemies to me.
Let me see what I can make of these last few resources, and go right in there.
Oh, a single boss! I’m ready for a frantic battle. Let’s go!
Hm. This just seems to be a reskin of the Blue Baby (or ???) boss in the chest, one of the areas added in the first DLC, Wrath of The Lamb, but... slower, for some reason? Did they give him higher health to compensate for the larger room size? Oh well.
Oh. Okay. When you kill that guy, a large face comes from the floor and starts performing a maelstrom of clutter attacks! That’s why the room is so large, to give you breathing room for when the chasers come. Obviously. Let’s start going at him!
Hm. No chasers yet, but he does seem to be firing some of his shots straight at me. I guess this guy wants to have his cake and eat it too? Nothing wrong with that. He does seem to have a lot of health, though...
Rings of bullets. Good thing I got lucky and got brimstone before this fight, I don’t really know how you’re supposed to avoid these attacks while consistently firing at him. The room size doesn’t really help, either... Oh well, at least he’s always in the center of the room.
...Cluttering. With little to no chasers to speak of.
Hm.
Oh, look! There’s the chasers! They’re... a ring of tiny flies with low health that come straight at me at a moderate speed.
Huh??? This guy is incomprehensible! What is he trying to do? Do his clutter attacks even give support to his allies? And why does he have so much health? He’s trying to be mom’s heart, but falling just short! Eh, whatever, maybe he has a second phase and gets better then.
Okay, what the hell is this attack? He just fires shots randomly towards one side, and then they go out that side and come out from the other side of the stage? Why are the shots zigzagging up and down nonsensically? What is going on? How am I supposed to dodge this?
...Oh, there’s a safespot that you can hide in when he does this attack and if you do that you take literally no damage? Hm. But wouldn’t the chaser attacks force you out of there? Is this guy just pure clutter? Weird. Oh well. I died, but thanks to one of my items, 1up, I get to respawn right where I left off in the last room. Since I’m trying to showcase this guy, being at half a soul heart could prove inconvenient, so I’m just going to deck myself out with a full healthbar through the console.
Oh look! He’s summoning chasers now! Finally the REAL fight is starting. I do wonder if he’s gonna keep doing those attacks while these guys are here, though... That would require the player to luck out with some high damage or extra health in order to be able to tank all the hits from the enemies everywhere.
Nevermind, those guys were pitifully weak and died almost instantly, and so he went back to full clutter mode. And now he’s moving away from the center of the room? If he keeps spamming attacks like that, I would straight up just not be able to hit him without getting hit myself or waiting for him to stop attacking. Thank the heavens for brimstone’s infinite range.
...Why’s this fight taking so long, anyway?
And out of nowhere, during the attack that literally requires a safe spot to consistently dodge, he decides out of nowhere to start firing fast as hell chaser beams after me??? I don’t think I’d be able to avoid these if my speed stat was lower, although, to be fair, The Binding of Isaac never set out to be a fair or balanced game. The fun of it is precisely found in the imbalance of creating a broken build and flattening your enemies like sheets of paper under a wartank. Although this guy doesn’t really seem flatten-able? Hm. Something’s up here.
And now, he’s finally dead. That was surprisingly long for Isaac. I wonder how long I would’ve been stuck here if I didn’t have some of the best items in the game and the ability to give myself health through console commands. His attacks are weird as hell? What was up with that guy, anyway?
Dropping the character now and discussing this boss utilising my now extensive knowledge of the game: This, my friends, was Hush.
And Hush is where The Binding of Isaac’s core design goes to die.
Hush, added in the Afterbirth DLC, is a point of no return. He signals a before and an after in the way TBOI is designed, setting a precedent for future endgame bosses, floors and enemies to follow. He is the ultimate challenge for Isaac players because he’s not an Isaac boss, he’s something that was fitted into Isaac as Edmund McMillen’s thoughts on his own game started changing. Hush is when The Binding of Isaac stops being a casual rogue-like game with some bits of critique towards parental and religious abuse, and starts becoming Content.
500 (at minimum) hours of pure, raw, unfiltered content.
Because all this game decides to turn into is a gigantic container for the world’s grossest, most cheaply made slaw.
The Binding of Isaac is an action rogue-like based heavily around luck and strategy. It requires the player to get lucky with good resources and then be aware of how to utilise those resources to their fullest potential in order to grant themselves major advantages. It has a fairly simple combat system that relies on “clutter” enemies and attacks to make “chaser” enemies and attacks, also known as the main threats in battle, more difficult to avoid for the player. To keep itself satisfying, Isaac uses a format of short runs where everything can go by fast and fights are often more sudden frantic skirmishes than long endurance tests. However, the game itself also encourages the player to take their time in order to maximise their advantages and make themselves as powerful as possible, because creating strong builds that make the player feel like a god on earth is the most fun part of the entire game.
...Okay, that might have been a bit of exaggeration. But let me explain why I just despise Hush so much.
Remember everything I’ve told you up until this point about the game? I know you do, but let’s just summarise all that we know about this game for good measure.
Now, let’s see what the developers think about their own game.
Okay, okay, okay. Let’s ignore the part about the lore for now, because I also want to talk about it, but now is not the time.
It’s an... action RPG shooter? Well, the word “RPG” has no meaning nowadays, so that’s technically accurate. And you do shoot things. I wouldn’t call it a shooter, games with a focus on shooting tend to put more of a focus on interesting bullet patterns and consistency, and value skill much more highly than knowledge, putting the player in difficult and long battles they will have to work hard to survive. You know, actually, that’s a bit like Hush; he has a hidden attribute that makes you deal reduced damage if your damage stat is too high, forcing the battle to be longer, and tight bullet patterns that require lots of attention to dodge, and... Wait a second...
Does Hush think he’s in a Shoot ‘Em Up???
Nah, there’s no way. The next line in the description makes that clear: Players will find “bizarre treasures that change Isaac’s form giving him super human abilities”. There’s clearly more of a focus on strategy here. This is a game about strategising around resources in ways that maximise the player’s advantage, it’s not a shmup, it’s not Touhou, and it knows that. The devs know it. They must... How could they just be ignorant to the strengths of their own game?
That does beg the question though... Why is Hush Like That?
Maybe checking the patch notes for the latest update could give us a little more insight into what the game’s devs were thinking when they introduced certain new things to the game.
Hmm. Alright, that’s just a bunch of changes to certain items and stuff. But there’s one thing here that seems important...
...What does that mean?
Let me explain.
Tainted characters are alternate versions of the game’s main cast that can be unlocked by opening a secret door in one of the newest final floors added in DLC. Their characteristics are different and they usually have weirder playstyles. Tainted Cain is no different, having a set of characteristics that make him different from everyone else.
Tainted Cain starts with a special item, the Crafting Bag. He also can’t pick up items in any rooms (with like, one exception that only exists thanks to an item you unlock by beating most of the entire game), turning item pedestals into various pickups upon coming into contact with them. However, he can still get items: His crafting bag can turn 8 pickups of any type into an item, allowing the player to plausibly craft any item in the entire game.
You see, Tainted Cain is the ultimate min-maxer.
And the way that he’s been treated allows me to perfectly illustrate my point regarding how the devs feeling about min-maxing nowadays.
When I first heard about this character, I was honestly pumped to play as him. His ability to let the players create the item they want and craft themselves an extremely broken run seemed really cool and like the ultimate incarnation of the spirit of the game. With the help of the list of craftable recipes, and a bit of luck to get the pickups they need, the player now had the ability to get their favourite items every run and ascend to unthinkable levels of power!
First, on a previous patch, Tainted Cain lost the universal crafting list. From that moment onwards, every crafting recipe was randomly generated per seed, meaning that the player had no hope of actually learning useful recipes and applying that knowledge in the future, but rather was forced to rely on external tools in order to plan ahead and create a strategy. Something else also changed in that patch: Higher quality pickups now correlated with higher quality items. This was actually a fairly sound decision, although it made higher quality items rarer, because it rewarded the usage of higher quality pickups in the crafting bag.
But... Well, that’s not how that went.
Tainted Cain, much like the game itself, was bent and torn in the name of forcefully creating challenge, but in spite of the many attempts of the developers, he survived. Just as much less of a man than before.
This was all done with the intent to encourage the players to play without guides, or at least that’s how it appears. Since better drops were made more consistent thanks to the pickup quality rule and the special room drops, and since recipes were now randomised per seed, the devs wanted to get the players to simply pick whatever in their crafting bag and hope for the best. Or at least that’s what it seems they were going for, but in practice they ended up forcing players to use guides in order to know what items they could make on every seed, because people play Tainted Cain in order to get busted powerful runs and not in order to settle with whatever they happen to get like Every Other Character In The Game. By reducing Tainted Cain’s consistency, they forced him into more exploitative playstyles that made use of certain game mechanics in quite possibly unintended ways, while not changing anything about the power level of the character itself, just making him more reliant on external guides.
They also added one final thing: The “special drop” mechanic. Certain rooms (like secret rooms, curse rooms, or devil rooms) were now associated with certain types of heart pickups. This meant that if you, for example, salvaged an item pedestal located in an angel room, you would always get an eternal heart, and recipes for angel room items included eternal hearts in them.
And this mechanic brought with itself a whole new way of breaking the game: Since the player only had space for one active item (or two if they had the schoolbag passive item), this meant that crafting other active items would force them out of the inventory. On Tainted Cain, this meant that crafting an active item would immediately force the previous one to be salvaged into pickups, and these pickups would actually pull from the current room’s special drop pool. Since there were a few set recipes for items (namely, a few active items with limited and basic uses could be crafted by filling the crafting bag completely with one type of pickup, for instance giving the player a reusable bomb active item if they filled the bag with bombs), Tainted Cain then gained the ability to farm these special drops by crafting cheap and consistent active items in a certain room over and over, thereby gaining plenty of resources to then craft more useful (and quite possibly gamebreaking) items.
And now, instead of realising their mistake and playing to the character’s strengths, they attempted to nerf Tainted Cain by making it harder for him to obtain special drops! This is really, really funny to me, because it shows just how much the developers have lost sight of their game to the point where they’re nerfing the minmax and strategise character in the minmax and strategise game for being too good at minmaxing and strategising, but also because they didn’t even fix the “issue”. Since special drops are just pickups that have a special use when they’re in the crafting bag, they can (of course) be obtained through a multitude of other methods, or even as just random drops Tainted Cain can get from salvaging items elsewhere! A drop not being guaranteed doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to not drop, but it does mean it will take quite a few tries to get it to drop. So these absolute geniuses of game design “fixed” the character that best capitalises on their own game’s strengths by making him more luck-based, less consistent, and grindier to get to actually do what he’s supposed to be doing (or, at least, what most people are playing him for).
From boss armour being added to level the playing field between players who were lucky and strategised and players who didn’t, to the alternative Greed mode (a special gamemode where the player fights waves of enemies to get money and buy items at an expanded shop) being “expanded upon” with the difficulty setting Greedier mode (which gives the player less money and more enemies, and has to be completed with all characters in order to get all Greed mode unlocks), to gamebreaking combos and items that smart and lucky players could utilise to gain the upperhand, the game clearly has looked for a bit into becoming more challenging. But not in the sense of forcing the player to strategise or think beforehand in order to break the game and win through their wit and gained power, no. The game wants to be challenging... By having difficult fights. And one of these fights is Hush.
But why would they do this? Why would they try so hard to break a character that perfectly exemplified the best their own game had to offer? What was the need for any of this?
Well, it’s that TBOI is, apparently, supposed to be challenging.
Okay, okay, this kind of forces us to question everything we previously thought about TBOI. Let’s try to reconstruct our understanding of the game by utilising the things we’ve learnt over this time about the mindset the developers have.
The Binding of Isaac is a top down rogue-like game with... heavy shoot ‘em up elements, that aims to create an experience in which, with little variation between runs, the player can test their skill against difficult bosses in high-stakes endurance battles where they must keep their senses sharp in order to avoid attacks from every angle, and... How in hell is this TBOI????
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING???
Like, okay, okay, okay. I like shoot ‘em ups, right? I’m a big fan of the Touhou Project and I practically grew up on Undertale (yeah, I’m one of Those Kids), and I’m not that good at them but I still find enjoyment in playing them and getting better!
But that just... Isn’t what Isaac has been trying to achieve all this time? Like, the BASIC FOUNDATION of the game, the concept of gambling and minmaxing for better items and resources in order to be able to make the most of what’s available to the player and destroy enemies with their immense power goes completely AGAINST something like boss armour even existing. Like, why would you reduce the impact of good items in battle? To make the battles more into a test of the player’s bullet dodging skill? But Isaac isn’t skill-based! It’s luck and knowledge based! The fun in this game is supposed to be derived from being smart enough to devise a plan to break it, and then lucky enough to actually be able to go through with it! That’s antithetical to the game’s basic design! And not only that, but shmup design is also antithetical to Isaac’s! If ZUN made it so that in the next Touhou game your character had a limited range and low damage and speed but you could randomly get items through defeating bosses in order to make up for those faults (if you were fortunate enough to get the ones you actually needed), people would look at him like he was crazy! Bullet hells, tests of meticulous moment to moment skill, NEED consistency, because if you add random variables that affect how the player can interact with the world and also affect each other, you’re not going to have a consistent experience no matter how much you try to balance these effects out! Some people will just be stuck in situations that will make them unable to damage certain bosses or kill the enemies they summon as fast as required, but the game just ignores that because it also adds a mechanic which makes lucky and knowledgeable players get less use out of their luck and knowledge, just to make it fair to the others! Isaac encourages the player to understand it, but then turns the player’s understanding into what almost seems to be a requirement in order to even make the slow, tanky bosses that the game calls “tests of skill” passable! And don’t even get me started on the bullet patterns these bosses actually have! Their hitboxes aren’t even clear because Isaac bullet hitboxes were (obviously) not designed for needle bullet hell precision, but even leaving that aside they look like an Undertale fan’s AU fever dream. Like, who thought that it would be a good idea to make a bullet pattern where the INTENDED SOLUTION is requiring the player to stand still and wait until the attack is over, leaving themselves open to WHATEVER THE HELL THE BOSS WANTS TO DO RIGHT AFTER?
But, oh well. The bullet patterns did get better in some Repentance bosses, for whatever that’s worth (even though some of them are still fairly unintuitive, particularly one a boss does which references an item that you can only unlock by beating every boss including that one with one of the hardest characters in the game, and is not intuitive at all to dodge otherwise), and they manage to make decently fun to fight bosses (mother being one of my favourites in the entire game), even though they are kind of making bosses for an entirely different videogame that has nothing to do with the one we’ve been playing up until this point and often finds itself at odds with that one.
I would’ve talked about The Lost and his tainted counterpart more (two characters who’s entire gimmick is basically “don’t get hit), because I quite like them in concept but feel they also illustrate my point quite well, however I didn’t find the space to do so before, so let me just fit it here: While I often like no-hit characters in games, The Binding of Isaac is just not the game for them. No matter how much Hush and Mother and Dogma try to be no-hittable, the game’s basic battle design that most combats in the game use does not accomodate for characters like them existing at all, because if you get unlucky and don’t have enough damage or good enough items to kill clutters fast enough in some rooms chasers literally just murder you (and that’s leaving aside some rooms that feel almost deliberately impossible to no-hit). Just like Tainted Cain illustrates how the game tries so hard to stop being what it is, these two demonstrate how the game tries so hard to be something it isn’t, being presented as the ultimate challenge characters for a game that wasn’t ever meant to be played hitless in the first place. The Binding of Isaac tries really hard to paint itself as a fair and balanced game based on player skill and not luck or gamebreak knowledge, but that doesn’t work when the bases your game is built on are exactly the things you want to not be, and the way the game actively tries to avoid itself in order to become something else feels strange as hell to me...
It’s almost like Edmund wanted to release DLCs for one of his most successful games but didn’t know where to push it next so he just decided to push it off a cliff and onto an entirely different genre for no other reason than a need to add more Content. If The Binding of Isaac stayed as what Rebirth gave us and the ideas that were put into the other DLCs were utilised for another completely different game built from the ground up to be a shoot ‘em up that tests the player’s skill in a consistent environment that not only lets them beat hard bosses but builds itself around making it fun to do so, maybe we could’ve gotten two good games instead of one bad one. But I’m not Edmund, and I don’t get to decide what he makes, and he decided to make this.
But, oh well. Maybe this is all a big misunderstanding on my part. I mean, it could have been that this was Edmund’s vision from the start! He wanted to create a shmup with rogue-like elements, but didn’t know what made shmups good and went a bit too hard on the rogue-like, and so he ended up creating a rogue-like action game with a heavy component of strategy and no shmup elements to be seen besides a few tangential comparisons. I mean, it’s not like he’s changed his mind halfway through developing a franchise before, especially not this one!
The Binding of Isaac is a game that actively fights against itself, presenting gameplay ideas that contradict themselves when you progress more and more into the unknown depths below Isaac’s home, and tries really hard all of a sudden to become a skill-based shmup when it simply is not. It’s okay to be luck based, it’s okay to be simple and it’s okay to be easy. Not everything has to be a hardcore game that people will play for hours and hours in order to conquer and completely master in order to be good. But when you take a casual game that very clearly is not that, and you stretch it into, as the steam page says, 500+ hours of Content, you get a lackluster game that tries to balance two different ideas by putting them in a blender and mixing them carelessly, and then has to be botched and reworked and changed and have 3 DLCs released for it in order to be in line with what you wanted to create. The Binding of Isaac, as we will soon see is one of the things this game tends to do, had to pick a side, but in the heat of the moment just refused to do so and came up with an excuse as to why it didn’t. The Binding of Isaac has to be challenging, getting 100% has to be hard, even if that means it doesn’t have to be fun. And when the game manages to convince itself of this lie, it mangles itself into a form completely different to what it was built to be. Challenge in the name of challenge is prioritised over fun in a game that’s strong because it’s fast, bite sized, casual fun, just because the devs said so. And that’s how The Binding of Isaac breaks itself: by misunderstanding what made it work in the first place.
Chasers and clutters are just a made up concept, a thing I invented to make the game easier to understand and explain, but it looks like they explained the game wrong. Or at least, that’s what the developers seem to think, and that’s why bosses in the latest DLCs think they can get away with pretending to be Touhou.
Oh, good lord. Welp, looks like we have a lot of ground to cover when we return... Tune in next time for my discussion of this game’s story, because it has one, and it is not that great. We’ll cover everything from child abuse to religious abuse and how the game explores all these topics: Poorly! We’ll talk about how the game misutilises its own tools and symbolism in order to make the simplest narrative ever as convoluted as possible, and finally get to the bottom of why I am so mad about a story that should, on the surface, be the most “me” thing ever.
Hey, hold on. I’m getting a phone call from the voices in my head.
...What’s that?
...Demonic Isaac?
...Mom is a good guy?
...THAT’S THE FINAL ENDING?
But that’s all I had to discuss for this part. This has been SerenaOculis, tune in next time for more insane ramblings, and until then: See you guys on the next post.
#video essay esque thing i'll never make?#long post#game design#tboi and why everything about it pisses me off
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(Max Phillips x F!Reader) | 22+
Rating: Mature (no smut, but foulmouthed language)
Word Count: 7817 (it wouldn’t let me stop writing)
Summary: You’re Max’s personal assistant. He needs you for a lot of things. Wants you for more.
Warnings: pining, nonchalant mentions of murder, etc., reader gets sick for a few paragraphs but not graphically. max is a perv. <3
A/N: this is my first reader insert fic!! Hope ya like it. Also, read/kudos on AO3.
“No, mom, I’m not an indentured servant to my boss. I’m just interested in doing a good job and building my career!” You shut the door to the car with one hip and scowl at the dusty mark left behind on your skirt. Damn it. “Quit trying to talk me out of a decision I made over two months ago!”
Your mother’s tirade of a response spills out into the air, as your face-grip on your phone fails and the device clicks to the speakerphone. “—You don’t need to serve another person to feel a sense of worth, honeybun.” You know arguing with the nickname would only make things worse.
“Everyone works for someone, mom. And I work for—”
“Need a hand with that?” Speak of the devil.
Your mom continues to prattle on until you give a clipped “gotta go” and hang up. You’re frozen in that moment, arms full of grocery bags and your purse and Max’ Saturday drink order. It’s his day off, but not yours, so you get to see him dressed down, comfortable. His broad shoulders are barely contained in a worn blue college tee shirt in a language you can’t read, and low-rise jeans that probably cost more than your monthly rent payment. The sudden glint of his shiny white teeth breaks you from your reverie.
“No, sir, I’ve got it. Perhaps the door, though?”
“Sure thing, honeybun.” A sudden flood of conflicting emotions replaces a flush of instinctual irritation. Max was a pervert at the best of times, and a walking HR disaster every morning he came in. Hearing that long-hated pet name on the same lips that called you sweet thing and sugartits like they were your name should have made you feel cool indifference, but this was suddenly more personal than all that. This was what your mother called you when she wanted to butter you up to bad news.
So really, you should have watched your step a little better.
When you fall, there’s half a second of breathtaking panic, the tip of your shoe having hit a white concrete step and sending you crashing down like a battle-axe. The latter half of that second is weightless wonder, a sudden presence of muscular arms pulling you from your rendezvous with the ground and steadying you at the next step. Max had been nearly at the front door when you’d taken your first step, but had used his supernatural vampire speed to come help you when you fell.
“Alright?” He asks, his breath just a little too soft for it to be genuine concern. You can feel the barest brush of his lips on the shell of your ear, and you wonder if it was just your imagination when he pulls back, as cool as he’d been just a moment ago. Seduction is half of what he does every workday. You shouldn’t be so affected by this. You nod, unsure if any words you might say would come out moaned and breathless. Max seems to pick up on your affect with a grin made of thick molasses: slow and dark and so sweet it makes you sick to see it so close. Luckily, the next few minutes pass in a blur, setting groceries and coffee down on the kitchen island and Max’ coffee table, respectively.
As his personal assistant, your duties aren’t tied to that of the company he works for. If he needed an executive assistant, he’d have one Turned and on payroll. But no. He wanted someone to handle the tedious parts of life he still had to deal with, though his life had ended years ago. That meant getting him groceries, driving his car to get detailed, making personal appointments and sending thank-you notes, picking up and sending out dry cleaning, meeting his weed guy, retrieving expensive coffee from the vamp café in downtown, for starters. Occasionally you had to incinerate a duffel bag of bloody belongings, but cognitive dissonance and extreme discretion had been skill requirements on the job posting.
There were downsides, but none of them were to do with his personality or attitude or undead status. Sometimes his vampire cohorts would try to enchant you, threaten to kill or turn or drink from you, and whenever Max was around, he was sure to put an end to that. When he wasn’t around, a simple pair of bewitched silver earrings and a matching choker he’d bought you seemed to do the trick. You had no intentions of becoming a vampire, and Max had no intentions of turning you. There was only so much fake tan that could conceal his true nature, and there were many things you could do that he couldn’t.
“Nearly had to gut a guy for these, so you better enjoy them.” You hold up the last box of farmers’ market strawberries, ripe and red and tempting.
“Gimme,” he says, abandoning his drink and crowding your space to pluck the strawberries out of your hands. You frown at his back when he turns to wash them in the sink. Normally, Max is very good about letting you do your job free of his help. Grocery day had its own routine, but he seemed adamant about his hard-won fruit.
You put the rest of the food away, and toss the expired things out of the fridge. It had taken quite a bit of unimpressed eyebrow raises to get Max to use the plastic bins for his blood bags, but you’re pleased to see he’s using the system you’d set up for him. He’s reaching for a bowl when you turn around to fold the bags, and you glimpse a tan, smooth stomach. You know the ab-building pills and devices he sells are bullshit, but for a hysterical moment you think he’s the perfect poster boy for it.
“I can cut those up for you, if you’d like,” you offer. He locks eyes with you and— fuck. There’s that molasses grin again, like he knows all your secrets and then some.
“You know I like to use my teeth,” Max says in that low rasp you can’t help but shuddering at whenever you hear it. You know that he’s using his seduction voice, his come climb on my lap voice. Unfortunately, for the relationship you have with him, he can act however he wants, and you have to remain professional. That fact is made even more abundantly clear when he continues, “Honeybun.”
You force a smile over your scowl, which lights up his dark eyes with amusement. You’ll kick yourself for showing even that barest bit of annoyance. He was a salesman long before he was a vampire. Leverage is his second language.
“Is there anything you need me to handle before I start my rounds, Mr. Phillips?” You ask in a curt tone.
“You’ve got a bit of dirt, here,” he says, moving faster than you can track with your eyes. He’s on you, or close to it, and his hand rests heavily over where you’d bumped your dusty car with your hip. He truly misses nothing. His hand is warm, somehow. You don’t know how, and don’t really care how, but for a single moment, all the porn you’d cum to, all the fantasies which had filled your bored mind, they all surge to the forefront of your thoughts and catch your tongue. Max’ tongue, however, never stops. “Maybe you should take it off while you do your chores.”
“That won’t be necessary,” you say on reflex, your core throbbing, crying, would have punched you if it had the means, because you rest your fingers over his wrist and remove it from your hip. “Enjoy your snack, sir.”
“Not sure it’ll fill me,” Max says, mostly to himself, but you know his words are calculated and deliberate. Deliberate in that he wants to pull that blush to your cheeks. He wants to see your throat bob with a rough swallow. He wants to hear your heart pound, your pulse race. He wants to see you fight all of that in the name of professionalism. He wants, he wants, he wants. He’s not a cruel man, but he is an insufferable tease.
And you curse yourself every day for liking it.
You catch your breath at the far end of his house. The housekeeper wouldn’t keep her mouth shut when she’d seen the blood, so you were stuck with doing the grunt work. Max thankfully put a tarp out for when he knew he’d be messy and kept the massive orgies to company property. The routine once again calmed your nerves, and you found solace in the cradle of his belongings within minutes.
You hardly see him whenever you work in the house, partly because you snapped at him not to micromanage and partly because he was almost never there. Whenever he had days off, Max liked to get out of town and drive. To where, you don’t know, because you never asked. Some people just needed solitude, but in a big postmodern monstrosity like his house, loneliness echoed and reflected on oneself a hundred times louder than it started out.
He isn’t old enough to have lost touch with the life he lived before, but you know that having his family ice him out after learning of his affliction hurts him even now, seven years on. He still looks like most new grad students, if better slept, and with all his success in business you’re not surprised. With as mercurial and opinionated as your mother is, she’d probably do the same as Max’ family, despite the affection she lords over you.
You’d been in the house yesterday afternoon, so most of what you’d cleaned is still spotless. Max hadn‘t had anyone over for dinner, so there was no bleach cycle to run. You did, however, take your skirt off for a moment to rub at the dirt while in the laundry room, but you worked fast.
Not fast enough.
It seems like Max Phillips has an innate sense of finding women in states of undress, and you have barely three seconds of time between hearing his approaching voice and the turn of the handle on the laundry room door. He cuts off his own question - something about frozen mangos and a blender replacement - when he sees your flustered expression, hears the rabbit-quick thump of your pulse. “What’s this?” He says, the hint of another smirk on his face.
“Was there something you needed?” You ask, rushed and a little breathless.
He keeps his eyes on you, raking up and down your form. “No.” The smirk emerges. You prepare for some other smart statement, but it never comes.
Your knees shake once he leaves the doorway. “Fuck,” you whisper into your hands. Your mind is already supplying suggestions of what he’d look like if he actually saw you in just your blouse and panties, how the lick of desire would spark in his eyes, how he’d push his bottom lip out into a point when he was actually trying to hide a smile. How his fangs would grow just a little, helpless to hunger like a fledgling creature of the night.
The rest of your chores go quick, and after a quick last-check, you grab your purse. “I’ve finished for the day, Mr. Phillips. I’ll be uptown most of the evening, if you need anything else.”
“Great,” he says, following you to the door. He opens it for you, guiding you out with a small push of his hand against the small of your back. “Drive safe.”
“Thank you, sir. I will.” You can’t wait to put this weird day behind you and just get a drink to forget it.
You make it all the way to the car before Max makes that impossible.
“Honeybun?” He asks, all fake nonchalance. “Your skirt is on backwards.”
##
You seriously, seriously consider faking your own death instead of getting up for work. If it weren’t for your boss having carte blanche access to your apartment and knowing what ‘dead’ actually looked like, you might have even gotten away with it. Still, the stupid sniffles make you reconsider a dirt nap. Max never seems to get sick, even when he eats really sick people. Perhaps he meant a different kind of sick.
Your head feels stuffed with cotton balls and your sinuses feel like water balloons. The comparison only seems to make more sense as you toss away another soggy tissue in disgust. You pull up your calendar, which is just Max’ calendar, and wince in the bright light. He’s meeting with other vamps for a social lunch, which, inexplicably, requires your presence. As if he knows you’re thinking about him, you get a text notification.
MP: Still on for our 1pm?
You’d seen what your name was in his phone, once. Considering he treats that thing like it’s a third hand, you aren’t worried about someone seeing him texting ‘Sugar Tits On Demand’ about his dry cleaning bill, but you’re still fairly annoyed with him about it. He hasn’t changed it. You expect he’d change it to something worse if you told him to. You sigh and check the clock. 10:30. You indulge in a moment of petty emotion, kicking your feet in a little tantrum and pouting. Why does the bed feel so comfortable now that you have to leave it?
You: Yes.
You can’t put any more effort into the message, which he notices. His response is almost instantaneous.
MP: What’s wrong? You don’t want me to drive you?
You’d expressed discomfort with being around so many other vampires, and having no personal means of escape, but that had been a few weeks ago. Obviously, your lack of a prompt response is enough to make him call you, his stupid fangy contact picture filling the screen. You groan once more at the ceiling and answer. “Yes, Mr. Phillips?” you ask, not even attempting to hide your state from him.
“You sound like you got hit by a truck. You go out drinking last night, honeybun?” He says after a long moment of silence.
You mute the phone to scream briefly into your pillow, before responding, “No, it’s just a cold. I can still go to lunch.”
“You do know that sick days are meant to be taken when you’re sick, right?”
“Don’t be a micromanager,” you scoff before freezing up. Did you just say that to your boss? “I—”
A bark of laughter screeches through your phone, and you hold the receiver out from your ear, wincing.
“Don’t be a manager, she says. No. You’re taking a sick day. Have fun~!”
“Mr. Phillips, you need me to go to this lunch with you, you were very intent on that!” you protest.
“I’ve got a whole afterlife to reschedule. You don’t.” It seems so simple a statement, so unquestioningly true, that it makes you startle. Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water, eyes staring straight ahead at the wall like it’d have the answers painted there. “See you tomorrow, honeybun.” Click.
“You bastard,” you whisper, before getting up for a hot shower.
Stubbornly, you fight sleep and rest while stuck at home, cleaning your apartment with the same intensity you’d clean Max’ house. Of course, you have none of the spectacular views of the valley, none of the modern amenities, no pool to relax at, so you just end up scowling at your dingy rug and adding to Mount Kleenex tissue by tissue. Your anger and exhaustion war against one another for hours, until you hear the door to your apartment unlock. Panic freezes in your veins for a heart-stopping moment before you remember the only other person who has a key is—
“Honeybun!”
Oh.
Max pokes his head through the door. “I’ve brought you human food.” The rest of his body follows, still in his work suit.
“Thanks for specifying,” you say with a withering glare. You can’t even feel embarrassed at being caught in your pajamas. You feel awful.
He sets down a brown paper bag, and due to your sickness, you can’t smell what he’d brought. You creep forward, but he waves you off. “Go sit. You should be resting. I may not have caught a cold in nearly a decade, but I still remember this part. Sit.”
You do as he says, reluctantly. As strange as it is to see him here, in your apartment, you are a little too fog-headed to have thought of getting yourself food. He comes over with a warm tub of wonton soup, humming and grinning to himself. The soup feels amazing against your chest, and you can almost smell it through the mess of your sinuses. “You didn’t have to do this,” you say weakly.
“No, I didn’t. Look how good of a boss I’m being.” He’s smug, of course, but this is something else. You just scoff and roll your eyes. What a ham. At least you get food out of it. Super.
To your continued surprise, he stays. He sits on your lone armchair like it’s a throne and doesn’t even put his feet up on the coffee table. Your exhaustion grows after finishing the soup, and you’d find it suspect if he hadn’t promised the soup was un-drugged, and he hadn’t used his command voice on you. “I’m sorry about the lunch, Max,” you say softly, putting your head on a throw pillow. The pout you’d indulged in earlier is clawing its way back onto your face.
His face doesn’t so much soften as it does flicker, the mask of smugness and haughtiness falling away for just a moment to reveal something soft and squishy and a little more human than either of you were expecting. The smirk is back on his face after that momentary lapse, but it seems hollow now. “Well, I’m sure you’re suffering enough for making me miss it, so just internalize that for me, wouldja?”
You shake your head and laugh, feeling sleep wrap her arms around you, pulling you from the conversation and any further thought on what that flicker meant. “Whatever you say, boss.”
He’s predictably gone when you wake up, the sun having gotten low in the sky. Disoriented, you float through your apartment, unsure of what you’re searching for until you find something out of the ordinary. It’s simple, more trash in the bin, a spoon in the sink, a picture nudged out of place on your bookshelf, but they stick in your throat a little. They’re signs of life, you realize. Signs that Max had left his mark on your home, had held that old picture of you at 12 and your fat tabby cat. He’d rubbed his thumb over your face, a soft smudge in the dust where you hadn’t cleaned earlier. You hold the picture softly, no longer feeling that sense of nostalgia and happy memories which came with seeing the picture. You instead see an oval smudge, half a fingerprint, and your expression.
You catch the flicker when the expression departs abruptly.
“Fuck.”
##
The next morning, you feel much better. It’s probably because of the near-lethal amounts of DayQuil you’d ingested, but you’re determined to get out of your apartment, and away from that smudged photo frame. You have a blood latte (which you’ve taken to calling blattes in the privacy of your own mind) in one hand, and a water bottle in the other, as you stalk through the cubicles toward the door marked Max Phillips, Sales Manager. The blinds are open, which had become a more frequent occurrence as soon as the employee uprisings had been quelled.
He doesn’t look up from his desk when you let yourself in, bent over a file and frowning at what he’s reading. You set his drink down on the coaster. “Anyone give you any trouble?” he asks, though he knows the answer. Vampires somehow hate the taste of DayQuil and avoid the recently-dosed population. Still, the seventeen-dollar blatte normally draws a few hungry growls from the sales floor.
“Not today.” Or at least, you hope so. The cold had moved from sinus pressure to ear pressure and fucked with your hearing a bit. Perhaps there was a rumble of a growl you just hadn’t heard. Max takes his drink and looks up at you.
“How are you feeling today?” Two inquiries about your state in five minutes. You must have taken too much DayQuil.
“I’m doing much better. I think you caught me on the upswing of whatever I had.” A lie, but Max was kind enough to not call you on it.
Wait. Asking how you are and not calling you on your bullshit? Something fishy was afoot, and it wasn’t sea-sirens.
“Good,” he says before sipping his drink. He groans. “Worth every damn penny I reimburse you for.”
“Glad to hear it,” you respond. “Have you gotten a reschedule for your lunch?”
“Jerome has moved it to a dinner, tonight.”
“Same attendees?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Well, I’ll be there.”
You wish you hadn’t said that.
Brunello’s is one of three vampire-run restaurants in the city. The others are the café you visit most mornings, and a takeout place Max is banned from visiting. But Brunello’s isn’t on that tier at all. Grigor Brunello, a 350-year-old vampire from Long Island, knows that the appeal to becoming immortal lies in the ability to get really fucking dressed up for no reason. The whole restaurant is done up in heavy velvet curtains and polished candlesticks and bone china and pure gold cutlery, and the menu features dishes for the undead and the not-yet-dead. Grigor had caused quite a stir with his management style, though not the way Max had. He understood that finding solace in a world that sought to kill you and your vampire brethren meant making quite a few sacrifices. The older vampires don’t even try to charm their way into a human’s bloodstream these days. They usually like to bite first, and pay the bill later.
Grigor doesn’t tolerate that.
So that’s why you’re here, on Max’s arm like a leashed pet, though you know it’s really the other way around. If a vampire is mannered enough to get a human to agree to dinner, then we get a reservation. It’s like saying, “look how well-behaved I am, this human trusts me.” If that guest is killed or harmed, they banned the vamp responsible for all eternity from Brunello’s restaurant chain. We can’t have nice things if we don’t play nice, Max had explained. The first time you’d come to one of his meetings here, you’d fainted in Max’ car right before going in, but after, you were surprised. You hadn’t been able to pick out the humans from the non-humans until they started making jokes and telling stories of events a hundred years in the past.
You wonder, sometimes, if Grigor approves of Max’ business methods, or if they’d studied in Romania together. You can picture Max’ aghast face, at your suggestion that he socializes willingly with culinary arts majors. Also, the inevitable “that’s so offensive, just because I’m a vampire doesn’t mean I know every other vampire out there.”
Thoughts of the hypothetical type are shaken off as you step past the velvet rope to the inside of the restaurant. The splendor and the dim lighting both require a moment to adjust to, which Max expects with a slight pause in your footsteps. A maître d’ seems to materialize out of thin air, smiling in that same insufferable way you associate with vampires past their fledgling years. “Mr. Phillips, your table is this way. May I take the lady’s coat?”
“Thank you,” you say coolly, shrugging out of the thick shawl around your shoulders and handing it to the coat-check attendant. Max had coached you in the art of Acting Like You’re Made Of Money, and you swear you can feel the pride radiating off of him from your side.
Past the other tables of the supernatural and their human tickets, you’re led to a private room in back, where most of Max’ vampiric business meetings take place.
“Maxy!” a booming voice sounds suddenly, making you jump and a couple of forks clatter to plates around you. A gigantic man walks through the room with an almost palpable confidence and ease.
“Grigor,” Max says in greeting, going for a handshake and getting a hug instead. You watch with barely concealed amusement. Grigor sets Max down and lets him dust off his suit and put himself back together.
“It’s been too long! I heard you were supposed to be here yesterday for lunch! I served that duck dish you like.” Your face flames in embarrassment at the reminder that you’re the reason everything rescheduled.
“Had a conflict come up at work. Nothing serious, just needed all my attention.” You’re always impressed by how easily Max can pull off a lie of omission. He has little to no secrets from you, as keeping information from you makes your job harder and therefore, his life harder. So you got to see his delicate wordsmithing in action, a delight.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight. Jerome has requested quite the spread for your group.” Max takes your arm again, pretending to play escort despite you being able to choose to walk away, and he’d follow. You feel the tension in his bicep.
“Best not keep him waiting much longer than a day and a half,” you say pointedly, knowing you two are probably minutes from being late. Grigor turns his eyes on you.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Make sure he behaves, will you?” He says with a wink. You give a nod and a smile, and he’s gone. Max somewhat deflates against your side, tension you hadn’t felt build now dissipating.
“Something wrong?” You ask once you’re out of the middle of the dining room, but not quite through the doors to the back.
“No, just. No.” Max shakes his head and takes an unneeded breath. He looks like he wants to say more, but changes his mind the last second, going for the door. How strange.
Jerome and his human husband are waiting at the small cocktail bar in the corner of the private room. Several other couples cluster around the room, and twelve place settings are laid at the grand table at the center of the room. Your entrance is met with ten pairs of eyes, a tense pause, and an approaching Jerome.
“Max,” the vampire says, greeting him with a handshake. This is more obviously familiar to your boss, and he shakes the hand comfortably. Jerome greets you by name as well, before taking your hand and laying a kiss across your knuckles. You’d been flustered and discomforted by the attention the first time you met, but at 98, you couldn’t fault Jerome for his habits. It suited the atmosphere, certainly.
“It’s nice to see you again,” you say politely, and catch a grin from Jerome. His husband comes up and greets you both as well, salt-and-pepper in his hair and love clear in his eyes.
Max seems a little on-edge, but you can’t place why. Perhaps he thinks you’re going to faint again. You small-talk for the both of you, leaving him to think about the business to be discussed soon.
Not all of Max’ business dealings were in miracle products and snake oil. Most of the immortal scene liked to ensure a healthy sense of community and growth. Vampires hadn’t warred for hundreds of years, and because of this modern mentality of civility through monstrosity, they thrived. Jerome is kind of the chapter head of the vampire clans in your state. He likes to check in and make sure things are being run well, and in line with a better future. Vampire businesses had voluntary non-compete clauses with one another, and a wide network of assistance. Jerome was even trying to set up a community college similar to the Romanian university Max had attended. Business dinners like this were full of doublespeak and agreements that were made and adjusted so quickly it flew over your head. In all fairness, your duties here were simply to exist and be alive, while Max did the legwork.
You could handle that.
They assigned seating at random, though there was always a human between two vampires, and vice versa. Though the vampire community wasn’t officially ‘out’ to humans, they encouraged socialization and diversity in opinion. Tonight, you sit between a beautiful artist visiting from New York whom you hadn’t met before, and a guidance counselor for a night school in the next town over. The artist introduced themself as Terra, and points out their human sitting serendipitously next to Max at the other end of the table. “Fox is my muse,” Terra says, swooning a little. You can’t help but enjoy the affectionate look they send the stoic man.
“Have you taken him to many dinners like this?” You ask interestedly.
“Oh yes, he’s just always like that. He’s so paranoid, since his divorce.”
“Oh?” the guidance counselor to your right says, leaning nearly on top of you to get closer to the gossip.
Dinner goes by quickly, a seven-course meal with wine pairings and blood served chilled in shot glasses between plates. Your own palate-cleanser is more wine. When things wrap up after dessert, you’re glad Max is driving.
“Perhaps the DayQuil wasn't the best thing to pair with the Bordeaux,” he says in your ear once you’re alone again.
“I’ll puke on you if you tease me right now,” you mumble, sniffling. A tissue is placed in your hand.
“Whatever you say, bunny.”
That’s new.
##
The goddamned air conditioner in your apartment is out. It had died at around six in the morning, right when the sun had risen, and by the time you were awake at seven, you were drenched in sweat and convinced you were dying. Even the tile in your bathroom didn’t seem to soothe the burn all over your skin. The cold shower you tried to take was merely tepid, and the walk to your car nearly had you on the phone declaring your resignation to your boss. Of course, Max wouldn’t put up with that, no matter how much he seemed to like you. So you slog over to the cafe, you pick up an iced bloffee in an opaque cup, and you trudge to the office. At least they keep it cool in the office, and you know how to make yourself look busy.
“Don’t you look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning!” Max remarks when you come in. You put the blatte down on his desk a little more forcefully than normal, and fix him with a scowl.
“My air-con unit is waiting for an interview at Grigor’s.”
“May it rest in pieces,” Max says with amusement. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Why didn’t you call your boss who flirted with you nonstop and took care of you while you were sick and took you on expensive, exclusive not-dates to the hottest crypt in town? Why indeed?
“I woke up in Satan’s asscrack, this is me on two hours of no central cooling and east-facing windows.” Max at least winces.
“Well, you know I’ve got the space at my place,” he says, going for casual, and tripping over his words anyway. Your eyes snap up to his. “Don’t make that face, you spend more time there than I do, practically.” You know that’s not true, but he continues. “C’mon. You know I won’t bite...you, at least.”
“I’m...” Suddenly the air in the room feels just as hot and thick as it had in your apartment. “Yes.” You know this is breaking a ton of rules, rules you had in place to protect yourself, but the danger is too tempting to turn down.
Max is surprised. “Yes?”
“Yes, I’ll stay at yours tonight.” There’s a bit of a beat before you continue. “For the air conditioning.”
“Of course.”
“Right.”
“Yes.”
“Yes...” Max takes his iced bloffee. “So. Let’s go over today.”
The morning standup goes quickly, and with your mind daydreaming hours away, when the sun goes down, it’s like you blink and it’s five. You nervously pick at the sleeve of your shirt, eyes flicking over to Max at his desk. He’s wrapping up work, a new product agreement coming down the pipeline from the regional office. You’d retrieved lunch for him and had to remind him to eat. With a last sigh, he closes the file and shuts down his computer.
“Did you want to meet me there or consolidate gas and go together from your place?” he asks, and you don’t know why you’re surprised, but some part of you seemed to truly have thought his offer had been a joke, or at least forgotten. Had it been on his mind the entire day, the way it had plagued yours?
“Yeah, let’s save gas,” you say, mouth gone dry.
“I’ll see you at yours, then. Text you when I’m on my way.” You take your leave, braving the suffocating drive home in your car. Things aren’t much better back at your apartment, and halfway through packing an overnight bag you text your landlord about the A/C issue.
Marcus L: You’re the fifteenth person to complain about there A/C today.
You want to shoot back a nasty text, but find it takes too much effort, between agonizing over what clothes you want to pack and just expiring on the floor. Max texts you.
MP: Outside.
You quickly shove a few more things into the bag and rescue your suffering little plant in the kitchen window. Poor thing, it looks like wilted salad. You lock up and send a nasty glare toward your landlord’s name on the tenant announcement board on your way out. Max is still in the car, cool air pumping full blast as you slide into the leather passenger seat with a groan.
“Never thought I’d hear that noise out of you without asking,” he says, and you’re too in love with the ventilation system in his car to care. The rest of the ride is spent in silence, relief too thick in the air to be brushed away by conversation.
Still, when the two of you pull up the drive to his house, some kind of strange sensation sinks into your stomach. This reminds you of an old memory, seeing your parents hold hands in the front of the car as you pulled up the driveway. This reminds you of a ritual long-lost to death and time, a brush of a kiss on the knuckles and a soft, “Home again, home again.” You can picture yourself in the role your mother usually sat in, and Max in the other seat, holding your hand and declaring your arrival with a kiss.
None of that happens, of course, but the feeling doesn’t fade for even a moment as you walk in.
“Wanna use the pool?” Max suggests.
“You just want to see me in a bikini.”
Max gives a shrug and takes off his jacket, disappearing into his wing of the house. You choose a guest room where you haven’t seen any blood on the floor, which you assume is the proper guest room, and not a place where Max takes his messier meals. His suggestion sits in your mind, an unshakable suggestion you can’t deny sounds amazing. You peek into the backyard and nearly choke.
Max has foregone any sense of shame and had undressed poolside, his work slacks in a haphazard pile to the side. His tight, bright red boxer briefs leave nothing to the imagination, and you have to take a deep breath to center yourself before looking away. You press your overheated body to the cool wall beside the window, sweating for an entirely additional reason now.
Could you justify doing the same, joining him in the pool? You know it’s kept at a comfortable temperature year-round, but haven’t had the chance to experience it for yourself just yet. You stand at a precipice, professionalism and security at your back, and the winds of desire and the unknown whipping at your front.
“Fuck it.”
You strip like Max had, but in the comfort of the guest room. You’re glad at least to be in something a little modest beneath all your clothes, though it won’t matter once you’re soaking wet. Before you have the chance to talk yourself out of it, you take a running start across the patio, and leap into the pool in nothing but your skivvies.
Max had heard you running up, but didn’t have time to look before he was hit with the wave of your splash. When the water settles and you finally surface, he can take in the sight of you, soaking wet and nearly naked. His eyes flash darker with desire, and he clenches his fists so he won’t reach out to touch you. When you finally blink the water out of your eyes and tread in place, you lock eyes with him. “Change your mind, then?” he asks.
“Clearly.” Just to tease him, you recline back and float, letting your body soak in the sun.
“You need sunscreen.” Max had patiently walked you through the myths and facts of being a vampire, and luckily, sunlight was only slightly irritating, unless there was sunscreen involved. For fledgling vampires, they could look like lobsters before noon. Max had worked with his tan guy to not only get rid of the sickly pallor so many of the newly-undead had, but also to formulate a more permanent form of sun protection, so he wasn’t going through several cans of sunscreen every week in the summer. He cared about things like his appearance, and namely, making his appearance seem deceptively human. So skincare and sun protection were on his mind.
“You gonna help me put it on?” you ask teasingly, half-expecting a lewd answer, and instead getting...
“What’s gotten into you?” He’s chuckling, but you can tell there’s a thread of genuine confusion beneath it all. You’d agreed to stay at his house with little-to-no convincing, and within ten minutes of arriving, had stripped to your underwear and jumped in a pool. Now, you were openly inviting him to put his hands on you, on your bare skin he so often thought about. You swim a little closer.
“Trying something new. It’s called relaxing.” Though your words are nonchalant, the sudden pounding of your heart gives away your nervousness. This is a leap of faith. Would Max show his cards, or let you fall on your face?
“Well, I know all about that,” he says, his voice dropping into that familiar low register that plagued your dreams. Suddenly, he’s right in front of you, holding you close when the displaced water threatens to push you back. You can’t help but gasp, his hands still so warm against you, and still just as shocking. He moves the both of you with ease, that incredible vampire strength coming out to play. He normally held back from most of his baser instincts and abilities, knowing it was messy and frightening to some, but all you feel is a thrill, as he hoists you up to sit on the edge of the pool. He pushes himself out next to you.
Sitting side by side like this, wet shoulder to wet shoulder, something warm and sticky and heavy settles in your gut. It feels like that same weightless drop you used to feel every time he would look at you. At first, but now, his eyes had become familiar... However, all at once, they’re not. They hold emotion instead of pride, softness instead of calculation, want instead of lust, and curiosity where there had been smugness. The butterflies in your stomach want out. They want to push the craving for a kiss up from your chest and into your mouth, they want you want you want.
But then Max is standing, and the insufferably hot summer’s day feels colder. You chew your lip and shiver at the feeling of water running down your back. You release that want as an annoyingly-besotted sigh, and jump when Max speaks again. “Miss me that much?” You look up at him. He’s blocking out the sun with his broad shoulders, leaving him with an undeserved halo around his silhouette.
“Don’t flatter yourself. Your ego’s big enough.”
“I think my ego is perfectly proportional,” he smirks, offering a hand up. You take it, feeling that lump in your throat dissolve under the warmth of his attention. “C’mon, on the deck chair.”
You sit, and pull your hair away from your shoulders so he can reach more of you. It’s an offering, a baring of the neck, leaving your guard down. It might be reckless, might be the wrong thing to do, but when he sucks in a quiet breath, you can’t help the silly smile that spreads across your face. He warms the sunscreen up in his hands before spreading it over your shoulders and neck, working slowly so every little bit is rubbed into your skin. “No tattoos?” he asks, once the silence edges into ‘mildly uncomfortable’ territory.
“No,” you sigh. “I’ve got a bit of an addictive personality. If I got one, I’d get a hundred more before I knew it.”
He huffs a laugh. “When I was Turned,” he starts, and your ears perk up. He almost never talks about his time in Romania aside from what you needed to know to do your job. “I had two full sleeves, they were pretty shitty, but I was proud of them, I guess. They stopped right before the end of my shirt cuffs. After the Turning, they were gone. I was white as snow, and not just from the blood loss.”
“They...how?” you ask, wanting to turn just to check and see.
“You sweat a lot during the Turning. My skin’s thicker now, physically. Kinda has to be, to fight the sun. There are other scientists and theories floating around, trying to understand what’s going on chemically, but as far as I know, no one’s tattoos have survived the process.” He sounds wistful, and your heart pangs a bit.
“And you can’t get any more now?”
“They don’t take. They’re more like really painful temporary tattoos. We aren’t perceptible to stains or anything like that, either. Helps with the blood, at least.”
It’s your turn to give a soft laugh. “That’s a shame. I like tattooed guys.” His hands falter for a moment, and you grin to yourself.
Then, his voice is much closer to your ear. “I still know how to leave a mark, bunny, I promise you that.” Your body lights up like a fucking jumbotron at the feeling of his whisper against your neck. “You just need to ask.”
You blush, despite it all.
“Let me get your arms.” Limb by limb, he covers your skin with sunscreen, and takes his time rubbing it in. You take your time enjoying it. By the time he gets to your neck, you’re having to bite your tongue to keep from squirming. His hands are just so big and strong. Two fingers tap beneath your chin, and you move willingly, baring your neck the most it’s ever been. Whereas before, he could have blamed his pace on thoroughness, he moves glacially now, pausing his fingers over your rapid pulse and massaging the tense muscles through the sunscreen.
Then, he’s tilting your head back down with his hand in your hair. He’s so fucking close, and through the chemical smell of the pool and the hot dusty smell of the patio, you can smell him: his cologne, his fucking hair product, that dangerous predator smell you couldn’t quite place. His lips are partially open, eyes dark, and his brow furrowed. Your instincts lift your hand to his forehead and smooth down that little furrow with your thumb. It’s the first time you’ve initiated a touch with him, sweet and caring and not enough.
“Can I kiss you, bunny?”
“Please.”
It’s hot and it’s messy and rough and you think his fangs may have descended on accident, but you don’t mind one bit. His mouth is heaven and his body is hot and clings to you like nothing else ever has. You’re both making tiny little noises in the back of your throat, rapturous little sounds of triumph that this is finally happening now.
You moan his name when his hand comes to rest on your lower back, and his fingers dig in just a little harder in response. You nip at his lower lip a little, playful and not at all thinking about the consequences. When you pull back from one another, he looks more dazed than you remember him ever being around you. He’s chasing your lips again a moment later, and his kiss meets your grin when he makes contact. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long...” he murmurs, kissing down your jaw to your neck. The sunscreen hasn’t dried, so he just leaves soft closed-mouth kisses on you for now.
“Me too,” you admit, finally. You’d lived in denial of your feelings for him for so long, mostly out of a sense of protection for your poor little heart, but also out of fear. Fear that he wouldn’t reciprocate, fear that he’d womanize his way into breaking your heart, fear of the unknown. “Me too,” you say again, firmly.
His eyes sparkle with delight as you repeat yourself. He pulls back and kisses you softly on the mouth, then your nose, and forehead, before wrapping you up in his arms like you’d dissolve into smoke if he didn’t. If he had a heart that beat, it’d be pounding. But you settle for the comfort you can get in the castle of his embrace. It’s a calm quiet between the two of you, before you realize something.
“I should’ve known you were a big softie underneath it all.”
He barks out a laugh. “You gotta keep that one a secret.”
“I don’t kiss and tell, Max.”
“I know you don’t, bunny.”
#max phillips x reader#max phillips#bloodsucking bastards#max phillips x you#pedro pascal#unhingery#f!reader#pedro pascal fanfiction#flicker
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🗡 for.. vanakh? vahakh? my cool buff mom w a weirdly spelled name, :(
Send 🗡️ and I will rate my muse’s danger level in several category in a number of stars out of 5. (Max: ★★★★★)
Raw power. ★★★★☆
Formal Training. ★★★★★
Combat experience. ★☆☆☆☆
Willingness to kill. ★★★★★
Previous victims. ★☆☆☆☆
Man this was an interesting one to think about. Vahakn is a highly trained individual, and has zero qualms about killing anyone... but for as much as she talks about being a proper soldier and the like, she's never actually been in battle. Which is sort of funny, right? The head of a rebel rehabilitation program, and she's never actually fought!
That's not to say she's not dangerous though. I do think with full honesty that if she was dropped into one, she'd have no trouble easing into the battlefield and fight whoevers put in front of her. DEFINITELY not a troll to underestimate because she has nerves of steel and can punch someone's head clean off their shoulders.
And funnily enough, she's also got an extremely low body count for a troll. The importance of the trolls she's killed though is alarmingly high. It's not every day some by the books pencil pusher manages to murder their boss and get away with it after all.
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Cat’s Definitive Ranking of Every ML Episode as of 4/22/21
Are you guys ready for this? I did the thing. You’re all welcome. Don’t ever ask me for anything again. You can watch me get progressively more unhinged in real time.
Now, just to preface this, I did not give this too much thought. Most of these are just my gut feelings. I went through every episode and just made some snap judgments based off the lasting impressions I’ve been left with. These are my opinions. If you don’t like them, tough. And also I don’t care. Go spend 4 hours making your own damn ranking. And shut the hell up. Anyway, this is probably the longest post I’ve ever made, so I’m gonna put it all under a read more. Click on it if you have an hour to read it. Okay, here we go!
1. Origins II- Good starting point for our heroes. Good establishment of canon ships and character dynamics. Umbrella scene literally stole my wallet. Cannot emphasis enough that I am whipped for the umbrella scene. I wrote a whole ass AU just to say how whipped I am for the umbrella scene. In the Rain will play at my wedding. Jk. Weddings are for suckers. But dammit if I don’t want these kids to get married. 10/10
2. Origins I- Good introduction to lore. Good introduction to characters. Good establishment of status quoyo. Just good. 10/10
3. Simon Says- Listen, I am nothing if not a shipper at heart. This episode just sparks joy. And the whole series almost ended when Gabriel almost jumped off the roof. I was really rooting for this one. This was the episode where I saw Ladrien and went yes, ma’am, I’ll have one of those. 10/10
4. Evillustrator- Are you all surprised? Cat, the MC-skeptic ranked the pivotal MC episode so highly? Well, let me tell you all a thing, I started this fandom out a MC shipper because of this episode. Their first interaction is gold. I don’t deny that. I enjoy it. This is the MC dynamic I fell in love with. Yall toxic shippers ruined MC for me when you opened your mouths and spat in the face of Ladrien and baselessly declared MC the sin-ship. We all know it’s Ladrien. Stop kidding yourselves. Boy in leather catsuit? Please. Basic ass vanilla bitches. I’m getting off-topic. Solid episode 10/10. We love to see it.
5. Stormy Weather- Baby’s first Miraculous episode. It holds a special place in my heart. It’s a solid episode. Good establishment of what the show is. Fun villain. Good times. Fond memories. 10/10
6. Riposte- Listen, I know I’m an Adrinette stan, but hear me out: Ladrien. It’s just so good. And Kagami was compelling in this episode. It was just really solid. It’s my favorite s2 episode. If you ask me if I want to rewatch Riposte, the answer is always yes. 10/10. We stan.
7. Gorizilla- Okay, so this episode has some solid Adrinette in it, but the real reason it ranks so high is that fucking Ladrien trust fall. I stare at that scene for hours, you guys. HOURS. It is absolutely just *chefs kiss*. Sometimes when I need a pick-me-up, I just go watch gifs of that catch on loop. 10/10. Beautiful. Radiant. Carefree.
8. Gang of Secrets- I have been keeping most of my opinions to myself about s4 (mostly because I’ve backed way the hell out of this fandom), but GoS was pretty solid. Gotta say, it’s the first episode in a long time with this show that made me actually excited to see what happens next. Most other episodes I was like, okay, that was cute. The show is still meh overall. But GoS really got me like oh shit, is ML good again? 10/10 for making me feel things again.
9. Oblivio- Told you guys this one was probably rated higher than I thought. Oblivio is just really fun. There is good Adrinette. That “No wonder I fell in love with you” paired with the softest of Adrien smiles just sends me. And the kisses. The unquestionable trust. These two kids literally woke up together alone in an elevator with no memories and said welp, you’re my boyfriend/girlfriend obviously, I don’t make the rules. Honestly, how anyone could argue that these two dorks aren’t made for each other after that episode is beyond me. 9/10
10. Backwarder- Okay, I know I am weird and alone for this one, but I really liked this episode. It got a lot of shit for the constipation capsule thing at the end, but like who cares? We finally got some more backstory on Fu. He got a love-interest who is dope as hell. This episode is my favorite lucky charm use ever. Like that queen DID that. I like Backwarder, guys! Fuck off. 9/10.
11. Kwamibuster- We all know I am a Marinette-stan by this point, but our girl was SHINING this episode. This bitch said gimme all them and let me go whoop this bitch’s ass, and she DID. Hawkmoth could never. Multimouse is a gift, and Marinette is a boss ass queen. 9/10
12. Chat Blanc- Listen, this episode was very good. I enjoy the idea of my children being happy in another timeline somewhere very much. We got all 4 sides of the square in an episode. It’s just really solid. I know this is the fandom’s favorite, and everyone is gonna shit their pants because it didn’t make my top 10, but this is my list. So, I put it at number 12. It’s good. I like it. It just didn’t steal my wallet like other episodes did. Put the pitchforks down. It’s gonna be okay, you can still love it more than me. 8/10
13. New York Special- I know everyone felt some type of way about this special, but I wasn’t mad at it. My perception of it might be clouded because I watched it in Disney World where I was chilling and having a great time, but like this special really did somethings for me. The Adrinette was top tier. Tippy top tier. Even though they hurt us in the end, I am okay with it because it just means the children will grow and come out stronger. I don’t care if it’s not technically canon. Ask me if I give a fuck. I don’t. I had fun here. 8/10. Solid.
14. The Collector- This one might shock a lot of you, but let me paint you a scene. It’s the first episode of s2. We have just come off a 2 year hiatus. The fandom is thriving. We’re hungry for canon content. We have hopes and dreams and expectations. Everyone is going wild with theories. This episode confirmed something that was long since obvious (in my opinion) and ended the stupid arguments people had been having. It made Gabriel actually seem semi-competent. We got our first taste of how Chat/Adrien will react to his dad being Hawkmoth. We got a peek at their life. Adrien’s isolation and sadness. They were so close to figuring it out. The battle was epic. Like Collector really had them on the ropes there for a second. It’s a solid episode, yall. I’m not wrong. Hate me all you want, but this episode brought it. 8/10
15. Despair Bear- Is this episode up this high because of the Adrinette slow dance scene? YOU BET YOUR ASS IT IS. Okay, but fr though, shipping aside, this episode gave us hope that Chloe was actually gonna redeem herself. I mean, she didn’t but, we didn’t know that at the time. Seeing her run around trying to be nice was fun. And then she actually did something good, and we had a moment of okay, she’s capable. We’ll get there. We didn’t. But what a ride this episode was for making us think she would. 8/10
16. Startrain- Cat, you’re just ranking all the Adrinette episodes highest. And? What of it? Are you surprised? You clicked a blog that has simping for Adrinette in the description, and you’re surprised all my favorite episodes have Adrinette? I’m not wrong, you’re just an idiot. The Adrinette nap cuddles aside though, this was a pretty good episode. If you don’t think too hard about the whole space thing, we got a look at Max’s life, his mom is a driven, smart lady doing her best. Adrien rebels against papa for once. Alya stops a Lila scheme. Chloe gets to play the hero. Alya and Nino actually investigate like the heroes they are. Gabriel gets to realize what a dumbass bitch he is. I mean. Guys. Startrain is solid. 7.5/10
17. Sapotis- This one shot up in rank for me after GoS, but tbh it’s always been a solid episode. Alyanette sleepover? Check. Alya becoming a superhero? Check. It’s a fun episode. And looking back, it’s nicely called back to later in GoS. We love it. 7.5/10
18. Sandboy- Idk why I enjoy this episode as much as I do, but I do. Sandboy is a cute bean. I love his aesthetic. We also get hilarious looks at everyone’s nightmares. “Plagg, who turned you into a sock?” cracks me up cause like Adrien, bby, no XD And Chat Noir’s nightmare. I think it would have been interesting though if since Sandboy dusted the Agreste mansion, if we got a peek at Hawkmoth’s nightmares. It would have been a nice hint of plot to go along with Master Fu’s nightmare. Also Plagg giving the akuma the slip like the clever boy we know he is deep down? 7.5/10
19. Furious Fu- If you guys haven’t realized by now that I love Fu, idk what you’re doing. Pay attention. I know that some people don’t like him, but I’m just gonna say it, you’re wrong. Fu took care of the Miracle Box for over 100 years, and this episode kind of gives some insight to what the Order was like. Very strict. Lots of rules. And ya know what, Fu said fuck the police, I’m gonna befriend these little magical demigods, and fuck off! Like what an absolute legend. I was really happy to see him living his best life, and that he and Marianne got married because it’s what he deserves. We love to see it. 7.5/10
20. Gamer- People like to shit on Marinette in this episode, but like honestly, if I were in her shoes, I’d have probably done the same thing if I had the skill. Ain’t nothing wrong with a girl trying to spend time with the boy she likes. And Tom and Sabine being absolute shipping trash. I love them. And the awkward Adrinette. The introduction of the lucky charm that Adrien STILL carries. Wholesome. This was a good episode for their friendship, and we love to see it. 7.5/10
21. Christmaster- Okay, I know a lot of people hated this episode when it aired, but I thought it was really funny? Everyone skidding around in the ice rink was hilarious. If you don’t take this episode seriously, it’s really fun. Chris is pretty cute, and damn right Ladybug is the best kid in the world. Idk. This episode is fun. I’m not mad at it. Sue me. 7.5/10
22. Weredad- What? Another MC-heavy episode in Cat’s top 30? Listen, I don’t hate canon MC. The fans just annoy me. This episode was funny. The secondhand embarrassment and cringe was real. Plagg taunting Adrien because he knows the secret was great. Marinette being a self-saving queen was great. It’s a good episode. I like MC, you guys. I do. I swear! 7.5/10
23. Miraculer- This episode was interesting to me, and I think it’s still a good development episode. For one, Sabrina finally got her own akuma episode named after her. Secondly, because it’s a big step for Chloe, just not in the way we expected. It totally makes sense that Chloe can’t have her Miraculous back because literally everyone knows her identity. Can’t argue that logic. And she is the first person to ever refuse to become akumatized, so like mad respect. I know a lot of people had high hopes for redeemed Chloe (myself included), but I think watching a character fall from revering someone to hating them is also an interesting path. The friends to enemies arc as it were. Idk. I liked this episode. It was an opportunity for Chloe to grow, even if she didn’t in the end, but we’ll talk about that later. 7.5/10
24. Lady Wifi- I like Alya. I feel like I don’t say that much, and people make some assumptions because of MDCSP, but MDCSP is just a concept I wanted to explore. It doesn’t really reflect how I feel about any one character. Except maybe Lila. And Gabe. But every other spite fic I’ve written branching from Chameleon, the class has been fine. Alya has been fine. So, let it be known that I like Alya. Lady Wifi was a fun episode. Putting aside the fact that she thought Chloe was Ladybug for no reason, I like her akuma. I like the interactions we get with LadyNoir in this episode. After GoS, this episode gets a bit funnier. It’s solid. 7/10
25. Dark Cupid- I don’t have much to say about this one. LadyNoir. That’s it. That’s the tweet. Send it. 7/10
26. Volpina- So many things about this episode. It introduced a new antagonist who we didn’t exactly 100% know was going to be an antagonist at the time. This episode sparked a lot of fun fan theories for a while. Who was Lila? How was she going to shake things up? Not to mention this episode gave us a taste of plot and lore, and set up Marinette meeting Master Fu officially. Lots of intrigue sparked from this episode. And that LadyNoir door scene? OOOOOO 7/10
27. Hearthunter- One word: Adrigaminette. This episode was so cute for them! I loved seeing them all goofing and running around together. Adrien and Kagami being absolutely in love with Marinette when her hair is down. They both love her, I don’t make the rules. Not to mention, Marinette takes a big step by letting her friends be happy without her. Kagami not wanting to hurt Marinette. The drama!! Gabriel being a messy ass bitch to his friends. It loses points for the abomination of an akuma, but overall, I wasn’t too mad at it. Yet. 7/10
28. Glaciator- More MC in Cat’s top 30? It’s more likely than you think. Listen. Listen… Listen. MC is fine. This episode was the closest thing to fanfiction that we got. The balcony scene was really sweet. I was drinking the irony. We got introduced to Andre the icecream fraud. Andre the please just give me the flavor I asked for man. I could have done without Chat pouting, but the LadyNoir in the end was pretty good. I wish they’d done more with Ladybug’s feelings for Chat. Had her question herself a bit more after this one, but overall, it’s cute. 7/10
29. Zombizou- A lot of people started hating Mlle. Bustier after this episode, and like I can kind of see it, if I squint, but I did not draw that same conclusion from this episode. Mlle. Bustier just wants good things for all of her students. They’re 14 ffs, she just wants to be a good influence on all of her students and wants them all to be successful. But go off, I guess? Plus, this episode was basically just a spoof on zombie apocalypse movies. We got so many things. Julerose, Myvan, DJWifi. Chloe actually showing some depth and emotion. LadyNoir. We won this episode, babes. Sorry you didn’t get the memo. 7/10
30. Timetagger- Okay. This is the last episode in the ones that I’d venture to call “good.” Number 30. I enjoyed Timetagger. I know people have feelings about timey-wimey bullshit, and like I’m not gonna lie and say I’m thrilled with it either (I mean, I changed the rabbit’s power in MDCSP) but that being said, Timetagger was so sassy. Bunnix was cool as hell. We get to see that LB and CN are still doing the thing in the future. So many questions sparked from this episode. It was fun. Idk. I liked it. That’s all I got. 7/10
31. Malediktator- Okay, from this point on, less comments because this is the section that are more or less just meh to me. Like they’re fine. This episode was fine. Chloe was fine. Chat playing with the laser was cute. 6.5/10
32. Mayura- Adrien’s speech at the end. Nuff said 6.5/10
33. Ikari Gozen- Ryuko/Ryuuko. Gals being pals. 6.5/10
34. Reflekdoll- I talked about this earlier, but I don’t hate this episode. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be. Sue me. 6.5/10
35. Anansi- Nino is the goodest boy. Also I need more of the gang taking Adrien on adventures via Facetime. Stat. 6.5/10
36. Shanghai- This one is new, and tbh I still haven’t watched it with subs, but I had a good time. Fei was cute. The boy squad was cute. Adrien bonding with Great Uncle Cheng was cute. Hawkmoth getting literally dunked on was *chefs kiss* 6.5/10
37. Gigantitan- I love overly supportive, ride-or-die girl squad. 6.5/10
38. Party Crasher- Idk why this episode was funny to me. Kim is the purest bean. We don’t deserve him. 6.5/10
39. Desperada- This episode was an emotional roller coaster, and even though we all collectively hate Aspik’s stupid egghead, we love the Ladrien this episode provided us. 6/10
40. Oni-chan- Listen, I loved seeing Lila get a tiny bit of karma even if she made it up in the end. I loved Chat going off on her. I loved seeing her get outsmarted in the end. 6/10
41. Frightningale- My good lesbian Clara Nightingale. We stan. 6/10
42. Style Queen- I like Audrey in a “she’s the worst person I’ve ever met, I want to travel the world with her” kind of way. She’s funny to me. Idk. I love her firing everyone. She’s the one I love to hate. She’s the worst, but we love her for it. Plus this episode gave us Plagg’s adorable little Cataclysm that destroyed half the city. 6/10
43. Gamer 2.0- Chat confidently strutting in heels made this episode worth it. And we get to see the beginning of Marinette being overwhelmed. Plus it was the return of gamer!nette. 6/10
44. Troublemaker- I don’t hate this episode as much as the next person either. It was fine. Jagged is a manchild, but we love him for it. He’s a Marinette stan which like mood. The Adrinette at the end was cute. I wasn’t mad at it. Idk. It’s fine. 6/10
45. Reflekta- Where are all my Juleka stans at? I loved the LadyNoir banter in this ep. V. cute. 6/10
46. Dark Owl- This episode was fun. And it really shows their level of trust. Plus Plagg and Tikki interacted. 6/10
47. Timebreaker- Have I ever mentioned that I like Alix? I like Alix. 6/10
48. Silencer- I don’t hate this episode as much as you’d expect me to, and that is 100% because of the LadyNoir. 5.5/10
49. Prime Queen- Chat purrs. 5.5/10
50. Syren- I think the fish power-up is adorable. Ondine is a gem. Kim is a pure bean, but we been knew. 5.5/10
51. Befana- I like Gina, but this episode fell flat for me. Almost as flat as the animation. 5.5/10
52. Reverser- Another episode that everyone hates that I am actually fine with. This episode made me like Nathaniel more. Probably because I was previously indifferent toward him. Marc is cute too. 5.5/10
53. Mr. Pigeon- Marinette is one clever girl. And the Adrinette hand-touch. 5.5/10
54. Felix- Felix is a gremlin of chaos. A true chaotic neutral. He gives his uncle the finger, and I think that’s beautiful. 5.5/10
55. Truth- Bet you expected this episode to be higher. While I did enjoy watching toxic people’s world crumble, this episode still gets a meh from me dog. 5/10
56. Lies- The Adrigami was cute, and I respect Kagami as a character. The akuma could have been better tho. 5/10
57. Princess Fragrance- Not much to say here. 5/10
58. Copycat- 5/10
59. Bubbler- 5/10
60. Mime- 5/10
61. Animan- 5/10
62. Robostus- 5/10
63. Ladybug- This episode ranks this low purely because I don’t care about GabeNath, and I hate that Lila won something in the end. But Adrien saying I won’t hesitate, bitch! At the end was nice to see. 5/10
64. Catalyst- I know I ranked Mayura way higher, but Catalyst fell flat for me. Like it was fine. Wasn’t as into it though. 4.5/10
65. Puppeteer- One of my favorite lucky charm uses. 4.5/10
66. Pixelator- My favorite Cataclysm. 4.5/10
67. Horrificator- That almost-Adrinette kiss tho 4.5/10
68. Pharaoh- 4.5/10
69. Kung Food- 4.5/10
70. Rogercop- 4/10
71. Guitar Villain- 4/10
72. Dark Blade- 4/10
73. Bakerix- 4/10
74. Antibug- And now onto the bottom 10. To start us off, I will just say: UGH, this episode annoyed me. First of all, Sabrina didn’t even get her own episode. Chloe was a piece of shit. Idk why they made Ladybug the one in the wrong when Chloe was being obnoxious. Ugh. 3/10
75. Captain Hardrock- I’m gonna be honest. My apathy for this episode has grown into loathing. Toxic stans are 100% to blame. Birthday ruining, bitches. This is the reason I threw a breakup bash after Truth. Yall deserved it. 3/10
76. Christmas Special- I didn’t hate this episode as much as everyone, but it still wasn’t great. 2.5/10
77. Stormy Weather 2.0- This episode was really dumb. It didn’t need to exist. 2.0/10
78. Queen Wasp- Why did we give Chloe a Miraculous after this episode? 2/10
79. Animaestro- Did we really need a self-insert? Did we really? 2/10
80. Puppeteer 2.0- Listen, this episode would have made more sense in s1 or at the very latest early s2. Adrien gave a whole ass speech on how great Marinette is, then he turns around and is like idk if she likes me… Clean it up. 2/10
81. Miracle Queen- I could talk at length about how much I hate the ending of this episode and what they did with Chloe and Master Fu, but we’re just going to remain calm and give it a solid 1.5/10
82. Frozer- This episode made no goddamn sense. I call bullshit on so many things. Just ugh. 1/10
83. Chameleon- Surprisingly, even though this episode sparked many, many spite fics out of me, it’s not my least favorite because at least Ladybug semi-redeemed this episode. Still really dumb and ooc tho. 1/10
84. Feast- Okay, okay, okay, here we are. Bottom of the barrel. Cat’s most hated episode, and you wanna know why? You want to know why this episode fills me with the rage? Because we spent two fucking seasons building up all this mystery and lore and intrigue surrounding Fu’s big mistake, and they dropped the fucking ball! They did my mans so dirty! They could have really deepened his character, deepened the Order, deepened anything other than whatever fucking affair Gabriel and Nathalie have going on, but NO. They made it some stupid, bland-ass thing that got resolved magically in the end, then just ignored it for the rest of the season. I will never not be salty about how they did my boy Fu in this show. I’m happy he found his peace, but fuck if I’m not livid about how they did it. Whatever. Chat being done with Ladybug’s shit when they’re about to get eaten was funny I guess. .5/10
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