#might do more of this series if interested
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For slick sunday
I am once again asking you to imagine Scream Queen O!Steve & horror fan A!Eddie,
except in this idea/AU Eddie is the co host of a horror podcast similar to Dead Meat but it's called (u guessed it) Corroded Coffin, Eddie hosts & A!Jeff co-hosts & O!Gareth mostly works with the sound while A!Chrissy & B!Felix (unnamed freak who apparently has a canon name but idc I like the name felix & using this name made me realize gender things so it has special meaning for me now) ANYWAY Chrissy & B!Felix mostly handle research
Well they talk about all horror not just movies, they discuss books & they discuss other podcasts & of course they discuss movies. Eddie & Chrissy are slasher fans through & through, Jeff is more for the supernatural stories, when Gareth comes on an episode very occasionally he's an unrepentant fan of elevated horror like The VVitch, meanwhile if felix is on an episode it's explicitly because they're talking about cosmic horror OR horror coming out of east asia (felix is a Junji Ito devotee, as am I & yes this is me projecting onto a fictional character)
WELL their podcast is fairly popular, they're considered Z-list celebrities within popular culture maybe D-list amongst horror fans, the Corroded Coffin podcast has gone on tours & done live shows. they've even established a small podcast network they call Hellfire Club & expanded to making more shows: chrissy & felix host a folklore podcast, Jeff & a new guest every week have discussions abt the new expression of horror abt being a marginalized identity (i.e. being a black person in a white supremacist society or being a beta woman/omega in an alpha centric patriarchal culture)
Then one day their business email gets an inquiry abt a new movie coming out in the next year & the executive producer wants to know if they'd be interested in a slight PR stunt/limited podcast series around this movie.
The producer in question is one Jim Hopper, a known name who's only ever produced action flicks, apparently he's dipping his toe into the horror space bc his daughter & step-son r huge fans of the genre & encouraged him to take on a script he'd normally ignore.
The movie is called Strange Times On Main Street & it follows an ensemble cast tht r meant to b the residents of a dwindling town in nowhere Indiana in the early 1980s, the horror factor comes in when the different characters start to see things tht might not b real but all seem connected to an individual who has terrorized the town for decades, culminating in a town hall meeting where they're told there's nothing tht can b done; so the situation dissolves into an eerily quiet mob tht ends up hunting down this person & the movie ends abruptly with this guy being executed in broad daylight practically in the middle of Main street.
They agree right away. The gimmick involves Eddie & Chrissy acting like the hosts of a true crime podcast who are "interviewing" the people of the town supposedly years after the incident. Everyone is excited because there r some big names involved in the movie, most notably the undisputed scream queen Steve Henderson who got half of his fame from working his way up from among stunt doubles on action movies so he's known to do his own stunts.
Well, it's a fantastic process & absolutely everyone has a wonderful time & Eddie sort of bumbles his way thru the episode w Steve (whose character is implied to have been the one to kill the supposed antagonist) but Steve finds it cute & gives Eddie his number.
The movie does well & wins not only a Screamy Award but an actual Oscar. Steve even wins the first Oscar of his career for best omega man in a leading role. He kisses his date before going up to give his speech, who's his date you ask? Eddie Munson host of popular podcast Corroded Coffin
They announce their wedding & mating a month after the awards show
horror meet cute🥰
#slick sunday#steddie#steddie omegaverse#omega steve harrington#alpha eddie munson#steve x eddie#omegaverse#a/b/o#my asks
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Reliving Roleplay Fever with a Warrior Cat Adventure!
I started this Tumblr account because, like many of you, I’ve been feeling the weight of missing those amazing roleplay moments. You know the ones I mean—the times when everything just clicks, when the stories unfold in ways you never expected, and you’re fully immersed in a world you and others have built together. It’s always those special sessions, that one moment, or maybe a series of memories that you just can’t shake. You know what I’m talking about, right? I think we all have that one RP that we just can’t forget.
I want to get back into roleplay because it’s something I’ve always loved, and there’s just something about the creative energy and the stories we can tell with other people. I’m planning on still talking about roleplays and lore in general, because it’s so interesting seeing everyone’s perspectives and hearing other people's stories. But... I think I might start a roleplay again myself. If I do, it’ll probably be Warrior Cats-based, mostly because who doesn’t feel the nostalgia of being an angry little kitty again? It’s a world with so much to explore and create, and I just think it’d be a fun thing to dive back into.
That said, it’ll likely be a little while before it opens up because I want to get the website set up just right—proper coding, neat layout, all that. I also want to touch up my preexisting litter roll and make sure everything looks nice and polished before I officially launch.
So, if you're interested in joining or just want to hear more, please let me know in the poll! Even if there’s not a huge interest, I’ll definitely still go ahead with it because, honestly, world-building and character creation have always been my absolute favorite parts of roleplaying. No matter what, I think it’s something I’ll enjoy as a hobby.
I would share a pic of the litter generator but its kind of large and even zoomed out it doesn't all fit. I'll try to get a video of it at some point for those interested in that type of thing! Some cool features it currently has:
Genetic Inheritance: Picks traits from both parents or just one for variety!
Mutation Possibilities: Introduces mutation chances (e.g., 0.3-10%) for added surprises.
Fertility System: Adjusts the fertility rate based on genetics, affecting litter sizes and chances of success.
Chance Breakdown: Some traits have multiple chances within chances. For example, the eye roll might first give a chance for heterochromia, and then, if it rolls, it splits further—whether the left eye is mom’s, dad’s, or a random combination!
#warrior cats#roleplay#rp#erin hunter warriors#proboards#warriors#warrior cats roleplay#warriors oc#What do you want from a roleplay?#Should I make a discord?
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Senku l. (before & after the stone)
Headcanons, sfw,nsfw, suggestive…
Author’s note: Senku is a fictional character he is canonically 15-16 in the beginning of the series and 17-18 by season 3 not taking account for the manga which he is older. If in the future I make works on characters you deem unfitting for the roll of nsfw fiction or suggestive works of while aged up feel free to block me! Also a reminder that this is a fictional character, made up of lines/pixels. Do not waste your time writing petty hate comments which I will remove and are a waste of your life which you will not get back. I choose to be delusional about fictional characters for my own satisfaction, good day!
Word count: a lot
Before the stone
Sfw
Senku is a bit more less responsible before the stone as he is allowed to act like a kid. He often spends his time in the school lab or at home and can be seen with is small group of friends. (Taiju Oki and Yuzuriha Ogawa.)
Love and romantic relationships are something Senku has found himself uninterested in his teenage years. Dedicating himself to his craft and love for science.
You can take science away from the man but not the science from the man. (You really can’t do either)
Senku has found people conventionally attractive to a specific statistical standard but not to him personally and probably won’t ever given he doesn’t have a common attraction to physical attributes.
Though through statistics he can still find someone who he would be generally attracted to physically. Someone with glasses, makes their interests obvious ex: paint on body all the time, a lab coat or constantly wearing something of their special interest would be people he gravitates towards.
(As someone who is neurodivergent in the worst ways I think half the cast is autistic or a Shokunin if you will a person deeply dedicated to their craft.) So someone as such will attract Senku not romantically of course but they will be bound to cross paths.
There are a multitude of ways you could meet you might never meet but to keep it simple I’m going to give you a multitude of possibilities to have rot in your head.
Being apart of the school’s science club is one way always spending time with him constantly in the science room after school.
Being a dumbass needed tutoring friends with one of his friends but not with Senku directly, or competing for higher grades, a good enemies to lovers. Maybe you’re even apart of the school’s science club making you and Senku acquaintances if anything.
Senku doesn’t back down from competition when it comes to brains but quickly when it comes to fights. Being rivals to Senku is a good asset in the stone world getting you to be one of the first few people to be revived truly testing if you’re book smart (can do it in theory on paper in school) and street smart (do it for real and faster than the time given in school).
Senku was hesitant more than he ever has been getting in a relationship with you. Being shy was simply not an option for him, he thought it was a waste of time often making him coming off as stiff and blunt.
A relationship of romantic interest with Senku will never be said nor be official. He will never say he loves you or that he likes you even give he believes actions speak louder than words. If you give him time you will see through subtle ways that he is attracted to you. 
He will ask you about things that don’t matter much: like should I choose this or that color the small things…
He’ll allow you to touch his hair if your one for pda, he won’t reciprocated often at most leaning into the touch out of pure comfort. He won’t push you off understanding that this is a love language (that did take him a while to understand.)
Senku’s love language is quality time and gift giving. This is more often seen in the stone world but it expressed as well before hand even more so if you’re a science nerd along with him.
He’ll be willing to conduct experiments with you along with share materials with you which is a rare thing for him being an only child never having to share much of anything.
I believe that Senku is aroace or at the very least ace. He can still have platonic love and relationships but isn’t fond of romantic ones being in a romantic relationship from his perspective is his treating you like a best friend practically treating you like a mixture between yuzuriha and Kohaku.
Suggestive
Anything remotely romantic would have to be initiated by you and 9/10 you’re going to either get pushed off. Or he just sits there waiting for you to get over with it. Something like the (kohaku kissing Senku scene in season 3)
For your sake he has experimented once or twice before with make out sessions or kissing to get you to do something (like get you to do an experiment with him.) any kind of physical touch from him romantic wise once again if not initiated by you. 
He’s a responsible enough person to know better than to have sexual intercourse at his age nor is he interested enough to risk it not that questions about it don’t cross his mind but we’ll explore those much later down the line.
Though he’s more likely to tease you occasionally and lean his arm atop your head if you’re short. Expect this more often if you have curly hair
If you have 4c or curly hair in general he will be near you more often especially if you’re a foreigner. Have issues finding hair products for your hair type in Japan? He got you give him a couple strands of your hair next thing you know he has a whole list of products for your hair and product sample packets surrounding him.
Nsfw
Sorry there is none Senku was not interested in sexual acts before the stone nor very much after.
Though he will ask you a lot of “inappropriate questions” but i promise you he’s just genuinely curious. And he’s not trying to infer anything he promises.
After the stone
As I said Senku’s love languages are gift giving and quality time. This becomes more apparent in the stone world. If you had something you held close best believe he will try his best to make it for you. If you’re an artist he’s make brushes and paint etc…
He’s a bit kinder and softer after the stone. People he has known longer therefore care for more he unconsciously takes them on more missions with him around or in a safe space.
If he knew you before the stone you’re likely to be one of the first people out of stone. Though if not you are an important asset and he sees you for your skills and talents so be grateful for that.
If you’re a creative type expect to be paired with Yuzuriha often. A martial artist or athlete expect Kohaku and Taiju.
What Senku appreciate most is people interested in his work, he loves experimenting and explaining his process even to those a who don’t understand so please entertain him for a while if you expect at friendship let alone a romantic relationship.
People who are aroace can have relationships but they can often be on sided in the romance department. It’s not that they don’t love platonically you they just don’t know how to react to that romantically or don’t want romance.(yall can choose if Senku is aroace or not) As long as you’re ok with that your relationship with Senku will be fine. (I’ll just write him as dense to love for yall though.)
Senku if he does love you will occasionally indulge in your romantic behavior and take this a complent if it was a last resort he wouldn't be against procreating with you. (it took him a lot to admit that so you better take it.)
Romantic relationships are often seen as an inconvenience given he doesn't see the need for them and doesn't think he could would be the best fit for something like that.
He true for the most part but he is able to be in a romantic relationship. It may not be as romantic as a you like but if he has an interest in you he will unconsciously do these things. Don't expect any hand-holding and kissing though.
The only way you could get him to hold your hand is for technical reasons like you not getting lost.
Suggestive
I do agree with the fact that Senku would experiment on his significant other and I think this would be more common before the stone but in small ways.
An unexpected romantic act to see how you respond.
He will use this advantage if gen tells him you like him or something for free labor but we won’t abuse it he’s not that mean.
The only way I could see a “relationship forming” Is Senku using you for labor and “paying you” with physical touch. Kisses, hugs and stuff, he likes you platonically but as time goes on he starts experimenting with you first it’s his far will you go for each type of affection. Then it’s soon how will you react to this or that. He says it’s not you that he loves but the reaction you make like a chemical reaction in your mind. Knowing his autistic ass it might be true but the way he acts makes you unsure.
Or maybe finding a girl smarter than him would rial him up he might see you as arrival at first. You guys could be partners, he swears he doesn’t love you, but the science you create the knowledge you know, that wrinkly brain of yours.
He tends to have a love for things rather than people in a way he loves science and the things people are good at their talents but maybe not themselves, he swears but he does establish relationships with characters like Gen and Chrome as friends so I’m sure he can establish a romantic relationship if we take this route.
Then I could actually get into how Senku would “experiment” with his “friend” this would create an friends with benefits kinda situation but it’s not like Senku sees it like that he just doesn’t have time for labels and probably wouldn’t care about it. Just don’t call him pet names because he doesn’t like it. The relationship would be private so the villagers don’t make a fuss, for as far was that would last with Gen around.
NSFW - ish
Let’s talk about Senku’s experiments
Of course you consented to this but you might know what your getting into 100%
It’s basically just a very handsy check up while he asks you questions you may or may not be able to answer.
Ex: “Are your breast sensitive? There is a high concentration of nerve endings present in that area, making them one of the most sensitive parts of the body. While he’s over here playing with them in every way imaginable. He’s going to continue to do this for every inch of your body and take an analysis writing how painful each part is and or sensitive.
So I’ll let you guys imagine that
Thank you for reading!!
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#anime#netflix anime#bf#dr stone#dcst smut#dcst#dcst x reader#dcst x reader smut#dcst brainrot#dcst senku#dr stone senku#senku ishigami x reader smut#senku x reader smut#senku ishigami x reader#senku smut#ishigami senku x reader#senku x reader#senku ishigami#ishigami senku#senku#senku smut#senku x y/n#senkuishigami#Senku x Black reader#x reader#dr stone x reader
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Misapprehensions and Confessions (part 2)
(moodboard creds to @sunshinebingo🥹)
Day 2: First Fight
Summary: It has been a regular routine for Gwyn to seek out the spymaster for training. And when he suggests helping her out with getting reaccustomed to society, it doesn't take too much persuasion for Gwyn to agree. But when he doesn't show up one day, Gwyn takes up the liberty to accompany herself into the city.
That one decision is all it takes for it all to fall apart.
•○●⛦●○•
Word Count: 3943
Warnings: angst hehehe, misunderstanding, azzie is a dummy but sweetheart cassian is there to make you happy 💪🏻 a teensy bit of an argument, but i think thats it?
A/n: heres the second part for the mini series for day 2 of @sjmromanceweek❣️ writing the angst was so much fun honestly, LIKE IT GAVE ME LIFE 🥹🥹🥹
once again, it was so good doing this collab with my love @sunshinebingo 🥹 ily so much omg thank you for doing this w me😭🥹
Read on AO3 here
ANYWAYS, ENJOYYYY!!!🥳🥳🥳
°•°•°•○🌑○•°•°•°
Gwyn’s pov.
Next week came, but the Shadowsinger did not.
Gwyn had been waiting for almost an hour at their usual meet up spot in one of the sitting rooms in the House of Wind, having snagged a book from the library to flip through as she waited.
She had been excited for the meet up, to say the least. She couldn’t stop wondering where he was going to take her this time after going to the restaurant the previous week. The thought had kept her up all night as she twisted and turned in her sheets.
She had gone the extra mile while getting dressed up too, picking out the teal sweater Azriel had once mentioned made her eyes look brighter. Under that, she wore a pencil skirt with tights, having seen one of the females in Velaris wear something similar. She had thought the female looked pretty, and wanted to see what she looked like in it herself.
She continued to flip the pages of the book, reading and reading, smiling at the words. The story was cute, one of a female who was trying to save her family with the help of her siblings and friends, one of them being her love interest. The banter, the softness they shared made Gwyn long for a similar connection, if not more.
She loved the male love interest a lot, and the fact that he was so similar to one of her own friends did not go unnoticed by Gwyn.
Maybe she will have her own love story one day, with the friend she liked more than she should.
More than friends should like each other.
But with each moment that passed, her eyes stopped reading, and remained unseeing. The tilt of her lips fading as she got lost in her own head. She stared down at the soft, crinkling pages, running her fingers over the edges. They were painted in beautiful shades, depicting a scenery of a mountain from the book.
Pretty.
But not pretty enough to distract her from the absence of a certain Shadowsinger.
Footsteps drew Gwyn from her reverie, and she perked up, her gaze lading on the doors she had left ajar. Hope bloomed in her gut, even as she knew it was not the one she had been expecting coming closer to her.
The footsteps were too heavy, too powerful, to be his.
Still, she waited, she watched, she wished.
She hoped.
And a moment later, Cassian strutted into view, a smile gracing his face when he realised Gwyn was in the room. She returned the smile, willing her disappointment to vanish.
���Gwyn! Good seeing you here!” He paused behind the couch adjacent to the one Gwyn sat on. “I thought you might be down in Velaris, this is a pleasant surprise.”
Gwyn sighed, relaxing into the soft cushions behind her. “Yeah, I thought so too.”
His brows furrowed, and he quickly glanced around the room. “Where’s Az?”
She shrugged, setting the book aside and pushing to her feet. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s busy?”
Cassian’ confusion was palpable as he huffed. “He can never be busy enough to put off your dates.”
“We don’t go on dates.” Gwyn scowled. “They are outings.”
He simply smirked in return, lifting his hands in a placating gesture. “Sure, right. My bad.”
Gwyn’s eyes narrowed as she watched him walk over to the balcony, dusting off her skirt absentmindedly. “Are you going somewhere?”
He glanced back at her, nodding. “Nesta’s at the river house with Feyre and Nyx. Gonna go pick her up.”
Gwyn chewed on her lip as she thought, then her eyes shot to him. “Hey Cass?”
“Hmm?”
“Can you take me down to the city?”
This time he turned to her fully, his brows high on his forehead. “I…what?”
Gwyn rolled her eyes, ignoring the new sadness taking root in her chest at the lack of those playful shadows and their quiet master’s presence. “Do you not want to?”
He took a step forward before pausing, extending his hand. “Oh no, no I would love to. I am just surprised, that’s all.”
Gwyn raised an eyebrow, but moved closer to him to let him pick her up. By this point, she was comfortable enough with him that the spike of fear and anxiety no longer pierced her heart when he was in close proximity to her, and it was just another thing she was proud of herself for.
He gently wound his arms under her knees and back, careful to only touch her where needed, and flapped his wings once. There was a reason the house built in the mountain was called the House of Wind, because as soon as he lifted from the ground, a powerful gust of wind caught under his wings and sent them soaring. He glided smoothly, his wing muscles beating effortlessly. Five centuries of flying practice truly showed in his skills.
Gwyn had once studied about wings and how they work, reading extensively about Illyrian ones. They had been so fascinating to her then, as they were fascinating to her now. The way they moved always had her mesmerized. Every time she flew with Azriel too, she would either always stare at his wings or the city down below.
Azriel.
Gwyn looked away from Cassian’s wings, instead casting her gaze downwards, towards the ground that rapidly grew closer as he descended. His feet touched the ground with a light thump before he bent slightly and set Gwyn on her feet.
“Are you sure about this, Gwyn?”
She turned to him, nodding. “I am. We go out every week so I can get accustomed to socialising once more.” And just because Gwyn was feeling petty, she added. “I’m not going to mess up my routine just because someone cannot be bothered to inform me before standing me up.”
Cassian’s lips parted, but then he closed them with an amused smirk. “Very proud of you, Gwyn.”
Though his expression was teasing, his words sounded so genuine they nearly brought Gwyn to tears.
“Thank you, Cass.”
“I will likely be here for an hour or two, depending on Nyx’s mood and who he is currently attached to today, so you can just come to the River House if you want to go back.” He clasped her shoulder, smiling. “And even if I’m up there, you can just ask Rhys to get me, yeah?”
Gwyn nodded gratefully. “Of course, thank you again.”
She waited until Cassian had turned away, waving in farewell as he climbed up the steps to one of the majestic houses of the High Lord.
Then she turned, and began wandering down the street.
She gazed at everything she passed by, unwilling to miss even a moment of the sheer beauty of Velaris. The shimmering waters of the Sidra, the golden shadows casted by the dying sun across the ground and the flora, the faelights bobbing gently over the entrances to shops and restaurants. Hawkers selling their wares, fruit stalls next to dessert stalls.
She walked without a destination in mind, her hand bent at a slight angle towards her thigh - where she had strapped her dagger under her skirt- involuntarily, the action muscle memory at this point.
She was lost in thought, wondering what could have been so important that Azriel had not even bothered to inform her. It could have been that he was on an important mission, and that he had no way to contact her. It could have been that he had almost completely forgotten.
Gwyn didn’t know. But she did know that she was mad, and she would not forgive him until he had grovelled enough.
The moment she had the thought, guilt followed. What if he truly was busy and if he had taken time off to send her a letter, he could have been in danger?
She shook her head, trying to dislodge the thought as she glanced around her. She felt tired already, so bored out of her mind without him. She had no idea what she even wanted to do anymore. It would have been better if she had stayed home and completed her projects for Merrill.
Home.
It was such a beautiful, comforting word. The word that had meant nothing to Gwyn for years after her sister was taken from her. It was just that, a word. No meaning, no feelings.
But for quite some time now, since she had met Nesta, since the day Gwyn had dragged herself to the training ring, telling herself over and over that she would be fine, better even, that Cassan would not hurt her, that he wasn’t that kind of a male, a male pathetic enough to force females to feel better about his own self, the word had taken on a new meaning.
Gwyn had learned that home meant more than just four walls and a roof. Home meant friends. Home meant laughing over trivial things, freely and loudly. Home meant warmth.
Home meant Azriel.
She didn’t know when, or how, but slowly, he had become the definition of friend, the laughter, the warmth that made a home, home.
And slowly, the intimidating, lonely walls that had kept her from the scary outside world became so much more.
It was almost dark, the horizon tinting darker and darker with each passing moment, when Gwyn stumbled upon the restaurant that Azriel had taken her to the previous week.
She smiled at the sight of those pristine walls, the memories that surfaced threatening to make her giggle. She walked on, passing by the entrance, the beautiful stars leading up to it.
And she caught a whiff of the smell she had become so familiar with.
It caused her bones to freeze, her muscles stiffening as she turned her head to look.
The interior was still dark, so different compared to the outside. Soft aroma of chicken, rice, herbs, everything drifted out, mixing into such a sweet smell that it would be impossible to not go in.
But yet, under that, was the smell of cedar, of night, of shadows.
Gwyn’s eyes narrowed, and she had only taken a step up the stairs when she saw him.
Past the reception, past a number of tables and chairs and candles, he sat.
At the same spot he had sat with Gwyn.
With the same smile on his face, his eyes soft. His hand under his chin, his lips tilted as he nodded.
At a female. The chair Gwyn had occupied merely seven days ago was now occupied by a female.
She looked like a complete opposite of her.
Curly blonde hair piled spilled down her shoulders, her eyes and skin the prettiest shade of brown. Her figure was curvy, soft, sweet. So unlike Gwyn.
The female wore a strapless tight fitting dress, the material clinging to her like a second skin.
She looked so comfortable, so confident, Gwyn wondered why she ever thought she even stood a chance with Azriel. Of course he’d be interested in someone who was confident in herself, someone who wasn’t afraid to know and show she was pretty.
His words from the previous week floated around in her head amidst the confusion and hurt, solidifying her new beliefs.
“So you like it?”
“Of course I like it! Anyone would love this place. It is so beautiful.”
Had she been only a friend who he wanted the opinion of to impress the female he was actually interested in? Just a guinea pig?
Gwyn’s eyes prickled, and she took a step away, as if simply the sight of Azriel touching the other female’s hand - smiling secretively, his eyes hooded and seductive- would burn her.
Yet she couldn’t look away, not until someone bumped into her shoulder, apologising profusely. She didn’t even look at the fae. She bowed her head in acknowledgement before willing her legs to move. Hoping to leave before Azriel’s shadows - who for some reason were so attuned to her every move that she would find them anywhere she went - reported her presence to their master.
She moved through the thickening crowds, laughing children and flirting adults. Kept pushing herself to walk, to run, back to the River House. She needed to go back. She knew she could not handle any interactions, especially one with Azriel if he found her before she could drown herself in work.
Just when the house came into sight, she slowed down, blinking hard and regulating her breathing. She could see activity inside the house, soft warm light spilling onto the grass under the windows and the porch leading up to the main door, which opened just as she went to knock.
“Gwyn?” Nesta stared at her wide eyed, brows high in surprise.
“Um, hey Nesta.” Gwyn swallowed uneasily.
Instantly, Nesta was alert. “What happened? Did someone do something? Where’s Azriel?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you Nes. I think Az forgot about their date and Gwyn went into the city alone.” Cassian’s voice answered before Gwyn could, and for that she was grateful, as she wasn’t feeling particularly excited to speak.
Nesta’s eyes hardened as she glanced at her mate. “He mentioned he was going out with a female. Did he not inform you? ” She turned to glare at Gwyn. “And even if he forgot, why the hell did you-”
“Nesta, she is not a child.”
Gwyn’s blood went hot, anger simmering through each vein as she realised he really was on a date. And he had told Nesta, but not her.
She would kill him.
Nesta opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to think the better of it and just pulled Gwyn into a hug. “What happened, Gwyn? Why do you look so spooked?”
Gwyn shook her head as best as she could in her friend’s embrace, her heart finally slowing down slightly at the comforting touch. “Nothing, really. I just got a bit… anxious, that’s all. I just want to go back up.”
Nesta pulled away, nodding and turned to Cassian. “Drop her off at the house please, I can wait.”
“Nesta- no-”
The glare Gwyn received in return was enough to shut her up as Cassian picked her into his arms like she weighed nothing, then shot into the sky.
“She really is scary sometimes, no?”
Gwyn huffed, her lips tilting in a surprised smile. “She was mad when we first met too.”
He laughed, his chest vibrating against Gwyn’s upper arm as she kept her arms folded close to her chest. He quieted after that, his focus solely on the mountain that loomed over them.
He flew towards the main sitting room, which they all used most of the time, as far as Gwyn knew.
But he was not Azriel, and the sitting room was not close to the library.
Just another reminder of how considerate, how attentive Azriel had always been to her. Of how he forgot about her today.
But no, she wouldn’t spend her day thinking about him anymore. Not when he couldn’t even bother to let her know he was going on a real date.
That he was ditching her for the one who he actually wanted.
She bid a goodbye to Cassian, not waiting to see him fly off before she retreated to the dorm she shared with her fellow priestesses, pulling out the large tomes she had been assigned to read through and summarise.
But she knew she wouldn’t be able to focus.
Not with him occupying her thoughts.
Az's pov
Something was wrong.
Azriel had considered many things in order to understand what was bothering him so much.
Last night's mission had gone fine; the female he had to seduce to get important intel an easy one to flirt with to get her to talk, even when his entire being had recoiled at his sweet talking and his suggestive touches. Even his shadows had felt uncomfortable and had hissed after every few minutes of the interaction. But it had been a necessity for his job, his duty towards his court. The accomplishment of this mission should have filled him with relief and a sense of freedom from something he had felt reluctant towards from the start. But still…
Rhys and Feyre had thanked him for the information he had gathered that day. Azriel didn't need their thanks for having done something that was expected of him, although having the validation of his High Lord and Lady had been nice. But still…
Something was wrong.
You know what, one of his shadows whispered. The only one that had bothered speaking to him since his mission with that female. All the others were still oddly silent, leaving that one - the same one which had always favoured Gwyn since they all met her - to occasionally use its voice to throw some scathing comments at him.
Azriel sighed after one of his daggers hit one of the dummies in the training ring.
“Yes. I know,” he muttered, even with no one but the moon and his silent shadows to hear him.
At least he thought.
Footsteps sounded at the doorway, before the source of Azriel’s troubled mind walked onto the training area. An intense wave of emotion washed over him; hope, relief, joy, excitement…awe.
Gwyn looked breathtaking under the starry sky, the night making her look even more fierce as she walked determinedly to the weapons rack clad in skin tight leathers.
Azriel stood still for a moment, unable to move as he watched his shadows - every single one of them - rush to her. Gwyn giggled at their excited dance around her. He heard her whisper something to them but couldn't make out what it was. He mentally called for his shadows to come back to him. None listened.
“Uh… hey,” he finally blurted out.
Gwyn turned to him then. Azriel felt a heavy weight drop in his stomach at the apathetic look in her eyes. His heart constricted with fear and worry, so much that he immediately began walking towards her.
“What happe-”
“Hi,” she cut his question off. Her dry tone stopped him in his tracks.
“Are you alright?”
Something flickered in her eyes for a second before she turned her back to him, took a deep breath in, then out, and picked up a few daggers from the rack.
“I'm fine,” she gritted out without looking at him.
Azriel frowned in confusion.
The hell she was.
He hadn't seen her at training this morning, hadn't caught a single glimpse of her anywhere for the entire day, hadn't heard the sound of her voice. And now that she was here before him, the usual light missing from her eyes and her posture stiff as though from restraint, she dared say that she was fine?
Gwyn walked past him, his shadows trailing behind, and stopped a distance away from the dummies in which the daggers he had thrown earlier were still embedded.
He followed.
“You can lie to anyone about this, Gwyn, but you can't deceive me.”
Her first dagger flew and landed in a dummy's throat. She let out a humorless laugh.
“Is this tonight's lesson then? Lies and deception?”
She threw another dagger, this one lodging itself in the centre of the dummy's chest.
Azriel looked at Gwyn from head to toe, hoping to find answers to the growing mystery unfolding before him. He desperately wished to know what was happening to her. He needed to make her feel better. Azriel needed his Gwyn back.
“Gwyn please,” he took a few steps until he stood right in front of her. His shadows remained closer to her. “What is happening?”
The sadness that darkened her eyes as she looked at him made him feel like the dummy, this invisible weapon sinking straight into his heart. It twisted deeper inside him with the tears that he noticed pooling in her eyes.
He brought a hand up and cupped her cheek. “My Gwyn,” he whispered, unaware that it had made it out of his mouth.
Her teal eyes fixed on his hazel ones, searching. For what, he did not know? But he was certain that he was ready to give her anything. Before he could give in to the urge to pull her into his arms, anger flashed on her face.
She grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away.
“Don't,” she said as she put more distance between them.
Azriel didn't hear what she murmured to his shadows due to the beating of his heart resonating in his ears and which drowned out every other sound. He didn't even acknowledge them slithering back to him. He only watched Gwyn run away and disappear through the doorway.
Azriel stood there, frozen and stunned. Until he felt his shadows smack him in the face, their shadowy forms conveniently solid for a task like this.
Idiot master, hissed the one shadow.
Is that all you have to say? He scowled at it. What would have been more helpful was if they told him what was wrong and how he could fix things with Gwyn. But that was apparently not in their plans.
I'm going with her, was all it said before it floated away. The others stayed. They remained silent, leaving Azriel alone with his thoughts.
The conversation - or was it an argument? He wasn't sure - replayed over and over in his head, even as he descended the stairs down into the House of Wind. He was so distracted that he didn't notice Cassian until he almost crashed into the chair he sat in at the living room table.
“Whoa! You alright here brother?” Cass asked, his mouth full of the cake he had a huge slice of on his plate.
Azriel pulled the chair next to Cassian and sat down. He pulled Cassian’s plate towards him and snatched his fork right out of his hand.
“I'm fine,” he said. He winced at the memory of those same words coming from Gwyn. The dread he hadn't realised he had been feeling worsened at the mere thought of her name.
He dug into Cassian's midnight snack, shoving a forkful of cake into his mouth.
“You don't have anything to do with Gwyn rushing down the stairs to the library like the house is on fire do you?” Cassian stared at him with raised brows.
Azriel looked at him. “What…?” was all he managed to ask with his full mouth.
What is happening to her, to us? What did I do? How do I fix this?
His shadows still remained silent.
Cassian stared at him while rubbing his chin.
“Listen, I'm only asking because she hasn't seemed well since she went out alone yesterday.”
Azriel suddenly felt like he was swallowing stones. “What?” he asked incredulously.
What is he talking about?
His shadows did not answer him again. But Cassian thankfully did.
“She insisted that she didn’t mind you missing one of your dates,” he put the last word between air quotes, “but her face told another story.”
Cassian kept talking, telling him how Gwyn had looked when she had joined them at the River House after.
Something clicked inside him. The fork he held fell on the table, its clatter echoing in the room.
Finally, his shadows muttered collectively.
“You're more dense than I thought.” Cassian shook his head, disappointment lacing his words as he dragged the plate back to him.
Azriel’s eyes widened. His heart pounded in his chest. His mind raced in panic.
He fucked up. And now he was paying for it, he realised. He needed to fix this. He had to if he wanted Gwyn back. And Azriel was willing to do anything.
°•°•°•○🌑○•°•°•°
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How does the 2003 turtles react to crushes - part 1
Just a little thing cuz I miss writing, i miss tmnt and I haven’t got the time to do a full one shot or mashup in MONTHS 😔, I’m still on season 1-2 so if anything is a bit too ooc, I apologize! I love reading about crushes, first kisses, first loves, so this is for my puppy love stage lovers out there!! p.s: there's a poll for the next turtle by the end of the headcanon, make sure to vote your favorite! <3
(English is not my first language and I have dyslexia, I try to check everything before posting but sometimes grammar mistakes still happen, I apologize in advance if you find one!)
Leo
That’s some deeply repressed, effortless devotion energy right there, Leo is a pro at pretending that everything is fine, keeping it cool, but on the inside? so freaking nervous it’s not even funny
it's almost creepy how quiet he suddenly gets near you on your first visits, he acts in such a secluded but... odd way that everyone know something is up with him, but no one really knows what.
His younger brothers are all 🤨 over how he’s acting, at first, they noticed tiny shifts in his behaviors, they weren’t big enough to raise a red flag of such change, but when Leo shows how inpatient and careless he has become in training or meditating, then they KNOW something was really off . he has been careless for the silliest things as well, breaking the toaster more than once a week, forgetting to nag them about the open toothpaste, stuff he usually wouldn't miss it, but suddenly he doesn't mind it anymore.
None of them have the guts to ask him (Raph and Mikey might tease here and there, but you know, it’s Raph and Mikey) Don might find himself studying his brother from time to time, interested to why his older brother is being way more introspective than before, he wonders if maybe he’s going through a natural turtle process of some sort April is the only one who truly leaves him be, but as your visits become more frequent, it all clicks when you randomly stop by to deliver some groceries by Master Splinter request.
The pure lovesick look he glances at you when you first enter... you caught him completely off guard as he was leaving the dojo with Master Splinter, his dementor shifted back rapidly to stoic, but April noticed it, her eyes widened slightly as it all made sense, softening right after. Leo helps you with the groceries with agility, as Master Splinter excuses himself after he thanks you, he even dares to make small talk after an extremely long and awkward moment of silence (which he researched his possible lines in his head several times, made up several scenarios in which topic it could lead into, I might add) We have seen how Leo reacts to Usagi in the series (he has a fat crush on each other and I’m right) so you know even if he is indeed nervous, Leo is so dedicated to your well-being, attentive to your needs and inputs to missions or even movie debates, it’s heartwarming to see how inclusive he can be of you. He notices everything – Not in an obvious way, or a loud way, but in a way that means you’ll never have to ask him twice about something important to you. You mention offhand that you like a certain type of tea? He remembers. You’re shivering? He’s already handing you his jacket before you can say a word. The exact moment you get tired even before you admit it.
One day at training after sparring, you absentmindedly rubbed your wrist. You didn’t say anything, didn’t complain at the pain you might have felt, but later that night, you find a perfectly wrapped bandage roll left on top of your bag. No note. No explanation. You glance at Leo, and he’s just calmly cleaning his takana, pretending like he has no idea what you’re looking at. He’s not the type to shower you with words, but his actions speak volumes. He makes sure you always walk on the safe path while coming back from a mission or scorting you back home, he picks whatever condiment out of your food because he remembers you don’t like them. He’ll “coincidentally” be around when you need help, even if he acts like it’s no big deal. He's gentle, kind, and a true gentleman, he makes sure his presence is there. He effortlessly puts so much thought into you, it’s just how his mind works.
He disliked how nervous he first got around you, but after a while, he didn’t even realize how he had grown used to thinking about you. He grabs an extra bottle of water without thinking because you might be thirsty later. His brothers joke that he’s got favorites, and he just denies it, but deep down? Yeah. It’s you. Eventually, he has to talk to someone, and he chooses to confide in April about… well, everything? regarding feelings, about how to be sure, what does it feel like to love someone and how should he react to it? wait, did he say love? How can he stop his hands from getting so sweaty? this is ridiculous, should he feel anxious and at ease around you all at the same time? From time to time, he tells himself he doesn’t like you like that, that he’s just looking out for you because you’re part of the team, part of the family. that's just him being a leader, That’s all it is.
his train of thought is broken as he hears Mikey chuckle “Dude, you’ve got it bad.”
Leo stiffens, cleaning his throat as he turns he page of his book a bit too slow “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you SO do.” Mikey grins. “The ‘eyes-follow-them-every-time-they-leave-the-room’ thing? The ‘silent-knight-hovering’ thing? classic move, real smooth.”
Leo exhales through his nose, forcing himself to focus on back his book. It’s not like that. It can’t be. "Maybe you should tell them, who knows, they might be looking back right at ya" Mikey winks at him, biting on this apple as he sits on the couch, turning on the tv. Maybe he was looking at you too long, maybe he wasn't as subtle as he thought he was, or his brothers just, unfortunately, know him too well and finally caught up. He prided himself and his control, his calm exterior, carefully managed. but maybe you slip through the cracks. He can't help but to continue notice how eyes shine brighter when you smile, remembering every little thing about you, doing things that only you get to see. Deep down, he knows. He just doesn’t know what to do with it yet.
#2003 tmnt#tmnt 2003#tmnt leo#tmnt leo x reader#tmnt x reader#tmnt leonardo x reader#tmnt headcanons#giulia writes#tmnt 2003 headcanons
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medialog january 2k25
books
ling ma, severance - first book of the year an unfortunate dud! the most notable thing about this book is that it’s a pandemic story published in 2018, but this is also true of carmen maria machado’s “inventory” which is a much better story at like 15% of the length. by chance literally the day after i started reading this brandon taylor sent out a newsletter talking about first person narration devoid of interiority, which allowed me to be like, yes, that! that’s what’s so fucking annoying about this! a first person narrative that feels like a list of stuff that happened, instead of a glimpse into someone else’s consciousness. and i knooooow people would say that’s the poiiiint because the book is reeeeally about late capitalist anomie or whatever, which would also be used to explain the fact that the narrator has no personality or emotional life, like she’s just so disaffected and detached and blah blah blah, but the theoretical justification for this mode doesn’t have any bearing on the visceral fact that i just at no point cared about anyone in this story, because it’s impossible to care about a narrator who doesn’t care about anything or act like a human being (a species that famously cares about things lol). might also be impossible to care about a narrator with a trust fund… open to having my mind changed on this one though. other complaints: prose clunky, nobody else in this book has a personality either, palpably convinced of its own interest and importance in a way that feels very Litfic Does Genre Trope Without Wondering If Any Genre Writers Have Thought About This At All Ever (zombies as capitalist metaphor is like... even i know that and i hate zombie shit!) the pandemic stuff closest to being interesting but the page count is unforgivably focused on 1 million backstory flashback chapters totally divorced from the present day because god forbid someone who wants to tell an immigrant narrative figure out a way to somehow integrate this into the actual plot of their book or otherwise develop a character through scene and action… truly this reads like someone was trying to write an autobiographical novel and realized they couldn’t make it interesting/saleable so they chucked a pandemic narrative at it to capitalize on the twenty-first century genre turn. i don’t know if that’s what happened… but that is how poorly the disparate threads are woven together.
miranda popkey, topics of conversation - really liked this! like it more the more i sit with it. i had it already and it happens to get mentioned in that taylor newsletter i mentioned as being a different kind of first-person narrator, so i read it figuring at least it wouldn’t annoy me in the same way as severance. i was a little skeptical at first for two reasons: (1) the book is told through a series of conversations across a long span of years, which i was worried was a cheat to avoid having a plot; (2) early on lots of women and sex and power stuff, which is dangerous territory re: potential to irritate me. but it won me over on the second point quickly by undercutting what it had seemed to be doing in a refreshing way near the end of the first chapter, and by the end i was ready to concede point (1) because it had done a very good job of telling a story beneath the story it was telling; more than once i was kind of rolling my eyes like, okay, but, really?, only to find a little while later the book addressing precisely what had been my concern, which made me feel like i had been pleasantly tricked. the prose is unshowy but very self-assured with a good ear, and a few lines/passages burrowed under my skin. the narrator is self-critical without being self-indulgent… idk, it threaded a number of needles very well. impressed and pleased.
myriam gurba, mean - another one i started out wobbly on and wound up liking a lot. in this case, the cover/what i’d heard led me to expect a different, darker, tone than i found, and i wasn’t sure i was on board; funnily enough, at one point i thought, disparagingly, “eh, kinda zine-y,” and then something clicked and i remembered wait, i like zine-y, and that let me recalibrate and get sucked in. mean is a memoir, more or less, opening with a description of a rape-murder in gurba’s hometown and then switching gears to become a coming-of-age story in vignettes, with the reason for the opening scene eventually coming clear in a way that made me really admire what the book was doing formally as a way to talk about sexual assault; i was also reminded of the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, a book i loved, both for its form and for, to some extent, its tone, or its willingness to combine a light touch and a sense of humor with some dark-ass material (although mean is not YA and goes much darker in both content and expression) & often incisive racial commentary. gurba is a really playful, funny, curious writer, and while i think she could have killed a few darlings, by the end her voice had really won me over. she is not opposed to pushing hard on the bounds of good taste, and i would say that most of the time i was with her because she was either honestly capturing the sociopathic awfulness of teenagers, including her own teenage self (people who self-righteously respond “well i actually never laughed at XYZ in high school…” this book is not for you and also you are annoying, and i say this as someone known in high school as a bit of a PC scold myself!), or else, for example, making jokes about her own sexual assault or other issues, and then there were some times where, like… ok maybe an illustrative example is that i saw a goodreads review that was like “i was loving this book until she used touretted as a verb, my condition is not a cute joke,” and i was like, on the one hand, i get it, but on the other hand, the prison rape joke didn’t phase you? the holocaust joke? (holocaust joke distinct from the chapter about how reading the diary of anne frank made her horny btw.) so… on that score tolerance will reasonably vary lol. given that a fair amount of the back half of the book is in fact about the aftermath of sexual assault, i really admired how the book refused any kind of redemptive arc, landing on a brutal note, but also avoided feeling oppressively downbeat by virtue of the ferocity of its own telling, which stands as its own proof of survival.
elaine castillo, how to read now: essays - not for me. none of the ideas here felt new if you’ve ever spent more than five minutes considering the relationship between art, race, & politics, and i didn’t feel like they were ever explored at a depth beyond (or… even equal to?) that which i would find on a random tuesday scrolling my tumblr dash. elegance of expression can be its own justification but stylistically this book mostly just convinced me that books are not blogs and should not sound like the internet; the lack of discipline which can be a feature in internet writing (not always! but can be) is always a bug in print (or, at least, i haven’t encountered the book to convince me otherwise). i was excited that the title of the first essay was “reading teaches empathy and other fictions” but then instead of unpacking the cultural ideology that associates any kind of moral education with leisure pursuits at all it was mostly about how the white straight male story is granted universality but others are not, which… you perhaps see what i mean about how this will not be revelatory for those of us enrolled in the continuing ed program at supernatural dot edu slash tumblr dot html. there’s a weird essay about going to new zealand and being like “wow imagine if native relationships were this good in the US?” which i found weirdly uncomfortable to read from an american who by her own admission is not well-versed in that region’s history. she opens an essay by being like “i know it’s basically boring to talk about how you hate joan didion” and then spends 45 pages doing that (including what i think is a misread of at least the tone of didion’s comment that writing is the act of a bully - i’m not a didionhead and would never defend her famously terrible politics, but a) she is i think pretty clearly being both hyperbolic and self-deprecating b) castillo takes this as the chance to be like “well i write to be vulnerable and connect,” which… perhaps this is self-indulgent self-deprecation on my own part but i have an instinctive and strong aversion to writers hyping up their own reasons for writing, lol c) this is objectively not a stance exclusive to white ladies bc zadie smith once said essentially the same thing except i think she used the word sociopathic lol)... and then in the end notes of that chapter she drops a casual rec for the “excellent” show our flag means death which… girl, be serious… you’re gonna write 300 pages about the dangers of reading without context and then simp for the slaveholder RPF show with no commentary whatsoever? it’s fine to like that show btw i might watch it myself one of these days but it’s just deranged to drop this without qualifiers in a book allegedly against the act of eliding historical reality for the sake of aesthetic pleasure and comforting fantasy! she also does two things that are unfortunately guaranteed to make me, personally, insane (characterizing damon lindelof’s HBO watchmen as an important statement on race in america and being kinda wrong about the odyssey) which i will address below the cut at the bottom of this post because i understand that my own need to talk about them is the result of my bad personality and also this is long enough already.
movies
no - this is a 2012 movie about the plebiscite vote that ended the pinochet reign, starring gael garcia bernal as the young ad guy the leftists rope in to helping them make the best use of their allotted 15 minutes of TV time. i really loved this, for a few reasons. first, an interestingly and well-made movie; the director is the guy who did spencer, which i hated, and i don’t know if it’s a matter of directing in spanish or what but it felt like two totally different worlds. second, some extremely funny and perhaps broadly relevant commentary on the purity-strategy tension in leftist spaces; i particularly loved the scene where our protagonist unveils the logo and the leftists are like, “oh, and the different colors of the rainbow represent the factions of the leftist coalition coming together, right?” and he’s like “uh huh. yeah. totes.” third, there’s a matter-of-factness to the way the movie depicts living in a military dictatorship — depicts oppression, depicts military violence against civilians — that felt refreshing and, ummm…. very un-American. perhaps very latin american. but certainly very un-American. something really fucked up happens and it feels bad and then you go home and play trains with your kid and you maybe don’t expect that everyone is spending 8 hours a day wringing your hands about How Is Anyone To Live Now. fortuitous timing for me personally maybe to watch this on new year’s day 2025. also gael garcia bernal is always the only guy in the scene wearing jeans and rides his skateboard everywhere. strong rec.
the shop around the corner - the philadelphia story baby jimmy stewart pilled me so bad that when i learned this both starred baby jimmy stewart and was directed by ernst lubitsch i was like, wow i GOTTA see that. two coworkers hate each other while falling for the anonymous correspondents that are, of course, each other all along… this does a couple things that mitigate the screwball romcom gender politics problem, my favorite of which is introducing the female lead in a scene that highlights her smarts and competence, which is important in a love story about a meeting of the minds. has superb production design, lighting so good even i was like “wow the lighting,” a great ensemble cast given a good amount to do in a way that makes the whole movie feel really suffused with tenderness and care even amidst all the screwball prickliness, and most importantly some incredibly funny jokes.
one way or another (todo modo) - this is a really weird italian 70s thriller whose plot is largely incomprehensible if you are not conversant in italian party politics of the 70s, which i am not, but it was still worth watching for the unbelievable Catholicism Is So Fucked Up vibes… the whole movie takes place in a catholic spirituality retreat packed with power-players, largely underground in the spookiest ass rooms imaginable… there’s a ruthless priest and a million political freaks… and then people start dying… kinda conclave meets and then there were none meets glass onion? tbh sassier and bitchier and more honest about institutional catholicism than conclave!
a complete unknown - most of the non-singing parts of this movie are Fine, I Guess, If You Like Biopics; some are pretty bad (why does this movie hate alan lomax so much… to say nothing of the women, through no fault of the two actresses doing their damned best…). the cast is reliably good, i was worried at first timmy was going to be giving SNL sketch the whole time but something shifted and he won me over and i thought he was good and especially that he was very funny in the too-rare moments the movie found itself a sense of humor, mostly on the topic of bob dylan being a weird freak pathological liar with no social skills or interest in developing them (valid and should have taken up way more of the runtime than it did!!!). lots of people have complained about how much of this movie is just watching bob dylan write down lines while playing his guitar but i actually think this is even worse than people are saying because what it does is almost entirely obscure dylan’s voracious cultural appetite and eclectic influences, which is a huge part of what makes him the artist of he is, and which he himself is the first to own (chronicles volume 1 — of 1 lmao — is in my memory almost entirely dylan talking about what he was reading and listening to and watching as a young person). however the reality is that none of this really matters to the viewing experience of the movie because the movie smartly understands it’s not going to be better at making a movie than bob dylan is at making songs, so it just never makes you wait very long before the next time bob dylan is playing a bob dylan song, and if you are a certain kind of person for whom the music of bob dylan has a certain kind of effect — which i am — what happens is that the opening notes of one of the best songs in american music history starts up and all cares over “screenwriting” and “gender” and such things fall away and you just sit there in a haze so grateful to live in a world where bob dylan gave us “girl from north country.” also, credit where credit is due: the movie looks very good, in a very standard hollywood way but well that’s a dying art it seems. i liked all the lens flares in the night scenes! they were pretty and evocative without being distracting!
juror #2 - i love watching a movie about people talking about a process while i wash dishes. bonus points for this one because of my wrongful convictions thing — i found it genuinely a relief to watch a courtroom drama in which we know the whole time that the logic of the court seems persuasive to many people but is wholly wrong. nicholas hoult!
jay and silent bob reboot - this is an objectively pretty bad and at times genuinely offensive movie that made me laugh so, so much. im sorry
presence - i was absolutely never not going to love a soderbergh ghost story; i like that it’s less a horror movie and more a family drama from the perspective of the ghost, and i like that steven soderbergh, who i first started feeling interested in because of how unusually willing he is (among our A-tier dude directors) to view women as potential protagonists, made a movie largely about a sad lonely teenage girl. camera work on the ghost POV very cool and for me very effective. a tight 85 minutes! they shot it in 11 days! i love you steven!
nosferatu - already said this was a miss for me, and the more i think about it the more i feel reasonably sure that it would have been even if i were not so dracula-pilled… idk. i agree with my anon who called it cold. there’s a fundamental distance between the storyteller and the story that, again, was part of what i enjoyed about the lighthouse, but just doesn’t work for me with a more traditional, more visceral (in multiple senses) tale. similarly to the line about how there can’t be an anti war war movie, because you can’t portray combat without glorifying it, i sorta feel like maybe you can’t tell a story where you want credit for giving your abused and disbelieved female protagonist agency and also have multiple scenes that are like, “ok now do the crazy possessed horror chick thing” lol. i also thought it looked kinda bad in parts and really muddy in all the moonlight scenes but i did see one review on lbxd that was basically like “this movie only looks good in IMAX bc regular theaters can’t get the blacks deep enough” so… maybe that’s true. on the bright side: nicholas hoult!
music
kendrick lamar, gnx - this thing happens to me often with music where anything presented as A Big Deal i have a hard time listening to because i keep being like no it’s not the right time… this is why for example i have never listened to a mitski album and also why until now i had never heard kendrick outside of his features with taylor (bad, not his fault) and the lonely island (p. good) and, ofc, not like us. but “squabble up” came up at the singles jukebox and i got really into one of the slant-rhyme runs near the end and the general personality of his flow so i decided to check out the album and would you believe? kendrick lamar, good at rapping. i like how this album is like kind of about having a god complex and sort of knowing you’re being crazy but also what if actually you kind of mean it? (people get mad if you say this kind of thing so don’t tell anyone but it’s actually similar to the pose i enjoy taylor striking on some of the wilder moments on TTPD, lol.)
girl pusher, gaslight gatekeep girlpusher - 20 minutes of very of-the-moment hardcore-adjacent punk, mostly too hardcore for me (literally, i don’t like music that’s all screamy) but the 3 songs that aren’t are real bangers.
ghoulies, shafted by the algorithm - 20 minutes of bright synthy punk where i have no idea what anyone is saying, kind of like matt and kim with less abrasive vocals? (remember matt & kim??? no? bc i’m old? well ok). not an album i’ll return you but i liked the vibe enough to chuck the whole thing onto my 2k25 rolling faves list and have been enjoying the occasional 2-minute infusions of pep!
underscores, wallsocket (director’s cut) - really impressed by this one, and also really enjoyed it. i keep seeing people call underscores hyperpop but either their earlier work (which i haven’t heard) is very different or i just don’t actually know what hyperpop is (very possible). to me it’s giving aughts indie, maybe a little emo but like the bright eyes kind, it’s giving saddle creek but made by a kesha fan. (does anyone else feel like we’re really in a post-kesha era in a way that is not being appreciated…) catchy, inventive, varied but cohesive, angry and funny, political & personal in the lyrics, sometimes at the same time. there’s a song called “johnny johnny johnny” which is an incredible banger about being groomed by an internet predator in middle school that really blew me away; would also rec “cops and robbers” just because it slaps. but even the quiet songs are good!
rosie gray, louder, please - flawless and sometimes even kind of interesting (although never that interesting) dance-infused pop (pop-infused dance? i think the first one but i’m no expert). pretty, fun, sometimes endearingly unsubtle — there’s a song literally called “party people” and another one where the refrain is “the best things in life are free,” also one called “switch” that rhymes “positions” with “submission.” dumb but thoughtfully and expensively so (or so it sounds, which is what counts). the way that people talk about feeling when they watch influencers swanning poolside in ibiza or whatever, that’s what listening to this album makes me feel like. vicarious luxury and all i need is a pair of headphones. another one where i don’t anticipate returning to the album as an album much but i rarely hit skip when a track shuffles my way.
zora, BELLAdonna - yoooooo this album FUCKS, like, SEVERELY!!!!!! saw someone rec this saying it was framed as a black trans revenge fantasy, which, i’ll be honest, turned out to have absolutely no bearing my listening experience whatsoever, but i am dutifully repeating because maybe you, too, will be intrigued enough to listen, and then discover that this album has BOPS. i am not really up to the task of describing this one — rap/hip-hop forward but with glimpses of both r&b and a pop (maybe even hyperpop?) sensibility, obviously broad in its influences (there are at least two likely refs to bodak yellow lol) while sounding like the clear work of a distinct voice, retro and futuristic by turns or sometimes at the same time. sounds really really cool and really really fun. sick flow, sick beats, a song called “sick sex”... strong strong overall rec here, this album rules.
single of the year so far is "IT girl" by jade (from little mix!!!) btw. if you care. really delivering on always low-key being the most interesting of the quartet in what she's put out so far, not all of it is my thing but she has a Vision and IT girl is a certified bop... really curious about where she goes next.
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okay so petty grudge-holding below the cut:
first, the watchmen thing. to start with, she drops in the intro that she admires HBO watchmen, and like, did this alone make me read the entire book less generously than i otherwise might have? entirely possible. that is me owning my positionality as a reader. anyway. mostly here i just want to say that she specifically discusses the fucking 1922 movie about a black hero saving a grateful white crowd that made me the joker and drops that the name of the hero is “historically accurate” because he’s named for the first black marshal in oklahoma or whatever, which, ok. cute, i guess, if i didn’t hate this. what i hate, and what is not historically accurate, is: the existence of a film in 1922 (7 years after birth of a nation!!!!!) with a portrayal of american race relations that looks anything at all like the one in this movie. i mean it’s just crazy. and i find it first of all just inane because if you’re capable of writing this scene and thinking it feels plausible, you by definition do not have a good handle on the history of antiblack racism in america or how deeply it has resided at the core of american popular culture (among other things), and second of all genuinely kind of offensive because of the smash cut to Real Historical Atrocity that follows, underscoring the alleged “realism” of the scene. and it is insane to me to praise this scene for its “historically accurate” detail in a book, again, largely about the importance of bringing an understanding of historical context to your reading. it makes the author look a little bit like she only means that for stuff she already happens to know about or saw someone else talk about online. lol.
also the essay starts out being like “another day another jkr twitter meltdown” which does not help with the sense that these essays were blog posts that did not get sufficiently cleaned up for publication (is that true? idk. it’s how it reads though!). and it’s called “the limits of white fantasy” (but then is largely about how HBO watchmen is good lmao) and has a thing like “well rightwing types can appropriate symbols from harry potter and the hunger games and wherever else because those authors never cared about oppression they were just interested in its trappings.” first of all, leave my girl suzanne collins, cashing her checks blissfully offline, out of this. but second of all i actually think this is a substantively wrong diagnosis. jkr very, very, very obviously and sincerely cares about oppression. she is just catastrophically wrong about who is oppressing whom! but it’s extremely clear she thinks of herself as an actual victim of the actual injustice (in her head) of the woke trans mob or whatever. ditto antivaxxers using hunger games cues or whatever. they sincerely believe their rights are being infringed upon. sometimes people are actually wrong! sometimes people care a lot about morality and justice and are wrong about what those things are! i think this is in general harder for people to contend with than the idea that anyone engaging in such wack behavior just “doesn’t care”... but it is true. writing this out makes me think i undersold the insight potential value-add of naomi klein’s doppelganger, because she’s actually really good about recognizing that while these movements involve a lot of sociopath grifters at the top, the footsoldiers are people responding to ways they do in fact feel victimized (and sometimes actually are, e.g. i literally can’t remember if klein talks about this or not although i think probably yes but a lot of people in the alt-wellness/medicine space got there as a result of terrible experiences with healthcare that failed to address their physical and emotional needs).
ok also AND one last thing about this essay, she really gives the impression that she thinks damon lindelof is like the first person ever in history to politicize the figure of the vigilante/superhero… lmao? she praises the show for being about how actually community is necessary and justice can’t be done solo, which, first of all, just gonna throw this out there, there are ways to tell that story without being like truly the most police brutality apologia nonsense i have ever seen, and secondly, this is literally thematically expressed quite poignantly in alan moore & dave gibbons’ comic limited series watchmen in the scene where the guy acting as a lone vigilante who has taken the fate of humanity into his own hands nukes a bunch of new yorkers coming together to try to mediate some conflict. do i think that you need to have read watchmen to write an essay — not a BLOG POST on your DUMB BLOG, an ESSAY in a BOOK — about the politics HBO watchmen? i mean, maybe? is that so crazy? she says making hooded justice black is a radical reimagining of a comics character which is so funny because it makes hooded justice sound like he’s fucking superman or something and not a probable nazi who dressed up as a kinky klansman as part of watchmen’s commentary on the politics of superheroes lmao. like hooded justice is already a radical reimagining of the superhero mythos… because he sucks… and i guess in my heart no i don’t think i’m just being a weird watchmen stan (lmao) to say, “you actually can’t get a meaningful read on the politics of HBO watchmen without taking into account that the actual intervention being performed with this character is ‘what if this nazi was actually a sympathetic black man.’” do you see how that feels different? (also not for nothing but wrt the idea of HBO HJ being inspired by the movie about a black hero, again, in the comics HJ through his klan-ish costuming is already inspired by american iconography of heroism — arguably one he also saw in a silent movie that actually existed by the name of birth of a nation lmao!!!!! — which is part of the indictment of american hero iconography… i mean whatever. it’s so fucking stupid. btw her big takeaway from this character’s arc is that justice has to happen in community which is also funny because like you know who had a really strong sense of community? the klan.) do you see how it feels maybe extra different in a show whose ultimate thesis is something like “what if nuclear weapons were good if we gave them to a black lady cop who loves doing police brutality so so much”?
and… ok one LAST-last thing… in her informal endnotes, she cites “the watchmen universe” created by moore & gibbons, which… idk man. on the one hand i’m like, ok but it actually is mostly irrelevant to my textual beefs here that watchmen was in fact not intended to be a “universe” as we now use that term in the IP era and that the extent to which it has become one has been expressly at the disapproval of moore largely because of the fact that DC fucked him over so bad with this that it literally changed comics contracts going forward lmao. but on the other hand, if you like claim to care about the social context in which art was created, isn’t it not the best look to do not a single google and uncover the most famous example of the abominable labor practices of the comics industry? i acknowledge i could be indulging in pettiness at this point.
OKAY so that’s all on watchmen i think. the odyssey thing is smaller and less of a big deal, more just goofy. so she talks about the cyclops sequence and highlights how in recounting this story to the phaeacians odysseus is identifying certain arbitrary marks of “civilization” such as cultivating fields, and how he ignores the arguably very “civilized” acts we see polyphemus the cyclops commit, such as tending his sheep and making cheese. this is all fine and unobjectionable, even true, although i will say that, first, she presents this like these are insights she is bringing to her close reading of the text but i really struggle to imagine the person in the past several decades who would disagree with the fundamental thesis “the stories and myths and texts of ancient cultures served in part to delineate and reinforce their own social norms”; and second, she opens the essay with an epigraph from toni morrison talking about how she always admired how homer could make you feel sad for the man-eating cyclops, but then she doesn’t bring this quote up at all and talks about polyphemus’s sheep and cheese as though recognizing in them the marks of humanity is, again, a novel way to read the text? idk maybe i am just misreading her tone bc by this point i was very tired of how impressive she seemed to find herself but i found it odd because she’s like “see polyphemus is actually complicated but odysseus doesn’t see that” and i’m like well yeah that’s like what morrison was talking about… i have no idea how this would have scanned in ancient greece bc i’m not a classicist but neither are you so… anyway. i couldn't figure out her attitude on the odyssey (or this chunk of it) as a text, i guess.
so she takes us through the whole incident, including a cutesy reading of “nobody is blinding me” as like a metaphor for how power operates by making it impossible to name it, which, sure. have fun. and she closes on odysseus’s final boast along the lines of “if anyone asks tell them it was odysseus of ithaca son of laertes who blinded you.” and then she goes into this whole thing about how like… this is odysseus wielding his privilege basically, that he’s doing this because he’s so secure in his name and the power that grants him. she says, “It’s his confidence in his own context that is Odysseus’s greatest strength, his greatest privilege, and his greatest cruelty.” which… i guess kinda makes sense… if you ignore the part where namedropping himself is literally what GETS HIS ASS CURSED? he drops his name and instantly polyphemus is like “grandpa end that motherfucker” and boom, odysseus’s men are doomed to death and he is cursed to ten years at sea. like… it is literally not his greatest strength!!! it is the thing that gets his ass beat!!!! and notice that observing this, the BASIC LITERAL PLOT OF THE TEXT, does not require morally defending odysseus, or claiming homer was woke, or whatever. it is very obviously the case that the text does not think odysseus’s thing about his name is bad and he is being punished for it to learn lmao. i actually literally pulled my old fagles translation off the shelf to find what bernard knox had to say about this, if anything, in the intro, and he reads it as an expression (one of several) of the same heroic code you see achilles living by in the iliad, which includes the idea that you must take credit for your shit — even in this situation in which doing so puts yourself and your ship at great risk. this is not a particularly sympathetic reading to most modern readers! but it is one that takes into account the fact that this is the inciting incident for LITERALLY THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE POEM!!! like it is crazy to quote that line and end the story there as if odysseus just walks away unbothered! the point of that interaction is not that he’s acting like a vanderbilt trying to get a table at a fancy restaurant, and it is not incidental what happens next because what happens next is THE ENTIRE STORY! and, like… it’s also not incidental because the fact of the matter is the world of homer is simply not a world where your name protects you, or achilles and agammemnon would not be hanging out in the fucking underworld. i’m thinking here about knox’s comment on the iliad that it was written in a century where athens spent more years at war than not, and how crucial understanding that is for understanding the world these stories were created in… i mean on the one hand whatever but on the other hand the essay collection is literally about the idea of reading things in context… so like… whatever. you could take the events in the text and then discuss their influence on 3000 years of western art and how that trickles down into values or whatever, i guess… but she didn’t do that so like :/
also then she says “he may be traveling, but he’s not a migrant,” which i just found goofy because i’m not really convinced the concept of A Migrant as she seems to want us to read it makes a ton of sense to superimpose onto the mediterranean 3000 years ago. (i feel like A Migrant requires the concept of… nations? borders? etc.?) happy to be corrected on this by any classicists who follow me.
also her didion essay is not as good a takedown as either didion's own takedown of woody allen or barbara harrison's takedown of didion. lol.
anyway. ok. that’s my grudges off my chest lmao.
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it’s ever so slightly unfortunate but maybe simultaneously interesting (in the sense of getting to see other people’s interpretations) that whenever a post of mine about theron starts going around, inevitably there will be an addition that on the whole aligns with my interpretations of the text and then the poster puts something in there that makes me grimace and go “oooooooh, i don’t agree with that actually”
anyway. theron does not hate the jedi order. one might even suggest, judging by one of his good friends being one, his mother also being one (and though the relationships with those character are complex, he still values them), him having partnered with the sixth line on ziost and took personal responsibility for what happened to them (and was fiercely defensive of surro and wanted to make sure she got back to the order), and whenever he talks about ngani zho, he still calls him master — sorry, i just don’t think a guy who hates the jedi or the jedi order or feels any lasting resentment towards them would do all of those things.
i do think there are particular kinds of jedi he doesn’t get along with (there’s a line floating around in my brain from annihilation but i can’t fully recall it), and he makes a kind of bitter comment about mind-reading in forged alliances if a jedi player gets mad he wasn’t more clear about the operation he was asking you to join (iirc). but these are, like, two instances stacked up against all his other interactions with the order.
like, again we’re going off of memory, but i don’t really think he get too much specific dialogue with him as a jedi as it pertains to your relationship. which, because it’s swtor, could’ve been a cut-content sort of thing, and i do argue it was a missed opportunity, and at the same time, the only reason i think it’d ever be a big deal to theron is in a romance route specifically because of the Attachment Rule. this is one situation - one - where i really think it should’ve come up considered how theron Happened, but, like, if you’re friends with him, why would it matter to him if you’re a jedi or not?
of course, i don’t think it’s the game that people get this interpretation from. what i think it’s from is that godforsaken series of panels from lost suns that gets posted here out of context, and people take that one snippet of a scene from the lost suns comics and go “oh, so theron hates and resents the jedi and so jedi x theron is weird” NOOOOOOO!!!!! [casts fireball]
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Hi! I love the way you interpret the books—you stick to what is canon, and it’s always great to see that.
I was wondering if you enjoy negative characters in the fandom while fully acknowledging that they are, of course, negative. I don’t justify their actions in any way, but I find them fascinating from a narrative and psychological perspective. Their motivations, dynamics, and the way they shape the story can be incredibly compelling, even if they are morally reprehensible (Voldemort, Bellatrix, Narcissa, etc…)
Do you also find some of them interesting in that sense?
I love characters who are terrible people, especially when the narrative doesn’t try to sell me that they’re good people, because they’re not, but at the same time, it shows that they’re human, and all humans can be terrible people or do terrible things, while also having a decent side. I mean, let’s take the Malfoys as an example, which in my opinion is the best: Are they horrible aristocratic elitists? Yes. Do they have a disgusting elitist mentality? Also yes. Do they invest their economic and social capital, as well as themselves, in movements that actively harm others? Totally. Are they terrible people? Of course, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have good qualities. Narcissa and Lucius are a couple that love each other, support each other, and above all, adore their son. Have they raised Draco terribly? No one denies that, but they love him. Draco is so confident and arrogant because his parents have given him a lot of self-assurance, and in fact, unlike Ron, who is TERRIFIED of the consequences his actions might have at home when Molly finds out, for example, Draco always shows a fascinating confidence in telling his father absolutely everything. Even in CoS, when Lucius complains that Draco’s grades are mediocre, Draco doesn’t seem offended or scared, he doesn’t see his father as a threatening figure; he’s just ANNOYED because Lucius said it publicly. That shows that his parents have given him enough confidence to tell them all his problems and have the assurance that they’ll always help him. Is that spoiling him? They spoil him in many ways, certainly, but at the same time, it’s quite positive for a child to feel they can tell their parents everything, whether it’s positive or negative, and we know Draco does this because it’s mentioned repeatedly in the series. Does that make the Malfoys better people? Well, no, as people, they’re terrible, but being a terrible person in one aspect of your life doesn’t mean you’re going to be terrible in everything. You can be a terrible, tyrannical boss and then be an amazing boyfriend. You could have had a terrible relationship with someone who thinks you’re the devil for how things ended, and then your next partner could think you were the best ex they ever had. You can have terrible political ideas and then love your family a lot. I’m sorry, but you can be the boss of a cartel that has literally killed dozens of people and have been a wonderful father, one thing doesn’t negate the other.
I’m very interested in this duality in characters, how some people can really have two faces, or what leads someone to commit a crime, or what happened for someone to end up on the wrong side. I like complex characters, although I prefer morally gray ones over villains. The problem is that most characters in Harry Potter are either darkened or whitewashed narratively. I’m not being picky about this because in the end, it was initially a story for children that later evolved into a young adult story, but still… meh. I mean, I think more could have been done with Bellatrix, I think Voldemort could have been explored better, I think Rowling was obsessed with selling us her moral framework for things. Honestly, I prefer books with multiple points of view where you decide if you like a character or not, but not because the author wants you to like or dislike them, but because you’ve had several versions - even the character’s own - and you can get a general idea of who they are and then decide.
But yes, of course, I’m generally more interested in morally questionable characters, I’ve always found them more interesting than heroes. As Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,' which implies that if there’s no conflict, there’s no story, because there’s no drama, and without drama, the story is flat. And for there to be drama, there have to be problems, and heroes never create problems.
#harry potter#harry potter analysis#harry potter meta#villians#heroes#villians and heroes#the malfoys#lucius malfoy#narcissa malfoy#draco malfoy#voldemort#bellatrix lestrange
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WHO'S THAT POKETEAM ??? IT'S D4 !!! 💥🔥🩸
#hypnosis mic#hypmic#hypnosis microphone#cheemaws art#hypstage#hypstage track 5#ibuki yagasaki#jyobu jikuin#rindo akune#seigen arima#d4#d4 hypmic#pokemon au#this was such a challenge but it was so much fun wow#might do more of this series if interested#i hope there are hypstage fans out there that see this i dunno the right tags for this
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Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.
#Fear and Hunger#D'arce Cataliss#Cahara#Ragnvaldr#Enki Ankarian#Unlike Dungeon Meshi - I cannot in good faith recommend this game to a broad audience.#My background with F&H goes as follows: I am hanging out with a friend. He says “hey try this game I've been playing.” I say “Okay!”#I have never heard of this game. I pick the mercenary. I go through 5 min of character history and background. I am mauled to death by dogs#It took me 4 resets to even get in the dungeon. But I finally get there. I am caught by a guard. He cuts off all but one of my limbs#I am forced to crawl around in a blood and corpse pit until the game tells me 'give up idiot'.#I reset. I am mauled by dogs again. I realize this is not for me but I am intrigued enough to go home and watch some playthroughs#And WOW what an interesting game it is! I really do appreciate games that blend their design philosophy with the theme it wants to set#This is a game about fear and hunger. And persevering. And penis (my god is there a lot of penis)#I recommend this to people who like extremely challenging games and can handle the many *content warnings* within this series#If the idea of Bloodborne/eldenring and undertale having a little RPG maker baby sounds appealing to you - give it a shot#It's made by ONE GUY and it's a great horror game. I am just really bad at it.#My friends just enjoy putting me in situations where I scream and yell. We don't talk about the corn mazes. Or the other horror game nights#Apparently I'm funny when I'm Scared!#As people who follow me on twitter might know; I am deep in the pits of this series right now. I will be back with more art.
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The X trilogy + "psycho-biddy" influences
#x 2022#pearl#maxxxine#x series#strait-jacket#psycho#what ever happened to baby jane#horror#psycho-biddy#hagsploitation#made this whole big thing which i still might post eventually but. in terms of aesthetics. this abridged version is better lol#i'm not gonna finish the other post tonight but consider this a preview of sorts#i can't stop thinking about what if they leaned more into the 'hagsploitation' aspect of it all lol#i actually find it odd + off-putting that they start and end maxxxine with a bette davis reference#with a big significant psycho cameo at the bates motel itself#and there's not really any payoff for those allusions!!#i think if you're gonna try to tie into a legacy of older horror films you should do it in a sincere way#because that just felt like 'elevated horror' bonus points + nostalgia bait#anyway. it's fun to think about the potential it had + how all the building blocks exist within the narrative to do something interesting#and i am a 1960s hagsploitation subgenre apologist lol#what ever happened to baby jane? changed my brain chemistry the first time i watched it as a kid#so maybe i'm just nostalgia baiting myself making these connections lmao#but it could have been so good#it could have been the perfect synthesis of the shared themes across all three movies#but i don't think hagsploitation gets butts in movie theater seats like girlboss 80s nostalgia vaguely true crime related shit#oh wait also i guess calling psycho a hagsploitation movie is like. probably not 100% accurate#but it is though. it's not an inversion of the subgenre bc the subgenre didn't exist yet#but it builds up a mystery 'psycho-biddy' character only to reveal that she's not the murderer#which is also what happens in strait-jacket so i think it counts!!#+ psycho is directly referenced in all 3 movies so it’s a pretty clear influence on the trilogy as a whole
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Glad we both enjoy hating omg.
AND YES! Istg the second that video dropped I watched it eagerly, I am such a Batman fan, ugh, if you're ever interested in him specifically, I'd heavily recommend Batman Animated Series, yearnful sigh. I miss when he's written well. And thank you! I appreciate this, I'm bound for a rewatch of this video, hehehe.
NO FR? Istg one of my BIGGEST pet peeves for lazy ass shipping is when OTHER characters have to comment on the relationship, as if it is in any way, shape, or form been properly conveyed as obvious to the audience. IT'S SO LAZY RAHHHHHH. Like you might as while have everyone calling them a couple and them blushing and saying NUH UH, and then never proceed to actually write them interested in each other, outside of predictable, boring commentary, WHICH IS OUT OF LEFT FIELD.
Rex and Eve are legit sm more interesting since they're supposed to be friends for years, then got together, and went through the same shit together. I'd legit rather than them than this. Why did Rex cheat? Why not explore any of these dynamics? Did Kate feel sidelined so she believed Eve and Rex were on a break? How shaky was their relationship?
Get this man in ethics, philosophy, therapy, and pysche classes istg. He truly needs college istg, bro needs education and awarenes. I do not believe he thought he actually thought of Eve, out of anything but guilt, if at ALL. This show feels like it's ACTIVELY trying to lie to me and it's not even doing it WELL? HELLO?
The villain opening was so dumb to me istg. Cecil's stuff I get why, but when it went back to why and justified why Cecil did what he did I wanted to roll my eyes. Like. I can assume why. I don't really need to see why. they're useful, and there's an unspoken GoG absence, yes? I get why Mark is opposed, sure, whatever. Can we use this time for anything else? If this show had more episodes and took things s l o w e r for once, it'd be more fitting to me. Otherwise? I don't care. Speaking of Oliver, they way he's better at fighting than Mark, like this is embarrassing. Mark lock in. Mark do better. Mark why is a child showing you up. WHY ARE EXPLICITLY SHOWN MARK IMPROVING AND THEN HE ACTS JUST AS SUCCESSFUL AS S1? HELLO?
I thought the fight against the underground monsters would be a great opportunity for him to be particularly lethal, like Omni-Man and actually show off some proper skills, and introduce Darkwing + Robots helping heros escape while he's distracted. Still can have Mark freak out, but people get reminded whose son he is. Casually shake off blood. Which we get later on (I wish it was cooler so bad, it's still my fav but with a hint of begrudging admittance), but I say why can't we have more feral Mark scenes? Why stop at one battle parallel with Nolan? Have him particularly lethal with monsters since he'll freak out over people, thinking of Angstrom! Let him mimic Nolan's efficiency and like casually dive through a monster's brain. Him freaking out when someone he cares about gets hurt is so dull to me, also? Did the venom work from the centipede????
GoG's breakup was truly so funny because none of these mfs have been meaningfully explored enough to make me shaken up that they're breaking up, or what that even means because their hero ecosystem isn't explored either! What's the stakes here? I don't get to see more dynamics I never got to see? I'm truly heart broken. Oh no. Also Immortal stay annoying me because bro truly invited himself, told everybody to stfu and get out to a team he decided he'd join back up again, and you're so correct he'd make a mf grovel to get back? Immortal don't be insufferable challenge.
Nolan being endeared to her because she's not afraid makes too much sense, omg. He's so baffled he's enraptured, and Debbie truly thinks he is not special for being capable of killing him, people could die randomly, asshole, get in line. I'd love to see how they got together if the show had time, and the potential dynamics from a "take no shit" Debbie and still learning about humanity, and flirting, Nolan.
REAL ASF THO. Like Invincible could be SO far if it was good. Shows where I'm already invested after it outright refuses to live up to it's potential are like catnip to me, I cannot shut up about it. I'm infuriated and enraptured and endeared. Begging everyone to watch this show, no I don't think it's incredible, watch it all anyway.
Please write the mentor Cecil fic of my dreams, if I can get some oneshots done I'd love to write it myself if I can think of some scenes. There's something so interesting about Cecil becoming an incidental (perhaps Mark opens up and Cecil Realizes: Oh, I can Use This) and then intentional mentor figure, (or again Mark insisting he needs to earn Immortal's approval to prove he's not his Dad fr). Like? Thefun extra wound of betrayal if Cecil still uses the whole scream thing! Maybe Robot/Rudy does a scan of him and finds it, and Mark has to conceptualize what it's for, or it's outright used to against him. I believe in Mark being put through the emotional ringer. Dad issues AND Dad-like mentor issues. Stack 'em.
GDA not have any contingencies or hidden plans is so baffling, like aren't you a paranoid department dealing with something as unstable and dangerous as supes? LIKE NO MEDICAL CHECK UP IS INSANE. Purposeful ignorance is so funny omg, they're actively make it difficult for them to pursue education lmao. But the way I would think they'd make Mark + Oliver binge every morality debate, philosophy, even skeezy therapy where the therapist is just snitching to what their mental states actually are. Enforcing Mark to understand how to fight mentally, and not following the same colonizer BS mindset. GIVE ME PARANOID GDA THINGS. Like if Mark went to college, does GDA have agent pretend to be a student to follow him?
While I'm not too familiar with the DCU- your batfam meta posts are intiguing- so in transfering some of the broader strokes from them- I think you tackling a 'Mark isn't Nolan's biological son' fic would be fascinating. Sort of a step to the side of the 'what if Mark never got his powers' fic that sometimes pop up in the fandom
OOOOOO chewing on this currently, hm, the much a distinct flavor of exactly what you’re talking about, but the potential for more family drama depending on WHO knows. Does Mark know?? Is he waiting every day only to be crushed? Does he confused non-Debbie features with Nolan’s? I suppose I’m not the most enthusiastic about non-power AUs, but I think there’s something very fun to explore about Mark having to settle with, if he knows all his life, he will never have powers? I think the trajectory of his dreams will obviously shift, I can see him still having that distinct fatherly idolization, but perhaps embraces being useful to the GDA? Cecil’s number one intern—only intern—curtesy of nepotism, ha! There is something tickling me about Mark taking the Robin Route/Role for the Teen Team in terms of having no powers, just insane skills, BUT there’s something way more delicious about intern Mark when s1e01 happens and Mark tries snooping around to find out the truth about what happened to his Dad.
I wonder if, with Mark having a whole another father, if they’re more or less distant relationship, depending on WHEN Nolan entered Mark’s life? Like if Debbie met Nolan later for this, or just for fun, they dated once, separated (Mark being born during then), then they happened to stumble into each others lives again and Mark’s already been born, anywhere from tween to teenager so there’s a gap in how close they are. I feel like one important aspect of the whole Family Drama is how close they’re supposed to be, a functional, loving family turned upside down? So I wonder what more distance does. I wonder how Nolan copes when his family is entirely human and he can’t project onto Mark.
I love thinking about these, omg.
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i think about Libby tacher and how much they fucking wronged her to the point that by the end of the series she was just a shadow of who she were before far more often than someone should
#By the end of the series they might as well have stuck a parrot with a wig to say “yes dear” “of course dear” and just called it a day#It would have cost less than#patti lupone#And it would have allowed her to do far more interesting things than just lay around and kill time ngl#your basic queerie
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Shapey Puppington
Obsessed with his mother and always defers to her despite his seemingly strong and stubborn personality, unconsciously makes messes even though he purports to need things tidy, talks a lot and very loudly in a way where it's hard to engage with him (talking 'at' not 'with' you), reveals very little of his own personality and seems to more parrot things others say, doesn't ever want children because his wife would be "distracted" by them, hates alcohol but is almost always drinking milk, hates his father (or says he does), struggles with his faith but pretends to be devoutly religious, still throws tantrums which his wife cleans up as he's throwing them so it's like nothing happened, calls his wife 'mine' as in "me and mine" or "mine's the same way" to the point where it's unclear if that's her name or not, doesn't recognize her as looking exactly like Bloberta, had a bad relationship with Orel as a teenager but they're better now, protective over Block who he calls his little brother, always frowning and usually complaining, holds his wife's wrist or grabs at her dress when he isn't looking at her so she stays nearby, struggles with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness that he doesn't know how to remedy.
'You used to be such a happy kid.'
[Patreon | Commissions]
#Shapey Puppington#Moral Orel oc#Bloberta Puppington#Block & Orel are making it out of the cycle but it demands new blood#bea art tag#moral orel jumpscare!!! on the star trek blog?? more likely than one might imagine#I've been listening to videos by a channel called Moralton University and I encourage you all to do the same#They're so interesting~!! They make me wanna watch the series again#I got into them because the Bloberta video was recommended to me and it immediately gained my trust bc it was a thoughtful#earnest character analysis instead of just raking her over the coals - again highly recommend~!#moral orel art#moral orel fanart#They haven't made a video about Shapey but I just started drawing him as I was drawing Bloberta while listening to the Bloberta video#Anyway in my mind his wife is not shown to have any interests or hobbies or thoughts outside of Shapey#She spends all her time focused on him and thinking about him and beside him if she can be#and yet despite this honestly absurd amount of attention - Shapey doesn't feel fulfilled by it. He doesn't feel loved by her and he doesn't#know why - what else could he possibly want??#working on a comm so doodle pages are nice warmups <3
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…ngl the Ilana & Rick dynamic was more interesting before they fucked
#creature commandos#rick flag sr#simu’s two cents#dc#listen. listen. ik u can chalk that pairing up to old men getting their power fantasy of the pretty young woman liking them#but LISTEN. the entire relationship was ilana initiating it. and maybe u could argue that’s part of the fantasy#but that reads as more…emasculating imo#rick flag sr said no like 5 times the first time she tried to make a move on him and ultimately backed off#then the second time ilana made a move on him he said no again before she kissed him. and then ultimately he was shown to be into it.#BUT LISTEN TO ME#i think theyre going to do smth interesting with ilana#she was described as a ‘disney princess femme fatale’#i think she’s manipulating rick flag sr to do smth. to what end? who knows#anyway i do like rick flag sr a lot from what i’ve seen of him so far tho so i might be biased#ugh he’s just weirdly honest and endearing idk. i like his mannerisms.#anyway i stand by my statement that it was more interesting when he was saying no while the princess kept making moves#u could’ve had some interesting subversion/parallel to the bride and victor and that weird grooming thing#except with more of a power dynamic rather than an incestuous grooming one?#when ilana said she’s to be the queen and she gets what she wants? hmmmmm#depending on how the rest of the series goes i might write a little drabble exploring what could’ve happened if rick flag sr kept saying no#yk. depending on how much thematic mileage that gets me.
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This addition might be considered a little bit off topic, so feel free to tell me to make my own post if you wish OP(s)!
Elder Scrolls games seem to have some kind of disease about them that makes it so they just cannot grasp the scale of JUST HOW BAD things are. Morrowind (edited bc my dumb ass forgot about beautiful Daggerfall and I own up to my mistakes), in my opinion, came the closest, but that's another post for another time. I think one of the problems with Skyrim and the Alduin storyline is that there's not really any true incentive in the game to seek out this information. You can ABSOLUTELY play the game not knowing anything but the bare dry bones of what is going on. Then, with no incentive TO learn deeper outside of having the question in the box go from white to grey, the incentive is more found in NOT asking the questions- gets you back to the ""fun"" gameplay quicker.
This DOES allow for player character variation (say you want to make your LDB an idiot or something) alongside an easier route for people who have already played before, but it doesn't work for portraying a world that is supposedly ending, or one that is being overtaken by dragon cults. To get the gravity of that to truly WEIGH on the player, you have to make it so not knowing, like not seeking out the books or the extra dialogue, in some way disadvantages the player.
However, this doesn't really tackle the issue of the confusing and overly simplistic way they handled Alduin in the first place. As said above, there's a huge unanswered question taken from the main storyline of "What the hell was he even trying to do?" that comes from different characters implying different sentiments. Perhaps this was supposed to be an attempt at pitting many theories against each other A LA Battle of Red Mountain(?), but without any elaboration on anything and no true incentive to seek out more information, alongside the fact that some of the MOST interesting stuff on Alduin isn't even in the game at all, it all just falls flat. You don't get a coherent story OR the full weight of the situation from the game, at all.
I'm, personally, fully convinced that this is the result of suppressing creative writing/portrayal ideas in the interests of making the game marketable. You can feel as you play the game, that it was intended to hit a very very wide audience. It's designed to be easily picked up and played by literally anyone, and that's a HUGE part of where the massive success came from. It was simplistic enough story wise so that nobody ever would have a single issue understanding. Big reach = Big money, and big money is more important to a game studio than a good story. Combine that reach with the fact that they've re-released the game (arguably) 17 times on 10 different consoles, it makes it pretty clear that they're more focused on creating and adding aspects to the game (and other games currently being worked on in the series) that make it lucrative-- not necessarily new, inventive, creative, or gripping story-wise.
Basically, this post is so correct it kinda hurts a bit. There are ways to make all of this information work. They don't really bother because they'd have to put more budget into story, and what if not every single person on the planet is pleased with the story? Bad for business. Better make it as generic as possible so it sells better. Fire every writer who cares. Underpay and mistreat the rest so they can't care. Now put Skyrim on the Switch. Now put it on VR. Now add paid mods. Now encourage everyone to play your MMO. Now release paid DLC. Now add something to the Crown Store. Now release paid DLC. Now add something to the Crown Store. Now release paid DLC. Now add something to the Crown Store. Now release paid DLC. Now add something to the Crown Store.
alright i might be misremembering some things bc it's been a while since i played the skyrim mq but.... man i really wish we could've had a proper conversation with alduin near the end of the game like we do with dagoth ur. like he's the one villain who isn't some Bad Guy gone mad with power he's literally a GOD. he's literally just doing his job!!!!! of ending the world!
i don't like how he's depicted as just a generic power hungry bad guy like isn't being the world eater literally his Purpose....you even have conversations w arngeir and paarthurnax, iirc, about the ethics of killing the "world eater" and if it's okay to let the current kalpa keep going when it's supposed to end. i wish that was a moral dilemma explored more in the game. i would've loved a final conversation between the ldb and alduin where he talks to you and asks you if you know what you're doing, if you know what it means to keep this world going. discussing if it's really your choice to decide when the world ends or stays. about death, rebirth and creation. who are you to interfere with this natural cycle?
#this is why i really love fan content and creations#because they really help fill the hole in this shit left behind in the best interests of profit#theres SOOOOOOO much you can do with the lore available and i hate how a lot of the official stuff is gradually getting put behind paywalls#like cool if you can enjoy the stuff that is paywalled! it just sucks that it IS paywalled.#and it sucks how people don't understand HOW it is a paywall. but again thats a post for another time
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