#maybe this was done before i just entered the fandom

[forgetme-eternally-blissfully]

Sorry it took so long to respond I've been occupied all day-

It's not a spoiler for me to tell you that Heniroksoo can use Kim Rok Soo's abilities! We learn it in part of the side stories and you will love it once you read it, trust me. As far as we know Heniroksoo doesn't have abilities of his own but some fandom theories (including my own) have begun to think maybe there's still more to learn about the character Cale!KRS yet. We don't know what abilities are, or really even what ancient powers are. It's all still up in the air.

My turn to put a read more...

Now! AHSHHHHSIGE YOURE AMAZING, I love it, oh my god. I love that the closer to the edge he gets, the safer and better he feels. I already feel bad for his teammates. Imagine when they're in a 3 story building and they enter a room to see their coworker, see krs, sat with his legs hanging out of a window, peering off the edge, just staring at the ground below. He's never done that before- is the situation getting to him? Is he a danger to himself? Im sure he's great a balancing because of his life in the tower but they don't know that!

If the walls were slightly concave that would be even better because it psychologically fucks with you into thinking that you're not on a tower, you're on a ledge. It also really shows how paranoid Brother is about Cale being able to leave. He wants to trap Cale forever in a small prison and never let him out, but if he gets depression that could lead to suicide: bad for hair. So Brother has to go through all this emotional manipulation in order to keep Cale from choosing the way down.

It's dangerous, it's risky, it's not worth it, you should just stay inside with me and we can brush your hair and eat candy and read books and be happy, okay? Stop looking out the window. Don't be interested in the outside past a certain extent. Stay with me (or rot alone).

I think it'd be cool if Cale was trapped in the tower in a similar way that in canon he trapped himself in his trash persona to protect Basen and Violan and Lily from the nobles scrutiny

OOOH my god what if he remembers being taken?

What if Brother entered the mansion to kidnap Cale, and Cale and Basen were in the same room, and Brother offered to Cale, "I can take you, or I can take your brother." (He doesn't know it was set from the start.) So Cale willingly takes Brothers hand. Brother tells him, "I'm your secret brother that you never learned about. We're going to go somewhere happy, and you'll never be left alone again." So little 8 year old Cale takes Brothers hand and lives in the tower and eventually it's been long enough that he doesn't question why he's there, just that he had to go. Then he dreams of krs and he has to confront the idea that, maybe, he shouldn't be kept in this tower- and, if he shouldn't be here, why did Brother take him? For what reason?

If he asks... would he get an answer?

The fact that he knows Brother would never tell him isn't assuring.

And with the added hallucinations? Major manipulation opportunity.

So, when, he was a kid, Brother would tell him that he's sick. He needs to stay or he'll hurt himself. Then he possesses krs and the hallucinations stop. He gets better- only one day for krs to shut him out entirely. Krs knew Cale and Cale knew krs, he wouldn't just cut him out without an explanation. Something bad must have happened. It's excruciating. Krs knows that isolation gets to Cale really bad, especially after that 4 week period where krs refused to let him in. So why couldn't Cale get in?

My idea is that when the towers appeared, certain people were automatically sent into the tower to climb. The closest ones, perhaps. Krs being one of them. So since krs wasn't on earth but inside the tower, Cale's wandering consciousness wasn't able to find and enter it. The rejection he was feeling wasn't krs shutting him out, but the world being devoid of people who could let him in. Krs turns out to be the only one with room for two in his body. Maybe that's the GoD's doing.

Krs finally makes it out of the tower, whatever qualification that requires, and he finds Cale's consciousness on the edge of his, waiting. He lets him in. Cale is teetering on the edge of a breakdown as Krs fills him in. He sees the walls torn down... something fits. He's meant to be on the ground, he's meant to be here, in this place. He turns to look at KRS's floating soul... but it's not there.

His stomach drops.

Also the apocalypse being a magic tower climbing scenario is AWESOME because Cale has been in a tower his whole life, and now these people or whatever want him to go back into a tower? One he can't leave of his own accord? Absolutely not!! He did that for so long already!!!

I think Cale, once he gets permanently stuck in krs's body, is able to use krs's abilities and his own. To everyone outside, his personality suddenly changed and he got new abilities. But, like you said, the apocalypse does crazy things to people.

I really like the idea that Cale and Kim Rok Soo are drawn to each other. Cale feels at home in krs's body but he knows that they're supposed to share. Kim Rok Soo is fine in Cale's body, but he needs to know how Cale is doing. What happened?

They both end up feeling conflicted when they deeply prefer being in the other's body than their own because they understand that it doesn't belong to them. Though, they both also understand that the other didn't like their situation- so what are they to do?

At least once, they need to talk to each other and communicate. I think that's one of the big Missions, something the main characters are working towards. Saying, "hey, are you cool with me living as you?" to each other. Just once, nothing big. If they check the other's living status, well, that's just a coincidence.

They were friends for years, too, there's no way they wouldn't be concerned for the other.

"The apocalypse started 6 months ago and the isolated princess who has lived in a tower his whole life just has to deal with that."

"My brother literally trapped me in a tower my entire life and now that wannabe slacker orphan has to deal with all my drama."

These are my thoughts though.

I like the idea that as soon as Cale gets an ability in krs's body, that's when the switch happens.

I think Cale!krs's ability should be something that makes his strength towards his weaknesses stronger. For krs, he got Record and Instant. Record because he remembered all of his tragedies too well- but it was that great memory that helped him survive in the apocalypse, and later Instant because he would time and time again break his limits to save what matters to him. So Cale!KRS would be similar.

Maybe it'd be like an ability to calm himself in the midst of chaos, a grounding method that would help immensely in group coordination. Or an ability like Observe, where he can see everything that's going on in an area from an aerial view- it'd help him become a scout. Perhaps something even more complex, like Wander, an ability that untethers his soul and allows him to walk around invisible and undetectable, while his body remains unconscious and safe.

Okay finally I'm done. I've been writing intermittently throughout the day and I finally covered the things you said...

But then we've gotta ask the bigger question... now that there's a rough idea for Cale in KRS's body, what is KRS gonna get up to in Cale's body?

Rapunzel AU!

Cale has been inside of the tower for his entire life. His hair is long, much longer than his brother's. His brother doesn't have a name. Cale knows they're brothers though- because they both have red hair, even if Brother has short hair and Cale does not.

Ever since Cale was 12, he'd been dreaming of a different world. He went to sleep and woke up as someone named Kim Roksu. This Kim Roksu was not in a similar situation as he was- Kim Roksu wandered the streets and ate food from the floor and hid in the small cabinet in his uncle's house. Kim Roksu was weak and strong.

Kim Roksu is a friend to Cale. When Cale wants to see the outside, he sleeps, and he dreams.

Kim Roksu figured out how to communicate with Cale after several years of simple body swapping.

Somehow, they are similar! They both agree that being trash is the best. Kim Roksu because it's easier being a bad person than a good person, and Cale because Brother won't let him be trashy and he wishes he could throw a fit without Brother punishing him.

"Your brother keeps you in a tower?" Roksu asks when he learns.

"Yeah. Is that weird?"

"Well, I don't know anyone who stays in a tower." Cale kicks a rock on the sidewalk with his barefoot, sending it skidding across the dirt road. "Ow, my toe." Roksu complains blandly.

Sharing a body, they also share the same sensations.

"You barely felt that and you know it."

"Shut up."

"You shut up." Cale retorts. He wants to say more, but he swallows those words and tucks them into his chest.

'The bruise over your eye hurts more but you don't complain about that.'

He bites his lip and looks down.

"Do you think," he asks quietly, "if I asked Brother to let me out, he would?"

Roksu, disembodied and floating over his body, frowns. "You haven't asked before?"

Cale smiles bitterly in Roksu's body. "... I did, once." After, Brother said he was going to be leaving for two weeks, and told Cale to ration his food well. Cale knew better than to think it was a coincidence. He didn't have Roksu yet. It was very lonely for a long time.

Roksu doesn't say anything.

"If," his voice trembles, "If I got out. If I left..."

"Cale." Roksu stops him. Cale winces, expecting to be reprimanded.

"You are trash. Trash does whatever they want, no matter what anyone says. If you want to leave, then leave." Roksu's translucent body floats over to stand in front of Cale. Sternly, he says, "Don't worry about useless things. Worry about making a plan and executing it."

Then, abruptly, Roksu turns and ignores him. Cale laughs and folds in half, a childish grin splitting his malnourished cheeks. How can someone be so blunt but so shy? Kim Roksu frowns, but it looks like a pout. Cale rubs away a tear and looks up at the back of his friend. No, the person who sometimes feels more like a brother to him than his real brother.

"And will you help me?"

Roksu rolls his eyes. "Don't ask something so obvious."

Cale smiles and looks down. "Right. Obvious, isn't it?"

Something like receiving help wasn't obvious to either of them. Yet, when it came to the two of them together, it was the most obvious thing in the world. It wasn't obvious with Brother, who he shared blood with. But Kim Roksu, who was abused and beaten down at every turn, chose to welcome a wandering soul into his body and share everything with him.

'You're the one who shouldn't want to be here,' Kim Roksu said when they first started talking and Cale asked why he didn't try to force Cale out. 'When you're in control, I can relax. Why would I want you to leave? That's so difficult.'

They learned that Kim Roksu really could force Cale out when his uncle kicked Cale, sending Kim Roksu's body sprawling onto the floor, then stomped on his arm so hard they heard a clear snap. For Cale it only hurt for a short moment. Roksu threw him out so fast you could imagine that he had practiced beforehand.

Every day and night, Cale slept to try and enter Roksu's body, check on him, share the pain, but Roksu kicked him out every time. It wasn't until four weeks later that Roksu let Cale back in.

Even that much pain was a lot for being four weeks after the incident, but while Cale was struggling to keep his cool, Roksu floated around him and spoke as if nothing was wrong. When Cale started sweating a few hours later Roksu kicked him out again.

'Don't be stubborn,' he said when Cale returned the next night. 'Just say that it hurts. If you still want to stay after you admit that it hurts then I won't kick you out.'

It was a very Kim Roksu thing to do.

"Brother," Cale asks one day at 15, impatiently brushing his hair. He gets scolded lightly, and Brother takes the brush from him. "I read in a book about something called a phone. Do you have one?"

Brother gives him a blank look. Then, as if it had been a lie, his expression changes into something kind and gentle. "Fone? Can you show me the book?"

Cale and Brother roughly root around in every book for anything like the so-called 'Fone,' coming up short.

"Maybe it was a dream," Cale excuses it like that, rubbing his neck. Brother looks at him, worried.

"It must have been. Get some rest, Cale." A kiss to the top of Cale's head, Brother hugs him and promises to bring him more paint. "I'll be gone for a few days this time. Do you want something?"

"Ah," Cale smiles, pressing his face into his Brothers neck to hide his face. "Could you bring me -------?" Brother freezes.

"... you-"

"I learned it from the books! This time I really did, Brother. Please?"

Slowly, Brother releases the tension in his body. "... If that's what you want. But you have to close the window if you're going to mess around with alcohol."

"Yes!" Cale jumps with joy. Then he suddenly runs to a bookshelf, changing the topic by talking about a book Brother brought to him last time. "-and I'd like to know if the sequel is out yet."

"I'll do that." Brother smiles. "You've been asking for more things recently, Cale." Brother settles a hand on his head, stroking his hair.

"It's because of my reliable older brother!" He grabs onto that hand, keeping it there, resembling a naive little brother who only has his role model in his eyes.

He sends his brother down the tower using his hair, and watches that spot of red disappear in the distance.

His face drops.

"... Bastard."

Cale turns on his foot. It's time to see Roksu.

[becomingmyownmuse]

Someone pls draw this

Edit: thanks to @wuekka for showing me that it was already done!

[may-stuff]

The Only Thing He Needs | F.C

Franco Colapinto x AFAB!Reader

Warnings: Cunnilingus, p in v, creampie (in that order) typos and grammatical mistakes because english is not my first language. reader has breasts and a vagina but nothing else about her looks is specified

Word count: 3k

Author's note: Behold... my first child. It's ugly af but I love it because it's mine.

This is shorter than expected and I'm sure it'll disappoint many of you, so I apologise in advance. I'm just a girl trying to make the fandom happy.

Interactions with this thing would be appreciated, even if you want to let me know how much it sucked 💖

The sun is setting when he finally enters his room after what it felt like an eternity. The weather outside is so hot that when the cool air touches his skin he almost lets out a groan.

Franco would be lying if he said that it wasn't an extraordinary day, because it was. Despite the tremendous heat inside the car and the physical pain he went through, he did an amazing job and couldn't be prouder of himself and everything he has achieved at this point in his career. Sensing that there's a lot more to come, he can only feel excitement for the near future.

Still, even after everything that has happened and all the love and support he's received in the last couple of hours, there's something missing. Someone.

You.

You were there at the paddock during the race, but trying to avoid the media and all the fuss that would be caused if they knew of your relationship, you left the moment you saw the cameras. He hasn't seen you since then, almost three hours ago, and he wouldn't be exaggerating if he said that he is dying because of it.

You're everything he needs.

When his eyes finally find you, you're coming out of the bathroom, freshly showered and dressed in nothing more than one of his old shirts. Your hair is loose and messy, your feet bare and there's that glint in your pretty eyes when you realise that now he's here in front of you, breathing the same air. Your beauty makes his heart swell with love.

His arms are wrapped around your waist the moment you literally jump into his embrace. Soon you're showering him in kisses all over his face and neck. He giggles in response, the grip on your waist increasing slightly.

"Missed you." You mutter, nose nudging the left side of his jaw. "I'm sorry I couldn't stay."

"It's okay." Franco answers. "You're here now. That's all I need."

And he means every word.

You smile in response. A smile that reaches your eyes and makes them shine with such intensity that makes him feel dizzy with love.

"You should take a shower." You don't miss the way he pouts when you pull away from him to have a better look at his face. "You stink, love."

"You love me anyway. Stinky and all."

Your laughter echoes in the entirety of the room as you walk towards the closet, where you look for a clean shirt and shorts and then toss them towards him. Rolling his eyes, he walks to the bathroom, chuckling when your voice, from the other side of the door, reminds him that you love him always.

Almost half an hour later he comes out of the bathroom, all wet hair and bare chest. He finds you in front of the bureau where you’ve put some of your clothes and he knows he should be thinking about something else right now, maybe discuss the race and his future in F1, or maybe he should tell you how much he would love to let the world know that he is yours, but all he can do is stare at you. 

Leaning on the doorframe, he observes your every move. You’re not doing something extraordinary, only going through your things, probably looking for the earrings you’ve lost again, but he isn’t afraid of admitting that every single thing you do, no matter how big or small, make you look like the most fascinating creature in existence.

Soon, as every other day, he finds himself walking in your direction. Hands itching with the need of touching you.

There's something about you. Something that lures him in like nothing else has done before. Maybe it's your hair and the intoxicating smell that touches his nostrils when he buries his face in it. Or maybe it's your skin and its taste, so sweet that it forbids him from thinking straight. It sure is the sound you make when you feel his hands on your waist.

His long fingers roam the skin of your waist and back as his lips kiss a wet trail down the right side of your neck. A soft breath leaves his mouth when his lips reach the spot right over your pulse, wasting no time in sinking his teeth in your flesh, softly but hard enough to make you hiss in pain.

"Fran." You warn him. Dainty hands touch his in an attempt to push him away, but his grip on your waist becomes stronger with the fear of losing the contact  with your skin.

"No, no. Por favor." He whimpers. He whimpers impossibly close to your ear, the agonic plea making you squirm in his arms almost against your own will.

"You bit me, Franco."

"Perdón." He cries. "Perdón. I won't do it again."

The mere thought of you leaving hurts him so bad that it is almost physical. It's been such a tough day and now all he wants is to hold you and never let go. You're the only one who can make him feel safe, at home.

There's nothing in this world that Franco loves more than having you in his arms, being able to kiss every part of you and rejoice in the way your body and soul respond to him. Always you, no one else.

“Tanta belleza..." he whispers. Hands now travel up your abdomen and then your sternum, until they finally rest on your round breasts. When he starts kneading your flesh at the same time he keeps kissing and licking the skin of your neck, you moan softly. In response he chuckles, amused by the way in which his words and touch make you forget everything.

You want to be mad at him, you want to scold him and forbid him from touching you if he bites you again, but your mind is dizzy by his kiss and the feeling of his body pressed against yours. His touch breaks your resolve and he knows it, always taking advantage of that.

Today is no exception, because soon he starts moving against you. Hips rocking forward, his growing erection brushes against the roundness of your ass, making both of you moan out loud.

"Can you feel me, baby?" He asks and he sounds desperate. You want to answer but fail miserably because of the intensity of it all. "Can you feel how hard you make me? This is all because of you, for you." 

You moan his name when he moves his hips once more, your own body meeting him halfway, desperately  looking for the contact that makes your skin shiver. 

“You have no idea,” he mutters against your skin, words interrupted by the kisses he's still giving you. “The things I want to do to you…” 

Your answer comes in a shaky breath.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

The next few minutes happen so fast that you barely have a moment to process it all. In no time you're laying on the soft bed, your shirt is long gone and the cool air kisses your skin. The only piece of clothing remaining on your body is your underwear. 

Franco is at your feet, looking at you with eyes full of need and adoration. He takes a long time taking you in, pretty eyes looking at every piece of you, and when your own hands travel from your abdomen to your breasts, repeating his actions from before, a soft whine escapes his mouth. He observes as you touch yourself for him, right hand going down until you start playing with the hem of your knickers. He licks his lips, sight fixed on the wet spot in them. 

Just before you can sneak your hand under the soft fabric, his long fingers wrap around your wrist and pull you aside. He takes no time in replacing you, taking both sides of your panties and pulling them down. In no time they're being thrown to some place on the ground, long forgotten for the rest of the night. 

Hands on both of your knees, he spreads your legs open and lets out a shaky breath the moment your dripping cunt is finally on display. He has seen you like this countless times before but he always reacts the same way: enamoured with every part of your body. He wants to taste everything he can, he wants to drink from you until you beg him to stop.

And that's what he does.

Flat tongue travels from your hole to right under your clit, repeatedly, during a few tortuous seconds that feel like hours. Spreading you open with his thumbs, Franco keeps licking you there until you're the one whining and begging him to give you more. 

In response, you feel him smirk between your legs.

“You want more, huh?”

“Please. Fran, por favor.”

He chuckles.

“Qué putita que sos.”

You want to answer but nothing comes out of your mouth. Nothing but a high pitched moan when his lips finally lick your clit. Before you can even process what's happening, he's suckling on your bundle of nerves like it is the most delicious thing he's ever had the pleasure to taste. When your hands take a handful of his hair and tug at it softly, deep moans sound on the back of his throat and the vibrations rumble through your entire body, making your back arch in pleasure.

There's nothing better than this. His mouth on you, kissing, licking, making sounds that would make even the boldest of men blush. He eats you out like his life depends on it, ignoring the need for air in his lungs because all the oxygen he needs is in you, in your skin, in the very taste of you. He drinks from your juices as if they are the sweetest ambrosia, giving him life, giving him everything he needs. Nothing else, no one else but you.

You keep moaning his name louder and louder, not caring if others are listening. You'll deal with that later, but right now there's nothing in this world that could make you stop from letting him know how you feel.

“So good…” you moan. “You make me feel so good, baby.” 

He moans as well. Hips rocking against the bed cover, unconsciously looking for release. Your words are music to him, because all he wants is to make you feel so good that you forget everything else. Everything else but him. 

“You're soaked.” He groans after gathering your arousal on his tongue and then swallowing it. “Is this because of me, amor?”

Once again, you want to answer but his actions interrupt you. This time, your words get stuck in your throat by two of his long fingers entering you. Carefully, making sure he doesn't hurt you, but the only thing you can feel is the immense pleasure spreading all over your body, legs shaking slightly with the feeling of his fingers starting to move inside of you at the same time his lips wrap around your clit again, suckling with need. 

You moan his name like a mantra, both hands gripping his hair as your hips start to move almost involuntarily, rubbing yourself on his face as you look for your own release. He doesn't protest for a second, in fact, he grabs your ass in his hands to move you closer to his face and now it's impossible to part away from him, tongue and lips torturing your puffy clit as you cry out in pleasure. 

And then he does something that he's never done before.

His teeth grazes your sensitive bundle of nerves ever so slightly and that sends you to the edge. You have no time to react because soon entire galaxies are exploding behind your closed eyes. Some sort of electricity makes your body tremble as you cum on his tongue, and for a moment you feel like you are touching the sky with your hands. Seconds that feel like an eternity, you want to feel like this for the rest of your life. 

When you come back from some wonderful place you've never been before, you find yourself still laying on the bed, but this time Franco's on top of you. He's waiting for you to recover, only caressing your sides with his hands and leaving short kisses on your collarbone and chest. 

He knows you're back when you intertwine your fingers in his soft hair. 

“You okay?” He asks. You nod in response, a content smile on your lips. “Need you to use your words, baby.”

“I'm fine.” You answer. “Better than ever.”

He purrs like a kitten when your hands travel down his back, caressing his soft skin for a few moments. Then you remember that you’re the only one that has had an orgasm tonight, the realisationg making you feel incredibly guilty. Part of loving him is taking care of him as much as he does with you. That’s why it feels wrong, leaving him like this.

Your gaze finds his. He’s hovering over you now, one arm supporting his own weight as the other is in your face, fingertips brushing against your cheek and jaw. His big, pretty eyes are looking at you as if he’s trying to decipher you, and soon he does. It scares you sometimes, how easily he can read your thoughts by the expression on your face. 

“You don’t have to, you know?” He mutters. 

You kiss him softly, tasting yourself on his lips. 

“Of course I have to,” you object. “Because I love you.”

Franco smiles as you sit and motion to him to now lay on his back. He complies, never denying anything to you. 

Soon you’re kissing him again but this time you’re the one on top, legs on both sides of his hips. The sounds leaving his mouth are intoxicating and, trying to coax more out of him, you take your hands to the waistband of his boxer and pull them down, just as he did with your underwear before. 

You wish you could take your time with him but you know that he won’t last long. His cock is impossibly hard, precum dripping out of the angry red tip. That’s why his reaction when you touch him doesn't surprise you; he’s at the edge and it won’t take much time for him to come undone in your arms.

“Amor…” he moans as you stroke him, spreading his juices all over his beautiful dick. You know what he wants. He’s trying to tell you that he can’t wait any longer, that all he wants is to feel you. 

So you comply. 

Both of you moan the exact moment he enters you, hard cock stretching you out in such a delicious way that has you closing your eyes tight. You’re so wet that he slides in easily, filling you completely. 

Your name leaves his lips in a plea that makes you move in no time. The friction coaxing more sounds out of the both of you. He whispers sentences that are never finished, words both in English and Spanish that have no coherence. He’s so lost in the bliss of having your sweet cunt wrapped around him that can barely speak properly. 

“You look so beautiful like this…” he manages to say, the phrase interrupted many times by his own moans. “Riding my cock… so, so good…”

In response you move faster. You can feel him inside of you, twitching with the need of release that will soon arrive. His grip on your waist tightens as you ride him faster and faster each time, breasts bouncing with your moves and that, too, sends him over the edge. 

“Fran…” you moan, your eyes pleading. “Come on, baby. Fill me up.”

Those words and your walls hugging his dick with such intensity are enough to make him cum. He reaches his orgasm in seconds, warm seed spilling deep inside of you and triggering your own climax, which is shorter than the previous one but even more intense.

You keep moving for a few seconds, milking his cock a little more. When you start feeling him going soft you decide to take him out of you, hearing him moan one more time as he watches his own semen dripping out of you. 

The way he looks after he has an orgasm is one of the most gorgeous things you’ve seen in your life. Hair dishevelled, skin glistening with sweat and pretty eyes full of satisfaction, he’s drunk in love and adoration for you and you love it. You love seeing him like this, knowing that you’re the reason behind it all. 

“You’re perfect.” you whisper to him, your lips hovering over his. “The prettiest boy I’ve ever seen.”

Franco smiles as his right hand comes up to caress your hair lovingly. Now, after the intensity of the love-making, both of you long for your lover’s touch in a more innocent way, in a way that can soothe all the aches. 

You stay like that, resting in each other’s arms, for what it feels like hours. After a while and starting to feel a little sleepy, you sit up on the bed. He looks in your direction, surprised and almost offended with you for pulling away from him. 

“What are you doing?” he asks. 

“We need to take a shower, come on.” 

You try to get off the bed, but his strong arm is around you in an instant, taking you back to his side. You giggle as he holds you tight and starts biting at your neck.

“There’s no way I’m letting you go,” he says. “You’re staying here with me forever.”

“But we can’t!” You laugh again. “We need to have a shower and eat something.”

“No, no.” This time his tone is more serious. His hands are both on your cheeks, softly making you look at him in the eyes. “You are the only thing I need.” 

For a second you want to scold him for not taking his own well being seriously, but then a smile appears on your face, leaving the previous frown behind, because now you realise that you feel the same way.

.

taglist: @bicchaan @amz824 @joyfulbookreviewmarvelspy

[madschiavelique]

Hi dear, how are you?, could you write an imagine onde reader mentioning offhand how much she would love a whole family. Four, maybe six children? Girls and boys split right down the middle, but the second Miguel hears this (maybe the reader is on the phone, or talking to lyla. or someone at HQ) and Miguel loses his mind

1) Miguel can't help himself and he would grab you and put you on the mattress for a very long time...... or

2) torture himself for two weeks before telling her why he was avoiding her please.

HIHIHI BREEDING BARK BARK (sorry this took so long to write anon zehfrfgh i pulled an all nighter to make this one so also forgive me if there are some mistakes in this gksffgjgbf)

summary : miguel learns you want kids, a lot of kids, so he breeds you

content warnings : SMUT (18+) minors dni, pnv sex - unprotected (be safe kids), breeding kink, soft!dom miguel, obsessive!miguel, no use of Y/N, fem!reader word count : 3,2k

tag list : @fandom-ash @haradasaya

Miguel was on his way to see you. He'd heard that you were back from your mission and that everything had gone well, so he'd come to get you to take you out for lunch.

He was taking advantage of the little free time he had to visit you, even though he would obviously pass this visit off as work-related in everyone's eyes. He had to always, always remain professional and keep everything under control so that everybody could do their bit.

"Six?!" asked Jess, the word choking in her throat.

Well, you were indeed back with Jess.

"Mhm, six," you affirmed as you both busied yourselves filing a report.

What were they talking about? He leaned against a wall. He knew it wasn't very polite to eavesdrop, but the word got around here. Most of society's building had cameras, and everything that was often said or done was recorded here.

He just wanted to listen to you, wondering if there were any topics of conversation that you weren't having with him and with the other spiders. Yes, he was manic, and probably a little too obsessive.

In any case, he wondered what you could have said to Jessica to make her exclaim like that.

"The more the merrier," you laughed softly.

"I hate this sentence so much," sighed Jess.

"Why so?" your voice was sincerely interrogative.

"In this context, it's really not my preferred idiom one might say," she replied as Miguel heard her tapping on a pad to enter more information.

What on earth could they be talking about? he wondered. What subject could suggest that six was far too high a number for Jess's judgement? He knew that Jess was an oragnised woman like himself, with a lot of tact and a fair amount of authority.

Was it perhaps a consecutive number of days doing an activity? Six days of marathon running might have been a bit much, but six days' holiday was never too much. He breathed in very softly, it had been years since he'd had time for such a thing. Did you want to take him on a holiday? If so, the number of days was inordinate. He would never be able to get away from his work for more than three days.

Maybe it was something else then. What was too much in Jess's mind with six?

Six empanadas perhaps? Miguel would obviously disagree. You can never have enough empanada for his taste. But Jess would probably disapprove.

Six... Six pets? It's true that having six pets might be a bit of an exaggeration, at least in Miguel's eyes of course.

Perhaps six books? No, that didn't make sense. Although Jess wasn't a huge reader, she did have a book in her hands from time to time.

So what was it? He was intrigued, that's for sure.

"You know, in my opinion, one kid is already way too much to handle," she sighed, "but six ? Nah, that's some good way of ending your life while still being alive."

But Miguel had barely heard the rest of the sentence, his mind having been caught by a single word: kid. He immediately froze, his heart skipping a beat.

Kid, like... children ? Like, actual human beings ? Small human beings ?

His eyes were wide, his mouth parted. No, he must not have heard correctly, although he dreamed that it was indeed that word that had been uttered.

"Why not? Surrounding ourselves with life is good," you said softly. "I'd love to see six little heads running around. I want three of each, three girls and three boys."

He wasn't mistaken: the discussion was really about the number of children you wanted. Six, he thought, six, six, the word echoing in his mind. He put both his hands on his hips, as if to hold on to something.

He pictured you, your rounded belly, stroking the hair of a child, your child, his child... both your children.

He swallowed, however, as another, immensely more tantalising vision took hold of his mind.

The vision of your cunt, glistening with your desire as from between its lips dripped little by little his own cum, his own seed leaking from you, your belly full of him...

It made his dick twitch for a hot second, and he couldn't remove that image, he didn't want to get rid of that image. The idea that your belly could be full of him, that he could breed you until he had no strength left was magnificent.

"What an egalitarian spirit," Jess noted wryly, "Well, it's all in order."

His thoughts were riveted on the image. He could almost hear in his own mind the sweet melody your moans would make as he came inside you again.

No, it was now impossible for him to think about anything else, he told himself that maybe he shouldn't be thinking about this. Except it's a well-known fact that if you tell someone not to think about something, they'll think about it.

He knew what breeding was, obviously, but what about you? Did you even have a clue what it was?

He tried to pull himself together, he had to either leave here or come towards you and pretend to come naturally. Would he be able to hold it together and act as if nothing had happened? Did he really have a choice in the matter after all? He breathed in, tightening his jaw as he decided to come towards you.

He walked purposefully, his usual grumpy face set surprisingly naturally as he advanced towards you.

"Ah, you're back," he sighed as if pleasantly surprised to see you both here, "how was the mission?"

"Excellent," Jess affirmed, "we've just finished the report, the anomaly has been taken care of as it should have been since we arrived."

He nodded, his serious face opening a control pad to check what she was saying and opening the file in question, pretending to read its contents. He had the impression that everywhere he looked the image came right back to him, on every tile, on every screen, everywhere in his mind.

"That's good work," he breathed.

"Damn right," nodded Jess. " Well, I'm off to join my own little demon, take care you two."

"See ya," you replied as she headed for the exit.

He wondered by what superhuman strength he managed to remain unwavering and stoic.

You moved closer to him, hugging his back and comforting yourself in the embrace.

"How was your day?" you asked, squeezing him in your arms.

Unwavering and stoic, Miguel, you have to remain unwavering and stoic.

You put your hands on his body, and with one touch his concentration was simply wiped out.

He turned to you, smiling a strange, uncertain smile as he stroked your hair, a little tense.

"You know how it is, just a lot of work," but his eyes were watching yours strangely, a flash of a vision where they were filled with desire looking back at him.

You studied him for a moment, noticing how distracted he seemed, his eyes looking at you in a strange way. You could feel a kind of desire there, a kind of longing, but you couldn't work out what it was.

"Is... everything alright?"

He shuddered, obviously his little show wasn't going to last much longer. He broke away from your embrace, he couldn't keep looking at you like that.

"Hey," you said softly, "you know you can tell me everything, right?"

Could I tell you this ? he wondered. He looked at you for a moment, another flash of you all moaning and covered in hickeys and marks on your body as you breathed his name. He looked away, closing his eyes in the hopes the flashes would stop.

"I'm afraid I cannot speak about this..."

But how he wanted to speak about this, to tell you how much he wanted to fuck you until you were full of him, until the only thing present in your mouth was his name and how much he wanted to see the sight of your round belly.

But you wouldn't listen to his silence. So you walked over to him and took his hand.

"Miguel, look at me. you asked, and he looked at you, his visions mingling with the reality where you were looking at him, worried. "Tell me."

He sighed. He couldn't run away from his ideas forever, run away from these images that he wanted to see in reality and not just in his mind. He wanted to raise his idea from the theoretical to the practical, and it was with an almost guilty breath that he admitted:

"I want to breed you."

There was a slight silence, his eyes plunged into yours, desperate to know what you were thinking. But above all he was met with confusion.

"What's breeding?" You had an idea of the term, usually used animalistically for the subject of... reproduction and maintenance of species. But just to be on the safe side with Miguel, you preferred to ask him anyway.

His lungs swelled like sails, did he really have to go through this?

"Why don't you ask Lyla what it is?" he suggested.

"Because I want to hear it from you, with your words" you assured him, your tone a mixture of strictness and curiosity.

He sighed, biting the inside of his cheek, slightly afraid of your reaction. You were practically hanging on his every word, waiting for him to explain.

"Breeding is... the act of a male and a female animal having sex, also known as mating, to reproduce..." he explained, pausing, "and procreate."

Your eyes widened slightly, and the possibility that he had overheard your previous conversation with Jess came to mind. All the same, you looked at him almost inscrutably, and he couldn't work out what you were thinking.

But now that the words had been said, he could no longer hide, no, he no longer had to hide. His thoughts were finally out, burning on his skin and lips.

He moved forward a little more, his gaze suddenly darkened by the desires he was no longer hiding.

"I want to fill you up with my cum and make sure you get pregnant."

Your lips were parted, your surprised eyes looking into his, black with desire and longing. A silence filled the air, both your hearts beating loudly in both your bodies. Miguel waited for an answer, unaware of the warm cloud that had settled in your lower belly.

He chuckled a little, an understanding smile gracing his lips as he said:

"See, your silence tells me enoug-"

"Breed me," you cut him off.

He stopped moving immediately, the statement immobilising him just like when he had understood what you and Jess were talking about.

Had his mind and his fantasies come together to play tricks on him? Or had you actually agreed with what he'd just said?

"What?" he said, his pronunciation almost slurred as he turned his attention to your next words.

"Breed me, Miguel" you repeated, determined as you swallowed in anticipation. "I want to carry you... in me."

The gleam in his eyes was almost predatory, but after all, wasn't that the very essence of breeding? The raw nature of it, the bestiality, the quenching of the oldest instinct that ever was.

You only had time to see his eyes turn red as he lunged for your lips, kissing you with his mouth wide open as your teeth almost clashed and he attacked your tongue.

The power with which he kissed you made you take a step backwards, but you weren't going anywhere, because Miguel immediately placed his hand in the small of your back to make sure he had you close to him.

He let out grunts between kisses, his hunger for your skin lengthening his canines as they brushed almost dangerously against your tongue.

Then he lifted you in one swift movement, placing you on his shoulder as he headed for the door leading to his quarters, his impatience growing faster than ever. You bit your lip, already swollen from his kisses, his hand gripping your thigh firmly as he led you to the bed.

He laid you down, following every movement of your body as he kissed you again. He stood back for a moment, watching your body.

"Do you have sentimental value for your suit?"

"What?" you asked, confused by the sudden question.

"Just answer," he asked through clenched teeth.

"I mean it's old but I can live withou-"

You hadn't even finished your sentence when he ripped off your suit with an ease that sent shivers down your spine, ripping the fabric covering your cunt, tearing your panties and throwing all the rags into the rest of the room.

"No questions about the sentimental value of my underwear?" you laugh lightly.

"I'll get you some new ones," he breathed, a carnivorous sneer inhabiting his lips, "I'll take great care in chosing them."

You swallowed as he kissed your neck, nestling in and marking your skin with thirst. He straightened to kiss your lips, and whispered against them:

"Turn over, get down on your elbows and knees".

You complied, his instructions increasing the size of the cloud of heat in your belly. You placed your folded arms flat on the sheets, your knees slightly apart.

"Lift your hips for me, nena," he commanded in a tone as soft as cotton.

You listened, arching your back as you lifted your hips, your ass gloriously up just for him to fuck. He swallowed, his hand coming to grip one of your buttocks and pulling it apart, pressing it between his fingers and gripping your skin full hand.

"Already so good and wet for me," he mused, one of his fingers passing between your folds.

Of course you were already wet, the way he had introduced the concept to you making you all fuzzy and warm in your belly. You'd never been against the idea of Miguel being a bit more violent, and to be honest you were excited by the idea of him being so from now on.

Once he'd coated himself sufficiently, he pushed one finger into you, soft moans falling from your lips filling the room. He added another one, and your lust was growing by the second. You were getting impatient too, but you couldn't help noticing that Miguel simply couldn't wait any longer.

Miguel was always very keen about taking his time, preparing you well apart from the few moments when one of you needed a quicky, but here eagerness was getting the better of him, and above all his most instinctive desires buried deep inside him had taken the reigns of all his actions.

The thought of him being in you through your core made him feel so drunk on you. These ideas had already been marinating in his mind for a while, it had only taken this conversation between you and Jess to flip the switch. And he observed in adoration, seeing you like this, underneath him with your much smaller frame, sitting up and ready to take him.

"Hands behind your back."

His orders became more and more urgent, his tone wavering with envy. It was impossible for him to formulate a whole sentence.

So you laid your face on the sheets, cheek pressed to your side as you brought your hands behind your back, joining your wrists together like you were imagining yourself handcuffed. You shivered as his hand, whose fingers had previously been inside you, reached out from between your folds and took both your wrists at the same time, locking them in this embrace. His hand was obviously big enough to hold both your wrists together and prevent you from breaking free from his grip.

He had locked you completely.

He had blocked out any possibility of you making a move other than squirming around him. Miguel would never tire of this control, this hold he had over you right now. You were his, nobody else's, and he would let eveybody know this by fucking his seed into you and get as many babies as you wanted.

That's when you felt the head of his dick coating itself with your juices, preparing to burry himself into you. You couldn't see Miguel like this, but you could hear him. Dark growls vibrated in his throat, deeper than you'd ever heard them before, and it felt intimidating.

He thrust, pushing his tip into you, and you let out a groan of relief that sank into the fabric of the sheets. You breathed softly, letting Miguel's thick, long cock sink into you. No matter how many times you had done it, taken him like that, you still couldn't get used to it.

His lower belly finally touched the skin of your ass, his dick deep inside you. And you felt him pressing against your stomach. You knew that if you brought one of your hands to your stomach, you'd feel the shape of his cock against your skin.

He was so deep in you, an almost bestial growl escaped him as he slowly began to pull back before thrusting in hard.

You let out a little cry of surprise and pleasure that echoed around the room, and he repeated the same gesture. He kept bearing down on you until he touched your slick on his lower belly and pulling away, pushing back in the next second until it'd touch his balls.

Your body was burning, unable to do anything but arch your back more and groan. Your hands were gripping the void, and the impossibility of finding a foothold in all this was making you feel out of control. But you were enjoying the sensations he was giving you, and so was he.

He listened to the symphony of your voice as he picked up the pace, the feeling of your gummy walls wrapping all tight and warm around him was absolute perfection to him.

He knew it wouldn't be long before his first cum would hit, but he needn't have worried. Miguel could go on for a long, long time, and he just hoped that you could keep up, although he had no doubt that his best girl would live up to his expectations.

He could no longer string a sentence together properly, the words he was trying to whisper as he sank deep inside you coming out as if chewed up by his long fangs.

He grunted, his rhythm and the tilt of your two bodies giving you both exceptional sensations. The knot in your stomach tightened, threatening to burst as Miguel came closer.

And the world stopped spinning for a second.

You came together, your walls closing spasmodically around him as you felt him spill into you. Because that's what you wanted, right ? That's the one thing you desired, and he was going to give it to you entirely.

He pulled out, just for the pleasure of seeing the work he had so long dreamed of seeing. And the satisfaction was superb, his white creamy cum slowly pouring out of your wet cunt, still pulsing with desire.

A dark laugh rose from his throat as he sank back into you and you let out a startled moan. He lowered himself, his lips pressing against your ear.

"I hope you thought of six names."

It would be a long, long night.

[companionjones]

Twist Her

Pairing: Tyler Owens x fem!Reader

Fandom: Twisters

Summary: You and Tyler took a break from hooking up. What happens when Tyler wants to jump back in?

Warnings: SMUT, Cursing

*******

"You're gonna be the deatha' me one day, Owens," you protested under your breath as you stared at your computer screen in the barn on your property.

He heard you. "Don't say that. And for the record, you're the one who won't sleep until these numbers are right."

"For the record, you're the one who got me into this business in the first place, so it's still technically your fault."

Tyler just laughed, "Whatever, sweetheart. You runnin' another model?"

"Mhm," you nodded as you stared anxiously at your screen.

Owens walked over and joined you.

"Ugh!" In your infuriation that your test had failed, you nearly chuckled your laptop across the room.

Tyler put his hand on your arm before you could get the tech off the table, however. "Whoa, there. I happen to know for a fact that you'll be much more upset if anything happens to this laptop."

You groaned again, and dropped your head against his chest. "Why can't I just leave this for tomorrow?"

"...Maybe you just need a distraction."

You looked up from Tyler Owens' chest to find a look on his face that you were all too familiar with. "Very funny," you brushed off, and straightened up to look at your computer again.

"Who said anything about jokes?" Owens defended.

You sighed. "I thought we agreed we were done with that."

He shrugged. "I honestly thought we were just taking a break."

"What part of 'it would be better for the team if we stopped this' sounded like a break to you?" You finally looked away from your computer screen and towards Tyler.

He nodded. "Okay, maybe I just didn't want to stop fuckin' the daylights outta you from sundown til' sun up."

"Ty..." You rolled your eyes and looked back at your computer.

"Come on, you have to of loved it just as much as I did..." Tyler approached you from behind, brushed your hair out of the way, and started kissing your neck. "...This okay, baby?"

Again, you groaned out of frustration, but this time, you shut your laptop, and whipped yourself around to start kissing Tyler's lips.

"Yes," Tyler parted from you to answer his own question before shoving his tongue in your mouth to get an approving moan from you. He moaned right back.

You parted from Owens to grin and hop up to sit on the table your laptop was on. You put your hands on Tyler's shoulders to pull him back in to kiss you, which he did so with a smile on his face to match yours.

You had to part again not long after to pull your shirts off. Tyler made you laugh when he unhooked your bra with one hand; something he had done many times before. You held yourself up in the air with two hands on the table as Tyler took your jeans and underwear off in just a couple tugs. This clearly wasn't the two of your first rodeo.

"You ready, sweet girl?" Tyler asked once he had taken out his cock and the two of you had rested your foreheads against each other.

"Never fucking stopped being ready," you told him, your eyes closed.

You both cried out when Tyler entered you, and you made out fiercely once he was sheathed all the way inside.

"Ty..." you squeaked when you pulled away from him eventually, rocking your hips to get some friction.

"You want me to start movin', baby?" he asked, a smile forming across his features.

"Mhm..."

"Fuck yeah. That's all I wanted to hear."

Tyler started jack-hammering into you, and soon your barn was filled with the sounds of mixed moans from the two of you.

"Fu-ckin'-missed-this-so-damn-much," Tyler admitted as he pounded into you.

"Yeah, baby?" you encouraged, leaning back onto the table.

He nodded. "Yeah I did. Ever since we stopped, fuckin' my hand, it's just--"

"--not the same," you finished with him with an open-mouthed grin.

Tyler almost laughed. "You feel the same? Mm, knew you fuckin' would. God, can I take you from behind?"

You threw your head back and actually laughed at the rapid change of subject. You nodded, straightening up so you could get down from the table. "'Course, sweetheart."

Once you were on your feet again, Tyler wasted no time in spinning you around and bending you over the table. He immediately shoved himself back inside your pussy.

You cried out.

"That's it, baby girl!" exclaimed Owens. "Now just ride it out. Ride this dick and let it make you feel good!"

"Owens..." You moaned because you felt it building. "Tyler...Ty!"

Finally, your orgasm overtook you. You arched your back as you felt your climax run through every square inch of your body.

Tyler wasn't far behind. "Fuck, I always fuckin' love when you get tight like this. Missed it so much. Missed you so much. Fuck, that's it. I'm close. I'm gonna...gonna...F-f-fuuuck," he cursed as he released himself inside you.

When you felt like you could move, you felt Tyler making out with your neck again. He helped you straighten up.

You turned so you could kiss him. The two of you enjoyed each other's company in your secluded barn for a little longer.

Soon enough, you parted from him. "Can I have my clothes back, please?"

Only when you had just finished getting dressed did you notice Tyler looking at you.

"What?" you wondered with a smile.

"You ever think..." he trailed off.

"I think all the time," you joked.

He smiled and shook his head at you, then continued, "You ever think we could be more than just this?"

"First you wanna go back to fuckin'. Now, you wanna do more?"

Tyler didn't take offense to your laughing. "I'm bein' serious," he told you, his arms folded.

You sobered up. "I know you are."

He wondered, "What d'ya think?"

"I think it's scary."

"Scary?" Again, he wasn't taking offense, he was just trying to understand you.

"Ty, we've known each other for a long time, and I haven't been in a relationship even longer. What if..."

Owens encouraged, "If..."

"What if I'm not good at it anymore?" you told Tyler one of your deepest fears.

He just smiled at you understandingly. Tyler unfolded his arms, straightened up, and walked forward to take you in his arms. He continued to smile down at you. "If I know two things, one is your great at fucking," he paused so you could laugh, "and two is you're great at caring. Sweetheart, there is no one I'd rather be romantically involved with than you. In my eyes, you are perfect."

You kissed him.

Tyler was still smiling when you parted from him. "I hope that was a yes."

You nodded. You laughed, "You are going to be the death of me, Owens."

For the first time, probably ever, Tyler Owens consciously backed away from you. "I really wish you wouldn't say that, you know?"

"Why?" you wondered, "I don't mean anything by it."

He nodded, shoving his hands in his back pockets. "I know, but like you said, I'm the one who got you into chasin' in the first place, so--"

"Oh, baby," you chuckled sympathetically. You went in and hugged him again. You looked at him. You really think I would ever do anything I didn't want to do?"

*******

Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading! Fill up that heart and reblog if you liked it. I would also really appreciate a comment, if you have the time. If you would like to read more, check out my masterlist. Have a nice day, night, or whatever time it is for you! <3 <3 <3

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on ��� sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[weepingtalecowboy]

Hyrule Warriors strategy lol

Fanfic prompt: A thing I absolutely love about Hyrule warriors is how the game needs strategy and how said strategy evolves

You go from

“Please go there I will carry you there but please don’t run off”

Too

“GET OVER HERE RIGHT THIS SECOND OR ELSE…!,!”

like you end up barking orders like a literal drill sergeant

You have absolutely no faith that anyone would go where they need to

I spent more time in the menu barking orders than I did actually holding and taking over zones

Even funnier is how replaying the game absolutely makes a difference

Where in games like windwaker or twilight princess you are forced to progress slowly through the game

No matter how good you get at them you still need to wait for bosses to enter second and third phase

Or more specifically need to either tear down the barrier (or skip it but that’s hard) or turn into a hylian in both games

The only thing that changes is that you can play the game better and more reliably than before

In Hyrule warriors the learning curve makes replaying the game hilarious

Because the second you genuinely understand the strategy for the game you play it completely differently

Fighting Volga the first time is literally more about precisely mashing buttons and aiming at him every single time than anything else

I beat him in like ten seconds flat

Like from a time travel fix it perspective Hyrule warriors let’s you do everything immediately

Like imagine warriors getting sent back in time to the first ever fight in Hyrule warriors and literally the second he gets promoted he goes full drill sergeant mode on people

Where first time you learn the usefulness of dragging people to do stuff rather late

You also eventually don’t trust anyone to do stuff if you aren’t outright controlling them immediately

This time around warriors got the confidence to scream at people right after he got the promotion lol

It probably looks so funny when a near new recruit gets the audacity to threaten everyone the second he gets promoted

And then out drill sergeants a higher up and finishes missions in like half an hour the most (respect speed run )

But only because he scared everyone into obedience (like npcs run like they would die if they don’t get to the ordered position right this second)

And kept tabs on all the zones that need to be held

While also ignoring literally every enemy except the generals , redeads and other special forces (honestly redeads make NPCs a new level of ineffective… way to slow)

Only doing side missions for two seconds and then doing the main ones exclusively

And boosting moral like crazy (because of how fast you get side missions done)

You legitimately become a tank at some point in Hyrule warriors and not even replaying the entire game would balance it out

Tune and mask probably feared the captain when he went drill sergeant (and you go drill sergeant way too often in this game)

We need more drill sergeant warriors in the fandom

Because in the game nobody disobeys your orders and runs like their lives depend on it

The chain needs to experience drill sergeant warriors when fighting a boss (maybe dink)

No honor for the evil … you trap them in a corner and keep beating them into submission and don’t stop until they disintegrate

Cia didn’t even have a chance lol

We need more time travel where the character simply immediately becomes their best possible form because they simply had a growing as a person arc they could skip this time around

Arguing with that guy about stuff involving missions is probably not recommended

Time and wind just sit back and watch as warriors get into drill sergeant mode and wait till one of the links gets to do pushups

You have better luck with literally any other type of discussion but not military or mission related lol

[phantom-playdough]

Macaque x GN!Stressed Reader: Fluffy Cuddles

It's been a while since I've written a fic, much less completed one. Especially for the LMK fandom because I've kinda fallen out of the fandom. But I miss writing fics for this show and have been needing a bit of an outlet. And what's more comforting than shadow monkey cuddles? Nothing. That's what I thought lol

Also posted on my AO3: My_inner_phantom

Things have been really exhausting lately. So many things have been pulling at you, demanding your attention that you've hardly had time for yourself. Much less your clingy boyfriend, Macaque. But every time things seem to finally be settling down, something happens that gets in the way of you being able to spend time with him. Needless to say, you're exhausted.

He's been trying his best to be understanding, and he's done a good job so far. Especially by his standards. So, when he finishes training one day, he decides he's sick of sitting around in his hut and doing nothing without you there. It doesn't feel right without you beside him, especially for this long. It's not your fault that you've been so busy, and it's hard for him to be mad at you for long, anyway.

But he misses you.

You've been working so hard lately and have been under so much stress practically every day that it's a miracle you're still holding it together. Heck, if he had to deal with everything you've been coping with, he surely would be doing way worse. But he's sick of being patient when it feels like the universe just keeps throwing things at you. And he'll be damned if he's going to let the universe keep you away from him like this, especially when you both need each other's company.

He lets out a dramatic sigh before dropping into a portal and landing on your couch in your apartment. He can tell you're not home yet, so he decides to lounge on your couch for a bit until you get back. Your scent in the room helps soothe his nerves just slightly, but it also just makes him miss you more. However, he plays it cool when he hears your footsteps enter the building and walk up to your door.

Opening his eye, he peeks over to see you walk inside and kick off your shoes. You don't even seem surprised when you see him on your couch. If anything, you seem relieved.

It's only a moment before you make it over to the couch and face plant into his chest, to which he responds by loosely wrapping an arm around your waist while the other stays behind his head. Despite his casual expression, the way his tail wraps more firmly around your leg is a clear indicator of how much he's missed you.

"Rough day?" You nod into his chest. "Need me to beat anybody up for ya?" He gently offers, which earns a small laugh from you. "Maybe later." You half-joke. His arm and tail tighten around you just slightly, showing clear restraint from pushing you for details or going on a hunt. You appreciate the effort and reward him with a kiss on the cheek, which surprises him a bit.

He'll probably never get used to your affection, and he secretly likes it that way. Every peck on the cheek from you feels like the first, and it reminds him that there's still some good left in this world. In his world.

He smiles after a moment, leaving a small kiss on your forehead in response. If there's one thing you know, it's that he's not going to let you get up for a while.

[phyrestartr]

Man of Worship (P.1) | Zagreus x M!Reader

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

w/c: 2.3k #NSFW themes, demigod reader, eventual polyamory, traumatic past, healing from trauma, mentions of dub-con, mentions of suicide, hurt/comfort, boys being boys, toxic parents, olympic gods doing typical olympic god bs

Note: SO this is basically a rework of Rhubarb, even though I still want to pursue the rest of Rhubarb with that particular reader character, HOWEVER I generally make two or three versions of the same story while I'm brainstorming, and I ended up digging into more Greek mythos while looking for inspo and BOOM.

ANYWAY I didn't tag for this since it's a new fandom I'm writing for, but if you'd like to be tagged, pls feel free to leave a comment!! I'll update my tag form thing in a moment too :D I hope this is a fun read!!

--

1. A Gardener?

He noticed first the flutter of feathered wings. It was an odd thing to hear in the underworld, and even odder still to hear it come from the outer gardens–the place poor, pitiful Zagreus was barred from. 

Father won't tell me anything of this. And that was true--Hades was anything but straightforward and honest with his son. So, to the real parent of the house was where the prince went.

“Erm, Nyx?” Zagreus asked, shooting glances back at the iron gates as he met his mother-figure. “I've got a question for you, if you don't mind.”

“I do not mind. I will do my best to answer, my child.” She watched him with eased attention, then followed his gaze to the forbidden outdoors. “Is something the matter?” 

“No–well, maybe? Not sure, but. Well.” Zagreus rubbed the back of his neck. “Just–are there birds out in the garden?” 

Nyx blinked. “Birds?” 

“Yes. I keep hearing something fluttering around every now and then, and I swear I've seen something moving around in the garden. You know, the one I'm not allowed to enter?” 

“Ah.” The goddess nodded. “Of course. There is a new servant of the house, one who was chosen to tend to the gardens.”  

“Really.” Zagreus planted his hands on his hips and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, gaze returning to the forbidden area. “Well, that's the first I've heard of it.” 

“He does not linger long; he arrives with the sun, and leaves only when the work is done,” Nyx explained. “He is a diligent helper of the House. Your father is quite pleased, I've noticed.” 

“Well, I've never thought that Father could be pleased in any regards.” Zagreus’ mismatched gaze flickered back to Nyx. “But why now? The garden's never needed a tender before.”

“A flower wilted,” Nyx sighed, looking aside. “And your father has grown concerned.”

“Hah. Concerned for the plants? Good to know he can still give a damn about something,” Zagreus bit, sending a scalding glare to the throne. “Guess that's why he locked it up, kept it from me.”

Night smiled, sympathetic. “You do have a reputation.”

“One that I must uphold,” he agreed, heart light and spirit lifted higher. “Thank you, Nyx. I should get back to ransacking my father's domain.”

Nyx nodded sagely and reached a hand up, fixing the tilt of Zagreus’ burning laurel. “I would hope for nothing less, my child.” 

–

“You play music?” 

Your voice startled Zagreus, sending a Zeus-like jolt through him and holding him in place with a fit of numbing static. Thankfully, however, twas not the true bite of the sky king, and Zagreus had the luxury to back out of his room a few paces. 

“You heard?” He asked, face somehow both paling and burning in tandem.

You, whilst leaning against the iron gate, nodded. “‘N if I did?”

“Oh.” Zagreus rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “That's unfortunate. Sorry for the bother.”

“Don't misunderstand me, god.” Your spectral eyes bore into him with easy confidence. Zagreus quite liked that look. “You played much like a dying pigeon at first, I'll admit, but you've improved.” 

Zagreus laughed and approached you. Your dry informality pricked him with intrigue. “Well, now I know you're lying.”

“Lies are useless for those who need the truth.” Your words came so bold, the prince had no choice but to believe you. “I can hear it. The notes–they come easier to you. Sweeter, even. Like figs ripe on the tree.” 

“Figs?” Zagreus tilted his head much like Cerberus might. “Huh. Can't say I've had one of those.” 

“Really? Well, then I shall see to it that you wonder no longer, god.” You leaned away, nearly out of sight of the iron-barred gateway, and jostled through the leaves of a bush or tree of sorts before the sharp snap of something announced your return. 

You stuck your arm through a gap in the fence, one where your glowing skin was threatened by a cascade of decorative thorns, but you didn't much care. That care, instead, found itself funneled into the deliverance of a ripe fig to the prince of the underworld, it seemed. 

Zagreus stared for a moment. He wasn't used to receiving gifts unless he bestowed one upon another, first. To him, this almost felt like–could it be--

“If you don't take it in the next three seconds, I'm going to eat it myself and not hand you another,” you groused.

“Hah.” He snatched the fruit from your hand. “You wouldn't dare.” 

“I've dared much worse, god, believe me.” You withdrew your hand and drummed your palms against the iron. “Well, enjoy. And be sure to clean your hands before touching that lyre again.” You looked him over, face placid as it'd been for his entire short history knowing you–but your eyes, the strange things, they hinted at hidden curiosities. “I'll be listening.” 

–

“Say, Meg, do you know much about the new House attendant?” Zagreus asked, flourishing his Stygian blade as he walked towards the Fury, prepared to fight after a quick chat.

Megaera's eyes narrowed. “You're talking about the flirt.”

“The flirt?” Zagreus rested his sword down, digging its diamond tip into the cracked ground. “Is that really what he's known for? Flirting? He doesn't seem like the type.”

A heavy sigh left Meg. “Ask Than. He might be more willing to endure your rambling and answer questions. I am not.” 

“You know, I think we really need to work on your patience.” Still, he flicked up his blade of the underworld, and lunged first. 

–

As the Fates would have it, Thanatos was already at the House. Even more fateful, still, was where he stood–not by the river Styx, no, but by the garden’s gate for a change. Death's presence on that side of the house seemed…odd, despite his infrequent visits to the lounge. Never before did he show interest in a coworker, neither, not unless it was his twin who needed some firm and stringent guidance. 

“Admiring the flowers?” Zagreus asked, and Death flinched. 

“No, I–” He sighed, and spared a look over his shoulder. “What do you want, Zagreus?” 

The shorter one shrugged, and stood beside his age-old friend. “Came to find you. Is that so odd?” 

“If you're going to shove more nectar in my hands, then you can forget it.” Thanatos looked away again and scowled beyond iron bars. “You've made your bed.”

Zagreus stifled a sigh, and rubbed the back of his neck. “I–well–in all honesty, I had a question, one that I'd hoped you could answer.”

“Then ask.”

“Right to the point then.” Zagreus cleared his throat and shuffled closer to Death. “Who exactly is the new gardener? Meg said you might know.” 

Thanatos graced him with a wide-eyed stare. “I thought you'd know by now.”

Zagreus shrugged. “I wouldn't be asking if I knew.” 

“He is–” Death paused, his jaw tightening, tendons threatening to snap. “Why do you want to know?”

Zagreus convinced himself not to pry. “We haven't had a new servant of the House in, well, eternities. Father wouldn't allow just anyone in here.” 

“Sure, but don't you think you should ask him yourself?”

“It's hard to catch him. He's quite flighty, as Fate would have it. Must be the wings.” 

“Must be.” Zagreus swore he heard the inkling of a smile on those words. “Well, I don't think it's fair for me to spoil the introduction. But I will say this–he was a servant of the House in life, and now continues on in death.” 

“Really?” Zagreus couldn't quite wrap his head around it. How could someone be devoted to the house before even arriving?

“Yes. He made my job easier, in some regards. Assisted, at the very least,” Death said.

“Huh.” Zagreus crossed his arms and scuffed his sole against time-worn stone. “Guess that explains that. I don't suppose you'd be willing to go into elaborate detail regarding what exactly our avian gardener did in life to earn yours and Father's favour? Or, even just his name?” 

“No.” A luminous wash of turquoise licked off Death's shoulders, his scythe. “Ask him yourself. I've work to do.”

And with the toll of a bell, he was gone. 

–

It took a while to catch you again. Apparently, you kept to a strict, self-imposed schedule that Zagreus couldn't even begin to understand despite its simplicity. Nyx told him you arrived come morning, at the very least. That may have been helpful, if Zagreus could tell the damn time in the underworld. 

So, he resorted to guessing; if he could not find you through the convenience of your daily routine, he'd swing by whenever he died. He was bound to run into you at some point. 

And he did. It was when he wandered to the lounge, eager to deliver a wealth of fish to the head chef, that he caught the ghostly sound of feathers against leaves.

Zagreus backed out of the lounge in time to see your curious glance. A rush pulsed through him–finally, finally, he'd get his chance to interrogate you.

“Hey!” He called. 

“Hey,” You called back. 

“Just--don’t go anywhere. I need to hand over some river denizens and then I need to speak with you,” Zagreus rambled off as quickly as he could. 

Your brows furrowed, but you offered a shallow nod. “I'll wait up.”

With that, Zagreus sped by the gossiping Meg and Dusa and a gaggle of other patrons to all but throw his catch to the head chef. It was a good haul today. Hopefully that meant–ah ha. 

Zagreus rolled the bottle of nectar over in his hands. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he sang, and ran off, tucking the gift away before approaching the iron bars.

You were toiling away, a little farther in the garden than before, but not too far to escape the prince's presence. It gave him a chance to take a good look at you: simple black chiton on a well-muscled frame, wings full of bronze feathers, wild hair tied back into the smallest of ponytails. You looked quite ordinary, save for the wings. 

But your eyes had been strange: they glowed. Not with the morose cold of Ixion, but with the exact opposite. Warm. Bronze. Sunlit, maybe. He'd never known sunlight, but you must have kept a drop of it in your very soul.

“So?” You said as you meandered back to him. You walked with unbothered confidence, much different to Zagreus’ sprightly impatience. “What important matters must we discuss?”

“Your name, first of all,” the prince requested. “I am Zagreus, son of Hades and--"

“Prince of the underworld,” you added. “Well, I figured you were him. Good to have a proper introduction, I suppose.” You took a breath. “As for me, you'll call me (Name).” 

Zagreus repeated the name. It held a fullness in his mouth, something sweet and foreign, too much like the fig you'd offered him not too long ago. Maybe you were the minor god of figs (wouldn't that be something?).

“Pleased to meet you, then. I trust the garden will be well-kept in your capable hands. And wings,” Zag said. “Oh! And, ah, here--a token of thanks for your hard work.”

Your brows raised and Zagreus’ chest filled with hope; for once, your blank mask changed, and you looked less like a gorgon-born statue and more like a human. Somehow, it gave him relief.

But your expression crumpled into furrowed brows and narrowed eyes. “Nectar?” You wondered aloud. 

Zagreus nodded and slipped the bottle best he could through the gap. “Yes, I…I hope you will take it, if it pleases you.”

You examined the bottle as it slipped into your hand and leaned a shoulder up against the gate. “Odd. Why is it in the underworld?”

The tension left Zagreus’ muscles as you accepted the gift. “Not a clue. Maybe Olympus ferries some down here from time to time to try and liven things up.”

“Hah.” The mock laughter almost sounded genuine. “Dionysus would, from what I've heard of him.” You held the bottle up, watching the light reflect shards of gold and ghostly greens. “He's not so bad, that god of wine.” 

“You've met him?” Zagreus wondered.

“No,” you admitted. Your light-filled eyes found him again. “But I've met gods, when I once lived. No man should have to meet them. They bring misfortune, even the supposed good ones.” 

The prince took a sure step forward, and your eyes steeled. “Well, you're right about Dionysus,” he assured instead of scorned. “He's good. I'm sure he's had his moments, still. But I get on with him well.” I'm sure you would, too, he decided against saying; the more he took in your features, the more he realized the god's work carved into you, painting you unnatural colours and robbing you of something only humans could have. He didn't think you'd much enjoy being forced into a hypothetical with them. 

“Then I shall take your word for it,” you said. “And I will pretend this bottle comes from Dionysus, to make it more palatable.”

“Well, whatever pleases you.” Zagreus smiled and leaned against the wall by the gate. “But, if I may ask, which gods have you–”

“Boy,” Hades’ voice thundered, echoing down the hall. “Do not disturb the rest of the House and distract them from their duties. Unlike you, they do not wish to disappoint.” 

Zagreus clicked his tongue and looked over his shoulder. “Yes, of course, Father. I'll get right to ignoring every blasted person in this damn House. Perhaps I'll consider a life of solitude while I'm at it!” 

“Do not test me further, boy.”

Zagreus rolled his eyes, but gave in, finding your (gentler?) eyes once again. “Well. I'd more than happily argue with my father all day–or night–about this, but I wouldn't want you to bear the punishment.” 

You nodded a little and glanced from the prince back down to the bottle. “I appreciate this, princeling.”

“It's nothing, really.” Though Zagreus did indeed beam with delight. “Well, then I'll leave you to your work.”

“Be sure to come back. I need to return the favour,” you said as you turned. “Until then, princeling.”

[thatsmzbitchtoyou]

Moody Bucky -Oneshot

@imagine-all-the-fandoms informed me that I missed posting this one! I'm so sorry to those of you who were excited to read it, I got bogged down with requests and it got lost in the shuffle. Here you go!

Word count: 2684

“Yeah, yeah sounds good.  See you Saturday,” Y/N replied before hanging up the phone.  

“What’s that smile for?” Natasha asked, walking into Y/N’s room.

“Jesus!  Nat, quit being a spy for one day, please?” Y/N gasped, her hand resting over her rapidly beating heart.  “My heart can’t handle it.”

Natasha rolled her eyes.  “Who was that?”

“His name is Lars,” Y/N smiled.  “He’s one of the Asgardian recruits that Thor brought in from New Asgard.  We kinda ran into each other a week ago after training.”

“Lars,” Natasha cocked an eyebrow at her.  “He’s cute.  But then again, all Asgardians are beautiful.”

“True,” Y/N laughed.  

“What about Bucky?” Natasha asked with narrowed eyes.

Y/N sighed at that.  She had had a major crush on Bucky for a while now.  He was the one she really wanted, but after a year and a half of unrequited feelings she was tired.  She felt like she had dropped some flirtatious hints to him while they worked together, and at times he would pick up the crumb and flirt back, while other times he was a perfectly polite gentleman.  He never pushed for anything more than friendship, and she didn’t want to ruin that friendship and work camaraderie with her silly little crush, so she didn’t push either.  “I’ve got to get over that, Nat,” Y/N said quietly, looking down at her phone in her hands.  

Nat sighed as well, moving to sit next to her.  “He likes you, too, you know.  He just doesn’t know how to go about it.”

“You keep saying that, but nothing has changed,” Y/N said, giving her an unimpressed look.  “If he really likes me and wants me, then he would have done something about it by now.  I’m not going to wait around forever.  I deserve more, don’t I?”

“You do,” Natasha nodded.  “If you like this Lars guy, then go for it.  Even if it doesn’t work out, it’ll be a nice distraction.”

Y/N huffed a laugh.  

***

“She’s got a date,” Natasha said flippantly as she passed by Bucky in the hallway.

“What?” Bucky asked, looking at her confusedly.

“Y/N has a date, this Saturday,” Natasha said, looking back at him.  “With an Asgardian.”  Bucky’s eyes widened at her.  “You waited too long,” Natasha shrugged.  “She deserves to be loved, Barnes.  If you won’t give her that, she’ll find it elsewhere.”  She gave him a tight smile then turned and walked away.

Bucky exhaled sharply.  You waited too long.  The words rattled around in his brain.  Had he really waited too long?  He had a sneaking suspicion that maybe Y/N reciprocated his feelings, but he was too afraid to do anything about it.  Potential rejection and ruining a good friendship held him back, but now…was he actually losing her?

***

Y/N adjusted her dress for the millionth time that night.  It fit her well, accentuating all the right places, the color complimenting her skin tone beautifully.  She was wearing much more makeup and had her hair done up more than she ever normally would.  She looked herself over in the mirror again, then sighed and grabbed her small purse.  “Chill out,” she whispered to herself.  Y/N walked out of her room, her heels clicking against the floor as she headed towards the living room she had to pass through to get to the elevator.  When she entered everyone’s eyes were on her.

Sam let out a wolf whistle.  “Goddamn, Y/L/N, you’re looking good,” he said in a suggestive tone.  “You clean up nicely.”

Y/N blushed and Steve stood up from his spot on the couch next to Sam and approached her.  “You look beautiful,” he complimented her, giving her a side hug.  

Natasha joined him and took her hand.  “Give us a twirl,” she teased, raising their conjoined hands and turning her.  Y/N giggled as she circled herself around, posing with her foot popped up behind her when she was done. 

“Get you some Asgardian ass!” Peter piped up from the corner of the room.  “Show him what we Midgardians can do!”

Y/N blushed and covered her face with her hand as everyone laughed.  “Stop it, you guys,” she murmured.  “Thank you.”

“Doesn’t she look great, Buck?” Natasha asked with a teasing tone, arching her eyebrow as she looked behind Y/N into the kitchen off to the side of the living room.

Y/N turned to look at Bucky.  His eyes were wide as he looked at her from head to toe, pausing particularly along her curves.  He swallowed harshly and blinked, a slight frown marring his face.  “Yeah,” he agreed, shooting a dagger-filled look at Natasha.  He softened as he looked back at Y/N.  “You look amazing, doll,” he complimented her.  He gave her a tight smile, then hung his head and quickly left the kitchen, marching down the hallway to his bedroom where he closed the door soundly.  Everyone watched him leave with a frown.

Y/N sighed quietly.  “I um…I think I forgot something.  Thanks everybody,” she said, quickly walking back down the hallway.  They all said farewell to her as she made her way toward her room, but then looked back to make sure no one was watching her as she veered to Bucky’s door.  She stared at his door for a minute, trying to get the courage to knock.  She pulled out her phone and texted Lars before putting it on silent and pocketing it, then knocking on Bucky’s door.

She heard shuffling and then Bucky opened the door.  He looked dejected until he saw it was her, then his face quickly changed into a pleasant smile.  “Oh, hey doll,” he said quickly.  “I thought you were leaving?”

“Can I come in?” Y/N asked.

“Uh, sure,” Bucky said with a slight frown.  He opened the door wider and stepped back, and she walked inside.  As he closed the door behind her she stood awkwardly near the edge of his bed.  She had been in his room multiple times, whether for a movie night, random hang outs or helping him through another nightmare.  Now it seemed formidable as she steeled herself for his response.  “What’s up?” he asked, looking almost anywhere but at her.

Y/N inhaled deeply.  “Can you be honest with me?” she asked.  Bucky’s gaze snapped to her, his frown deepening.  “Tell me right now why you don’t want me to go on this date, and I won’t go,” she said, gulping at the tremble in her voice.  

Bucky shook his head.  “I…I don’t…I didn’t say that–”

“You didn’t have to,” Y/N breathed.  She walked closer to him until she was almost toe-to-toe with him, looking up at him with longing and hope.  “Tell me you don’t want me to go.”

His mouth slightly dropped, his gaze flickering around her face.  “I…I don’t want you to go on the date,” he rushed out.

“Why?” Y/N pressed him.

Bucky blinked rapidly.  “Because you…you’re…” he sighed and closed his eyes.  “Because I want you to be mine.”

“Look at me,” Y/N whispered.  He slowly opened his eyes.  “Say it again.”

Bucky bit his lip then inhaled deeply.  He slowly leaned his head down until his forehead rested against her forehead.  “I want you to be mine,” he whispered.

“Then ask me,” Y/N whispered back with a small smirk on her face.

Bucky huffed a laugh, his hands grabbing her hands and holding her fingers loosely.  “Will you be mine, Y/N?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” she replied, her smile widening.  

Bucky smiled back.  “I’m sorry it took me so long to say it,” he said.

“I’m sorry it took me so long, too,” Y/N said.  

He nuzzled her nose.  “You do look amazing, by the way,” he said, his gaze slipping down her body appreciatively.  “Too bad it wasn’t for me.”

“Oh please,” Y/N rolled her eyes at his moody cheekiness.  “Whose fault is that?”

“Mine,” Bucky chuckled.  His fingers moved up her arms, until he reached the dress straps on her shoulders.  He slowly pushed one down so it hung loosely on her arm, then leaned forward and kissed her naked shoulder.  “I’m pretty sure you were thinking of me, though.”

“So what if I was?” Y/N teased.

Bucky pouted against her skin.  “You like torturing me, don’t you doll?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Y/N said.  “I mean, I could text him, send him a picture of my dress–”

Bucky nipped at her skin and growled.  His metal hand wrapped around the back of her neck and pulled her against him, his flesh hand gripping her hip.  “You wouldn’t dare,” he hissed, his flesh hand traveling down to her ass and giving it a quick slap that had her gasping.  “I don’t share.”

“Neither do I,” Y/N huffed, her hands gripping his shirt tightly.  

“You better call and cancel with him,” Bucky snarled in her ear.  “‘Cause I’m not letting you leave my room for the next few days…if ever.”

“Already did,” Y/N smirked.  

He laughed against her neck before pulling back and looking at her.  “Careful, doll, or you’re gonna make me fall in love even deeper than I already am.”

Y/N’s eyes widened at that piece of information.  “I love you, too, Buck,” she said sincerely.

Bucky’s eyes softened and he smiled before finally kissing her gently.  She kissed him back fervently, angling her head to deepen the kiss as her arms wrapped around his neck, keeping his face pulled down to hers.  It quickly became passionate, Bucky’s hands kneading her ass then leaning down to pull and pick her up by her thighs.  Y/N yelped against his mouth as he started lifting her dress with one hand while the other kept her positioned around his waist, her legs crossed tight behind him.  He got the dress off before laying her down on the bed, his lips barely leaving her skin.

When he pulled back he looked down to find her bare breasts, a thin thong barely covering her pussy.  “Fucking hell, doll,” he murmured.  “What were you hoping for tonight, huh?”  His possessiveness returned, making his eyes darken again.  “Was this for him?”

“Who?” Y/N asked, biting back a smile.

A low rumble came from Bucky’s chest.  “You’re just a little tease, aren’t you?” he asked, his flesh hand slapping at the side of her ass.  

“Sometimes,” Y/N shrugged.

Bucky’s finger dipped below the string of her thong on her hip and started pulling it off.  He threw it off to the side and dipped that same finger in between her legs, feeling how wet she was already.  “You’re soaking, doll,” he cooed at her.  “Who made you this wet?”  Before she could answer, his hand slapped her pussy lightly, making her gasp in surprise, looking at him incredulously.  “Was it him?” he arched an eyebrow at her.

“No,” Y/N whispered.  “It was you.”

He slapped her pussy again, tearing a cry from her lips.  “Who was that?  I didn’t hear you,” he said with a playful grin.

“You!”  Y/N yelped.  “Only you!”

“That’s fucking right,” Bucky grunted, then rubbed at her clit in fast circles with his middle and pointer finger.  Y/N tensed at the pleasure that zinged through her pelvis from his actions, her eyes screwed shut as she let out a shuddering breath.  He leaned over her again, kissing up from her breasts to her neck where he sucked at her skin, leaving bruises blooming in his wake.  “Nobody else can make you feel like this, can they?” he asked, his teeth scraping against the column of her throat.

“Nobody,” Y/N moaned as his fingers started flicking her clit instead of rubbing.  “Shit!  Just like that!  Bucky…baby…”

“Oooh I like baby,” he chuckled against her skin, licking up her jaw.   “What else do you wanna call me?”

“Anything,” Y/N hiccuped, her hips gyrating against his hand.  “I’ll call you anything you want, just please let me cum!”

He slapped her pussy again, making her squeal.  “I asked you a question,” he said.

“Bucky…baby…handsome…fuck, honey, love, daddy!” she yelled.

Bucky chuckled again.  “Wow, never been called ‘daddy’ before,” he smirked down at her.  “Say it again.”

Y/N’s eyes pleaded with him.  “D-daddy…please…”

Bucky eyelids fluttered at the pet name.  “Yes, babydoll?”

Y/N squirmed at the new version of ‘doll,’ loving how he was playing into the pet names.  “Please!  Daddy please, make me cum!” she begged.

“I’ve got you, babydoll,” he groaned, then his fingers pinched her clit.  

Y/N gasped and whimpered until after a few precise flicks she finally came with a loud moan.  Her legs were shaking as she panted and eventually came down from the high of her orgasm.  “Fuck…” she sighed.

“Good girl, Y/N,” Bucky praised her, kissing her cheek sweetly.  “Do we need a condom?”  She shook her head, unable to fully form words.  “Thank god,” he said, then suddenly sat up straight and manhandled her until she was laying on her stomach.  He spread her legs and lifted her hips so she was up on her knees, her face down in the blanket.  He slapped her ass multiple times, massaging the sting, before she felt the tip of his cock slip through her lower lips.  She hadn’t even heard him taking his clothes off, and she gripped the pillows by her head as she prepared for his cock.  “Ready doll?” he asked.

“Yes Daddy,” Y/N mumbled.  Her hips slightly jiggled and moved back towards him, making the tip of his cock push into her.

“Fuck yeah, you want my cock, babydoll?” he groaned, gripping her hips.  “Say it.”

“I want your cock,” Y/N breathed.  She was still so turned on and lightheaded from her first orgasm and his possessive, rougher treatment that she didn’t even know she liked until now.  “Please give me your cock, Daddy.”

Bucky moaned and finally started pushing into her.  They both gasped at the feeling, Y/N whimpering as he continued to push in, large and overwhelming her tight pussy.  “Holy fuck, so tight,” Bucky huffed.  “I’m not gonna be able to stop, Y/N.”

“I don’t want you to,” Y/N said, trying to look back at him.  “Fuck me, Daddy.”

“Jesus Christ!” Bucky whimpered, then slammed his hips into her, making her scream.  He set a punishing pace, the skin slapping against skin echoing in his room between his grunts and her whimpers.  Within just a few minutes his grip became bruising as he chased his release.  “I’m gonna cum, babydoll.”

“Please…”

“Gonna fill you up…”

“Fuck yes.”

“Then I’ll fuck you again.  And again.  Mark you from the inside out, so he knows you’re mine.”

“Yes Daddy!”

“That’s right, scream my name.  Make everybody know you’re mine!  Let them know who’s fucking you this good!”

Y/N came again at his command, screaming his name as her pussy clamped down around him, her entire body shaking.  Bucky was right behind her, her pussy milking him of everything he had, cumming with a shout and falling on top of her.  They shivered against each other, his panted breaths fanning her neck and his hair tickling her ear as she twitched from the aftershocks.  

“Damn, babydoll,” Bucky breathed after a few minutes.  He lifted himself and slowly pulled out of her.  Y/N groaned at the loss of his fullness.  Bucky lay next to her and pulled her in to snuggle against his side.  He brushed her hair from her face with his fingers and stared at her adoringly.  “Hey,” he said quietly.

“Hey,” she whispered, smiling at him.

“Are you okay?” he asked, concern flashing in his eyes.  “I’m sorry, I got carried away–”

“I’m fine, Buck,” Y/N giggled.  “Great, actually…Daddy.”

“Don’t start yet,” Bucky narrowed his eyes at her.  “Let me recover first.”

She giggled again.  “So jealous and moody,” she teased.

Bucky grinned proudly.  “Only for you, doll.”

[lucasandlily]

Rui x Reader who is really affectionate, but can't touch him because of The Curse.

A/N: I'm alive!! Rui my beautiful beautiful tragic boy. I've actually been having a lot of brainrot for this game, particularly an isekai AU that made me contemplate making RP blog (I love you guys btw. This is probably my first fandom where they're so active, I've been really well connected with this fandom somehow and it's so fun!!), so I figured I might as well be writing it down now. This is an idea I've had spinning in my head for a while, so it's VERY self-indulgent/insert, but enjoy!! AO3 link here

Rui's POV. Second-person pronoun "You" is used. Angst! But also fluff!! (825 words)

You’ve always been an affectionate little thing. It’s something Rui finds adorable about you, staying optimistic despite all that looms over you, not letting any of the ghouls he KNOWS can be more than a little much sometimes destroy your positive attitude. It’s as if you decided to be the light in a place that literally has dark in its name, and he lov admires you for that.

He can’t help but feel the bitter green of envy though, when he watches you ruffle Lyca’s hair after he whines at you for treating him like a dog. 

He pointedly turns away from the look Ed gives him over your head when you relax into his chest after he leans over your shoulder.  

He just laughs along at your drunken antics when you nuzzle into Haru’s hand, somehow even more touchy when your cheeks are flushed with alcohol. 

He tries not to remember the flash of hurt, confusion, the first time he’d backed away from your hand when all you wanted to do was give him a pat for a job well done. He doesn’t know if it hurt more when your face morphed into regretful understanding, or when you apologised and told him you’d try not to do it again. 

Rui tells himself it’s for the better when he notices you’ve been avoiding him for the past week. He’d have done the same to you anyway, if he realised his feelings were starting to fester. He tries to not let it get to him when he hears you enter the Obscuary mansion, only to quickly patter up the stairs without stopping by the bar first, as you would have done previously. 

Maybe before, he would have made it a little competition to see who could mess up the other’s hair more. He’d watched you run your fingers through Lyca’s after you’d tousled it out of place, anyway. Maybe in another life, you’d gently hold his face as you showered him with kisses. He’d do the same to you anyway, if he wasn’t forced to keep his hands to himself. 

If he didn’t notice you hold your hand back every time you saw his mask slip. If he didn’t see your hand stop short before pulling it back to tell him he had a bit of hair out of place. 

It’s all just part of the cursed life, he tells himself. He should be getting used to it by now, he sighs as he walks down the hall over to his room. 

Behind him, he hears the jingle of the bell you like to wear on your keychain. He turns at the sound of your quick steps approaching. 

“Rui! Ruiruiruiii!!” You call.

“Ah, there you are! Haha, I’m not going anywhere you know~ though I guess I don’t mind being chased?” He teases as you approach. 

You smile up at him brightly, “I have something to show you!” You tell him, he notices now that you have a hand behind your back. 

“Hm? Aw, did you get me a gift? And here I was thinking you were hiding from me!” He regrets the words the moment they leave his mouth. Your smile falters a bit as you blink at his confession. 

But before he can backtrack with a “Just kidding!” your smile lightens again, eyes filling with some sort of resolve as you pull out… a glove on a stick? in your other hand.

He doesn’t pull away when he feels the simulation of a hand on his head. He can’t, when you look into his eyes with such unmistakable fondness. The awkward, stilted movements as you try to run the imitation hand through his hair communicates how long you’ve wanted to do this, and the tears that well up in his eyes betray how much he’s needed it. 

He feels the cloth soak up the tears when you move the glove down to hold his face. It feels soft under his skin, and he can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

“How long did it take you to make this?” He asks as you let him lace his fingers with your hand extension. He squeezes the plush hand, feeling the soft give before it reaches the stick inside, inspecting where the glove and stick are attached. 

“Um! A week? It took a bit of experimenting to get it to stay on… And they don’t really sell gloves on campus either.” 

Your eyes crinkle when you look at him, the corners of your lips pull up triumphantly when he lets go of the hand to let you pat his head again. 

“You deserve at least this much,” you tell him. “I know it’s not really the same or anything, but I don’t wanna leave you out, y’know?” 

“It was worth it though, if it made you happy.” You look into his eyes as you say this, and he can’t help but believe you.

Reblogs and Comments are appreciated! I love you (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠✧⁠*⁠。

[anonymouslosersworld]

♡ Succubus♡ 

Prompt; Mc/reader armed with the teaching Solomon decided to mess around with magical creations and like Icarus flew too close to the sun before falling... in their case fell victim to horniness.

Fandom: Obey me shall me date

Characters: Lucifer, Diavolo, and Satan

Genre: Smut (M)

Contains: protected sex, unprotected sex, dom reader, sex toys, pegging, and maybe voyeurism??

Contains: dubcon, unprotected sex, dom reader, sex toys, voyeurism??, and corruption kink.

Credit goes to @asmology. They have wonderful blog and written pieces. I was so in love with their charmed series and just wanted to try my hand at writing it myself. Please don't hesitate and check out their blogs.

[Obey me masterlist]

Prologue; After you had successfully enrolled in the sorcerers' academy and become Solomon's one and only apprentice after a couple of months. He had encouraged you to explore magical items and such. Due to many lonely and hot nights, you settled on magical items. Using your knowledge you created a life-like magical dildo/vibrator/ pocket pussy of your love interest. Unknowingly to you {or maybe knowingly you did but wouldn't admit it}it was also charmed with your love interest feeling whatever you did to it. lucifers is a little different from the rest.

Lucifer

"hmm!" lucifer moaned into the kiss. He hadn't expected you to join him in his shower. Your hand swiftly went cradle his head as you deepened the kiss. Your tongue quickly enters his mouth, as your body molds into his.

The mirrors were heavily foggy and the steam from the scorching shower could have burnt you, but you persisted in kissing his neck after bruising his lips.

"aren't you eager today?" he questions while you smooch his Adam's apple. Your mouth worked overtime over his body and your hands groped whatever was within reach.

Lucifer could feel his face go hot as you completely ignore him in favor of more time with his body.

"sadly I don't have enough time today, darlin-" he gasped as you bit into him, breaking his skin. You had mangled to trap him onto the shower wall, with your body between his legs. His cock was already awake with all the fondling you had done previously.

" I'll be quick."

" What you can't handle a human's touch?"

Lucifer's face looked at you indignantly, offended by the mere mention of your words. Oh no, you will not be injuring his pride so easily.

"nngh!"

The skin-slapping covered Lucifer's pants and moans. His fingers have long since pruned from the water. You were on top of him riding him. Your hand gripping his neck prevents him from completely breathing. Your wet hair had been pushed back from your face as you wanted to see a completely devastated Lucifer, tired and spent and most importantly fucked out. He looked like you had fucked over and out. His eyes glazed over but his eyebrows borrowed trying to concentrate on his oncoming orgasm

"I thought you didn't have time today?" You mocked him, out of breath but with a smirk. Clearly proud of yourself.

" i-I have a few minutes!"

" You said that like an hour ago? Should I stop, you might be late? Think you can handle not cumming Luci?"

"f-fuck." He was so close!!

Lucifer looked at you desperately

Could he handle it?

"i-i can't!!"

Lucifer gasps awake, completely disheveled. His hair sticking to his head. He feels his legs weak and his cock completely spent. He feels his clothing on himself and he looks around his surroundings. His pajamas felt wet and obviously, he had cummed in his sleep.

He's in his room, he must have dreamt about it.

That's what he thought until he saw you climbing onto his lap in nothing but your underwear and loose shirt.

"good morning Luci ~ How about we clear your schedule today?" You say after tearing a condom wrapper with your teeth. " I need more than a few minutes."

Satan

"ooh~" he moaned quietly into his pillow. He had locked himself in his room as soon as he felt the fingers touch him.

His bare ass was up in the air as he felt fingers shove back into his hole. It was overwhelming the pressure entering him and exiting. The feeling of his cock wrapped up snuggly in whatever you had made.

whatever this was strong magic strong enough to completely overwhelm his senses. His kitty headband pushed his hair back

" m-mc!" he whines out into the open "To- too much~"

Your fingers had been replaced by a smooth object, cold to the touch but could reach the deepest part of him easily.

His fingers gripped his sheets as you kept hammering away into his hole. His sheets had seen better days. he had soiled them with his cum and tore them up with his bare hands when the pleasure got to be too much.

"a~aah!"

"keep going baby, I know you can do it."

" i-its hard~!"

'he-he of course it is, but soon its going to all spill out, "

" f- yess~!'' He panted, he was extremely relieved that his brothers were gone. The pleasure was blinding him and he could no longer keep quiet. His room can only muffle so much.

"f-fuck~!"

Dia

His body was hot, the sheet covers were just barely covering him. The squelching sound filled the room as Dia struggled to keep control of his legs.

why was he so sensitive today?

He made a great decision sleeping naked today, he had hoped you would be sleeping with him but you had student council work that kept him from you but you promised that "it would feel like I'm right there."

his confined cock felt the walls spasm against his size. Clearly struggling to keep him all the way in. The swell of his cock kept being squeezed and could feel your spasming walls. Dia furrowed his eyebrows and panted. It was so like you to torture him so after spending half a day trying to catch up with your sex lives with both your sex lives.

The pace was enjoyable but every so often you would stop just when he was supposed to cum and just squeeze him, not letting him cum. He supposed this was his punishment for accidentally denying both of your orgasms when you were getting hot and heavy in his office at RAD because some random demon had a meeting with him. So you took it upon yourself to edge him. He can't do anything with blue balls, can he?

"nngh!"

He panted, his chest heaving heavily.

"p-please, I'm sorry. i- I can't think straight anymore! forgive me" Dia begged and begged. " I promise!"

His cock weeping for mercy, mercy you decided to mindfully give him since he begs so cutely.

"fuck yes! Than-thank you!!"

Requests are open! Feel free to request!

My works are only posted here! If you see any of my work anywhere else please report it.

Do not edit, translate, or repost my work without my consent.

[catbread0]

Hiya, may I request a Sebastian Solace x (GN/fem)reader, where the reader had also went through urbanshade’s experiments to enhance mobility in the water or abnormal strength. Maybe it could take place a day or two before the whole lockdown where the reader is put in with Sebastian in hopes for trying to tame Sebastian’s bumbling rage and a companion (aka, another sentient being) in hope of keeping him under control.

Mayhaps as well when the whole lockdown does happen Sebastian goes to find the reader since they might have also been getting transported and they had more of a larger dose of the tranq (since Ik Sebastian faked being knocked out and someone had to smart enough to hear the gaur panic about it and gave reader and extra dose.). Just a smidge of angst.

Sorry if this doesn’t make complete sense, I tend to do that when I’m excited about something rush to put all my thoughts and ideas down 😭

-🌽 anon

Sebastian Solace x Fem! Experimented! Reader 

I loved doing this. Sorry for the late response. There have been so many requests since the last time I saw. Hopefully, you enjoy reading this.

(*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ*.ﾟ

Words: 3,148

Very OOC, mention of killing/death and drugs (anesthesia), a bit of angst, happy ending, a bit of comfort

All the information I found is from the official Pressure wiki, urbanshade.org!! NOT FANDOM WIKI (MOST STUFF ON THEIR IS NOT CORRECT, PLEASE CHECK THE OFFICIAL WIKI!!)(Note: I made this before the friendly fire update came out)

Sebastian Solace Masterlist

Beloved Companion

Document:

Z-##, codename: _________, real name “(Y/n)(L/n)”. Z-## has undergone experiments to enhance the ability to breathe underwater and strengthen humans. Z-## has successfully gained the ability to breathe underwater. However, their strength has also increased but only to a certain point that could break in half the body of a human. When added more DNA of stronger sea creatures, it seemed to stay the same no matter the animal. After that experiment was done, Z-## underwent another experiment that had DNA strands of sea creatures that are known to be calm and friendly towards sea creatures. However, due to most of the fish being small, it had a drawback, it decreased her height to 8 '2", she was originally 10' 1".

After the calm sea creature experiment, Z-## was put in containment cells for other experiments in Hadal Blacksite for a few days. Some include Z-317 (Eyefestation), Z-367 (Pandemonium), Z-283 (The Angler), and S-Q (Squiddles). All of the interactions with Z-## have been a positive outcome. The specimens have been calmed down and/or have been less hostile for a few days until Z-## is put back with them. 

Because of the variants of success with Z-##, her rank has been moved up to MR-P, and she was given more benefits with her rank being moved up. These benefits included: better living conditions, being allowed to roam the facility freely, and being involved in non-deadly testing. 

Recently, Z-13 (Handy Man) has been getting harder to control due to his anger and rage whenever he sees one of the scientists. We have debated if Z-## should enter Z-13’s containment cell. While Z-13 is also an MR-P, it is unpredictable if he would harm and/or kill Z-## due to the burst of outrage he has been having for the past week or so. In the end, it has been decided that Z-## will go into Z-13’s containment cell. If Z-## gets harmed, then Z-13 would be neutralized by any means necessary but not to the point of killing him. Then, Z-## would be taken out immediately and rushed to be checked up on.

The goal is that Z-## will hopefully calm down Z-13’s rage, just like the other specimens that have encountered her. This will also be a test to see if there could be a potential chance of them being partners to see how their human DNA mixed with the DNA of sea creatures in both of them, could affect genetics when it comes to their offspring.

End of Z-##’s current document.

You were roaming your spacious water enclosure when you heard your ‘name’ be called on the speaker in your enclosure.

“Z-##, please come outside your enclosure. You will be entering another specimen’s enclosure today. They are an MR-P just like you.”

You swam to the door that will get you out of your enclosure. You stood in the middle of two doors, the door behind you closed shut, and the water started to drain from where you were in between the doors. Once the water was fully drained, the door in front of you opened, and you entered the room.

 You followed the small scientist to where these new people you would be meeting today. You would wave to some of the scientists. It was a habit since you would always wave at the other sea people each time you met them in their enclosure. 

You soon arrived and stood in front of the glass window to the water enclosure. 

“Today you will be meeting Z-13. He recently has been having outbursts every time a scientist walks by or when they try to communicate with him through the intercom. You will be with him for 5 days and 5 nights, in the morning you will return to your enclosure. Then, later in the day, you are scheduled to have another experiment. If anything were to happen to you in Z-13’s enclosure, yell, and you would be taken out immediately. Understood?”

You nodded at the small scientist. You looked back through the glass window to try and find ‘Z-13’. To no luck, it looked empty in the water enclosure.

“I should warn you that he is bigger than most specimens you have encountered before. Z-13 is 10 '6".”

The small scientist stated that as you entered the door. At least they gave you a warning.

The door behind you was shut, and you were again in between two doors. The water slowly rose and filled the small room you were in to enter the water enclosure. The door in front of you opened once it was filled with water, and you swam into the enclosure.

The small scientist pressed a button that made the glass window no longer able to see through both ways. It was for Z-13 not to be outraged if a scientist were to accidentally walk by.

You swam around but still couldn't find Z-13. 

That was until you spotted what looked like a cave on the side of the wall near the floor, its entry was covered up in large seaweeds, making it almost hard to see it in the first place.

You swam into the cave, “Hello? Are you here?”

You soon see 3 blue eyes in the corner of the cave, and you jump a bit, not expecting that. You swam closer but stayed a few distance away.

“Hello, I'm Z-##, but my real name is (Y/n)(L/n). What is your name, Z-13? It would be nice to put a name to a face.”

Sebastian didn't answer. He thought you were just doing this because of the scientists forcing you.

When you realized he wasn't going to answer you, you waited on the opposite side of the cave and made yourself comfortable.

You kept talking about small things, like what you did before you were jailed, why you were put in jail, how nice the other sea people were to you, etc. Whenever you talked, you seemed genuinely happy every single time.

After talking, you started to think that maybe he thought you were annoying. 

“I'm sorry, I will leave if you are uncomfortable.”

You got up and started swimming the same way you entered since there was only one way to exit and enter the cave. 

“Sebastian, Sebastian Solace is my name”

You immediately paused, not expecting him to answer or talk to you at all. You immediately swam right towards him.

“That's a nice name. Can I see what you look like? If that's fine with you, of course.”

He was silent for a bit before pulling on his anglerfish lure.

Goodness, when you saw him, you felt something inside you, as if your heart skipped a beat.

He was quite handsome, at least in your eyes. But you shook that thought out of your head.

You both started small talks, but they would give brief replies.

Soon, the day would end. You slept on the opposite side of the cave, not wanting to invade his space.

Meanwhile, Sebastian would stare at you for a few minutes.

‘She'll probably ask the stupid scientists to take her away tomorrow’ he thought before turning off his lure and going to sleep.

The next day, he woke up to you gone, ‘I was right. It was stupid to think she would sta-’

“Oh, you're awake? I got your bucket of fish that the scientists brought. Here.” You said as you entered the cave and handed him the bucket full of fish.

Sebastian took the bucket but looked at it before eating it. He thought you put something in it before realizing you didn't. 

You talked, and he ended up opening up to you a bit more this time.

As some hours passed, you both were out of the cave and swimming around Sebastian's enclosure.

At some point, Sebastian was teaching you Spanish, or at least how he speaks Spanish since he's Chilean-American. Different countries speak the same language but say it differently.

You both ended up spending almost the whole day outside of the cave and returned to sleep.

On the 3rd day, he woke up and saw you sleeping. He went outside the cave and picked up both of your buckets of fish, and brought them back to the cave.

The whole day, you two spent knowing more about each other's life, your family, colleges you both went to, what classes you both majored in, and some of your talents. Sebastian even used some of the plants, rocks, and garbage he had lying around to make a prop that looked like an electric guitar and tried to teach you. 

You both laughed and smiled with each other almost the entire day.

Night came back more quickly than you both thought. You and Sebastian returned to the cave.

As you were getting comfortable to sleep in your corner, you felt a soft material cover your upper body.

“I snatched this when the scientists weren't looking while I was doing some janitor duties. Perks of being an MR-P.”

You gave Sebastian a warm smile and thanked him before falling asleep.

Sebastian didn’t want to admit it, but he felt happy when he was with you. You would listen to him, and it didn't feel like he was talking to the wall. Unlike those scientists, they only asked questions about his mutation and waited for a response from him to record it. 

Only caring about the progress.

On the 4th day, Sebastian woke up early and decided to pour some of his fish from his bucket into yours.

The scientists had seen this through the glass, during the night they decided to make the glass be 1-sided, they could see you but you couldn't see if they were there.

They saw this as a sign of success but also that maybe he was trying to court you. This made them think that there could be a possibility that you two could have offspring and they could continue their testing.

Later in the day you and Sebastian were messing around, he was trying to teach you how to ‘dance’. The dances were ones that he saw people dancing to at Chilean/Hispanic parties that he went to. It was a mess since you both didn't have legs to step on, but you both enjoyed each other’s attempts.

On the 4th night, you both moved closer to each other and slept peacefully. But both of you had your back to each other.

It was the 5th day, and you and Sebastian were getting closer to the end of your visit.

“Sebastian, I have to leave tomorrow morning, and after that, I'm scheduled to be experimented on. I'll make sure to see you after it's done”

After telling him you could tell he didn't look pleased, his ears and tail twitched.

“I am also scheduled to have an experiment done on me tomorrow. Maybe we will be able to see each other again right before it happens.”

You smiled when you heard that, “I hope we can.”

Soon, it was the next morning, and it was time for you to leave. You said bye to Sebastian and gave him a warm smile before you left. 

After a few hours, he was called out for his scheduled experiment. 

He was left in the surgery room and was given anesthesia. He pretended the effects had worked on him, but he was fully awake.

He heard the door open and close to his room, footsteps walking around the room, and heard the scientists speaking.

“After we are done with Z-13 we have to perform on Z-##, even if the chances of her dying is 75%, there is still a slim chance of her surviving and for it to be a success. It would be a great benefit for Hadal Blacksite.” One of the scientists said

“But she’s an MR-P. They are only allowed to be experimented on if it's non-deadly.” the second scientist asked.

The first scientist answered, “Well no surgery or experimentation is 100% safe. If she perishes, then we will start back on square 1 on another inmate.”

Sebastian felt his body fill with rage once again. Once the 2 scientists were close enough, Sebastian immediately killed them by slashing them with his claws. 

Sebastian immediately slithered out of his surgery room, and an Elite Guardsman was standing right outside. Just as the Elite Guardsman was about to shoot at Sebastian, Sebastian killed him and stole his keycard.

There were other scientists and guardsmen around as this happened. 

Everything went into chaos. 

People ran to escape, and guardsmen shot at Sebastian, but the bullets did not affect him, making some of them run away with the others. Desk’s, doors, tables, chairs, and the lights were either destroyed or thrown around.

Sebastian killed the Guardsmen who were shooting at him or trying to stop him. As he was doing this, he was trying to find your room to take you away before they could kill you.

Meanwhile, you were lying on the surgery table. You trusted the scientist who would perform on you since you are an MR-P. But also because you were always nice to them, helping them calm other sea people around the lab, always following orders, etc. 

How naive you were, or was it because of the fish's DNA that mixed with yours? It didn’t matter to them. To most of them, you were just a lab rat who benefited them.

As the scientist in your room gave a syringe of anesthesia, you both heard the sound of people screaming and things being trashed. That's when the scientist's handheld radio (or walkie-talkie) started making noise from the other end.

Blood-curdling screams could be heard loudly, “Z-13 HAS FEIGNED HIS EFFECTS OF ANESTHESIA AND IS ON A LOOSE KILLING SPREE. I REPEAT Z-13 HAS FEIGNED-” 

That’s all that was heard until the other end was abruptly cut off.

You sat up immediately, “Sebastian is wh-”

That's when the scientist gave you 3 more syringes of anesthesia quickly. They knew if Z-13 wasn't affected, then you mostly weren’t with just one. They were frightened with the idea that you would do the same. Your strengthened ability could break a human's body easily in half. They thought you would follow Z-13 and try to kill them.

You immediately fell off the table, from the sudden effects making you pass out. 

The scientist was about to give you another syringe again with anesthesia until Sebastian barged into the room. He finally found you but saw you on the floor unconscious. He saw the scientist who did this with the syringe in their hand. He immediately killed them, tore them up, and they were almost unrecognizable afterward.

Soon, the commotion died down and came to an end. It was only the two of you currently. Everyone who survived escaped or maybe died while running away.

Sebastian carried you in bridal style with his 2 arms and used the 3rd one to try and feel your pulse. 

He felt that your pulse was dangerously low.

He carried you out of the surgery room and went looking for other rooms. He soon found a vent that led to another small room. He laid you down carefully on the floor. 

He knew he couldn’t do much. It was just a matter of luck and time to see if you would wake up. Too much anesthesia could kill you or send you into a coma. All he could do was just watch and protect you from any further physical harm.

4 days have passed of endless waiting.

Sebastian watched over you, trying to find more things to make you comfortable, feeling your pulse from time to time, bringing in extra fish, or whatever snacks that were left behind by the scientist, and stored them on the shelves in the room in case you woke up from your coma.

During your coma, Sebastian used the keycard he stole earlier from the Elite Guardsman and released the monsters in Hadal Blacksite. Some of the monsters decided to help after being told what happened to you by killing the people who would enter to try and retrieve the crystal to get the place back into running its cruel experiments.

You slowly opened your eyes. It was pitch black. You didn't know where you were. That's when a sudden light lit up the room. (Sebastian’s angler lure)

“You're finally awake. You had me worried that you would leave me behind. I have food for you, go ahead and eat. I’ll explain what happened while you eat.”

You slowly started eating, still somewhat under the effects of the anesthesia that was steadily wearing off. As you were eating, Sebastian explained what he had overheard when he was faking about being under anesthesia, the killing spree he went on to find you, him releasing the monsters, causing the lockdown, you being unconscious for 3 days, etc.

You felt betrayal dig a small hole into you, but you also felt stupid for thinking they wouldn’t do that to you at some point no matter your rank. 

Sebastian helped you process everything and pat your back when you would choke on your food. Sebastian helped you all the time while you were still too weak.

After a few days, you started to become your old self again. You went to see some of the monsters and wandered into rooms you never got the chance to see.

You helped Sebastian set up his shop by collecting the items he accidentally found when he was trying to find files to blackmail Hadal Blacksite. 

After some months, you both started to gain feelings for each other. It took a while for the both of you to realize you felt the same way towards each other.

You both helped each other, you patching his arm, him protecting you from people trying to kill you because they mistook you for being dangerous, talking with p.ai.nter (Z-779) and spending time with each other in the shop while inmates buy things from the both of you.

You were glad that he saved you from your deathbed and glad you were both in a relationship.

You gave him one last kiss before you both went to sleep for the night. Already looking forward to tomorrow.

Bonus!

How you both learned you both felt the same was by accident.

You were visiting p.ai.nter, and you were talking to him until they accidentally mentioned that Sebastian likes you.

“Sebastian did tell me that he thinks that he has feelings for you, since when you were first with him.”

It was dead silent for a bit, both of you realizing what he said.

“Oops…”

He also made the same mistake with Sebastian, telling him you like him.

....Maybe it wasn't actually a ‘mistake’.

~Lilly's

[utilitycaster]

jumping off of that other ask: how do you think religion in Exandria should have been implemented?

honestly? I think this is the wrong question to ask. I think it is, ultimately, fine if religion in Exandria is only organized within the confines of Vasselheim and is otherwise a highly individualized affair; indeed, it even makes sense in a world where the gods can directly interact with their followers (even across the Divine Gate). In fact, the lack of organized religion now is a fascinating setup for it likely coming into existence in some form in the absence of that direct communication - like, every prime deity/betrayer god religion in Exandria is about to enter a cycle of once-per-lifespan messianic events. Some kind of organized practice will probably spring up around this!

My problem is that the PCs, to an extent, acted as though there were full religions in the world and that they were systems of oppression when that was never the case. So actually the implementation should have been taking Laura, Marisha, and Taliesin aside and being like "so your character's position is totally fine and valid! It is, objectively, exceptionally self-centered, in that you are basically just mad that you didn't get the benefits of a L20 cleric after calling up a god once or twice. Do you want to play them this way, or do you want to approach this differently?" And, of course, a lot of fans projected their own experience of religion as a vehicle for oppression - and to be clear, religion in our world frequently can be that- onto a world where that isn't the case. That's less preventable; you should never try to please the fans, let alone the dumbest fans.

On some level, however, a lot of the lore of C3 in the end failed to hold up to the plot of C3 and it wasn't even religion that was the problem. Like, Ruidus as a mystery and dark threat to the world was established before campaign 3, but the concept of Ruidusborn was rather weakly set up. The level of knowledge people had surrounding the Calamity and the gods varied wildly from "pretty decent" in C1-C2 to "what's an Asmodeus" in C3. Tharizdun was very much teased as a concept in C2 and now occupies a rather incoherent space of "it's on the same level as the primes and betrayers and was included among the betrayer gods whereas lesser deities are not; but it's also not The Divine Of Tengar and seen as food for Predathos (but the Raven Queen and presumably Vecna are); and also it's still shackled and THOSE shackles will apparently hold the OTHER devouring void without any problem even while the other gods are mortal and unaware of themselves and that's not an existential threat to be dealt with, it's fine to leave THAT bound," which thematically clashes with the entire story.

As a doorstopper fantasy fan/very casual comics fan/person who came to Dragon Age the Veilguard without much knowledge of the world to a fandom mad at a number of changes/person who has has a lot of critique of C3, this post says it more eloquently: in an ongoing work, sometimes you write yourself into corners and have to decide what to do about it. This is made even more complicated by actual play's unpredictable nature*. I think that Matt had a vision that the previous worldbuilding could have supported if the characters in C3 wanted to save the gods from the jump, but once they strayed from that the lore began to buckle under its own weight and here we are. So really it comes back to my point before: religion doesn't need to be implemented in Exandria and if it had been it should have been done in like, mid-C1, and as for how, that depends on the story Matt wanted to tell, but maybe he should have tried to tell a different one with Campaign 3 that was better supported by the lore we did have.

*to be clear I've already addressed why the "it's improv" defense fails to hold for Campaign 3 given that it failed to properly build on previous choices, but also, and I cannot stress this enough, the DM still makes the calls, and allowing a die roll (or not allowing a die roll), setting a poor DC, failing to establish something prior to a character asking about it, poor planning, and more are all poor choices that make for a weaker story. Actual play can in fact simply be bad, and nothing makes me immediately think you're stupid than trying to argue the mere possibility of criticism itself is invalid. Address the argument, accept that people will disagree with you, or leave; those are your options.

[depressopax]

The first - Part 1

Fandom - Breaking Bad/Better call Saul

Pairing: Multiple characters x gender-neutral reader (Nacho, Jesse, Kim, Jimmy, Mike, Howard) Genre: Fluff, hurt/comfort, one-shots Warning(s): Mentions of sexual tension, weed and alcohol. Cuss words Words: 1.5k Summary: The first kiss with the BrBa/BCS characters English is not my main language, if I make any spelling mistakes please let me know so I can improve my writing! <3 »» AO3 link || Masterlist || Request ««

The first kiss

Nacho

You and Nacho had been friends for quite a while during this time. One day, you were chilling in his house and talking and it kinda just happened. Having a complicated life, Nacho was scared to drag you - one of the people he cares about mostly - into it. But the sexual tension between the two of you reached a tipping point when you got into the topic of relationships.

“If things were easier, maybe I’d actually have time to find love” Nacho sighed.

“You deserve to be happy, Nacho.”

“I am. With you.” He realized how it sounded and shook his head. “...Nevermind.” 

But you’d heard enough to know you were not crazy. He liked you, too. Without another word, you pressed your lips against his. At first, he responded but soon pulled back.

“We shouldn’t.”

“I know.” 

Silence fell, and after a moment, you stood up, walking to the door before you felt Nacho grab your arm. Before given the chance to react - he spinned you around and pulled you into a kiss. With his palm cupping your face, he kissed you in a way no one had done before. It was passionate and needy. Afterwards, he held onto you, breathing hot air at you whilst your foreheads pressed against each other.

“Stay.”

You nodded.

“I’m not going anywhere”

Jesse

Jesse invited you to one of his parties and since you liked him, you decided to go. Little did you know, he felt the same… Opening the door to the house, you were hit by loud music, loud voices and the smell of alcohol, sweat and weed. At least 20 people in the living room vibing to the music whilst getting drunk and high. You felt a bit disoriented entering the place, directly scanning the place for Jesse. You found him sitting in the living room together with the friends Skinny Pete and Badger. When seeing you he smiled and greeted you.

“Yo! I’m glad you made it here.” After hugging you he dragged you along to the kitchen. “Something to drink?” 

“Yes please!” After handing you a beer, the two of you sat down next to Jesse’s friends and talked. They kept glancing at the two of you and grinning, like they knew something you didn’t. 

“Man… You’re so down bad for them, Jesse.” Badger mumbled whilst smoking his joint. Jesse looked like he wanted to murder his best friend on the spot, whilst Pete just laughed. So that’s what they were grinning about…

“Is that right, Jesse?”

“I…” He stuttered an explanation, but none was needed. 

“Maybe I like you too?” 

“If you’re playing with me right now…”

“Jesse.” You said firmly. “I mean it.”

After that, Jesse basically grabbed your hand and walked out of the house, with his friends whistling and laughing at the scene.

“Sorry ‘bout them. They’re such damn jerks.” Jesse muttered and looked at the night sky, his face turned away from you to hide the blush. 

“You like me.”

“And you like me, too?”

“Yea.” 

“Perfect.”

Without realizing it, the two of you had moved closer to each other. When he leaned down, you didn’t hesitate. It was like you could taste the smoke on his soft lips as you kissed. It was intoxicating. Afterwards, you both looked at the sky.

“We should have done that a long time ago.”

“Yea”

Kim 

Kim was overworking herself - as usual. And being her worried friend, you couldn’t stand the sight of it. During her lunch break, you went to her office at HHM only to find her buried in paperwork. 

“Kim, for fuck sake…”

She barely noticed your presence so you had to walk up to her and tap her shoulder.

“Hey…” she said absent-mindedly. 

“Kim…”

“I’ll be done soon, don’t worry”

“You’ve said that for days, Kim.” 

“Yea? Well why don’t you-” realizing she was about to snap at you, she went quiet really fast and looked at you in shame “I’m sorry.”

After some convincing, she finally agreed to leave the office and let you buy her a coffee. Seeing her holding the warm paper cup containing cappuccino melted your heart. She looked so calm, for once.

“I’m worried for you.”

“That’s sweet of you… But really, I’m fine.”

You were not satisfied with the reply, and she noticed that - since you had stopped walking. 

“Hey… What’s the matter?” she said softly and threw the empty cup in a near bin before standing before you.

“I care about you, Kim. I don’t want you burned out…” 

She stroked your cheek, and you could no longer hold back the feelings you harbored. When you kissed her, she didn’t pull back. Rather, she pulled you closer to her. 

“Will you stop nagging if I take the afternoon off?” You could only nod in reply, still in shock after the kiss. 

Jimmy

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Hmmm? What?” you looked at Jimmy, who drove the car. “Yea, of course. You told me about some clients.” 

“...If I bore you out that badly, just tell me, sugar.” he muttered before parking the car.

“You don’t bore me, Jimmy.” 

“Sure seems like it.” 

He left the car and you had to run after him. 

“Look, I’m sorry… It’s just, I’m worried, I guess.”

“Worried? Why?”

“You should hear yourself sometimes, Jimmy.” You hissed. “You’re dealing with some dangerous people. And you always put yourself in shit situations!”

“I got this! Ok?!”

“Yea, sure you do. Sure.” 

He rolled his eyes and continued walking. 

“Why do you even care?” he grumbled. You had to bite your tongue to not say anything stupid. Because what could you even say? “...And you’re back to ignoring me. Thank you, sweetie.” 

“Because I just care, ok?” Tears burned in your eyes, and now he noticed.

“Hey… Sweetheart-” he sighed, seeming uncomfortable with your emotions. “I’m sorry, ok?” 

He squeezed your shoulder. 

After a minute of awkward silence, he tried lightening the mood with saying:

“You got a lil crush on good ol’ Jimmy, eh?” Your reaction told him everything. “You do??” he chuckled. 

“...Idiot.”

“Your idiot.” he murmured before stepping closer - he tilted your head up and forced you to look at him. 

“I knew you got the hots for me, sugar. Don’t worry. I feel the same.” 

And then he kissed you. At first, you wanted to pull away. You were still angry at him - after all. 

But it’s hard to be mad at someone that kisses you like that. 

And the way he smiled against your lips - Oh god…

Mike

You had just found out about Mike’s work, and just what he does for his boss Gus Fring. And you were not happy. Saying “you needed to think”, you rushed out from his place. 

“Can you at least let me explain?” Mike hissed, following you - one step behind. 

“Mike…” 

“Please.” Something in his voice had changed. It went from the usually calm but firm tone - to a pleading one. It caught you off guard and you turned around to look at him. He seemed stressed.

“What?” you muttered.

“Please, let me explain.” 

And seeing how desperate he seemed, you couldn’t say no. So you listened to him, letting him tell you about his career and why he did it.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Why would I?” he scoffed, but quickly realised how harsh it sounded. Before you had a chance to leave again, he grabbed your hand.

“Because I care about you. I’m not pulling you into my bullshit.” 

Your heart skipped a beat at his next words…

“I can’t lose you. Please.”  

And then… 

He kissed you. Just like that. And how could you pull away, when you’d been dreaming of this moment for so long?

The kiss said more than thousands of words. 

Everything made sense now.

Howard

You had known Howard for quite a while and he invited you out for lunch during one of his breaks. 

“Over here!” you saw him sitting by a two-person table at the restaurant, waving at you with a big smile. You joined him.

“Jeez, Howard! This place looks… Expensive!”

“Only the best lunch restaurant in town!” He said cheerfully, but you could sense some sort of… Nervousness? In his voice.  “Tell me about your day!”

“Well uhm… It was-” He looked at you intensely. It was both cute but a bit weird. “...Are you ok?”

“Of course!” 

After lunch - which he insisted on paying - you tagged along when he walked back to HHM and his office. Before saying goodbye, he stopped you.

“Wait! I actually need to talk to you.” 

“Alright… Shoot.” 

“I…” he gathered his thoughts and cleared his throat before continuing - or at least trying to. “I kinda… Y’know…” 

You couldn’t help but smile. The blush said everything.

“Howard…” you cooed, and then leaned in and kissed him. He was startled, but then kissed you back and sighed in relief at you initiating this. 

“Was that what you were trying to say?”

“Y-yea…” 

“Well… I definitely feel the same.”

AHSHSHS this is prob one of my cheesiest one-shots yet- HOPE Y'ALL LIKED IT EITHER WAYS <3 Next part will be "First date". If you like this concept like, comment or reblog! Would mean a lot. :) MWAHHH

[tarithenurse]

The roommate

Fandom: MCU. Pairing/starring: Bucky Barnes & fem!reader. Word count: 1059. Content: Angst, slight pining, weapons, [Y/N], unbetaed as usual. A/N: Got an idea. Got to writing. Thinking of maybe making a second chapter...we’ll see if it makes sense. Please reblog and comment – it’s fuel!

The roommate

Somehow, it had all gone wrong.

You had just wanted to be helpful and dump the laundry in his room for him so you could wash your own load.

No scratch that, that’s not where it started fucking up.

You hadn’t known he was home. If you had, you’d have knocked. If you’d had knocked, you would have waited with entering until he called out ‘yes’.

If you just had done all that, then you wouldn’t now be faced with a gun.

You still have his laundry in your arms as your mind does loops to figure out how this could all happen to you of all people.

“James?” you manage to eek out.

You like your roommate. Quiet and polite, it had taken a long time before you two became friendly enough to hang out for fun. Then you’d learned that he was good at a lot of things: puzzles and quizzes – he always did the Sunday’s difficult crossword in record time while you struggled with the easy one, he’d sorted the lock on the storage unit in the basement when you lost the key – thus revealing that he liked picking locks, what was most telling right now that there was more to the man was the fact that he had you at gunpoint and only looked mildly apologetic.

“I didn’t think you were home,” he says as if that explains everything. It doesn’t.

“Likewise,” you stammer, eyes fixed on the weapon.

Stepping back, he motions you to drop the laundry on the bed. “You shouldn’t have come in here.”

It’s the first time you’re in the room since you rented it out to him. Now you see how spartan he lives...and you see a desk covered in an arsenal of weapons and passports and stacks of money and...nothing makes sense.

“I’m not...I won’t...” you offer tamely, hoping he believes you.

He sighs. Then he lowers the gun, clicking on the safety.

“Sit.”

Of course you obey, plopping down next to the pile of t-shirts, socks, and boxer shorts that you had tried not to think of him in.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, a nagging voice tells you that him lying like this about his identity probably is a breach of the rental agreement so you can keep the deposit. Another voice is trying to draw your attention to the fact that he’s only wearing grey sweatpants – his perfect chest is bare and not even the scar by the stump of a shoulder is enough to make him ugly.

“I know you won’t tell anyone,” he finally says, “because no one would believe you.”

He’s right. No one would. A one armed man would not be a logical criminal...or whatever he is. You glance to the table again. Spy? Assassin?

Following your line of sight, James nods. “Yeah...I guess you’re wondering what that’s for.”

He steps over, places the gun down and picks up a passport that he tosses to you. Fumbling, you catch it and flip it open.

Well, at least he gave you the right first name...it’s the other two that makes it all make sense, though: James Buchanan Barnes.

While you study the picture, you’re vaguely aware that he slides open the closet and pulls something out. It’s only as the whirring sound breaks the silence that you look up and see the infamous prosthetic that turns him into everyone’s nightmare or hot dream: the Winter Soldier.

“I’ll be gone in 20 minutes,” he says flatly.

“Why?” you blurt out, surprising yourself just as much as him.

James narrows his eyes at you. “I figured you wouldn’t want me and my...gear around.”

“I...don’t think I mind...I mean...you’re one of the good guys, yeah?”

You’ve seen the news: Falcon is the new Captain America. The Winter Soldier is his menacing sidekick.

Maybe James haven’t watched the same shows as you though, because he cocks his head with a bemused smile. “I’m sure there are differing opinions on that.”

“I’m sure there are people who hate me too but that doesn’t mean I’m bad,” you counter, now more sure of yourself. “I don’t mind you staying...kinda makes me feel even safer than it already did.”

“Technically it shouldn’t.”

“You can actually protect me if there’s a burglar or something,” you point out.

He lifts a finger and opens his mouth before lowering the digit again. “Okay. True.”

“Good. Then you stay,” you decide.

You glance at the picture in the passport one more time, realizing a bit too late that he might have scoped out the entire place – including your room – to feel safe here. And if he’s been to your room, then he might have found the pictures on your vanity...one of which is a young Bucky Barnes in uniform and looking cocky.

“If you’ll excuse me,” you mumble, tossing the passport back as you get up.

He doesn’t stop you but he does follow as you shuffle out of his room and head down the hall to yours. You’re loath to open the door with him there, knowing that the vanity will be in view, but you have to get to that picture and hide it just in case he hasn’t seen it yet.

“[Y/N]...” his voice is low. Humming. “Do you know why I took your offer even if the rent isn’t the lowest in the area?”

You’ve stopped with the hand on the door handle. “No?” You don’t dare to turn.

“Major in history, minor in politics...your thesis was on the impact of the serum in the arms’ race,” he quietly explains, “but you never lost sight of the person embodying it.” Cool fingertips land on your shoulder. “I’ve done my research...and I’ve gone through every nook and cranny of this place more than once.”

You can feel the heat rise to your cheeks. “Every nook and...?”

“Every surface.” Gently turning you, he has to lift your face up with a finger under your chin. “I’m surprised you didn’t realize earlier.”

“You look different with the hair and beard and...yeah...”

You can hear how lame it sounds. Sure, you’d liked that there were some similarities but you’d never allowed yourself to entertain the idea that he might be the very same guy.

“Let’s get takeout and find a bottle of wine or two and talk,” James, Bucky, offers.

“Sounds good.”